LISTENER AS OPERATOR

Found sound is recorded. Interference at the end of the scale. There are no instruments. Nothing is crafted or selected for performance. There is no beginning or end. There is no intervention to shape this electronic material that can be picked up from anywhere. If the sampler seeks to relocate its snatched fragments within a recognisable framework, if it relies on some conscious agency of a composer then this tape violently dissolves the act of composition and the vested interests that surround such an activity. It cannot be attributed to any one source.The author of this music is more than dead, they do not exist.

Perhaps its creation is truly multiple. The signals are sent out from an unknown and unknowing source…they are unlocatable, and yet thier creation is reliant upon a thousand and one contingent creations. But this is a creation that cannot be apprehended in words for as sounds they are generated without any sense of being captured, overcoded and territorialised. They are re-contextualised in no-place. Everything is to be disentangled, but nothing deciphered. It is all in the listening. It is all reception.

A Transversal Device

Maybe this tape is a conduit. A transversal device. But if ever we could hear deterritorialised music this is it. This is 90 minutes that escapes its apprehension as “music” but moreover it escapes its re-territorialisation as art:for listening is not a matter of fine tuning our means of perception but of multiplying and dislocating them. These are sounds that are always on the verge of becoming something else, sounds that are so mobile they are indiscernable. This is sound that flows over smooth surfaces. Sound without intention. As such it cannot signify anything, cannot infer or refer.

There is no message to interpret. These are sounds that resist representation and in doing so raise the question of power and constriction. For always it must be that sound is denied its power of propagation if there is no ‘face’ attached to it, if it doesn’t ricochet its listener back to a central source of signification. To hear an audible world, an immense reverb chamber without such mediations is to deterritorialise subjectivity.

To listen is to go schizzy with possibility

It is all reception. To listen is to go schizzy with possibility. It is to melt the masks. It is a luminous loss of sight. But sound is so much more able to complete the death of the author, to bury the author behind the unfolding desires of the listener. Where else is there to go? We have internalised the desires of another and it has created lack and need. It has tied us to the fortunes of composers who have fallen abject and prostrate before markets, images and expectations.

The creators, the authors, bind us to replicating and hollow images of themselves. And in thier totemic thrall, we empty ourselves out and worship our fears. This tape is not simply concerned with expanding the possible meaning of music and hence looking for a ‘return’. It works for the propagation of desire. We are always in the same place if we do not listen for ourselves.
No stars – here comes everybody.

Flint Michigan Underground Services

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