Review the Review – plan sonore

Review the Review is the introduction to the music review section of the very first issue of Break/Flow from 1996.

Desire never needs interpreting, it is it which experiments.

To what extent is a review a picture in words of sounds unseen?

To what extent does the review overcode the sound and becomes the means through which language Is imposed over the potentially deterritorialised flow of
music? Does the review hinder the fluxes of the music from combining with the fluxes in the listener by screening the interactive  process with  opinions and interpretations? Are there hidden agendas behind reviews? To what extent are we manipulated by the music makers? By journalists? By people who write occasionally AND, AND, AND..after all how is it that we have made of music a desiring-machine?

It should be possible for the review to be a form in itself, albeit a minor unrecognised form, and being a review of music it has the potential to be a fragile form that experiments and wavers, rises and falls like the tracks that inform it. The review has the potential to escape the monodimension of journalism, musicology, public- relations, prosody etc. The battle with words is to make them talk of desire – a conflict that music doesn’t encounter for it actively attracts desire to pass through it and become social-inspiration. In terms of the possible-review it can become a hyper-text, jittering here and there, getting lost and sensing the wide open spaces between music and its (dis)articulation in words.

The possible review can highlight that the dichotomy between a subject who writes (reviewer) and the object heard (record).should be upended and pushed towards its multiples – there are other listeners, there are other readers, there are other avenues beyond the-circuits of action-reaction. Taking the reviewer and the record-as distinct soon reveals that the subject/object relation Is inadmissible: the reviewer is fed by the sounds, the words effect the way the sounds are perceived; the intensity of the music is transfigured into an intensity of words – a continual associational and connective process. At very least you have two desires multiplying. Where is It possible to draw the dividing line (/) amongst all these relays?

How is delineation: possible. when: the reviewer can become the object at which the subjectivities of the music are aimed ? What was once a piece of plastic becomes a console for the listener as the operator. What was once a human subject becomes an alighted sensorium though which molecules of sound construct movements of unfinished learning (social becoming).

The review should shake loose of its function as a sales pitch and be written from the points of desire that are desired in the music. For it is said that desire can be constructed, discovered and made afresh and beyond the boring stuff about consuming products it is hard to deny that when we buy a record we are in a state of desire for sounds never seen, for propulsion, for travel, for action and infection. Collection and accumulation is a blockage of desire which is constipated into seriality, quanta, stasis and price.

The possible-review can be an encouragement to construct desires beyond commonly Identifiable ends. In other words it’s time to stray, time to fuck with the dividing lines and ride the relays.

Take the hypertext as an example: a multi authored document that ricochets between nodal points in other spatial dimensions – you could amend what ever you want, come in at any point.  Treat the social as a hypertext. Start with the authoritative text we call ‘review’:  the reader of the review should hear the record and review the review. Send it in…start a dialogue…after all there should be no fixed points or single meanings but a polyphony of active reception. This could be opened up indefinitely …occupations of media office suites  and broadcasting studios would be the next
stage. turntable guerillas. There is no masterMIX.

Amend.

Flint Michigan

• Other texts by Flint Michigan on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1

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