Endcollage Brigame
Nor do all the facets bear images. Some are dusty, some cracked; some are filled with senseless images of insects, or else with a vague, churning scarlet, shot with sparks, Some are as transparent as gin. Some are bright as mirrors and reflect our own faces … and then our eyes … and behind our eyes, distantly, our polyhedral thoughts, glinting, wheeling like galaxies.
— Hollis Frampton, A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative
I quit Rate Your Music last December. Assigning numbers to music, at that point in time, suddenly became less casual and more like a desperate attempt to satisfy my attention, not just its span, so that I could quietly feel like a blank slate trans teen version of a Rolling Stone journalist. Hailing over an imaginary crowd not by not being able to review but by making lists, which grew more conceptual and fixated on artists who carry transgression and form defiance until I felt unsatisfied. I had used it for five years. Through that time frame, I ended up baring witness, late, to RYM reviewers of the early 2010s who would have been permanently banned and forgotten if not for the sentiment they carry. They made reviews between styles, diary entries from imaginary times and projected memories. Even strange ASCII art sometimes, because it sufficed for how generic everyone else casually reviewing music was. A review of Basic Channel’s “Phylyps Trak” from 2011 by ~skyline reads;
“WROTE SEVERAL REVIEWS FOR THIS ALL INADEQUATE SOMEWAY OR ANOTHER TECHNO RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE VERY GOOD BOUNCY METAL SOUND FIVE STARS GOOD OKAY BYE”.
From memory, it had more than fifty upvotes. The beauty and the sentiment was in, at that stage, how much it fell under random humor. Looking back at it now, it had humor, but it was more all of a collage than anything else. ~skyline, from memory, passed away around late 2011. His comment box is carried on by people who were with him before he went, like any other late friend in cyberspace, but it all keeps tying into what was his own reviewing style and the site’s community’s aesthetic; documenting your life through the domains of the material and the imaginary. I felt the ghost of it when I left. And do we have to know immediately who people are in such a small space? It really does take time (social time, the way we see time socially amounts to the relative progress of other people around us. We have something to feel and to hide about waiting too long). How patient can you be, depending on if you’re an insider or an outsider, and why should it matter when you can occupy yourself by creating? Get deeper; why should it matter when you can occupy yourself by going inside what people create? Even before the Internet truly rose, artists accomplished it for fans, beyond the bullshit: no brutal rockist conceptual fuckwadery or cultural exploitation. I have occupied myself and it with that for the longest. I want to discuss, in this text (essay? A little auto-theory. I’m not established enough), artists who have transcended out of uncomfortable audience norms and established structures, and their music which naturally and personally breaks form, breaches genre, mutates aesthetic, auto-develops, trans-disciplines, before and after the Internet.
Music Industry As a Liminal Place
Laurie Anderson released Big Science in 1982. Laurie created it about America in a non-linear fashion, at times meta. She traces, through sound and lyrics in the album’s songs, passageways between the triumphant and the mundane, but rendered neutrally: as if it were being televised in regression from the future to then, and at best now. “O Superman (For Massenet)”, a secular electronic hymn about parental figures and the unbiologicalized familial trust that the military complex and government had established in the 1980s, has taken on a strange iconic status. Every time I bring it up to older people around me, they reminisce about hearing it on the radio or the jukebox and, for eight minutes or less (depending on the bitter irritability of the host), being placed in a brand new world. And now it seems to have some sort of 80s charm because of Netflix. I cleared it off and stopped memory from killing it. “O Superman” is a trans-communications hymn. Laurie voices several entities that do not know each other but are known only by a seemingly nonexistent protagonist, like lines traced from agents to an all-encompassing system.
O Superman, to me, is more than a pop song. It is a collage from one end of songwriting, and an auto-collage from another. The looping of a syllable of hers, “ha”, is intended to conjure a Greek chorus. Meanwhile, she continuously vocodes and harmonizes her voice with other hooks and refrains that seem to be floating around in the space of the song, and quotes from inscriptions of U.S. mythology. It’s a catchy collage, and it’s no surprise it ended up reaching collective memory by being on the pop charts. It felt cathartic to no one suspecting anything but a strange innovative woman making a song about phone calls and mom. She said in 2016 that the song is a “a one-sided conversation, like a prayer to God. It sounds sinister — but it is sinister when you start talking to power.” Maybe it is esoteric. Laurie had been involved with William S. Burroughs either way, so it was obvious what she was establishing with “O Superman”: a collage for the masses, like Burroughs’ own books, which were for an audience ready for disorder. Laurie took it oneirically, like a dream that makes you realize you need to do something. Coil, the post-industrial entity, the cross-genre group, somber occult surveyors and transmitters, alchemists, current day garish experimental music influences, garnered an audience somewhere between Burroughs and Anderson, and it was no surprise that they shared mutual appreciation. Coil’s debut album, “Scatology” (1984), was their own continuation of the esoteric collage: they were occultists, but they had samplers and (for dire certainty) not pentagrams. While pseudo-religious but similar minded trap-influence group Art of Noise worked with a quirky and open method to avant-pop, Coil at that stage were trying to evoke de Sade, Jarry, Dali, raunchy influences. But there was something more that they were tapping into, something personal, mystic and pornographic, that declared itself to stay in the present.
Coil’s music overall, especially afterwards, delved into the same atmosphere as personal standout track “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party”: intimate and disorienting, concrete, obviously simulated and played back. They were fixated, continuously, on alchemy, turning prima materia into gold. They accomplished it through the transmogrification of sounds to something unrealistically beautiful and fragile, post-nature, gold. Their later Moon Musick around the turn of the millennium was as intimate and disorienting, but more akin to silver, fittingly enough reflecting the listener in its ether, and utilized collaged songwriting that hypnotized and bewitched listeners. Prior to Y2K, other insider composers had tapped into intimacy and disorientation through collaging.
While Hungarian composer and avant-indologist László Hortobágyi created “Transreplica Meccano” (1988), a collaged suite demonstrating his secret society-like obscuring of meaning through vocoders and mutated darkwave raga influences, American composer and New Songwriter of the liminal world, Robert Ashley, created “Automatic Writing” (1979) out of his own vocal tics, brought to synchronized dimensions by tape circuit manipulation, ambience and a French female voice duplicating his words in whispers. Their individual intents were to transmogrify the mundane into something magic(k)al, of the present but caught between spatial-temporal frames; something extradimensional on Earth.
“Transreplica Meccano” subjects the listener to Hortobágyi sculpting a persistent derealized journey between mapped out societies, feudal states, irreversible future domains, broken present days. Melodies fall out of space into memory.
“Automatic Writing” treats the listener to Ashley projecting an utopia onto himself, causing utterances and quiet spasms. Everyone says it’s proto-ASMR, and I can’t do anything about it. It is not a comfort zone or a terrifying anti-artwork as much as it is transitioning between awkward states of language, sound and presence, fluttering in and out of perception, an oneiric zone of veiled truths.
There is no doubt Coil would have loved them, but now we can all be Coil. We can glitch out things as much as we want, and even further, our trauma is leading us to collage ourselves and our works into one multifaceted system, like a diamond of infinity with facets, not all bearing just images.
Internet As Liminality As A Place
When I was a child I dreamt of otherworldly figures whose opal spaceships landed in front of our house. After long conversations I asked them to take me, in fact to save me from this already then perceptibly hopeless situation. The feeling, the alienation, and the mostly the sensual pleasure of these talks can be compared to music. […] According to my strategy, I relish executing the program, the conception that I consider capable of functioning, like a robot. It is based on the fact, that I always learn everything I am interested in.
— László Hortobágyi, interviewed in 2010
The new millennium changed everything. When we realized we could trust computers and our standardization of the passage of time again after Y2K, we grew familiar and close to the Internet. I changed over time to love time, yet the art I love is seemingly a collective Worlding engaging with the manipulation of presence over spacetime. Being that the artists I have mentioned do so by placing themselves in the picture, it’s no surprise the Internet and its celebration of anonymity giving way to identity has changed music. Multifaceted? It’s worth it. Handling multitude secures ourselves.
In 2004, American composer, software maker, artist, Old English poet, transdisciplinary curator Akira Rabelais released “Spellewauerynsherde”. The album’s perfected mystique and feminine entanglement in reanimated dreams collaged out of a single source, a tape Rabelais uncovered of Icelandic women singing lament songs, feels like curiously tapping at a window to a domain of fem ghosts, seeing them become attracted to your sounded presence. His method of digitally unraveling the voice inside the voice leads to a perplexing, quiet result, embodied further by the track listing: abundant with Old English spellings and references to writings of the time, in the present without memory of the past, it feels like English written by an AI.
Meanwhile, other artists have extensively and transgressively taken it upon themselves to make collage music in the era of the Internet, further into the intimacy and disorientation that Coil provoked, and the transmogrification that Hortobágyi and Ashley suggested. Laurie Anderson’s comment on her own song, “O Superman”, as making it clear that it’s ‘sinister when you start talking to power’, resonates greatly and aesthetically with now already influential artists like Dominick Fernow (Prurient/Vatican Shadow/Exploring Jezebel/others), Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), James Ferraro, Elysia Crampton, Chino Amobi, Tom Krell (How to Dress Well) and Dean Blunt (Hype Williams), and so on; further out of so on into what really matters about their music and how their form helps its listeners and viewers. In fact, they represent a side of modern music that, while collaging traumatic remains of the modern world together, engages in self-collaging like Robert Ashley did. Self-portraits instead become auto-portraits, composed of what the world and their world have established in a strange and engulfing unison that teeters out of synchronization, relayed through aesthetics embedded in their memory and man-made things slowly but surely perfectly penetrating the human condition.
I’m remembering Rate Your Music again. I remember discovering a footstone of experimental Internet music; S. Plusmer’s “L@@K”, released on Bandcamp label psalmus diuersae. A strange two hour album of mercurial analog improvisations, droning on and on, marked with a strange track listing and album cover. It should have existed in another form, something I can tap into the space of but without the guilt of engaging with RYM and Bandcamp. It should be forgettable, but it reflects in my mind and feels both comfortable and uncomfortable. It exists with a different name and album cover now. Why can’t I just let go of things on the Internet attached to bigger problems? Maybe it’s collaging my mind as I listen to it. What do I do about the RYM mindset? I am proud to have let go of it but the way I openly feel about it feels double-edged for people I know and don’t know. I spout shit about being confused and feeling automated. Cues. In dire structures. The Internet is a sanctum for dreams in the form of collages. The endgame of music will never come; the word ‘endgame’ intertwining with ‘bricolage’, refer back. See title.
The autonomy of it all is what should be cherished. We as artists are like systems working in unison with our subconscious and the material world. Ticking at the same periods of time through transgression out of trauma. Through synthesis towards suggested infinitude, towards comfortable intimacy and disorientation, towards new transmogrification. And out of the oppression and monotony of suffering that capitalism offers, that we are influenced by in contempt of (because what other feeling), we look towards making art for an audience that trusts you, that you trust yourself. Look into the labyrinthine, the abstracted, the transdisciplinary, and retrieve coping strategies out of it to continue what the future has sent into the past. Do it for yourself and for the friends you resonate with, trace lines. Be collaged and be multifaceted. I regret leaning into the whole “avant-inspirational speech” thing now because I did not make this text a collage. Maybe I naturally think in collages. It links up? Maybe. Maybe screwww meee. Oh. Ah.
I can only write towards and soon, liminal, into whatever I love.
