This was, weirdly enough, the first lecture I have been able to physically be there for, which was nice for sure, but it does kind of feel like being dropped right into it even though I’ve been trying to be attentive to what is going on. Regardless, the class was mostly talking about a text from a prior week called “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening” which is a Journal by Andrew Brooks. I can’t say I got much out of it to be fair, not that I don’t understand it or anything it’s just that the ideas never really lingered. It does kind of make sense though as to why Queer spaces I am in tend to have more openness to alternative medias and more esoteric musics, but I guess it feels kind of obvious even without much theory, but maybe it is a product of me already being a part of these spaces myself that I feel that way, I don’t know.

The second half of the class was spent enjoying Supercollider, which I have had minimal experience with prior due to friends trying to show me how to use it a couple years back, but with this being more of a “teaching the absolute basics” than prior, where friends were trying to just throw me straight into making a track kind of, I found getting fixated on mouse position-based chords really beautiful, and spent most of the class making sine chords. Very wonderful.

I have nearly finished the Alan Licht book, I am not such a fast reader but I guess the constant back and forth on the train is a good motivator. I downloaded a lot of Alan Licht albums as well to get myself in that headspace of not only appreciating Alan’s historical recounting of the ideas but also appreciating how these ideas translate into his own practice through his approach to guitar. It feels like an apt way to read it, fully absorbing myself in the language and sound of a person, which is kind of funny, prioritising the author over the topic which he is giving a pretty impartial view on and seemingly trying to remove himself from. For certain though, the later parts of the book have been teetering off into what I feared the book would be, which is purely just a constant stream of naming things without much further depth than just naming them, and the section about No-Wave which is very briefly justified under the term, as Alan Licht’s definition of Sound Art can be vaguely summarised as Sound made by Artists, which No-Wave also was a movement of. Anyway, some more choice quotes;

Brian O’Doherty – “A music that has a surface constructs with time. A music that doesn’t have a surface submits to time and becomes a rhythmic progression.”  Pg 136.

I don’t have much to add other than the description of rhythm being a submission to time, it is quite beautiful imagery.

“Wolf Vostell’s de/collage music” focused on “all noises which are propagated when a form is destroyed,” claiming that all that is left of the form in the wake of the destruction is the sound. Indeed, he did a version of Satie’s Furniture Music in which he smashed the furniture; and in the piece Kleenex he smashed one hundred lightbulbs.” Pg 148.

Most of the things I wrote down are kind of less to do with a topic, more just things I would like to know more about, and I am very surprised that Wolf Vostell has never been mentioned to me, as this work seems very aesthetically aligned with Gx Jupitter-Larsen’s and some of The New Blockaders’ work in that it is creation of art using documentation of or remnants of entropy and creation of joyous noise. Basically, this demands further research after I finish reading this!

“Dennis Oppenheim did one untitled performance (1971) in which he placed a dead dog on top of an electric organ, which would theoretically produce sound by holding the keys down with its weight until its body deteriorated into nothing.” Pg 151.

I guess this is a different means to a similar ends as the prior work, being that as sound as a document of entropy and the focus on impermanence and duration, this in more stark, visceral means which I do appreciate. I did however kind of talk about this topic in the audio paper we did last term, so I don’t really want to repeat the same thing through different wording, but I guess duration could be seen as an enemy of sorts for a sound work which could be explored for the “issues in sound arts” prompt, and a suitably long / loop based work could be used to explore the durational means.

It is becoming quite clear now – especially as this is the only class I have been able to attend so far and it is the last before the spring break – that I am quite far behind where I should be at, as it was mentioned that after the break we should have a 1k – 1.5k word draft of our essay ready to submit, and I still haven’t got a topic nevermind started the essay. Reading this book has kind of set me in a good mood to explore things I already enjoy more inquisitively though, and I think a lot of what I enjoy I still find confusing as to what is appealing psychologically rather than purely sonically, so maybe similar to what Alan has possibly accidentally done, maybe I could illustrate my own aesthetic ideals and influences in art by narrating some of its lineage.

This week I got out another book from the library after finishing Alan Licht’s, this one being less sound-oriented and more general to the arts, called Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art by Kieran Cashell. This was because of some ideas generating over the break concerning Noise and what I consider an issue, going back to an older idea regarding the Harmful aspect of it but also thinking about the aesthetic interplay between the Harm of the sound and the Harm portrayed aesthetically, with a lot of the 90s American Harsh Noise and more distinctly and ironically classic Power Electronics material being fully absorbed in aesthetics of harm, opting to use extremely violent imagery and mean spirited lyrics, samples, themes, etc, which are kind of integral to the genre. I guess I am just wanting to explore what the effect of fully absorbing a work in moral reprehensibility (which is an obvious “issue”) actually achieves within a work, and reading about the ethics of definitely more well-known works will ideally help me apply similar standards to the works I hold to a high standard even now.

Again, it feels pretty awful being noticeably behind where I should be at, with this week being the deadline for us to hand in the essay drafts to get feedback on, but I guess I am becoming more content that I just work slower than I would like to / am expected to. But I feel like writing about Power Electronics should be interesting, the only book I have that is strictly on the subject is suitably baffling and ridiculous (Fight Your Own War), as it is an oral history kind of book based on Zine Culture aesthetics, so some chapters offer actual history and insightful perspectives and some offer entirely self-absorbed or uninformed kind of journalistic “empty takes”.

So far the book has been quite interesting, the first chapter after the introduction and thanks is about Richard Billingham’s photo series Ray’s A Laugh, a documenting of his family situation in a council flat (and a sound connection is made with it being related to Pulp’s track Common People) as a response to the middle class fetishisation of middle class lifestyles by documenting raw reality. The work itself is interesting, I had heard of it briefly before but I enjoy what is extrapolated from the work more than the work itself;

“Lewis draws our attention to the perplexing image of Ray crashed out on the lavatory floor right beside the freshly stained toilet bowl. He comments : “One might notice that Billingham chose to photograph the old man and then publish the photograph, rather than immediately picking him up and cleaning him off. One might ask why he chose to do that, and what it implies.” Pg 23.

This is always a question that is present in morally difficult work I feel, especially with “harsh reality” kind of material, what is the person’s intent doing this and at what point is the threshold of exploitation, with this example being that the decision to photograph rather than immediately help implies something voyeuristic about the photographers approach to his family, or that with that in mind how much of this voyeuristic attitude can be applied to an audience and how much is ingrained into the role of a photographer, or recordist, documentarian etc. How much does involvement matter, how much does the approach of a “fly on the wall” and human detachment lean into exploitation of the subject? I think I particularly like this idea in the context of Power Electronics because I feel like the genre has a default mode of hostility toward a subject, the inclusion of the most mundane things would be interpreted with this framework because the perspective taken is most often that of a perpetrator or stalker, kind of revelling in the moral disgrace of the voyeur ambiguous recordings have as a means of creating a more hostile listening environment.

“…This pro-intentional view enables him to argue, like Gaut, that if a work fails to invoke the moral response intended by its producer, this constitutes “a failure in the design of the work, and therefore, is an aesthetic failure”.The example he uses to illustrate this thesis is instructive. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho is aesthetically compromised, he argues, because the author’s intention that the work be interpreted as a satirical critique of the 1980s yuppie culture Reaganomics failed aesthetically because readers were unable to reprocess the lurid and baroque descriptions of the protagonist’s serial murders in ironically detached satirical terms.” Pg 31.

This interpretation of art is interesting, I don’t think it’s entirely correct but it draws on something mentioned earlier in the introduction to the book, with something deemed classically “aesthetic” is to be appealing through disinterested gaze, which I interpreted as being having a surface level appeal to the work that doesn’t need to be dug into to “get”. The argument is made that transgressive art is the antithesis to this, it gives the audience something immediately unappealing that becomes more appealing with more time spent with it, thinking about or engaging with it, but this view kind of strikes a balance between the two. It offers that work can be “aesthetically compromised” if the intention becomes too masked by, in this case, its “transgressive” element, where the extreme violence overshadows the subtext and the “point” is smothered. I find this with a lot of Power Electronics, funnily enough, with the more late Whitehouse inspired work that deal more with “researched topics” such as Martin Bladh’s work related to classical theatre, 2000s Sutcliffe Jugend poetry based works, Con-Dom’s work related to T.E Lawrence, the medium chosen’s absolute prioritisation of “extremity” destroys nuance and desires “blood”, and audiences will often not take away the nuance as much as they take away from its strength.

This is just what I kind of extrapolated so far from the book, the wording of it is quite fun in that it is very bound to classical philosophy (which is obvious because of the subject of the book being “ethics,” of course), but I am basically completely unequipt with a majority of these ideas but it isn’t frustrating weirdly, kind of exciting since it is still penetrable. The only thing I am missing is how to integrate practice into the work, since the practice is supposed to inform the research and vice versa, if my topic is to be Power Electronics then it would make sense to make a Power Electronics track myself to articulate its inner workings, but in my mind that would be asking too much of the person marking the work and a little ridiculous, possibly embarrassing. I will keep reading though and see if this is still working.

Spending more time trying to absorb myself in this work, I think I feel like I have a more solid grasp of what I want to write about, and it is kind of funny to me that I am going to be writing about Power Electronics since it is going to likely set myself up for failure as proper “analysis” of it is kind of missing the point I feel like (or at least for the majority of it), but that is appealing to me to be fair, that idea of treating something with an antithecal approach to what is intended, and I’ve written about Harsh Noise Wall prior which is even more knowingly absurd to take that position with. Anyway, the goal I have decided on is to demonstrate how Power Electronics’ prioritisation of extremity and “harm” aesthetics creates a hindrance to works that seek to tackle more earnest, researched subjects, by either the classic self sabotaging method of morally ambiguous presentation (with the artist acting as if the work is non-representative of their own belief, and that it is simply “presenting things as they are”) that can be seen as “muddying the water” of its ethics – as seen in Whitehouse and Nicole 12 who’s hands off attitudes to the morality has backfired with the artist’s statements incriminating them and removing the benefit of the doubt for many that PE audiences often have. Another hindrance is made purely through the sonic quality of the work’s insistent violence similarly having a masking effect to the artist’s intention as was demonstrated in the last blog regarding American Psycho, which’s use of excessive violence masked the artists’ intention of the work being a satire of the 80s, and brought it closer to sensationalist violence. I think this is especially apt after remembering an interview with extremely (and justifiably) controversial artist Mikko Aspa regarding Nicole 12, and how strangely well versed and “artistically minded” he was about a project that has cheap shock written all over that has given it a genuinely vile reputation for its cover art and themes. I think this is pretty common for Power Electronics though; it always had the appeal of being the complete opposite of what this course strives to be, just kind of mindlessly trampling over extremely sensitive topics with the least grace imaginable. I have been stressing over whether or not it is a sensible topic to cover. Still, I think from a more detached perspective, it might be interesting to tackle something as difficult as this. Still, it is also extremely intimidating, the likelihood of overstepping is probably too far, but also, it seems too in line with what I’m reading right now to just move on from really.

The chapter in this Aftershock book as well helps build a vocabulary around this kind of work;

“Sometimes actually reduced to lists of names – as if biblical incantation were enough for the canonic defence to achieve its hypnotic effect – the most compelling aspect of this quantitative strategy is that it reveals a telling anxiety on the part of the critics who employ it. Compulsively cramming as many references as possible into a small vacuum of potential structure, the hope is that some relevant theoretical link will eventually be uncovered that contributes meaning to this work that they fear may be meaningless.” Pg 98.

The appeal to its history to justify morally abhorrent work is not only extremely apt to what I am covering, visibly making art critics panic about a work is I guess amusing and I like this chapter’s kind of apparent dislike of both the art critics’ writing of the work and dislike of the Chapmans’ art coming through a bit despite the demeanor being relatively kept impartial.

“Because aesthetic defences are exploited to justify or vindicate the ethical status of morally problematic works like Zygotic Acceleration, this doubly transgressive art cannot be defended on aesthetic grounds; and because it is iconic, obvious, banal and severe, this sculpture makes a literal, if extreme, moral statement.” Pg 122.

This kind of illustrates the appeal of Power Electronics also in that, because of the immorality of the presentation, it prioritises evoking an extreme reaction at the behest of the aesthetic appeal. What I am skirting around a little, though, is how I can illustrate or explore any of this through practice, so I decided to start working on an idea for what my audio work could be relative to the Power Electronics centric topic.

My concept is to create an atomised version of Power Electronics, with the approach I take with my own Drone Noise work with granular effects used to inform the sound design for a Power Electronics track, that does everything it is supposed to within its traditional context. The only issue at the moment is that I am in the process of moving out, meaning most of my gear is back home and unusable, so I have instead taken the somewhat blasphemous approach of making the basis for the work on laptop (which I mean isn’t entirely unheard of, groups like Cathode Terror Secretion and even some modern Sutcliffe Jugend uses it).

I spent a while on a patch that has enough going on that I don’t have to do many overdubs as to prioritise the ‘liveness’ of the work, which I did a take with to work out how to structure the track with but it was missing something, so I think I’m going to re-record next week playing the output through an amp or through tape.

I will briefly go over the functions of each part of the patch, though, to make itmore vivid what I plan for it to sound like.

This is a section for the 2 ‘noise’ oscillators, I’m using the clock output to sidechain the oscillators and control their levels better due to the volatile feedback on the funnily titled “PLEASE KILL ME” Biset Oscillators. I’m using these because of the feedback function, giving the sound a beautiful grit and analogue-feeling extra harmonic distortion. It is great for feedback emulation, which the Prince of Perception delay is also adding to. Prince of Perception is made for ultra-tight delay time synthesis, and automation of this parameter creates tonal stretching sounds and exciting feedback frequencies that can interact with the tones created from the oscillator. Both are being run through the XFX TUBE Distortion because it is the only distortion sound I like in VCV rack because of it’s Xtra-Bass setting which is extremely deep even without much distortion applied.

This section running into the Macro Oscillator is the main ‘drum’ sound, which has a Drum Sequencer running into an ADSR to control its characteristics. The Drum is then being sent into the same distortion and into a Supercell module to give it a reverb and have more of a shimmery release that strangely gives it a metallic timbre. The Surge Flanger is used for the same reason, the extremely low Rate and Depth makes it obvious that I’m not using it traditionally, I’m using the Feedback Depth and Comb filter to use it as a Resonator, as most of the Resonators I’ve used in VCV rack are too tonal. This gives the ‘drum’ more physicality and abstraction from an otherwise boring deadened kick pattern.

Above is the more tonal sounds that can be brought in, the Complex Simpler playing a piano loop into a Quantised Harmonic String mode resonator, which I often use to ‘purify’ sound into pure sines. The Macro Oscillator is being used with an LFO to cycle through the Colour on the Flute mode as more feedback emulation, with the “IT’S GOOD CHOLESTEROL” being used for its dreamy pitch shift and bizarre digital stretching delay (with more delay included after to mask the stretching for development).

Because the other elements are somewhat too fixed despite a lot of random automation and feedback, this is a Supercell patch running the master channel through its input, so that it creates chaotic feedback-heavy glitch noise interacting with the rest of the track, the Simpler is mostly there in case for development I want to replace the feedback in one ear with the loop.

For the past 2 weeks, I have had hearing issues that have rendered me basically unable to hear, which was obviously extremely depressing since I don’t do much other than music. Thankfully, after 2 appointments with a doctor, the issue was solved. I’m not wanting to go into the specifics since it is pretty gross, but thankfully, it was not caused by any noise-related damage and was reversible (and excitingly has solved some issues that I didn’t know were ongoing)! Because of this, and obviously not being able to engage with the sound piece at all during this period as per doctor’s orders of “taking it easy”. But now that we are back to normal, work can be continued!

I recorded a proper take of the setup done last week straight into my tape deck with the gain pretty high this week, to get that ‘classic’ crunch and avoid the undesirable digital clipping characteristic. It took a couple takes to have the tracks develop how I’d like, and a few instances where the take is ruined by my laptop’s CPU overloading and gets near to crashing, but what is functioning now is with starting with ultra high pitch whine, adding more harmonics and building the track into drone, sending the clocked LFO to more parameters over time to slowly introduce the rhythmic element before fully bringing in the drum track. The performance is loose though and ‘live’, as is important to PE I think, and the structure this way shows three different styles of Power Electronics (ultra minimal high pitched focus, drone laden Industrial Noise, Power Noise / Industrial Beat led material) without being jarring or gimmicky in that regard.

I recorded a vocal take, which was just sending these toy microphones from a kid’s karaoke machine through superfuzz, looper, pitch shift, delay and reverb into my amp back home, but because of the current situation with a new neighbour moving in I couldn’t have it so loud, and my vocals are more of the ‘half screaming’ variety with a lot of feedback. To be honest, I am not that happy with the take, but when next to the track, it sounds pretty exciting as a textural addition to hear how the feedback interacts with the pitches in the VCV rack recording. The track so far I really like as it is to be honest, but 17 minutes or so is quite overkill for the person marking, and I feel like with the high volume and high pitches I might come off as being obtuse, so changes I need to make next week is to trim the track down and add more elements of “atomised Power Electronics” as I mentioned last week, the only thing is I don’t know if I will be able to record vocals again like this, so sampling from elsewhere might be necessary.

Thinking about what I am trying to achieve with this piece, I want to show both understanding of the genre and exciting deviation from its norms, applying character to it in a tasteful/funny way, and in all honesty I don’t have the heart to go all in writing mean spirited lyrics, so just screaming garbled nonsense at the moment feels right as it is. I am mainly worried about length and about if the loudness aspect is too ridiculous for an academic setting, but true to form of the genre ‘extremity’ is key, and demonstration of it is generally integral to showing understanding of the form (and characteristic loudness is something common within most of my stuff anyway). As it is now, it is extremely loud, and hopefully that will be appreciated.

Because of being more behind on this project more than I would like to have been, the final week of the project has been full of a lot of work as well. I took to trimming down the work to 12 minutes (which I guess is still maybe overkill, but it really works with the track I think, there is no specified maximum length for the track so I feel like this is generous, short tracks aren’t as fun), as well as structuring the work a little more through the use of adding some extra drones around the halfway point of the track using chords taken from the Greg Haines track “Sehnsucht” (yearning; wistful longing.)

I think the contrast between the beautiful drones and the extremely harsh sound is an exciting use of the two sonic extremes, but is also a good deviation from Power Electronics traditions as it adds too much of a ‘musical’ element than is usually preferred. It also leans into my own interpretation of noise approaching the sublime, and in the written work relates to the use of ‘extremity’ in Power Electronics to force a reaction in this context through the use of sampling conventionally ‘sad’, ‘beautiful’ music. The contrast also relates to the genre’s focus on cruelty and victimisation; this way, something beautiful is being turned monstrous and violent sonically. But also, rather, the ‘extremity’ of the work I find enhances the beauty of the couple chords I sampled, the contrast between it and the constant aggression surrounding it is exciting. I also made the looping chords slightly off from the ‘beat’ in the track to appeal to my own love of the ‘primitivist’ side of the genre, where things are manually triggered and a bit shaky.

Another addition I made to substitute for the fact I can’t re-record vocals is the famous rant from the 1976 film Network (which will never not be relevant), as it is sampled in quite a few Power Electronics records I’ve heard and I find it kind of iconic to include within my own track. It adds an extra layer of Power Electronics canonisation and another vocal layer of shouting, which is buried and stretched, which is something I like to do a lot with my work, as well as torn up with tape emulation to provide more grit and drop outs. It also is just generally a great speech and is enough to get a listener righteously angry, as Power Electronics (at least to me) tries to do with its samples.

I didn’t add much automation since the priority is that it has ‘liveness’ and most elements were performed, but I added a couple of exciting moments with interaction between the sample and the noise takes, and raising the level of the vocal take I did towards the end for some more fun. I don’t usually like editing in FL studio because the cuts feel worse than in Audacity, but I gave it a go for the effects chains I wanted on the Master (I added a limiter because I don’t want to be too obtuse) and it actually went alright I feel like. The creation of a Power Electronics track after spending so long writing about it (and feeling like I was being extremely negative about it in the process) is exciting to practice some of the techniques I like listening to (I tried a rug pull at the start!) and make something more suited to my own personal tastes within Noise. I am extremely pleased with the track as well, I feel like it should be worth releasing in some form somewhere at some point and as a start of making Power Electronics, I feel like it is pretty effective in relation to the grander scheme of work.