Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 3: Passing Through the Diagram (Part 2)
This is the third chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
Music: resonating the encounter
…man unites himself with the soundscape about him, echoing back its elements. The impression is taken in; the expression is thrown back in return. But the soundscape is far too complex for human speech to duplicate, and so it is in music alone that man finds that true harmony of the inner and outer world. It will be in music too that he will create his most perfect models of the ideal soundscape of the imagination.[1]
Schafer’s quotation — from his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World — brings into play Moon’s ideals that I’ve discussed so far through Nancy and Cavarero. Music organizes the world of sound, transforms the sounds received and echoes it back entering Nancy’s endless referrals of the renvoi. Lastly, music breaks the semantic voice so that it can find its uniqueness/timbre in interacting with the world.
Music in the films of Moon serves as an extension of the voice, not to drown its uniqueness in the multiplicity of sounds, but to further develop its relationship with the instruments and the world around it. I’ve approached this idea in reverse through the film Mezzo Morra, where the voice is seen in relation to the sounds and the instruments of Sardinia. Here I’ll tackle it head-on with the film An Island (2010), where the band Efterklang together with Moon fold the soundscape of their hometown into their music. The collaboration between the director and the Danish band produced one of the most robust examples to grasp the interplay between music, soundscape, and the visual.
a) An Island (2010)
An Island is shot on the Baltic Sea island of Als with performances from Efterklang’s eight-piece live band. During the film they partnered–up with more than 200 local musicians, ranging from kids to their parents, creating new performances and interpretations of songs from their album Magic Chairs. All the sounds and mixing of An Island was made in partnership with Efterklang, giving the documentary a layer of mastery and intentionality in creating the sounds that is only present in few of Moon’s films. This is not to take away any merits from Moon in what is one of his best works as a director. The sound in An Island showcases the full potential of his diagram when given time and dedication to develop these little worlds fully.
To situate the film within the director’s work, this project was done in 2009 when he was distancing himself from the music industry and starting his new series Petites Planètes. An Island is one of his last documentaries that somehow still has ties with the indie music scene before diving into experimental ethnography.[2] It is the documentary that marks his graduation from La Blogothèque and showcases a director with firm and determined concepts, a period where he actively started working on establishing a more personal vision.
The film starts with the faint sound of water and a fog horn in the distance. Gradually, specific sounds are introduced while the members of Efterklang are silhouetted against the night. The credits are overlaid on top of these images. The waves get louder followed by the deep rumbling of the boat’s motor. Birds start chirping at a distance as the night gives way to dawn. The sound of the engine chugging along increases in speed as it gets stronger. The water splatting on the hull of the boat swells together with the rumble of the motor. An airplane is heard, and from the growing sound, it’s apparently approaching. The continuous crescendo creates anxiety until suddenly all the sounds are muffled, it feels like I’m now underwater and only vaguely hearing what is happening above the surface. The screen turns black while the title of the film appears.
As the camera pans through the horizon, it turns into a musical notation with each tree becoming a musical cue. Foreshadowing the next scene where the band is collecting sounds in the countryside of Als, this sequence of the landscape from inside of a moving car disclose that these sounds are not natural, they are created and recorded through an electronic device that changes and modifies them. The mediation between what you see and what you hear is in the hands of the filmmaker.
Michel Gondry, in his music video Star Guitar — The Chemical Brothers (2002) turned the countryside of France into musical notation by recording the landscape from inside a moving train, assigning each object in the scene a note or a beat and using special effects so that it would seem like a single take. The music video, becomes a literal “video music” where the moving image of the landscape generates the music. An updated concept where the landscape is used in the same way that the early synched-sound cartoons of the late 20s and early 30s — “The whole world becomes a wind, string, or percussion instrument creating a jazzy music that sets everyone and everything to dancing.”[3] Or as in Eisenstein’s chapter, that I previously mentioned, The Landscape of Music where he creates drawings to illustrate how the landscape can refer to notes.
Similarly, the world of An Island also sets in motion the music of the band. To follow the introduction with a landscape that is sonically registered as music is strategical since it will give the basis to understand how the landscape and soundscape of the island of Als influenced the way in which the music was played and created for the documentary.
Here it’s the trees that dictate the duration of the noise, but throughout the documentary and most obviously, in the next scene, we can see the band harvesting sounds from the their hometown. The muffled helicopter sound stops giving way to a countryside ambiance and a deep drone frequency. Casper Clausen (Efterklang’s vocalist) asks “Can we start?” and a low metal bang syncs with the cut to show a barn in the field. Images of this bucolic and abandoned barn are over-imposed on the sound of drumsticks banging on the metal surfaces and columns. Moon cuts to show the process of Efterklang collecting these sounds, Clausen is holding a shotgun microphone, a recorder on his lap and headphones. With the banging metal as a base sound, each new source of sound is added on top of that.
Pointing the microphone to a wood log, he hits it while recording the vibrations it produces. The other band members (Rasmus Stolberg and Mads Brauer) are also recording sounds by throwing logs on top of a pile of wood, scratching their hands on a damp metal surface, running, etc. All these sounds are introduced individually and accumulate on top of each other. An ongoing synthesizer drone starts gaining more volume. The metal bangs fade away as we see two of the band members recording the crisp squelch of their boots walking on the wet grass. Immediately after, a recorder is shown in a close–up capturing the sound of raindrops on someone’s hand.
From there Moon cuts back to Clausen walking through the woods searching for a station in a portable handheld radio.[4] As he tunes through the radio channels static noise comes out with small outbursts of distinguishable sounds. He finally finds a station playing classical music and, holding the radio close to his body he closes his eyes to immerse himself in the sound that surrounds him.
The island of Als is where the three members grew up and met each other, so coming back to shoot this movie and capture the sounds of their childhood can be interpreted as a tuning of the world, looking for the noises that surrounded them and capture the sounds that formed them into what they are now. Their roots are not only physically based in Als but also sonically. Their music carry this soundscape, it’s a way to interact, and make sense of the sounds that gave them their voice. An Island, however, is not a document of the sound of Als. It does not aim to preserve a sonic registry of the island, but instead looks towards how the band members of Efterklang experience these sounds. Sound ends not being an object to dissect, but the basis on which music and encounters happen.
To clarify this distinction, compare Moon’s film with Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain (1942). Jennings turned what could be a simple propaganda film into a textured, lyrical evocation of Britain at war. As the early treatment entitled The Music of War indicates, for Jennings it is the sounds of that time that matter the most. Playing at the brink of fiction and non-fiction, with the help of editor (turned co-director) Stewart McAllister, the film is built on top of the music and sounds that create a continuum to which the image dialogues on top. Jennings, contrarily to Moon, understands and captures the music as being an outcome. It is not the ground on which subjectivity is built but the result of a modernization process — the Canadian soldiers sing on a train to the sound of an accordion; the factory workers follow the song that blasts through the speakers; a duet sings during lunch break at a large cafeteria. Moon and Jennings, both used soundscape and music as the skeleton of their films, and although reaching very distinct effects, their process of transfiguring the landscape into sound bear some similarities that is recognized through the work of the writer, educator and composer Murray Schafer.
Schafer opens his book announcing that “the soundscape of the world is changing.”[5] These changing soundscapes drastically differ from those of the past, both in quality and intensity. Continuous and loud sounds like the machines introduced in the industrial revolution, for example, were something unknown to humans until that point. There are now so much sounds in our ambiance and everyday lives that most of it turn into noise. When living in a city, for example, there are very few instances when there’s not constantly sounds from cars, buses, metros, trains, horns, shouts, and construction equipment.
This overaccumulation of noises leads in turn to noise pollution, a problem that is now worldwide. Against the common sense of ignoring or trying to silence all noise in any possible manner, Murray Schafer gives an alternative:
Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach. (…) Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape.[6]
Schafer’s admonition is a political one, where the power to decide which sounds should be eliminated and which ones should be preserved is given back to oneself.[7] It’s also a musical admonition, for listening is the genesis where one becomes the composer of its own music.
The 10-minute intro of An Island (which has 50 minutes total) orchestrates the sounds of Als analogously to how the music present in the rest of the film will. This extreme focus on very specific sounds creates what Schafer denominates a Hi–Fi Soundscape.
A Hi–Fi soundscape is a place where the listener can clearly hear each sound and identify its source. It’s described as “a favorable signal–to–noise ratio. The Hi–Fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level.”[8] A good example would be a countryside where one can pay attention and listen to a bird on the tree, a cow in the pasture or some vehicle approaching from afar.
The opposite would be a Lo–FI Soundscape, a place where “individual acoustic signals are obscured in an over dense population of sounds.”[9] A large city or a busy factory is a good example, where the constant hums of cars, horns, trains, machines, air conditioner, airplanes and other sources are continually fighting each other for dominance.
The whole introduction to An Island creates a Hi–Fi soundscape where signal–to–noise ratio is high, and each element is distinguishable. Each new sound also brings new interactions where I can sense a little bit more what it was to grow-up in such place. As the movie will showcase later, these recordings and Hi–Fi sounds are integrated into the Efterklang’s music, by playing in places where the soundscape is present and fully embraced by the filmmaker and the band.
The first performance in An Island is the music Raincoats. Moon cuts from the intro sequence to an old pickup truck that slowly comes towards him in an out of focus shot. The sequence starts with a cut to black as the syncopated claps of the band mark the rhythm of the music, seconds later the first image is an extreme close-up of the vocalist’s hand clapping. With a very shallow depth of focus the background is just a dark green blur of the forest that they are driving through.
The deep sound of the motor that is shown in the previous scene is present throughout the whole song. It is not a coincidence and neither inability to separate the sound of the truck from those of the voices and instruments being recorded. The low, continuously truck rumble doesn’t cut from the previous sequence indicating that it most likely was recorded separately and added in post-production. So far, the band has collected sounds from the environment, in Raincoats these sounds are sonically introduced for the first time in their music. The world around them is a profusion of noise that if adequately tuned can give birth to new sounds, putting to test Murray Schafer’s claim of not dismissing certain kinds of noise but selecting and including them in our sonic landscapes.
The spectral analysis above reveals this integration of the frequencies present in the world as a changing force in how music is presented in An Island. If comparing the version in the film with how the music was recorded, the first observation is the inclusion of this deep motor sound that strangely enough fits perfectly in the music and is in rhythm with the rest of the sounds. It gives a deep continuous murmur of the soundscape (the frequencies highlighted at 1) that ground the other sounds to a continuous materiality in space. In contrast, the version recorded in a controlled studio environment eliminates all unnecessary noises as exemplified by the lower frequencies that only resound specifically when the bass guitar joins in (highlight 4). In addition, the voice is clearly separated from the other instruments (the voice in 3 resonates across a wider range and interacts with more sounds in contrast to the voice in 5 that is more constricted and clearly separated from the higher notes of the guitar that starts at 6).
Music in Moon is integrated into a world that is sonically made present. In An Island, noise is an invitation to focus on specific elements from the soundscape that interact with the sound and the film. The rumble of the motor places where the performance is happening but will soon affect even more the music.
The fine-tuning of the sonic world is repeated visually in accompaniment; Moon transposes the extremely focused sounds that were being captured by the band into extreme close-up shots and frenetic camera movement to the rhythm of the song. As the verse starts Moon smoothly pans to Clausen’s mouth singing and slowly zooms out to show the person next to him joining in the verse. When the guitar enters, he follows by quickly panning to it and framing just the hand striking the chords. Still keeping the tight framing, he moves to the person playing electrical bass and, as if instructed by Moon, the bassist slightly moves so that he can capture the drummer and his snare drum. Next to the drummer, another member is following the rhythm by slapping his hands on his thigh.
Only after throwing the listener straight into the music he pans up to show the faces of the band and slowly reveals who is on the truck and where they are. This doesn’t last long, because briefly after situating the action Moon uses the rhythmic bridge to the verse as an opportunity to visually express the sounds by following each compass with a new movement. First compass — quick pan to the bassist. Second compass — quick pan to the singer. Third compass — zoom in at the eyes. Fourth compass — pan down to the guitar. Once the chorus enters, the camera follows Clausen as he sings before zooming out, at last, giving a full view of the back of the pickup truck.
While Raincoats is reaching its apotheosis, the song abruptly stops as the sound of the motor dies, and the film cuts to a black screen. Clausen in an interview talks about the truck dying, but it happened after the shot had already been entirely recorded and it never turned back on, they had to call in a tow truck to carry it out of there.[10] So why interrupt a performance that was perfectly recorded? This abrupt cut further strengthens the connection between the music and the soundscape.
In Moon, one cannot exist without the other. Music is not a separate ethereal aggrupation of sound, it always is connected to bodies, to the landscape, to the voice, and to the instruments. The sudden interruption is a reminder of this, without the soundscape, without Als, there is no Efterklang.
In all the following performances of An Island there are always elements that connect it to the soundscape of Als. It’s their parents and their relatives making sounds out of the shed where they first rehearsed using unusual instruments (like balloons and brooms), the children of the local school who sing and play instruments, and the teenage choir for the grand finale in the town’s auditorium.
Editing Raincoats so that the music depends on the sounds of Als is symbolic in this relation of the band to their origins, but I would say that it’s even more representative in how little interest Moon has of merely filming music as recorded in the vacuum of the studio. The death of the rumble of the motor sound kills all music and only when the roar of the ignition turning on resounds — the diesel pumping to the combustion chamber as it starts heating up with it loud old pistons reverberating the whole truck — is that the performance can continue.
The spectral analysis appears metaphoric in using the soundscape as the ground to which all else sprouts from. Remove the basis (as the highlighted segment where the motor dies) and music collapses into emptiness.
The Hi-Fi soundscape in Moon’s cinematic diagram is then the place where music can orchestrate the noises of the world so that the uniqueness of the voice can interact with the singularity of each sound. It comes back to the balance of being at the edge, a Lo-Fi soundscape the uncontrolled chaos whereas a Hi-Fi soundscape allows the director to focus on specific interactions.
An Island marks a period where Moon shifts to a view noise as the natural sounds of the world from which music emerges.[11] Moon continued challenging the commodity status of music, but it was more as a consequence of this shift. Music (as also the voice) becomes an opening to interact with the sonic world. To provoke an encounter by resonating together with everything around it, the soundscape, the musicians, the director and the listener.
b) MEDEA *made in the black sea* (2011)
At times music even disappears, as in the films where Moon partners with sound artists to exclusively focus on orchestrating the noises in the soundscape. MEDEA[12] is a film made together with Soundwalk Collective in a sailboat fitted with radios antennas, scanners, and microphones. For two months sounds and images were recorded from the Black Sea in their trip from Turkey to Ukraine, passing through Georgia, Russia, Crimea, Romania, and Bulgaria. The sounds and images almost exclusively were collected from inside the boat.[13] Moon shoots the landscape and the people from the point of view of someone looking from the boat towards the shore. The sounds collected reach the boat either through the natural sonic world (the waves, the other boats, shouts from the shore) or through radio waves that are captured by their scanners and antennas.
This self-imposed limitation on what to film and the nature of the project being primarily aural transforms the image into a sidekick to the sonic experience that is developed. After a lengthy introduction take — where the waves of the dark sea blur, shake and merge themselves, transforming into a visual audiowave of the soundscape — Moon’s first cut is to a close-up of an ear. Vision breaks all the connections to the aural, it is no longer the referential that sound helps to flesh out and render it real. The ear becomes the main site for the encounter. As Soundwalk Collective turn the sounds they captured into music with a “quivering beauty [that] remains cruel and obscure”[14] Moon reinforces this abstract feeling using the image to reinforce the sensations.
In Medea, music is found in the soundscape of the sea. It emerges from the landscape and from the acousmatic sounds that are captured in their radio equipment as an echo from the shore. Sound arises from the objects that can be seen (the sea, the mountains, the people passing by) but also from sonic bodies completely detached from any physicality like the radio voices and music that are caught as they pass by each country. To be at sea, in constant movement, without reaching any shore, turns sound into the primary way to interact with the world.
Salomé Voegelin, in his book Listening to Noise and Silence, observes how sound unfolds into an encounter — “However far its sources, the sound sits in my ear. I cannot hear it if I am not immersed in its auditory object, which is not its source but sound as sound itself.”[15] The distance from the sound sources creates the fertile ground for the singularity of each sonic body to be unhinged from its physical aspect and enter the composition purely for its value in interacting with the other bodies.
Nevertheless, this distance creates a friction in the film. Perhaps, because only in the first opening shots the sound of what is seen (the sea) is heard and thereafter, it becomes a purely abstract sound piece, the music from Soundwalk Collective becomes the soundscape of the film itself extinguishing any link between sound and image. In An Island, for example, the “natural” soundscape is always present and gives the basis on which the songs will be created. In Medea, however, the original soundscape is extinguished and replaced for the music that was created.
Medea takes this concept of the soundscape as music to the extreme. It tests the limits of how far Moon is willing to go in exterminating any reference back to the image and approach the film almost purely as a sound piece. The sounds of the world are fully orchestrated into abstract music that do not mantain any link to what the listener is seeing. My personal experience when first watching Medea was to close my eyes for I felt that the images were interfering with my listening of the film. After watching it many times it still feels that the link between the visual and the aural is broken in this film.
Recurring once more to Grandrieux’s cinematic diagram helps comprehend this rupture that is present in Medea. For Grandrieux the story in his films has this function to draw in the viewer into the world. Grandrieux needs the story as a tenue line to keep at the “edge of meaning.” The narrative permits him to break any internal or external logic and force the figure to be comprehended not through its relation to meaning (any action that further advances in explaining or giving a development to the account) but as being a bloc of pure sensation. Why doesn’t Grandrieux remove, then, the story and just focus on bringing presence to the figural in a non-narrative cinema?
I don’t feel myself as an experimental filmmaker, because I need to be inside of a kind of a story, maybe if it’s a very simple story, of a man looking for a woman, like in fairy tales, like Sombre, you know, the beast… You can build the world that you want with this simple story but I think that you need this story to be able to construct the movement inside of the movie, the movement of what we are following like a wave. So stories are important for me and also this question of [t]aking the audience inside of something that is possible to follow, even if it is very difficult to follow, even if it is very confused, very obscure, very hard to understand, but the structure is very simple.[16]
Even if the narrative is barely constructed in Grandrieux’s films, it gives the bones on which he can work his other aspects to wrench sensations in tearing this body apart. How to create the pain of breaking a bone if there is none in the first place? To explore pleasure if there is no flesh? Perhaps a better analogy would be with the nerves, a connection between the corporeal and sensorial that has been ruptured. Of course, this goes back to Bacon denying the purely abstract for a logic of sensations to emerge. In his case keeping the figure but removing the figurative, which for Moon would translate to keeping the connection between sound and image but removing any signification.
In Moon, the bones that keep his cinematic diagram together is this immediate connection of the image to the sound. Music can be performed, the soundscape can turn into music, both can even disappear into noise, but the visual and the aural must be in a constant interaction for the encounter to take place. In Moon, finding sens is the result of his unique approach to how to connect the aural and visual, and submit both through the diagram. Medea is the negative example when the focus becomes on the strengths of each separate medium and not in their interaction. Moon’s cinematic body, that he will wrench sens out of, is held together by the music. A music that is present aurally and evidenced visually, be it through the body of the performer or from the natural elements that are present in the soundscape and landscape.
His films with the sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard discovers how to work the music in soundscape in a manner unique to film, keeping both in interaction. A year after Medea, Moon together with Kirkegaard did a series of films called Now Ethiopia. This time Moon’s spontaneous methods of not planning anything in advance and figuring what to do once he arrives at the place didn’t work as expected:
In Ethiopia, people didn’t care at all about being recorded. Most of the musicians I ran into were so pretentious and asked for so much money to perform (I never paid any musicians before for the recordings, so the contrast was a bit tough) that I was feeling very awkward — I didn’t have any money to give them, being completely broke myself (bad idea, you can travel being broke in many places around the world, but not in Ethiopia), and the simple fact of paying someone to perform was something I avoided always to keep a ‘true’ relationship to the musicians. Was I wrong? Maybe. So I paid most of the people I filmed in Ethiopia. Did they play better because of the money? I don’t think so. Did it create a weird relationship on my side? Most of the time, but it’s my own fault. I remember this quote from Michel Leiris: “Africa does not need me.” Well, Ethiopia didn’t need me![17]
Even with some problems (and a hint of colonialism), nonetheless, Now Ethiopia series is still an appealing part of Petites Planètes, as it explores the vast various religious practices unique to the country. Having the partnership of a sound artist like Kirkegaard resulted in a rich sonorous landscape in the films where they collaborated. In particularly two films stand out for engaging the soundscape. The first is METAL MACHINE MERKATO • Jacob Kirkegaard in Addis Ababa (2012), a film that answers the question raised in Medea of finding a balance where the music can emerge from the soundscape without breaking the connection between image and sound. And the second is YESETAN MENFES • exorcism ritual in Addis Ababa (2012), an eerie film that precedes Moon’s next step in approaching rituals and possession.
c) Metal Machine Merkato • Jacob Kirkegaard in Addis Ababa (2012)
As the title already indicates METAL MACHINE MERKATO • Jacob Kirkegaard in Addis Ababa has the sound artist as the subject of the film, similarly to how Soundwalk Collective assumes the function of the musician that composes the soundscape in Medea. Throughout the film, Kirkegaard is continuously shown pointing his microphones to capture the sounds, adjusting the sound in the mixer and recorder around his waist, and listening to everything through his headphones. The sound is recorded and mixed to emulate the binaural format, giving the impression that I’m hearing exactly what Kirkegaard was when he recorded.[18]
There is a particular pleasure in listening to binaural recordings and being surprised in spatially locating the source of each sound. Moon and Kirkegaard seem to feel the same way. The first 5 minutes of the film explores the sounds of the streets of Addis Ababa by spatially placing each sound so that the listener can recreate in the mind what is being heard. The morning prayer emanates from the distance while birds sing all around, soon another mosque that is closer to the left starts its prayer. A car approaches from the front, its noise getting louder and louder until it crosses over and disappears behind. Someone shouts from one side to another person that answers from the other. A dog barks in the front while a truck passes by from right to left. A friction of the metal wheel of an old handcart produces a dragging sound as it transverses from left to right and slowly fades out lingering in the next scene. Sheep bleat as they cross in front and the crack of the whip is heard as the shepherd direct his flock through the streets.
Soon, though, something becomes clearer — not everything that is shown is heard, and not everything that is heard is shown. Even identifying many objects this isn’t purely a soundscape recording; it’s a composition using some elements that are visually present to create something else.
This disparity becomes stronger as they move to the primary location of the film, a market where metal and plastic trash are sold to be manually recycled and converted into useful objects. The soundscape of the market is full of noise, according to Murray Schafer it would be a Lo-Fi soundscape. People shout, large plastic containers are thrown and hit the ground, metal barrels are manually cut with a wedge and a hammer, rusty metal objects are hammered into sheets, and many more sounds. But, in the film, Kirkegaard and Moon recreate the soundscape so that each sound is audible enough to be distinguished (a Hi-Fi soundscape).
The market is a playground to both artists as they play in how image and sound interact with each other. Towards the middle of the film, an idea starts to be repeated in different sequences that merits a more in-depth investigation. As the film transitions to focus on how they recycle old metal barrels, the sound of each bang on the different objects pile upon each other layering the various unique timbres of each resonating metal. At a certain point, Moon focuses on one man, slowly but consistently hitting a wedged knife with a hammer into a metal barrel. Other sounds are dimmed to emphasize the crisp metallic bang that each hit produces. Suddenly the bangs that reverberated through the deepest frequency to the highest are muffled, all mid to high frequencies are cut off, and each hit sounds like a dampened drum bass. This only lasts a few seconds, soon returning to its natural sound.
The noises from the soundscape can be synthesized, transformed and layered with effects so that they are more similar to an instrument, but doing so breaks the connection to the sonic body that created it. Medea, in contrast, makes use of all these tools in transforming the soundscape to a point where the singularity of each sonic body is lost in the process.[19]
By playing with drastically changing the sonic properties, the film indicates that they could transform it, opting instead for each sound to be heard as music itself. This idea repeats twice after this. The Hi-Fi soundscape fades out when Kirkegaard and Moon close in on a man hammering the metal sheets into a large kind of bowl. The close-up is followed by a closely microphoned bang in this metal bowl. Slowly as Moon zoom’s in each hit is followed by an increasingly outworldly echo that alters its properties to resound as a foley in a sci-fi movie.
Another invitation to listen to the uniqueness in each sound happens moments later when a metal rod is being straightened by a hammer. The mid to high frequencies are maintained while the lower and deeper bass of each hit is slowed down for some brief seconds, causing a dissonance between the hit and its slower than usual reverberation.
After calling the listener to carefully appreciate each timbre, multiple sounds of metal being hit is layered in an almost harmonious manner. A symphony where all parts are played by the metallic percussion that exists continuously outside the need of a composer or musician. The natural music of the soundscape if I only stop to listen.
The concept of music in Moon, in finding a point to balance itself turns out remarkably similar to that of John Cage — “If this word ‘music’ is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.”[20] Cage’s concept of music is highly influential in contemporary art, and certainly, Moon´s collaborator in the film Jacob Kirkegaard is no stranger to his writings.[21] In METAL MACHINE MERKATO the union of both artists crystalizes an idea of noise and sound that directly interacts with the legacy that Cage left and that was developed fully in concrete music:
Where we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.[22]
METAL MACHINE MERKATO also spins into full gear another idea that underlaid Moon’s shift away from The Take Away Show and commercial music, that of music as a becoming not a being. In 1958 Cage delivered a lecture in Darmstadt where he describes (what he perceives) as the essential formal aspect of European art music, that of producing a “time-object”:
…the presentation of a whole as an object in time having a beginning, a middle and an ending, progressive rather than static in character, which is to say possessed of a climax or climaxes and in contrast a point or points of rest.[23]
What Cage meant by using “time-objects” are compositions where the music is separated from the flux of time. An object that only exists in the act of resounding a bounded score that asserts its identity over time and coerces the performers to reproduce the instructions of the composer. This isn’t a criticism against the role of the performer as a copyist or of music becoming dull and boring, but an ontological revision on the notion of music. Music as a being is closed in itself, existing and interacting only when it is performed, an interaction based on the time it creates. Opposing this idea, music as a becoming is open as it happens in the duration of the existing flux of time.
The success and genius of his work 4’33” (1952) is based on this notion of music as existing in the duration of a time outside itself versus being a “time-object” where time is created for and only exists during the music. The sequel 0’0” (1962) radicalizes this notion; in his previous project music was a cut of 4 minutes and 33 seconds from the sonic world I live in, now it is all of it. “What the piece tries to say,” according to Cage, “is that everything we do is music, or can become music through the use of microphones; so that everything I’m doing, apart from what I’m saying, produces sound.”[24] For Cristoph Cox, who observed Cage’s importance in reconfiguring the concepts of music in his article From Music to Sound, the aim of both pieces “is to open time to the experience of duration and to open musical experience to the domain of sound. It is also to open human experience to something beyond it: the non-human, impersonal flow that precedes and exceeds it.”[25]
Moon’s shifting perspective on music, then, can be looked through this idea of it changing from being — a “time-object” looking to preserve its own characteristics — to that of a becoming — a music that already exists outside that only demands me to stop and acknowledge it. The beauty in Moon’s career is that the seeds for this shift were always there from the beginning. First, by inserting the streets and its noises into these “time-objects” in the Take Away Shows. The music at that initial moment still had a beginning, middle and end, but the introduction of the soundscape aimed to distance itself from the concept of “time-object” and approach the idea of being only a creation in that specific moment of time. It gradually progresses (or gradually becomes) by fusing and giving more importance to the sounds that existed outside the performance, like in An Island. And finally, music as a becoming, the sounds that already existed and will continuing existing create the duration of the film that captures only a moment of something independent from the director.
This revisioning of music, of course, directly interacts with the other notions of listening (écouter) and that of the singularity present in everything that lives in the sonic world.[26] In Moon, music as becoming creates a deviation in the subjects of his film and how they are produced. Slowly Moon drifts from recording music that is performed specifically to be filmed, to focus in sounds and music that are already present and exist outside the notion of “time-object.”
These changes also carried new forms of interaction and encounters. The renvoi between oneself, music, and with Moon, locked in the time of the performance, opens to an ongoing renvoi with a world that precedes and succeeds the listener. When Moon’s sole interest becomes rituals, the renvoi grows to a space where one can listen and interact not only with what is beyond in time but also what is beyond oneself as human.
d) YESETAN MENFES • exorcism ritual in Addis Ababa (2012)
The cornerstone of this last shift can be seen in YESETAN MENFES. Recorded in the church of Entoto Mariam, located on the Entoto hills right outside the city of Addis Ababa, the film conveys the exorcism rituals that take place in the church. How the film was produced dramatically differs from Moon’s usual approach. Kirkegaard, in an interview to The Guardian talks about how the series was produced and what made this film special:
We did six portraits together in only 10 days. It was very intense and interesting. It was the first time we’d worked together. On some portraits I was more the sound recordist for the films. On other projects we shifted the roles. At Entoto Mariam, for example, we both recorded alone and would pair the recordings afterwards. I am therefore currently putting together a sound piece based on my recordings from Entoto Mariam. Vincent Moon will then edit his footage recordings according to my sound piece.[27]
This unusual approach to how the film is made, paired with the fact that no images are allowed inside the church, ended shaping YESETAN MENFES into one of his strongest films regarding ritual and music.
The film starts with the sounds of a bell being rang, birds and a deep reverbing gong. Slowly a distant prayer is chanted while a voice whispers something incomprehensible. Moon shows the landscape of going up the Entoto hills to finally arrive at the Entoto Mariam church. Entering through the gates, the film gradually presents the believers wrapped in white garments coming to the church to pray and participate in the rituals. The steps and voices are contrasted with the chant that is transformed (the time is stretched, echo is added, and the pitch is modified) into a chilling ambient drone sound. Even though it’s a sunny day, Moon filters the light entering the camera so that the white clothes are correctly exposed while the rest in drowned in shadows. The people come walking through the woods to receive the blessing and the holy water on their foreheads.
A profound bass begins a rhythm and gains volume together with the metamorphized echoing layers of chants. One of the chants progressively returns to a more natural state. It can now be identified that there are words being said, even if it is layered on top of the droning sounds. As people cue in a line (it doesn’t reveal where this line is. Is it outside the church? In the woods for the holy-water?) the sound of a gush of water bridges to the next section where the exorcism will take place.
Moon cuts to a black screen when the first sound of an animalistic screaming is heard. At first, it’s hard to know for sure what this is; it sounds like a high-pitched shriek of something being tortured and in constant pain. The scream is heard together with the water flowing and the drone-like chant. The image disappears during this first encounter with exorcism. For one minute and twenty seconds the image is black while the listener is left to interact with the sounds purely on a sensorial basis, the only explanation whatsoever of what is being heard so far has been the title of the film.
When the image briefly fades back in, a woman helps a drowsy child out of the church where he is conducted in a trance-like state to his family. This sequence suggests that the screams heard before were probably the high-pitched voice of an infant being exorcised.
More voices, this time of adults, are added to the mix. The droning-chant creates the basis for each peculiar sound of the ritual to interact in a musical manner. It is no longer only screams, but the sound of bodies moving, hitting the floor and the walls. As the film continues the sound evolves between the voices and sounds of the ritual, the sounds of water and fire, and the chants in the background.
Moon, meanwhile, jumps between long black screens and shots of the people leaving the precinct after partaking in the ritual. The film ends showing a prayer being sung inside the church while the rites continue in a more calmly manner.
In analyzing the film, it presents a beginning, the development to a climax in the sounds of the exorcism and a resting end, couldn't it be comprehended as a “time-object”? Even with these structural fabrications imposed in post-production, the sound ruptures from this notion of “time-object” as it favors capturing the already manifested instead of creating a separate time of its own. The film doesn't infer that it is but a fragment, a small duration, of an ongoing ritual that lives independent of Moon’s interference.
In Medea, the sound is used to create a centripetal abstract sound piece that breaks all the links with the source and draws attention to its own process of operation. It lives by itself with a beginning, middle, and end, barely referring to anything outside of the piece instead pushing the listener to its inner world. In effect, a “time-object” able to create its own time, its own development.
YESETAN MENFES, distinctly, doesn't drive its own separate existence but is always in referral to an ongoing ritual that lives outside the film. The sound is centrifugal, pushing the listener outwards to the world, to continue the film by going to Entoto Mariam and hearing it for oneself.
In addition, by altering certain sounds while preserving others, YESETAN MENFES posits that a becoming of music is also a reconfiguration between the relations of these preexistent sonic bodies. By rearranging the soundscape, the film opens a site for listening to find a sens beyond what is recorded. I first hear these voices and sounds in an interaction with an elsewhere, to only thereafter see the bodies that produced them frozen in space. In doing so, the film grounds the aural as the site for an exchange that supersedes itself.
Noise: forcing an opposition
With a diagram that englobes and encompasses all aspects of the film, noise is an important trait to also be transformed and subjected by Moon. There are many ways to approach the concept of noise. The first one that has already slipped into this thesis is Murray Schafer’s understanding that noise is something undesirable and prejudicial. Noise, as described in the book I previously used Soundscape: The Tuning of the World, is something that saturates the environment, it pollutes and suffocates the precise hearing of the world. His Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi concepts derive from this core idea and while it helps flesh out Moon’s approach to sound, to view noise purely as something detrimental closes the possibilities of music that Moon grew to in his works such as METAL MACHINE MERKATO and YESETAN MENFES. If Murray Schafer’s own opinion on Luigi Russolo’s pioneer sound pieces is any indication, he would probably consider these latter films that I mentioned as garbage — “Russolo’s experiments mark a flash-point in the history of aural perception, a reversal of figure and ground, a substitution of garbage for beauty.”[28]
This mode of perceiving noise through its physicality and its implications paves the way for future authors. Newer scholars, even without having such a negative opinion on noise, choose to focus purely on the forms noise forces itself upon the listener, how it interacts with the sonic bodies that surround it. Works like Brandon Labelle’s book Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2006), Douglas Kahn’s Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in Arts (1999), and Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Music (2010) are some examples that updated Murray Schafer’s approach but still kept noise under its sonic properties.
Parallel to the publication of Soundscape: The Tuning of the World in 1977, Jacques Attali published his book Bruit (or Noise once it released in English in 1985), where he presented an alternative method to investigate noise. Attali stems away from noise as a sonic element to focus on its indexical relation and the power aspects of how noise is ordered and suppressed. Noise loses its fundamental oppositional nature to become a sign of essential violence (based on René Girard). The book focuses on how music orders noise to comprehend and prophesize how society keeps violence in order. Paul Hegarty follows in Attali’s steps in his book Noise Music: A History (2007) and in the books where he acts as an editor.
Lastly, a third, aberrant route emerges in Greg Hainge’s book Noise Matters (2013). This work bypasses noise’s aural characteristics and its indexical relation to power to search and question the ontological function of noise. I’ll expand in this section the first two approaches and how it helps expand Moon’s diagram. Later, I’ll return to Hainge’s ideals on the ontology of noise once the basis for Deleuze’s becoming is laid-out in the chapter explaining the encounter-image.
Noisy bodies and noisy voices
Salomé Voegelin playfully defines noise, in his book Listening to Noise and Silence, by saying that “Noise is other people’s music: my neighbor’s collection blasting at full volume.”[29] As such, noise initially may seem like a matter of perception. If it is something that is pleasing it is not noise, or in other words, noise could be seen as any sound that is bothersome, that is unwanted at the moment that it resounds. To stop here, though, would be to only explore the surface without delving into the deeper implications of noise. As Voegelin suggests, noise is also intrinsically connected to the body and sensations — “Noise ingests me and yet it is only noise because it works on my body.”[30] Noise invades the body and forces it open as an organon, as a body without organs. It makes the body loose control, as Voegelin thoroughly described through his experience in a Rave party back in 1993:
I and all the other hundreds of ravers became the visual interpretation of noise: a euphoric mass of isolated movement. The vertical pull of noise intensifies listening’s solitary experience. Noise exaggerates the isolation of my sensorial engagement and tightens the reciprocity between the listener and the heard.[31]
There are many interesting implications in the quotation above. First, Voegelin visually interprets noise as “euphoric mass of isolated movement.” The body is separated from its environment as it becomes pure movement. Remembering Bacon’s paintings, isn’t Voegelin’s depiction of noise the figure being isolated from the figurative? Going back to Deleuze’s notion of hystericizing, for him “the hysteric is at the same time someone who imposes his or her presence, but also someone for whom things and being are present, too present…”[32] I previously approached the notion of hystericizing the body in parallel to how listening opens the renvoi and invokes Nancy post-phenomenological self. For this to happen though, one must listen, to voluntarily assume the stance of searching for a beyond meaning, and here is where noise enters. Noise becomes a weapon to force listening:
Noise does not have to be loud, but it has to be exclusive: excluding other sounds, creating in sound a bubble against sounds, destroying sonic signifiers and divorcing listening from sense material external to its noise.[33]
In this manner, noise is an extreme measure that breaks with all other modes of interacting with sound and imposes the notion of listening to something that can’t be understood, but that can be felt, a connection that I see directly related to Nancy’s sens. Noise becomes the crowbar that forcefully opens a space where the body is hystericized — “Besieged by noise I am concretely the singular body of my formless thinging, speechless but ecstatically me.”[34]
a) Petites Planètes _ volume 6 _ ZAR (2010)
Take Moon’s film ZAR, for example, a film shot in Cairo that finds in sound a form for women to rise to the forefront. The Zar consists of an exorcism ceremony to “treat individuals possessed by spirits, or jinns.”[35] Similarly to Voegelin’s rave party, the exorcism happens by playing specific rhythmic patterns, called “khuyut” which literally translates as threads.
It’s hard to distinguish or even theorize between what is music and what is noise. In the case at hand, what would make a rave party noisy and a ritual musical? Voegelin, similarly to Murray Schafer, take for granted that noise compositions are indeed composed of noise. A rave party, therefore, is pure noise as it eradicates “verbal communications” and insists “that I hand over my body to its force.”[36] Hainge, on the other hand, criticizes this concept, mainly through how Russolo and John Cage are perceived since noise becomes expected and therefore is not oppositional in nature. Through Hainge’s thought, a rave party is not noisy at all since there is nothing that opposes why the people attending are giving over their bodies to the music. The noise in a rave merely reinforces the pleasure of its own existence. Regardless, Hainge doesn’t properly answer the question of what is and isn’t noise, preferring to research how noise functions. As such, to help explore Moon’s diagram, I will operate in the junction between both, regarding noise as that which is naturally oppositional (sonically and also philosophically). This is not to exhaust the full possibilities that are still being unfolded in noise studies, but rather to find common ground. It also falls in line with Voegelin’s explanation that “noise simply manifests the failure to communicate, it becomes the negative of what is beautiful, permissive and harmonic,” and lastly that “Noise re-asserts experience over modernist reserve, and gets the body moving.”[37]
In this context, Zar is a very noisy film. Firstly, it is highly subversive because it opposes established norms. The rite itself is the only musical tradition in Egypt where women have the most important roles. It is “intended to be a mode through which women can experience freedom and release anxieties and tensions without being restricted by the social norms.”[38] Furthermore, it also breaks with any modernist rationale for it is a ritual to appease the “jinns.”
Summoning the spirits is an elaborate and lengthy ritual, climaxing with animal sacrifices and their blood being spilled on top of jewelry and amulets. In Moon’s 10 minute film we see only a brief snippet of this rite, two women put in trance another one and heal her by drumming, chanting, and singing the name of Allah all night long.
The origins of the ritual are from the sub-Saharan region and came to Egypt in the mid-19th century with the slaves. The women passed down to the younger generations the ritual but due to religious conservative deeming it un-Islamic nowadays only approximately 25 people still perform the Zar in Egypt.
In his film ZAR, the sound grabs Moon and holds him hostage. The director, even without any prior knowledge of what was happening, has his body viscerally subjected to the sonic charge. For Voegelin, when “there is no question about your physical engagement, noise is realized in your body.”[39] Moon, in one way or another, felt this and was profoundly changed by it:
I think, like three or four years ago, something happened to me, and I ended up in a ritual in Cairo one night [the Zar], very sacred, a very sacred ritual, and I knew this because of the way people were playing the music. I never expected that … I didn’t make any research or anything between music and spirituality, let’s say, or rhythms and trance, and when I saw this, it completely changed my way of thinking about this all, and since then I’ve been pursuing this quest of how people live with music.[40]
Zar carries in Moon’s oeuvre the importance of forcing through noise a space for listening, where these bodies could resound. It distinguishes itself from his previous films in The Take Away Shows, for it is oppositional in nature, sound becomes the force that creates resistance. A resistance to meaning, to understanding, and to the society. As I’ll talk later in Hainge, this resistance is the function of noise.
There is another crucial topic to be discussed in Zar, that of noise opening a space where censored bodies and muted voices can resound. Could noise, open Cavarero’s idealized place for encounters where a voice can be listened to and acknowledged? Voegelin, while more proximately dialoguing with Nadal-Melsió’s ideals of the singular in the voice, sees in noise a way to force different voices to be heard through what he calls the noisy voice:
The noisy voice is the thing-ness of the subject, in turn; the subject listening becomes its thing-ness in its voice. They are both on trial producing their own non-sense, sensitive to the intersubjective process that generates them both in simultaneous isolation. (…) The voice as noise pursues no legitimation in language. It is thinging in its most provocative fashion. Embracing me in its breath, it is the sensible sentient, the sensing body as thing, that senses my sensibility in its sensorial production, as my own sensibility senses it.[41]
Investigating noise through its sonic properties, such as opposition and resistance, invariably also leads to its political implications. As with Zar, in Petites Planètes Moon inquires and, in some cases, even makes use of noise to resound marginalized muted voices. Voegelin, who tried to keep away from this parallel area of research recognizes the intrinsic implications of noise when inserted into a society:
In a more general sense noise amplifies social relations and tracks the struggle for identity and space within the tight architectural and demographic organization of a city. In this sense, noise is a social signifier: determining unseen boundaries and waging invisible wars.[42]
The proponent of researching noise as social signifier is Jacques Attali, whose ideas on how music orders and regulates certain noises helps comprehend the power relation at play when noise is inserted into a larger scenario.
Noise as violence
Despite the fact that Attali is talking about noise and music, his fundamental approach is still through a visually based philosophy on how identity needs to be fought for, gained and exhibited to have any validity. This search for an identity is the basis for essential violence to emerge — the violence where each being has to battle to assert their difference. Faced with this crisis of identity, society needs to find ways to extricate and control this violence so it can grow.
Attali, based on René Girard’s writings in his on violence and mimesis, sustains that noise is a simulacrum of how this violence is purged. At the heart of Attali’s theory is the idea that music is order imposed upon noise. Forcing order upon sounds, therefore is a kind of violence, although it’s one that claims to put an end to violence.
Furthermore, for Attali Noise doesn’t exist in itself but is always inscribed in a system: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Which is to say, it’s not an autonomous being capable of its own reasoning but is subjected to the logic of the system of its insertion. At one end of the spectrum, I can buy a machine that continually emits certain frequencies that are pleasurable for human’s ears, and that drowns out unwanted noises. At the other extreme, noise was used as a method of torture for the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay.[43] In both cases, there is a “perpetrator” (or a system set in motion) with its ideology, desires, and goals. Noise is never void of motives, never free from politics.
For there to be a society, there needs to be a mechanism to channel the violence so that the differences, the hierarchy that legitimizes the use of power, is maintained. In similarity, to keep noise from reaching the level of generalized violence, it must find its own techniques to constrain and channel the noise.
The ways society and music deal in channeling this “essential violence” is an unsteady and fluctuating relationship of dynamics and power shifting through time. Both find ways to impose an order that aims to control violence. In the community, this is reflected by bestowing to an agency the legal monopoly of violence so that it can deliver security and peace. In music, it is imposing certain noises that are deemed acceptable to protect and exclude any unwanted noises.[44]
Out of this imposition, a line is drawn of what is considered to be music, and what is noise. Attali, rightly insists that this differentiation is the work of politics. The result being exclusion as a form to create identity. The distinction and exclusion of certain noises to bond the ones that are deemed acceptable, drawing a direct connection between the imposition of order in society and the imposition of sonic order that is music.
Most interestingly, if both are so intrinsically connected he proposes that in music it’s possible to foreshadow big political changes, such as the move to capitalism.[45] “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.”[46]
This is a drastic change from the more common conception that music reflects the manners and culture of each place. A view that is perfectly exemplified by the writings of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax:
…since a folksong is transmitted orally by all or most members of a culture, generation after generation, it represents an extremely high consensus about patterns of meaning and behavior of cultural rather than individual significance (…) expressive behavior may be one of the most sensitive and reliable indicators of culture patterns and social structure. Apparently, as people live, so do they sing.[47]
This view expresses music as a reactive force being shaped by what surrounds it, by “cultural patterns and social structure.” Music here functions as a container of the established views of specific time and place. Why Attali’s vision is different from merely seeing music as reactive is well explained:
…the musician is not a mirror of the productive relations of his time. (…) They are and remain, witnesses of the impossible imprisonment of the visionary by power, totalitarian or otherwise.[48]
Here is Attali’s most prominent contribution — the musical process of structuring noise is also the political process for structuring society. Music due to its nature is faster to react, to find new orders within the noise, in effect foretelling bigger social organizations/changes. Thus, by studying and understanding when noise (violence) breaks the established musical order transforming into something, new or different patterns of changes emerge, a site of creation where due to its malleability one can glimpse what is to come. A container of the underlying desires that are still to be manifested in the larger structures of society.
This concept from his book Noise (1977) is very audacious and ambitious as he links the production, performance, and consumption of music to fundamental questions of power and order in society. He constructs four historical phases, or codes, where the ordering upon noise in music epitomized the broader regime of the time: sacrifice, representation, repetition, and composition. Each of these codes marks a distinct way how noise is organized by channeling certain sounds and in specific orders. The first three at times intersect and even coexist in the complex forms that music evolved.
Composition, on the other hand, reaches a conclusion that foregoes these power relations to find in the aural a solution to free noise (music and sound) from politics so that it can resound in and for itself. Music finally becomes an end, now free for it to be used for individual expression, for “pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange.”[49]
To pursue Attali’s notion of the crisis of identity as the primal motor for the “essential violence” to which noise acts as a proxy would be unfruitful for as I already construed through Nadal-Melsió and Cavarero, in the aural identity is not only constant but an intrinsically-inherited trait. There is no need for differentiating oneself in the sonic world; it is already affirmed. What interests me though in Attali, and the reason to delve into Noise is to find how Moon’s otocentric approach subverts ocular schemes and unfolds new spaces where identity is a given condition.
An example of Moon’s intersection with Attali is the film Gaby Amarantos • Live in Jurunas (2011). A project, made in partnership with the director Priscilla Brazil, about the Brazilian tecnobrega singer who helped spread and popularize a marginalized sub-culture of the northern city of Belém to the rest of the country. The work unfolds a celebration of opening the singer’s own space using noise as a weapon and also through Attali’s notion of noise as an instrument to subvert established codes.
a) Gaby Amarantos • Live in Jurunas (2011)
Primordially, the production of music has as its function the creation, legitimation, and maintenance of order. Its primary function is not to be sought in aesthetics, which is a modern invention, but in the effectiveness of its participation in social regulation. Music — pleasure in the spectacle of murder, organizes the simulacrum masked beneath festival and transgression — creates order.[50]
Attali’s question above may seem contradictory within this thesis, but it lays the ground to how the insertion of noise into music can subvert a regime that oppresses and is deaf to the unheard voices.
Noise, as proposed by Voegelin, has the power to force a voice to be listened to. Going back to Calvino’s story, the sounds of the unknown prisoner banging an undecipherable rhythm in the palace’s basement sequestered the king’s attention and was the responsible for inducing (or shocking) a new mode of listening into existence.
Attali doesn’t pay much attention to this. For him, music has a function (to purge violence through the simulacrum of sacrificial murder) and what changes is only the path to how music achieves this function. That noise is furthermore capable or affecting how it is listened to falls outside his jurisdiction. Nevertheless, this is adamant to Moon. His film about Gaby Amarantos celebrates the tecnobrega movement appropriation and reconfiguration of noise as a form to force their previously silenced voices to be listened.
This film is symbolical for it connects conceptions such as the role that new technologies had in forcing open the order of composition through noise. At the beginnings of the 2000s, an exciting phenomenon started happening in the northern Brazilian city of Belém. With the absurd prices of original CDs and DVDs, an elaborate network of pirated-copy sellers started spawning around Belém and in Brazil as a whole.[51] Illegal distributors and copiers stocked the sellers at the traffic lights and the informal shops crammed in the busiest streets. As soon as an album or film was released, it would immediately be available in almost every city for a fraction of its price. With limited internet connection, buying from these sellers was the easiest way to get highly sought releases.
Such scenario, of course, is not an exclusive phenomenon of Belém or even Brazil, many countries where the price of the original media was outrageously high ended up with similar networks. What is unique about Belém, though, is how artists made use of this network of pirated copiers and sellers to promote and find a public that the record labels were not interested in.[52]
Belém musically got famous in Brazil for a style of music called Brega which would best be translated as a mix of tacky and kitsch; cheesy romantic songs that assumed its simplicity and lack of refinement as a strong point. With the rise of digital instruments and computers getting cheaper, the musicians of Belém adapted this older style into something called Tecnobrega, still tacky and kitsch but now made entirely with pirated computer instruments with a vocal track slapped on top of it.[53]
The film Brega s/a (2010) documents it’s popularization and consolidation from 2006 to 2009 and gives a panorama by showing all the steps from production to consumption. Being able to make the songs in the readily available programs, new artists started fashioning and adapting popular hits to the tecnobrega style. Local radio DJ Alex mentions in the documentary, that every day he gets around 20 singles from new artists asking to play their songs in his program.
With the record industry having no interest in signing these artists, the solution they came up with is to give the “matrix” of their album for free to the copiers that after printing thousands of copies would then send them to the pirate sellers in the streets. In a matter of days, it would be available all over the state of Pará. The musician himself doesn’t get a single dime from the copies that are sold, but in exchange, benefit from the larger ecosystem that is activated by this — the local tv, radio shows, and most importantly the nightclubs and parties organized around the tecnobrega (where they are paid to perform).
The style of the music is crazily fast-paced, the dance that became popular with it carries out at a breakneck speed where the closest the dancer seems to be convulsing the best. The urbanist Paulo Cal, interviewed in Brega s/a see these characteristics as the result of the style being from Belém:
To exist this thing, the city of Belém was fundamental because of the urbanistic disorder and the violence that comes out of this mess. It’s because of this that the music ended up like that. I need a crazy rhythm to feel like I’m hallucinating, to follow the speed and craziness of this city.[54]
Tecnobrega came from the voices that were at the margins of any order, from the violence that spread through the streets. It was disorder that gave space for the artists to adapt an illegal network to their own benefit. It was outspread violence that dictated the rhythm of the music. It was noise that opened a space where their voices could interact and be acknowledged.
Rearranging and reorganizing noise violently opened a space for these musicians. The sound itself is a site of conflict. Brega s/a describes the ongoing dispute to have the most potent sound system, to be the loudest possible. For journalist Flavio Pinto (giving his opinion from the comfortable position of his silent office), this will end up taking music back to the stone age.
From this [dis]order Gaby Amarantos is born. It is not a coincidence then that the first song in Live in Jurunas is an a cappella version of Canto das Três Raças,[55] a song mourning the voices that could never resound. The voices that inserted into a society of power and dominance were left at the margins of [visually] having any identity:
Nobody heard
The sob of pain
In the singing of BrazilA sad lament
Has always echoed
Since the Indian warrior
Was brought to captivity
And from there has sungThe Negro intoned
A song of rebellion in the air
In the Quilombo dos Palmares
Where he took refugeNot to mention the struggle of the Inconfidentes
For breaking the chains
To no availAnd from war to peace
From peace to war
All the people of this land
Whenever they can sing
Sing in pain
ô, ô…..And it echoes day and night
It is deafening
Ah, but what an agony
The singing of the worker
This singing that should
Be a song of joy
Sounds just
As a sob of pain [56]
Amarantos sings about the frustration and impossibility that music had in Brazil as an instrument of revolution. That the noise of the Native Indians couldn’t prevent their extinction. That the noise of the enslaved Africans didn’t stop the destruction of Palmares.[57] That the separatists of Minas Gerais were also unable to achieve their goals and ended with its leader being killed to suppress the noise against the Portuguese crown.
Amarantos grew in the poor suburb of Jurunas, one of the most violent neighborhoods in already one of the most violent cities in the world.[58] To start with this song references the hardships that she and those around her must struggle everyday. However, what follows isn’t a sob. Differently from the previous attempts, they managed to make their voices heard. Due to accessible technology they can create their own place of interaction, they don’t need traditional media to accept what they are doing, or established critics to validate their music. Tecnobrega has forcefully opened through noise their own place of encounter. A site where they can resound, resonate in the renvoi, without being censored. These noisy voices are forcing a space where they can be heard, from the possibility to compose they are creating their own order.[59]
While finishing Canto das Três Raças Amaratos prepares her outfit to leave her house and start the show that will happen in front of her apartment. Using a cocar (a type of war bonnet typical to the native Indians of Pará), she opens her door and singing Faz o T constructs through the lyric the raison d’être of tecnobrega:
The tribe invades the forest
Face painted, with arrows and cocars
Everyone in their posts waiting for the leader
The ship of sound will command us
The chieftain’s war shout will echo
As the chieftain, she commands her tribe in the streets to invade the city, to impose their place through sound. To echo the music of a parallel order to those who have forsaken them. Contrary to Canto das Três Raças, this film and Gaby Amarantos herself, isn’t a sob of pain but that of the joy of music, of finally being able to sing freely. The lyrics mostly have references to making sounds, noises and “aparelhagens.”[60] It seems that a big slice of the pleasure is in being able to own and make noise, their noise, their music, their order, without any censorship.
The live band that accompanies her — a luxury in tecnobrega as mostly it all comes out from loops and playbacks — is set in a manner to reproduce the electronic sounds that would usually be related to MIDI instruments. One set of drums are actually pads, and together with the keyboard, they are configured to sound like the ones in the program FruityLoops. There are though real guitars, bass and a second pair of drums, putting this show in the upper echelons of tecnobrega.
Midway through the show, she gets up on a sound truck and takes the noises through the neighborhood. Everyone has to listen; everyone has to acknowledge and interact in the renvoi.
Gaby Amarantos’ show Live in Jurunas was produced and filmed to be a celebration of the possibilities of composition. Amarantos returns to Jurunas the noise that made her and her career. It successfully presents a parallel order born out of the lack of essential living conditions, but ironically, with an overflow of media commodities. An excess due to piracy, the spoils of stockpiling. The options in such a situation either leads to submission and acceptance of being a sub-consumer in repetition (of literal everyday violence in the streets) or in turning this excess into production, reorganizing and using noise as a weapon to become producer and consumer. Subverting the visual search for identity and instead forcing down the fleshy throats of those who previously denied any possibility to resound, one’s own uniqueness.
Producing noisy compositions
Attali’s path to a place where music is free to resound is a torturous one. Steven Shaviro critiques Attali’s conception of repetition as a being “lazy and obvious.” For him it falls short to “plumb the commodity experience to its depths”, and that the best way to grasp the power of music is to work “through the logic of repetition and commodification pushing this further than any capitalist apologetics would find comfortable.”[61]
Articulating such an approach is not easy, Shaviro recognizes that he is not able to do so and thus can’t blame Attali also but sees, at least an attempt in this direction, in his last code of composition. It’s in composition where due to the technological advancements music is entirely liberated from commodity; it’s no longer a product but a process open to everyone. This argument is precisely one based on taking to the extreme the intensification of music as a commodity. From the excess of consumption of music (and of images) in an even more privatized way, Attali argues that it mutates into a practice of freedom:
Pleasure tied to the self-directed gaze: Narcissus after Echo. Eroticism as an appropriation of the body. (…) The consumer, completing the mutation that began with the tape recorder and photography, will thus become a producer and will derive at least as much of his satisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces. He will institute the spectacle of himself as the supreme usage.[62]
The way to reach such level is not only a psychological one but a technological one also, for it needs to give access to all consumers to the tools of production also. From this aspect, since the book was written, it took almost 30 years for the production tools to reach the level of mass availability. Only becoming widespread with the popularization of computers and smartphones.
For Attali and Shaviro the only way out of repetition is storming through it, of taking repetition to such an extreme that “the loss of meaning becomes the absence of imposed meaning” and from this freedom composition can exist free of any simulacrum of society and artifice. This presupposition stands on the assumption that every person will become the producer and their own consumer and therefore unlikely to ever fully being able to achieve realization.[63]
Such a scenario would only be possible if music and media commodities reached such a point of saturation that it would become useless altogether, a doubtful outcome any way you look at it. For Attali’s version of composition to arrive, it would need “the destruction of all codes.”[64]
When music is approached through the otocentric philosophy, the core argument of it being an organization of violence falls to the ground. As a sonic body, since being gestated in the womb of the mother, each heartbeat from her slowly opens the fetus as an echo-chamber. The first cry of the neonate is an interaction that already carries the body’s own unique timbre and the singularity of the voice. When approaching music being all ears, instead of all eyes, it organizes noise not as a form of control, but as a form that makes possible to listen to the singular in each element. Noise, furthermore, becomes a tool, an instrument to impose listening and create a space where noise, voice, music and sound can interact and be free of any power relations.
Continue reading Chapter 4: Unfolding the encounter-image(available soon) or go the INDEX.
[1] Schafer, M. R. (1977). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books, p. 42.
[2] His other exception was that four years later he released a sort of continuation of An Island with his Efterklang movie The Last Concert (2014).
[3] (Chion, Film, a sound art, 2009, p. 39)
[4] A brief voiceover of Clausen talking about how he met the other band members is inserted before the radio sequence.
[5] (Schafer, 1977, p. 3)
[6] Ibid., p. 4.
[7] Greg Hainge, on the other hand, in the book Noise Matters (pp. 41–42) criticizes Murray for perpetuating a negative relation towards noise. As I’ll reach later in the section specifically about noise, Hainge perceives noise as being an elemental material of which all sound emerges and cites The Soundscape as the urtext of the anti-noise lobby.
[8] (Schafer, 1977, p. 43)
[9] Ibid.
[10] http://www.qromag.com/interviews/casper_clausen_of_efterklang_an_island/
[11] The same period where in parallel he was starting Petites Planètes.
[12] A live-version where the images were reworked on-site together with the Soundwalk Collective was presented at Centre Pompidou on May 4, 2012.
[13] In the final minutes of the movie there are three shots from the docks and a party that happens on the boat while docked.
[14] Soundwalk Collective’s words in presenting the project Medea. http://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=4085
[15] Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Bloomsbury, p. xii.
[16] Grandrieux quoted in (Hainge, Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, 2017, p. 186)
[17] Moon, V. (2013, February 13). “Ethiopia didn’t need me” — Vincent Moon on Ethiopia. Addis Rumble. Retrieved November 5, 2015, from http://addisrumble.com/?p=2347
[18] Purists would call binaural recordings only the ones where a dummy head is used and the microphones are inserted inside where the ear canal would be. I use binaural here in a wider sense — where the sound was captured through two different mics in an A-B stereo configuration mimicking the distance between left and right ear and mixed in post to maximize the spatiality of the sound.
[19] That is not to say that there isn’t uniqueness in the outcome of such transformation, but that in reconstructing very little, if any, of the original voice/timbre is left to be sensed.
[20] Cage, J. (2011). The Future of Music: Credo, 1937. In C. Kelly (Ed.), Sound: Documents of contemporary art (pp. 23–26). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
[21] Kirkegaard refers to Cage in an interview and in addition many of the reviews from his work also cite Cage. The former http://passiveaggressive.dk/jacob-kirkegaard-sound-in-itself-as-a-political-statement-interview/ and the latter reviews that are hosted in hist website http://fonik.dk/pressarticles-english.html
[22] (Cage, 2011)
[23] Cox, C. (2011). From Music to Sound: Being as Time in the Sonic Arts, 2006. In C. Kelly (Ed.), Sound: Documents of contemporary art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 81.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Although Cage’s revisioning opens the space for this singularity to be discussed his approach is still modernist in invoking the totality of sound. Fluxus, on the other hand, a group of artists largely influenced by Cage and his series of Experimental Composition classes quickly went beyond this to explore smaller sound worlds and the uniqueness of each sonic body. For a deeper exploration of how they differentiate and how Cage’s ideals transpose his modernist conceptions read CAMPBELL, Iain. (2015). Experimental Practices of Music and Philosophy in John Cage and Gilles Deleuze. PhD Thesis. London: Kingston University.
[27]Kirkegaard, J. (2012, November 9). Ethiopia: sounds of the present, past and future. (A. Hansen, & K. Obling, Interviewers) The Guardian. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/09/ethiopia-sounds-jacob-kirkegaard
[28] (Schafer, 1977, p. 111)
[29] (Voegelin, 2010, p. 44)
[30] Ibid., p. 48.
[31] Ibid., p. 46
[32] (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2017, p. 37)
[33] (Voegelin, 2010, p. 43)
[34] Ibid., p. 46.
[35] Mangialardi, N. (2017, February 1). The Zar: Staging an Egyptian Exorcism. Retrieved March 20, 2018, from Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage: https://folklife.si.edu/talkstory/the-zar-staging-an-egyptian-exorcism
[36] (Voegelin, 2010, p. 47)
[37] Ibid., p. 58 and 61.
[38] Madiha quoted in Kasinof, L. (2010, March 26). Egyptian music: ‘Zar’ tradition gives women a rare moment at center stage. Retrieved March 19, 2018, from The Christhian Science Monitor: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0326/Egyptian-music-Zar-tradition-gives-women-a-rare-moment-at-center-stage
[39] (Voegelin, 2010, p. 60)
[40] Moon, V. (2014, July 23). Filmmaker Vincent Moon talks about the influence of music and rootlessness in his craft, Part 1. (H. Morgenstern, Interviewer) Retrieved from https://indieethos.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/filmmaker-vincent-moon-talks-about-the-influence-of-music-and-rootlessness-in-his-craft-part-1/
[41] (Voegelin, 2010, pp. 71–73) The stance to listening as the newborn baby in Nancy and Nadal-Melsió seem like the perfect illustration of a noisy voice.
[42] Ibid,. p. 45.
[43] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
[44] At times, in music this is literally also a gesture to assert peace and security. One older example is Bach receiving a letter from the consistory of Leipzig in 1730 censoring certain tonal arrangements from being played at the divine services (Attali, 63). A modern example is how in more conservative Christian circles there is an ever-ending debate on what instruments and rhythms are deemed permissible and what is considered to be profane.
[45] Some of his examples for this foreshadowing work better than others. Tracing the genealogy of the star to Liszt and Mendelssohn was quite revealing while arguing that Bach’s exploration of the tonal system “heralded two centuries of industrial adventure” seemed hyperbolic and weak.
[46] (Attali, 1985, p. 11)
[47] Lomax, A. (2003). Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934–1997. London: Routledge, p. 193.
[48] (Attali, 1985, p. 18)
[49] Ibid., p. 137.
[50] (Attali, 1985, p. 30)
[51] The price of an original music album was around 10% of the monthly minimum wage and of an original DVD around 20–30%.
[52] Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor in chief until 2012 made tecnobrega famous by including it in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (2009).
[53] Mainly from a program called FruityLoops.
[54] Translated from the original interview in Portuguese.
[55] A song by Clara Nunes from 1976 translated as The Song of the Three Races.
[56] Adapted and translated from the original in Portuguese.
[57] Quilombo de Palmares was a safe-have created by a community of fugitive slaves in the northern state of Alagoas during 19th century. It lasted for 89 years before being destroyed.
[58]According to the Mexico’s Citizens’ Council for Public Security rankings.
[59] In hindsight, this ecosystem was heavily reliant on physical copies of CDs and DVDs and the informal market that came with it. As smartphones and digital platforms became more popular and better organized (like Spotify), unfortunately very few were able to adapt and navigate the bureaucracy and requirements to have their work available. The initially disruptive technology, gradually was transformed by the industry, making it harder for the new coming order to effectively break the patterns of repetition.
[60] The name given to the full equipment to make a tecnobrega concert: Extravagant costumes, led lights, loudspeakers and stage props.
[61] Shaviro, S. (2005). Attali’s Noise. Retrieved March 16, 2018, from The Pinocchio Theory: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=397
[62] (Attali, 1985, p. 144)
[63] On the section about the encounter-image Moon offers a solution to the problem that Shaviro raises that not everyone wants or can compose and be their own producer.
[64] Ibid., p. 45.
