I find that these reflections are important to our opera. Have a read:
Best/Per
Spiritual telegraph, hauntological research
project.
Some reflections as theoretical background to
recording sessions at Amateur Theatre in Solleftea, Sweden, a place brought to
attention of the local parapsychological society by its reputation of being
haunted.
The Late Mike Kelley, planning a hauntological
project he accounts for in his essay An Academic Cut-Up, said that he was tired
of phenomenological gaze, intending to bring representation and signification
back to sonic experience, tying together myth, history and sound. The project
was about recordings at historical places in Paris which could potentially be
containers of inscribed energies. According to Stone Tape Theory the whole
environment is a recording medium and ghosts are nothing but a result of an
activated play-back. From other hauntological projects he refers to (Fredrich
Jurgenson's and Konstantin Raudive's tapes), we know that the path can lead to
strictly materialist results- it is the tape hiss, white noise, that becomes
the main meaning bearing component.
sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a
virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension
that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for
example, music and speech (Christoph Cox, Sound Art and the sonic
Unconscious)
As Friedrich Kittler points out " the phonograph does
not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words,
and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness
becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise." The process of
recording on tape where an electronic device is applied instead of a medium for
communication with the other side, is a physical process, contracting the flows
of matter across the barriers of space and time, and through a disembodied
experience it provides, inspiring a thought of being able to surpass the
ultimate barrier between life and death. What we perceive as voices of the dead
may be some electroacoustic phenomena we interpret symbolically, but taking the
sounds as they are involves an interpretation on a different, non-linguistic
level, the way Nietzsche uses the word- he extends it to cover all natural
processes, and probably thinking of forces that move them, make them explode,
not so much of what the voices say ( this one was from Deleuze).
Sound resists discourse. Not because it is
too abstract, but because it is too concrete. For many sound artists it is a
material substance external to signification.The quality that made Schopenhauer
commit his Kantian mistake of placing music in the metaphysical domain, the
world of will or noumena or things in themselves as opposed to the world of
apperances or phenomena. The intelligibiltiy of sound is suggestive of a
transcendental quality (in Deleuzian understanding of it as an aspect of
virtuality), as the listener gets transported into another realm, oblivious of
the passage of time, and actually it is the result of being immersed in the
flux of forces or experience of duration- of sounds not as distinct events, but
as a continuum, a field, what Bergson describes as the soul being lulled into
self- forgetfulness and Nietzsche as dissolution of the boundaries of the
individual and fusion with the Dionysian, the plane of immanence of nature
itself. That is where Nietzsche corrects Shopenhauer's mistake of putting music
outside and says that it is immanent in nature, present as the flow of forces
and intensities. His name for that flux is will to power manifesting in
ceaseless becoming and dissolution to a pre-existent state. To interprete sound
from the inside seems the only option as sound as a medium is direct, not
requiring a distance of a gaze as image or text, and thus going beyond the
dualism of subject/object relations- to the world of "this will to power
and nothing besides!", a creative force of nature. Sound being external to
the actual is placed in the virtual, as intensities that give rise to empirical
forces- conditions for possibility for the appearances, but not cognitive or
conceptual .
( Somehow it makes me think of cygmatics with
its biblical implications of "in the beginning was the sound"). The
artist is the one that coalesces with the flux according to Nietzsche or as
Deleuze expresses it " a musician is someone who appropriates something
from this flow".
And finally a quote from Christoph Cox "Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism":
Sound is not
a world apart, a unique domain of non-signification and non-representation.
Rather, sound and the sonic arts are firmly rooted in the material world and
the powers, forces, intensities, and becomings of which it is composed. If we
proceed from sound, we will be less inclined to think in terms of
representation and signification, and to draw distinctions between culture and
nature, human and nonhuman, mind and matter, the symbolic and the real, the
textual and the physical, the meaningful and the meaningless. Instead, we might
begin to treat artistic productions not as complexes of signs or
representations but complexes of forces materially inflected by other forces
and force-complexes.
