BREAK/FLOW versus DATACIDE
...once desire is specified as sexuality, it enters into forms of
particularised power...
Felix Guattari
Libidinal Musics
Electronically composed sound, communally celebrated has the effect of some
collective plateau phase. Music becomes a device, a prosthetics that leads
to a hypersensitization - an overspill that establishes a field of flow
between listeners. This incessant repetition with its controlled highs and
lows, its deep grindings is nothing other than the continuation of erotics
by other means, an erogenisation without object or delimited locale. The
carefully placed touches of digitalised breaks, tips of searing reverb and
the conducting of frequencies through skins plays the body to effect a
libidinal response... to take us elsewhere. The desire for music is the
desire for erotic communicstion as diffuse sensuality. Dancing becomes the
means of expending the build-up of energy that wells up as a result, not
only, of sound stimulus but of the general confinement of social desires.
Electricity abounds. Tension and friction. The walls are silver. Desire
manifests itself in the broadest social field. Channels are opened up for
the release of energies which are not necessarily directed towards the
genital figure of pleasure but toward a prolongation through repetition of
an endless deferral of accomplishment. Tracks that never end. The night
that goes on without run-off.
Machinic Mayhem
Wires, jackplugs, sockets, circuits, entangled cables. We are building a
desiring-machine with no one aim other than the continuation of the various
processes we can bring into further relationship with it. Dancefloor.
Mixing Desk. Groove. Just as sound is made to run through treatment
chambers in an effort to ward off its formation and solidification as
'music' so we enter into these relays to become unlimited, to ward off the
formation of a distinct identity.Then something begins to vibrate, begins
to function. Rhythms appear... Both sound and subjectivity become a network
of actual and possible relations. A-signifying. Unidentifiable.
Promulgating the urge to produce something. Because we cannot return to a
fixed point of reference, because the sound no longer strives to represent
anything, it can only unleash surges of intensity that correspond to an
ever changing subjectivity that challenges the passivity inducing effects
of models. We are always moving away from subjugation. We are always
resisting the institutional control of intensive flows.
Cycle 1, Cycle 2, Cycle 3, Psychic War
A repeating loop loses all sense of place and time. An attainable plateau
firmly rooted within shared biological and psychic realities. The world
turns round, the world turns round, the world turns round, the world turns
round. There is a pursuit of devices and techniques that take us on the
verge of our local and intimate edges - the cliff-top of
repetition-compulsion induces the necessary vertigo and loss of footing
ascribable to the pull of the unconscious. That repetition is meaningless
in light of normative, melodic musics is exactly what we are after. It can
take us beyond pleasure and unpleasure, to which the ego fearfully clings,
and bring to light unconscious drives and desires that strive for
actualisation and proliferation. Ecoute et Repete. If the unconscious is an
orphan then this repetition-compulsion obliterates the ego: our boundaries
are loosened, we are in-process and the cycles of sound make of identity
nothing other than a ceaseless pleasure constantly to be undertaken afresh.
The prohibition of a continuing engagement of psychic warfare - access to
the unconscious is prohibited, identity must be inherited.
Ministry of Identity Defense
The prohibition of a 'succession of repetitive beats' is simply the
authorities' answering salvo in a continuing engagement of psychic warfare.
What is at stake is a battle over access to the new territories made
accessible by the collision of identity and desire with machines. A
manic-inducing cocktail that moves at lightening speeds to create an
a-signifying scrawl on managerial control grids. Falling short of the final
frontier of micro-biological implants, this penultimate frontier, this
existential territory is made accessible by linking up to machines that
unleash the non-discursive: a child playing with shit in the darkened
glades of a forest where dancers burn money. These machines are
personalised, made malleable, taken out of their rigidified context, and
made to experiment and express. Machinic-sound conducts a collective
proliferation of de-organised erotics, an exploration of unconscious
potentialities. Listening to this. The sound of desire. The active
composition of several selves again and again, the Ministry of Identity
Defense must pass a law.
Libidinal Musics (2): A Guide
To come to a point of libidinal intensity whilst listening to electronic
dance music it is simply a matter of reversing the cultural outlook which
considers that penetration is the pinnacle of sexual gratification. This
fits into the whole process whereby our energy and therefore ourselves are
subjugated to easily representable and mediated images that can then be
disseminated as the only path to pleasure. The phallic symbol is the
cultural norm. We are continually pushed in this direction. If we maintain
this mono-dimensional outlook on pleasure then we become easy prey to
brainwashing and conditioning through the industrialised manipulation of
libidinal energy. If there is only one path towards release then this
insinuates into our consciousness that there is only one zone where we can
feel pleasure and by extension that our identity is limited to a single
Self. What we aim for is porno-stereo. Others may call it the body without
organs. Others still may call it the great ephemeral skin. Libidinal musics
is another approach to polymorphous perversity where the intersection of
bass surges with syncopated kicks and spectral strings can make the skin
into a field of goose bumps. This spreading of feelings of pleasure all
over the surface of the body, the way it avoids centering on the genital
region still makes it a libidinal sensation. Onanism? A fetishism of black
vinyl? How can it be possible that music is not a desiring-machine?
LABEL:Flint Michigan @ Break/Flow
GROOVE NOTATION: "there's only 24 hours in an evening"