Anti-Record, 1982 (detail)
Articles
Anti-Record, 1982 (detail)
The New Blockaders combine the use of non-musical instruments, art
inspiration, and a critique of musicality that is designed to renew. They
released their first album Changez Les Blockeurs in 1982. The
'instrumentation' is made up of objects and bits of rooms being scraped,
dragged, thumped, scratched, etc. The soundworld that emerges is something that
continues throughout their work, albeit sometimes featuring more processed
elements, especially if in collaboration with others. What marks this first
album out is its refusal to go beyond what is actually a very limited set of
sound possibilities - whilst there is continual clatter, it does not aspire to
variety. Unlike other of their releases, there is a dynamic, with changes in
emphasis, mainly in the percussive elements – 'Part One,' for example, calms
down toward the end, dissipating any momentum it might have acquired and in
place of what could have been construed as rhythms are staccato metallic
scrapes. Throughout, the percussiveness is jerky, but also insistent, as if
trying to create an object that is both resistant, massive, and also something
that exists only to be pummelled away. 'Part Two' ends with quiet creaks (having
taken in a dog yapping and something like elephantine trumpeting.) Clatters give
way to bumps and finally, a hiss like dust. On the face of it, this is very
similar to the recordings and performance of Einsturzende Neubauten, who use
electrical tools, metals, bits of buildings, and so on at about the same time.
But the German group are using destruction, where TNB are destructive of
instrumentation. TNB refuse the evocations that characterise 'Industrial music,'
and collapse signification into material. Initially, unlike Pierre Schaeffer or
Nurse With Wound, the sound seems to maintain its ‘dramatic context’ –
i.e. we know, and are encouraged to notice, what is being played, however
unusual it is in the context of music (recording, performance, artwork.) But TNB
refuse a virtuosity of the newly musicalised object. If a chair or wall is to be
used ‘as percussion’ it will not be salvaged as a musical instrument, but
will retain its flatness, its essential unmusicality. Later recordings and
performances even lose the residual possibility of ‘properly playing’
objects in an indistinction of sound. Refusal is a key part of their strategy.
Also in 1982 came the 'TNB Manifesto,' which lays out a strong rejection of all
art, the past and meaning. In being 'anti-music, anti-art, anti-magazines,
anti-books, anti-films, anti-clubs, anti-communications' they aim for new
thoughts, new actions etc. Their rejection is purposeful, but also contains the
same seeds of contradiction propagated by the multiple Dada manifestos: 'we will
make a point of being pointless.' Their philosophical nihilism (as opposed to
the use of that word as an accusation of hypocrisy, cynicism or violence) is
complete: everything is to be refused, even the meaning of the refusal. They are
genuinely rehearsing and re-presenting the purpose of Dada – a continual
questioning and destruction being in its own right creative, and not just a way
of clearing a path, or effecting a cleansing (as some parts of Futurist
manifestos suggest.) The manifesto does announce ‘we must destroy in order to
go forward!,’ but the important thing is how this is achieved – the going
forward of TNB music is always a dwelling in the destruction of musicality.
They recall the era of high modernism as a refusal of all that came before or at
the same time. The manifesto summons a moment where the artistic avant
garde imagined they could change society through art and exclamation marks. This
manifesto doesn’t quite work in the way it seems to at first: it is much more
of a commentary on writing manifestos: a meta-manifesto, which, because it takes
'the manifesto' idea seriously, ends up being less than a manifesto (and this in
a good way.) It both means what it says and realises the impossibility of this
working, replaying Nietzsche’s dictum 'Nothing is true! Everything is
possible!' The sounds that we get are in place of music, and this writing is in
place of a real programme for change. Above all, what characterises the attitude
and the sound is refusal – hence the 'blockade,' but how to keep this fresh
without changing is a dilemma.
One of the ways out has been collaboration, and ultimately the outward contagion
that bears fruit on Viva Negativa! (2005/06), two four-album sets of
'versions' of TNB works. But before we get there, it is worth tracking TNB a bit
further in their own right. The 'Live Offensives' of Gesamtnichtswerk
(2003) continue the harsh, often jerky percussiveness, with pipe rolling and
bashing to the fore on Live at Morden Tower (10/83.) All four
performances establish a mass of sound that avoids light and shade in favour of
a randomly phased strobing of sounds. There is no attempt to make high-quality
recordings, so tape hiss and loss of sharpness also become part of the block of
sound that is set up. Noise music is always an attempt to re-assert the material
over the musical, and this means not hiding the process of production as digital
sound attempts/claims to do. Loss of quality is not inherently something to do
with Noise music, as mp3 sound compression and selective heightening of vocals
over other elements demonstrate, but the boundary between means of reproduction
and material to be reproduced in TNB's material blurs, as does the line between
what is acceptable and unacceptable on a recording, as does the distinction
between music and non-music (where, in this case, music would just mean the
sounds purposely created or replayed by 'musicians.') Everything about TNB
entails refusal, and yet this refusal to even be anti-art is potentially
problematic, because firstly, it is a common gesture, and secondly, it had in
this case produced a large body of 'not-even-anti-art.'
The title of their collection, Gesamtnichtswerk, is important here. It
reminds us of Wagner’s dream of the 'total art work' – the Gesamtkunstwerk,
but the art is replaced by nothing, a nothing that is emphasised in the sleeve
notes, as being outside of everything, an emptiness that becomes total rather
than being a contained space of nothingness, or some sort of nothing reserve. In
place of art then, is nothing – no renewal, no radicality to inspire. As it is
a collection, it is not about a total single moment of nothing but the sprawl of
nothing where there should be something, which means the 'total' part refers to
the entirety of music and art (scraps of which litter the booklets.) Clearly,
though, creation has occurred in this nothingness, just as many currently
suspect of black holes, but creation based on refusal is not the same as
affirmative art, art that believes itself, and this because, not despite, of the
'manifest.' The gesture is backed up by a material working-through of 'nothing'
where art/music is supposed to be, and where a space has been cleared, there
will be no building, only more clearing. The third CD of Gesamtnichtswerk
offers two 'symphonies': Simphonie in X Major and Simphonie in O Minor
(1991): neither of which are recognised keys for composition … Simphonie
in X Major begins with huge industrial blasts, and moves through phases o
machinery destroying itself – there are rhythms, made up of booming and
howling. After 7.10 in the 'First Movement,'
the noisier part stops and gives way to scraping and thumping, building back up
to more overwhelming blasts. The 'Second Movement' is crashier. Simphonie in
O Minor is mostly quiet hiss, fizzing, and, gradually rising in volume from
virtual inaudibility, a background throbs within it. The symphony is of course
the privileged mode of 'classical' music at its height as an elitist art
(culturally as well as in terms of class reception and production.) Like the
realist novel, its steady narrative and teleology reassures the higher classes
of European society. Its structure makes it easy to construct a linear history
of aesthetic beauty around it, suggesting a sense of order at all levels.
Modernist experiments moved away from the symphony and/or sonata form, and in
the case of Noise music, attempted to leave form behind (somewhat optimistically
and didactically.) TNB take the symphony into the woods and pound it until it
stops speaking its language of reconciliation and resolution. Narrative is
specifically undone through the nonlinear trudge through 'nonmusic' in the first
'simphonie' and through absence in the second (without being the smug silence of
John Cage’s 4'33".)
This rejection of narrative is crucial in returning us to the question of
influence – which can no longer be heard in terms of inheritance but must be
seen as agonistic and retrospective. Not only this, but it is undone – not
refused, the spurious belief in individual genius unconnected to history
stripped back.
This rejection of the notion of the creative genius (as seen in Dada) extends to
TNB collaborations, which range from Organum through The Haters to Merzbow, to
the 'versions' or 'tributes' on Viva Negativa! The working methods are
kept obscure, but it mostly seems as if material is being shared and altered,
rather than the Jazz model of the individual player finding a like-minded spirit
and realising some sort of meeting of musical minds through presence. Similarly,
TNB collaboration is not like remixing, where one self-present individual brings
their style to another, in a mutual reinforcement of supposed greatness.
Instead, individuality is swamped as the material gets more isolated from any
controlling 'artistic' force, and aims for the selfgeneration and
self-maintenance of living organisms. From the descriptions here, it might seem
this is a very dry 'music' but it breathes, albeit slightly toxically. Its self-containedness,
its removal from individual fingerprints being the key to its uncontrollability
for listener and performer alike. This is not to say there is no recognisable
style, or that a TNB/Organum recording (such as Pulp (1984) doesn’t
suggest elements of individual styles combining. But once the 'music' is
essentially made of noises, structured noisily and disruptively, without
offering a welcoming form, any recombination takes it further from artistically
recognisable modes of talent, skill, etc. even if a certain audience would
'appreciate' this music as if it had those attributes.
The manifesto too exists as if it were a manifesto, as if it returned us to
Dada, but without being merely a knowing reference or something in a 'retro'
style. It is there again at the opening of the Viva Negativa!, both
written and recorded on seven-inch single. Underneath it lies several hours of
material, where TNB material has been ingested by others and 'tributes' made:
the manifesto’s seriousness (it is not ironic, in the sense of smugly deriding
those early twentieth-century manifestos, but
it is a humorous take on the idea, I think) is essential for its own failure,
and therefore its capacity to set up a tortuous, 'aporetic' path through the
material. Its contradiction through eight albums of 'covers,' four of them
literally coming after the manifesto, in box 1, is part of the noise not being
simply within TNB 'music,' as it establishes an effect that stretches out
of the record itself, between records, between TNB and others, between TNB and
listeners, and so on. Like Dada, the manifesto cannot but does succeed. It
becomes impossible to fail, but to succeed as 'not-even-anti-art' is failure.
This 'failure' is what defines noise in its encounter with music, for noise must
fail to be noise if it is accepted, and of course it fails if not heard as well.
This failure is where noise resides, the fate it selects for itself, or has
selected for it.
Noise must be only as if it were music, not as a new musicality, and all this is
signalled in the relations set up the TNB manifesto and their actual musical
practice, something akin to Bataille’s 'formless,' which travels between and
undermines both form and formlessness. No assessment of influence and the way it
plays out in art could ignore Harold Bloom’s influential The Anxiety of
Influence, originally published in 1973. Bloom argues that a later poet is
in a continual struggle with precursors, and realises their work as if free of
influence, but all the while making that influence come to be, in the new poem.
Many have misunderstood the 'anxiety' of the title, as Bloom is not shy of
pointing out in his preface to the second edition. The anxiety is not separate
or prior to new creation: 'what writers may experience as anxiety and what their
works are compelled to manifest, are the consequence of poetic misprision,
rather than the cause of it. The strongmisreading comes first.' (Bloom 1997.)
The later poet develops as artist through six stages or 'ratios,' beginning with
a misreading that is never excised ('clinamen') and continuing through various
reworkings until ultimately, the later poet becomes the precursor, thereby
belatedly making the earlier poet into precursor ('apophrades.') Influence
becomes unavoidable, and something that 'cannot be reduced to source-study, to
the history of ideas, to the patterning of images.' (ibid.: 7.) Anxiety and
influence come late, not early, such that 'a poem is not an overcoming of
anxiety, but is that anxiety' (ibid.: 94.) Bearing in mind the seeming absence
of worry in TNB with regard to their artistic precursors, they offer good
examples of Bloom’s idea of 'anxiety': the presence of Dada or Surrealism, for
example, represent a creative misinterpretation rather than a happy wallowing in
older, better forms. That those movements are thought to belong to the past
(chased away by a succession of other avant-garde movements) heightens the
possibility of 'misreading,' without becoming cosy irony or nostalgia, but an
awareness of the influence as an inevitable connector. TNB’s collaborations
represent a way of incorporating influence, of annulling it respectfully. The
collaboration is away of realizing equality, but what is produced heightens
Bloom’s idea of anxiety in that influence cannot be surmounted and all
attempts to do so only emphasize its lurking (creative) force. Influence is no
longer linear, in this view, and nor is it capable of being clearly delineated:
'misreading does not simply occur between two texts, but spans and in fact
constitutes the history of the poetic tradition' (Allen,
1994.) Again, it is worth noting that 'misreading' is not the implication
of an error by Bloom, by the process of reading itself, which is always removed
from the source (and we could extend this, to the author.) The field of poetry,
of creative writing in general, even art in general, is composed of misreadings.
So when the influence of influence is raised, as it is by TNB, to become
something problematic, rather than hidden, this is a playing out of Bloom’s
theory. In fact, they can tell us something about its reach, can display its
functioning. This is in large part because the actual precursor, for TNB (seen
from a Bloomian perspective) is not a movement, or an artist, but music. It is
music that must be re-read (misread), re-appropriated, denied, destroyed and so
on, and finally music is brought back to an origin through its denial (i.e. the
beginning of all music is its emergence from other sounds, which then become
thought of as noise.)
TNB’s Gesamtnichtswerk even undoes the idea of a historical
compilation, not just through conceptual framing, but also through closing on
the twenty-minute silence of ‘Null Bei Ohr' ('Nil By Ear.') This is not a
reference to, or repetition of Cage (but in being silent, it makes itself the
anxiety of such a repetition.) At the end is nothing, in place of Noise music.
As it occupies time, the listener awaits, attentive – is it going to burst
into sound? Is it made of frequencies beyond hearing? Is it about the machinery
of recordings? All of this was never about listening, it almost says. Paul
Hegarty (author of Noise/Music)