Speculative Approaches to Sonic Objects, Dancehall Style!

I have a new piece about sonic borders and boundaries in the excellent sound studies blog Sounding Out!, which is edited by my friend and colleague Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman.  As with a lot of my recent work about “the politics of vibration”, in this piece I try to think about what happens on a dancefloor in ontological terms and what it means to be able to access moments of ontological depth through bass, drums, speakers, partying bodies.  I look at the current revival of ballroom/voguing styles by artists like the fantastic Zebra Katz, and the way that some of the most interesting new hip-hop explores a strange. maybe speculative zone between Eros and violence on the one hand, and immersion in vibration on the other.

Radio Student Interview on Drugs in Literature and Theory

I just did an interview with Lana Durjava for Slovenian radio station Radio Student.  The introduction is in Slovenian, but starting around 9:40, the interview itself is in English. It’s very wide ranging, and we really get into the ways that specific drugs appear in history and in literature.

Politics of Vibration talk at McMaster, January 15!

Boon

A Primer on Drone Music in Boing Boing

I’ve been interested in drone-based music for a while and have written various pieces about it, including this overview that was originally published in a book edited by The Wire .  Recently, Boing Boing asked me to write a guide to drone, so here it is.  I’ve tried to cover recent mutations of drone such as the post-hiphop drone pop sound of Tri Angle Records, and the drone metal of Earth and Sun O))).  Writing the piece also got me interested in drones in nature, cosmic drone vibrations such as the “sounds” that a black hole emits, and drone apps such as the marvelous SrutiBox and Droneo.

Global Bass essay in Boing Boing!

I just wrote an in depth introduction to global bass music for the excellent Boing Boing. What’s global bass?  Well, try this remix of native Canadian dubstep crew A Tribe Called Red, by Monterrey, Mx’s Javier Estrada for a start:

Talk on Odd Future and the Politics of Vibration, SVA, NYC, Sept. 27

I’ll be giving a talk at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan on Sept. 27th at 7 p.m. The talk will go into some of my recent work on vibrational ontology and what I call the politics of vibration, through an examination of some recent music videos, mostly by members of LA hiphop crew Odd Future.  Almost certainly including this one:

Mostly, we don’t think of music as a particular type or culture of vibration. I argue that hiphop, being a profound meditation on and mobilization of sound, is keenly aware of the dangers of pleasures of vibration, and that in different ways, artists like Azealia Banks, Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt are making decisions about what a human relation to vibration could be. If you’re in the city, come down and listen ….

Fire On The Water at Sunnyside, Toronto, August 26th!

So I’m doing a second TheWaves event with my wife/partner Christie Pearson.  The first one was an amazing all night party/installation/event called Night Swim at the Trinity-Bellwoods public pool in Toronto, featuring folks like FM3, Sandro Perri, Windy and Carl and many others.  The second will be an all day party/installation/event at the Sunnyside bathing pavilion on the lakeshore in Toronto on Sunday August 26th.  There’s a website for the event here and an FB event page here.

What is it? TheWaves is about making events/happenings/installations which somehow connect my interest in new/experimental music scenes and Christie’s interests in bathing culture and installation art.  We transform specific spaces so that new kinds of sociality, play, relationships to sound and water can evolve. Part of the fun of it is that we don’t exactly know what will happen.  The events are experimental but populist: anyone can come, and anyone might enjoy it, whatever age or background they’re from.  Basically we think sound and water are fundamental aspects of human life, experience, environment, and we’re interested in celebrating that, and intensifying our relationships to those elements.

If you’ve been to any of the MAMA parties in downtown Toronto, you know that I’m interested in new global bass music.  Fire On The Water has given me an opportunity to invite some of the masters that we learnt about global bass from to play in Toronto.  What is global bass?  It’s electronic dance music emerging in different parts of the world right now. Usually with roots simultaneously in Afrodiasporic dance musics (reggae, funk, house, hiphop, techno) and local traditions (Colombian cumbia, various West African styles).  You can’t necessarily tell where anything is from.  But that’s part of the point.  It’s part of a global conversation in which more and more intense musics evolve. It’s heavy and it’s alive. As philosopher Cornell West put it to one of the MAMAs: “William James is smiling on you when you throw a party!”

Everyone puts it together differently: Venus X’s vicious chopped and screwed style is different from DJ/Rupture’s elegant connections, or Poirier’s soca/dancehall/hiphop rave ups, or Maga Bo’s intense percussion storms.  Myself (I’m probably not going to play tho my MAMA brothers and sisters will be opening the event and perhaps closing it down too), I’m listening to Angolan house, Venezuelan “raptor house”, Traxman and other Footwork stuff from Chicago … if I did play it might sound like this recent mix by our friend DJ Zhao.

Anyway, Sunnyside Pavilion is a gorgeous semi-public space. It was originally imagined and used as a utopian public space by crowds of people in the early part of the twentieth century.  We want to evoke that old dream and imagine it as a new kind of utopian space for the twenty-first C.  It has a lovely upstairs open air dancehall that looks out onto the lake, it’s right on the beach, there’s a huge pool next door, two mysterious pavilions at either end that will have highly psychedelic installations in them. It’s all ages.  It’s free.  It’s a party.  It’s a love letter to the lake.  You should come down …

On Brian Massumi’s Semblance and Event

I have a longish review of Brian Massumi’s recent book, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, in the new issue of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy.  You can download a copy of the entire journal here.

Low End Theories

 The latest issue of The Wire has an excellent section on bass in contemporary music and theory, which includes two pieces from me, one on UK soundsystem Aba-Shanti and their heavy vibrations, the other on the deepest bass sound in the universe, emitted from a black hole.  I also suggested a piece on the humming sounds of Putumayo shamanism, as described by my friend and teacher Michael Taussig, and the following piece about plumbing sonic mental depths, as described by another teacher of mine, Sri Karunamayee:

“In an interview conducted in Delhi in 2001, the Indian singer and philosopher Karunamayee, a long term student of Hindustani raga singer Pandit Pran Nath, teacher of La Monte Young, Terry Riley and many others, explained to me how she first learnt to sing: “At the age of six, good teachers were coming and teaching my brother and sister.  But I was very small and it was not considered necessary for me.  But I had a gift.  Whenever I heard some music it just became ingrained in me.  My consciousness of silence kept my slate very clean.  Most of the time I enjoyed the silence, even when everyone was talking, I felt a kind of echo of the silence, as if I was in a tunnel, untouched by any of it.   Whatever I heard was imprinted, and I found myself singing in that way.  Nobody cared.  I would just put my head down and start going sa-re-ga-ma.  Sometimes I would hear my sound very clearly.  I would think: it may be that my sound is not heard, but I can think of music!  And holding that thread, not of the sound that I’m making, but of the concept of sound, with that I would go up the scales for many octaves.  And then I would say, alright, let me come down, keeping the thread, and I would find my voice becoming audible, very clear, and then deep, and then less clear, more unheard, but I could go deep also.  This was my favorite exercise.  I would go higher and higher like the birds at noontime in the sky.  Then I would imagine that somebody is taking water out of a well. You can go as deep as you want.  There is no limit on either side, up or down.  So I experienced infinity in height and depth through sound and silence. It gives you control over your mind. A thread of sound. “

Sound Workshop at Cornell, Friday April 20th!