There are, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris formulation,
two possible ways to conceive of time. There is, firstly, Chronos:
the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a
form, and determines a subject, and then the time of aeon,
the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows
only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an
already-there [un déjà-là] that is at
the same time not-yet-here [un pas encore-là], a simultaneous
too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen
and has just happened. 1Whilst
it sometimes appears in their work as though these two different
times were two different possible models that could be used to describe
time, it is rather the case that they describe not so much time
itself as a relationship to time, a relationship that can be either,
in the case of Chronos, transcendent, time being extensive,
divisible into fixed and known measures and used to gauge finite
periods, or else, as in the case of aeon, immanent, time
being merely a dimension of the plane of consistency upon which
everything is situated and from which everything springs, an absolute
outside that cannot be surpassed nor, therefore, judged in finite
terms.
Neither of these formulations
would appear, at first, to have anything to offer an analysis of
the loop as a temporal form, for the subject perceiving time as
Chronos sees only an inexorable progression towards a finite
end, a perception producing a single line therefore that does not
return to cross over its own trajectory and form a loop, whilst
the event-filled time of aeon that is conceptually but a
dimension of the immanent possibilities of creation and life does
not produce a hierarchical series of sequential moments to which
we could return and thereby force time back on itself into a loop.
And yet, for Deleuze,
if life is able to perdure and if creation is sustained as an active
force, this can only be because of an eternal return. The very possibility
of language, then, to take but one example, is dependent on a return
to pre-existing forms, but each linguistic act of creation does
not return to a past moment that would be identical to its prior
incarnation as though we were only ever capable of representing
in our present an originary past moment. Rather, the repetition
of past linguistic acts upon which the very possibility of language
hangs brings about a repetition which effects difference in itself,
the eternal return (the déjà-là) being
then precisely that which drives us forwards towards a future (the
pas encore-là) which will necessarily be different
from what has come before since it has time, itself driven by difference,
as one of its dimensions.
Perhaps it is then possible
to consider the loop as a temporal form that would indeed be able
to inform a consideration of Deleuzes concept of the time
of aeon. But if we are able to do so, then this will only be possible
if the loop we are dealing with is a pure loop. Let us explain.
A loop, according to a dictionary definition, is formed when a line
curves back to cross itself, so, for instance, a strip of paper
whose two ends are pulled together in such a way that they meet
each other in a straight line would form a loop. A loop formed in
this manner, however, cannot be said to describe the temporal form
of aeon found in Deleuzes work since it is possible
to ascertain in this loop a starting point and an end point, the
loop being formed, then, from a finite span whose extremities can
be ascertained. A loop of this kind does not sufficiently describe
a Deleuzean plane because one is able to apprehend it in an extensive
mode, to measure the loop as the length or duration between two
returns of the point at which the beginning and end meet. It is
in extensity, let us remember, that we apprehend the time of Chronos,
that measuring, fixing, form-creating mode of time proper to a transcendent
philosophical stance which believes itself able to apprehend all
objects in existence from a remove, whilst the temporal mode which
we have suggested might be usefully informed by the figure of the
loop is the time of aeon, the time related to a philosophy
of immanence, the time which eternally returns since it always contains
within its present the virtual forms of all possible past and future
events.
It might of course be
objected that a loop formed in the manner described above can fuse
its ends together so neatly that the break becomes impossible to
ascertain. However, in many of the cultural forms that employ a
loop this ideal or pure loop would seem difficult to attain. For
instance, the loop is often used in online artworks utilising a
movie format because of the obvious advantages a short looped movie
holds over a longer linear movie in terms of bandwidth. To create
a looped movie of any kind whose break cannot be found is extremely
difficult, however, especially if the movie takes as its subject
matter objects in the world deployed in time and not simply objects
created from digital code. Indeed, it could be argued that in all
loops that start out with a finite block to be looped, a break will
always be present, a moment of hiatus, as when a stylus in a locked
groove on a vinyl record jumps back to the grooves beginning.
And whilst this moment of hiatus may not be as perceptible as the
locked grooves click and may indeed, in spite of what we have
suggested, seem to be imperceptible, it will always be present in
such a loop, even if only conceptually. More than this, however,
a loop such as this which starts out from a finite block which is
repeated in a purely mechanical fashion is, one might argue, not
creative in the truly productive sense of the term that Deleuze
attributes to difference, for it does not deploy repetition as difference
in itself but, rather, a banal form of Platonic repetition which
merely re-presents or reproduces an originary figure whose concept
remains absolutely identical 2
although this will not necessarily be the case for all instances
of artistic deployment of such a loop; as Deleuze goes on to suggest,
artistic practice often consists of introducing a disequilibrium
into the dynamic process of construction when an element of one
instance is combined with another element of a following instance,
a point to which we will return later. We must then search for a
different kind of loop.
If we have posited the
locked groove as a model of the kind of loop that cannot usefully
serve an analysis of the time of aeon, this is no coincidence,
for an excellent example of the pure loop that would not be formed
from a finite block can be found on a vinyl record unlike any other,
Notos Endless Loop Edition (2). Part of Carsten Nicolais
bausatz noto infinity project, each part of which (for the
time being) consists of vinyl records inscribed with concentric
grooves, 3 Endless Loop
Edition (2) for its part is a work made up of two ten inch vinyl
records, each side of which is cut with twelve grooves which run
not in the normal spiral fashion of this medium but, rather, in
a loopor, let us say for the purpose of clarification, a circle,
the form most often associated with the loop yet which is nonetheless
fundamentally different from a loop, the latter being a dynamic,
genetic form that can only exist at one given point along its perimeter
or trajectory at any one time whilst a circle is a complete form
with an unbroken perimeter and fixed spatio-temporal co-ordinates
that endure together in perpetuity. This release is, for Carsten
Nicolai, aka Noto, an attempt to carry out an analysis of a record
as a physical-mathematic medium. To this end, the
basic frequenzies [sic] are mathematically connected directly to
the physical specification of the locked grooves. (the frequenzies
hav[ing] been cut to meet at the zero point so that it creates a
constant sound / tone). 4This
is a record, then, conceived of primarily as a conceptual exercise
and it is by considering it in this same way that its exemplification
of what we have termed a perfect (or, for Nicolai, endless)
loop becomes clear. For deployed as a material artefact, the loops
on this record would, of course, have a beginning point, the moment
at which the stylus drops into its groove. However, if one considers
this loop as a conceptual experiment, it is impossible to say what
each loops start point would be, even more so in the knowledge
that the sound source for each groove is a mathematical constant
calculated according to its physical specifications which
is to say a sine tone. And yet, given the nature of the medium on
which the loop is inscribed, it is at the same time impossible to
apprehend this groove as anything but a loop; it is not a circle
since (as even the most basic knowledge of a vinyl record will attest)
its deployment in time will never present the sonic content (and
thereby spatio-temporal co-ordinates because of the correlation
between the two) of all points of the groove at the same time; rather,
successive moments will appear, all of which seem to be the same
and thereby create a constant tone, but which, because of the inextricable
relation to the progress of time that the loop has inscribed into
its ontology, present difference in itself.
This is not all there
is to this release, however, for as well as having its grooves cut
in a concentric fashion, the other peculiarity about this release
is that each disk has two holes into which to insert the turntables
spindle: one in the very center of each disk (which is to say in
the normal position) and one off-center. When one plays these disks
using the central hole, each of the grooves produces a uniform tone,
but when one uses the off-center hole the lopsided rotation produced
creates a speed differential in the trajectory of the stylus running
through each groove and, subsequently, alters the previously uniform
nature of the tone, the pitch now fluctuating up and down. To consider
this in terms of the temporal model proposed here, we could once
more argue that this aspect of the loop provides further proof of
its link to the time of aeon, for if the eternal return of
time is in the most literal sense created by the rotation of the
earth on its (off-center) axis and its orbit around the sun, then
our experience of time from a perspective that is inseparable from
both of those movements will necessarily be somewhat elastic, producing
a sense of a continuum which is not experienced as we would attempt
to measure it when we apprehend time as Chronos, each minute, each
hour, each day appearing identical in length. Thus, just as the
stylus in the grooves of Endless Loop Edition (2) (grooves
from which there is no escape, no possible outside) produces a continuum
from an eternal return, a continuum that constantly passes through
different speeds and intensities when the rotational movement of
the plane is set off-center, so we on the plane of immanence (which
we cannot observe from a transcendent position, an outside) partake
in the production of a continuum, a continuum that returns at different
speeds and intensities, producing a flow which is constant yet always
different to itself. Time flies at the same time as the minutes
drag.
We have then posited
that Endless Loop Edition (2) enables us to apprehend the
loop as a diagram of the temporal form which would describe the
way in which the eternal return operates in Deleuze and Guattaris
formulation of the time of aeon. Nonetheless, it does so
arguably only on a conceptual level because when one deploys Endless
Loop Edition (2) as a material artefact and plays it on a turntable,
regardless of which spindle hole is used, the sound material contained
on the disk (which consists primarily of sine tones, let us remember)
is not sufficiently dense to envelop us and we are thus easily drawn
out of its drone and pulled back into the temporal co-ordinates
of our everyday world governed by the time of Chronos. The
drone music of Phill Niblock, however, can in many respects be said
to operate according to similar principles to Endless Loop Edition
(2) but, what is more, to be sufficiently dense to envelop the listener
and allow her to experience an aeonic relation to time.
Niblocks normal
composition technique involves recording a musician or various musicians
playing sustained tones on the instruments specified for any particular
piece. These tones are then manipulated so as to remove any attack
and decay from them and, in turn, these smooth tones
are layered one upon the other, slight discrepancies in pitch, microtones
and Hertz differences resulting from a note played in different
octaves producing a pulsing or throbbing effect as well as creating
sum, difference or combination tones which are not present in actuality.
The generation of these combination tones is dependent on a mathematical
differential generated between two different pitches that produce
what David Soldier terms auditory hallucinations. As
the latter explains in the liner notes to Music by Phill Niblock:
The highest
pitch played in Five More String Quartets is roughly
a G-sharp resting on the top line of the treble staff. The lowest
note is played by the cello, around a G-flat at the bottom of the
bass clef. If you hear higher or lower pitches (or pitches in the
middle that are not centered around G-natural) and are listening
on distortion-free speakers and you are in a non-reflective room,
you are hearing auditory hallucinations produced inside your ear.
These pitches, called sum, difference, or combination tones, are
determined by the played (fundamental) tones. For instance, if a
violin is playing a pitch close to a G-sharp above middle C, say
420 Hz (cycles per second), and a viola plays a flatter pitch an
octave lower, say 200Hz (a little above G), the sum tone is f1 +
f2 = 620 Hz (close to a D-sharp above the violin note), the difference
tone f1 f2 = 220 Hz (an A below middle C), and the combination
tones derived from harmonic frequencies, for example 2f1
f2 = 640 Hz (between the sum tone D-sharp and E-natural). These
auditory hallucinations are audible at sound pressure levels from
about 20 dB to 65 dB. 5
Although dependent on
mathematical formulations, these difference tones are far from being
merely a conceptual element of Niblocks work. Niblock wishes
his listener to experience these tones and in order for this to
happen, very specific conditions must be in place for the optimum
generation of these combination tones. It is for this reason that
Niblock is famously exigent about the conditions in which his pieces
are played and demands the very highest quality equipment for the
playback or performance of any of his pieces: equipment must be
able firstly to deliver a very high degree of precision and fidelity
in order to capture the difference between the smallest of microtones;
its response must be of the highest reliability; and it must be
able to play the piece back without distortion at incredibly high
decibel levels, Niblock demanding almost impossibly loud playback
levels for his pieces. By layering tones over each other in increasingly
dense structures and demanding a very high volume level, Niblock
follows in the footsteps of La Monte Young and Conrad in wishing
to envelop his listener in sound so that liminal harmonic relations
are experienced from within the sound what Douglas
Kahn terms listening inside sounds. 6
What is important about this for the purposes of the present analysis
is that by thus enclosing the listener within sound, the listener
is (unlike the listener to Endless Loop) unable (aurally)
to leave the auditory space of the piece and thus able fully to
experience its most essential dimension, namely time. For as well
as being dependent on mathematical formulations, like Endless
Loop Edition (2), by deliberately removing any attack or decay
from the recorded tones and extending them by sequential repetition,
Niblock can be said to generate his drones by creating a pure loop
that has no discernible beginning nor end, by instigating an eternal
return of his basic sound material. Conceptually similar to Nicolais
work, then, Niblocks démarche goes one step
further than Nicolai since he wishes to act upon the listener
in time, to alter our perception of our relationship to time.
Niblock attributes the
birth of his compositional technique to a personal experience. As
he explains:
In the mid 1960s, I
was riding a two stroke, Yamaha motorcycle up a long mountain
slope in the Carolinas, stuck behind a diesel engine truck. Both
of our throttles were very open, overcoming the force of gravity.
Soon, the revolutions of our respective engines came to a nearly
harmonic coincidence, but not quite. The strong physical presence
of the beats resulting from the two engines running at slightly
different frequencies put me in such a trance that I nearly rode
off the side of the mountain. 7
According to Niblocks
description, then, the pulsing created by the near harmonic coincidence
of the two engines created a trance state, a state, that is to say,
in which the subject is removed from the punctual co-ordinates ordinarily
used to orient oneself. Indeed, the space created by this effect
is one in which there are no punctual co-ordinates, the apparent
temporal beats not being imposed from outside as a measure of time
as in the time of Chronos but, rather, created as an intensive
effect of the event born of a differential relation. Niblocks
aim was to translate this experience into a musical experience and
judging from various commentaries on the experience of listening
to his works, he would appear to have succeeded. His entire musical
career has been described as an exploration of the musical
possibilities of the timeless continuum;
8 some have suggested it is intended to steal your sense
of time from you, 9 that
it slows time, 10
that it achieves a balance or merely a state where organized
sound floats and stands still at the same time,
11 its effect being to drone your own
self into a real-time oblivion; 12
listening to his work, different commentators have said, time
feels suspendeda 20 minute piece can seem less than five
13 and time seemed to stand still.
14 It would seem, then, that Niblocks
music manages to remove those listening to it from the punctual
co-ordinates of the time of Chronos where time can be regimented
and known by the imposition of arbitrary units of measurement,
instead to plunge the listener into the time of aeon where
the capacity of those very same units to measure time fails utterly.
It might of course be
argued that Niblocks music is ultimately no different from
any music employing a drone, a feature common to many musics from
around the world, especially Hindustani music and the vocal music
of the Russian, Greek, and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches. However,
whilst in such musics the drone is generally a continuous note which
plays an accompanying role to other musical happenings, in Niblock,
the drone is everything. More than this, however, it can be suggested
that his compositional technique further frees time from its moorings
in Chronos by relying on a form of repetition intended from
the outset to generate difference and differential relations. For
whilst each piece relies on the repetition of a set number of original
tones, these tones are layered in such a way that differential relations
are deployed vertically Hertz combinations producing the
pulsing effect mentioned, the immanent measure of time and
horizontally, the editing, manipulation, microtonal alterations
(a microtonal interval being arguably but a different level of intensity
of the original tone as opposed to a different tone) and gradual
phase shifting of each tone producing a difference between various
instances of a repeated tone so that, as one critic has noted, when
you listen to each piece straight through [
] it never
seems to change, yet jump around within a track and the differences
are stunning.15 This
technique employed in Niblocks work might thus be termed a
properly artistic operation since according to Deleuze artistic
work does not employ repetition in a banal or Platonic fashion as
does, for instance, a decorative motif in which a figure is
reproduced, while the concept remains absolutely identical.
16 For Deleuze, on the contrary,
This is not how artists
proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure,
but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another
element of a following instance. They introduce a disequilibrium
into the dynamic process of construction, an instability, dissymmetry
or gap or some kind which disappears only in the overall effect.17
It might also be suggested,
however, that Niblocks work brings about a properly temporal
operation. For to deploy in a temporally-based form such as music
a banal repetition in which each instance of the figure (or tone)
would be governed by an identical concept would be to produce in
the work itself the time of Chronos or chronological time
in which every past moment is measured in units which are conceptually
identical to their predecessors. By founding his work on the difference
that arises from the repetition of tones, however, Niblock creates
in this time-based artform a direct image of time experienced
from the inside the only place from which one can experience
the time of aeon since it cannot be viewed (and measured)
from a point of transcendent remove. Even though music is arguably
the artform which bears the most intimate and certainly longest-standing
relationship to time, this capacity for art to constitute a direct
image of time is generally reserved for cinema in Deleuzes
thought, for cinema, freeing perspective from a transcendent point
of organisation is able to show us cosimultaneously multiple perspectives,
times and even (in the cinema of what Deleuze terms the time-image)
different realities, a glimpse of the multiple virtual forms that
might be produced by the differential flow of time experienced from
the inside in which everything is déjà-là
and pas encore-là. And does this not also describe
Niblocks work which is but a drone, a pure loop which immerses
us in a continuum displaying no punctual co-ordinates that can serve
as a privileged position or perspective from which to experience
the work? Does Niblocks work not in fact provide an even more
complete direct image of time since it is nothing but an eternal
return which is always déjà-là (its
immanent terms fixed from the start by the choice of tones) yet
always pas encore-là (its dissymmetry both vertically
and horizontally always producing differential relations which can
never be known in advance)?
Here again we must remember
the difference tones produced by Niblocks pitch combinations
which, producing a vertical dissymmetry, come to generate a virtual
present, which is to say a potential only ever realised in the evental
(événementiel) circumstances of each listener.
Indeed, explaining the physiological mechanism that governs the
(hallucinatory) perception of these tones a complex process
resulting from a dissymmetrical or nonlinear relationship between
the frequencies arising from the auditory stimulus (the fundamental
or played tones) and the actual movement of mechanoreceptive cells
which is affected not only by the external stimulus but also by
cellular voltage shifts that occur with the opening and closing
of ion channels Soldier finishes by suggesting that,
the pitch hallucinations
are apparently the result of the opening and closing of cellular
ion channels. The hair bundles new hallucinatory
vibrations are transmitted through the ears basilar membrane,
activating other hair bundles in the region of the cochlea responsive
to the new frequencies. The auditory nerve, and the cerebral cortex
are therefore unable to differentiate between real
played frequencies and those arising from this special characteristic
of the frequency responsive cells in the ear. 18
These hallucinatory
vibrations, then, can be said to be (in a very real
sense) a glimpse of the multiple virtual forms produced by a differential
flow experienced from the inside: they are not objects in reality
which can be apprehended in extension but entirely new forms dependent
on differential relations, forms which are always immanent (déjà-là)
yet simultaneously pas encore-là since only ever present
in the deployment of the work in time which, experienced from the
inside in an aeonic relation, is itself always only ever this cosimultaneity
of compossibilities.
Niblocks music
is indeed then a direct image of time, and in a sense it is only
ever this since it is a continuum in which are present both the
same (the déjà-là) and the different
(the pas encore-là). Indeed, as Gerard Pape suggests,
In the
music of Phill Niblock, we are confronted with the aural equivalent
of trompe-lil. Apparently static clouds of harmonically
dense material turn out to be not so static as they appear. Whats
more, one has the distinct impression that the music is changing
spatially over time. How is all of this possible? The key is in
Niblocks use of time. In his music, the experience of time
is as very slow and continuous. There are no disruptive, discontinuous
musical events to disrupt the flow of time. Time is suspended. Niblocks
music gives the impression of having always been and continuing
to be. Yet, this is not the idea of Being as stasis. Each time
one feels that Niblocks music isnt changing, one realizes
that it is never the same, and yet, always the same. Being and Becoming
as one. Moving Immobility. 19
It is precisely in this
seemingly paradoxical or impossible state of moving immobility that
Niblocks reflection on time lies, within its apparent
stillness in which harmonic fields shift and change,
and yet somehow stay the same 20
that the time of aeon is experienced. Indeed, as another
commentator has suggested,
Niblocks
dense stationary waves are, ultimately, essays on Time itself. Niblock
manipulates our perception of Time by disguising change as stability.
As Saint Augustine said about 16 centuries ago, If I don't
think of it, I know what Time is. The more I think of it, the less
I know what it is. That is precisely what Niblock does to
us: he makes us think of Time. His floating galaxies of tones force
us to focus on the very nature and essence of Time.
21
Niblocks work is,
then, the ultimate still life displaying a motionless
progress, and it is in this respect that it constitutes nothing
but an image of time itself. 22
As Deleuze writes of this very concept of still life,
There
is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does
not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself,
a little time in its pure state: a direct time-image,
which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change
is produced. [...] The still life is time, for everything that changes
is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change
only in another time, indefinitely. 23
Embodying the apparent
oxymoron that is called into being by the very term still life,
Niblocks music takes on the unchanging form of time that is
itself change, a constant potential for movement within difference
in itself that does not proceed inexorably towards an end but rather
bends times arrow back on itself, forcing it into a loop whose
form can now also be apprehended as the form of difference in itself.
It is then perfectly justified to describe Niblocks work,
as one reviewer has, as the aural expression of re-contextualizing
the space-time continuum, for in creating music in the manner
described herein he proposes a (pure) loop as the form which gives
us a direct image of time stripped of the co-ordinates with which
we normally apprehend it, an image (and experience) of time without
seconds, minutes, hours, days and years, an aural glimpse of the
multiple virtual forms produced when we experience time as difference
from within and do not count it from without.
24
Greg Hainge is Senior
Lecturer in French at the University of Adelaide. He has published
a monograph and numerous articles on Celine and many other articles
on film, Critical Theory and music. He is currently researching
cultural manifestations of noise and will shortly move to a new
position at the University of Queensland, Australia. He can be reached
at greg.hainge@adelaide.edu.au.
|