Massimo Canevacci About METAXU

Metaxu

“There is a hidden, transcendent compositional principle that is not sound, that is not audible in itself. A degree of warmth, an intensity of white, a sound, diary of a feeling that has no less time than a perpetual calendar; meteors that live in our gait, the indefinite time of the event, the unstable line that continually divides what happens into an already here and a not-here, a secret signifier necessary for subjects, a hidden structure necessary for forms.”

With this statement, Maurizio Martusciello begins the presentation of the concrete music group Metaxu, of which he is a part along with DJ and turntablist Filippo Paolini (a great connoisseur of different music) and VJ image manipulator Mattia Casalegno. And he clarifies the meaning of this name: “In Plato’s Symposium, metaxu is the daemon Eros, the middle ground between extremes, the place of oscillation and blending or, according to Novalis, the daemon of pleasure which oversees our tactile, visual, auditory perceptions” (Martusciello, web). Music that scratches from their concerts, music that corrodes every known sensation, music that extremizes and expands sonic vortices. Emission of waves that have not yet been heard: this is extreme music, mixed with images that disturb the tranquility of normalized vision. “Metaxu is somehow a middle way, between being completely immersed in reality and unanchoring from it, which takes the form of a writing that has no completed form, but rather composes itself, the result of an extreme feeling and suspension in a continuing search.” The initial reference is to Pierre Schaeffer and the entire experience of concrete music as the starting point of their encounter, which decidedly changed their listening education. They consider themselves concrete composers, electroacoustic, even though the techniques and means used are no longer the same as those of the 1940s and 1950s; listening to everything, from Esquivel to Bernhard Günter, from Crass to John Dowland, from Zorn to XTC. “The idea is to seek an imaginable in the imagination, an unthinkable in thought, to give life to a hybrid thought, capable of holding together concept and sensation, truth and horror, spirit and body. A place of metamorphosis and transformation, a place where one cannot linger for more than an instant, a landscape with frayed and changing borders.” Adorno already affirmed that dodecaphonic music had a sort of mission to constantly modify every tonal relationship, so that the various musical phrases, just hinted at, always had to move towards different compositional sonorities. While in popular music, “pleasure is practically equivalent to recognition. For those surrounded by standardized musical commodities, evaluation has become a fiction” (1974:10). Not only the ear, but the entire body is destined for a listening that is no longer interested in recognition (pigeonholing notes into well-known schemes that appease the anxiety of the different): but rather in a constant challenge to experiment with the unheard. This alone is concrete music that carries unheard sounds towards the pleasure of the unexplored rather than the repeated. The musical landscape as soundscape is not a mere sonic backdrop, whose peripheral perception coexists with chatter. Adorno also says, “the seductive force of the stimulus still survives only where the forces of renunciation are stronger, i.e., in dissonance, which does not allow belief in the deception of constituted harmony” (14). Yet Metaxu experiments with something that seeks and explores beyond: not only renunciation – ascetic opposition to any harmony, both musical and social – but also experiencing dissonance as compositional timbre that can – even listening to the horror of the sonic abyss that affects the listening body – be implanted in the desiring scratched body. Dissonance no longer as renunciation, dissonance as opposition, certainly, dissonance against every political-expressive synthesis, but also dissonance as auditory pleasure. “Everything that falls into the categories of pleasure can no longer be enjoyed, and the promises of happiness – as someone has long defined art – can only be found where false happiness has been stripped of its mask” (Adorno, ibid). Yet tearing off the mask of false happiness – always conciliatory and synthetic – can also involve dissonances that produce temporary pleasures even without constant happiness. This is extreme music: sonic crossings that tear off the acoustic mask of reproduced banality and drive desire into the laceration. “The disruptive desire is one of the constant conditions of metaxu, the desire that turns to objects and makes them loved. This is Eros. But it is always about things that intersect, never about things that reduce. A cartography, never a symbolic” (Martusciello, web). Sonic residues The concert space is one that defines sound. An old factory on the outskirts of Rome. Open spaces with bare columns supporting the building. A sort of huge loft. Metaxu uses computers as musical instruments with intense and disturbing bodily movements. Images processed by the PC are also projected on a screen above by Mattia. The music starts by crawling among post-industrial noise: because everything is sound, every timbral/acoustic distortion caused by the play of frequencies – which reach heights now difficult to hear on CDs – produces changes in the images, strange geometric variations in which oblique silhouettes emerge. The noise-as-sound is loud, sometimes very loud and accelerated, scratching every electroacoustic possibility. Metaxu sometimes seem immobile, barely moving their hands on the keyboards, serious faces, concentrated expressions, bodies slightly bent over the visors to follow or pursue the timbral twists on the display. The concert, after a dark start, winds its way through searches for dirty frequencies, finds residual tensions, tries to calm down on electromagnetic acoustic streams, and you can feel they are looking for the climax. Indeed, a paroxysmal crescendo, a deluge of noisy accelerations submerges the entire loft. I feel tensions and twists, something to do with anguish and, at the same time, with a dissonant joy that comes into the body aided by frequencies that pierce. That contact between agony and orgasm sought by Bataille or Burroughs. The climax comes as a jolt made of paroxysmal precipices, dilated sounds, disturbed residues. “Suspended sound-bodies in hesitation that develop all the senses of disjunction. Disjunctive articulation, where sound-bodies contain a hidden language, the most abstract argumentation. To form a ‘glorious body’: nothing is more verbal than the excesses of the flesh (…). Sound-bodies that collide, cut, penetrate. Listening is like composing, a restitution of sensations that allows that erratic path that is the only true purpose of composing” (Martusciello, 2002:72). Listening as active forgetting, as imagination of the unimaginable and the unlistenable. Environmental noises, analgesic sounds, acoustic saturations, timbral walls, dissonant sprawls, web rhythms, sonic compulsions … “John Cage’s contribution was to blur the boundary between music and soundscape. And to help appreciate the fusion between music and sound, he opened the windows of the hall (…), shaping a new type of listening that required not attention, but inattention” (Murray Schafer, 2001:355). Scratching the friction. Friction, squeaking, scraping between different sources and different subjectivities experience alteration: never ever banal imitation. Between rhythmic and timbral irregularities, connections composed of friction must be established. Friction is a constant rough flow that modifies, alters its own surface. Friction is losing parts of one’s corporal surface, overheating them, peeling them, stripping them and allowing oneself to be affected by alien traits to ingest them, regenerate them within one’s irregular spacetimes. This risking and being scratched by the other is not a definitive guarantee against every impressionistic duplication, sugary from assimilationist good feelings: but it is a naked interzone each time experimented and renewed of irregular, displaced, and dissonant improvisation on one’s musical and expressive choices. A famous phrase by Adorno states that “perhaps the absolute limit of the historical sound space of Western music has been reached” (1974:171): the entry of digital technology and the expansion towards non-Western music make this statement obsolete. Metaxu position themselves on these sonic streams. A eXterminated sonic.