Reflections Martux_m

The new processes of sound experimentation, in Italy as in other parts of this new colonization called Europe, face profound difficulties. In Italy, all this depends mainly on radically changed political and social conditions (right-wing parties led by the owner of almost all media outlets). Our societies are increasingly alienating what are the universes of value, and by this, I mean constellations of values, heterogeneous and singularizing. Racism, xenophobia, violence replace values; the pernicious nature of homogenization of capitalist values ​​is clearly seen. In Western societies, market laws have increasingly shifted towards establishing common opinion, and the most retrograde forces of power and new experimental music must now more than ever address the problem of how to escape and refuse to be the manifestation, the sign, governed by the managers of the spectacle, by the “undertakers of art” as the Situationists said, who in the great apparatuses of consensus are able to standardize every difference and to suppress every language of opposition.

“Musical machines” have increasingly invaded our lives, in our living rooms, bedrooms, cars, department stores, often treated as accessories of our habits, but sound also belongs to other accessories of our daily life, cell phones with various ringtones, alarms, diagnostic searches, in short, new sounds are part of our daily listening. A true “soundscape,” a real invasion.

Sounds – messages, sound communications, sound-language. As inherently phantasmic entities, auditory ghosts, sound could exist even if the world were not there. Since sound has entered a state of “technical reproducibility” through new electronic equipment capable of recording or generating sounds, it has become necessary to broaden the concept of “music,” no longer just sounds belonging to the closed circle of those that our musical tradition has made us familiar with, but also those sound-noises that are heard every day, integrated into the circumstances of our daily life, a kind of “painting with sounds,” a transfer of a visual image onto the acoustic plane, music becomes nothing more than the art of sounds.

In the reconciliation of music and technology, “listening” today becomes the primary mediator. “Listening” has become one of the most important compositional characteristics, “composing by listening” is possible today, contemporary music, rock, ambient music, techno music abandon their usual places, cross new genres, and settle in new, still unexplored territories. Every day we observe these new predators of gray areas where everything is in continuous evolution, where existence is insecure and orientation is difficult. Virtual sound worlds produced by digital machines give rise to constantly different sound configurations. The great revolution lies in the infinite possibility of transforming and assembling sound material.

A literature without letters, a dis-writing, one cannot make music with music anymore, just as one cannot make theater with theater, or cinema with cinema, creating interludes as foci of creation, being a stranger in one’s own language. “No one is the author of anything, just as there is no work of art, just as one cannot produce a work of art, since we continually re-program ourselves, one can no longer produce masterpieces, one can only be a masterpiece.”

With setbacks, dislocations, in a desituated space that frees the shadow that inhabits the sound body; let its soul come to life, like from the hideous clots of blood and humors, in the refuse of the womb, like loudspeakers protruded to form a “glorious body.” A fluctuating time, fluctuating lines, the Aion opposed to Chronos, “a clock that produces variable speeds.”

The obsessive search for that place, or “non-place,” where life and death touch, where there is all the sense of our existence, to understand the intersection of timelessness with time, which as Eliot says, is the occupation of the saints. Belonging to that space of “beginning” without knowing where the thing began, and where it might lead us, if beginning did not always and in any case mean continuing. Relationships between unformed elements, relatively unformed, of movements and stillness, of speed and slowness; sound molecules or particles that compose themselves carried by flows.

The only connections with other languages ​​can only be in that embrace that leads to every foreign land, and in the loss we proceed forward, like dogs desperately digging the ground. It is always about relationships that intersect, and never about relationships that reduce. A cartography, never a symbolic one.