◌
Every something is an echo of nothing
John Cage
◌
Halfway through Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial,
the unlikely figure of the court painter
outlines to the protagonist Josef K
the potential positive outcomes
for the future of K’s ongoing court case
for an unspecified crime.
The painter describes to K
the three possible acquittals
that may be hoped for:
definite acquittal,
ostensible acquittal,
and indefinite postponement.
Definite acquittal is described as the stuff of legends –
a utopic ideal only to be imagined
which has never occurred in the painter’s experience,
and can therefore be absolutely discarded as a viable possibility.
This leaves K with two remaining realistic options:
ostensible acquittal
and indefinite postponement.
Ostensible acquittal is a non-binding acquittal granted by the lower judges,
which may be revoked at any time should another judge
or higher level of the Court demand action.
This acquittal requires a fatiguing flurry
of petitioning and lobbying,
but little effort thereafter –
that is until the case is potentially revisited,
at which point the efforts of postponement must begin anew.
In this state, the possibility of the case’s resumption –
of arrest at any moment and a return to square one –
hovers perpetually over the accused,
in the form of a continual tireless haunting
whose lurking background hum
could inevitably become deafening at times.
The alternative option of indefinite postponement
requires constant attention
and contact with the Court,
but keeps the case in its initial stages.
It avoids the perpetual anxiety of possible arrest,
but requires constant activity
to ensure that the case does not pass
from these initial stages into anything resembling a trial.
The process is exhausting and engaging,
a ceaseless balancing act.
The advantage to be gained from both
ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement
is that they prevent the case from coming to sentencing
through ducking and diving,
through evasion and distraction.
The target result of both instances
(to varying different degrees)
is to keep the trial
in a condition of exhaustive limbo
for the duration of the accused’s life.
A holding off of death,
a tired presence of living,
head bobbing just above
the surface of the water,
gulping in just enough air
before the next wave
passes overhead.
◌
To follow the Siren’s song is to disappear into the abyss. The abyss is at the same time silent and the source of all sound; deathtrap and delight; real yet utterly unattainable. It points to the beyond of music and sound, to that which is inaudible and unknowable and which exists as the hither side of the real.
Eleni Ikonaidou
◌
And nothing, where I arrive now, is shining.
Dante Alighieri
◌
If you think you are a ghost, you will become a ghost.
John Cage
◌
on the sidelines
on the bench
on hold
on standby
out-of-sync
in a fix
in a funk
in oblivion
in the twilight
in the upside down
in the wasteland
in the barren fields
in the badlands
in the wings
in the middle
in purgatory
suspended
congested
clogged
confounded
choked
muddled
moribund
mudbound
jammed
stuck
stumped
stonewalled
stymied
set aside
stagnant
flummoxed
bamboozled
blocked
barren
arid
desolate
empty
impoverished
infertile
parched
sterile
dithering
timeless
listless
formless
floating
unanchored
out there
adrift
afar
afloat
at sea
unmoored
untethered
deserted
depleted
fruitless
to fallow
impotent
in the wind
on the breeze
in the ash
out to pasture
waiting
waiting
waiting
waiting
like a frog in the throat
like a bone in the gullet
between a rock and a hard place
in stasis
◌
Tis a strange place, this Limbo!– not a Place,
Yet name it so;– where Time & weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mair sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;–
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark’d by flit of Shades
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
◌
Music is the last enunciation of the universe
E M Cioran
◌
In drone music,
there is no secret message –
no code, no real thing to interpret.
A nothing sitting in the midst
of beautifully consistent sonic experience
that creates an alternate reality –
an attention to the passage of time –
the infinite in an instant.
Joanna Demers calls drone music
a music for the end of the world:
Drone music excels in creating and maintaining tension. It aestheticizes doom, opening a door onto once and future catastrophes, those that are imminent and those that, once believed to be imminent, are now detours in a past that turned out otherwise.
The music of artists such as Celer and Éliane Radigue
lead the listener into a sort of melancholy stasis
which progresses slowly
with the minute modulation and manipulation
of a constant flow of sound.
Listening to drone,
we slip into this limbo state,
a thick liminality,
a time within time,
a time out of time,
where the sheer breadth of sound
points in all directions at once –
everything and nothing.
Within the comfortable gap of the drone,
the listener is exposed to the elasticity of temporality,
the void in-between events
where true time lurks.
Defining intervals and instances
blend seemlessly into one another
forming a slow progression
of rising severity.
The longer the track is
(and some of them are upwards of three hours)
the more the listener is divorced
from their cognitive state
at the beginning of the listening.
When I listen to drone
I fall into a sort of semi-meditative trance,
a time out of time
in which the thick fabric
of the weight of my day can fall off
and be replaced with an alternate
form of total oblivion,
an end in and of itself,
a vibratory state
that brings me out of my head
and into my body.
◌
That’s the mystery of music: the creation of a temporal totality. Put differently, the past is contained by the present just as the future will contain the present. If we don’t cut them up into pieces, if we don’t interrupt them, these three times form a whole. The present is always a junction in the mind of past memories and future projections. Especially in difficult moments, these three can appear unified in a present that becomes singular, immense and eternal. It’s a frankly extraordinary state, which also occurs in advanced meditation. In some ways music is a filtered form of this experience.
Éliane Radigue
◌
Celer’s music, as with so much ambient drone, speaks of the end of time, the end of the world, and all the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany such ends… Any Celer track sounds like it could go on forever, and perhaps is currently going on forever in some other space. This is the music of heaven, how we all might hope the afterlife to be, with no hint of kitsch. A few moments in this music might indeed be fair recompense for a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, aggravation, and boredom. But the threat of an abrupt end, of apocalypse, is latent in this music, too.
Joanna Demers
◌
drono-sapien – noun – an andro-median quadrimanual demi-demo-deity, composed in equal parts of a drone and a human being, generally assigned to surveillance or remote control duties
Raqs Media Collective
◌
There have been many instances
throughout this long past year
of enforced solitary confinement
that the limbo state that I have found
myself to be in has been rather unpleasant,
quite restrictive, and filled with collective feelings
of ennui and creative impotence.
There have been many instances
throughout this long past year
of warped elastic time
that the limbo state that I have found
myself to be in has been rather constant,
yet quite elusive, and filled with collective feelings
of confusion and unknown direction.
There have been many instances
throughout this long past year
of individual time, space and pace
that the limbo state that I have found
myself to be in has been rather pleasant
quite expansive, and filled with collective feelings
of self reflection and positive projection.
◌
We do not destroy the past: it is gone; at any moment, it might reappear and seem to be and be the present. Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we.
John Cage
◌
You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing.
Lydia Davis
◌
and in fact relax
ghosts don’t kill people
because imagine how awkward it would be afterwards
Crispin Best
◌
Specific weather conditions
cause a very slow rising and falling
of the entire surface of water of the sea.
These movements act like an enormous drum
producing infrasound in the form of microbaroms
that can propagate for thousands of kilometres
and penetrate the upper atmosphere.
These microbaroms create a sustained droning,
which we could call the humming voice of the sea,
whose arc stretches from the depths of the past
into the horizon of the distant future.
The mountains that surround the seas
act as acoustic amplifiers for this sound,
as it refracts and echoes off of their steep sides
and through their winding valleys.
As a bassline accompaniment
to the rhythm of the microbaroms,
a low frequency noise is emitted as the earth rotates.
This is caused by the friction that is created
between the topographic varieties
of the earth’s crust and the lower atmosphere.
These droning hums and bass rotations
are the sounds of the lifeless,
conducting a geologic musical score
on the scale of deep time.
Each slow note of this planetary drone score lasts a decade.
It takes a century to listen to a single refrain,
and a millenium for one verse to play out.
The Triassic period marked one musical score –
the last in the three seasons of the Earth’s Mesozoic composition.
This is a deathly slow music made by the sea and the rocks,
amplified by the mountains for the ears of the cosmos.
The sounds of the dead sluggishly
echoing around a world of the living.
◌
Time is the condition for the existence of our ‘I’. It is like a kind of culture medium that is destroyed when it is no longer needed, once the links are severed between the individual personality and the conditions of existence. And the moment of death is also the death of individual time: the life of the human being becomes inaccessible to the feelings of those remaining alive, dead for those around him.
Time is necessary to man, so that, made flesh, he may be able to realise himself as a personality. But I am not thinking of linear time, meaning the possibility of getting something done, performing some action… Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.
Andrei Tarkovsky
◌
In 2019, I went to a performance of William Basinski’s
album project On Time Out of Time.
The concert was to take place
in a Cathedral, quite the location
for a sacrosanct listening experience
of an album based on sonic source material
from the sound of two black holes colliding.
In the artist talk before the performance,
Basinski was quick to point out
that the following show
was more of a presentation
than a performance,
as the only performing
that was necessary
had already been done
in the mastering of the album.
The subsequent sonic presentations
in a variety of locations required
just the slight slip of dials
to fine tune the sound
to the resonance of each space.
Performance or presentation,
it did not matter,
the inherent religiosity
in the act of listening
to an atmospheric
and transcendental
drone piece
that was composed
using the sonic imprint
of two black holes combining
1.4 billion years ago
placed the audience on a timescale
beyond our comprehension.
I felt as if located upon
the event horizon
of one such singularity,
body stretched
in a time without time
the infinite in an instant.
A wilful stasis
and quiet respect
was felt throughout
the collective consciousness
of the listening audience,
as we were taken in time,
taken out of time,
tuning into the melancholy melodic
background hum of the universe,
held in stasis,
taken out of the mindset
of our busy days
and into our vibrating bodies.
◌
Distributed bodies—distributed apocalypse. Metaphysics everywhere. Your body is coupled with environments both immediate, distant, and microscopic; it is bound to the internal abyss, the eternal possibility of the annihilation of ‘you’ at any moment.
Olga Goriunova
◌
No one desires the void. It is not a cheery place, and pretending otherwise would be another form of cynicism.
Joanna Demers
◌
There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares,
there are suicides waiting on sandy cliffs
in suits of armour before plunging into the sea.
There is a slow separation of myself from myself
and of myself from all others,
and of all others from themselves
and of all others from all others.
The soul does not live on the edge of time,
it is in a conference call hallway,
it is an airborne jellyfish.
◌
Today I do not even dare to reproach myself. Shouted into this empty day, it would have a disgusting echo.
Franz Kafka
◌
References
Alighieri, Dante, ‘Purgatorio’ from The Divine Comedy (Oxford University Press, reprint, 2008)
Best, Crispin, Hello (Partus Press, 2019)
Cage, John, ‘Lecture on Nothing’ from Silence: Lectures and Writings 50th Anniversary Edition, (Wesleyan University Press; second edition, 2011)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Limbo’ from The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Penguin Classics, 1997)
Davis, Lydia, The Complete Short Stories (Penguin, 2014)
Demers, Joanna, Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World (Zero books, 2015)
Eckhart, Julia & Radigue, Éliane, Intermediary Spaces (Umland Editions, 2019)
Goriunova, Olga, ‘The Bodily Sounds of the Abyss’ from AUDINT—Unsound:Undead, edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou (Urbanomic, 2019)
Ikoniadou, Eleni, ‘Falling’ from AUDINT—Unsound:Undead, edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou (Urbanomic, 2019)
Kafka, Franz, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: Volume One 1910-1913 (Schocken, reprint, 1988)
Kafka, Franz, The Trial (Penguin Classics, reprint, 2015)
Raqs Media Collective, We Are Here, But Is It Now? (The Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity) (Sternberg Press, 2017)
Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time (University of Texas Press, 1989)
Samuel Brzeski (UK/NO) is an artist, writer and researcher currently reading, writing, walking and living in Bergen. He studied English Literature at University of Sheffield, took an MA at The Art Academy, University of Bergen and participated in the Mountain School of Art programme in Los Angeles. Samuel’s visual works and performances have been shown in various galleries and theatres across Europe, and he has published several artist books. Additionally, he co-runs the art collective and publishing platform TEXST, and currently teaches at The Art Academy, UiB, and Bergen School of Architecture.