Sustain//Decay : A Circular Scaffold

An Unstable Release Date for an Unstable Text: June 19th 

https://voidfrontpress.org/portfolio/sustaindecay/

An Introduction by Owen Coggins and James Harris

//Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.........

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........

Ngngngngngngngngngngngngngn.........    //

Charlie Blake, Dronoclasm //  

//I draw circles and sacred boundaries about me; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains—I am building a mountain chain out of ever-holier mountains //

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra //

//And what defines the scale of the ultimate symbolic mountain is its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches. [...] The door to the invisible must be visible //

René Daumal, Mount Analogue //

//Before time… before even the gods… there was only…//

Bong, “The Dreams of Mana-Yood-Sushai” //  

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...Drone is the beginning and was before the beginning // Drone was the Nothing // Nothing Droned // The droning of Nothing was the Nothing from which Drone is self-created...

...Om // the first sound, the cause of the universe, itself a drone // an empty signifier swells to overfull // evolves, fragments, ramifies into a constellation of meaning the way a solid droning tone may begin to wobble, vibrate, oscillate // mutating, expanding, infecting // spreading, branching, self-intersecting, self-interweaving, self-absorbing, self-annihilating, becoming different through manifesting the same // “The empty set is the set with nothing in it. The number 1 is the set with only the empty set in it. And so on…”

...the End of Drone, already contained within the drone, is the End of Everything // Drone is the End which outlasts itself...

...from near-silent single tone pure ambient minimalism to crushing oceanic hyper-amplified metallic maximalism // from trance-like repetition of sameness to explicit experimentation with the radical question of what it can mean for a sound to be different from or the same as another sound // drone rotates or fades or spirals away from linear historical/genealogical genre conventions toward a meta-foundational sonic arsenal // drone is capable of infecting all genres as it is itself composed of ontologically primary techniques for sound generation and modulation, realized in extreme extension toward outer- or inner-most depths, boundaries, limits, frontiers, horizons // different variants of drone select different techniques to maximalize or minimalise, whether hijacking and mutating source material or inaugurating original tonal topologies // all genres (all life, all differentiation) can be imagined as mere clusters of patterns of iterations of momentary deviations from the drone...

...elements, both sonic and metaphorical, of drone exist in natural and artificial worlds, in geometries of plant and water, architecture, even space, underground, mind // the Universe breathes - the physical expands and contracts // the Socius hums incessantly in communal conversation // the ceaseless oscillatory dynamics of the Brain silently howl...

// For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together //

St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22 //

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...this book is a call to approach composition and attentive listening as ritual practice // to approach drone music as a training ground for the attention, for cognitive endurance, for a weird absorption from which hidden transformations might flower // to approach the melodic and rhythmic movement toward and away from central harmonic figures, the manipulation of the “tension between background and foreground” as ritually patterned upon the mystics’ tuning of the tension between subject and object, between inner and outer worlds // listening to the spark of impenetrable darkness, in contemplation of the shadow paradoxes of language, mysticism and death...

...the spectral spectacle of drone’s all-devouring taste mirrors the range of this book // intensive studies of emptiness, inaccessibility, and eternity // death, death of god, death of death // forest, mountain // Infection, parasite, swarm: disparate mind in shattered multiplicity // sine waves between ascetic austerity and wild excess, at either pole confessing the violence of the sacrifice, of the sacred // insane or becalmed transformations of perception, infinitesimal time-slices and isoluminant eidolons // all contained within the elastic-walled labyrinth of this new spacetime, our non-terminating Cymatic Church...

...drone casts paradoxes into perception // sounds heard as light, metaphorical and alchemical, offer the transmutative properties of mystical shimmer //Wolfe// in ‘resonance subordinated to redundancy’ //Freeman// spatial sense is transformed, illusioned, bewitched, the drone ‘echoing off an invisible realm’ //Wolfe// drone foregrounds the difference and connection between sound and hearing //Kang// ‘the possibility of stasis and the sprawling occupation of its power’ //Drone Box// levitation //Csihar// ‘It escapes itself in a perspectival “experience” of time not tethered to the specific form of the human subject, to be integrated into an exceeding and not-necessarily human - an alien or machinic-transcendent subjectivity’ //Caron// drone is excess and/or asceticism //MOUTH// honey and tar //Strickland/////

...drone invokes antinomies and contortions in language too, which, ‘alienated, orbits around a central absence’ //Coggins// words dancing in rituals of forgotten purpose around the chalk circle which it is not forbidden but rather impossible to enter // in the language spat from drone’s black centrifuge, there is again and again repetition and repetition and yet transcendence of sameness // the intuition of the death of intuition //Shakespeare// the absolute emptiness of emptiness //Absentology// drone is ambient, atmosphere, a hum behind the world, but it is also metal… that pagan resonant interval //Drone Box// riffs beyond riffs, metal about metal, a meditative treatment of heavy metal’s symbolic codes so radical it may not be recognised as such //Coggins// this Möbius strip, this snake which eats itself yet is still nourished, yet is still consumed, this convulsion, infects and is infected, is the infection // is the ashy pest // ‘is legion, yet imperceptible, neither faith nor reason can fathom their presence or the principles that pertain to them except through their manifestation in distress, agony and death throes’ //MOUTH/////

...drone is death and drone is immortality, which is death // endless life is 'an increasingly pestilential drone', a background before which our deaths become relief //Shipley// it all starts with the signal path //Newstead// we 'send a signal and let it die' //Hissen// the signal, channel, noise all at once introducing 'a silent mode of communication that is directed towards nothing other, the No-Other, which is death' //Absentology// silent but communicative, towards death yet from death, expression through mortal silence // the gift of the skull of a fox //Legard// 'Everything that is dead quivers' //Cascone// 'not rhythm at all but merely a near endless ripple of vibration stretched across expanses of time...' //Norman/////

...drone ruins // is found in ruins // decays, sustains // witnesses decay // drone is 'eternity's future burden' //Shipley// that term, burden, bourdon, an archaic term for drone, the memory of the word ruined by time // monoliths, pyramids, stone circles, temples //Csihar// ‘the subject sinks into the labyrinth of the ear...' //Freeman/////

...drone is the life which grows through the ruins, testifies to ruin, is agent of ruin // creeper // root // undergrowth, overgrown // to the palace of birds, to a shallow garden //Legard// a 'monstrous aspect' of Nature ‘seeks to annihilate everything individual' //Shakespeare// a 'whole forest is heard in each sound...' //Cascone/////

...drone is the absolute // it is 'the infinitely dense form of silence, the recollection without object' //Absentology// the sound of ‘a god pulling gravity’s strings...’ //Norman/////

...drone is finally a portal //Cascone// a mountain, liquefied // the listener 'must conceptually climb untold numbers of unholy mountains to see the surface again’ //Harris// the pieces included here departing from each other and returning, requiring a re-reading of an earlier segment, a tumbler falls into place, the lockpicking continues, repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseam // an incessant, droning, revolving system of holy mountains // each climb faltering, failing, exhausting, “coming up against an insuperable object”, rotating into a new mountain with its own failures // each failure driving a new mountain range, each new range innovating its own apparatus for climbing from out of the experience or the text, for climbing out of experience or out of text, for climbing out of climbing itself // Written in the textual body of the climber, the history or memory or output of the climber, each climb demands tools from the other climbs, each apparatus applied to old mountains makes new challenges makes new failures, growth comes to be measured in cycles of failure, “progress” measured only by the uninitiated // for Wittgenstein, language was a ladder to be climbed up, and then discarded // for Daumal, the base of the mountain must be accessible while the summit inaccessible (as outlined in a book which stops, mid-sentence, unfinished at his death) // this book too, then, is one to be climbed out of // drone sound at the end of sound // ‘record needle gently click-flapping’ //Norman// ‘Listen to all at once if possible. Join’ //Hissen/////

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//For what is God but the index that pointed to the failure of all signs?//

Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable //

//For what is drone but the unending echo of generational potential?//

Aliza Shvarts, “Troubled Air” //

no hope : not now : not ever

[[[this text is for the program from Vincent Como's ( http://www.vincentcomo.com/ ) upcoming exhibition titled 'No Hope. Not Now, Not Ever.' at the Reinstitute in Baltimore opening on October 29th]]]

//Hail thee, holy darkness! - The INCAL//

//But in the beginning there is not light,

there is not life,

there is the black universe.

- Daniel Barber, Whylessness//

//I am neither god nor creature. - Meister Eckhart//

//I am the spirit that negates.

                             and rightly so, for all that comes to be

deserves to perish wretchedly.

- Mephisto, Faust//

The threat of possession, of being swarmed by the intangible unknowable, presses incessantly on the light. The slightest break in light is pervasively swamped by blackness, voiding the safety of referential anchors and //making slits in the umbrella - (Deleuze/Guattari)// through which the outside peers back. Abyssal mirrors lurking in every gap capture our emptiness and reflect it back through these slits, entrancing, encircling, oppressing, embracing, restraining : a nebulous army of dark potential that resonates with the harmonic undertones of our own self-repression. We see our selves and our laughable negligibility in the void, but also a preeminently sovereign intensity hidden in the nigredo and it is this dual realization that generates anxiety, profound to the point of nausea. The realization of the power of darkness is the recognition of //the exponential multiplicity of all which will never be known - VC//, and //what more do you want, o soul? And what else do you search for outside? - St. John of the Cross//

The realization that our shadow, and not our light, is the shape of god; that the supreme power motivating the infinite clockwork of heaven is the supreme negation of nihil : sublimation of Self into Black. The mystics chase possession and cure themselves - and afterward count themselves among the dead, a pinprick nothingness among a field of undifferentiated dark matter. This heretical reversal is a circular inversion, a being-in-the-world being-turned-inside-out, the alignment with a black universe that is the [ur/un]ground for the Great Death called sunyatta.

//Unbearable, isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony

of friends. There is a secret song at the center

of the world, and its sound is like razors

through flesh. - Pinhead, Hellraiser//

//To have a body is to suffer. - Bodhidharma//

//Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, he hardly

will be caught a second time. - Dr. Faustus//

Friction: the body is gripped by ghosts and the grasping distorts the mirror. The black universe is nothing more than reflection, harshly illuminating the nothing inside and projecting it onto the firmament. We mistake a glimpse into a hole for a self; staring into deep space with telescopic lenses has replaced the sensation of existing as an infinite space - we no longer recognize that it is us we are looking at. The resistance to this recursive realization accretes on us; a body forming from layers upon layers of fear: of the dark, of separation, of differentiation.

Dreaming of arresting decay is already a misunderstanding: to hold the true image fast we must nail ourselves to the cross - god is not dead, we are, and this recognition shreds liminal boundaries as easily as it does the spirit and flesh on either side. We must nail ourselves to the cross for god is not dead: god is death, and rebirth and re-death is the passage through the secret webwork of the underworld that inscribes the negative image, penetrating darkness to reveal Black. The mouth of Yama opens onto the nunc stans: the standing NOW is held tightly by hidden teeth, constricting and compressing carbon-based lifeforms into lapis philosophorum. To paraphrase Alan Watts, as long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, the wretched earth will conceal the black universe.

//For what remains of the representable if the object is to

evade representation? What remains is to represent

the conditions of this evasion. - Samuel Beckett, Disjecta//

//bathe in the horror that the blood of time carries

with the plague, and befoul yourself with

worship - Sunn O))), Bàthory Erzsébet//

//For we know that all creation keeps on groaning

together - St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22//

Dark matter : dark meaning : inverse topology : non-tology : Black had already taken its apophatic unshape before the beginning of time. Black is the deep sphera of non-differentiation where tomb and womb become smeared as if soaked with acetone. At this depth there can be no delimitation of Black to color, as we sink below the surface of the light - where no light reaches, everything is Black, and one may come to forget the barrier between inside and outside. The ontological primacy of Black is the corporeality of the Warp and Plex and sinew behind the World; the screen upon which the light plays is a necrotic purgatory whiteness marking the stagnation of the material. Light and life is but a transient flicker on the vault: //They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. -Samuel Beckett//

Light does not exist at an oppositional end of a linear spectrum from blackness, nor does it emerge from a field of blackness in an evolutionary gesture, nor does it remain when blackness is cleansed.

Light is color corrupted, burning up on reentry into Black: the spectacle that traps the gaze and ruins our nightvision: a negentropic plague haunts anything that clings to the light.

Everywhere light exists, Black grips.

Everywhere, light slips.

Black out the light - be what seeks to become secret for //only the secret sees into the secret like Black in Black - Francois Laruelle//

Sustain/Decay : choice cuts from the abstract pluripotentiality

//edit: it is driving me batty that I can't seem to edit the text of this one.....sorry. deal with it.//

Official project page @ Void Front Press

Something to make you want it...a few of the submitted proposals for Void Front's upcoming anthology....

Cymatic Church

For the cymatic Church, drone was Pantheistic; resonance within the architecture of the Church betrayed a God in nature and insulted the Christian God beyond nature. Certain forms of drone were especially forbidden within the walls of the Church,1 as was the geometry of the pentagram and golden triangle. The Devil’s Drone was attenuated by ancient dampers of resonance, and in 1234 Pope Gregory IX outlawed the tritone in Church music. This pagan resonant interval was considered sacred by the architects of the Church, and to preserve their dark secrets they encoded cymatic2 symbols into the architecture of the Church.3

Cymatic representations of the Fibonacci ratio 13:8 or 1.625 are embedded into the architecture of Churches.4 After the ratio of 13:8 the ratios of adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci series converge into the infinite golden ratio and damping increases, gradually canceling all fractional standing waves and leaving only whole number harmonics. The Devil’s Drone was muzzled by the architecture of the cymatic Church itself, and the standing wave patterns of drone avoided long before Chladni’s scientific discoveries.5

The Church strictly forbid the standing waves of drone, relegating the Pantheistic knowledge of resonance to the secret knowledge of the Underworld. But in the very act of outlawing drone the church indelibly bore features of what it negated. The damping effect of the cymatic Church was so effective that to this day it is used extensively in the design of speakers and other media to cancel resonance. The secret knowledge of the Church’s architects disseminated into the modern world. It no longer has anything to hide.

Two things interests us in this essay: First, the cymatic Church — a chamber which amplified the Angel’s symbolic resonance while minimizing Pantheistic drone with anti-harmonic damping effects — as well as its modern correlates; and second, drone compositions designed to exploit the resonant and damping properties of the cymatic Church. We will explore an array of cymatic media and composers such as Emptyset who subject Woodchester Mansion’s irregular spaces to their sonic investigations inscribing its architecture onto their drone; the composer Paul Jebanasam with his Music for the Church of S t John the Baptist which was created especially for the church of St John The Baptist; and Maja S. K. Ratkj with her Crepuscular H our which was inspired by the phenomena “crepuscular rays”6 and is to be “performed in a cathedral or similar”. 

1 The unstable character of the tritone, for instance, rendered it particularly unsuitable for the resonant chambers of the Church. The tritone is a restless interval, and was known as Diabolus in Musica and cautiously avoided in the theory of the “old authorities”.
2 Cymatics, from Greek: κῦμα, meaning "wave", is a subset of modal vibrational phenomena. The term was coined by Hans Jenny (1904-1972). In 1967 Jenny published two volumes entitled Kymatic, in which, repeating Ernst Chladni's experiments (see below), he claimed the existence of a subtle power based on the normal, symmetrical images made by sound waves.
3 The Rosslyn Chapel is but one example.
4 This is the first non-resonant Fibonacci ratio. This begins the convergence of the subsequent Fibonacci ratios which lead to the golden ratio (~1.61803) found in the pentagram and “golden triangle.” There can be no fractional, or unstable, resonance at or near the infinite frequency proportion of the golden ratio.
5 In 1787, the jurist, musician and physicist Ernst Chladni (1756-1827) published Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klangesor (Discoveries Concerning the Theory of Sound), laying the foundations for what came to be called acoustics, the science of sound. Chladni is best known for demonstrating that sound actually affects physical matter and that it has the quality of creating geometric patterns.



 

Summoning the Black Flame

Trepaneringsritualen's Music and the Philosophy of Noise

Dark ambient ritual noise band Trepaneringsritualen allows the listener to contemplate the "black flame", the foreclosure of existence. The droning monotony transmits what Maurice Blanchot in his The Writing of the Disaster calls "the language of waiting", a silent mode of communication that is directed towards nothing other, the No-Other which is death. Noise is the infinitely dense form of silence, the recollection without object. Each object, through such dark ambience, contains objecthoods glued to its form. Trepaneringsritualen's "All Hail the Black Flame" is animated by a sense of basic incompleteness. In Peter Schwenger's view, the defining characteristic of objects, including the objects of love, is the impossibility of possession. We must ask what is the "mysterious item" of Trepaneringsritualen's love? What is the Thing that we pray to when we engage in black rituals, when we "hail the black flame"? What is it that blackens the flame? According to the lyrics of the mentioned song, there is a "Ceaseless Howling", both "Cherished" and "Despised", underlying all existents. Indeed, every object, we argue, may be interpreted as constituting a ceaseless howling, a manifestation of noise. Alphonso Lingis observes that human voices, however individuated they may seem, are indistinguishable from the murmur of the world. Rather than seeking to escape from noise, we must recognize its inherent unity with silence. To unite oneself with the murmur of the world is to "become what one is" and be dispersed among degraded ruins. This black flame is more than a mere absence. Poetry annihilates the world and makes room for manifestation, the irruption of volcanic emptiness. "Language", writes Pierre Klossowski, "is the stranger inside us." A sinister stranger, we add, the strangeness of the darkened flame.

The Bouncing Wall

Through mediation and remediation — recording and rerecording —images and words are rendered unintelligible, nothing more than the operators of resonance (artifact drones, codec drones). In this essay we will explore two examples of resonant phenomena: Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room (where a subject, hidden behind a device, vanishes into artifacts of resonance), and Florian Hecker’s Chimerization (where the subject’s voice is recorded in an anechoic chamber and processed through chain-linked, hyper-chaotic algorithms). We explore the absolute difference of Hecker’s algorithmic process and how it can dissolve the drone of the resonance chamber, faintly attenuating it with an increasingly complex network of “walls” undergirding the subject and the recording device (through this process drone is grafted into a complexly spatialized environment that smothers the tyrannic drone of the resonance chamber).

What interests us is the interpellation process of the resonant chamber, and how the subject becomes nothing more than a functionary of drone. We will unpack the subjectification hypotheses of Butler and Foucault, combining them with Flusser’s theory of “triple abstraction”, as well as DeleuzoGuattarian theories of resonance and cave systems. We will also explore how the work of Hecker explodes the quadrangular architecture of “cubic” resonance chambers, and palpates haptic space to produce topological fictions.

We hope to provide an evacuation route; a plan of escape; an échappatoire that siphons the “arborification of multiplicities” which form “when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin to resonate together” forming “the Face” that binds the town and the countryside. 

Ritual Intoxication Toward the Universal Field : Pleromaticatalyst

//the song of empty space - Aliza Shvarts, Sunn O))) - Kannon liner notes//

In this essay we wish to triangulate a tradition of ritual intoxication that transtemporally cuts across cultural and geographic boundaries, an historical flattening that is isomorphic to the dissolution of social, neural, and psychological boundaries found in many altered states of consciousness.

We shall utilize the work of mathematicians Gabriel Catren and Fernando Zalamea in coordination with cutting-edge psychedelic research to illuminate the cyclic, pendular, homotopic continuum between the particular and the general in the phenoumenodelic experience - any experience that //involves a shift of the very transcendental structure that renders a transcendent experience possible (Catren)// - and which unfurls the pleromatica out of hyper-enfolded limitations of the stratified human - “transcending transcendence” onto a “free field” of “impersonal experience”, the immanent “void-plane of zero-intensity.” In order to demonstrate how drone music itself functions as a phenoumenodelic opening onto the pleromatica in the audible field, we will diagram the structure of the drive to ritualize intoxication and codify psychedelic gestures toward this unified universal field that emerges in diverse localities ranging from hash-eating Sufi saints and the Eleusinian kykeon ritual to modern drone metal performances that collapse the difference between the visual and audible. This collapse amplifies the ekstasis of dissolution and unveils //...not the inside knowledge of an elite but a kind of “low intuition,” a universal openness to movement, difference, sensation. - Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs//

Isoluminance

That sense of unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. (Yeats, 2004, p. 139).

There are sounds that present a quality of otherness and have an illusory, almost paranormal quality. They can have an atmosphere of liveliness, unreliability, presence, or mystery. I am interested in sounds that have no discernible source and/or whose presence alludes to an impossible sense of place. The listener can hear it but cannot locate it— as though it were a spirit from another realm. This sonic situation can lead to interesting perceptual results, much like mystical negation.
In the visual realm, this is a situation known as isoluminance and is common in mystical art. Isoluminance can be identified in many religious art traditions, where the divine body is represented as glowing or shimmering. Examples of this can be seen in medieval paintings of holy people, in Hindu and Buddhist art, and in the Yolngu art practice. The divine is represented by light with a shimmer or a glow to represent the spirit. Though isoluminance is a term used specifically to refer to light, there are analogous experiences in sound. I argue though that the ephemerality and time-variable nature of isoluminant phenomena brings this particular visual experience closer to sound and the mystical-ephemeral than to the normal visual sphere. The conflation of location and identification can lead to interesting and somewhat supernatural impressions of objects in space, because the eye can easily identify the presence of an object but cannot easily determine where the object is. Sometimes, when the object is not located in the visual field, the object is interpreted to be from another, possibly spiritual, realm.

In sound, I consider sonic isoluminance to be aberrations in the spatial/locational information gathered from a sound. This would be identifiable as a sonic object but impossible to locate in space, or would seem to have spatial qualities separate from a known listening space. Within this context, isoluminant objects exist almost outside of the realm of space, time, and form. Their conflation of the “where” within the space of the “what” can conjure new, often mystical, sonic experiences and I propose to write a chapter on the meaning of these sounds in a mystical and musical sense.



The Black Depth of the Droneswarm 

In this piece we argue that the drone is the sonic expression of the swarm insofar as the latter is the formula for the One and the innumerable, the infinite and the unnumberable. The droneswarm may be heard in the buzz of existence without being, but more often it is not heard at all except in the resonance of the funeral bell, since it occurs above or below the threshold of human perception. For the most part the droneswarm has no relation to human perception or aspirations, even as it provides the indispensable undead condition of life including the matrix of cultural and social being, its infrastructure and the possibility of its complete de-structuration or destruction. This is an essay on the blackened depths of the droneswarm that can only be evoked and assessed in terms of the uncomprehending effects of incomprehensible catastrophe. It draws on the devastating histories of pestilence in the visual arts, in scientific and religious speculations, in fiction, and currently in contemporary music and lyrics, in particular black metal, the RAT guitar drones of Sunn 0)))), and the plague songs of Scott Walker. The piece revisits the Black Death in order to explore the swarming contagion and voracity of rat rationality (Negarestani) alongside the bacterial logic of Yersina pestis (S1(S1(S1(S1àS2))) in order to metaphorize excess, base materialism and existence below the threshold of being that refuses the biopolitical quantification and management of life. The indistinction of the droneswarm refuses the division of life and death upon which biopower depends, its resonance dissolving the measurable limits of human calculation and moral utility, heralding the necessity of a different conception of ontology, of being and existence, in anticipation of ‘all these plagues that are coming that we have no answer for’ (Walker in Young, 2012).