The Fundamental Integer

Reading books on tour can be difficult. Although there is often a lot of waiting around during those long afternoon hours between load-in and soundcheck, it is always accompanied by the possibility of unforeseen obstacles appearing at any moment to demand your time and attention. It could just be for five minutes or maybe four hours. An opinion might be needed on how to squeeze all the equipment onto a stage that was half the size as advertised. It might be the discovery of a broken input on a guitar from the previous night's antics and it is Sunday so all the local guitar shops are closed. Perhaps a MIDI ghost has started haunting some or all of the tangled cables but you cannot tell which ones are affected as you chase the spectre from v-drum trigger to piano to sample to mixing desk. Often only a full exorcism of unplugging everything and then plugging it back in again is enough to reliably drive them out.

Or when everything does go to plan and the venue is open as you arrive, the equipment can be loaded straight onto the stage (no stairs!), everything still works, the dressing room has sofas and coffee and windows: that’s when you relax enough to realise how tired you are and your brain convinces you that doom-scrolling your phone is as rewarding as and easier than book-reading and so you do that instead.

Despite all of that, books can and do get read, just slowly. And so reading Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers was a long, drawn out and memorable experience that took place across Europe during the 65daysofstatic Wild Light tour of 2013.

I remember starting it in a chilly backstage dressing room in Zagreb, rain hammering down outside from a low, slate grey sky. Earlier in the day, reasoning that sporadic exercise would surely cancel out the constant hangovers, I had gone for a run by a fast-flowing river, been soaked by the storm, and afterwards found it hard to warm up. This damp cold made the searingly hot, dry salt plains of Utah the book opens on burn all the more vividly.

A few days later the book's narrative switched to Italy during the Years of Lead, a period of national upheaval, violence, kidnappings and revolutionary fervour. I found myself arriving in Rome just as the book's protagonist did. Mine was not the Rome of coliseums or ice creams (or political uprisings) but the Rome of rusting train tracks, non-brand supermarkets and hot dust. We had rolled up in the scruffy edges of the city, where a cumbersome, hulking tour bus could settle itself for the day in the large car park of a petrol station rather than do battle with the tiny, twisting streets and anarchic traffic of the city centre.

I borrowed a deckchair from the driver and got comfortable in the shade of the garage forecourt, reading about the Red Brigade and the radical storms unleashed on 70s Italy while he was power-washing the grime of European motorways off the bus.

These memories of The Flamethrowers came back to me a few days ago while doing some reading. I had decided to take my own advice and pick up a Fredric Jameson book (Archeologies of the Future - The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions). I had delved into chunks of this book in the past, read a chapter or two, but I wanted to see if I could get through it cover to cover. See what it might take to hold an entire book's worth of Fredric Jameson in my head all at once.^[1]

Although the texts Jameson refers to as case studies tend to be novels or films (or endless classical plays I have never heard of), when I am reading him I cannot help but bring it all back to how his ideas might be applied to music-making. And it was this act of translating ideas from a relatively formalised discipline to a more instinctive, heuristic one that reminded me of Rachel Kushner.

About a decade ago, almost as soon as I started doing a PhD I was immediately considering dropping out again. Stumbling across an interview with Kushner was one of the things that made me decide to stick with it. She was discussing her first book, Telex From Cuba^[2]. It's another great book, but the utility of this interview to me was in seeing how she talked about the research she was doing into 1950s Cuba, the plantations, the political corruption of The United Fruit Company and so on. At first she had thought that it was all going towards her PhD thesis, but slowly realised that a better form for her to communicate what was important about the events in question would be to write not an academic thesis, but a novel.

It was the ease with which she considered these different forms not just of equal value, but as equally effective methods of glimpsing some kind of fleeting truth of the world that grabbed me. The notion that fiction has the ability to bring certain things to light that a collection of facts cannot. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to me - for years I had been claiming that the reason 65daysofstatic songs didn't have any lyrics was because we were trying to write music that said all of the things there were no words for. But still, hearing somebody else say it in such a direct way was instructive. Who cared if I ever finished a PhD or not? As long as my research helped me to learn new ways to think about and write music, then why wouldn't I keep going? Coming out the other side with a new record would be just as useful as (if not more) than a piece of paper with a qualification on it.

Deciding to take a break from my current self-inflicted Fredric Jameson struggle session, I went looking for this old interview to see how it had aged, or rather how my thinking had aged in relation it.

I am not certain, but I think that I found it: a conversation published in Bomb Magazine between Rachel Kushner and Hari Kunzru. It is not at all how I remembered it! The book they're nominally discussing is The Flamethrowers, not Telex From Cuba, and while they do briefly talk about how heavily the books were researched and what Kushner previously studied at university, nowhere does it suggest that Telex... was originally an academic project.

Did I make the whole thing up? Was I building my own escape hatch from academia, reassuring myself that if this was not for me, I could duck out with a hard drive full of recordings I had done in the university's studios and feel like I hadn't wasted my time? Or is this a different interview and the one I remember reading is still out there somewhere, hidden in a forest of dead hyperlinks?

Either way, what I found was an insightful conversation between writers who think a lot about making their work. The kinds of writers who say things like:

For me, the sentence is the fundamental integer. But there is an ebb and flow in density, and the rhythms change. Tone is a ruling condition of possibility of life on planet fiction—every sentence must embed and embody a very particular tone and also further it, propel it. The sentence has to be doing something hidden, or coy, or openly funny, or odd. I use different tones in The Flamethrowers, so different parts of the book have different densities of sentence. Some of it is more conversational, while some of it is more thoroughly ruled by the language, which then creates the meaning rather than the reverse.

I love that: the fundamental integer. A sentence can be considered as a melodic and rhythmical thing, but it is ultimately monophonic, indivisible. Countless textures and patterns flattened into a single flex of language. I enjoy pushing at the edges of the analogy that writing sentences is like writing music and vice versa: what would it mean to have a chorus of sentences? Not like, for example, the novel Brown Girls which does a neat first person plural thing, having a chorus of voices as its narrator, but rather a literal stack of sentences sharing the same temporal space, needing to be read simultaneously? It doesn't really work. It breaks down. But it is still fun to think about. I suppose the skill in being a great writer is precisely this though: sculpting every sentence, paying attention not only to its visible surface, but hollowing it out, designing and then manifesting the depth behind it to create space for those other textures, patterns, moods to breathe. The words must not only be themselves, but in combination they must also be the key that unlocks a path to the world in which they exist. In music you get to do this more literally, with reverbs, counterpoints, polyrhythms. You can write as many synchronous layers of meaning as you like. The depth and height of music is more directly accessible than that hidden space behind careful assemblages of words.

I won't spoil the end of The Flamethrowers, not least because I have no memory of what actually happens and I can't remember exactly where I was when it came to a close. Still on tour though, I think. The shape of the novel in my head when I think of it feels similiar to some other books I have read over this last year, Our Share of Night and In Ascension come to mind, as books that evoke a particular mood so forcefully it eclipses both plot and character. I probably don't read enough of books like this. Because I am a big fan of plot. I enjoy characters. And yet I am curious about what it might mean to try to make music that reduces the centrality of plot or characters, and brings mood to the fore. Is that what I have always been doing? Or is that something new, something different? I can't help but be reminded of the minor revelation I had not long ago, about how I instinctively reach toward pattern-based music rather than sound-based music when trying to start something from scratch. Could that dialectic be mapped onto the one Kusher seems to have been teasing out when she says that while sometimes sentences are more conversational, others are "more thoroughly ruled by the language, which then creates the meaning rather than the reverse"? I wonder if all of these fuzzy ideas can somehow be joined together.

Well, I suppose that's what The Komoy Noise Research Unit is for, isn't it.