THE JUNE SCRAMBLE
Alright.
The heat is upon us. My brain cannot multitask at the best of times and certainly not in these end-of-days temperatures.
So like a broken record an urgency loop, I will repeat at the top of yet another KNRU dispatch that, as usual, I continue to work on a wonderful juggernaut of a project that, alas, I cannot discuss. And whatever creative energy I am left with outside of that I am funneling into two projects: Wreckage Eternal and also trying to break the record for the slowest album ever written with the rest of 65.
RHYTHMIC FORMS
I'm not going to discuss Wreckage Eternal development in detail this month, but I have been snatching moments when I can and am grinding away at it. Actually, there has been quite a pivot because as good as the ChucK language is with audio timing and scheduling, it's really cumbersome to do any kind of data management and pattern-making. Or at least it is for me and the kinds of patterns I want to make. I am trying to navigate a path where I am not only recreating Wreckage Systems as they already exist, but where I can still also do that to some degree, while trying to push in more exciting directions.
And so most of the work since last month's post was rebuilding the ChucK code into a no-frills, minimal audio server. A machine for scheduling audio patterns. And then setting up a way for other bits of software to send it pattern data to schedule via OSC. This is now kind of up-and-running, and so my next immediate efforts will be to turn to Godot to build some kind of pattern-making machine that will send its inventions to ChucK to play. Is that clear? Probably not. It's been a long month.
All this messing about with scheduling and patterns got me thinking about the nuts and bolts of rhythm-making.
This little perspective lodged in my brain when it somehow appeared on mastodon feed the other month... 'Rhythm is a way of trusting the future':
Robert LoganIt was one of those little insights that made immediate sense to me. Imagining the safety of a pounding 4/4 kick drum conjures up an almost physical feeling of calm for me. That sense repetitive beats can bring about of having some surety over what will happen next. Something you can place your trust in. The peace that can be found there.
But also, Shklovsky's 'Art as Technique' recently hit my attention more than a hundred years after he wrote it, via a mention in Adam Phillips' latest book On Giving Up (some really useful ideas in this book! But Phillip's prose wears its grandiose, heavyweight intellectualism like chain mail armour; it is annoying to grapple with, difficult to know how best to attack it, yet when it does land a blow you really feel it.)
Anyway, Shklovsky's whole thing is pretty seductive to me. Art as de-familiarisation:
Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important...
Presumably Shklovsky would have hated techno then. Probably more of an Autechre head.
A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception.
Another useful dialectic here then. Rhythms are constructed or at least perceived in part upon an assumption of the future, and repetitive beats are great. But also, Shklovsky insists that that art should make objects unfamiliar, should deliberately throw up obstacles for the audience to let them contribute their half of the work to manifest meaning. The text is just a text, it is what it sparks in the beholder, and then what the beholder does with that spark that matters.
I think Pixies were great at this kind of confounding, dialectical rhythmical form. Songs that are at once immediate and accessible, but mischievous and eager to keep you on your toes. The way the beat in Bone Machine is offset so the snare falls on the one, or the way Tame only has a three chord sequence when the weight of the entire history of alternative guitar rock pop songs up to that point is telling your brain that that correct number of chords in a song like this should be four.
A more recent example of this kind of 'perception jolt' in rhythms that I think hits in a particularly lush way is a moment in Go by BLACKPINK. It's at 2mins 33secs in this video but will only be effective if you give it enough of a lead in. It's so simple: a missing kick drum on the one, replaced by a silky smooth filtered synth note. Only happens once through the whole song. Love it.
I like how much the production of this song overall and that moment in particular reminds me of Boom Boom Satellites, an all-time favourite band of mine who I wrote about here once before. Their song Push Eject is another great example of this technique I've just decided to call The Perception Jolt™, this wonderful injection of some kind of rhythmical friction into familiar formal structures to make the listener go OH WOW or, perhaps WHAT? or, ideally, OH WOW WHAT? In the case of Push Eject I think it is done by the song being in 15/8, but with the beats mostly pretending that the song is just the regular 4/4 (i.e. 16/16), but then dropping the last beat. Except sometimes a lot of the beats give up on sticking to that rule and create some kind of polymetrical chaos I still cannot parse and I've been listening to this song for more than 25 years.
There's also this weird band 65daysofstatic who have done loads of this kind of stuff over the years but whatevs.
Frustratingly, Shklovsky ends his short essay thus:
Should the disordering of rhythm become a convention, it would be ineffective as a procedure for the roughening of language. But I will not discuss rhythm in more detail since I intend to write a book about it.
I can find no trace of this book ever being written. If any of the presumably numerous Shklovsky scholars reading this might know what this book became, please do let me know.
Anyway, that was the month. Now I'm listening to Pixies. Everybody: go listen to the Pixies and good luck the heat wave.
Bye for now.
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