The Long Roll of Thunder That Follows
There are at least three abandoned K.N.R.U. blog posts that have tried to find a window into talking about the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's unfinished mega-work in which he uses the shopping arcades of early 20th century Paris as a jump-off point to try describing... something. The dawn of commodity fetishism? Fashion? A new theory of knowledge? Catacombs? Postmodernity? Everything?? Hidden in the space between the pages is something so vast it can only be glimpsed at as a fleeting, shimmering kind of understanding that floats between the labyrinth of paragraphs and quotations and shuffled notes that make up the work.
I am in no way comparing myself to Benjamin, but I think this confusion of a book resonates with me because I recognise the desire to make something that doesn't know exactly what it is and also how the act of making it is to try documenting and describing the thing that is getting made, all the while reverse-engineering meaning from whatever starts to takes shape and using that meaning to course-correct. I mean... perhaps that is how anyone makes anything? Backs to the unknowable future, excavating the past in order to push forward through time? Familiar territory indeed for The Komoy Research Unit!
I have often wondered if approaching posting to The K.N.R.U. in the manner Benjamin seemingly approached the Arcades Project would work. Less conclusions, more hunches. Less joined-up-thinking, more sketches. Would it be more satisfying for me? Would it be more appealing or off-putting for whoever tries to read it? Let's find out together throughout the rest of this post.
Last summer I pulled the Arcades Project off my shelf for the first time since the heady days of making replicr, 2019, when it sat around the studio like the secret fifth member of 65daysofstatic, brooding with oblique, existential angst and vague communism. (It fit right in!). I wasn't sure what I was looking for or why, but then that has been the only way I have ever grappled with this book.
The first time I saw it in real life was in Dundee while giving a talk about No Man's Sky and some things from my PhD. It was on the shelf by the desk of the lecturer who had invited me.
'Have you read that?' I gasped, admiringly.
'Well', the lecturer said, looking at me like an actual, world-weary philosopher might look at a naive, starry-eyed philosophy student, 'it's not really the kind of book you can just, y'know, read...'.
Chapel Studios, 2019, making the 65days album that would become replicr, 2019. /// Sitting at the long table in the morning, drinking coffee, I would open the Arcades Project mostly at random, melting my brain over whatever paragraph caught my attention, trying to construct a loose constellation of meaning and ideas from a similarly loose constellation of meaning and ideas.
"Rather than pass the time, one must invite it in. To pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore.—To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur. Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form—that of expectation" (p. 107)
Reverb constructs both time and space by capturing a snapshot of frozen time — the stillstellung —and copy-pasting it into the future, multiplying it with entropy as it goes. It pushes ahead by recreating the past with less and less fidelity. It takes in the time and renders it up in altered form.
The album stores time as a battery stores energy. Album as flâneur: observer of the world? I guess so.
The world as felt by the composer exists in the music they create. The listener, too, listens in a world of their own. The resonances and frictions, ruptures and fractures as these two worlds manifest and collide in the same time and space is one of the ways music can illuminate our understanding of another person's world by way of our own, one of the ways music can let us glimpse our own existence in relation to others. /// -> “Great music grounds the world of the composer as the world is ‘brought to a stand’ in the experience of the
music [...] the work of art calls into question our own mode of existence” (Ferrara, 1984).
Translator's Note: "Stillstellung is Benjamin’s own unique invention, which connotes an objective interruption of a mechanical process, rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not."
"How this work was written: rung by rung, according as chance would offer a narrow foothold, and always like someone who scales dangerous heights and never allows himself a moment to look around, for fear of becoming dizzy (but also because he would save for the end the full force of the panorama opening out to him)" (- p.460)
As much as I like the metaphor I struggle to recognise it, unfamiliar with the notion that I can avoid glimpsing the thing I am making to such a degree I am able, once whatever I have done reveals itself, to savour the phenomenological blast of experiencing what it has to say all at once.
It isn't the impact of being a stranger to my own work once it fully exists that I don't recognise so much as the wilful, blinkered climb that makes it. First of all, I am not sure there is a need to look away from the work; looking at a thing as it takes shape does not so easily give way to understanding it.
Secondly, an ascent implies a clear direction of travel to a final point where a person can observe the thing in its entirety. To me it feels like less like a person climbing, more like they are on a trek through an unknown landscape, constructing a work from the things they carry and the things they find on their journey. They come to know these individual components intimately even as they leave them behind, even as they remain a stranger to what their constellation of actions and artifacts may or may not coalesce into. They let the wake generated by dropping these fragments into existence nudge them in whatever direction the ripples head toward. Maybe once it is over the person can find a vantage point to look back on what they have made and hopefully feel the full force of it anew. But this is just one of an infinite number of angles from which whatever it is can be seen.
It feels like the Arcades Project is a book that is figuring out how to make itself.
"In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows".
All of this goes some way to describing the perma-mood of 65daysofstatic circa replicr, 2019. Unlike here at The K.N.R.U., 65 had the sense to keep it all to ourselves. Or rather, to limit any articulation of such things to the ultimate work itself, releasing a record of sad bangers that confused/antagonised/frustrated/dismayed our record label enough to get us dropped, just in time for a pandemic to swallow up any and all futures such a strange record may or may not have unlocked.
To actually release this record though, it had to be brought out of the realm of untethered noise and into something a little more... material.
A little while ago I pointed to a post from Caspar Newbolt of version_industries, long-time friend and designer of 65 and Polinski artwork, who had written something about the Telex From MIDI City album cover. There's a new post over there now, about how he made the artwork for replicr, 2019.
It's a good read, about how another bunch of worlds were collapsed in service of explaining that strange tumult, that howl of a record, the most intentional and yet unknowable thing I reckon 65days have put out.
So far.
"PROGRESS BEGINS WHERE IT ENDS" - Everyone's favourite grumpy philosopher
I went back and read some of the early essays from Wreckage Systems. I am constantly surprised by (and proud of) the quality and quantity of that project, in particular how clearly addressed the hypothesis was from the beginning. Informed by Walter Benjamin, that whole project was concerned with finding ways to apply a particular understanding of historical materialism to composition. How to create music by chipping away at the future as it bears down upon you, and then constructing sonics from the debris of history you leave in your wake. Or, to put it both more and less clearly: WHAT IF THE ANGEL OF HISTORY WROTE NOISY ELECTRONICA IN ODD TIME SIGNATURES?
SPEAKING OF WRECKAGE SYSTEMS
There's a conference happening at the University of Sheffield at the end of March. 26th-29th. I have no details about it yet, other than it is called Composing (with) Systems and one way or another I'll be giving a short demo of the Wreckage Systems project. Not really sure what that is going to entail right now, but I imagine one way or another some of it will end up either here or over on the 65LABS patreon, or maybe in both places.
Is this format of not-quite-joined-up things interesting/insufferable? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
Happy March, everyone. Fingers crossed we all make it to April.
-P.
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