This is a continuation on my previous essay WORTHLESS LANDSCAPES. It is expected that you are at least aware of what a poor image and a cheapscape are. [Here is a link to that essay] , it’s short and you’re allowed to skim it. This essay is a lot better.
This essay has been written with a musical soundtrack in mind. Every act of this work has a specific song that is supposed to be played while reading. Hyperlinks to these songs are included.
INTRODU.
Although the visual representation of the landscape or the cheapscape is by far the most dominant boxing the poor image in the visual is an act of ocular centrism. To be able to create a full map of cheapscapes and poor images we also need to spend time with auditory images. Especially if we eventually want to spend time analysing the poor cinematic.
In this essay I talk about two compositions.
- Repetions by Max Cooper (including the music video)
- Aisatsana by Aphex Twin
1. AudioToVisualConverter.net
Although there is an overlay the auditory image is not just music. It is more the auditory trying to do an act of necromancy, trying to create an almost photographic landscape out of sound waves. In this act of necromancy, the auditory will always become poorer in some way. By trying to enter a zone claimed by the visual it must compress itself in ways, this can include digital compression, analogue compression and time dilation (the auditory has to recon with the almost instantaneous nature of the photographic thus having to bend it’s time to fit the scale of the landscape1.)
A lot of the work of Northern-Irish musician Max Cooper deals with this challenge of portraying the photographic landscape in an auditory form. Max Coopers work is often composed with the intent for it to provoke a sense of (infinite) scale. The best way I can describe his works is it is the soundtrack for an airplane lift-off: long songs (6 to 8 minutes), infinitely arpeggiating synths and massive drone-like sounds consuming the entirety of our dynamic range.
His track Repetition fits this description extremely well. It a collaboration with video-artist Kevin McLoughlin in which they explore our constant strive towards the infinite and its unsustainability of it.
‘Repetition’ is an attempt to convey the importance of our endless endeavours toward human development and growth amidst a chaotic and disorienting landscape.
The struggle for a fruitful future is challenging with the distractions of everyday life alongside its ever-growing technological ‘advancements’.
the hope is for humanity to strive through all of this in a meaningful and
positive way. – Kevin McLoughlin2
Visually Kevin portrays the landscape of glass skyscrapers and infinitely stretching highway, zoom-out but the landscape never ends and there is never any kind of glitch or abnormality that breaks the landscape.
The same themes are present in the composition itself. You can skip to anywhere in the song and you will never be shocked where you ended up. The infinite repetition turns into a sort of stasis. When you strive for the infinite nothing with ever really be able to change. In these ways it is a very deliberate critique of cheapscape form the perspective of a landscape.
2. British People 😐
The British have a long history of pioneering electronic music. From the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to EDM. An integral part of this lineage is artist Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin. Who was in the 90s and early 2000s ascribed as frontman of the computer-based electronic music with songs such as Window Licker and Come To Day.
Although these songs are some his most intense, corrosive songs RDJ in tandem has a history of creating more ambient, anodyne music such as a large part of his selected ambient works albums or the 10 minute long 3 chord loop stone in focus which has become a soundtrack for anxious and depressed students. But what I think is RDJs most soothing track must be Aisatsana, a song which only two layers: A simple piano composition and a recording of birds tweeting.
Aisatsana does not create a landscape like Repetition does although it does do something. The landscape that Aisatsana contains can’t be created, you would not be able to tether the track to a specific music video, it’s landscape instead is focused on the presence of the already existing visual landscape. The long breaks in between motifs force you to look at the world from an outside looking in perspective. When layering it on top of a cheapscape the cheapscape regains some of its beauty by adding back the cracks and rough spots that were removed. It and RDJs other work (even the intense stuff) create a temporary antidote for the cheapscape, alienating you from the things that are alienated, an acidic escapism.
Is there a better aural instantiation of Fishers “inside as a folding of the outside” than this? An album that mixes the sounds of the family home with the sounds of BDSM dungeons, splintered across the temporal wormholes of studio dub and Satie-esque prepared piano compositions3
CONCLU. On (Vanishing) Lands
Song: The Lost Day – Brian Eno
In the book The Weird and The Eerie writer Mark Fisher talks about a walk he took past the container port of Felixtowe in England. He gains many thoughts while observing this port form a distance.
Here is an eerie sense of silence about the port that has nothing to do with actual noise levels. (…..) What’s missing, at least from the spectator watching the port from a vantage point outside, are any traces of language and sociability4
A similar sense of eeriness can be felt in the cheapscapes sketched in Repetition. In general, it is worth connecting the eerie and the cheapscape together as it opens a lot of doors.
Eerieness is when the outside enters the inside, the stillness of the landscape being present in a space otherwise known for being everything but still such as the city, creating the urban landscape. Or the city being present in places that would otherwise be the landscape, creating the urban landscape.
Repetition and Aisatsana fill these two opposite positions on this spectrum of the urban landscape. You can watch Repetition while listening to Aisatsana and suddenly every false reflection, every crack, becomes visible. It is quite magical how that shift in focus takes place. In opposition to that you can watch Aisatsana while listening to Repetition and you just get an infinitely stretching cheapscape, a poor image, incomplete, yearning for its missing parts. At least Repetition has the tongue to express this yearning.
The landscapes of the auditory image have a voice, a voice that can be used to add to or create models of cheapscapes, creating the potential to deconstruct them in a safe environment. A training ground for future generations to take the next step.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Steyerl, Hito: In Defence of the Poor Image, New York 2009
Cooper, Max: Repetition, London 2019, last accessed 9-10-2022 Repetition – Max Cooper
NOTES
- This made me think of the ted-talk by musician David Byrne about how architecture shapes music itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uXJWxpKBM ↩︎
- in the description of – Cooper, Max: Repetition, London 2019, last accessed 9-10-2022 Repetition – Max Cooper ↩︎
- Colquhoun, Matt: Aphex Acid, New Castle 2017, last accessed 9-10-2022 https://xenogothic.com/2017/11/13/aphex-acid/\ ↩︎
- Fisher, Mark: The Weird and The Eerie, London 2017 ↩︎