Читать книгу Hard, Soft and Wet - Melanie McGrath - Страница 32

Determined not to be entirely ignorant in the face of ‘the scene’ event tomorrow, I pass much of the day in Ambient Soho, Unity, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus and with a pile of NMEs, Melody Makers, iDs and Mixmags catching up on being young. Nonetheless, I feel like someone trying to swing. My one comfort is that at least I now know what ambient techno is. It’s aural wallpaper, slews of electronic sounds devoid of narrative. Future noyz. Geek pop. Which makes Daniel a geek pop king.

Four hours with the music press has taught me something else too: Geek pop kings make it big on the quiet. They don’t appear on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. Aphex Twin, the Orb, MLO, Muziq, Wagon Christ, Cosmic Baby – a bunch of egghead boys with tiny marble eyes and thin white features bounded by fuzzy hair and street style. Mostly they work alone, up in the teen-boy heaven of circuitry and kit control, remixing, remodelling, switching names as fast as record labels, in constant drift and flux; sampling, distorting, sequencing, dipping, cruising around the musical ether. Occasionally they collaborate – two tides of repressed testosterone converging in a sound wave.

Geek pop albums – Lunar 7, Electron Pod, Weimar Supernova – are named after bits of Germano-Japanese technology and scifi tropes, presented with sleeve notes quoting from French deconstructionist theory and The Brady Bunch. The albums are divided into quadrants and sectors, their tracks given numinously impenetrable titles. ‘Phragmal Synthesis Part 3’. ‘Nexus Techtronics’. ‘Tokyono’. ‘Space Warp Exodus’. Albums more like pieces of machinery, heavy with devices, levers, buttons, musical gadgetry, technical gewgaws, bytes and showy displays of novelty. Sometimes a secret track lurks beyond the album’s seeming end, causing entire Internet newsgroups to spring up in order to explore more fully the profundities of geek pop secret tracks, the digital generation’s equivalent of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ played backwards.

From ‘A Thousand Plateaux’, a geek pop manifesto, written by two French theoreticians, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

A musical consistence-machine, a SOUNDMACHINE (not for the reproduction of tones) one, that, molecularises the sound material, atomises and ionises and captures the COSMIC energy. If this machine should have another structure than the synthesiser, in that it unites the modules, original elements and working elements, the oscillators, generators and transformers and brings together the micro intervals it makes the sound process and the production of this process itself, audible. In this way it brings us together with more elements that go further than the sound material. It unites the contradicting elements in the material and transfers the parameters from a formula to another. The synthesiser, with its consistence-operation, has, a priori, taken the position of establishing in the synthetic decision: this is a synthesis of molecular and cosmic, of material and energy and no more of form and material, ground and territory. Philosophy no more as a synthetic judgement but as synthesiser of thought, to allow thought to travel, to make it mobile, and make it to an energy of the cosmos as one sends sound off to travel…

A reminder, incidentally, of a course in formal logic I took at college:

It is raining

It is not raining

Therefore Paris is in France.

And the moon is made of Gorgonzola.