Found Sounds #5

Noisenik Mattin recently told me about a new project of his, Deep Shit Listening. Part of a workshop programme with a focus on extended improvisation, it requires participants to sit still for a quarter of an hour and pay attention to the dark undercurrents of their inner monologue—the quotidian feelings of stress, anxiety, and terror that swell up whenever we pick up a phone or think about the state of the world. It can be argued that the intensity of these feelings is unprecedented because they are constantly amplified by an attention economy whose primary goal is to keep us emotionally engaged at all times. However, the very same system also supplies us with tools and strategies of suppression. Algorithms thrive on rage, but social media themselves are also designed to give us constant dopamine hits in order to keep us happy enough to keep scrolling.

There also exists an industry that revolves around supplying us with calm. Meditation apps, sound healing workshops, and listening bars paradoxically invite us to drown out the noise of everyday life by cranking up the volume of comfort music. Two new albums by Jasmine Guffond and Okkyung Lee pick up on this. Guffond’s »Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity« refers to a type of background music that has seen a strange resurgence in recent years. Muzak first emerged in the 1930s when it was piped into factories to facilitate worker efficiency, and has become known as »elevator music« due to its use in non-places such as shopping centres. Its primary functions are stimulation and simulation; it increases productivity and emits a sense of tranquility. Muzak was revived during the rise of the streaming economy in the form of »lofi beats to relax/study to« or chillout piano playlists.

Berlin-based sound artist Guffond’s LINE debut is based on a 2024 installation that was meant as a »poetic inversion« of muzak’s historical and contemporary uses in the context of »seamless, efficient productivity [and its] effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment.« Guffond works with drifting horn and clarinet sounds that seem to follow circular patterns that are constantly interweaving, consistently evolving. Both sonically and structurally, the four pieces thus almost perfectly mirror the type of neo-muzak that continues to flood the streaming platforms. This irony is of course very much intended by Guffond, whose previous works dealt with surveillance capitalism and aspects of the platform economy’s impact on our lives, but it also confronts its audience with a paradox: If you find real comfort in this music, does this make you complicit?

That Okkyung Lee’s work would one day pose similar questions wasn’t at all obvious when she debuted two decades ago on Tzadik. Even though the cellist was very capable of displaying compositional rigour when she wanted to, she became primarily known for her improvisational work that was more often than not described as abrasive. Recent years have seen her focus on her work as a composer, and »Just Like Any Other Day (어느날)- Background Music For Your Mundane Activities« on Shelter Press takes this one step further by decreasing the sonic intensity even more. Composed by the artist in near-isolation over the course of four years, it picks up on traditions such as ambient and minimal music for a sort of uncanny chamber music that occasionally calls to mind modern reinterpretations of Old Music in genres such as dungeon synth: It is synthetic music in more than one way, both in regard to the sonic material used and Lee’s compositional methods.

Much like »Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity,« also this album asks uncomfortable questions. If it truly was explicitly made for »passive listening« according to the press release, doesn’t this run counter to the usual presupposition that composed and experimental music is not to be consumed, but to be actively perceived; to be reflected upon, and to be listened to deeply? In raising these questions, Lee’s album reveals its inherent radicality while also displaying a kinship with Mattin’s newest project: Deep Listening was envisaged by Pauline Oliveros as a social practice of paying close attention to a world from which we had become alienated. However, it can be argued that the recent resurgence of the practice is an expression of a new form of alienation; a more or less conscious attempt to distance ourselves from ourselves by pointing our attention to something else.

I would make the case that Deep Shit Listening is not the antithesis of Deep Listening, but updates it for a time in which Deep Listening has become a form of conspicuous consumption—yet another a means to drown out the everyday noise. Raven Chacon might agree. In a recent Wire feature, the composer talked about how his relationship with silence has changed. »I started to wonder, well, is silence a choice, a privilege?,« he told writer Esi Eshun. »And I also wanted to think about the privileges of Deep Listening. [...] Pauline Oliveros did very influential and meaningful work, but I think she too would question what it means to deep listen in a time of crisis, an emergency.« The fundamental question that Chacon implicitly poses is whether Deep Listening in this context is still about confronting the world—or about escaping it, if only temporarily.

Chacon’s new release »Voiceless Mass« on New World can be understood as a programmatic response to this question. The Diné artist categorises the three compositions—»Biyán« from 2011 and »Owl Song« and the titular piece, both written in 2021—as chamber music, a term that could equally be applied to the music on Guffond and Lee’s newest albums, however Chacon’s use of noise and electronic sounds as well the sociopolitical themes he addresses put is distinct from them both sonically and conceptually. In »Voiceless Mass,« he uses an organ to reflect upon the intertwining histories of the Catholic church and crimes committed against Indigenous peoples in North America—a sort of Deep Shit Listening on a historical scale, if you will. The result is music that necessitates its audience’s full attention while making it feel deeply uncomfortable.

A sense of discomfort also runs through Berlin-based electronic musician Concepción Huerta’s newest album for Umor Rex. »El Sol de los Muertos« takes the middle path between Guffond and Lee on the one and Chacon on the other hand: The six tracks could be consumed passively as background music at low volume, but upon closer listening reveal their themes of colonialism and ecocide through the use of abrasive sounds and massive drones. A similar ambiguity is also at play on Andreas F. Staffel’s »Lascia vibrare …– Solostücke I,« a collection of eight pieces performed by musicians from Berlin’s contemporary music scene like Elena Kakaliagu and Nikolaus Schlierf. It is the first of a two-part showcase of the Berlin-based composer’s recent works for soloists and concerned with aesthetic questions, but also here, something seems to be brooding beneath the surface.

Take »Fünf Episoden für einen singenden Bratschisten« (»Five Episodes for a Singing Violist«) that put Schlierf’s virtuosity on full display by applying different aesthetic ideas and techniques and whose titles like »Versetzung gefährdet« (»Relocation in Danger«) express a sense of doom. In the last piece, Schlierf sings five words lifted from an e e cummings poem. Removed from its original context, the line »who are you, little I« takes on new meaning. Is this still an ode to transformation, or an identity crisis? Subtleties such as these indeed make Staffel’s music resonate, as already promised by the title, and make it possible to uncover its hidden secrets on an emotional rather than on an intellectual level. In this way, they share a kinship more with Chacon than with Guffond or Lee, whose albums can only be fully understood when taking into account their conceptual underpinnings.

On their latest for Ftarri, Berlin-based Quentin Tolimieri and Eric Wong strive for a fusion of intellect and affect: The three pieces on »Erasures« see them do away with what is considered integral to music—melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic progression. Tolimieri’s piano playing is sometimes louder and sometimes quieter, and what Wong does in Max/MSP and with bluetooth speakers creates different clusters of intensity, but the end result sounds static rather than dynamic. It is as if this music sets out to indeed erase itself, or at least its own musical qualities. Even at its fullest-sounding, this is the sound of absence, a sense that something is missing presented as something that is barely music. While »Erasures« has that in common with a lot of neo-muzak on an abstract level, concretely speaking it too makes for a (wonderfully) uncomfortable listen.

In their different ways, all of these artists present alternatives to a status quo in which music itself has become a sort of sedative, at a time in which Deep Listening has been commoditised. You could argue that, in Mattin’s term, they provide us with something akin to Deep Shit Listening. Even though that particular practice asks its performers to interrogate their suppressed emotions in silence, these albums also provide us with opportunities to confront what Chacon calls »a time of crisis, an emergency« by questioning our relationship with music itself at this point in history. Does the music that is being used to stimulate calmness or simulate silence not deafen our senses for the dark undercurrents of our inner monologue? Don’t we need more music that puts us back in touch with them? Music that reminds us that every comfortable escape from uncomfortable truths is only temporary?

Mattin’s music is doing that. Besides his work as a solo artist, he is also a member of the group Al Karpenter, whose new album »Greatest Heads« has been jointly released by the Night School and Hegoa labels and sounds as if Ghédalia Tazartès and Scott Walker had teamed up with Throbbing Gristle, The Dwarfs of East Agouza, and Polwechsel before the results of this unlikely marriage was subjected to cut-up techniques à la Burroughs and Gysin. It is aggressively noisy, wonderfully psychedelic, and full of moments of abrupt calm and introspection that create even more confusion. It is the most striking example of what this instalment of this column was all about: Discomfort Music.