jukes of chaos

Jukes of Chaos

Published in 'Blind Sight' (Salty Press, 2004) Exhibition of sound works by Scottish and Finnish artists.

We also have sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation, we have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser sleights of sound, diverse instruments and musick, likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make diverse tremblings and warblings of sounds which, in their original, are entire.[1]

Varèse’s procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.[2]

Utopiate: (eyelids and earlids opened):

“Let us sing him” said one of the friends to the other, “the lullaby of hell”.

Eternally infolding sonic swells into cosmic looped lush hollowed languishing morbid enfolding

wraith-like flicker unfolding(psychobabble present)

Dis…disembodied voices in telegraph wires and behind radio staticcck.

O resonant barbaric throne of drones the throat. Arched whalebone yawning channel for perforated whines, wheezes, gurgles, coughs, sneezes, moans, whispers, words, songs, noises, reasons, nonsenses, jokes, silences. Aeolian larynx-harp.

Mahler says that the singing of the birds, the colour of the flowers, and the fragrance of the forest are not enough to make Nature, that the god Dionysus and the great Pan are needed. The Ur-refrain of the earth harnesses all refrains whether territorial or not, and all milieu refrains.[3]

This Ur-refrain:

Two lands; Scot and Fin: split by sea but below the strata stretches like a sleeping dragon, or serpent indeed:

Ancient charméd tree-mapper; old slant-eyed pattern-forger. Rippling in many S-ed way, resembling the warbles of a flanger or a ring-modulator. You have flexed your cracked-up analogue hum on the slow sliding silence in ticking pulse of the ecstatic electronic electronic ecstatic static electricity stab and chorussing shard of rich chord chroming in jitters and flanges, phased delays and aural choral reverbs under the ant-feeler twitch of plotted closed hi-hat statter and then the open hi-hat slanting on the off-beat. Choral mytic-runs in fluoro-drive under this roaded flight. The bang of thudding kickdrum drives like passion, like nothing in god; repetition for the irreligious…

When the air moves between membrane and membrane; skin speaks to skin. Plastic to nerve. Steel to DNA. Nerves wierdly wired. The stretch’d crater of the speaker cone. Pitted and rivuleted in semi-gloss and receding in sound-slope to the epicentre, tending the whirling whorls of shell-like ears pouring in a shocking cold gasp into the funnelled dens of the skull. Slapping against the primed, taut drumskin stretched near the brain to act as an intralingual force for the heedlessly pulsing ether-tides. This is geological and eschatological news.

Salmon in vibratory trance at the spawning beds.

you metronome of the other kingdom

you time-devil of the quantized galactic spin

quartzite dream chill of oscillating crystals

Our memory of chromatics (timbre/texture in music, colour in painting) fades faster than our memory of pitch and line. Similarly, timbre and space cannot be notated on a score. Yet its these amnesiac, ineffable, untranscribable elements in music that are the most bliss-rich.[4]

O aethereal flight, beatific mesmer, mystic ascension, hallucinatory rapture; O revelation divine. Bright white bright light. Inhabit the hauntèd rock of the jukebox stylus with spiral spirits; O sweet faery stone vibrant till the last click of deep-dredge sorrow at the run-out groove when ye have runnèd oot.

Walk record-wise. Glad as we walk round a circle out on the hilltop under ringèd trees spiralling voices in a light of un-nam’d colour.

Box of reterritorialized sound powered by daemonick hydro-electricity; the force that thro’ the black fuse drives the inmost mumur drives also the jukebox tragick.

Finnish warp and Scottish weft weaving a fabric of fictitious psycho-acoustics; threads of molecularized sound material. Musical grotto of frequencies; sonic kirlian snaps in clandestine séance; phantasmacoustic conference.

Northern Octave: Of lands Scot and Fin.

[1] Francis Bacon New Atlantis (1622)

[2]Deleuze & Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (1988)

[3] ibid.

[4] Walter Benjamin