Asja Lacis

I was sitting in a traffic jam listening to the radio recently, I flipped aimlessly around the dial and every song seemed familiar, like I had heard it a thousand times before. Occasionally I would pause to hear most of a song. I guess because it reminded me of something or someone. Or maybe because the rhythm fit in with the traffic as it began to pick up. A younger cousin was with me and she started protesting as I flipped past tunes, which she evidently liked (although she does have the maddening ability to watch the same video movie every night for a week). Many times I only had to hear the first note or two to recognize the song. Whole game shows have been built around that recognition factor.

There are times when the repetition on the radio (and let’s face it, commercial radio is nothing but repetition — couldn’t make any money otherwise I suppose) seems so overpowering I just can’t stand it, I feel like everything is closing in on me. Other times, it actually seems sort of comforting. I can sink into it, maybe even sing along. I was going to say that it can make me forget my troubles but I think the opposite is the case; I can succumb to repetition because I’m relaxed and I’m not worrying about anything. It seems very much like sex in that respect. Of course I realize that some people operate in the reverse, they use repetition to forget about stuff. That’s always struck me as akin to addictive behavior, something I’m not too fond of. Which is only to say that most of radio music fits into addictive and/or fetishistic patterns.

Sometimes I come close to thinking what seems to be a dangerous thought: that improvisation really doesn’t exist and that where it does, it’s only a mask for something else entirely. Maybe even it’s opposite.

But then I flipped onto a station that was playing techno. The funny thing is that many times I also can’t remember whether I’ve heard a techno song before or not. They all seem to be cut out of very similar patterns. But that being said I don’t think of that extreme repetition as a critique. The mindlessness of it seems purposeful to me, sort of like Zen.

Even the way it’s produced confuses the issue of repetition and difference, since preset modules are often used, with patterns that can be tweaked to various degrees. They’re different but the same, kind of like a human face.

In a way, techno and free jazz strike me as very similar. They both are intent on creating their own furrow as they go along but the resultant crops can be very different. The both seek a sort of enclosure for the listener, a closed world which manufactures its own rules as it goes along. They both have a hypnotic quality, to those listeners who are able to give themselves over to that world being traced (those respective worlds being both the extremes of repetition in the case of techno and the extreme of continual unfolding without necessary recourse to rhythm to push the unfolding as is the case with so-called ‘free music’.) And too the freest forms of music (that is, not bound to rule-like constraints other than what is necessary to make the piece ‘work’) seem to be seeking a certain form of astonishment or even amazement. (It is perhaps a measure of how far we have come in the twenty first century that this almost seems like a commonplace now, even in contemporary classical music, for example Iannis Xenakis, whose works seem to border on a tremendous daemonic and chaotic freedom–but yet are bound, prometheus-like, to a stochastically generated score, at every moment setting up sliding, hybridized conditions of chance and necessity.)

Virtuosity accounts for part of the amazement in both sectors. In both cases, ‘virtuosity’ seems to indicate something that seems more than is humanly possible. With techno it is literally so, given the abilities of digitized sound now; with free music, it has to do both with dexterity but also an uncanny, almost telepathic rapport between players, almost to the point of conjuring an epiphenomenal Sound Entity, a sonic body, puppet, or golem, willing to do the bidding of the players. (As in the conversational, call-and-response of traditional jazz in the older forms but there is also in the newer forms the sense of a physical process taking place, sound as an analog of events that are way below the human kin or way above….which is maybe to say that the traditional story-telling or narrative-like structure based on a Newtonian causal temporal begins to fall away. For many listeners the only possible result of such would be chaos or nonsense. It is curious though that sheer repetition can make sensify almost anything, even non-sense begin to take on a condition of intelligibility. Even if that sensibility is somehow empty, a musical kenosis as it were. This not to pass judgement on this emptying process, whether from extreme repetition or from extreme non-repetition; however it is to say that there is something else going on here than traditional musical story-telling.)

This astonishment is also the effect an attunement to an outside. (As a side-note, it is symptomatic that in both musics, drugs are often used by partisans to enhance this border condition of amazing grace, an escape from gavitas into a condition promised as rule-less and gravity-free. This condition can be likened to the momentary creation of particles in a nuclear reactor however, in that the condition of weightlessness, spontaneity, and transport — and also wait-less in relation to a score--is short-lived and drops then to fetishization, production, and addiction.) It’s no surprise that one of the favored terms in jazz is to play ‘outside’ ---the lines, the rules, the score. And improvisation sure does give a rush from being ‘outside’ not least because of it’s intense embodiment. (There would never be a rush if there were no bodies. But then this becomes confusing in newer forms of music because of the kenotic (emptying) effect, which give rise to ecstatic bodily affects.)

But maybe it’s the case that nobody ever escapes from anything and that all is happening are paramecium getting trapped in the meniscus. Ok, cool, but maybe it doesn’t really matter. The power of the Imaginal (as Henri Corbin put it) is so powerful as to perhaps punch its own hole through various barriers, to create virtually ex nihilo a reality based on nothng but itself, a reality that bootstraps itself through space and time. I would think that navigation under these conditions would have to have a very high improvisational component, a necessary ingredient of anything that promises a free subjectivity. (Techno is a peculiar move which can owe much to S/M as it imprisons before it releases–but then anything that figures in the body has to allow for a series of containings and releasings, the basic pulsion of the flesh.)

Some fear that we will simply become so gravity free that we will just float off if we abandon the rules. It doesn’t work that way. It’s more likely that we will wind up getting our shoes nailed to the floor.

But back to the safety/pathology (they are inseparable we should have figured out by now) of wiederholungsdrang, or the repetition that Freud figured as diagnostic of many neurotic traits, a sort of non-fulfillment pact that the addict makes with the material world.

Just as in the repetitions of addiction, the most extreme stance of improvisation (emptied of past, shorn of futurity, flush and co-terminous with now) would be an evacuation (without exhaustion) of itself, a full, efficient, and even ecstatic rendering of itself into an other, constantly mutating, form.

It would be a crest of ‘un-knowing’ which uncannily throws itself open to knowing/being known through a release of neglected powers. (This ‘knowing’ then travels through the world in a very repetitive fashion also, the natural fallout of the performative whether language or music: an event, a recordings, an audience, a geneology, a mood.)

To round up this pony: the great and disturbing horror (for some) would be the disappearance of the improvisational possibility at its extreme, absorbed into the great maw of a Nietzschean eternal return, some deamonic imp whispering in our collective ear late at night "T’was ever thus, and will always be!". Th apparent Brownian motion of chaosities would only be apparent, merely clearing the way for a repeat performance–of which at that point all performances become repeat performances.