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1. Aleatory Music as a Critical-Poetic Practice
This project is, first and foremost, an attempt to think critically and historically about how and why we interact with urban environments in the ways ‘we’ do, with the intention and hope of developing new ways of thinking and interacting with the world around us that might be more radical politically, ecologically and ethically. We noticed that our interactions with the great majority of nonhumans in urban environments reduced those actors to their functionality, and only one particular function at that: a metal railing becomes only a risk-management tool, a stop-sign only a member of a network of traffic technologies, a plastic cup only a receptacle for water. These habits of thinking and acting are so commonplace, so much a part of everyday life, that they have become ingrained into our psyche and largely escape notice. It seemed to us that this reduction was extremely ideological in character, both in that the particular functions these objects are reduced to potentiate the capitalist mode of production and in the ways that this reduction becomes an unconscious structure that governs the ways we interact with these nonhuman others. The question that arises from this observation bifurcates into two levels or modes: a) how and why did this come about and b) how can ‘we’ think with and engage urban environments in ways that subvert the ideological organization of human-nonhuman relations?
As musicians/sound designers/would-be philosophers, it seemed that sound and music was one way in which we could critically engage with these problems. On the first level, the din of contemporary cities is so loud, pervasive and normal that it escapes our attention. It has become normalized. It’s simply ‘the way things are.’ The average noise level of a midsize suburban town like Santa Cruz is around 60-65 decibels during the daytime. As such, the possibility of things being different or even the more modest goal of changing how we interact with our environment can seem almost impossible. One way we have been engaging these questions is through the critical-poetic practice of field recording. Thinking of this kind of sound (the sound of sitting in a crowded bus, for example) as music through the practice of field recording does three things:
• it makes the listener consciously perceive and pay attention to that which is normally registered unconsciously and taken for granted
• rendering what we normally think of (if we think it at all) as background noise music makes the listener engage with these sounds in a different mode; it changes the quality of their relation with the sound
• moving through environments thinking about potentially recordable sounds changes the ways in which we engage nonhuman actors in a way that subverts the ideological organization of human-nonhuman relations that relegates and defines nonhumans in purely functional terms. Thinking of these actors sonic potentiality makes us move through spaces in a completely different way, changing both who we interact with, why we interact with them, and how we interact with them

This kind of practice takes its inspiration from John Cage, a 20th century modernist composer who tried to think of music in a new way. Whereas previous composers worked exclusively with musical instruments for their compositions, he attempted to work with things we would normally categorize as ‘noise.’ He writes in Silence: Lectures and Writings that “whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds,” (Cage, 4). The sound of a bus or footsteps clacking in an abandoned warehouse become potential elements in a musical score in a way that challenges the distinction between ‘noise’ and ‘music.’ Additionally, Cage attempted to make space within his compositions through the use of silence for ‘extra-musical’ musical elements, such as the sounds of the environment where the performance was taking place. We sampled his notion of what can count as music in our attempt to make something wild, unexpected and worthwhile. Later I will address how we are using his concept of music and, significantly, where we disagree with him.
The second concept we sampled from Cage is the notion of ‘chance composition’ or what some (and I prefer this due to its more historical/ politicized valence) have called ‘aleatory music’. Aleatory music tries to use the concept of chance to compose pieces. Chance is incorporated in a variety of ways: one could use chance as a way to determine the particular values of a given variable. One could, for example, decide to write a piece using the variable ‘dynamics’ and then determine its value through a chance operation. The most famous is example is Cage use the I-Ching, a Chinese text used to divine the future, to determine the values of some of the variables in his compositions. An overriding concept (dynamics) is chosen and then its potential permutations/manifestations make up the piece. Another way chance is incorporated is to leave the notation of a given work open to the interpretations of the performer. An example of this is, in lieu of a notated musical score, a composer would give a performer some written instructions (i.e. ‘move the hand as fast as physically possible’) that they were then free to interpret. Thus, the piece is open to chance because it is different every single time.
This kind of practice (making aleatory music from field recordings), for ‘us’, inevitably leads to historical questions concerning why we, at this particular historical juncture, encounter the particular sounds and objects that we do, in the ways that we do, and it is here where we part from Cage and his contemporaries. They failed to inquire into the historical conditions of possibility for their engagements and interactions with the sounds that surrounded them, and thus fell into a deeply depoliticized avant-garde-ism. Our experiments are mediated through the histories of colonization and the rise of industrial capitalism, through structural violence in the form of on-going institutionalized racism, classism and sexism, to name in a very general way but a few of the ways in which our access to sound is non-innocent. They thus failed to see the most radical form of chance and indeterminacy that is at the heart of every musical composition/sound: that the auditory encounter, in its particularity, historical contingency, and politics, ‘took hold’ (Althusser) in the first place.
Moving through spaces with a field recorder becomes a critical, in addition to poetic, practice only if we historicize our aleatory encounters with particular sounds. It is through this recognition of historical contingency, through the deeply situated way in which a situation arises for a sound to be felt and recorded, that aleatory music takes on a political cadence. The point in moving through spaces in this way is to engage critically with everyday life, to “ regard everyday life as the frontier between the dominated and the undominated sectors of life… [and] to work ceaselessly toward the organization of new chances,” (Debord, 1961) as Guy Debord notes. It is to think through, in the medium of sound, the possibility of making other worlds in the present through our concrete practices, of the possibility of a life without dead time. We are in the business of creating the conditions of possibility for chance encounters to occur and to recognize the potential for the rupture of the restlessly new to emerge in everyday life. Part of this work is to render the everyday strange through turning the everyday into music in order to expose the possibility of a new way engaging with those environments where resistance seems most hopeless.

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from Intoxicating Porosity, released December 14, 2013

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Bourgeois Speedball Oakland, California

Bourgeois Speedball lives in ruins. Sculpting compositions from crumbling synthesizers, samplers, and the soundscapes of Bay Area rebellions, Bourgeois Speedball organizes sound within the decaying oikos of globalized neoliberalism.

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