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  • Splitting Bits, Closing Loops:Sound on Sound
  • Philip Sherburne (bio)

Every artistic practice, it seems, maps itself grammatically, as if a part of speech. Documentary photography, the most literal application of an already empiricist medium, privileges the noun, the thing itself. Action painting, tautologically speaking, is all verb. Impressionism? Adjectival. More and more, contemporary music—from the pop charts to the world of academic computer music and gallery installations—positions itself prepositionally: It is meta-music, music about music, sound about sound, and process about, well, process.

None of this is news, of course. Properly postmodern, we are surrounded by the products of meta-culture, from the films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation to the array of versions, mash-ups, remixes, shoutouts, lyrical putdowns and experiments in genre that comprise the pop music universe. Increasingly, contemporary music is itself simultaneously, in a phrase made famous by VH1, "behind the music"—that is, when it is not over the music, within the music, around the music.

What is new, however—or if not new, then at least in the ascendant—is the degree to which music has come to concern its own process, its own materials, its own making. As Nic Collins noted in the call for papers for the issue of Leonardo Music Journal that occasioned this CD, "The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of the medium as the instrument— the crowning achievement of a generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as tapping two sticks together" [1]. And as Kim Cascone has noted, Marshall McLuhan's famous formulation, "The medium is the message," has given way to a new phenomenon: "The tool is the message" [2].

In his poem "Axe Handles," Gary Snyder quotes Ezra Pound: "When making an axe handle / the pattern is not far off" [3]. The artists featured here break with Snyder's and Pound's cycle, as if turning their blades against the very handles that support them: not using their tools to make faithful reproductions, but carving the selfsame utensils into new forms.

From AGF's spoken code to Institut fuer Feinmotorik's improvisations upon prepared, "empty" turntables, the works here attend not simply to the matter of sound but to the materiality of all phases of musical creation and playback in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction.

Attending to belt drives and runout grooves might seem to run counter to the increasingly virtual condition of contemporary media, as music flees the prisons of vinyl, aluminum and magnetic tape for a fleet-footed existence of pure circulation, enabled by fiber optics. The materialist tradition runs deep, however, from John Cage's incorporation of turntables in his 1939 piece Imaginary Landscape No. 1 to the Jamaican sound systems that provided the foundation for the recombinant culture of hip-hop.

Since the world has gone digital, artists have dug even deeper into the guts of their gear. In 1994, some electronica fans were startled to hear the German post-techno producer Oval create an album entirely out of samples of skipping CDs [4], but they needn't have been: Yasunao Tone had been manipulating aluminum discs since shortly after their introduction, and Nic Collins had incorporated the technique in compositions as early as 1988. Toshimaru Nakamura's No-Input Mixing Board seems an even more radical—in the literal sense—act of [End Page 79] auto-generation, "playing" a mixing desk with no inputs aside from its own output [5]. Without recourse to any external sound source, Nakamura's strategy utilizes only the device's own internal feedback, creating a purely latent music that might be considered to be always-already present in the machine. William Basinski's shortwave compositions in the 1980s treated the radio spectrum itself as an audio source, ignoring particular "musical" content in favor of the formless static between stations [6]. More recently, the dance artist Akufen has incorporated the same idea, replacing techno's drum sounds and synthesizers with bursts of white noise spun off the radio dial [7]. Name a recording medium or transmission mechanism— turntable, film, DAT, videotape, minidisc, cell phone, hard drive—and it is likely...

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