Essaimmusic

Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff

The New York Times style editors noted a resurgence of ambient music : “Your Most-Played Song of 2020 is … White Noise  ?”1 Has the disturbance in the sense of temporality, the real of time, affected our pandemic aural sensibilities ? Enough with narrative music. Mid-20th century experiments with repetition and noise locate the origins of ambient. These two concepts emerged together to confront classical harmony. Background becomes foreground, signal becomes noise.

Arnold Schoenberg who taught John Cage2 said, “Even variation is a form of repetition.” Cage pushed the use of repetition further, “I try over and over to begin all over again.” Brian Eno inverted Schoenberg by stating, “Repetition is a form of change.” They challenged the binary of repetition and change. In a 1974 interview, Cage spoke of “the demilitarization of language.”3 In his book, Silence, he quotes from his audience : “Relax, there are no symbols here to confuse you. Enjoy Yourself !”4 The crisis of representation in art was set on the battleground of the symbolic. Cage demonstrated an effort, that is now ubiquitous, to disrupt the power of master signifiers through noise and contingency.

Where are we left after the ‘cagey fantasy’, “no symbols here” ? His answer was clear : Enjoy Yourself ! Lacan captured the same phrase, calling it the superego. There is jouissance of a body enjoying itself. It is a distinct modality of repetition, a series of ones that fail to establish a chord progression, founding a practice of discord.

Now composers often sample sounds from quotidian life. Jouissance hums along like a refrigerator or garbage disposal. Following Cage’s path of Empty Words5, experiments in ambient are attuned to lalangue - a movement towards essaimmusic6. A sound cloud, a swarm, a mass, background reverberations assembled from contingent noise replace melodic structures in music. Some associate the result with banality. Erik Satie spoke of “furniture music.” The new turn to white noise7, auditory static as the soundtrack of life, evokes an ambient-symptom. Is the endless looping lull of senseless oblivion anaesthetic or diagnostic ? Listen to “On Hold” by Photay released in 2020. It is constructed entirely of samples from ‘hold music’, the crazy-making on-repeat audio heard over the phone while we wait for the Other to answer our calls, our demands for a refund. Press “0” to speak with the Operator that doesn’t exist …

References

1 Beery Z., “Your Most-Played Song of 2020 is … White Noise ?”, The New York Times, December 24, 2020.

2 John Cage was a post-war avant-garde American composer, author, and theorist. His legacy continues to influence experimental, electronic, and ambient music today. Cage’s most cited work is 4’33’’ from 1952, which framed silence as a field of contingent noise.

3 Cage J., “On ‘Empty Words’ and the Demilitarization of Language,” Radio interview, August 8, 1974.

4 Cage J., “In This Day,” Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition , Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2012, 94-95.

5 Cage J., Empty Words, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1979.

6 See “essaim” homophonic with “S1” in French, translated as “swarm” in Jacques Lacan, Encore - On feminine sexuality, The limits of Love and Knowledge, The Seminar, Book XX (1972-1973), translated by Bruce Fink, Norton & Company, New York • London 1998, 134.

7 Audio engineers also classify “brown noise” and “pink noise” depending on the register of the sound.

Photo credit : Liz Sullivan.