The Dominant Ear

It is often said that we live in the empire of images. While in the 
beginning was the word, it is believed that in our final hour the flesh 
has become image. The occident on which night has fallen is lit by 
flickering signposts that guide our stumbling sight through the labyrinth 
of speed. It is believed that in this dreamland, reason can no longer 
write its name and has become a PIN code. Uprooted metamorphoses herald 
our downfall while we watch, dumbfounded and fascinated by its sheer 
visual beauty. Involvement has zero force in the mediacracy. So power 
runs no risk, and is hard for the stupefied senses to locate.

The above specter, as propagated by cultural conservationists, is meant 
to avert the threatening decline of literacy by restraining visual 
consumption. Language as a national culture carrier is assumed to 
guarantee profundity, in contrast to the addictive superficiality of 
R/TV/VCR/CD/PC/VR, which only stimulate passivity. The bourgeois 
character, who turned out immune to fascism and communism and is doing so 
well materially, is feared to collapse under the internal assault of 
zappable impressions in the third dictatorship of images.

This specter has an audio equivalent. The ear is believed to have been 
dismembered and surrendered to the senseless but excessive noise of trail 
bikes, fighter jets, loudspeakers, chainsaws, dogs, factory floors, 
cloudbursts, carnivals, loading zones and parties. Parallel to their 
literacy campaign, the opponents of noise are lobbying for the allocation 
of sanctuaries where tractors have been replaced by horses and the scythe 
will sing again. It is the sound of nature, which humanity, with all its 
rights, must obey under penalty of mutation.

The preachers of pure sound and vision accompany the disappearance of an 
audiovisual culture that gave us a Goethe, Rembrandt, and Bach. From 
Altamira to Bikini, the primary task of our legators' civilization was to 
fell the enchanted forest of the cracking twigs, the indistinct 
fluttering, the piercing looks and the rustle of leaves and nocturnal 
animals. The acoustic space of the first human being on earth was a 
constant flow of quadraphonic imput with no locatable sound source. The 
struggle for civilization was an effort to realize clearings and local 
silences, to be filled with the mystique of the unreproducable work of 
art. Through human intervention, a harmonious order could be installed in 
the primordial chaos in which the subject knew its place among the ranks 
of higher beings. The singular quality of the great artists was that they 
knew how to evoke and exorcise the threat of original anarchy, in a 
gesture which helped the petty bourgeois to overcome their most 
individual fears. 

The highlights and evergreens of Western civilization were part of an 
audiovisual regime that imposed its coordinates by means of the clock 
tower, with its 3-D dial and carillons. Power produces not only images 
but also sounds; it enters the body through the ear and the eye. The 
image, although it ensured a continuous norm, could still be ignored by 
the people at large, but the intermittent chiming of the bells had a 
range that was impossible to escape. Until, when the industrial machinery 
was started up, the volume of acoustic space was increased so that the 
masses were subjected to permanent acoustic pressure. This gave the image 
a suggestion of silence. In this vacuum, impressionist painting, 
photography and the silent movie could rise to full glory. They 
accompanied the transition to a power type whose secret derived from the 
hidden power of the image. For a while, the proliferation of visual flora 
was curbed by the retro-futurism of European fascism, which harked back 
to the auditive media of radio and the public speech. When, after some 
insistence, the marching music died down, the rodeo was replaced by 
full-color movies and the flickering screen, which were celebrated as 
democratic achievements. The civilization fan club at the time 
immediately ascribed pagan characteristics to rock 'n' roll, which 
belonged to the haunted forest where cultural beings indulge in their 
most primary passions.

Through the flexibilization of taste, musical preference has become a 
condensation in the global and historical network of styles, trends and 
genres. To each state of mind its musical genre and vice versa, and that 
twenty times an hour. The listener who as a fan was once defined by 
subculture and identity has suddenly become receptive to every sound 
wave. If in the fifties only parents couldn't handle rock and roll 
physically, today the physical border experience has lost its age- and 
group-defined character. The dislike of certain video clips reflects a 
similar effect on the social body as swing has on the lip-synch show. 
Everyone is open to anything, but each reserves the right to his or her 
contemporary favorites. Every audioviewer can read and interpret any 
musical genre. A socio-genetic approach to music is the only mode of 
promotion. Rap is a ghetto thing, house comes from an empty warehouse, 
trashfolk from Ireland, indiepop from London, highlife belongs to chique 
Ghanaian dance clubs, and speedmetal to suburbia. Once culturally tagged, 
each new beat contributes to the soundscape.

A precondition for this is that music, which always results from local 
experience, is freed from its origins, to become a contextless, 
universally understood global language. The experiential media of the 
sixties neatly screen a whole era with a kind of freshness and radiance 
classified as original in the age of the digital drone. The universal 
musical-sociological retraining of the ear has created an immune system 
which prevents music from penetrating those primordial cerebral layers 
that might be aroused by it. As entertainment, even the crudest sound 
lacks the Dionysian élan of the primal band.

Music, the dominant mechanism of the social organization of personal 
memories, immediately makes us forget the social misery as sound. Pop 
music is such a perfect system of auto-reference that there is immediate 
appreciation for people who copy the guitar play or voice of one or other 
predecessor who died too soon. Pop musicians who wish to charge acoustic 
space with dangerous signals engage in a battle against the transparency 
of their own style, in an effort to render the singularity and 
qualifiability of their methods more opaque through increased complexity. 
The existing openness to all continents and eras provides the material 
for minimal classifiability. But pop music knows its own history, and can 
endlessly and rhizomatically copy it in a way that is effortlessly shared 
by the media masses. Is it possible to make timeless, abstract pop music 
which refers to and derives from nothing?

The limitations of pop music lie in its technological a priori. Not only 
is music technically easy to date based on the samplers used, but the 
transition to new information carriers also filters out an entire musical 
collection from the hole in the historical memory. Who will make the 
switch to CDs, who stay magnetic forever, who vanish into the hobbyist 
sphere along with untracable spare needles and racks of 78 rpm singles? 
Again, music reacts with a defensive attack. In the first days of the 
gramophone, vocalists sang directly onto a wax disc. Later, only live 
performances were cut into vinyl, with no dubbing. During the next phase, 
studio recordings were produced in which each instrument was 
independently recorded and mixed in. In the terminal phase of the LP 
medium, records provided the raw material for the direct scratching 
process. Now the LP seeks to survive by becoming the content of the CD, 
which, however, is actively and digitally emancipating itself from its 
source material. Soon, it too will be forced to become the material for a 
subsequent round in the inevitable economic transition to a new 
generation of noise carriers.

Time and again, musical workers blindly submit to the secret power of the 
medium offered them. Before, there were guitars or pianos; now there are 
fully integrated audiovisual circuits. Acoustic emptiness screams to be 
filled as it deserves. Whereas the guitar still depended on the guitar 
player's fingers and fits, the beat box needs no physical movement to 
perform. Musicians never controlled their guitars or drums; the keys 
themselves imposed a kinetics on the hands. The musical instrument sought 
to rid itself of the soft machine's touch. Punk understood this, and 
reacted with an unrestrained attack on the predigital equipment - neat 
material for another compilation CD. The next phase will be synclavier 
microchips flying about as house DJ's smash up their mixing desks. As 
soon as the audience becomes interactive, the laser projection reveals 
its destructive side. As digital culture reaches its zenith, noise once 
again invades acoustic space.
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