Almost every time I play a vinyl record, I think about the other copies of it that exist in the world and if anyone else might be playing one of them at the same time.
A lattice of coincidence
A lot of people don't realise what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.
At 8pm on Friday 7 July 1978 (8-7-7-78), Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik performed a piano duet at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf. The piece was dedicated to Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who had died that year on 9 May, aged forty-seven. Inverting his age at the time of his death, the performance ran for seventy-four minutes. Its duration was determined by an alarm clock set for 9:14pm. It is one of the few Fluxus events that has been documented in full on video and vinyl LP published in 1982 through Edition Block (whose founder, gallerist René Block, once said ‘the future belongs to multiples’) as a recording of the three one-sided LPs.
Side A | In Memoriam George Maciunas, Klavierduett, 7.7.1978 24:29
Side B | In Memoriam George Maciunas, Klavierduett, 7.7.1978 24:40
Side C | In Memoriam George Maciunas, Klavierduett, 7.7.1978 22:07
A one-sided vinyl record is not an object that corresponds well to boundaries or the notion of things being considered apart from one another. Encoding, capture, categorisation and organisation of sound-based performance as media needs to be planned for before it enacts its affective resonances, mirroring a problem of excess in the serial production of cultural goods.
The heuristic of coincidence — things happening at once — that is referred to in the song ‘Miller’s Lattice’ offers one pathway towards a different type of media theory in sound-based contemporary art that extends the ways that both situatedness and materiality are thought of. Coincidence, thought of in this way, takes problems of inscription, storage and containment, and traceable associations, as intra-medial concerns.
Interpolating a phonograph and interpellating a listener: cross medial endeavours
It was Friedrich Kittler in the book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter who suggested that it was possible to fix the chaos of exotic music assailing from European ears by ‘first interpolating a phonograph, which is able to record this chaos in real time and then replay it in slow motion’ and ‘facilitate the synthetic production of frequencies is followed by its analysis’.
In ‘“Roots and Wires” Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic’, writer Erik Davis observes: ‘I fear the clarity we expect from sight, the birds-eye view of the mappable field, can no longer be relied on to illuminate the network of relations that surround us. Instead, I suspect we might do better to prick up our ears, to sound the sensorium that engulfs us’. Davis continues: ‘I am not just talking about listening as an act of sensation, but as a fundamentally different mode of engaging with the world, one that tugs against long standing habits of perception, knowledge and experience’.
Opening up listening through embodied experiences that can be understood as a function of proximity to sound(ing) technologies, material networks of sound-media and their respective object-biographies. It is a way to ‘acknowledge the partial perspective of our own listening, while allowing for the porous and transformative experience of attunement to the many perspectives within, and histories of, the places and times we are embedded in’. This seems at odds with deep listening, a practice that seeks to integrate an awareness of one's sonic environment (proprioceptively) with one's internal states of bio-awareness. Listening with a foregrounded attention of sound-objects in the material world rests on visual hierarchies of space and the body’s various material and emotional relations to objects within it. The bio prefix here takes on meanings that have to do with vitality, a link between humans and nature as mediated through sound and its sensory apparata and the biographic as in the story of one’s life.
Once this visual way of thinking about sound is established, it’s hard to hear what’s outside of it. While the visual places an emphasis on the linear, sequential or hierarchical, the sonic emphasises the lattice — a zone where many events can occur, some at the same time, some separated by space-time. ‘Blocks of sound can overlap and interpenetrate without necessarily collapsing into a harmonic unity or consonance, thereby maintaining a paradox of simultaneous difference’ — this is what Kalani Bianca Michell calls ‘cross medial endeavours’. She writes:
Thinking through sound is also distinct and different from our habitual thinking through images, or, it is important to note, music. Indeed it also has to be distinguished from thinking about anything.
In the video material that documents preparations for Playing Beuys’s Records (2021), a piece performed at Tokyo’s Goethe Institute by Takura Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff), Koichi Makigami, Chiho Oka and Makoto Oshiro, the participating artists listen to Beuys’s vinyl records together and discuss how to create a set of instructions based on their impressions from just listening to the sounds. The instructions were intended to guide the performance. The instructions were also intended to travel with the actual records as a blueprint for future collaborations. Oshiro, for instance says: ‘when we play music there’s a natural sense of build up or flow, that’s not happening here [...] this would be one aspect to include’. As this conversation continues, the artists discuss the strategy of taking a fixed period of time and having individual participants move around the space with a preallocated number of times they can sound an object — they ask: ‘can two people performing concentrate and ignore each other or do they drift into a kind of synchronicity?’
Vibrations into solid objects
Can you imagine a way of thinking about sound where auditory metaphors are abandoned in favour of touchable objects?
In a 2017 interview with Ben Marshall, the Sydney Opera House’s head of contemporary music, the late DJ Andrew Weatherall points out that
if you send vibrations into things, it’s how records and tape works, it’s vibrations sent into solid objects. Whether you call it ghosts or spirits, I think people that tune into those things … that part of their brain is more open than other people that don’t see it.
Atsushi Sugiura has a box of photographs which are worn to the point where corners are rounded and surfaces are faded. This form and texture comes from being constantly handled. Moved from his closet to bedside. Shuffled around inside a tin, touched over and over. He tends to touch parts of the photographs showing people and things that he’s most fond of. The image of his father has been worn to a point where it resembles a faceless ghost. Sugiura’s photographs are treasured in that he wants to hold onto them forever. The manner in which this is approached is more intense than we might imagine. In Time You’ll be Heard was the title of the exhibition component of the 2020 Yokohama Paratriennale born of the collaboration between individuals with disabilities and artists from a wide range of fields, in which Atsushi Sugiura’s photos, titled Affirming Both Extremes, were presented alongside a companion work by Mizuta-Lippit, Memories that resonate through erasure — A response to Atsushi Sugiura’s work. As curator Kodama Kanazama notes in the exhibition book:
… worn or damaged photographs naturally give the impression of disappearing memories. So when Sugiura focuses his love on the memories burned into these pieces of paper — a love that causes them to fade — there’s a clinging onto and a slipping away simultaneously at play, whose explosive coaction results in the strong halation effect that we see.
For Kittler, the mechanism of playing the sound inscribed on vinyl records via a needle following the contours of grooves was playback accompanied by erasure. In response to Sugiura’s work, Mizuta-Lippit states, ‘I started a process of erasing records with the turntable. This was also an act of listening to sounds that exist[ed] prior to the recording of music — the sound of vinyl, paper, and the motor through the mechanism of the playback’. A boxcutter, sandpaper, and eraser were attached to the pickup, scraping away at the surface of the record while producing textural noise and resonating tones.
In memoriam
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt points out that it’s the durability of things that gives them relative independence from people. Playing a record is a ritual that acknowledges time in ways that ground and stabilise forces of change when one returns to the same object over and over, bringing the old to the new.
Much of the market for vinyl records is predicated on preloved artifacts: on playing other people’s records. Just before I play someone else’s records, I wonder about the last person who touched it before me. If they’re still here. If I play this record, what am I erasing from its surface?
One day my records will be here, and I will not.
I am forty-seven this year. I was born in 1978. Given where I began this essay, that too is a coincidence.
¹ Repo Man (1984); also sampled on ‘Miller’s Lattice’, Harvey Lindo, Kid Gloves - A Modaji Long Player, Compost Records, 2005.
² Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press, Redwood City, 1999, p. 4, p.26.
³ Erik Davis, ‘Roots and Wires’ Remix: Polyrhythmic Tracks and the Black Electronic’, in P.D. Miller, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 54 [my emphasis].
⁴S. Loveless and F. Zinovieff, Situated Listening: Partial Perspectives and Critical Listening Positionality. Proceedings of the Conference of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, 2023.
⁵ Ibid., p. 54; Kalani Bianca Michell, All in the Same Box: Unhinging Audiovisual Media in the 1960s and 70s, thesis, University of Minnesota, 2018.
⁶ Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2011, p. xvii.
⁷ K. Kanazawa, M. Tanaka and M. HataiIn, Time You’ll Be Heard: Some thoughts on understanding one another, its difficulties, and its hopes, Yokohama Paratriennale, 2020, p. 158.