In any case, somewhere or other I read an interview with Cecil Taylor, and he said he didn’t play notes, he played alphabets. That changes things. Fuck Workfare.           — Sean Bonney.

 

As we are constituted of atoms that vibrate with a restless activeness, constantly punctuated and contaminated by other bodies and matter, prone to all sorts of interruptions and agitations[1], music can act on us as a radically disruptive force, or it can sedate us: “the record bought and/or listened to anesthetizes part of the body”[2]. Music can also be a murder weapon, the instrument of a sacrifice and a kind of sluice or conduit for violence. Capital, broadly speaking, controls music production in a way that means music becomes a channel for social violence and a means of social control. The point where music becomes the possibility for subversion is the point where it is punctuated by noise, hence why modern states try to supress and control noise as much as possible: noise is the absence of meaning, and therefore the possibility of any and all meanings[3]. The moment in a record, song or performance that noise erupts and shatters the authorised codes of musical production, the codes that favour unanimity over difference, or to put it like Rancière would, consensus over dissensus, music becomes like a ‘detonator of everything that does not exist’[4]. Sean Bonney’s “Second Letter on Harmony” contains a description of just such a moment:

I’m thinking about a specific moment on the album, around thirteen minutes into ‘Evolution’, when someone – I don’t think it’s actually Coltrane – blows something through a horn that forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre: dialectical love, undeclared logic. Etc etc etc. I guess Seattle, like anywhere else, is sealed up in its gentrification by now. But anyway, that horn sounds like a metal bone, a place where the dead and future generations meet up and are all on blue, electric fire. (Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament, p.35)

Capital moves to prevent such moments: noise suppression has been a part of its arsenal since the time of the industrial revolution[5]. Music is the simulacrum of ritual sacrifice[6], a spectacle of violence that simultaneously proves that order is possible. The music provides this simulacrum of violence so that the state can carry out its own ritual slaughter: “Capital’s untruth, its site of corporate slaughter – i.e. ritual slaughter – the silent frequency at the centre of its oh so gentle melodies.” In this essay we will consider how to find, via readings of Bonney’s poems, a new ground outside of official harmony from which to act.

*

In the six letters on harmony in Letters Against the Firmament we can see Bonney linking music to revolutionary politics, corporate slaughter and occultism. Bonney’s text wavers between an account of noise as insurrection and as oppression. The horn in Coltrane’s “Evolution” is a way to open up a dimensional time-loop that brings us to the meeting place of dead and future generations, but then we also have the description of Thatcher as a type of horrifying anomaly,

There are those who say Thatcher is just a frail old woman and we shouldn’t pick on her. I prefer to think of her as a temporal seizure whose magnetosphere may well be growing more unstable and unpredictable, and so demonstrably more cruel, but whose radio signature is by no means showing any signs of decreasing in intensity any time soon. They can hear it on fucking Saturn. (Bonney, Letters, p. 38)

Bonney is aware of the dual and contradictory nature of noise. It is the voice of the marginal and unheard and at the same time it is related to the violence that underpins society, that holds in place the hierarchy in which present conditions are justified[7]. In an essay dating from 2014 on Sun Ra and Amiri Baraka, Bonney touches on Fanon and his writing on the Algerian Revolution in which the duality of noise is evident. Fanon’s text is about Radio Algiers and the ways that the freedom fighters listened to and experienced broadcasting during the revolution. Fanon mentions the practice whereby, after listening to a radio broadcast, the Algerian fighters would sometimes leave the needle on a wavelength that just produced static. For the Algerians and for Bonney this unbearable noise is

the whirring, necessary psychopathology of revolutionary consciousness coming into being made material by the modernity of the radio set. The static is not only the sound of the enemy jamming our signals, but the sound of our own thinking as it moves outside of what official language permits.[8]

In Bonney’s “First Letter on Harmony” the static emitted by capital, whilst being a way of jamming our codes also invokes a noise that is an inversion or aberration that “while in its weak form may only be manifest in certain cries of disbelief and fear, in extreme conditions may […] ultimately manifest as a ring of anti-protons” (Bonney, Letters, p.32). Bonney sees music “as a slicing through of harmonic hierarchies” (Bonney, Letters, p.33), an uncovering of what is hidden by the static, the untruth at the centre of the state, which, though it is the justification of ritual sacrifice, is always in danger of transgressing its own limits and becoming something else: the impossible, the absence of all meaning and the possibility of any and all meanings.

 The static emitted by capital is, as suggested by the word ‘static’, a low inaudible whine, which in Bonney’s text is like the music played just below the standard audibility range in job centres and offices. Jacques Attali, in a text titled Noise: The Political Economy of Music, touches on this type of music in a passage on the company Muzak, which sells music programming to workplaces, music which has its range of intensity limited in a process Attali compares to castration. According to Attali this type of music is far from harmless:

It is not just a way of drowning out the tedious noises of the workplace. It may be the herald of the general silence of men before the spectacle of commodities, men who will no longer speak except to conduct standardized commentary on them. It may herald the end of the isolable musical work, which will have been only a brief footnote in human history. This would mean the extermination of usage by exchange, the radical jamming of codes by the economic machine. This is given explicit approval by musicians who think music should insinuate itself into the everyday world and cease to be an exceptional event.[9]

The point about silence is important here. In his text Bonney writes about speech being “compressed and stretched into a network of circles and coils”. (Bonney, p.40) Here manipulated into a shape that resembles a solenoid (an electromagnetic coil that is used in speakers, radios, door locks etc.) and ‘at its perimeter a system of scraped, negative music, and at its centre a wall.” (Bonney, Letters, pp.40-41). In Bonney’s text we (those of us that are powerless, on the bread line) are trapped within a ghost dimension where capital, personified as a jagged knife, scrapes over us endlessly. The powerless and the rich and powerful are both aware of the existence of this ghost dimension. The process by which capital controls this ghost dimension is one of converting the most current pop songs into a harmonic whine with a low range of intensity, at the centre of which is the lexicon of control. Even apparently radical musical projects underwrite the existence of the ghost dimension: Capital doesn’t understand the alphabets that Cecil Taylor plays but Taylor’s music becomes part of the process of evacuating each hour of your working day and selling you that time in the form of food, vinyl records and concert tickets (Bonney, Letters, p.47). Bonney’s poems echo Attali’s point about mass music acting like an anaesthetic on the body, developing this truth into a harrowing image in “Letter on Harmony and Crisis” where the playing of a song by Leadbelly in a supermarket unravels the fabric of culture:

It’s a great song, the guitar picking sounds like a spiderweb. It’s like a trap. Christ, it’d be awful. We wouldn’t be able to get out, we’d be trapped inside and all light and sound in the place would be reduced to a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level: the forced unity of a few almost inaudible bands and spikes. Products, yeh, goods. All known popular songs would be seen flickering and burning like distant petrol towers in some imaginary desert, the phase velocity of the entire culture as a static sequence of rings, pianos, precious stones and prisons. (Bonney, Letters, p.43)

*

In Our Death Bonney writes of the death of music and its transformation into something different that has to do with the inaudible, or barely audible (whispers, white noise) and simultaneously with cacophony (ear splitting screams). This text is perhaps more embedded in a physical landscape (Berlin, Kreuzberg) than Letters Against the Firmament, and it seems like the poet of Our Death is very much like one of those musicians that collects ambient noises from the city and the countryside and composes from those sounds mood-stabilising soundscapes. There is nothing stable about the ambient sounds that Bonney interrogates though, they are “inaudible radioactive signals” (Bonney, Our Death, p.67), an impossible music that causes the borders between our world and other worlds to flicker suggestively. That these other worlds are, in the text, ‘impossible‘ might not matter, I think the word ‘impossible’ means something different in Bonney’s poems.[10] One of the early poems in Our Death, “Letters Against the Language” introduces two images that are central to the rest of the text, the scream and the barely audible whisper, both are attempts to go beyond the voice, to produce something unpronounceable and inaudible. The poem describes a moment from Pasolini’s Theorem

where the father – having given his factory away to the workforce, and then having tried and failed to pick up a boy at a railway station, takes off his clothes and wanders off into some strange volcanic or desert landscape and, as he enters that landscape, he screams. I was ranting on to a friend a few days ago that I take that scream to contain all that is meaningful in the word “communism” –- or rather, whatever it is that people like us mean when we use that word, which is, as we both know all too well, somewhat different to whatever it is the dictionary of the visible world likes to pretend it means. You know what I’m saying. A kind of high metallic screech. Unpronounceable. Inaudible. (Bonney, Our Death, p.17)

The barely audible whispers and the screeches that attempt to go beyond the voice are, for the poet, where Pasolini’s politics reside. The moments where noise goes beyond the limits of the voice and the body, where all of history seems compressed to a single, insensate howl, are where noise seems to transgress into something that heralds change, something like an impossible new harmony. An important notion here would be Attali’s view of music as a place where the real is inscribed:

Yet music is a credible metaphor of the real. It is neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure. It is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. Undoubtedly, music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded, and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision that is rich, because unexpected and prophetic. At times it yields nothing but the swirl of the void.[11]

Attali’s mirror game resembles the figurative diagram that appears in “The Ignoble Fate of Rock n Roll” that the poet has made out of the various detritus and debris accumulated during their day, and which he tries to neutralise. And this attempt to neutralise these various objects and images involves a cacophony of noise, noise that pushes the borders of the audible, and within that racket the poet thinks he can make out possible songs about various incidents from the history of class conflict (Bonney, Our Death, pp.90-91).

We find the history and cultural practices of music interrogated again here in much the same way as in Letters; the theme in many of these poems is music as a form of oppression and control, a way of capturing whole swathes of memory and social life, setting up and operating borders inside us (Bonney, Our Death, p.94). Bonney’s poet makes the link between music and ritualised violence that we are now familiar with from reading Attali. Songs are “scraps of symbolic devotion” that fade away leaving you to contemplate “the stone in your hand”, and the word ‘psalm’ is equal to the word ‘vitriol’ (Bonney, Our Death, p.94). There are certain musical frequencies that transcend harmonic control, but these exist only as splintery and fugitive accomplices at the borders of audibility, made by plucking barbed wire, by the scream that goes beyond all voice, all body, past all borders (Bonney, Our Death, p.88). The idea here is to reclaim something foundational about music. Police sirens are an instrument of psychic control and disruption, but originally the songs of sirens (mythological sirens, that is) contained knowledge of everything that had passed and everything to come (Bonney, Our Death, p.117). If there is a radical use for music then it is found in the what we keep hidden within our silences, in what we mutter underneath our breath, in the spaces between musical tones (Bonney, Our Death, p,36).

 

Notes
[1] LaBelle, Sonic Agency, p.61
[2] Attali, Noise, p.111
[3] Attali, Noise, p.122
[4] “Time Negatives of Variable Universe: On Sun Ra and Amiri Baraka”, Sean Bonney
[5] Attali, Noise, pp.122-23
[6] Attali, Noise, p.32
[7] LaBelle, Sonic Agency, p.69
[8] Bonney, Time Negatives of the Variable Universe, p. 11
[9] Attali, Noise, p.112
[10] I might not be able to define what this different meaning is.
[11] Attali, Noise, p.6

 

Appendix: Playlist
Evolution ( Live in Seattle , 1965) – John Coltrane
White Light/White Heat – The Velvet Underground
The Gallis Pole – Lead belly
Who Will Survive America – Amiri Baraka
Black Mountain Blues – Bessie Smith
Voice of Space – Sun Ra

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Connor May is a poet, writer and support worker from North West England, currently residing in Belfast. He has published two short pamphlets in recent years: Poems for Chris Morris (Creative Writing Press) and Soap in a Dish Below Rain in a Valley (Electric Frog). Two of his previous essays have appeared on the SPAM zine website. He can be found on Twitter/X as @c_may_cm.