lusted fleeting

For more demos see this YouTube playlist.

Despite the existence of a 2020 Netflix documentary on the subject, it was through a piece called Not Terrorized No by Cristina Rivera Garza in Harper's Magazine that I learned of the case of Marisela Escobedo and her murdered teenage daughter, Rubí Frayre. That a 16-year-old girl is murdered is awful enough. That her killer is acquitted of the crime despite confessing and detailing the burial of her remains is jaw-dropping. That the aggrieved mother becomes a social activist, demanding justice for her daughter, is worthy of everyone's respect. But that she herself is then murdered—by the government? a cartel? a government cartel?—is an iniquitous scandal.

What sort of social processes lead to such abominations or to femicide in general? Never mind the murderers, what happens during the socialisation of boys and young men, women too, that leads to the circumstances in which hatred and misogyny can fester to such extremes?¹ This is not just a case of a few bad apples, but rather a maelstrom of complete wrong-headedness, of which the many, not the few, are guilty.

Then there's artificial intelligence. OK, terrible yet almost predictable non-sequitur, I know² but let's move along at the risk of appearing too glib. I'm not alone, particularly amongst people of a certain age, harrumphing against all the AI-hype, rejecting both its temptations and charms. Well, I didn't, finally: I caved. Most of us do, eventually. I was searching my memory and my hard discs for a particular sonic atmosphere and found it in a memory poignant and redolent of my student days in Bristol, in a recording of a famous speech from Hamlet (not that one). It has bugger all to do with murder (err…Hamlet? no, the speech I'm referring to), but it stuck hard and fast so I asked an AI engine to rewrite it with femicide as a new focus. Well, whadyaknow? Well, we all know, don't we?, that this is where AI excels because it's what Large Language Models are great at. I wasn't disappointed, even if I did have to call it out (in my piece, even) for getting a little too obvious and cheesy, virtue-signalling even, if AI can do that (of course it can't, but the oversensitive amongst us (OK, me) can perceive it that way, can't we?). So yes, I used the generated text, and even got some AI voice models to read it, as so many of us do these days. Ho-Hum. Paths well-trodden and all that.

Well, that clearly wasn't enough, was it? Forge your own path and all that instead, thank you. I'd already been working on a simple algorithm that generates bizarre semi-graphical half-profanities inspired by the medieval musical technique of isorhythm. It's basically a combinatory approach to subject-object-verb sentence structure. With a bit of creative bad taste, it leads to such beauties as the president ground wearily down their creaking cracks. I skimmed the pseudo-Hamlet text for both common and juicy subjects, objects, and verbs, e.g. quite simply "I" or "vowed", to the more colourful "my idle thought" or "all-consuming spite".

Depending on how much input it gets, and how uneven the list lengths are, the bespoke algorithm generates hundreds of short statements, thousands even. These are then ordered by their occurrence in the subject-object-verb lists but ultimately by their character length. So the statements proceed from the short and pithy to the long and often bizarre, some making more sense than others but almost all ending up quite or even extremely evocative. For example, direct from the slides to be used in performance:

…and hundreds more in-between, becoming ever longer…until…

These are read quite soberly, without filtering or changing the order (unless the final mix or flow demanded the odd deletion after initial placement). They occur mostly in quick succession, one after the other, in strings of non-sequiturs, at various junctures throughout the piece. By no means, however, were all used. That would have made the piece even longer; much longer.

For the version without live speaker, i.e. the release, I recorded these myself. In addition, both Karin Schistek and I recorded a highly—what should I say?—bizarre, squeaky, almost small-animal-like version of the AI text, and this plays a sometimes quite prominent (but often enough also a hidden) role in several sections.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964 that, "The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were …" The loudspeaker playing constant-amplitude white or coloured noise is the audio cousin of the light bulb. But the loudspeaker is also the purest and most capable of all sound producers: more like a film projector than a light bulb. In its ideal form, it can (re)create sound waves over all audible frequencies, from the threshold of audibility up to perhaps deafening volumes. It can thus reproduce any and all audible messages whatsoever, whether musical or otherwise. The loudspeaker is neutral; it is pure sonic potential; it is surprising, even shocking; it is immobile, slightly unnerving, unnatural, beautiful, terrible.

Loudspeaker music is one obvious form of message content of the loudspeaker-as-medium. But the very genre of loudspeaker music, its essential character, is most interesting insofar as its technologies, e.g. the tape machine, the record player, the digital audio workstation (DAW), etc., make new structures and contexts—new messages—possible. Leaving aside all the references to found sound and musique concrète, an audio jump cut, for example, like its filmic cousin, can be made in several different ways. In its simplest form, by establishing a structure that has a perceivable trajectory but then skipping the transition/development (with a splice) to get to the point. Of course, this can almost be achieved with a paper score, in formal concept at least. But in its realisation, the score, performed by a fixed consort of instrumentalists in a fixed acoustic environment, can't jump nearly as well as a studio production replayed over a loudspeaker, any more than a theatrical work can jump instantaneously, like a film, from descending the steps of one building to entering an office in another. The potential of this becomes exaggerated, and the medium revealed and revelled in, when the audible effects of the technology behind the jump-cut become clearer, for example, in a click or a sudden, perhaps impossible, dynamic or spectral shift—a jump even, to a radically different acoustic, e.g. from a telephone booth to the same sound in a long underground tunnel–that's the whole point, and where loudspeaker music far surpasses the music score. Here we are even in a realm where sound exceeds film in its ability to be perceived synchronous to other sounds, or more to the point, the same sound can be heard in two or more environments simultaneously. No split-screen trickery can come close.

Another possibility, related to but also quite different from plunderphonics³ would be cuts to actually different pieces or structures which seem unrelated, in any or all of their materials, timbral content, acoustic setting, dynamic, or spectral content in general. Again, this is conceptually possible with the paper score and acoustic instruments too, but not only with the caveats detailed above, but without all the injections of the nostalgic and state-of-the-art elements of digital clocking errors, audible button presses, or tape/CD fast-forwarding or skipping, i.e. without the inherent possibility of revealing the medium.⁴ Hereby, the obsolete medium (the technology) is also the message.⁵

While we're at it, that world-famous phrase of McLuhan's, the medium is the message may be 60 years old, but it was not, as I understand it, referring to a change that took place only in the 1960s. It was instead referring to a timeless function of any technology, insofar as all technologies are extensions of our physical selves and thus rewire our perceptions through their new potentials as they are explored and interacted with. This is as true for loudspeaker music as it is for the string quartet, the fresco, the film, or social media. In fact, is it not in the realm of social media where the medium is the message becomes clearest? Such technologies are not merely channels for information exchange but they actually channel and change the way information is received and processed, how society is formed and moved.

To become concrete though, and to return to lusted fleeting, maybe we have an arrhythmic noise-music aesthetic stuck edge-to-edge with 909 rhythms, dark ambient sound worlds rubbing against real-world soundscapes and hyper-synths—maybe all of these within significant stretches of 'perfect' immersive sound, but that's not all. There will be unexpected pauses, glitches, interruptions, sudden style clashes, and seemingly 'broken speaker' solos. In other words, foreign structures cut into and superimposed onto normally functional and self-sufficient compositions; a meta-narrative, if you will, that breaks the suspension of disbelief, that brings disbelief into focus, and emphasises disbelief through the revelation of the technology.

Which brings us of course to Lyotard and his famous definition of postmodernism as "incredulity towards meta-narratives".⁵ This is both confirmed and denied in lusted fleeting's aesthetic plurality and 'promiscuity', by imposing a meta-structure on already-structured materials as just described. It is perhaps the meta-structure that is most important and the more usual structures are mere fodder to its exigencies. In this way, the piece is saying, to put it somewhat crudely, that I/we do not believe in a single aesthetic or historical-technological-social narrative. It's meta-narrative in Lyotard's sense—as a rather prejudiced historical story that aims to unify the interests of the powers that be—versus the artistic meta-narrative that imposes alien structures to reveal the artificiality of the medium and its perception.⁶

But why is all this important? To break the illusion; to expose the machine and the machinations; to break (with) the system; to break the belief in the system; to reintroduce the human element (at the risk now of being too melodramatic) and the human spirit; and ultimately to create a positive meta-narrative, or better still, a critical commentary. Phew!

One of the most stunning album releases I've come across in the last couple of years is De Tristresse, De Deuil, De Desplaysance by Ensemble Tetraktys. Particularly stunning is track two, Gualterius Libert's rondeau from which the album title is taken. This is roughly translatable as of sadness, of mourning, of displeasure. Libert lived approximately 1400-1435 and was active, as far as is known, from 1423-1428. Tetraktys's recording of De trisstesse is a little disconcerting as it's hard to know whose music you're listening to exactly: The first thing that strikes the ear is the opening tritone, and this becomes the musical DNA, as it were, of this interpretation of the piece. This is not, however, to be found in the score rather it is an example of musica ficta:

The disconcerting aspect is that, to my ear at least, that opening and recurring tritone is what makes the work so poetic, so emotionally powerful, especially as performed so beautifully by Ensemble Tetraktys. I couldn't get it out of my ears as I was working during the first phase of lusted fleeting in the first half of 2024, and it ended up making its way into my piece. If Ensemble Tetraktys had the courage (or is it audacity?) to introduce that G-sharp where only a plain G is written, then I wanted to write a new bass line that brought the implications of this musica ficta into a slightly more modern tonal (as opposed to modal) context:

This sequence is used on several occasions in lusted fleeting, mainly to enliven the spoken voices produced out of the AI-generated Hamlet variation after it was fed through an AI-driven voice synthesiser. These are quite unmusical though not completely uninteresting renditions, but when processed by an auto-tune algorithm using my two-voice elaborated transcription of Ensemble Tetraktys's interpretation of the fifteenth-century Libert rondeau, it becomes something else entirely:

On another note, worthy of discussion elsewhere, the lineage of this passage is an extreme example of Stecker's⁸ description of the radical constructivist view of art: that works are created and not just changed during the process of interpretation. OK, there's more than interpretation at work here, but I like the connection.