For our final blog we were asked to provide a summary of an assigned chapter from Ocean of Sound by David Toop. The chapter I have covered is Altered States 2 and the chapter mostly focuses on a musician named Jon Hassell’s musical practice and work, and the nature of music as a fantasy made into something one can tangibly hear.
The chapter opens with a quite from David Thomson about a woman stripping, this quote pertains to how the art of stripping pertains to distracting the voyeur, getting them to focus on the act and the aesthetic pleasure of it rather than focusing on the woman herself. This is a precursor to how this chapter views music as an art form, later on Jon Hassell refers to his use of technology to edit music as ‘eye shadow’. One of the first topics which is touched upon is David Thomson’s idea that fictional characters live beyond what we see, and this idea is compared with the process of making electronic music, the idea that overlaying icons on to fictional histories has been an integral part of the technological music revolution. John Cage’s work is mentioned and then the chapter moves onto its primary subject, Jon Hassell; it was in the 1980’s that Hassell started to capture, loop and laminate fragmented sampled sound on his albums. He took this idea of creating something new from something known and expanding upon something already established by naming his band ‘Bluescreen’, so named after the cinematic technique of filming against a blue background so explained by Hassell as: ‘adopting this metaphor in musical ways, creating magical textures in sound, making something familiar sound fresh and exotic by separating it from its background and combining it with something new and startling’. This quote perfectly describes what the act of sampling is in technological music.
Hassell’s study of raga is mentioned and his concern that the use of sampling and audio sleight of hand has taken the arduous study and concern for detail out of music, everything is immediate now and the audience doesn’t care how long it took to compose or about the musical theory behind music. He is, however, one of the pioneers of sampling within modern music; with his album ‘City: Works of Fiction” setting the industry standard for digitally sliced audio tracks. This album with its huge array of vastly different references and influences contained an otherworldly studio sound through its use of digital delay and pitch shifting. The chapter then goes on to talk about how different the approach and practice of technological music is from traditional music; Hassell compares traditional music as drawing with one pencil and technological music as drawing with a handful of them. Something Hassell said here particularly captured me, he said ‘…so when I add the electronic eye-shadow, the mistaken conclusion is that it’s all done with mirrors, not meat’. Firstly referring to technological effects as ‘eye-shadow’ seems a very apt way to describe it, it dresses up the sound, not changing it entirely but making the base sound that bit better; secondly referring to these electronic practices as as ‘done with…meat’, this particularly struck me, audio editing is not a trick, done with mirrors, but this is how many people view it, especially more traditional musicians. Electronic musicians carve into sound and make something new of it, letting it be perceived in an entirely different way from what it originally was, not unlike how an animal turns from a living being we would feel empathy for into meat on a dinner plate treated with complete indifference. Audio editing is not a magic track, it is a science; not something light like playing tricks with mirrors but something weighty and hard to accomplish.
The chapter also brings up the concept that music itself is a fantasy, it is creating your own world and letting other people enter it; Hassell refers to his own music as an ‘erotic fantasy’. A piece of music in the new, technological landscape doesn’t have to come from the composer’s own experiences but instead can be a product of their imagination. The chapter theorises that music creates new worlds and captures imagined or real scenes within the listeners and the composers minds but, from my understanding of it, rarely will they be the same as music is an individual imagined experience. To exemplify this the chapter ends with a few different scenes, set in entirely different countries and places that produce different emotional responses in the reader. These scenarios are run through so succinctly that the reader feels in a haze and you can almost hear the music that would fit this scenario through the dreamlike state imagining so many things at once puts you in. It feels like a surrealist fever dream. All of this harkens back to the ‘Bluescreen’ idea, another thought Hassell shares that pertains to this is ‘…within each chord, that note takes on a different kind of character. It’s a different picture each time, but using the same foreground.’.
The conclusion I have drawn from reading this chapter of ‘Ocean of Sound’ is that original context is of no consequence for samples, nor in fact for the music the samples are contained within. They are something new both in the context of the music and in the context of the listeners minds. All sound is a ‘bluescreen’ for us to project our own stories onto.