Ambient Music and the Impulse Towards Deconstruction

Out of Light - cometh Darkness, dark ambient music and the impulse towards deconstruction

1. "These recordings may be seen as a notation of our deadminded society, but not as a reaction against it, we will all become ambient dead heads, if not..." (Archon Satani, In Shelter, liner note, 1994)

If not, then ellipsis. The conditional clause of fact, followed by an open-ended ellipsis, where not only the conjunction between a conditional present and an effected future (then...), but the whole of future time itself is omitted - is a good way to immerse oneself in a description towards a functional definition of a difficult form of a "popular" underground music (I write popular because it is, in critical terms, usually excluded from the domain of "high" culture, or "serious" music, being more aligned with other popular underground genres, eg, industrial, death metal), that would seem to defy the very notion of popularity a priori: I write of so-called 'dark ambient' music.

2. Your attention is drawn to a notation of the future as ellipsis, as a potent form of signifying a coming-into-being that is never-yet, and may well never be, as a danger:

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with the constituted normality and only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity (Derrida, 1974: 3).

This ellipsis of the future, signifying danger (becoming, in Archon Satani's space, dead headed), also dislodges the comfort of the present, and of presence; of the representing object, and its relation to the object represented, of the sign versus its referent. Hence the need for a notation, obtuse of signifying directives, not yet as a denotation and decoding, full of revealed meaning, of a certain type of society; but only of the function of recording qua art in reality, over and against symbolised reality, and even without any metaphysical reality. Archon Satani refuse permission for their recordings (not yet historicised as music, nor art) to be seen and hence, to be read as a reaction qua art against society: "we will all become ambient dead heads..."

3. In refusing music, and art, and reaction as historically revealed, politics are also seen to be refused. The future is one where the listener-subject will become as dead as the given inanimacy of the environment that surrounds her. Fundamentally psychoanalytic desires - those hinged upon death and sex may be in nuance in such a statement. In that case, this is not music with a message, a will to change the world, it is not resistance a la Theodor Adorno against regressive listening, it is not vibrant, it is not constructive, it is not essential, it's not high art, it is not even supposed to be music yet, with all the ideological imports that the word 'music' carries, and may well never be. It is just a notation, a form of writing, transcription, a recording. But to that extent, it must be added that it appears as such already given within the universal ideological written document that is usually named as reality. These recordings are neither transparent signs - across the surfaces of which one may easily interpret the messages, nor opaque signs - seeking to problematise notions of reference, representationality, or even the position of the speaking subject. The recordings are just discrete bits submerged within the general recording called 'the environment'. And it must be emphasised that their discretion is lent them mainly by the signs of commodification which surround them - here, the compact disc, the cover art, the credits, the track-titles, the band's name, the price tag which informs me that I paid $26.95 for these recordings. All these commodifying instances lend these recordings a certain productive, cultural, musical value which directs the way in which they are listened to, which in fact makes them that much easier to accept as, at least, 'recordings' and not just background noise. The ellipsis, however, remains - an internal slippage and excess, a trace, within the notion of recording and its product itself - and hints that they are, after all, just noise, a part of environmental excess, and it is in this very manner that they manage to actually be a notation of a certain society, rather than simply a reaction against it. The future to be fashioned is never anything that is to be found, it just always might be, or it might not be, in death, and danger, and to hope for more is to succumb to a cynical nihilism of the present. In this sense the recordings offer a moment of affirmation...

4. Similarly, Time Machines (better known as Coil) on their self-titled disc from c. 1999 direct the listener to the idea that, "Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience". Once again, what is affirmed is no longer all in the music, is no longer all generated by music, is not a simple or even more complex expression of the music's 'inner form', but is the problematisation of the distinction between presence and future - so as to affirm a historical moment in preference to history as a 'grand scheme', a relation between music and the environment in which listening is done - so as to affirm the social - but which environment music traditionally has no relationship with, which it's supposed to transcend. In such a direction, perhaps the existential as opposed to aesthetic authenticity, but also the reifying, and stultifying principles of repetitive listening, which tend, admittedly, to make much popular music into more or less relevant pieces of nostalgia, but nonetheless static and ossified in terms of the present moment, (ie formally complete) are violated. These principles must be aborted where the listening environment (never static, never repeatable) becomes an intrinsic part of the (musical) experience:

5. ...the emphasis on the artifactual element in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be...[Artworks] speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them...it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labour, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their Inhalt [content]...If art opposes the empirical through the element of form - and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation - the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content (Adorno, 1997: 5)

It is by this appeal to the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content, through a self-consciousness