That's Helsinki thinking!

At the Digital Sound Art Event in Helsinki yesterday I found myself using a John Kerryesque double negative. 'It's not that speech acts aren't, in themselves, beautiful sound objects,' I said. 'It's just that the narrative they carry is so compelling, and we're so attuned to the logic of stories and plot and meaning, that once we notice a story, we tend to forget everything else.' I was explaining my dilemma in making songs: the entirely resolvable conflict between text and texture, between sense and sensation, between recognition and cognition, between orientation and disorientation. For instance, in the sentence I've just written, you may have been concentrating on divining what I meant and mapping it to your own model of what a song is, and not noticed that I picked my binaries so that, despite being intended as opposites, the words resembled each other -- sense and sensation, recognition and cognition, and so on. This was either perverse of me (shouldn't a clear system try to make opposites sound like opposites?) or rather Derridean (for Derrida has pointed out that binaries depend on each other to the extent of creating each other) or simply rather aestheticist of me, choosing words like pretty pebbles on the beach.



It's unlikely that you read my sentence out loud and savored the rich sibilant rhythm of 'sense and sensation', the play of assonance. I'm not reproaching you, just pointing out that sense itself is often what draws our attention away from the sensuality of language as a sound object. Sense can be the enemy of beauty, and meaning can take us away from the pleasure of being in the present moment. Well, there are ways to get back into the moment. One depends on the listener drinking a lot of beer or wine, or taking some other kind of moment-enhancing, sense-enhancing drugs. Another depends on the artist doing something 'druggy' with the relationship between sound and sense in the work itself.

On records like 'Oskar Tennis Champion' and 'Summerisle' I collaborated with people who fucked up, chopped up, trussed up or drugged up my songs, which can all too easily lapse into folk tales, pastiche, stereotypes, comedy, one-liners (boom boom!) or tangles of references and footnotes -- they can all too easily make too much sense, too soon. So my collaborators made the songs more arty and more sensual by re-editing them somewhat against the grain of meaning. John Talaga and [Bad username or unknown identity: Anne Laplantine] forced the listener to pay attention to the songs as sound objects, detailed and somewhat randomized. They drew attention to the inherent mystery of sound itself by tripping up meaning here and there, scrambling sense in order to encourage the listener's appreciation for the sensual and the textural rather than sense and text. Where I seemed to be racing to the chorus or the punch line, they threw in some little diversionary details, or cut the chorus altogether. Call it ostranenie, delay, alienation or disorienteering. It's something I wonder whether I'm capable of doing, left to my own devices. My tendencies, reflexes and habits are still very folk, very pop, very populist. I have the commercial songwriter's 'killer instinct' -- let's do the job, hook the listener, get the 'ear worm' (as they call a catchy song here in Germany) as efficient and deadly as possible. The new songs I've been posting on Click Opera suggest that I'm in 'killer' mood this year, not in 'disorienteer' mood -- this material seems to be 'a return to core Momus values' in the manner of 1997's Ping Pong album. Last year's Summerisle Horspiel, though, shows that I can combine songs and sound art when I set my mind to it. I was so proud to have a horspiel accepted into Ubu Web's archive, because that place, a treasure trove of ostranenie, has been a second home to me over the last couple of years -- if you can call a catalogue of methods of getting lost 'home'.



Of course, there's the argument that narrative is, in the hands of some artists, an excellent disorienteering tool. Apparent sense, and an apparent plot, can be paths that lead the audience deep into the forest, then abandon them, allowing them the pleasure of finding their bearings little by little -- exactly the 'delay' Marcel Duchamp talked about, and also, incidentally, the pleasure of a good computer game. Art should be difficult, it shouldn't join up all the dots and do all the work for us. Hannu Puttonen, the director of the 'Man of Letters' DVD, told me yesterday that when he heard the 'Oskar Tennis Champion' songs live (I played a show in Helsinki's Dubrovnik lounge on Saturday night, following 18 laptoppists and a Japanese conductor, the Helsinki Computer Orchestra) he suddenly 'got' the Oskar album; the playful pleasures of its strategic strangeness fell into place. The Momus track on the new Hypo album (due in May on the French label Active Suspension) is a classic example of narrative-as-disorientation: the track follows a New Orderish template for a couple of minutes, but keeps erupting into weird vocal samples made of voices from an old film soundtrack, then dissolves quite unexpectedly into a sick sound which I think of as a piece of seaweed suffering a bout of bronchitis. The seaweed twists the song away to a slippery early death, only to be resurrected by a crossfade into the next twitching heap of sonic oddities.



The weekend in Helsinki was full of inspiring lectures. Charlie Morrow, a sort of shamanic post-Fluxus John Steed in smock and bowler, improvised on a conch shell and talked about his Morrow-3D sound cube and the projection of sound in installations. Andrei Smirnov's lecture was a fascinating tour of the sound inventions during the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union -- the super-fertile, exploratory period in which Viktor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie, and inventor-composers like Arseny Avrahamov could conduct the entire city of Moscow from a rooftop in a composition made up of alarms, sirens, fog horns and factory whistles. Alas, in 1933 Stalin came along to curtail the disorienteering.