Stasis, Time, Perception
As someone who thinks and writes about music, I have noticed the impulse in this practice to say something singular about a work, to find some form of closure in its structure. In many ways this tendency is antithetical to music’s organizing principles: to derive a singular meaning from a work opposes the limitless complexity and wild ambiguity that is music’s fundament. Perhaps we can understand this impulse as a defensive posture against these very characteristics – that in fact, the assertion of a singular meaning seeks to repress music’s unboundedness. Music is infinitely aspectual, to borrow a phrase from Brian Kane. There is always more to be heard, another aspect to uncover, something else to perceive in its structure. This openness, simultaneously terrifying and liberating, is central to my understanding of Michelle Lou’s body of work. We will return to this idea shortly by way of a formal device identifiable in much of the music included in this release.
Static or stasis-variation is a mode of variation in which the musical material undergoes limited transformation over the course of the work and yet appears to be changing and developing freely. I hear two types of stasis-variation appearing throughout Michelle’s work: the first stretches a single complex sound across the piece’s form. Generally phrases, subsections, and smaller formal structures are created by revealing or opening onto a different aspect of this single sound. The sound might increase or reduce in amplitude, its timbre might be varied, or its pitch content momentarily altered. These modifications create a form that is block-like, alternating between the original sound and these momentary shifts. These form-creating shifts are akin to a perspective change: this type of stasis-variation resembles sculpture insofar as the form of the piece is not unlike the movement a viewer makes around a three-dimensional object, encountering different aspects of it as they move along the construction’s perimeter. Examples of the sculptural form of stasis-variation include HoneyDripper, Hexa, and Molt.
The second type uses a limited set of materials organized into a vertical structure or simultaneity[1]. These materials are methodically unspooled from the vertical structure and are presented in new configurations as well as in isolation. By reassembling and recombining these initial materials in new combinations the work’s form is created. I understand this type of stasis-variation as combinatorial insofar as form is the result of a novel combination of largely unchanged materials. Examples of the combinatorial form of stasis-variation include Near Distant, heartlung v.1 / v.2, and Sections 1-20.
This is not to say that the materials aren’t being developed at all, that they remain entirely inert and unchanged. But the types of changes we encounter are subtle, largely leaving the overall character of the sound intact. The pitch might be altered, a rhythm modified, a dynamic increased or reduced, a timbre adjusted, an accompanying figure added or removed – but the substance of the material seemingly remains the same, as if all the sounds were in fact pre-recorded samples. This is not a type of variation that finds its origins in the classical conception of development, wherein the material transformations allow us to hear the piece’s content as containing an entirely new meaning. Rather, the modifications are applied to secondary sound characteristics that keep the material frozen in place.[2]
In spite of this we still hear a transformation! We feel it in our listening, sensing that something is changing. This transformation is catalyzed by Michelle’s treatment of time: the key to stasis-variation resides in the temporal, in dealing with time in such a way that the listener is moved out of a purely musical register and into a perceptual one, often without being entirely aware that this shift has occurred. Michelle accomplishes this through her work with proportion, by extending proportions beyond our sense of the musically correct (which we know to be nothing more than years of cultural disciplining). This extension is no indulgence but a necessity: within this extended proportion the listener must hear a transformation. They are set in motion by it, compelled to hear more in these materials, to listen beyond them. In this way the temporal aspect of Michelle’s music becomes the domain of the listener, the space where they can set to work transforming the materials according to their sensibilities as they make contact with the piece, its context, and its performance.
In this sense, Michelle’s music takes up the perceptive element of the post-Cageian moment. After Cage’s discovery of the auditor[3], something crystallized in the focus of the musical avant-garde: music would choreograph the listener’s perception of a work’s sounding materials. The act of composing became one of composing the listening act, of attending to how the listener heard. However, with the codification of the experimental music industry — the creation of venues, record labels, presses, publications, and distribution networks dedicated to “experimental” music — the focus on listening shifted away from the auditor and towards the surface character of the materials. Perhaps this burgeoning industry believed that an appeal to the affective strangeness of the sounds was what would allow for its streamlined marketing and dissemination? In the process, these works were mistranslated — the forms of listening integral to the conception of the work were abstracted into markers of style indicating the newly formed boundaries of “experimental” as genre.
Michelle’s music owes more to this elided moment of perceptive music making than it might appear at first listen: unlike many, if not most of her new music colleagues, Michelle takes the discovery of the auditor seriously, attempting to make active the listener’s perceptive capacities through the time domain. Michelle’s music presents a seemingly inert, static, unyielding sonic field but in doing so makes known to each of us our ability to transform the encountered materials. It reveals the unbounded aspects of music by way of our own unboundedness – through the seemingly limitless force of our perception. In this regard, there is something hopeful about these works – Michelle consistently posits the listener’s capacity to transform that which appears unyielding. From my own encounter with this music, I am left with a further question: if these unyielding materials can be transformed by our listening, what else in this world can we set to un-forming, changing, reconstituting through our audition?
[1] Though frequently this simultaneity will emerge gradually.
[2] The more abstractly I think about this type of variation, the more familiar it becomes. Michelle represents in sound something we all know too well: the seemingly intractable inertia of this moment. She conjures the appearance of change without a significant development occurring at the level of the material.
[3] A discovery solely within the context of the Western Classical canon, as many other musics took as their structuring principle the listener’s perceptive faculties.