Popular Capacities

“I want to make a music that becomes popular – that makes people cry because it is ‘unheard of’ – it develops too sensitive areas. A music which awakens you to ENERGY.”

– Maryanne Amacher

What do…

Peter Ablinger’s THE REAL AS IMAGINARY and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless…

The Beach Boys’ Here Today and Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura…

Maryanne Amacher’s Dense Boogie 1 and Sunn O)))’s live performances…

Jana Rush’s Suicidal Ideation – Aural Hallucinations Mix and Chris Mann’s Humility – On Eating Your Words…

…have to do with one another?

Each pair of pieces shares a unique perceptual structure. Take Ablinger’s THE REAL AS IMAGINARY and MBV’s live performances, as an example. In both, the listener encounters a voice buried beneath dense noise and complex musical sound, making the comprehension of speech all but impossible. In both instances the vocal content is nearly entirely masked, and in part, the pleasure of our listening resides in recognizing this position of incomprehensibility. It causes us to orient our ears towards straining: placing us in the liminal space between semantic meaning and noise, we lean in to catch some bit of meaning but to no avail. It is a type of ear-reaching we all know well! Think: have you ever been at a bar, straining to understand the person in front of you, watching as their mouth moves but hearing no discernible words given the ambient noise of the space?

At each moment, various sensory operations are at work to construct our perceptual experience of the world – these capacities work at a level beneath conscious apprehension: we are not entirely aware that they are even happening, yet they are constantly translating and forming stimuli into information for further processing and interpretation. It is worth noting that these structures mediate the world around us - yet they seem to do so seamlessly. They seem to operate so quietly that we are often unaware of their functioning.[1] In this sense, they remain unnamed or even unarticulated in everyday life. They are capacities that are repressed.

All music reaches or touches these unarticulated capacities – in fact, music might be more generally understood as a varied and complex instantiation of these myriad sensory operations. While some perceptual modes have been granted cultural and historical hegemony – so deeply ingrained as to appear natural - music remains capable of bringing attention to various possibilities afforded by our biology. The naturalization of these perceptual modalities is not a given but is the product of historical forces that discipline us into prioritizing certain auditory structures, certain ways of hearing. Thinking through this by way of Bill Dietz: we as beings are biologically capable of so much more – our senses are more capacious and are always operating, reading, and mediating in additional ways. Music, whether we attend to it in this manner or not, addresses those additional capacities directly – as listeners we can tune our reception to attend to those unarticulated structures. As musicians, we can make musics that make us aware of what we can "also" do, sense, feel: “music that touches us in ways we didn't even know we could be touched.”[2]

Though the above works share perceptual interests, this does not mean that the musics function identically or that they will affect listeners similarly. When mobilized within a distinct genre and in making use of said genre’s specific linguistic codes, and when performed in a context with its own social and musical norms, these shared perceptual modes can activate wildly different experiences of sound. My claim, however, is that in part, our enjoyment of these distinct musics results from encountering and recognizing a previously unarticulated form of perception that the music concretizes in us. In hearing ourselves recognize said perceptual mode, an energy is released as we momentarily make tangible the force and form of our perception which so often operates beyond apprehension. Perceptual Music aims to work with these unarticulated sensitivities, ones I call popular capacities. More often than not, these popular capacities are also repressed in the musical context – eventually, however, they find their way to the surface.

Popular capacities offer a different understanding of music’s affective potential, shifting it away from the dead-end of immediacy. In Perceptual Music, an energy is uncovered when we recognize a perceptual mode that was previously repressed as having been brought to the surface. But this energy is one that emerges out of a further mediation: we hear ourselves listening to said form of perception. Put another way: music’s affective potential emerges by way of music’s mediation.

Popular capacities disavow the tired and trite conversations regarding a distinction between “high and low art.” All works of music realize in some manner the unarticulated perceptual capacities that are continuously in operation just beyond our conscious apprehension. Additionally, the emphasis on perception shifts our awareness towards the work’s reception. This raises a new possibility: that a music is only as experimental as our reception of it. In this way, music becomes a kind of test-tone with which we can begin actively probing our relation to sound. We might then ask: where do these listening tests lead us, to what and to whom do they connect us, what behaviors and beliefs do they allow or suggest at any given time, who do they allow us to be, to become? These could be preliminary questions towards something like an ethics of reception.

Popular capacities offer a new positioning for marginal musics. This music has historically shunned wide-reaching and broad popularity as an indicator of formal, conceptual, and material concessions to the market, which moves in favor of works of mind-numbing equivalence and tepid consolation. This is a seemingly reasonable position when dealing with musics whose structuring logic is consciously market-driven.[3] Perceptual Music seeks to be popular: it is a popularity that emerges when we become conscious of the unarticulated capacities operative in everyday listening, revealing to us from within our newfound sensitivities. It is popular because it is already widely known, experienced, enjoyed, and played with each and every day even if unconsciously.

Popular capacities suggest that the “new” is in fact something we already know: that the new isn’t something to wait for, that is given to us, or that emerges around us, or in spite of us – rather, the new is something buried deep within us which has not yet come to the surface.

[1] The reality is that they are much louder than we admit – we seek to repress the loudness of their operation. Perceptual Musics attempt to expose this work.

[2] Thank you to Bill Dietz for offering this phrase.

[3] It would do us well to recognize: few musics can avoid the influence of exchange.