On Stoppages

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what it feels like to compose. What are the characteristics of that very particular state when music really happens? It’s a way of being that so strongly resists our language, our powers of description: to describe it is really just to be in its orbit. Sometimes it feels indecent or even dangerous to talk about – in doing so, there is the possibility of tainting or dispelling it. Nonetheless, it feels important to put to words, if only to better understand ourselves and our work.

Guston, via Cage, got close to the feeling when he said: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave,” (Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations; Pg. 4). In making, as in listening, we can achieve a loss of self - an abdication of identity that elevates instead the otherness of our materials. Those phrases, ‘to lose yourself in the music,’ or ‘give yourself up to the music,’ begin making sense. As we allow ourselves to be enveloped and dominated by the form of our sounds we begin to shed ourselves, our egos, and our subjectivity. What about our desire though? Where does that go?

Our desire doesn’t really ever go away: it becomes, instead, our listening – which gives way to our composing. As Bill Dietz writes: “the desire to listen can also be seen as a desire to realign the normative play of ‘personhood’: a desire to be other,” (Universal Receptivity, Destruction Beyond Death, Bill Dietz). Listening is, in fact, an expression of this desire to shed our subjectivity, to loosen the bounds of this normative, modern personhood. The compositional process that works with the computer seemingly takes us one step closer to this self-abdication – at its most extreme, the logics of form and material can be entirely decided by the internal, computational processes of the technology. It’s a kind of 21st century indeterminacy – but the algorithm still needs to be encoded, the sonic synthesized, the rupture realized, and the tracks selected for release. After all this consideration and calculation, how could it really be a glitch?

In Hunter’s Stoppages, a meticulous and raw collection of works, where can we locate his particular wanting? Behind the technological and computational rigor, the austere aesthetic, and the cold, caustic, digital sounds is something much softer, much warmer. At the core of these pieces is a desire that things be different – that the world as shaped by our malicious impulses, our greed, our insecurity, and our violent lust for acknowledgment were to be re-formed. If you know Hunter then this begins making quite a bit of sense: beneath the surface is something extremely gentle. Does Stoppages suggest an action towards the transformed world and way of being that the work so desires? I’m not sure I have an answer yet, but my instinct tells me it has something to do with the rupture, of breaking things apart and letting our desire leak out. Hunter does the work necessary to cause the first crack - it’s up to us to place our ears against the hole and listen as the gap widens.