1. ‘ATOMIC’ MUSIC: INTRODUCTION AND ISSUES
The conceptualisation of sound as matter, particularly on an imagined ‘atomic’ level, has played a significant role in crystalising certain experimental electronica genres. The impulse to ascribe mass to sound or to conceptualise it as a material object, as is implicit in microsound, has had many historical antecedents, especially in the twentieth century. These range from Edgard Varèse’s seminal writings in ‘The Liberation of Sound’ (Varèse and Wen-Chung Reference Varèse and Wen-Chung1966), notably in his advancement of compositional practice as the ‘organisation of sound’ that ultimately objectified a notion of sound, to the very nature of musique concrète, as principally described in Pierre Schaeffer’s tome Traité des objets musicaux (Reference Schaeffer1966), to György Ligeti’s compositional practice and aesthetic of sound masses in such works as Atmosphères (1961). Musical sounds understood as physical entities extends into the technological sphere, encompassing the advent and use of various technologies that visually represent sound, the sound spectrum and sound waves, rendering sound visually tangible in different ways. Such tools include spectrograms, Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC system (1977), software that enables granular synthesis, and other programs offering pictorial models of sound, such as MAX/MSP and Pro Tools. However, the comparison, representation and analogy of sound as an object of material composition is a peculiar metaphor given that sound is not literally tangible, nor has any actual material substance.
This paper looks at microsound – an emergent term, corresponding concept and associated genre of experimental electronica appearing in the late 1990s – which animates the idea of sound as material entity, and, as I will demonstrate, ultimately complicates and expands questions concerning disciplinary boundaries. At the meeting point of microsound, a wide spectrum of musicians and listeners across genres and subgenres has converged, along with a diverse range of technologies and approaches to them. I will begin by tracing the emergence of microsound, focusing on how it pre-figured and re-configured certain electronic genres, and also on its inherent conceptualisation as musical ‘matter’. With its insistence on materiality, as well as its aesthetic affiliations with the visual and plastic arts, I examine a few exemplary works to show how microsound provides a vital critical perspective on the evolving relationship between art and music. As will be introduced and observed, sound art reveals pressing, necessary issues of experimental electronica; I argue that exploring the inception and implications of microsound offers one intriguing path that elucidates their complex commingling.
2. THE PARTICLE LEVEL AND SOME BACKGROUND OF ‘MICROSOUND’
Appearing in the late 1990s, ‘microsound’ was coined by composer, theorist and computer programmer Curtis Roads. Through the notion of microsound, Roads illustrates an approach to composition on a minute level, one of increasingly precise time scales and their subsequent construction from ‘grains’ of sounds on an analogous particle level. His pioneering book Microsound offers the following description:
Beneath the level of the note lies the realm of Microsound, of sound particles. Microsonic particles remained invisible for centuries. Recent technological advances let us probe and explore the beauties of this formerly unseen world. Microsonic techniques dissolve the rigid bricks of music architecture – the notes – into a more fluid and supple medium. Sounds may coalesce, evaporate or mutate into other sounds. (Roads Reference Roads2004: vii)Footnote 1
Roads’s words read as though they were lifted from a nineteenth-century essay about the microscope. In describing a phenomenon of sound, the ‘invisible’ and ‘unseen’ conspicuously stand in for the more intuitive ‘inaudible’ and ‘unheard’, pointing to a metaphorical mode of thinking activated by ‘microsound’. This comparison of the microscopic to the microsonic – where sound is conceived of and represented visually and physically on a granular or ‘atomic’ particle level – has both theoretical grounding and ramifications. This materialisation of sound as matter not only continues to dismantle systems of pitch and harmony, but also dismantles sound itself as it is reduced to particles to be manipulated and sculpted on this perceived fundamental level.Footnote 2 Though rooted in some of the most specialised veins of computer music composition, the concept of microsound also arose in, and in some cases enveloped, other electronic music-making spheres and genres, specifically those in experimental electronica.
Elsewhere in the late 1990s, experimental electronica composer and scholar Kim Cascone adopted ‘microsound’ to connect diverse practices of composition. The .microsound.org mailing list, which he started in 1999, became a locus for those also composing with sonic minutiae deeply implicated by approaches to and ideas about compositional tools. He describes microsound as a manifestation of:
a way of tinkering with technology below the surface. A peeling back of the shiny, hermetically sealed surface of digital audio, enabling musicians and composers to work with sound on a sub-atomic level, so to speak. (Cascone Reference Cascone2009)
Though .microsound.org was not founded with ties to any particular genre, it appeared around the time experimental electronica genres – including glitch, microhouse and various laptop-based musical practices – were gaining visibility. These categories were fluid, and as genres and subgenres proliferated, so too did problems: sometimes their names went in and out of fashion; sometimes categorisations inadequately expressed, or even mislabelled, artists’ practices; sometimes the categorisations were too vague; and sometimes the labels were unwanted. For example, many who were working with short snippets of sounds were not necessarily working with sonic glitches and thus weren’t technically ‘glitch’ artists, though they were sometimes given the (occasionally unwelcome) label; in addition, there were often erroneous assumptions about the specific technologies being used.Footnote 3 In this muddled terminological environment, microsound became an umbrella concept that would reconfigure, unite and redefine the many artists to whom it was applied.
This instability of experimental electronica genres – and especially that of microsound as it subsumed, overlapped, or conflated with other genres and sub-genres in experimental electronica and beyond – is emphasised by Cascone in his purposefully unsuccessful attempt at pinpointing the term ten years after the launch of .microsound.org. As is implied here, microsound is not necessarily limited to specific delineations and employs of the microsonic time scale. Rather, microsound incorporates the many understandings, and sometimes misunderstandings, brought to it. As I will extend later, microsound connected with and rolled in other associations, including what observers added to the notion. Cascone states:
Yet here we are ten years later and it seems noone can offer a stable definition of what .microsound is exactly. Journalists consistently get it wrong, outsiders get it wrong, and sometimes even some of our list members get it wrong by conflating it with ‘glitch’ or some other mutant strain of electronica. As of today there are no useful descriptions of tendencies in the contemporary practice of.microsound, which, in my opinion, gives testament to its success. (Cascone Reference Cascone2009)
Furthermore, some of the artists featured on .microsound.org are established experimental electronica acts, such as Fennesz, Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai (a.k.a. Alva Noto and other monikers), Oval and Nobukazu Takemura. Notably, the website also includes institutional/academic composers François Bayle, Herbert Brün, Barry Truax and Iannis Xenakis. Categorisation within microsound appears more often to be delimited by the aesthetic concepts and technological practices it alludes to, rather than strictly by genre or professional affiliations.Footnote 4
In 1997, when Roads and Cascone were working, experimental electronica artist Taylor Deupree, also interested in working with the minutiae of sound, formed the record label 12k to promote his own work and that of like-minded artists, including Sawako, Richard Chartier, Cascone and others. These artists represented vague or unfixed genre categorisations: glitch, ambient, microhouse, minimal techno, sound art and others yet unnamed. Addressing the possible ambiguity of dealing with such unfixed genres, 12k’s mission statement sums up its aesthetic:
Despite the startling diversity of these [the label’s] activities, the 12k philosophy has only become clearer over the years. Even though it has occasionally dabbled its feet in unknown waters, favored abstractions over easy references and refused to mark time, the label’s protagonists always keep returning to the beauty of minimalism and the beguiling mystery of an infinite cosmos of micro-sounds. (‘About [12k]’ 2014)
In addition to forming the record label, which helped define and solidify a concept of microsound, Deupree curated a 1999 CD compilation. The conception of the album again underscores the idea of sound becoming something with the ability to be viewed – i.e. objectified – and was fittingly titled Microscopic Sound (Various artists 1999). The album features Cascone, a mentor to Deupree as well as an artist on the 12k label, alongside other artists who come from diverse genres, in some cases defying classification, but could be grouped together here under microsound.
Though not all experimental electronica musicians create music specifically utilising a plane of sound that imagines a pseudo-atomic level of construction, this idea was important in shaping experimental electronica as a whole. Microsound united many artists, practices, technological approaches and corresponding genres, and it absorbed and transformed some previously predominant experimental electronica genre labels, in the process becoming a genre, or even metagenre, of its own.Footnote 5 Moreover, as a concept rooted in technological ideas, microsound addresses and further realises other principal aesthetic attributes and concerns central to experimental electronica. For example, the practice of working in microsound advances the ‘clean’, ‘surgical’ sonic precision sought and manifest by many experimental electronica artists more broadly. The use of sounds on the ‘particle’ or ‘atomic’ level also illuminates how this artistic aesthetic is bound up with technological and scientific ideals, aligning the practice with other research-based fields, keenly reinforcing this key tenet of experimental electronica. The concept of the minute sonic building blocks, grains or particles, and an experimentation with how they relate to a whole, has parallels in atomic, DNA and cellular research and modelling, as well as in digital technologies’ units of pixels and bytes. Finally, conceptualising sound as matter helps articulate what is expressed in materialisation: a ‘creation’ and ‘filling up’ of the musical place. Turning to this idea to elucidate a relationship between experimental electronica and sound art, I draw on the work of Richard Chartier to offer some insight.
3. MUSIC AND MATERIALITY
Chartier is an accomplished figure in the field of microsound, conceiving works that exemplify some of the ramifications imported by this mode of objectifying and materialising of sound. Chartier, also one of Deupree’s collaborators, has released music on the 12k label, and has worked with Cascone, William Basinski and other noteworthy experimental electronica artists. With Deupree, Chartier launched the record label LINE, with the following suggestive aim:
LINE = a programmatic sound platform with a strong inclination towards the visual arts and multimedia, born from the desire to take the tactile qualities of audio installations from the gallery space to listeners’ living rooms. (‘About [LINE]’ 2014)
LINE has released works by Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), Janek Schaefer, Steve Roden, Bernhard Günter and many others. Chartier’s own inaugural release for the label, Series (2000; his fourth full-length album), received an honourable mention at the 2001 Prix Ars Electronica festival in the Digital Music category and was later exhibited as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2002 Biennial.
On Series, Chartier’s digital tools allow for meticulous work with small components of sound. Instead of filling space, his sound is striking in its sparseness. Sounds articulate and punctuate the supposed emptiness of ‘space’ (that is, silence) by playing with it, illuminating what might fill it, or leaving it void. Of course, actual space and silent places are not literally empty but filled with invisible molecules. Although in actuality it is air molecules vibrating because of sound waves that activate our ears, I maintain that this is not the sonic imagery depicted by microsound. The close analogy between the sonic as granular particle matter embedded in the music – ‘the tactile qualities of audio’, the sounds themselves as something mould-able, craft-able – is highlighted further in Chartier’s website biography:
The sounds are treated with a sculptural integrity. Each crackle, hiss, and tone is distinct, an instantiation of an auricular physicality that nonetheless proximally and often approaches silence. (‘Bio’ 2014)
This sparseness and quietness of materials, as Chartier suggests in the album notes, are the reason his compositions are ‘intended for quiet amplification or headphone use’. As Will Montgomery observes of Chartier’s suggestion, ‘it [is] clear that this is introverted music’ (Montgomery Reference Montgomery2006). The listener’s importance to Chartier is typical in microsound, where works are meant to tap into and engage with the act of listening. As his website biography puts it, ‘Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself’ (‘Bio’ 2010). Montgomery emphasises this same point: ‘just as shyness can be a means of drawing attention to oneself, the music pulls the ears towards its own disappearance’ (Montgomery Reference Montgomery2006). That is, because Chartier’s ‘small’ sound treads so close to a vanishing point, it intensifies psychoacoustic, and particularly physiological, effects, forcing listeners to engage with it, to find, it, to hear it, to listen to it. Perhaps because of this acute focus on sonic material(ity), treading the edges of its reach and of consciousness (Do I hear something or not?), listener reviews are helpful and illuminating in describing the album’s sound and relation to tactility, physical space and experience.
Richard Chartier turns his ear to the pockets of sound huddled inside silence’s expanse. Truth be told, my computer monitor makes these sounds when my cell phone rings (which should probably worry me), but that’s not to discount Chartier’s work. Indeed, Series proves the depths of Chartier’s investigations into the physics – and the physicality – of Microsound. (‘Review: Richard Chartier: Series’ 2014)
Furthermore,
there is the distinct sense that each discrete audio event – each crackle, pop and hiss – is treated with all the reverence usually reserved for sculptural elements of (seemingly) larger and more tangible significance. ‘Series’ demands close, attentive listening and – perhaps more fundamentally – a quality pair of earphones. Sound objects cascade from the quiet, establishing themselves during brief bursts of activity only to die away moments later. A parallel might lie at the level of viruses or bacteria, where activity – though often ferocious – takes place almost unseen. Series[4] opens to a sequence of sustained attacks on an invading cancer, massed white cells repeatedly wreaking havoc at cellular level, a vibrant encounter that unfolds within the space of no more than a few seconds. Series[6] meanwhile occupies a much more spacious niche, perhaps the constant fluctuations of alveoli within a lung. (Murphy Reference Murphy2014)
Not only at the level of composition but also in reception, there is a seemingly inherent connection between the imagination of sound and microsound, and a conception of sound as particles, or like cells, as opposed to waves and frequencies. This materiality of the sound is imagined and experienced on many levels – it is visual, visceral, physical and, importantly, tactile. Grasping the music is both an act of comprehension and effectively, an act of the (pseudo) physical, to reiterate, to hear it, to find it, as we will see further below.
4. MATERIALITY, MUSIC, ART?
Imagining and conceiving of sound as tactile, rather than utilising or developing a musical language/theory, and treating sound as a material, like cloth, film frame, paint or sand, evokes different associations and practices for creators and listeners. While other genres, such as musique concrète, certain spectral musics (most of which also work on microsonic time scales) or even some sampled musics imply a tactility of sound and could also provide vantage points for considering the art/music distinction and the emergence of sound art, to which I now lead, microsound stands out. Microsound is a musical genre that is also simultaneously situated within the visual and plastic arts as an artistic genre, and thus offers a unique perspective on the complex relationship between art and music.Footnote 6
Microsound’s peculiar reimagining of sound on the particle level activates these points of connection with the visual and plastic arts. It implies a precise use of very small musical materials and manipulations on an immensely precise level, but those connotations do not necessarily dictate the resultant sound. Nevertheless, a sound did come to be associated with many artists – a ‘minimal’ sound – that clearly aestheticised microsound and contributed to defining it. To offer some context, by the late 1990s and early 2000s a new, revisionary ‘minimalist’ aesthetic had become widespread in many experimental electronica genres including glitch, onkyô and various other improvised subgenres. This minimalism employed sparing, sparse, abstracted and clipped musical materials, a stripped-down texture, emphasis on and use of silence, and extremely low amplitudes. Almost ubiquitously, listeners came to describe this sound as ‘minimalist’; in many cases this minimalism and its corresponding genres became synonymous and overlapped with microsound. The following three reviews, of which there were innumerable, demonstrate this close association and conflation of minimalism and microsound. From a review of Chartier’s Reference Chartier2008 album Further Materials:
He is one of the originators of the ‘microsound’ or ‘lower case’ form of digital music, which is, as it sounds, minimal music, usually played at minimal volume. What’s intriguing about Chartier’s music is that if you listen carefully, and with the volume pegged to ten, there’s incredible depth to his music. (Michelfelder Reference Michelfelder2008)
From a review of a 2000 compilation album called blueCubism: transcoded audio structures, featuring remixes of Cascone’s music by Experimental Electronica musicians that include Pita, Terre Thaemlitz and Toshimaru Nakamura:
This compilation takes tracks off of Kim Cascone’s brilliant minimalist treatise BLUE CUBE and subjects them to more subatomic reconfiguration. (‘Review: Various Artists’ 2014)
From a review of Nakamura and Sachiko M’s Reference Nakamura and Sachiko2001 collaborative album Do:
Perhaps it’s the shift in gaze from the macroscopic to microscopic that we have slowly, but surely witnessed over the course of the last century; perhaps it’s the growing focus on near-invisible structures – nanotechnologies and molecular architectures – the carefully engineered products of this, and future, centuries; or perhaps it’s the pervasiveness of software and its seemingly intangible by-products … Whatever, we are undoubtedly witnessing a progressive shift from large scale to smaller scale structures; ultra-minimal in realisation, but far from ultra-minimal in impact. On ‘Do’, Nakamura+Sachiko M take this interest to new heights. (‘CM’ 2014)
While described as ‘minimalist’ by many, this minimalism as also understood in experimental electronica more broadly did not necessarily adhere to the formal tenets of Minimalism, capital ‘M’ (or likewise, Postminimalism), which I will address shortly. Instead, this minimalism was essentially and literally descriptive and drew from its explicitly tactile implications. Pieces were often quiet, using ‘small’ sounds and few sound materials or objects. This ‘minimalism’ also helped unite experimental electronica artists from various genres, including those who did not necessarily or solely work with digital technologies, as well as those who did not technically work with ‘micro’ sonic phenomena, or microsound, at all.Footnote 7 Additionally, many electronic dance music subgenres, also observing this pervasive aesthetic impulse, were similarly being called ‘minimalist’: minimal techno, minimal house or, simply, minimal. Perhaps to de-emphasise the implications, connotations and gravity of the artistic movement of Minimalism, an overlap and adoption of ‘micro-’, as seen in microhouse and microsound, would become more widely applied and used. Though the use of ‘micro-’ as a kind of amendment to ‘minimal-’ would not negate the connection to ‘minimalism/Minimalism’, these connections were deeply established, and absolutely impacted and augmented the expanding notion of microsound.Footnote 8
Though I previously suggested that the use of ‘minimalism’ might not reflect conceptual understandings inclusive of theoretical or historical perspectives, what was described of this musical minimalism did also link it to Minimalism (capital ‘M’). In an inherently revisionist use of the term, parallels and connections emerge between this sonic minimalism and Minimalism in the visual and plastic arts, which were expressed more extensively than with Minimalist music.Footnote 9 Links to visual Minimalism may be seen in ‘empty’ canvases, precise lines, a sparseness of objects and materials, a palette of limited range, and elemental forms. Although this may be a rudimentary depiction of the Minimalist aesthetic in the visual arts, I wish to reaffirm the poignancy, immediacy and frequency of this aesthetic connection for both creators and listeners, as seen in the following quotations. The first forges a comparison between Robert Rauschenberg’s monochromatic paintings, which have long been viewed as presaging Minimalism, and Chartier’s Current (2006); the second presents Chartier’s compositional aesthetic as akin to Donald Judd’s approach to material:
Chartier’s every sound, every nuance has been thoroughly and lovingly honed and assembled with a surgeon-like hand. If this were a painting, it would be one of Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings, with subtle depths, and mystery in every crevice, a work of clarity, that shifts focus and perspective constantly. (‘Review: Richard Chartier: Current’ 2007)
Chartier’s work has this overriding singleness of formal vision. While it is clearly formed of discrete parts, the work doesn’t look beyond itself, it doesn’t refer to other sounds or musical instruments, it is entirely conceived within the field of digital sound. And, like Donald Judd‘s three-dimensional objects, it is faithful to itself as a medium: the audio is self-sufficient. Chartier allows his pieces to be governed by their own internal dynamics, finding specific arrangements of sound that integrate the various sonic objects he chooses to work with into coherent wholes. (Montgomery Reference Montgomery2006)
This bond between microsound and Minimalism of the visual and plastic arts is further reinforced through album artwork, which often features images that directly recall Minimalist canvases and forms (something that could be argued of the recordings discussed here).
Moreover, whereas I noted a certain ‘lack’ of sounds in works that were understood as ‘minimalist’ and were in many cases overlapped as microsound, both microsound and Minimalism require more than scant, quiet sounds and sparse canvases to define them. Indeed, even in minimalism/Minimalism, the air may be quite ‘full’ of sound in the way that the Rauschenberg’s white paintings are indeed completely full of paint.Footnote 10 Inherent to an understanding of the Minimalist aesthetic is an acknowledgement of its palpable focus on materials – an exploitation and unfurling of them that plays on and is informed by their nature and composition.Footnote 11 It is precisely this focus that reinforces a convergence in microsound between the sonic and the material. In microsound, this materiality might manifest itself in the exploration of densities, textures, associations of colour, masses of sounds, and emphases on the physicality and experience of spaces and places. And of course the air is already full of particulate matter, like the ‘empty’ white canvas. However it is in this conceptualisation of sound as matter that such sound ‘objects’ can articulate an ‘empty’ space, bedeck and be positioned in it, or fill it in some way. This tangible, physical approach to and experiencing of sound helps locate microsound among discourses of minimalism/Minimalism and in the visual and plastic arts more widely.
5. INTO SOUND ART
Described as ‘minimalist’, with certain connections to Minimalism, and as practitioners utilising ‘material’, many experimental electronica musicians, particularly those involved in microsound, are cross-identified as sound artists. Also recall that Chartier’s Series was presented at the Prix Ars Electronica festival as well as the Whitney Museum, illustrating how works of microsound circulated in both musical and visual art spheres.
A historical grounding of sound art can be established through artists in the visual and plastic arts and musicians from the twentieth century as they increasingly conceptualised and treated sounds materially and spatially. However, ‘sound art’, a still burgeoning field, remains inchoate. Despite a lack of clarity regarding what the term encompasses, works that might be defined as sound art are proliferating in museums, gallery shows and other venues traditionally affiliated with visual art, stimulating much-needed critical attention. Most fundamentally, sound art connotes an artistic practice of working with sound as medium with varying implications for aurality. The emerging concept and practice preceded the necessity of the term, which did not appear until the early 1980s. Sound art initially served a useful designation for sound-based artworks that were created by those who more closely reflected artistic, rather than musical approaches, aims and pedagogies, and such works in presentation or on display that were associated more readily with visual art spaces than with musical ones. Such a primary characterisation of sound art implicates many practices and disciplines and undergirds the many issues that the existence of the category brings up. Though the introduction and employment of the term sound art first became necessary as the realm of visual art expanded to incorporate sound as a material, sound art has become imperative to the realm of music as works of microsound, other experimental or yet unnamed forms and their possible precursors are harnessed in. That artists and works in microsound intersect these creative terrains, intensifies questions regarding the nature of the relationship between sound art and experimental electronica, and music more broadly.Footnote 12
Microsound resonates with many characterisations of sound art, further seaming together genres and disciplines in its intriguing fashion. This is particularly due to microsound’s pseudo-atomic nature of conceptualising sounds, resultant manifestations as materially imbued works that are physically present and affecting, which also foreground the experience of aurality. A few key ideas from writings on sound art follow to help solidify some of the connections with microsound, and to help indicate some of the defining questions that sound art – and, as I argue, microsound – correspondingly activates. Though none of these conceptions of sound art were written expressly regarding works of microsound, works including those on Deupree’s record label, as part of.microsound.org’s purview, and also Chartier’s Series can be seen as confronting and engaging with many of these ideas directly.
Experimental musician and writer Alan Licht offers a fundamental delimitation of sound art by defining it as consisting of works that might be better suited as exhibited than as performed (Licht Reference Licht2007). Others suggest a revision of approach in helping locate sound art; Salomé Voegelin, an artist, scholar and curator, proposes the act of listening as a defining virtue (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2010). Art and science scholar and curator Bernd Schulz, in his introduction to Resonanzen/Resonances, notably poses the idea of sound art as a form contingent on a materialisation/spatialisation of sound (Schulz Reference Schulz2003). Likewise, philosopher and curator Christoph Cox, by means of disarming signification and representation, is also insistent on materiality as a decisive property and offers materiality as a means of distinguishing sound art from music – the very principle I cite of microsound that affords it the ability to complicate such a divergence by conversely bringing together and cohabitating these domains. Cox identifies a shift from the ‘phonic to the sonic’ (quoting poet Steve McCaffery) in articulating this distinction and a focus on how sound might ‘become’ (Cox Reference Cox2011).
Of course, sound art is not a fixed category, and even its name has been reappraised, with questions arising about its relation to other fields, such as soundscapes, sound poetry, performance art, sound sculpture and, certainly, the varied forms of experimental musics, including microsound. As such, composer and scholar Trevor Wishart has proposed a wholly new name, ‘sonic art’, which has been adopted and adapted by others (Wishart 1996). Others have broadened the scope of sound art by looking at contextual paradigms that might supersede distinctions between art and music. They include artist, scholar and curator Seth Kim-Cohen, who has discussed the emergence of sound as an independent aesthetic concept and domain of aurality (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009). Similarly, media arts scholar Douglas Kahn purposefully goes beyond, or around, sound art by considering a larger category he claims for ‘sound in the arts’ that focuses on a broader consideration of aurality itself, one that is profoundly informed by materiality, also not limited to art and music (Kahn Reference Kahn2001). Writers have converged at sound art, approaching it as a notion complicating the territories of art and music, with they themselves and their multifaceted viewpoints also representing an interesting commingling of disciplines.
While resonating deeply with these ideas about sound art, this does not simply resolve microsound into sound art. I neither wish to nudge microsound, along with other sonic works that blur genres or disciplines, into the category of sound art, nor do I reject that possible categorisation. Likewise, I do not dogmatically insist on categorising microsound as experimental electronica, or even as music, though that is the vantage point from which I predominantly work. The artists working in microsound are representative of the dynamism, provocation and agility of those currently working in sound more generally, and are all the more interesting and important as navigators, violators and traversers of categorical frameworks. This is not because they demand the choice of one over the other, but because they signal the instability of seemingly fundamental categories, as well as the new possibilities for thinking about the various points of contact. Microsound in this context presents an instructive critical opportunity because it does not resolve such discourses of music and art; rather, microsound opens them up much wider. In the following I turn to specific manifestations of microsound and look at how the repertory allows artists to work across disciplinary lines, but in doing so, also sometimes draws attention to their distinctions.
6. NAVIGATIONS THROUGH MICROSOUND
I focus here on microsound to delineate one genre that highlights a conceptualisation of sonic matter, with this realisation of materiality allowing the repertory to provide a useful analytical lens on the complex relationship between art and music. When Chartier, like many other experimental electronica musicians working in microsound, is frequently described as a sound artist, rather than as a musician, this vagueness is more than just a terminological problem. As indicated by the breadth of definitions offered above, negotiating this vagueness has become one of the pressing issues for writers of contemporary experimental art, as well as for the artists, the works themselves and for their ramifications on audiences. In a statement about his piece exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Chartier articulates one concern related to straddling both arenas:
Well, I travel in these two different worlds where it’s music versus art. The work is on CD so it’s available to the public and you can get it on eMusic and iTunes and all that. So I think being selected for the Whitney Biennial and having my work displayed within that context – it made people, perhaps, think of it differently … With ‘Series’, a lot of it is very imperceptible compared to the standard listening experience and it’s actually the most minimal work I’ve ever done. Having that in [the Biennial], I thought, ‘Oh God! No one is going to hear it, find it, experience it’. (Chartier, quoted in Richards Reference Richards2010)
In addition to demonstrating his entanglement between these two ‘worlds’, as he calls them, Chartier’s statement is noteworthy for how it reveals underlying conceptions about sound, notions about the work, and meanings in varying experiential contexts. While his works exist in the aural realm – and their microsonic phenomena may be directly perceived when accessed through a CD and headphones – Chartier crucially points out how the nature and effect of such works are different when realised in spatial settings. He highlights their importance as sonic and material works. Beyond ‘hearing’ the work, Chartier hopes museum-goers will ‘find it, experience it’ – that is, to find these sound objects in the museum space and to exist among them, as I infer, tactilely and physically. In this manner, the act of musical listening and concert-going are homologised with the act of artistic engagement and museum-going. However, though these activities may seem to coalesce ideologically, this does not guarantee that works can transcend these different contexts and be ‘found’ equally readily. When microsound alludes to and assumes a pseudo-material presence like this, it may illuminate the negotiations and subtleties of varied experiential contexts – notably contexts that also articulate the disciplinary lines of music and art.
Similarly, Chartier’s performance at the 2006 Sónar festival reveals the liminality of the relationship between (sound) art and music, to which the following review alludes:
Reduction of a more extreme sort was less ably delivered by Richard Chartier at SonarDome. Playing from his Brooklyn-based Line catalogue, tenuous and fragile music in the best of circumstances, it drifted away in this open arena, leaving even his thunderous bass tones untethered. (Meggitt Reference Meggitt2006)
Unfortunately, in this context, the microsonic sounds that Chartier presented – representative of both experimental electronica and sound art – got lost in a venue better designed to showcase musical works, and ‘drifted away’ like particles in the wind.
In exploring microsound as I have done, my aim is not to further separate experimental electronica and sound art, to prioritise one, or even to attempt a reconciliation between the two. For some listeners and critics, they are from independent disciplines; for others, there are interchangeable aspects; and still others would prefer more inclusive names, such as digital arts (itself a limiting term), media arts or sonic arts. Microsound conceptually had the ability to draw in a variety of aesthetic connections with, and in some senses subsume, several experimental electronica genres and subgenres, all of which impacted and became part of microsound’s very conception. Yet, these other genre labels (such as glitch, microhouse, minimal) have not disappeared, nor has microsound remained a fixed presence. Microsound has figured into the evolution of these genres as it also unfolds, all adding to the broader picture of experimental electronica during the first two decades of the 2000s. This new musical term arose enmeshed with a powerful technoscientific idea of sound on an ‘atomic’ level and helped us to conceive sound in a more tactile manner, thus also drawing in and associating genres beyond music and in the realm of the visual and plastic arts, from minimalism/Minimalism to overlappings as sound art. Microsound’s reimagining of sound on a particle level creates a conceptual bridge between musicians and artists both working with sound materially, playing a key role in the corresponding cohabitation of microsound among experimental electronica and sound art. And while greatly perplexing disciplinary lines, microsound ultimately helps to clarify vagaries by offering some direction from within the murky ontological terrain by articulating specific points of connection, commonality and divergence between these intertwined fields of creation.
