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table of contents

by names_of_music

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1.
Introduction 04:01
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2.
Beginning 08:01
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3.
Middle 08:01
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4.
Variation 08:01
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5.
Reprise 04:01
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6.
Ending 08:01
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about

The following is excerpted from the essay “Immobile Music” (2016) by Warren Sentence.

In 1917, Erik Satie introduced his “musique d’ameublement” by instructing his audience to pay no attention to it. Like the wall hangings and carpet underfoot, the music was meant to contribute to the general atmosphere without drawing undue attention to itself. As a result, critics and listeners tend to think of “musique d’ameublement” as an intervention into the space of performance. Brian Eno, always keen to repurpose good ideas from the past, makes similar claims for his “ambient” music. Like the lighting or the sound of rain on the window, ambient music is one element of the listening environment.

But these musics perform another function, one that might be considered more radical, both in terms of musical convention and relative to philosophical and, indeed, political concerns. They alter the listener’s experience of time, slowing it, nearly stopping it. In this regard, we can think of Satie’s “musique d’ameublement” as related to Warhol’s “Empire,” Kawara’s date paintings, or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, especially his Repetition, which repeats Kierkegaard’s earlier repetitions. Against Western, bourgeois notions of development, these works embrace stasis and boredom. Against the iniquitous denouement of so-called “progress” as manifest in such 20th century horrors as the “Final Solution,” apartheid, and global neoliberalism, an immobile music remains loyal to the cyclicality of the Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the sun.

Satie’s earlier “Vexations” is a single page of staff notation, with the instruction, “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses. (“In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.") Although “Vexations” was not performed in Satie’s lifetime, the composer clearly understood that, more than space, time was the critical variable in works of this sort. Both “Vexations” and “musique d’ameublement,” then, present a kind of immobile music, a musique d’immobilisement.

Musical minimalism explored similar effects, sometimes creating the illusion of endless cyclicality. The 60s and 70s music of Terry Riley, in particular, has the ability to deter the steady elapse of time. But all of these examples operate in a rarified realm, disconnected from situations in which the profound implications of an immobile music might alter the rhythms of real life. In the repetitions of funk and disco, and in latter-day club music, the immobility of repetition comes closer to such realization. But, too often these musics aim for the sexual crescendo of release or resolution, undermining the very immobility they take time to create.

Functional music such as Muzak or chill mixes intended for late night play in the hotel rooftop lounge, come even closer. But too often the banality of these forms poisons the ear against submitting to the effects of their insistent periodicity. A truly immobile music would transcend its own musicality, spilling over into what has been called the “non-cochlear” (Kim-Cohen, 2009). This can only be achieved via attention to detail in arrangement and instrumentation. A fine balance must be struck between musical invention and hackneyed moods. Too much of either tips the balance, contravening the immobility that portends liberation.

And this brings us to the philosophical and political dimensions of immobile music. In the man-machine hybrid proposed by Kraftwerk and adopted by Moroder and other disco savants, there is something of the immobile. But the extreme mechanicity of this music removes it from the Weltanschauung of human experience. An immobile music cannot be the product of machines, sequencing, or looping. Rather it must be played in real time such that time itself is felt in its exuberance and its lethargy, in its mania and its depressions. Only then do we begin to feel our habitation in time as something constructed around us like a cage or a subject position. Any music worthy of the categorization of “immobile music” will rage against the bars of its enclosure, take the measure of its subjectivity by delving so deeply into its bars and measures so as to expose them as aethereal illusions, no more solid than gender, race, or the State.

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released June 19, 2020

table of contents is an exercise in deconstructed song structure. Each track is one section of one contiguous, but never-realized song, repeating its basic elements for four or eight minutes. The total album (40 minutes) functions as a kind of exploded view of a song, all its parts separated and magnified for inspection.

Made entirely by names_of_music (drums, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, electric piano, electric organ, and percussion things) during pandemic 2020 (May/June) at Casa del Collo Rotto. No loops, sequencing, or comping.

names_of_music is Olias Nil.

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names_of_music Chicago, Illinois

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