Non-music

Is there a limit to the act of listening? Is there perhaps an experiential threshold beyond which it becomes impossible to state with certainty, not so much whether we're listening to music, but whether we're actually listening to anything at all?

The debate over the boundary between music and so-called "non-music" concerns an audience that extends well beyond the ranks of authoritative critics and theorists, touching ordinary commenters on web platforms and potentially anyone who places their music within a given category, outside of which lies something else entirely - and it's a survey you can easily carry out among your own friends.

It may seem presumptuous - nowadays most people would say hipster - to think in terms of an "ecology of sound": to many it might seem absurd to devote part of our precious time and our even more precious passion for music to sonic phenomena that verge on absence, acoustic traces of an almost imperceptible existence. And yet we all continually experience acoustic (semi-)voids: an office where nothing reigns but the constant hum of computers, the waiting room of a doctor's surgery, the slow passing of life at six in the morning... Every context has its own sonic dimension, which it's up to us to identify, decipher, and possibly endow with a "musical" value and meaning otherwise foreign to it.

Drawing on the fertile (if incomplete) philosophical analysis of Vladimir Jankélévitch, silence and music are bound together in an indissoluble relationship. Silence comes both before and after music, but it also punctuates the very substance of which music is made. Barring digital subterfuge, silence is in fact the destination of all musical intention; it is where music begins and where it necessarily returns. Indeed, if we limited ourselves to considering classical composition, what we call music would in reality be nothing more than an elaborate arrangement of ink on paper, which only comes alive and becomes sound through the act of the performer (and should the figure of the performer disappear, would the concept of music still exist?)

Absolute silence does not exist in nature: we cannot therefore deliberately choose to isolate the sonic elements that interest us from the reality surrounding them. It's worth clarifying, then, that the set of practices referred to here (as elsewhere) for convenience as "non-music" pursues a form of research whose goal is not to master silence, but to remain in constant interaction with it.

With the advent of Cagean thought, the limited concept of silence becomes a container capable of holding everything that occurs sonically within the space we occupy. In the later reinterpretation and development of the new improvisation, particularly the Japanese strand, one could identify - without any restrictive taxonomic pretensions - three different approaches to the use of silence in music:

a) as a raw material to be "shaped" directly. The prime example is the nearly fifteen-year-long research of Toshimaru Nakamura with his no-input mixing board: the silence of a machine that produces no natural sound is both the idea and the means through which Nakamura - also in duo with Sachiko M - works on repetitive, aseptic electronic micro-manipulations;

b) as a non-color on a palette. A style of writing and performance largely traceable to the American composer Morton Feldman (incidentally a close friend of John Cage at the time), which we find in another form in the essential "Opposite" (1998) by Taku Sugimoto, a collection of clean-toned guitar meditations built on the discontinuous alternation between played notes and their natural resonances, which then fade into pauses charged with meaning, almost contrapuntal in character. Another exemplary moment is the final track of "Duos for Doris" (2003) by Keith Rowe and John Tilbury, among the most celebrated titles in the Erstwhile catalogue and in all of EAI (Electroacoustic Improvisation);

c) as a blank canvas against which individual sounds stand out with even greater force, and on which to act directly, with brush as with knife - following the spatialist intuition of our own Lucio Fontana. Random but effective examples can be found in the second movement of the recent quartet recording "Tsst!" (2012) or in the pointillistic wind instruments of Masahiko Okura on "Time Service" (2004).

With some of the albums mentioned below we will also outline the features of the onkyô (音響系) phenomenon: born out of the need for public quiet within the walls of the small Tokyo venue "Off Site", over the years the term onkyô has come to encapsulate a way of thinking and a musical aesthetic specific to contemporary Japanese impro - and in this sense, leaving the name untranslated has ensured it retains its inherent national specificity.

It simply means "sound": a terminology that frees musicians from having to pin down their style precisely, its only common denominator being an absolute focus, precisely, on sound itself - both as the product of an instrument and as an uncontrolled acoustic phenomenon. It was under the aegis of Ôtomo Yoshihide that figures such as Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M and Taku Unami established themselves, artists who today hold absolute relevance in the scene of electroacoustic improvisation and lowercase music.

So, as one can easily grasp, this is not simply a matter of the boundless Cagean legacy: indeed, it's worth stressing that John Cage himself first borrowed from Eastern philosophies and cults to give life to the most disparate acts of sonic existence that make up his catalogue, and that it would therefore be necessary to trace things back to far more ancient sources in order to understand the development of these tendencies and to include the concept of silence within our own listening baggage.

That said, Cage's wide-ranging exploration remains, to this day, the ideal starting point for probing the boundaries of what we commonly understand as music. And an interesting reworking of the conceptualism underpinning the notorious 4'33" can be found in Dancing In Tomelilla (Hibari, 2012) by sound artist Éric La Casa. Long devoted to examining spaces and their hidden sonorities, here he sets out to capture, from various distances and angles, the rehearsals of a bar gig - followed by the actual performance - by the jazz group Cool Quartet together with singer Lina Nyberg. The acoustic fragments that make up the collage "September In Tomelilla" unfold as an acoustic journey structured like a noir tale, marked by creaking footsteps near the stage or the clinking from the bar area, all the way to the space just outside the venue, where only a few muffled notes filter through. La Casa invites us to listen to the spaces around the music, to realise that outside a performance, other things keep happening, the world carries on regardless, and nothing can silence it.

Un Peu De Neige Salie (Selektion, 1993) by Bernhard Günter is the landmark of so-called "microsound", one of the most iconic examples of electroacoustic experimentation aimed at revealing almost imperceptible sounds. Although the artist himself discouraged listening to it through visual association, it's impossible not to think of the tiniest sonic events in nature: it's as if we could access an otherwise inaccessible acoustic dimension, where we might hear an ant's footsteps or, as in the title drawn from a haiku, the fall to the ground and instant melting of a snowflake. Set within a silence that is never truly silent, these microscopic sonic events act like tiny pinholes in a flat surface of utmost stillness - not as disruptive elements, but as harmless external agents that immediately become an organic part of the sonic surface. Listening to it demands the utmost attention - on pain of total inaudibility - but it rewards us by unveiling a parallel acoustic universe that is pure metaphysics. Günter's radically reductionist aesthetic laid the groundwork for much of the EAI that followed, and it remains, to this day, an astonishing wellspring of innovation and avant-garde enthusiasm.

In certain compositions by the Dutch composer Antoine Beuger there's almost a fear of disturbing the sacredness of silence: in the twelve movements of "Tanzaku", the performers' strings are grazed with grating caution, giving rise to a sinister, anti-emotional polyphonic "breath" that pushes Salvatore Sciarrino's nocturnal visions to their extreme. "Sekundenklänge (Some Sounds, Just Seconds)", written "for an instrument with sounds in decay", features none other than Taku Sugimoto, the leading figure of onkyô guitar, who inserts short, discontinuous pulses into the acoustic space with such delicacy that they seem like the keys of an electric toy piano. Here we are, without a doubt, in the realm of pure sound exploration.

The collective of composers and performers Wandelweiser, founded by Beuger and German violinist Burkhard Schlothauer, remains to this day a stronghold of "silent music". The catalogue of its record label is rich with fascinating releases, spanning from the historical avant-garde to the new generation of composers and field recorders.

Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto are the architects of one of the most fascinating investigations into chance and the passage of time in music: the triptych 2 Seconds/ B minor/ Wave (Erstwhile, 2010) runs exactly sixty minutes, twenty for each piece. A conceptual, schematic record, loosely planned and then performed separately, with instruments of choice and complete autonomy (Pisaro in California, Sugimoto in Japan), much like in John Cage and David Tudor's foundational "Indeterminacy".

"2 Seconds" originates from the metronome's temporal grid, the starting point for any musical composition: the two musicians' syncopated accents almost always end up moving in perfect sync, giving shape to each moment through sonic interventions that are faint yet precise. Even more so in the harmonies of "B minor", which leans more towards a reflective, delicate musical figure; each with his own guitar, the two artists freely move through two different musical tempos and probe the spaces with feedback and natural resonances. Finally, "Wave" plays out, as the title suggests, in two different interpretations of the concept of a "wave": for Sugimoto, a sound of constant intensity and pitch; for Pisaro, the concrete crashing of the sea against the Californian shore.

Although isolated from one another, the duo's interventions manage - surprisingly - to find their mutual meaning in a continuous, systematic motion that nonetheless retains an enchanting spontaneity. Three different forms of listening ecstasy: chance finally meeting the natural order of things, of time and of sound.

Also worth mentioning is the collaboration between Nikos Veliotis, Taku Sugimoto, Kazushige Kinoshita and Taku Unami on Quartet (Hibari, 2005), which has since become a cult record for listeners drawn to these ultra-minimal drifts. Emblematic in its own way, precisely because of the number of musicians involved and the determination with which they set out to not make music. The first, half-hour-long track contains only a handful of notes played on guitar and violin, brief ambient creaks and a dense, natural silence. In the following section, a mournful string duet emerges intermittently, recalling the barest work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Hard to believe, but slowly one begins to sense a build, a faint climax to the sonic act, where the isolated interventions don't converse with one another but simply attest to their mere presence. A meditative setting in which it becomes impossible not to notice the sparse acoustic epiphanies, and it's precisely there that the ultimate value of "Quartet" lies. Those who've approached it with the right mindset describe an experience capable of reopening the senses and moving them through its sheer, unadorned honesty, free of any ideological agenda, even amid the evident radicalism that defines it. A non-music that makes no claim to speak to us or convey anything, but simply is.

Moving into somewhat less forbidding territory, one could then trace a brief path through what we might call "narrative" non-music. A notable example is Pétrole (Entr'acte, 2009) by Lionel Marchetti and Yôko Higashi, a kind of film without images set in an imaginary Chernobyl still pervaded by invisible radiation. The atmosphere recalls the endless grey of the devastated post-industrial landscapes of "Perdition", which already made use of repeated, stretched-out ambient sounds to convey the oppressive, noxious air of an imaginary edge of the world. Here too, fragments of popular and modern music drift through the acoustic space and blend with Marchetti and Higashi's musique concrète, as if they were the last trace of a civilisation subject to a gradual, inexorable disappearance. In the distant, ever-present choirs, one seems to hear a faint echo of Luigi Nono's tapes: stripped of any residue of proletarian defiance, what remains is a muted lament, powerless before an already-certain catastrophe.

Among the most interesting results in this same vein, particular recommendation goes to Teatro Assente (Erstwhile, 2011) by the duo Taku Unami/Takahiro Kawaguchi. No hay banda, to borrow from the grotesque nightclub performance in Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" (lynchian, indeed): the action of a hypothetical stage and an audience made up of a single person is rendered abstract by the suppression of the senses - hearing excluded, of course. With the help of caption-like titles, we're invited to reconstruct the almost motionless scenes of this theatre of the mind; we can't know where these sounds come from, we can only perceive them and imagine a microcosm in which, through their interplay, they acquire a full meaning. Let's darken the room around us and lose ourselves in this post-dadaist happening, where once again it's up to us to unravel, as best we can, the tangle of meanings.

Actual narrative, on the other hand, lies at the heart of the long poetic piece The Middle Of Life (Die Ganze Zeit) (Gravity Wave, 2013), created by Michael Pisaro, Oswald Egger - author of the text and principal narrating voice - and Julia Holter, a rising "dark" star of American songwriting. Inspired by none other than the opening lines of Dante's Commedia - recited in various languages in the first part of the piece - the story winds its way through peaceful field recordings of a stream captured in Neufelden, Austria, interwoven with Pisaro's subtle electronic drones, the distant echo of a flute (Antoine Beuger) and ghostly orchestral passages. Only towards the end of the journey do the overdubs of Julia Holter's celestial voice come to the fore alone, like a wordless verse, before the piano leads Egger to close the circle.

Photographs (Erstwhile, 2013), the final chapter of a trilogy by Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet, delivers exactly what its title suggests, but in a curious and fascinating form: sonic photographs, field recordings filtered and electronically modulated to take on the shape of a faded memory, as if pulled from the dusty archives of Caretaker. A conversation on the street, a short car ride, a hymn sung during a liturgy, but also the quiet of a home's walls: for a few minutes we become part of other people's lives, watching them through a telescope whose lens wavers between faithful adherence to reality and abstraction, in an attempt to describe the memory of the senses.

enough still not to know (Sofa, 2015) is the third monolithic effort by the duo of Keith Rowe and John Tilbury, legendary members of AMM, and marks a new extreme milestone in the art of non-music. It's the creation of a sonic space that becomes both subject and object of the performance, in which the two musicians efface themselves, devoting three and a half hours to art for art's sake, to the patient wait before laying fingers on a chord, or on a scrap of paper, or on nothing at all. A colossal blank canvas on which Rowe's guitar is merely a shadow that occasionally passes through and leaves a small mark, while Tilbury sets the tonality, drawing sparingly, drop by drop, from his Feldman-esque repertoire.

The dedication with which the duo strives not to signify makes "enough still not to know" the ultimate fulfilment of a statement made long ago, presumably, by Andy Warhol: if so many people can accept that life has no meaning, why don't they do the same with art? Any other question about this (non-)"object" is answered by the performance itself: an extremely long sentence never written down, and therefore impossible to erase. The record could thus stand as the last bastion of resistance for free artistic expression, open to anyone simply willing to pay attention.

Many other fascinating releases fill out the catalogues of labels such as Erstwhile, Cathnor, Trente Oiseaux and Hibari, key reference points for this inexhaustible compositional strand, where the only measure is the courage to push beyond the conventions of what is labelled "music", in an attempt to explore something far vaster and more absolute: sound itself, the forms it can take as it's shaped, and the associations it can evoke when placed within the most varied contexts.

Listening experiences that may leave you puzzled, spark philological disputes, but can also fascinate, opening us up to countless other discoveries and, above all, re-educating us in the art of attentive listening, even if only once in a while. After several decades of avant-garde experimentation, the hope remains the same: not to escape musical form, but to expand it beyond the limits imposed by passing trends, feeling our way toward an "absolute" concept of sound, doing away with the arbitrary line between what is music and what isn't. It's up to you to break this taboo, once and for all.

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