Lambent Ambience: Home Fires

I have read it from a 1999 printout under the title "The Alchemy of Ambience" housed on a Finnish WWW site (at the Aalto University bookshop). It's no longer there. Have found its 1994 abstract on the International Symposium on Electronic Art archives: [ISEA94] Nicholas Gebhardt – Sounds Natural: Sonic Landscapes and the New Age. Slippage in the title between the program and the delivery?

The Way Back Machine of the Internet Archive preserves a copy from 1998
http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/spacescapes/j/19.html

The moment that interests me in Gebhardt's exploration of questions relating to a notion of "musical terrain" is the quotation from Stockhausen which precedes Gebhardt's pointing to the work of Deleuze and Guattari (The Refrain from Thousand Plateaus). First the Stockhausen:

We can now hear a well-tempered music of moments where "... every moment is important or nothing is important. A moment is not simply the result of preceding moments, nor the anticipation of moments to come. It is a personal, centred entity, with its own existence. A moment is not a fraction of a time-line, not a particle lasting a measured length of time. Instead, concentration on the now makes vertical incisions in the horizontal line of time to reach timelessness, which is what I would call eternity: an eternity that does not begin where time has ended but that can be reached at any moment." [Stockhausen cited in Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), pp. 101-102]

And now, the invocation of Deleuze and Guattari

So as an eternal music of sonorous moments, ambience necessarily begins to act upon the environment through which it moves, on the light, on other sounds, on smells, on the texture of the space, extracting from it various vibrations, rhythmic structures, decompositions, projections and transformation. [Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.348 Their notion of the "labour of the refrain" has also been vital to the shape of my analysis.]

Which led me to read the section and locate on p. 320 a return to the notion of terrain...

Members of the same species enter into rhythmic characters at the same time as different species enter into melodic landscapes; for the landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes.

This conjunction of character and landscape reminds me of Gertrude Stein's pieces published under the rubric of Geography and Plays and of her operas. Indeed most of her oeuvre. Rhythm and melody make us as readers attuned to process. It is as Ulla E. Dydo writes in the introduction to A Stein Reader about attention to the materiality of what is before us. Her appeal to the craft of painting allows for us to recursively think the terrain of "musical terrain" and the musicality as a passage marking that terrain. See

The energy of a piece comes in part from the act of writing, which enters it as value that can be read, just as hues and brush strokes can be read in a painting. A text must be transcribed with attention to the evidence of its making. Print, while it cannot always reproduce that process, need not wipe it out. Inside a text are the lines that carry the words, the hand moving on paper, line breaks and spaces dictated by notebook or leaf, size and folds of paper, pen or pencil forming words, the shape of a draft visible in the way its is copied into a notebook, and even the effort to end a work in the space of one notebook.

All perhaps archaic gestures. Other tools permit other glimpses to be heard... Take this line "Not a doctor to me not a debtor to me not a d to me but a c to me a credit to me." from Stein's "Next. Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp" and type (not cut and paste) it in a word processing program — you might encounter a series of suggested completions which disappear like notes and if you use text-to-speech program your eyes glide at a guided speed. In typing you also find the s e p a r a t e letters cause the speed of the fingering to alter. Instruments, interactors, and music!

And so for day 1171
26.02.2010