Perhaps, I am now in a bathtub filled with water. Water is dripping from the faucet to the surface of the water, and it echoes heavily in our ears. Am I listening to the dripping sound of the drip infusion beside the sickbed, quietly heading towards death? Or am I in a deep and strange dream? Around myself, various concrete sounds keep sounding subtly from the beginning though, they have a distinctly different texture from the sound of dripping water. I wonder if anyone is making sounds here... Anyway, it seems impossible to escape from here.

After about 1.5 minutes later, a repetitive electronic sound like the ringing of a gong begins to be heard. It's like being in a coma but I can barely hear the vague sounds of the outside world. However, my surroundings are still unclear. A little before 5 minutes, the electronic sound calms down for a while, and on the other hand, the outline of the concrete sound gradually becomes clearer. Sounds like musical instruments playing or dishes vibrating. Moreover, both types of sounds begin to harmonize gradually.

In the second half, sounds shift to be more complex and make my senses overload. It feels like past memories coming back momentarily. And finally, the curtain closes with an electronic sound.

'Dezember' is a work that might be said to be the summary of Schiefner's career so far. Although he was performing with bands and collaborations in Berlin, after moving to Marseille he stopped performing. He launched a label called Falt and has been devoted to it for a while, but later he regained his passion for concerts. However, then he had no interest in performing the way he had done before. Even if it was amusing, it seemed nonsense to him. So, he stopped using the things he used previously such as a guitar, tape players, and a loop machine. Now he works on his laptop. He prepares various samples inside his laptop, and does improvised performances using a controller. In this piece there is the sublimation of both his past and present styles.

Let’s get back on track. In this space of under 20 minutes, everything aurally is unstable. As if in a dream, each sound goes back and forth between the concrete sound and the abstract sound. Probably it is quite difficult to wake up from this deep dreamlike world he made.

Camilla Hannan's 'It Won't Be Like This All The Time' opens with long, rippling yet static tones slowly washing up in trailing highs. These eventually give way to the folding together of human and more than human sounds of (sub)urban Australia. Bell birds and trains, cicadas, and the swirling giddy shrieks of kids.

The folds of 'It Won't Be Like This...' are temporal, stretching, compressing, and reversing time in place. It brings to mind Social Interiors, a grouping of Shane Fahey, Julian Knowles, and Rik Rue who produced similarly darkly familiar soundscapes of the places of this continent. It sits too with the psychologically pressing music of Thembi Soddell, pushing at the edges of perceptions of sound. Essay film-maker Chris Marker creeps into mind as well as I write.

Hannan's practice is propelled by field recording but eschews the naturalism that so commonly dominates the practice, producing compositions that are representational but mysterious, slipping in and out of focus. It's electroacoustic composition but with a documentary like concern for offering a 'trace of the real' more consistently than a 'reduced listening'. Hannan feels out the tension between the recognised and unrecognisable in recorded sound, and I find myself wondering how she thinks about that boundary.

Listening to 'It Won't be Like This...' I fall into the place Hannan creates, only to find I am already there. Trains, water, birds, voices; here, and frequently, Hannan works with the most cliched of recorded sounds. However, she does so deftly, both creating and leaving space for listeners. 'It Won't Be Like This...' is rich with both mystery and familiarity.

The Artist and the Un-working of Work

Jasmine Guffond’s ‘Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity’ was produced out of a collaboration with Zabriskie Bookshop in Berlin. Invited participants were asked to select a book from the Zabriskie collection to respond to. Guffond chose David Graeber’s ironically titled Debt: The First 5000 Years. During his career, sadly curtailed by his premature death in 2020, Graeber, a renowned anthropologist and outspoken anarchist strongly attached to the Occupy Wall Street movement, directed much debate to the centrality of work in capitalist societies. As he and an ever-increasing panoply of contemporary critics of neoliberalism’s mantra of endless production, endless competition, have pointed out, much of what passes for waged work these days is in fact, ‘bullshit’. Graeber’s equally ironically titled book Bullshit Jobs, deploys a wealth of research including numerous primary case studies, to illustrate his thesis that capitalism’s obsession with work is largely a ruse: many workers today are employed to do tasks they feel are meaningless and contribute nothing to society. Waged work, even highly remunerated at times, simply becomes a means of disciplining individuals, keeping them in their place day in and day out in order that they don’t find better (re: potentially subversive and/or creative) things to do.

Doubly ironic about our society’s fixation with productivity and work is the fact that with the massive financialisation of the economy, most profits now are derived from rents and debt, with genuine production contributing a lamentably low percentage. This variety of capitalism favoured by the neoliberal markets that dominate global exchange, has rightly been referred to as ‘rentier capitalism.’ It is a system that channels ever greater profits to an ever-concentrated minority of the ultra-wealthy (around 0.01%). Of course, those with the means to profit via these means, effectively doing nothing except mobilising their existing wealth, have no problem with this situation. In fact, it’s likely they see this as evidence of their natural superiority, their role as modern-day feudal lords assured.

Unfortunately, traditional leftists also often fall into the trap of valorising the fetish of work as an ideal often over and above its actual necessity. Indeed, one of the best ways to irritate members of the economic right or left is to question the necessity of work as preordained. For the former, work is what proves the superiority of the boss over the worker, while for the latter work is the primary means by which an individual self-actualises their social potential. Alas, particularly with the rise and rise of various types of automation - a trend that will only expand exponentially - clinging to traditional left valorisation of work seems less and less credible. Besides, given the opportunity it is practically inevitable that many blue-collar workers around the world - especially those toiling in so-called ‘third world’ countries producing components for the luxury gadgets of the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ West - would prefer not to engage in habitually backbreaking and degrading activities.

If rentier capitalism is ‘socialism for the rich’ why, beyond the epidemic of precarity foisted on workers by economic elites, would workers not want to do less and actually enjoy their lives, “why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?” Moreover, it is a basic fact that democratic principles of equal representation do not pertain to the fundamental reality of the wage relation in which bosses have all the power and the final say. ‘Non-work’ does not mean the disappearance of all work (a ludicrous notion) but having the genuine option to choose meaningful work. It also means a situation where less pleasant but necessary work is shared throughout society and not just dumped on under-classes.

The paradox of Guffond’s ‘Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity’ is the fact that the artist’s own productive labour created it. Unforced creative labour for ‘no other reason’ however seems to escape the bondage of mere work. Indeed, the fact that art is a job that isn’t one has the potential to provoke resentment and jealousy in others. This is because for some, particularly certain varieties of conservatives, art is not ‘real work’ with the artist portrayed as just ‘mucking around’, a privileged timewaster with pretensions particularly within Anglocentric cultures. Yet this ‘timewasting’ aspect is also part of art’s power to provide alternative models for work that are affective, engaging, not only life-altering but life-affirming. Art as work is demonised by those who diminish its value for its unreliable profitability and lack of statistically quantifiable outcomes (beyond onerous neoliberal-induced accounts of ‘best of’, ‘most liked’, or ‘most profitable’, in the end the only thing that system can comprehend). At the same time, paradoxically, art’s singularity is what entices collectors who want some of the (in)action: if you are wealthy and still feel burdened and unfree at least you can buy representations of freedom.

And what of the music? Well, for one thing, Guffond refers to her composition as muzak, which it clearly isn’t. This relationship is central because muzak is essentially a functional musical form. It arose as the pseudo-science of ‘stimulus progression’ and is associated with the first subscription radio network. ‘Stimulus progression’ alternated fifteen minutes of muzak with fifteen minutes of silence. It followed a pattern beginning with a ‘low stimulus’ tune and over a series of six progressions, ended with a more up-beat one. Muzak was conceived as a utility to ‘benignly’ enhance worker productivity, the idea being that a sedate worker lulled into a false sense of comfort will work more efficiently.

So called ‘elevator music’ would be deployed over the years to theoretically elicit a state of calm in public spaces, including, appropriately, in lifts. More insidious about muzak within a burgeoning corporate-capitalist world, was the implicit need for an enveloping if not embalming, calm. If you were angry or frustrated at work, it was your fault and not the fault of the working conditions (and/or colleagues) you had to endure. With muzak there was no excuse for being ‘up tight’, the world was universally good and prosperity just around the corner. Even more sinister was the use of muzak in other corrective institutions like asylums where it was believed conflict-less tunes would produce unconflicted ‘healthy’ patients.

Today variations of muzak persist on several levels. On Spotify for example, an extractive platform notorious for minimising artist income associated with ‘plays’ of their music, subscribers may access, or ‘curate’, and programme, specific playlists corresponding to different moods, occasions, and times for the day. You can create, or access pre-programmed ‘moods’ for waking, walking, working, working out, relaxing, a romantic evening, a dinner party, or any other situation. Thus, as in many other instances of the way work works in neoliberal society, labour and leisure become indistinguishable, one is simply coextensive with the other. In a culture everywhere saturated with capitalist imperatives, it is no longer enough to pacify people’s minds and bodies at work, now one’s whole life is the object of controlled purposeful mediation. In the public arena too, predominantly in tele-visual form on big screens in train stations for example, the muzak of ads and commercial endorsements frequently fills the air: where there isn’t exposure to some form of external stimulus, some saccharine or ‘exciting’ distraction designed to provoke consumption, one can only fear what people might do or think.

More than muzak, tellingly in Japan during the bubble years of the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ (long passed), environmental music, kankyō ongaku, was produced for shopping centres and other public settings. The sophistication of this specific genre of ambient music saw a strange utopian attempt - understandable perhaps in lieu of the severity of post-WW II trauma and privation in that country - to conflate ethereal music with consumerism. Some of this music still plays in the locations for which it was written. Guffond’s ambient ‘muzak’ on the other hand, with its drifting horn and harp modulations interweaving foreground and background, is just too down-tempo for upbeat spending. Unlike ‘official’ muzak too, which is unerringly static in its feigned optimism, Guffond’s piece rises and falls in melancholic strains, expanding and contracting and broken occasionally by subtle discordant interruptions that momentarily puncture its overall organicism. If this is muzak it is possibly muzak for the end of the world, thoughtfully seeking transcendence through implied questioning after all avenues for shopping have been exhausted.

Alex Gawronski, Oct 2023

1. This exchange was facilitated by Berlin based Australian artist Felicity Mangan.

2. See, Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who owns the Economy and Who Pays for It? (Verso, NY/London), 2020.

paravox by Gail Priest is five explorations of human voice and the machine, which like an assemblage fold onto each other and into a whole. Each piece is an expression of agency within voice, across human and the machine, and transcends the dichotomy of organic vs inorganic sound.

As if arising from the back of the throat, ‘clone drone’ begins with looping vocal samples, half formed syllables, spreading through the stereo field, layering harmonically. Priest then begins a spoken treatise. She asks me to listen to her, to agree with her assessment of her voice: It is too thin, shrill, it reveals her fears, it lacks in profundity.

It is not Priest I’m hearing but her voice clone she has trained on reading text from a wildlife documentary, built and housed by a third-party platform. In order to maintain it, and probably avoid losing access to it, she rents it for a monthly fee as she ‘feels responsible for it’. It, not she. A digital intervention into her voice has freed the voice from the body to transform into a digital tool itself, creating a buffer for the ‘vulnerability revealed in the direct path from thought to voice’ and creating a way to shape voice to Priest’s ideal.

‘It’ is uncoupled from a body categorised by gender and subject to private and public spheres and the laws of time and space, bringing to mind Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’.

There is slight awkwardness to ‘it’, Priest speaking through the voice clone, the transformation is not flawless. But Priest doesn’t express grief for the human qualities of voice lost in this process, more a hopeful nervousness that she will one day be untethered from her trainee.

‘My mediated self will one day eclipse me’, it says.

As ‘clone drone’ ends, so does ‘it’s presence on the album. But their prompt lingers over the ensuing listening: Beyond words, language and the body, voice is a loaded information-bearing signal.

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paravox is a combine. ‘Para’ closely resembles, combines forms, and sits alongside, beside and beyond ‘vox’, voice.

Priest uses material gathered from the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (M.E.S.S), a haven of vintage and modern synthesizers available for public use, to sublimate herself into machines in the following three works. Now Priest’s bodily voice, both its physical manifestation and creative force, becomes driver, co-composer and carrier signal respectively.

The work titled ‘indeciphers’ suggests an incomprehensible exchange of language, two entities unable to parse each other. Priest speaks directly into the machine, powering the signal chain of a Doepfer modular. What could be heard as throat-singing folds into machinic ticking as the modular warps and jutters around the voice’s soft edges, the two trading places back and forth in the stereo field. Initially low in the mix, Priest emerges reciting a list of numbers. A barcode? A patent number? The translation is complete.

In ‘voltaic voices’ the bodily is left entirely behind. Priest opens up the filter on a series of synthesizers and I’m in a town hall mid-conversation. A relay of voices growling, whining, whispering, an LFO arcs up and stutters out. The modulations and fluctuations give some the quality of human breath, and I forget it’s the push of electricity through envelopes and gates I’m hearing, not air, diaphragms, mouths.

Priest’s presence, encrypted by vocoder in ‘symbiont mantras,’ feels translucent in tides of triangle and square waves, and my ability to discern between natural and synthetic sources falters, as if that taxonomy still matters.

In contrast to these subtle inter-leavings, ‘babel saints of the sales’ is an uncomfortable composition using online samples of AI voices sold by a tech company. The bright, ultra-compressed, slick voices overwhelm as they build in intensity, repeated, and layered in several accents and languages, peaking as an unintelligible wall of words. One phrase stands out from the rest, ‘my voice is very trustworthy and mellow, perfect for sales videos and video ads’, as a neat distillation of the limits of mainstream tech to imagine possible uses for AI voices and our limits as a training species.

The ‘gradual disembodiment’- a term used by Priest’s voice clone- that occurs across these explorations is non-linear. As voice moves away from the body it does not necessarily move toward the machine, but rather the two inhabit each other in mutable ways. Like Haraway arguing we are all already cyborgs, paravox positions Priest, her voice and ‘it’ as already the machine, building agency from within.

Returning to the prediction that Priest’s mediated self will eventually eclipse her, I wanted to ask her voice clone/ ‘it’:

Will you, one day, be yourself eclipsed? What will your voice sound like then?

Answer