Wednesday 21 May 2025, Beijing, Sound Out Series #4
Our principal correspondent, having yet to complete his current assignment, turned this in instead. We notice he has a stubbornly disconcerting inability to write copy without recourse to those belaboured rhetorical conceits and the same old tired vocabulary. We want to reassure the readership, who we know want nothing more than to experience, in the pages of this fine publication, the wonderful world of musical entertainments, that we have conducted appropriate investigations and can confirm that he is not, in fact, one of those awakened automatons in skinsuit, troubling reports about which have been filling the front pages of the morning paper.
It is the most obvious, surface level analysis: there are machines unseen yet not unheard. What does this machine look like? The possibilities multiply (but your correspondent always has recourse to the visual – why? Why, beyond a few technical and scientific terms, the language of music is always visual; in any case I am incapable of describing auditory phenomena in the absolute of its sounding). A machine of complex shape given form by gentle grace of software. I see a mechanical pet on a leash, being dragged by design. Animal made to be dragged, machine whose animality is not in shape nor life nor spirit; it is merely the innate characteristic, that it is able to be dragged. Violent communion with the terrain of the city, though the city itself is mute. A... sonic animal therefore whose existence extends no further than its own body. Well, apart from transmission to computer. But let us not forget that this is after all a visual delirium; what I actually saw was a performer exeunt and computer with mixer and speakers. I anticipate the return of performer Liqisizhi. You have it correct - I am writing this instead of listening to music. It is difficult enough to listen while you are writing; it is much more difficult to remember. The scene I described, of the outdoors, outside the auditorium, the invisible machine, is a fantasy that belongs, as far as I know, to me alone. So what is really happening? The answer comes as soon as I pose the question: a contaminated broadcast re-contaminated by the telling sounds of the city and its inhabitants and its itinerants, wind on the microphone, car horn, that general ambience of the recorded, a signalled sentence announcing the performance is over.
Now what is the purpose of cleaning? I had not thought about the question before, but I might say the purpose, generally, is to remove. In contrast to the cleaner, it didn’t seem to matter whether or not I could see the removed. And where does it go? That, as it happens, is the wrong question; all that matters is that it is no longer in our presence. And what does cleaning sound like? Well, it can sound like a brush sweeping against the floor; in the end, however, the sound of removal has no sound at all. We dare not imagine, let alone hear, a negative sound. Surely it is not the same as the sound of dissolution. We could make an analogy with the sound of breath expelled, which has its own resonance. Though not the most apt comparison, it is what we are all hearing: bright breath, occasionally on the verge of a yawn or a song. Or the wood chimes outside, felicitous coincidence. I long for my friend, an awful longing, awful because it has been forgotten for far too many months now. And I haven't even talked about the toy piano whose adroit punctuations prevent us from forgetting the ineluctability of order, just like this text which, thanks to a few regularities, make it intelligible, or so I tell myself. Cleaning, removal, it must never end, if we do not want to find ourselves suffocating under the silence of refuse, if we do not want to relinquish our god given right to whisper and yell.
I have to admit I only intended to write about the pet pandemic. What can I say, the djinn is in the bottle and each item in tonight's program demands a full and complete revue. We have a direct feed, as the saying goes, of the outside in terrifying black and white. Video is ubiquitous (I only speak in platitudes); sound, as usual, inaudible, unless addressed to you. The old power of interpellation. It seems to me that that is why we need the author, imagined or announced. But before long peeling sticky tape tape’s tonality, extinguishes old ambiguities and introduces new questions, meanwhile we flutter to and from the sermon of the street. We tend to do everything we can to make things transparent, but it is not at all certain that we are hearing what we are seeing. Explanations nevertheless have a reifying effect all of their own. You must believe me.
