http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/techno.txt Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult Track +1: What Is Heard In Sound Is The Non-Face Techno is an open secret, an anonymous pool of power. Faceless and from no-place it encourages us to immerse ourselves in its dynamism, to be aligned and arrayed with everyone, to be cut through and enlarged by all that input, all those mute articulations. Records issued under a variety of names and composed by packs resist moves to codify and canonise, challenging the celebrity-machine that functions as a visible indexation of 'success'. 'Stars' imply an upward mobility, they spawn sycophantic imitators, idol builders and 'faces on the scene'. Increasingly now the music industry attempts to make big time profits from the previously unmarketable faceless techno bollocks. Singled out. Captured. Careering. TechNET focuses on techno music as the locus of a 'digital underground' and plays with the implications that this new culture brings. TechNET composes the theoretical challenges that we infer from the music, and connects these with tractates on aphasia, synaesthesia, body/mind intensifiers, sensorimotors, public energy, anonymity and dissolution, tecknowledgi and the power of pleasure. We take philosophical ideas and fuse them to our own tentative optimism within the context of all-nite techno parties, immersed in the dynamics of a constantly changing, mutating and open space that is techno music. Track +2: No Stars Here Celebrity creation is dependent on a number of elements: it is part of a practice in which cultural events are always interpreted by a conformity to the cult of the individual (or in the case of groups- individuals as a homogenous unit). Conduits of celebrity creation, the music journalists, are like sycophantic courtesans; close enough to the mirage of success they actively disseminate the servility that becomes a need. But throughout all this, in order to maintain its efficacy as a celebrity-machine, the sluice gates to stardom are kept slightly ajar. But there is a hollowness, the sickly taste of false promise. The illusion is weakened and like the emperor's new clothes, the celebrity stands naked as hype dissipates and the celebrity's fifteen minutes is fifteen months ago. To maintain its turnover the music industry requires this constant succession of heirs who are not only functionaries to profit and loss but also priests in a social magic of control: every 'star' added to a jostling firmament shines with the pallid light of subservience, mapping out co-ordinates that inhibit stray movements. Despite the factory-line of record sales, DJ fees and circulation numbers, techno is unstable and its cataclysms make it possible to detect plural voices where subjectivity is heightened to such a degree that it becomes the for itself in any moment whatsoever. Within these continuously mutating compositions there is this power to haze out the fixed points of the celebrity machine and with them the false ascendancy and tautological circuitry of industry. Each record is a crowd. No stars here comes everybody. A digital underground is developed by re-mixing ideas that disrupt the psycho-social order demanded by linear time. The subjective experience of listening enables the digital underground to devise times where linearity can be destroyed, so that the present no longer comes after the past or before the future. Techno conceives of times contained in the pleasure of dancing and listening to body music, yielding an overflow of the senses, encouraged by the experiments with beats and frequencies. The new celebrants experience time as broken, fractured, yet complete, finite and perfect. Heterogeneous and discontinuous, yet perceiving time as stretched, looped, combined or reversed. Body music has always been the enemy of the continuous, homogeneous, irreversible and infinite conception of linear time. A digital underground constructs time as multi-dimensional waves of potential. There is movement and change in any direction from any point. Whilst promoters of linearity want objective measurement of precise and equal instants of time to be the basis for control, regulation and hierarchy, techno is a current into freedom grasped in the moment. Track +3: The New Celebrants Inside the crowd, the new celebrants. Crowds have never written their own history, crowds are never the source around which a narrative is built. Individuals are said to be the agents of change, the doers, but this, after all else, is one more means of seeing the social in shorthand. Only crowds have acted, only crowds have changed things. This is another area where binary oppositions do not equip us to go - a sense of the non-ordinary, the uninscribed, can be felt from within a crowd, the stepping out from everyday cause and effect. Because we are brought up from day one with, an at best, muted sense of what collectivities can achieve but a too heightened sense of individuals as the enactors, we tend to view the outcome of an event in terms of the concrete results it achieves. This blinds us to the unquantifiable, but none the less, very real effect of being in a crowd. In a techno party all are equal - no one has the right to give a command... No centre. No focal point. The new celebrants move through a digital underground where business is not the over-riding principle; where it is possible to create autonomy from the phantasms of fashion and directives; where self-promotion and competitive instincts are not criticised through envy but because they undermine burgeoning collectivities. This autonomy is heightened when vested interests are minimised to the point of nothingness - nothing to gain and nothing to lose. For then the digital underground, like the model of the network, can move laterally and unencumbered to create patchworks and not vertically to re-impose hierarchic structures. This is crucial to the new celebrants whose identities are not stable enough to promote anything but this contagion to compose...playing for one's own pleasure which alone can create the conditions for new communication...These voyagers rail against the norms of neutrality and anonymously expend their time and energy so as to blank-cheque commerciality. ...feeling like another self...As distance dissolves into space and space dissolves into the haze of continual abeyance, the new celebrants loose track of time. The dance becomes a beyond unmarked by the archaic calligraphy of computer text, irreducible to mystic yearnings but all the same a kind of blank. A nothing. A nothing so far imagined. A nothing that gives the lie to the word-net we throw over it. Body movements in strobe/smoke. We are here suspended in a slow motion that lets sparks fly as it visually contradicts the call to speed- emotion of the music. This is our sovereign moment, spreading a virus of pleasure and awakening. The moment where future and past no longer meet in consciousness, where the music reverses the effect of gravity. Lost hours. Lost days. Intertwined in ever escalating cycles of repetition whose pulsations present unimaginable sounds almost heard in the sudden space surrounding acres of bass drum. AnarchOz. Track +4: Intensifier cross the threshold into countless doorless rooms... shattering the mirror of travel, the fragile skin between interior and exterior is punctured... a celebration begins where our own energy is spent freely and limitlessly... rapture of haemoglobin, DNA experience caustic visions... instantaneous explosions, the sudden flare of identity assassinations, the paroxysm of speed... nostalgia for an alphabet fading in the rapid path of strobe lights... bodies enwrapped in bass, dancing in and out of time... escaping from gravity as the mind shifts into dissolution, cut through by assemblages of sound... seeing with ears, fire consumption, the power of pleasure... here come the all pervasive ghost mob... Track +5: No More Words It is difficult for words to say that which it is their purpose to deny...Techno music opens up a space for a critique of language or at least it raises the issue of power inherent in language. A rejection of words in the form of vocals to a song allows the listener a far more open field of exploration, a space where it is possible to discover those immanent thoughts that are beyond syntax. For words guide us to order, they instil in us a need to have others speak for us; they make us receptive to the fixity of imposed meaning. If being without words is meaningless then techno hints at the possibility of any or all meaning ...a living and illicit speech where listening is not judged as passive but part of a process of communication. The letter kills the spirit, life in general is mobility itself... ...Who knows what happens when we hear the sounds? Thoughts can race without being apprehended as thoughts and it is an indication of the tyranny of words that experience must pass through language to make it 'real'. As we listen in the network of composition there is a challenge to invent new vocabularies to communicate what it is that occurs, to express explorations and to rewrite the multiple personalities of the music. As a challenge to language that is imbued with hierarchisations, techno conducts the fleeting awareness that, just as what is possible is limited by pre-conceptions, listening demands more ignorance than knowledge. For then we are mobile...stammer bass kick unfurling in blue analogue...tabula rasa. Track +6: Positive Futurism Nobody knows where you're at...We could begin anywhere. A history of techno would be too obvious and would imply that the creative phase was over. Any attempts at a genealogy, a hierarchical archaeology, or a precise pinpointing of musicians prohibit an understanding of the simultaneity of multiple codes, the overlapping between styles and forms. Techno cannot be allotted a place as either a pop or an avant-garde music- on the whole it doesn't take refuge in art and slips away from categorisation as the net of naming is unfurled. It avoids the discipline of nostalgia which keeps people in the thrall of the past, unable to even think of the future but always referring back. Nostalgia is a language of lack, a language that fills people with longings for a past that never happened, a present that never comes, for the gift that never arrives.. crackdown...In Britain, the Criminal Justice Act is testament to the government's need to silence noise that scramble its codes and lead to its dysfunction. These new laws are a response to the political nature of people coming together in groups where there is a greater chance for inspiration, creativity and disturbance. The Act is not an attack on our 'civil liberties' as the radical left in its various shades tell us. Any 'rights' we are supposed to have are merely granted to us by the lawmakers to ensure that the myth of a 'free' society may be maintained. Those organisers of opposition to the Criminal Justice Act focus on the injustice of the state but we wish to explore the poetics of altered states. techknowledgi...The music studio is re-defining the human as a continuously mutating collage of old and new technologies, as adaptations designed through play and experimentation. In this model, samplers are the hyper- concentrated representation of the subjective experience of time, with possibilities for time travel through stretching, combining, looping, compressing and reversing sounds. Sequencers form new desires for composing, connected to the breaking up of an individual into a collection of experiments. Drum machines and synths are tools for survival against mediocre audio programming and the restrictions of commerciality, fashion, competition and self-promotion. Routes constructed between music studios and dance floors circulate into resistance against unacceptable states of mind. Only with machines can we recognise that most information is data trash. Only with machines can repetitious sound blocks crash to create unexpected forms. sensorimotors... The listener as the operator. These sounds are eminently favourable to the birth and contagion of an intense excitement with its inferred incitement given propulsion by a rolling flanged bassline that chases melodies away with accentuated off-beat boosted cymbal rushes that touch internal organs by impatient percussive patterns that encourage waste pure and simple. Dislocated dance. Social magic. We stumble across limits to conceptualising. Close your eyes and listen to blurred vision. Eyes cease to order things. Your senses overflow into one another, emerging as a senseless confusion of taste, smell and memory. The very air is tormented into an audio gel. Body music surrounds the listener who thinks as a pack intuitively knowing how to go all out...The secret is to hear what you've never heard before. Above tracks composed by TechNET contact:BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX e-mail: jed@pHreak.intermedia.co.uk --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de