UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
MINORITARIAN MUSIC
REVISITING MUSICAL NOISE
THROUGH CINEMA
OF JIM JARMUSCH
A Master's Thesis
by
Lev Fišer,
a student of Arts and Culture: Music Studies,
Graduate School of Humanities,
University of Amsterdam
supervisor: prof. dr. Julia Kursell,
Second reader: prof. dr. Barbara Titus,
Acknowledgements
I express my warmest gratitude to prof. dr. Julia Kursell, my supervisor, and prof. dr. Barbara Titus, the second reader. They gave me considerably more than merely official supervision and grading. During their lectures and consultations with them, I have gained knowledge to be cherished for years to come.
This text would not exist without infallible support of my family. My parents have represented a point of stability in a life of uncertainty both in research and beyond. My friends can never be thanked enough for their kindness and reassurance.
* * *
Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia ensured that my research was generously financed, for which I remain thankful. The ministry provided me with a grant for the entire academic year.
Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to approach the music that is used by Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of
Control (2009), a film he scripted and directed. On the basis of close listening and viewing,
selected songs from the soundtrack were read as minoritarian music. Minoritarian music is a term newly introduced in this thesis, and it serves to conceptualise the particular musical expression either created or insterted by Jarmusch into his film. It is an attempt to (re)theorize musical noise and timbre. During the course of the research, significant correlations with the idea of the minor by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were observed. Hence, findings of their work have been included into the argument in favour of minoritarian music.
The soundtrack case studies are songs and song excerpts by the groups Bad Rabbit, Boris, Sunn O))), and The Black Angels. They are based on electric guitar distortion, monotonous repetition, and superposition of disparate timbres. A comparative case study analysis to once again scrutinize the concept of minoritarian music is also included.
Key Words
Contents
0 Opening ... 5
Methodology ... 8
1 Jarmusch as a Musician ... 9
The Limits of Control and Its Shift to Music ... 12
2 Noise and Recognition ... 17
On Timbre ... 20
3 Toward Minoritarian Music ... 25
On Minor Literature ... 25
Toward Sound ... 26
Minoritarian Music ... 28
Minoritarian Music as a Material Imprint ... 32
4 Expressions of Minoritarian Music ... 34
Repetition and Its Frame ... 34
Yorgos Lanthimos and Music in The Lobster ... 38
Voiceover Narration and Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no. 1 ... 40
A Music that Lingers: Fuzzy Reactor, Police Sirens, and You on the Run ... 46
Coinciding Events: Sunn O))) and Boris in the Kidnapping Scene ... 53
5 Conclusion ... 58
6 Bibliography ... 60
5
0 Opening
What if we fail to take music for what it is? Sometimes, what seems banal might not be such at all. Uncertainty remains regardless of experience, knowledge, and intuition giving the verdict of banality. Such disposition rarely seems to coincide with a scrutiny of our judgement. Understanding seemingly trivial things according to their proper content is central to the films of Jim Jarmusch. It deeply relates to their music as well. The object of this research are the songs of a 2009 film that he scripted and directed, The Limits of Control.
The film takes place in today's Spain. A mysterious loner is hired to carry out a criminal job. His contacts only give him cryptical information about things he needs to do to reach his target. The assignment involves countless hours of waiting. Days sometimes pass without him meeting anybody. He is often instructed to wait at a café, where time elapses as he observes the world go by with people attending to their daily errands, birds flying, bells ringing. There are occasions when he is joined by one of the informants. He silently listens to their tirades on art, science, human perception, and history. Each interlocutor tells about a different discipline – music, cinema, science, art in general, hallucination. The lone protagonist then presents a matchbox he has been given by the previous contact. The boxes contain coded messages which he promptly reads and swallows. By starting each day with tai-chi exercises, he trains the awareness of the surroundings. When in Madrid, he makes four visits to modern art gallery Reina Sofia, and views four different paintings in total, immersed in art and his relentless concentration.
It may be the case that this film requires repeated viewings, since it lacks a coherent plot to immerse the viewer. Whereas the story is simplistic, the film's power lies in its atmosphere, determined by thought-out frame composition and music. In fact, the latter was so important to the director that he decided to record some of it himself – in cooperation with a band that he at that time was a member of, Bad Rabbit.
It is here that our critical doubt may arise once again. How can something that is exclusively atmospherical contain artistic value? Should we assume that there is no artistic value, but a different meaning behind, what could that be? Rather than a cinematic work that addresses the thinking viewer explicitly, The Limits of Control leaves a bothering imprint on one's artistic
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perception. Not particularly fulfilling or pleasant at first, it is a bothering piece of cinema that burns slowly inside us, questioning our critical judgement of film – and especially music. How can the impact of music in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control on me as a viewer be explained? How can the meaning conveyed by this music be theorized, and which musicological frameworks correspond to it? How can a subjective interpretation of cinematic music be articulated as a general approach to music listening? This thesis argues that despite the fact that any film music is embedded in cinematic narrative, film serves not only – or even not at all – as a skeleton for the songs to tie upon. Instead, it provides a superposition of meaning to the music. In The Limits of Control, this makes the music convey its proper substance whether it is reproduced in- or outside of the film. The case studies are used to prove this.
Along with the film by Jarmusch as a primary research object, a Yorgos Lanthimos film from 2015 will serve as secondary case study to conduct a comparative analysis. The Lobster is considered for its recurring use of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no.1, second movement. The test analysis proposes that any cinematic music can become minoritarian if minoritarian framing is imposed on it. However, the comparative enquiry also shows that music turned minoritarian by sound imposition does not exist outside of the imposing context. Selected excerpts in The Lobster show another, contextually confined way of music becoming minoritarian whereas The Limits of Control represent a source of minoritarian music that has place even outside of cinematic context.
Music in Jarmusch's films is given a concise coverage in Sara Piazza's Jim Jarmusch: Music,
Words and Noise. The book provides an engaging comparison betwen the earlier films – his
graduation attempt Permanent Vacation, and a project where Jarmusch worked together with Wim Wenders – Lightning over Water, directed by Wenders and Nicholas Ray. Piazza compares the films' concluding sequences, but stops at short descriptions of their music, even though it is the sountrack that she claims to be a decisive factor in the comparison.1 More
importantly, she touches upon the power of music's projection, stating that music renders a passage of time perceivable – even visually, and thus impacts the overall film's expression.2
1 Her approach to the music of the Lightning sequence consists of labeling it as “[...] a saxophone and piano [that]
strike up a melancholy tune,” whereas the Vacation sequence features “John Lurie's saxophone [which] blends in with the slow, constant and, at times, slightly dissonant Indonesian gamelan [...],” as well as Lurie improvisation on Over the Rainbow theme. Compare Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 71.
2 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83: “In the white monochrome image [Antoni Tàpies' painting Gran llençol (1968),
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Piazza does not discuss cinematic influence on music. My thesis fills the ensuing discursive gap. Firstly, I propose that music in The Limits of Control does not change the film narrative, but rather that the music's substance is amplified by the visuals and the constitution of the soundtrack. Secondly, given that my close listening largely involved only listening without watching, this thesis shows that music preserves such emphasis on its substance also when not performed in cinematic environment.
Sofia Glasl's Mind the Map: Jim Jarmusch as a Cartographer of Pop Culture3 more
systematically addresses Jarmusch's correlation of sound and cinema. However, the phenomena that have originally described sounds become analogies that help her interpret his films. For example, sampling becomes a narrative trait in his film Coffee and Cigarettes. Rather than to concern music, it is used to explain recurrences of certain phrases from the dialogue. Similarly, tracking is used to explain an overposition of character traits on protagonists by the films that have allegedly inspired Jarmusch.4 On the other hand, conceptualizing sound effects
such as resonance and feedback as cinematic, not music theory5 presents a starting point for
interpreting the music in cinematic sense. Filmic dimensionality of assembling and then retouching contents of the frame also corresponds to Jarmusch's idea of musical collaboration, as he stated it in a conversation on his project with the lutenist Jozef van Wissem:
What's so beautiful about Jozef's music is [that] he uses very minimal structures like palindromes . . . I see it like he is painting the foreground and the details and I'm putting a kind of wash of the background in of clouds and trees . . . I really think of it as Jozef's music and I am like . . . on film sets you have a guy called a ʻscenicʼ who paints all the backgrounds, you know, if you need a wall touched up or to make it look older, and I'm kind of the scenic guy in this duo. I really like that position a lot because I love music that has spaces in it that make it cinematic.6
who cannot take his eyes off it, the power of the music's projection and appeal assumes – as far as the spectator is concerned – the crucial role of rendering the passage of time perceivable and, in some way, visible.”
3 The original title is Mind the Map: Jim Jarmusch als Kartograph von Popkultur (Marburg: Schüren Verlag,
2014).
4 Glasl, Jim Jarmusch, 69–73. 5 Ibidem, 63–68.
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Methodology
Methodology consisted of close watching and listening to the case studies. To facilitate collection of information, transcription techniques were used. More precisely, some soundtrack excerpts were rendered into space-time notation7 or regular Western staff notation. Since
numerous examples were impossible to convey graphically, verbal descriptions had to be used. Such labels were applied particularly to timbrally complex music, and mostly concern the sound of distorted electric guitar. The method was that of Robert Morris' contour theory as applied by Ciro Scotto.8
To theorize music that fails to yield analytical results if approached by studying pitch sets, rhythmical pattern development, or chordal harmony, I have decided to use the concepts of noise and timbre. Noise is understood, in part after Gilles Deleuze, as an empirical entity that is initially disregarded by our perception.9 As such, it represents a new way of perceiving music
given that the listener succeeds in acknowledging noise in the first place. Timbre is in a close relation to the problem of noise perception. An analytical term, it involves the recognition that noise mostly fails to receive.
This entire work is an attempt to derive minoritarian music as a term to describe sonorous expressions that are bound to noisiness that is in turn produced with the loss of the meaning – the significance that has been addressed by genre-oriented music theory through time. In sculpting the idea of minoritarian music, the primary method remains immersion into the case studies, whereas the secondary research technique is that of close reading, especially of the work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.10 The minor in minoritarian music correlates to
their idea of the minor. Nevertheless, an effort has been put into distinguishing between what shows in the relevant film music, and what is proposed by the two authors. The connection
7 This notation divides the five line staff longitudinally into units of half a second. According to a temporal scale
thus sketched, note heads are placed so as to designate their pitches. Their duration and timing is conveyed by the graphical distance between the heads.
8 Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.” Music Theory Spectrum 38, no. 2
(2017): 178–199.
9 Compare Higgins, “A Deleuzian Noise,” 53, italics in the original: “[...] the ground or noise will be the absolute
difference of empirically resounding sound as given to the listener's senses, and the signal will be that which the listener may recognize through the application of a model of listening.” The empirical ground of noise is not disregarded entirely, but only in its part that spreads beyond what can be acknowledged by the listening model.
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between close viewing and listening on the one hand and detailed reading of their texts on the other is always that of correlation, never a bare application of Deleuzoguattarian theory. This thesis contains five parts, numbered from zero to four. Parts 0 and 1 stand for the general opener and for the introduction to Jarmusch as a musician, respectively. Chapter 2 presents the concepts of noise, recognition, and timbre. Afterwards, outline and explanation of minoritarian music are presented in correlation to minor literature (3; Toward Minoritarian Music). Subsequently, Expressions of Minoritarian Music feature analyses of selected excerpts in The
Limits of Control, and a concise rounding up of the the findings. The chapter also includes a
comparative analysis of minoritarian music in The Lobster, preceeded with a proper introduction to the examples. Lastly, the conclusion as number 5 sums up findings of the research.
1 Jarmusch as a Musician
Jim Jarmusch directs and scripts films that are distinctive for their slow pace, cryptical dialogue, depictions of everyday life details, and last but not least, important role of music.
Permanent Vacation, his first feature film, marked the idea of the wandering protagonist, lost
in existential uncertainty. Similarly, questions of one's life perspective permeate Down by Law, where the lives of three men disintegrate after they have been thrown into jail and coincidentally placed in the same cell, facing their striking dissimilarities. In Night on Earth, taxi drivers are inspired by the passengers who represent entirely different modes of existence, not to mention Dead Man's William Blake, a bookkeeper who became a wanted killer, wandering the North American wilderness with his Indian friend Nobody. While some of the films have been acclaimed by critics and audience alike, there are works that many consider borderline experiments with the viewers' taste and patience. As Marc Masters has written, “Whatever story he's telling, Jarmusch likes to give his characters – and his audience – ample time to think about it.”11 This holds particularly true for The Limits of Control (2009).
Jarmusch states that the artists who have really inspired him are those who express themselves in their own form. Citing film directors (John Cassavetes and Robert Frank) and musicians (Ornette Coleman, Thelonius Monk) alike, he reliquishes respective formal constraints of music and cinema. Treating music cinematically by becoming a “sound scenic,” and cinema
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musically by structuring films as seemingly random sequences of ordinary events, he seems to focus more on the content itself than its ordering.12 It is as if the form of his stories were not
determined by him, but by chance of everyday occurrences – and this applies to music as well. His cinema plays with what we disregard is insignificant – the workings of everyday life. The way coffee is drunk, the manner in which a cigarette is smoked or a bird has flown is central to his films. So central that the story might indeed be told through them, even though it would sometimes lack unities of time, place, and action.13
As a musician, he started out in 1981 Lower East Side New York as a keyboardist and singer in the group Del-Byzanteens. The music was deemed art-punk and compared to Velvet Underground and Television.14 The song that had a greater impact on the scene was Girl's
Imagination. It contains a bass ostinato along with a driving drumming pattern that is at times
rejoined by repetitive guitar chords or short melodic fillings underlined by synthesizer sounds. The highly repetitive structure, over which unfold the lyrics, is dominated by a strong tonal center that is enforced by frequent semitonal deflections in an upward direction, giving the song a phrygian feeling.
To trace his subsequent musical development means to leap two decades into 2009 when Jarmusch, organist and sound engineer Shane Stoneback, and drummer Carter Logan recorded songs to be inserted in The Limits of Control.15 The name of the band was Bad Rabbit. They
issued only one album, Film Music from the Limits of Control.16 However, their efforts
continued under the name Sqürl, and resulted in a soundtrack for Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch's next cinematic project. Subsequently, they released a trilogy of albums. EP 1 and
EP 2 were issued in 2013, whereas EP 3 came out the year afterwards. Recently, the band also
produced EP 260, as well as album collections of songs from the films Only Lovers Left Alive and Patterson, along with a session from Third Man Records studio.17
12 See Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84.
13 Cf. Aristotle (transl. by H. S. Butcher), section VIII. For the disunity of action, consider the films by Jarmusch
Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth, the plots of which are fragmented into shorter stories connected by
the protagonists' profession and repetition of certain phrases.
14 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 63.
15 Sqürl World, “Bad Rabbit: The Limits of Control,” a website entry at
http://www.squrlworld.com/bad-rabbit-the-limits-of-control/
16 Ibidem. The album features four songs: Sea Green Sea, Dawn, Dusk, Blue Green Sea. 17 Sqürl World, “About Sqürl,” a website entry at http://www.squrlworld.com/about-sqrl/
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In 2012, Jarmusch records two albums with the lutenist Jozef van Wissem: Concerning the
Entrance into Eternity, and The Mystery of Heaven. The songs feature arpeggiated chords on
lute repeating and gradually embellished, as on Apokatastatis (Restoration) from Entrance. Whereas Wissem establishes a firm ostinato with a particular regard to the lower end of lute sonic spectrum, Jarmusch provides distorted electric guitar insterts, based on a play with feedback. They are static, monolithic sounds that despite being in a duet with lute live their own expression, since they embrace the anachronism between historical connotations of lute, and electric guitar timbre. Jarmusch and Wissem seem to play one past the other. Each infused in his own envisaging of the present musical moment, their parts differ fundamentally in the idea of attack, and tone. Each part is thus only a division of the whole, with their interplay pushing the albums forward. In The Mystery of Heaven, lute gives more space to the electric guitar. For example, it is entirely absent from Flowing Light of the Godhead. These two albums feature no percussion, and except for a brief spoken word contain no lyrics either. As for the rudimentary harmonic underlining with tonal functions and intense play with different kinds of guitar distortion, Wissem and Jarmusch clearly relate to Sqürl.
Sharing similarity with Wissem-Jarmusch projects, Purple Dust18 by Sqürl is an example of
Jarmusch's use of feedback. Feedback is a technique used to sustain and highlight the tone generated on the electric guitar. As the feedback loop is established, a high-pitched howling ensues, and represents an uninterrupted continuation, albeit with a transposition, of the previously rendered tone. Feedbacking signal is considerably higher in amplitude. In spite of the possibility of the mastering process to reduce the difference between volume of the regular tone and the feedback, Sqürl rarely do that. Instead, Purple Dust features a distinctively feedbacking ending which is a loud indulgement in the use of this technique. The howling sonority emerges through the sound mix, and makes the overall listening experience more dimensional.
To achieve dimensionality, the band make ample use of the stereophonic recording technology to distribute melodic figures around sound space. Their music is constructed as a net of disparate sounds, spread around the listener's imaginary hearing space. The most important factor in producing the feeling of musical space is the positioning of the band's amplifiers and drums on live concerts. Moreover, this also depends on the studio mixing of tracks in the left or right signal. The band uses sharp volume contrasts between sounds as another dimensional
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emphasis. The sounds are distinguished by their original pitch (sometimes, it is hard to discern), and by articulation. Electric guitar string bending is common, and is performed in small intervals. If there are multiple tones involved in one sonorous event, the resulting “melody” has a very narrow span, dominated by movement of semitones and whole tones. In Purple Dust, repeating notes are avoided in favour of the regular oscillation of the tone's amplitude, achieved by sound effects, that results in a close imitation of a quickly reiterating tone.
From the songs for The Limits of Control, the expression of Sqürl has evolved in two directions: One is a greater focus on chord progression, as witnessed in Francine Says19, where the
transitions between chords are more clearly pronounced, as well as denser. To illustrate, a Bad Rabbit recording Sea Green Sea is essentially built upon one D major chord, whereas Francine
Says explores the main functions of G major tonality, adhering to the principles of verse and
chorus structure: twice the verse, then the chorus with a distinctive harmonic twist, even if only a temporary orbiting around a minor harmony. Furthermore, Sea Green Sea does not feature a distinction between verse and refrain, which Francine Says does. Even in EP 1, denser harmonic rhythm is already present – compare Little Sister, an irregular twelve-bar blues with swift chord changes at the cadences. Additionally, Sqürl songs started to feature vocals by Jarmusch, whereas Bad Rabbit works have no lyrics. On the other hand, Sea Green Sea features a rich texture of guitar “licks,” small melodic fragments that Francine Says lacks in its constrained verse-chorus form, instead adhering to functional harmony. To sum up, soundtrack music for the film is less clearly moulded into a coherent form, but rather relies on a complex texture. The second way of development, which seems to be inspired by noise rock from other bands featured in The Limits of Control soundtrack, leads to an even greater emphasis on guitar distortion. It is prevalent on EP 260, especially in The Dark Rift.20
The Limits of Control and Its Shift to Music
The music of Bad Rabbit has much in common with the everyday feeling of Jarmusch films. Its particularity and eclecticism raise a thought that the sonorous material is indeed assembled spontaneously. His statement that he prefers music to contain cinematic spaces is only an additional argument telling us that such music is not aleatoric, but most likely an improvisatory
19 EP 3, ATP/Recordings [ATPREP06D] 2014, digital audio streaming. 20 EP 260. Sacred Bones Records [SBR-179] 2017, digital audio streaming
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creation, intentionally adhering to a diversity of small events in his films.21 Such a diversity
would then span across filmic events in narrative focus, and those that are merely in the background. A description of Bad Rabbit on the Sqürl website reads: “Their sound is percussion-heavy with detuned and droning guitars, loops, and cassette recorders, drenched in feedback. The music melds everything from chopped & screwed hip-hop to country to stoner metal and soundtrack-like atmospheres.”22 Especially suggestive is the designation that the
songs contain soundtrack characteristics.23 Curiously enough, even certain later works of Sqürl
feature the same description – that the musicians had in mind a score for an imaginary film. However, sountrack is not merely a cinematic score. It also designates a succession of sonorous events, a combination of sound from disparate sources, and a final mix of all sonorities contained in the narrative.
Jarmusch's use of soundtrack points toward a musical style not to be built upon foregrounded musical characteristics, yet nevertheless evoking the viewer's attention. In this discussion, foregrounded matter stands for features placed in the soundscape in such a way that they draw attention – accompanied melodies, emphasized harmonic sequences, distinctively articulated motives upon which a song is built and structured. Regardless of its background-oriented and even atmospherical musical traits, The Limits of Control channels our attention toward the songs. This is due to the rudimentary plot, and to placement of music where the narrative action is not important.
Jarmusch himself has put that his role is sometimes more one of a scenic rather than a musician.24 Therefore, he works in the background of musical process, sometimes leaving the
composition of melodies and harmonies to others, and rather applying sounds of a specific timbre to the mix.25 In this case, referring to timbres without exact pitch designations makes
21 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84, after Schafer, “New Sounds: Jozef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch.” 22 Sqürl World, “Bad Rabbit: The Limits of Control.”
23 Aside from the soundtrack suitablity of the songs, Nick Neyland of Pitchfork suggests that Sqürl's Pink Dust
from EP 1 resembles another song, abundantly featured in The Limits of Control, Boris' Farewell. Compare Nick Neyland, “Sqürl EP,” Pitchfork, May 20, 2013, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18077-squrl-squrl-ep/
24 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84, after Schafer and Jarmusch, “New Sounds,” ep. 3256. Scenic is a film crew
member responsible for surface treatment on the set, such as painting an imitation of a certain material, for example.
25 Compare his recording with Jozef van Wissem. “The Mystery of Heaven,” Sacred Bones Records [SBR-079]
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sense because Jarmusch has explictly stated that he uses the electric guitar more as a noise generator.26
My task is to dispute the position that these songs make no sense outside film and that they require an understanding through recognition of familiar patterns, through imposing a meaning on them. As an alternative, I claim that what nevertheless is dependent on visuals of The Limits
of Control is an initial discovery of the music's proper meaning. Rather than altering or
imposing it, the visuals prevent us from making sense of the music metaphorically. Thus, one can listen to it in a way that has been intended by Jarmusch and his collaborators.
Proximities are especially prone to disregarding: monotonous repetition of chords and melodic fragments – or harmonic overtones as an inherent proximity of pitch, sometimes termed timbre. By way of the absence of a linear narrative, using a recurrence of similar events, The Limits of
Control inclines to the lowered sensibility of the viewer, only to raise the sensibility of the
film's listener. The soundtrack-like quality of music, I argue, is a pervasive factor in this film. It means that due to the effects of fading in- and out- of the songs used, as well as by the utilization of the drone in almost all of the chosen case studies, each song gives an impression to be a part of a larger whole. This thesis, however, states that such a bond of coherence bases on the similar structure of individual songs, on their distribution of expresive musical means.27
The film case studies can be ascribed to genres. The classification is only an endeavour to illustrate the music in question, and does not play a role in the argument.
Song Title Performer Genre
Sea Green Sea Bad Rabbit
Contemporary Rock
Neo-Psychedelia Fuzzy Reactor Boris
with Michio Kurihara Neo-psychedelia
Blood Swamp Sunn O))) with Boris Drone Metal
You on the Run The Black Angels Neo-Psychedelia
26 Jarmusch, “Board to Death,” YouTube video, 13:02, posted by "EarthQuakerDevices," January 31, 2018, time
cue: 1:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvoGlcLwPIk
27 As in Branigan, “Soundtrack in Mind,” 51, the idea of listening to the objects not signhted belongs to Rudolf
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Bad Rabbit, Boris, Sunn O))), and The Black Angels all belong to contemporary rock genre. Rather than inventing a groundbreaking, new musical expression, the genre withdraws into what has been there all along – sound.28 Repeatedly, the literature treats contemporary rock as
a response to an intesive genre emergence in the last decade of the twentieth century. The dense stylistic invention – in part also a matter of musical marketing rather than expressive invention – corresponded to departure of the bands like Oasis and Blur from their local scenes into larger commercial environment.29 The term indie nevertheless continued to denote smaller-scale
record label productions with a limited market reach, and hence musical exclusivity. During the nineties, indie rock began to produce subgenres, such as post-rock, space-rock, and lo-fi, and featured experimentation with electronica.30 Given the recent historical context, it seems
logical that contemporary rock does not try to revive older genres. However, the thesis case studies feature an exception, since The Black Angels represent a revival of the garage sound, and sixties' psychedelia.31
The psychedelic in musical neo-psychedelia refers to a strong power of the songs to immerse the listeners along the entire hearing spectrum, and to present multiple complex instrument parts at the same time. The resulting texture is dense, and due to a heavy use of effects, especially reverb and pitch manipulation, the complexity all of a sudden loses its distinctive textural meaning, and rather comes across as a simplistic sound experience driven by either a recurring drum beat pattern, or the monotonous bass line. Hence, the term denotes blurring the relative complexity of the texture in ample use of sound effects, which provokes an analogy of psychedelic music with indulging in the related psychactive substances, prominent at the inception of psychedelic music in the late sixties.
Drone metal is a musical style with the prominency of heavily distorted guitar sound, usually lacking regular meter. Tempo is extremely slow. Vocals, if they are featured, are either growled or screamed. The statement by Owen Coggins is very illustrative: “Slow to the point of tense stasis, tracks extend to the limits of recording media, and performances stratch beyond the
28 Crauwels, “Contemporary Rock,” MusicMap, [2016], https://musicmap.info/ 29 Bennett and Stratton, Britpop, 2010, 93.
30 “Indie Rock,” Explore: Indie Rock | AllMusic, [2011],
https://www.webcitation.org/5wTaUVdId?url=http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/d2687
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endurance of some audience members: minimalist structures at maximum volume.”Furthermore, Coggins situates drone metal around the bands Sunn O))), Om, and Earth.32
The chosen case studies are constructed not so much upon the parameters of melody, harmony, or motivic development, but rather feature repetitive rhythmical and motivic character, are timbrally diverse and multilayered, often without a clear delineation of which layer – an instrumental part, for instance – is emphasised.
Timbre is therefore a crucial concept to keep in mind when discussing such musical expression. In this thesis, it is theorised both with regard to philosophical treatment of the term by Gritten33
and with regard to empirical approach in music psychology, especially evocation of the research by McAdams and Giordano.34 The enquiry's references to McAdams and Giordano
serve as a signpost to possible empirical elaboration of this research. Indeed, the motivation to produce a new theoretical framework grows entirely from a speculative thought to open this thesis. The forthcoming case study analyses revolve around interpretation – both of how timbre and noise can be thought and the interpretation of the music itself. A crucial part of thinking music in the chosen case studies is the proposal of a new concept, the so-called minoritarian music. The minoritarian quality relates to a book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature. Envisaged as a literary trait, minority in the book nevertheless fits
the scope of my research. Firstly, Deleuzoguattarian minor involves losing-sense of language via word or phrase repetition – “losing sense” as an abandonment of prevously established meaning and a pursuit of a new one. Secondly, political impact of minor literature – itself a product of diasporas – applies to withdrawal from cinematic plot towards music, which is difficult to grasp without reconsidering a question as political as that of what is noise. Thus, minoritarian music is relevant as a scrutiny of what and whom one should listen to. Thirdly, the word minoritarian corresponds to aridity, poverty of expression, present both in minor literature and, I argue, in what I term minoritarian music. However, minoritarian music stems from case study analyses, and not from theorizing on the groundwork by Deleuze and Guattari. Throughout the thesis, noise is used to acknowledge and theorize the very timbral aspect of this music. Thinking about noise brings us to the emancipation of that which is considered an
32 Coggins, Transforming Detail into Myth: Indescribable Experience and Mystical Discourse in Drone Metal”
Global Metal Music and Culture […] (New York: Routledge, 2017): 312, 315.
33 Gritten, “Depending on Timbre.”
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interference to the signal: imagine, for example, Bach's corale awash in electric guitar distortion; some will say that the distortion was an inappropriate addition that wrecked the piece's expressive intention. Despite taking it for disruption, one can reflect on noise as an agency that allows us to question the models according to which we understand music. If there are no models applicable to a certain combination of sounds, then this does not mean that the combination is nonsensical. Rather, it shows that the music in question bases on different principles.
2 Noise and Recognition
In his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Douglas Kahn defines noise as a non-musical phenomenon, which can provoke and stand for thinking, or provide a groundwork for it.35 In contrast, my endeavour is to recontextualise noise in music where noise
is not (yet) accepted as a valid artistic expression.36 Rather, my goal is to provide an
understanding of noise as a formative quality of the music that is pushed aside as inferior in its presupposed support of another expressive medium. I am interested in noisy music that is deemed explicitly functional – cinematic music. My task is to perceive noise as a musical element, and to show how it can create music without embracing functionality.
If noise is considered to be “that constant grating sound generated by the movement between the abstract and the empirical,”37 the abstract is a way of reducing the noisiness of the message
– discerning that signal fraction left intact from it. However, noise itself could constitute a message. For the message to be perceived, the unacknowledged onthology of noise has to be distinguished from undesirable interference. It seems that the definiton of noise does not make any sense, if it only implies disregarding. In the end, all distributions of sound are somehow meaningful, the question is only who or what acknowledges them.
35 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge: MIT, 1999), 25–30.
36 Accordingly, the thesis does not deal with musique concrète and forms of electronic music that feature
artificially generated sounds, because noise as non-signifying sound has already been deemed their constituing element: “One thing that remained tenaciously extramusical, however, was what was usually called imitation. However it may have been invoked past or present – noise, sound, reproduction, representation, meaning, semiotics – the primarily sonic has been recuperated into music with relative ease while significant sound has met with great resistance.” Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 102, commenting on the development of mid-twentieth century European and North American musical avant-garde.
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The film music used in this thesis, given the broadened definition of music as minoritarian provided in the next chapters, largely depends on accepting noise as a discoverable, not ignorable entity. This seems to be one of the ways to think the chosen case studies beyond cinematic functionality. Even though all film music, no matter if it has been written exclusively for a film or not, is embedded in cinematic narrative, film is not neccessarily a skeleton for the songs to tie upon. The Limits of Control provides a superposition of meaning to its music, only for the music to be able to convey its own meaning. Consequently, the film is not only a medium any more, but becomes a way of listening. Songs that above all feature rich arrays of timbre, may at first be treated as music with atmospherical function. However, when the visuals have no narrative action to offer, claims of atmospherical music are refuted. This is because the songs acquire good part of the attention that is normally targeted at the visuals, and hence do not fit the concept of “unheard” atmospherical music.38
The second way of thinking this particular cinematic music outside of its functional value is to acknowledge the creation of musical noise. Far from being only a random sensual occurrence, noise is also created by excessive repetition. When a motive is repeated for too many times, its conventional meaning thus heavily overstated, it becomes noisy. Its appearance no longer serves to quench our symbolical desires of discerning the rhythm, melody, texture, or the musical instrument involved. The readily recognizable messages have come across. Now, it is time for the ones yet to be recognized. Similarly, noise is created by a sound sequence, coherently bound together, where recognitions of individual sounds undermine each other, thus yielding a perception that we commonly label noise.
In the text A Deleuzian Noise/ Excavating the Body of Abstract Sound, Sean Higgins discusses “the problem of an abstract structural model aimed at signal recognition: it [the model] defines noise as its outside—as corruption or non-signal—and thus fails to account for its signal's immanence to a more essential noise.”39 Inverting the relationship between noise and signal
means to perceive what is said to be a signal – a sentence spoken in one of the world's languages, or a musical phrase by Beethoven – as an essential noise.40 Conversely, the
remaining, unrecognized noise – for instance a sound with no specific pitch or rhythmical identity, but rather timbre-based – is now heard as a signal.
38 The matter is discussed in greater detail in the subchapter Towards Minoritarian Music. 39 Higgins, “A Deleuzian Noise,” 52.
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In this thesis, noise is treated as a phenomenon not only to offer something that transcends recognition, offering us sensory experience that changes our way of perceiving. In addition, it is also discussed as a disregarded entity, in order to highlight the thin line between the acceptable and the disregarded in music. Timbre carries a central role even in unrecognized noise. The contact between music and linguistic discourse thus shifts to concern timbre. As a consequence, the emancipation of the unrecognized noise will base on our sensuality rather than rationality. However, the thought as a foundation of Western metaphysical system41 can
then hardly be preserved as a central tool of the discourse on noisy music.42 The problem is
important because thought is to a great extent signal recognition. Departing from disctintively lettered discourse centering on music theory, then acknowledging a stance envisaged by Roland Barthes as the insufficiency of the adjective in discussing music,43 thinking noise becomes a
description – and not even an accurate one. Moreover, recognition does not limit itself to what Higgins calls “the absolute difference of empirically resounding sound as given to the listener's senses,”44 but also overarches to that which fails to be recognized according to characteristics
of its empirical existence. How can one tell when the object that we recognize is really there? In this thesis, I term the recognition of something that is not actually there – or more precisely, an imposition of meaning to a certain object – a metaphor.
Only by discussing how the unrecognized or what is beneath metaphorical overposition is
created, we can avoid both recognition as a driving force of thought in general and
metaphorical overposing. The creation of noise always begins with a sound that can – as everything – readily be interpreted metaphorically. A temporal fragment of any sound can always be suppressed by a metaphorical imposition. However, when more sounds are concatenated over a period of time, their recognitions undermine each other, creating an awareness of noise. If the fragment in question is subsequently repeated over and over again, the combination of partial recognitions is quickly considered senseless by the listening subject. Similarly, if the recognized sonority is succeeded by a non-repetitive heterogeneous sound sequence, the recognition of uniquely the first sonority is still considered senseless. This is the
41 Ibidem, 53.
42 Regardless of the fact that the question can be exxpanded to include most disciplines, not only music and
musicology, the focus of this work is to scrutinise the understanding of music, hence the limitation in focus.
43 In Barthes, the predicate is even said to function as a protection of the imginary of the subject (hence of the
music, exposed to discussions which subjectify it) not to be lost. It seems, however, that the imaginary cannot be compromised at all, given that the flawed functionality of the adjective. See Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 179.
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case when the sonority belongs to sounds concatenated after it. By belonging to a concatenation, I mean an uniterrupted flow of sound, or that the sound is a part of the same crescendo or decrescendo, or that we consider it to come from the same source, for instance a musical instrument.
Due to gradual emergence of any noise, the thesis' chapters on minoritarian music involve considerations of repetition, fade-ins and -outs in cinematic soundtrack, and tonal attack. In addition to describing how music can linger, the common denominator of minoritarian music is a transparent, minimalist texture of clearly articulated monotonous metre. Such textural distribution is governed by timbre, which evades clear recognition by preceeding other tone properties (pitch and rhythmical beat), presenting itself as a process – a determinator of what happens after the attack.
On Timbre
We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music. [...] (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identification, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells) [...].45
Timbre is the first characteristic to be heard – or performed, present before a pitch is clearly articulated, or a beat in rhythmical pulse is established.46 It is also present as the sonority
continues with a more or less clear pitch and/or rhythmical identity. However, timbre as the chronologically first sonic characteristic is not necessarily the same as timbre which ensues along with pitch, rhythm and harmony, hence the distinction between the attack and sustain portions of a sound. A mediator between our hearing and listening, it is the most elementary quality of sound. It can itself define the listener if he becomes aware of the impact that the present musical moment has on the immediately forthcoming musical future – for instance, how a specifically articulated tone defines the coming phrase. Alternatively, timbre remains unaccounted for in the act of hearing, when the sonority only permeates our immediate
45 McAdams, Giordano, “The Perception of Musical Timbre,” 1.
46Gritten, “Depending on Timbre,” 6: “Timbre points to its own future, spiralling back into itself, into the attack
portion of its spectral envelope. Lacking duration, evading measurement, it is the start of sound, and can only start again and again.”
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perceptive present. Because it is the first sound characteristic to be perceived, it determines what happens immediately after. The sound just before pitch and beat are perceived is said to be a part of the same unit as the ensuing tonal and rhythmic properties. Thus the attack determines the matter to arrive next, even though it may be a perceptually distinctive sound.47
A limited set of timbral characteristics and their designations has been proposed by Ciro Scotto.48 Even if the classification primarily applies to electric guitar sound, it can also be used
on other musical instruments and human vocals, along with the application to timbral alterations in post-production mastering. Pursuing an innovative structural view on rock and metal, Scotto departs from the adaptation of contour theory by Robert Morris. The latter stipulates that any characteristic, ordered into a row between two extremes (low to high, transparent to dense, monophonic to multiphonic, and so on), with its elements defined relatively to one another without exact intervals between them, can be represented in contour space. Contour space is set by two axes: the first features a succession of particular elements one chooses to compare, the other their temporal succession. The latter, a time axis, is not measured in temporal metric units, but features only a numbering of events.49
Primarily, contour theory was made for melodic analysis. Contour space elements were termed
c-pitches.50 However, contour spaces can be used for any sequence of musical articulations
which can be relatively distinguished from each other. Because timbre is hard to describe by adjective in absolute terms,51 contour theory is a practical resource for framing different
47A projection which stems from an attack, clearly, means that we recognize the sonorous characteristic of the
attack, imposing it on a timbre which “comes next.” As such, timbral recognition is a limitation in sound perception and reproduction. Contrary to Gritten (see the note directly above), I argue that timbre is not a text to be projected from the attack onto the upcoming timbre, but rather a power trajectory, departing from the attack into the listener's anticipation. Anticipation can be questioned, scrutinised, even negated. In contrast, projection determines what is to come, and it makes no sense to deny it since it is already haunting the present moment.
48 Ciro Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion,” 178–199.
49 Elizabeth West Marvin, “A Generalized Theory of Musical Contour,” (PhD diss., University of Rochester,
1988), 66–67.
50 Ibidem, 66: ʻMorris defines contour space (c-space) as a type of musical space “consisting of elements arranged
from low to high disregarding the exact intervals between the elements.”17 These elements are termed
“c-pitches” (“cps”) and are “numbered in order from low to high, beginning with 0 up to n-1,” where n equals the cardinality of the segment, and where the “intervallic distance between the cps is ignored and left undefined.”18ʼ
References in the original, after Morris, Composition [1987], 340 and 26, respectively. As can be discerned from the proposed discrepancy between low and high and from the fact that contour space elements were termed c-pitches, contour was first seen as a melodic characeristic to be used in the application of the theory for melodic analysis.
51 Reading Roland Barthes, the adjective is not merely an attempt to render the subjectivity of music, but rather a
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timbres in a musical work or even accross different musical works. As such, a timbral c-space enriches the adjectival description of timbre. Therefore, it allows us to “read” the music subjectively.
Focusing on timbral aspects of distortion, Scotto derives a concept of dist-space [distortion-space] from dyn-space [dynamics-[distortion-space], a contour rendering of perceived loudness, in order to demonstrate the structural role of distortion in songs by Metallica, Korn, Dream Theater and The Pixies. His dist-space schemas of the songs show a believable trajectory of musical development, which is led by shifts in distortion types. However, a problem remains regarding more precise definition of sound as clean, overdrive, crunch, distortion, and CS/N,52
respectively, the labels he uses as distortion region specifications.53 To discuss the matter, he
consults a statement by James Hetfield, one of the guitarists of Metallica. “Distortion always starts with the amp . . . you can recognize Marshall distortion in an instant; that's why I shied away from that and went with MESA/Boogies.”54 As Scotto also comments, distortion is not
merely a matter of manipulating amplifier settings, but equally about studio post-production. Hence, the only possible approach to its classification is aural analysis, rather than research into the workings of the sound source, which is processed by too numerous and nuanced alterations of the original signal. Initially, one has to decide upon the guitar and playing technique, then on which sound effects, amplifier, and speaker cabinet to use, not to mention post-production sound editing. For this reason, I make use of the spectrograms,55 in order to
visually represent different timbral structures. According to the classification, derived from listening to music and reading spectrograms, selected excerpts are discussed as featuring different distortion characteristics. Specifically, the terms overdrive and distortion are used most commonly and in accordance with figure 1. In addition, the term feedback is also used to
discoussions on music by creating epithets, is therefore an overshadowing of what music really is. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 179.
52 CS/N denotes a pulse wave or noise, a signal space completely saturated sound. Scotto, “The Structural Role
of Distortion,” 185.
53 He proposes that distortion designations, present in dist-space, be not only labeled verbally, but also shown
mathematically. For this end, he uses a function F(A) = D, where A represents amplitude and D stands for distortion. Clearly, the intensity of distortion rises from clean to CS/N, and somehow distortion could be measured more objectively by using amplitude data. See, for instance, the abstract of Scotto, “The Structural Role: “An application of Robert Morris's generalization of countour theory, dist-space couples sequential time to a sequentially ordered dimension of discrete distortion regions whose foundation is the distortion function F(A)=D and spectral analysis.” A second determinng factor would then be a spectral analysis.
54 Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion,” 179, after “Guitar Player: Distortion,” 1992, 59. 55 The spectrograms were generated by Overtone Analyzer from Sygyt Software.
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describe the sound produced by electric guitar amplifier, which is again collected by the guitar pickups, forming a loop of ever-raising volume and modulation in overtone structure of the sound.56
Apart from classification through distortion type, timbre will be approached in terms of instrumental layerings, and its articulation. Instrumental layers will be discerned by attentive listening. However, instrumental performance can shift to the timbral aspect of sound when two instrumental parts are impossible to discerned individually. Fuzzy Reactor by Boris and Michio Kurihara, and Blood Swamp by Boris and Sunn O))) are relevant case studies to feature such amalgamation into unitary timbre.
Thus we touch upon the problem of what to appropriate timbre designation to. Whether one acknowledges it or not, timbre is always prone to be ascribed an unclear identity. It is often considered simply as the sound source itself – a clarinet timbre, for example.57 However,
typical timbres are rare, and empirical sound almost always diverts from the ideally sounding clarinet, if there even is such an instrument. There is always a trait present in the sound that sets it apart from its alleged source identity.
The problem manifests when sound cannot be reliably interpreted using source designation. Instruments from the same family are prone for such confusion, as are instrument parts which employ electronic sound processing. Sound alteration can bring them close to other, source-designated timbres. For example, an electric guitar tone can strikingly resemble human voice.
56 Hartmann, Principles of Musical Acoustics (New York: Springer, 2013), 185. 57 Oxford Music Online. s. v. “Timbre(i),” by Murray Campbell, acessed 5 July 2018,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000027973?rskey=4413yx&result=1
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Furthermore, the very idea of source is evasive. After all, music composition is often about envisaging sound yet unheard. Musical discourse, however, cannot establish an identification with such an internal timbral source. Concerning the notion of minoritarian music which is to be established in this thesis, its timbral trait is rather about defying the identification with the sound source. As an alternative, timbres should rather be heard as amalgams of both sound and sonic source identities. Consequently, sonorities, which have priorly been listened to as predominantly musical (song timbres, for instance), lose their distinction to sonorities normally claimed to be non-musical, such as cinematic sound effects.
Is timbre a noise, or noise a timbre? Considering the power of identification of musical instruments that timbre carries regardless of its empirical denotation proposed here, the second option seems more plausible. However, what applies for a series of sounds, each of them recognised differently and the recognitions showing incompatibility one to the other, can also be understood as a specific timbre of the particular sound combination. If concatenation of sounds is disruptive to our recognising agencies, therefore producing an idea of the unrecognizable, timbre is in itself noise.
However, since the timbre seems to be the closest musical concept to noise, it seems valid to start and buid this discussion on it. Not neccessarily to disasemble the case studies in order to distinguish diferent timbres, or to perform any similar analysis. Rather, timbre's determining of the sound to arrive immediately after, as well as of next song excerpts in film can further be extended for the agency to make an impact on the music that is to be made, in general. Here, the paradox ensues: for the timbre to affect music so profoundly, it has to be accumulated into noise. Noise in itself is unrecognizable, and often disregarded. The disregard may not assume an absolute form, but may nevertheless include an aesthetic judgement of this noisy music. At this moment, the work of Deleuze and Guattari comes into play – discussing minor literature, they explicitly write about the bareness, aridity, and poverty of language.
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3 Toward Minoritarian Music
On Minor Literature
The term minor literature has been invented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. An art expression, it appears when an author is forced to write in a foreign language. Not only is the language foreign. Let us imagine that for the writer, it represents a mode of estrangement, inhibiting his expression. It is unsuitable to produce a literary work. However, the mother language has perhaps atrofied due to years of neglect during his expatriation. Along with other reasons irrelevant to this discussion, he is left with no choice but to use a language foreign to his art.
In consequence, the writing adapts. Ample, but estranging foreign vocabulary shrinks to accomodate the culture of the diasporic community the author is part of. Some meanings are forgotten, others freshly imposed. Furthermore, personal concerns of fiction protagonists become increasingly bound to an expression deeply rooted in any minority – a political striving. In addition, it delivers a collective utterance of the respective minority and hence abandons the linguistic structure of the majority. Minor literature establishes a collective assemblage of enunciation, which withdraws from endorsing individual subjects as fiction narrators and/or characters.58 Instead, minority writing conceives crowds, which function as agents of narrative
development and carriers of identity. Often, they are engendered as entire communities, as in works by Franz Kafka, chosen as the primary reference point by Deleuze and Guattari.
“Almost every word I write jars up against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show.”59 Aside
from acknowledging its expressive shift, Deleuze and Guattari speak of their main case study, the literature of Franz Kafka, as minor music: it is “a language that moves head over heels and away.”60 It features non-articulated sounds overcoming the importance of articulated, symbolic
ones, pulling the expresion from conventional sense into utterance that is hard to grasp. The meaning is deterritorialised. Still inherent in the word as an empirical entity, it has left the linguistic framework. Such expression forms a new core of the literary language that Klaus Wagenbach defined by incorrect use of prepositions, overuse of pronouns of that which refers
58 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18.
59 Ibidem, 23, after Kafka, Diaries, 15 December 1910, 33. 60 Ibidem, 26.
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to them, multiplication and succession of adverbs, use of pain-filled connotations, and significantly, a key role of accent as forming the internal tensions of words and a specific placement of vowels and consonants as a part of an internal discordance.61 To sum up, language
begins to lose representative function.
It is very telling that minor literature is defined in negative terms. In an accessible historical insight in the emergence of expressive minority in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, one reads about deterritorialisations of all sorts. Why do Deleuze and Guattari write of Albert Einstein as providing “deterritorialization of the representation of the universe,” or of the Alban Berg's “deterritorialization of musical representation?”62 Why do they speak of the refrain's
withdrawal instead of seeing new territories, new knowledge? One can assume that despite the dream of becoming-minor,63 minor literature is caught between having withdrawn from the
symbolical use of language, and partly remembering symbolical linguistic meanings left behind. As such, minority is not an oppositional, symetrical Other to the major, but rather features an imprint of the major to sustain its own subversiveness, becoming-minor. Moreover, there is an opportunity to read minor literature as a departure from the literature of societally recognized “great authors” – as something different and perhaps not as well articulated.
Toward Sound
When minority authors reshape the language of the majority for themselves, a shift of meaning takes place. A word, for example, changes its lexical value, its meaning abandoned. It does not merely transfer to a new significance. Rather, there is a time in between, as the deterritorialisation of articulated sound leads into reemancipation of the sound as such – noise. For a shift in the meaning of the word is also an awareness of its noisy nature, which endures even when a new significance is imposed. This is why “[t]he sound or the word that traverses
61 Ibidem, 23. 62 Ibidem, 24
63 The term becoming stands for defying the binaries, according to which our communities are ordered: the
binaries of male – female, white – black, adult – child, human – animal, and so on. Rather than contesting one of their respective poles – male, white, and adult, for instance – one should change the identities that these designations stand for. The idea of male or female is thus somewhere beyond the binary's instituted characteristics. Binaries of abstractions can also be found. One of them is that of major and minor. I argue that relativisation of this binary, which would logically result in becoming-minor, is never entirely fulfilled because of our linguistic symbolism rooted so deeply both psychologically and socially.
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this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be.”64
The sound of the transitory moment, which is deprived of sense, requires another infusion of meaning, different from the new expression of minor literature. Since it is still susceptible for the creation of metaphors, parts of it become personalised and their sonic characteristics compared to generally recognized agencies. Metaphorical agency originates from the shift in linguistic meaning from major to minor. Should the transition proceed without an intermediary stage, there would be no need for such a metaphor, which Kafka considers a redundancy. He aspired to write without metaphors, yet the tendency seemed to manifest in his diary.65 After
all, it is a widely-spread manner of understanding and explaining – so wide in fact, that it can transcend the lettered language and enter other means of expression, among them the combination of music and moving image.
Even though the metaphor does illuminate a part of the noisy nature of minor literature, parts remain which cannot be grasped by it – simply because they have not been recognized, but disregarded. In this case, it is beneficial to employ a way of expression which does not directly address the noisy nature of sound – a moving image, for instance, which does not synchronise completely to the rhythm of the minor utterance. By a seeming incompatibility, new aspects, so far evasive to our recognition, can be acknowledged. Simultaneously, minor utterance is protected from simplified explanations: the other expressive medium provides a reading of the first. Thus, minor utterance is not merely confined to grounding a metaphor.
By reterritorialising articulated sound fragments in metaphor, understanding is indeed lost as a consequence of a complete deterritorialisation of sound as an empirical occurrence. In addition, articulated sound merely derives from sense, but does not contain it. Language, displaced from sense in such a way, “no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection.”66 In his diary, Kafka writes about losing his “useless head for a
moment,” while he focuses on a short word – the mutual exclusivity of sense and nonsense is a defining trait of the minor literature – what is meaningful in it is the beginning and end of each phrase, an inception of the coexistence of sense and nonsense, and the repetitive nature of
64 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21.
65 Compare ibidem, 22: ʻWe are no longer in the situation of an ordinary, rich language where the word dog, for
example, would directly designate an animal and would apply metaphorically to other things (so that one could say "like a dog"). Diaries, 1921: "Metaphors are one of the things that makes me despair of literature."ʼ
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language on the line of flight. Deleuze uses child behaviour as an example how phrase repetition makes an escape from sense.
The characteristic that I am drawn to in the minor literature is its aridity, or poverty. The two terms stand for a tendency to write it off as something irrrelevant, carrying no value – a valueless art. What such judegement is usually based on also belongs to the arid, or poverty. It concerns expression, and designates a subfield of the banal. Since the banal in music is not only rudimentary style, but can also assume complex, elaborate forms, the banal and arid/poor do not overlap entirely, the latter being parts of the former. What is banal on the poverty and aridity in minor is constant repetition which highlights sound as an empirical phenomenon – the repetition of vowels, words, phrases. What is termed arid/poor is the process of losing linguistic sense.
Minoritarian Music
With conventional meaning of the major, symbolic language redefined, a momentum might appear when in minor literature the lapse of stable symbolic interpretation allows for deflection from styles of conventional signification towards those of explicit sonority of word.
A dream of “consonants [that] rub leadenly against each other and the vowels [that] sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show”67 is a step towards the emancipation of noise.
The noisy matter is acknowledged, but still treated metaphorically. Minstrel show, which Kafka imposes on it, is a political statement, making the workings of minor language grotesque as if they were depictions of the American black community in the beginning of the 19th century. In cinematic music of The Limits of Control, the power of the metaphor rapidly fades. Illustrative potential supposedly present in objects with similar characteristics – a fluid river flow expressing a “fluid” melodic trajectory, for instance – is superposed by cinematic picture. Music fails to be listened to metaphorically because the visual narration of cinema itself has become this very illustration. Hence, the film's music is an act of resignation, a withdrawal from metaphorical affordance, a retreat to the sound itself. Cinematic image is therefore a political dream of minoritarian music, it is a dream of the circumstance which even allows for the affirmation of minoritarian expression. Hence, this dream is active, because it acts as a
