Annotations

The Duga-3 site within the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The journal Public Culture recently published (and sequestered behind a pay wall) a paper called “Sensitive but Unclassified,” which claims that national-security developments since World War II have transformed America “into a new kind of secret society.” State power now depends on the management of the “public/secret divide through the mobilization of threat,” writes the author, Joseph Masco, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. The strategic conflation of secrecy and threat, Masco argues, has become an odd feature of American politics, turning the power of the secret on its head. Strangely, because of the sheer volume of information now available on the Internet, the state seems to benefit as much from the public knowledge that secrets are being kept—which sparks people’s imagination, often leading them to exaggerate the government’s power—as it does from any of the things it keeps secret.

The carefully managed interplay of secrecy and threat provides a rich context for understanding the spatial and architectural strategies of the modern military, and a second angle for looking at communications sites like those surveyed by Steve Rowell in “The Ultimate High Ground,” published in issue 11 of Triple Canopy. These sites, including the Menwith Hill satellite-telecommunications post in North Yorkshire, England; the Teufelsberg listening post in Berlin; and another in Bad Aibling, Bavaria, represent a small part of the incredible infrastructure the US has built to give itself omniscience—the ability to “see everywhere” and “hear everything,” as Rowell puts it—and which now extends across the earth. The function, and sometimes the existence, of these places tend to remain obscure to the people whose lives they record and analyze, which in turn gives the infrastructure greater dominion over the imagination—so long as the public has an inkling of its existence. These sites illustrate a particularly effective use of exhibitionist secrecy by the state: They mythologize the security apparatus and compound its real might with phantasmic power.

Part of this fictional power results from the strictly functional architecture of large-scale, specialized communications technology, which makes for an uncanny atmosphere. For instance, the haunting hums and eerie lights emitted by the decaying radome at Berlin’s Teufelsberg listening station are aesthetic hallmarks of science fiction and of political-conspiracy narratives: Paranormal or covert actions leave their mark on the landscape but always elude our view. That the slightest indication of a structure’s purpose, any sliver of transparency, only points to the welter of secrets they may shield further augments this power. The fact that investigative reporters took decades to discover that the Menwith Hill base is, in Rowell’s words, “a key component in the global signals-intelligence collection and analysis network known as ECHELON” doesn’t bring us much closer to comprehending that network, but it does highlight our ignorance regarding the clandestine purposes of hundreds of other installations and militarized spaces, many of which we live among. The secrecy of these sites acts as a magnet for conspiratorial energies, implying murky activities where there may in fact be none.

The US is not alone in keenly balancing knowledge and secrecy in the management of its publicly visible military architecture. Communications sites within the USSR have inspired the same sort of science fictions and conspiracy theories as their American counterparts. The enormous wall of latticed antenna towers at the fabled Duga-3 site within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, for instance, sparked a lasting mystification of Soviet power. Though the structure was really nothing more menacing than a cold-war early-warning system, it seems the USSR neglected to tell anyone. Through the years, the wall has inspired wild fictions: Some call it a weather-control device, others say it was used for mind control. The latter speculation has even been used to great effect by the creators of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl, a popular video game partially inspired by Tarkovsky’s 1979 film. The game’s designers recast the antennae as “brain scorchers,” building on the local myth that “the waves emitted by the antenna were psychoactive. The antenna was directed onto Western Europe and preoccupied with a long-lasting military experiment on psychotropic influence onto human psyche.”

Indeed, the world’s most powerful militaries sometimes seem intent on building structures that conform to this aesthetic of conspicuous concealment, exploiting the public’s conflation of the military and the sinister or unworldly. As Rowell writes of first seeing RAF Menwith Hill, a heavily guarded array of white radomes parked in the English countryside: “The contrast between the bucolic landscape and the base felt uncanny. Conspiracy theories abound among locals: a massive subterranean lair beneath the base, connecting portals in the surrounding hills and caves, mind control, alien technology.”

But the inconspicuous concealment of such communications sites, when revealed, has an even greater effect on the imagination. This is part of the reason the Washington Post’s Top Secret America series has been so popular. Of course, we are infuriated by the wasteful expense of state security and intelligence systems, which have grown so large and complex that not even the government knows their extent. But the series also reveals that the sites supporting these systems are so thoroughly hidden in the banal architecture of our cities and towns that they could be practically anyplace, discoverable only by high-order number crunching and the mapping of data flows. The revelation of this secret—which is not only unknown but also unknowable—has effected the greatest mythologization of all, projecting an image of the state’s security and surveillance apparatus as a self-sufficient entity that has virtually disappeared into the fabric of everyday life. —SEAN HIGGINS

Lubomyr Melnyk. Photo by Jay Sanders.

Last week, the Flamboyan Theater in New York hosted Numina Lente, a three-night music and performance festival curated by Jay Sanders and Keith Connolly, with bills including Lubomyr Melnyk, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, Bill Orcutt (formerly of Harry Pussy), Blood Stereo, Hype Williams, and Michael Smith with Title TK (Cory Arcangel, Howie Chen, and Alan Licht). Besides my excitement for individual acts, I was struck by the beyond-or-outside-genre quality of the program as a whole. In an initial email, Sanders mentioned a few intentions: “To address some blind spots in terms of music presentation in the city: a bit of a nostalgia for clubs like Tonic, the Cooler, etc., in Manhattan. To carefully pick individual acts whose work is nonidiomatic, hard to place, and singular. To draw on a network of people in NYC committed to these kinds of things, so the eccentric resources of the city’s vibrant scene can come into play.” A further exchange appears below. —SAM FRANK

Sam Frank: Let’s start with the title. Numina Lente—or, per the logo, NUMINA lente. Numen, plural numina, means “presence,” and has to do with the spirits or gods present in the everyday. Lente means “slowly.” There’s Slow Food—is this a suggestion of Slow Music (not slow music), of some kind of transcendence in the experience of the quotidian?

Keith Connolly: Yes, “slowly holy,” or “holy lens” … the term numinous was used by German theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (1917). It was his attempt to qualify the moment in awe that extends indefinitely, outside of time—what he refers to as a “feeling of peculiar dread.” Our everyday experience, saturated as it is by the technological instantaneous, is quite antithetical to this. So the NUMINA lente programming was an attempt to reconnect the audience to this kind of noninstantaneous experience. And there has been much in music of late employing slowed-down or time-stretched elements: the post–Three 6 Mafia “chopped + screwed” aspect of much hip-hop, Graham Lambkin’s increasingly experimental sound work, and Detroit-area noise artists like Andrew Coltrane, Lidless Eye, and Tarpit being some examples. This can be heard distinctly in Hype Williams’s music as well. I recently heard a time-stretched version of the theme from Jurassic Park that absolutely floored me!

SF: This was a three-night festival on the Lower East Side. Given the location and duration of NL, and the range of musicians/performers booked, a number of models spring to mind. You mentioned the departed & beloved intelligently & diversely booked Lower Manhattan spaces like Tonic and the Cooler, where, plausibly, over a few years, you could see everyone playing Numina Lente. Then there are the short, heavily curated festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties (rock, mostly) and No Fun Fest (noise). And then there’s the dispersed situation in NYC today: Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, sometimes the Kitchen; Issue Project Room, the Stone, from time to time Le Pousson Rouge: for “experimental” or “avant-garde” music. And a range of more specifically art-world venues and events. Numina Lente seemed pitched, rather consciously, somewhere in here. It seems significant that it was in Manhattan, in particular—to bring things back together, somehow. (But what things?)

KC: All that you mention here were indeed points of reference. I would add to these Dylan Nyoukis’s Colour out of Space festival in Brighton, Clint Simonson and Matthew St-Germain’s De Stijl/Freedom From Festival in the Twin Cities, and Mike Kelley’s “A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality” for Performa. It was after attending the latter, and subsequently seeing Lubomyr Melnyk at the Friends Meeting House off Gramercy Park, that we began to formulate the ideas that led to NUMINA lente. This first took shape at “An Evening of Incohative + Centerless Portrayal” at SculptureCenter, which was in itself something of a continuation of a series of events beginning with Yuzo Sakuramoto and Taketo Shimada’s “can we expand MUSIC?” at FiveMyles Gallery and the series of shows Taketo organized around Yoshi Wada’s Pipe Dreams at the Emily Harvey Foundation. In realizing these events, we began to perceive the possibility for something on the scale of NUMINA lente.

SF: My parenthetical above: “But what things?” It’s surprisingly tricky to pin down the performers at NL, and I imagine that’s the point—you used the words nonidiomatic and singular. Is there a unifying logic here outside a mass of singularities? I can start listing genres—comedy, minimalism, noise, blues, improv, cinema-performance, etc., etc.—but they seem somewhat unhelpful, or only a point of departure.

Jay Sanders: Well, one bit of organizing logic was a constraint we gave ourselves—that as much as possible, we wanted to bring performers who wouldn’t be playing New York otherwise. Some, in fact, had never been here. Like Ilitch, an infamous French band going back to the 1970s that had never been to the US before this week. Or Hype Williams, which materialized very recently as a kind of music/media phenomenon. This was their US debut too. We’d never seen these acts and had no idea what they’d do. A high level of unpredictability is something many of the performers shared and something Keith and I are very attracted to. In terms of genre classifications—right, maybe that’s not a very helpful way of identifying what happened with these shows.

SF: Who helped you make this happen? Were any of the logistics especially notable or insane? You mentioned a “network of people in NYC” and the “eccentric resources of the city’s vibrant scene”; and I imagine the kind of networking you and Keith had to do to pull everyone in was a bit different (more or differently eccentric?) than that involved in curating a visual-art show.

JS: There’s a great collective connoisseurship in NYC among people who take this kind of music seriously. It’s a formidable and eccentric intelligence and resides mostly in private conversations at bars, performances, screenings, etc. Friends have been fantastically supportive as collaborators in every imaginable way, including navigating the logistics of doing a large public event in this city. As for notable and insane: Tal Sharon, Yuzo Sakuramoto, Justin Luke, Olivia Shao, Ben Manley, Joe Frivaldi, Adam Pettis, Alex Tuttle, Clark Griffin, Aaron Moore, John Jines, Sam Pulitzer, Bill Hayden, Carol Greene, Emanuele Carcano, Clint Simonson, Sean Flanigan, Fabio Roberti, Tommy McCutchon, Kevin Spencer, Alex Hubbard, John Corbett, Jon Pestoni, Todd Warnock, Steffi Lynen, John Richey, Bradley Eros, Lary 7, Family Underground, Tom Carter, Tom Thayer, D. Charles Speer, Lee Ranaldo, Michael Morley, Tom Surgal, Dave Miko, Stabin Cabin, Faust Harrison and Yamaha Pianos, Badlands Unlimited, Other Music, El Paso, Audio Visual Arts, Mast Books, Greene Naftali, Forced Exposure, De Stijl, Unseen Worlds, Built by Wendy, and many more …

SF: Jay, you’re cocurating the next Whitney Biennial. Are you carrying over ideas from NL to that much larger project, either specifically (curation of music/performance) or conceptually: a focus on particularity, singularity, hardness-to-place? (Though it’s funny—as soon as I start writing it out that way, it becomes obvious how much rarer that curatorial approach is in music than it is in art; in art it’s probably just step 1, or at least should be.)

JS: Only time will tell.

As part of his article "The Quiddities," published in issue 11, writer and media artist Joe Milutis has published This, a print-on-demand book containing a selected concordance of the poet Ron Silliman's uses of this and an accompanying essay. Here, Milutis elaborates on the word's relationship to American poetry and the logic of his concordance, which is available via Lulu.

There is a black hole at the heart of American poetry. Poetic experimentation has, since Whitman, been uniquely attuned to creation ex nihilo—channeling unconventional energies—but also drawn back into "pastness" by the memorializing powers of the word and the organizing principle of the book. The attempt to create a future out of difficult, discarded, democratic sources has met with the dictates of the uniform and lineated, the white and the black.

As a sort of minimalist sleight of hand, this-pointing, even documentary-allows for a passing literary capture of a coordinate where words fail. This announces a here and now, even though this here and now must, by its nature, be transformed from reading to reading. Tracing the ubiquitous unattributed thises of Ron Silliman, we can appreciate how the word creates a conceptual rhythm throughout his work, a network of floating moments which nevertheless make clear how language and history move together in pointedly material ways.

The concordance in This gathers all the unattributed thises from available PDFs of Silliman's work. Aerating each sentence this inhabits enables us to linger on the decontextualized moments and multidirectional puissance the word creates. In composing these sentences, I strived to create a research artifact that is both poetic and performative, revealing patterns in Silliman's work while creating a new object that exceeds mere "understanding" of his poetry.

The thises of Ron Silliman document the ephemeral contact, or even contract, with the reader, who is urged to "make it of this"-whatever the hell this may be from moment to moment. However, because these unmoored thises are locked on the page rather than embodied and performed, this becomes a reservoir of indeterminacy to be activated with each reading. This-the book-posits one possible performance, an activation that nevertheless holds within it another set of indeterminacies, moving, inexorably, into the past but awaiting future recombinations. —JOE MILUTIS

Portrait of Matthew Mehlan by Will Calcutt.

In the past decade, Skeletons has been many things: a one-man pop band, an avant-pop group, a free-jazz ensemble, an acoustic duo, and a big band, all helmed by Matthew Mehlan. (Skeletons performed at Triple Canopy's Impossible Geometries event last February.) The protean project has also been the anchor of Shinkoyo, the record label and collective founded by Mehlan and a number of collaborators in 2003. On Sunday, March 27, a Brooklyn Philharmonic string quartet and guests will perform "Where Is My New Face?," a new work by Mehlan, as well as his composition "Hands" and Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union," at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In April, a new Skeletons record, People, will be released by Shinkoyo and Crammed Discs, as will the debut record by stellar Brooklyn teenage rap group Nine 11 Thesaurus (who performed at Triple Canopy's More Talks About Buildings in 2009), produced by Mehlan and Gang Gang Dance's Tim Dewit.

Mehlan writes here about his work as a composer and with various iterations of Skeletons. Click here to listen to "Hands"; here for "Grandma," from People; and here for "Pencilneck," from the forthcoming record by Skeletons Big Band, The Bus.

“Hands” was written for a three-night event Doron Sadja (a longtime collaborator and cofounder of Shinkoyo) and I put together at Roulette last October called the Easy Not Easy Festival. We asked for “simple compositions” from a wide range of music makers and composers and assembled three very different groups of musicians to play those pieces. The idea stemmed from an interview with David Behrman and Christian Wolff on Roulette TV. David's always talking about "deceptively simple scores," in which a very simple set of instructions on a page leads to quite complex music. Christian talks about leaving things out of the score and allowing for a situation in which the “music happens when it's played,” with the performers making some decisions rather than being reduced to “reproduction machines.” 

Those ideas are really exciting to me and are a big part of what we've been doing with Skeletons Big Band, the large ensemble we formed as an extension of Skeletons. “Hands” marked the first time since music school that I put a piece of paper in front of some players whom I hadn't worked with on some improvisational or collaborative level—which is something I've avoided, as the experience of making every musical decision yourself, without the kind of rehearsal and back and forth you get working with a group of likeminded people, can be frustrating. I've always tried my best to let the music happen in the most organic way possible; the capital-c Composer doesn't often fit into that equation. 

We realized with Skeletons Big Band that the music wasn't going to work without some scores and guidelines: Twelve musicians in a room don’t magically make the music you have in mind as a composer. But all the players in that situation are chosen for a particular reason, and for their ability to truly interact with the music; I found that we could achieve something pretty special with just the right amount of notation and instructions and minimal rehearsal—sometimes the most exciting things happen completely unexpectedly.

This concert with the Brooklyn Philharmonic on Sunday is a completely different beast: I won't meet the performers until we start rehearsals, of which there are only three. There's an intensity to making sure no time is wasted. These players will obviously know how to read the music and play it incredibly well, but they might not be so interested in having a conceptual conversation or mind-vomit-jam about some chicken-scratch “score” I made. The concert comes out of my participation in the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s composer mentorship program, which paired me with composer Randy Woolf. He’s been incredibly helpful, reminding me of the proper terms that classically trained musicians will understand, making sure I’m accounting for every little detail—an overwhelming amount of details compared with how I usually work. With Skeletons and Skeletons Big Band I might say, “OK, we'll do this part for a while and, like, let's get it really loud and crazy and then maybe let's bring it back down and let it simmer for a while; then look at me for the cue to change.” But here we're talking about details down to the bowing direction and an accent on a sixteenth note that happens once.

At first I was pretty annoyed by being thrust into that mode of thinking, which I've avoided in the past because it seems like such a waste of energy, and a bit outdated and self-rightous too. (I’ve written more about this on the Skeletons website.) Isn't it more fun to interact with people on a creative and collaborative level? Isn't a violinist going to have a better idea of how to play this violin part than I am? But in the end there are so many possibilities that can't be achieved in one or the other mode of composing and performing, and it's been exciting and informative to go back and forth. 

Working on this new piece opened up a huge range of ideas for me—a third stream, if you will (though maybe it should be fourth stream, in this context). I love pieces that are super-singular and/or -intense, like those by Penderecki, Ligeti, Reich, and Niblock, but I don't have the patience in writing my own music to just let something be in that way. At the same time, I hate the kind of rigidness required in that kind of music: You'll never get the same kind of energy you hear in more improvisational settings. I've been really heavy into Julius Eastman's music lately, which makes sense, I think, as it takes some cues from minimalism and pop music, but in a way that’s very intense and sometimes messy. I also think the band Zs is making some of the most important new music right now, a kind of evolution of post-minimalism and post–No Wave.

With Skeletons there's always a little voice that's obsessed with pop music (“Don't take it too far!”), though a lot of pop-chamber-orchestral hybrids annoy me (“Really? You needed another flute trill in there?”). At the same time, I love complex rhythms and bombast and weird musical hybrids. There are still elements of chamber music or jazz or "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" in each piece of music I write. With the new Skeletons record, People, I initially wanted to make something like McCartney II or the first Paul Simon solo record: Trim all the fat and focus on the songs, don't worry so much about perfect takes or string arrangements or tons of overdubs. It's been interesting to let the pop elements of Skeletons be what they will and explore the darker, heavier elements with Skeletons Big Band—taking some of the free, energy-based playing and trying to orchestrate it into big blocks of sound. I've never been a big fan of solos, but when you have four saxophones soloing at the same time it gets really exciting! You start to deal with texture and energy rather than phrases or melodies. Melody is fine, of course, but I can't think of anything more boring that hearing a saxophone playing over the changes or a singer singing a variation on pop song x for the zillionth time. All Skeletons-related music is, for me, very focused on words, so it's good to break from that. It's also nice to not have to worry about whether I can play it or not. —MATTHEW MEHLAN