By 1997, Wax Trax had been putting out Zines in one format or another for about 15 years. We had gone from ‘Events’ to ‘Local Anesthetic’ to ‘Waste Paper’and finally to ‘Wax Trax Fax.’ Or in other words, we went from a xeroxed three or four page handout listing local shows and vinyl releases; to a 17” X 23” fold-out newspaper with a broader range of local and touring band live show reviews and grainy black & white photos and vinyl releases; to an 8 ½” X 11” magazine on cheap pulp paper with up to 40 pages of even more stuff we liked and thought people should buy and play at headbanging volume.
The store had also grown – a lot! We had multiple storefronts on both sides of our block on 13th Ave between Washington St and Pearl St, including Across The Trax, devoted just to posters, t-shirts, buttons, books, magazines and cult VHS tapes both for sale and rental and Nine Inch Nails condoms (Yes, we did!). We also had a store on the Hill in Boulder.
Lots of stores. Lots of customers. Lots of sales. Lots of employees. Lots of fun. But lots of headaches and hassles as well. We were stretched a little thin and the Zine was one of the things that eventually got lost in the shuffle. We still wanted to do it, but it was difficult to find the time or energy to write it, arrange some artwork and photos, lay it out and put it together, get it to the printer, get it back from the printer and then shift a few to coffee shops and bookstores and various hangouts around town and still have enough to time to drink the amount of beer every Wax Traxer was required to consume in those days.
But I couldn’t stop getting excited by music and I couldn’t stop writing. Sometime in the early 90s the first computer had arrived–even at Wax Trax. I bought our first out of the box software, on 5.25” X 3.5” floppy disks, that had a program that sorted and alphabetized all kinds of lists and then, miracle of miracles, my first publishing software, MS-Publisher, which came out in 1991. You can rag all you want on Bill Gates – he’s a big boy and can take care of himself – but the MS-Pub software was breakthrough technology for me.
I used it for the last run of Waste Paper before I ran out of steam and that iteration went into hibernation.
But then I bought a laser printer and a primitive hand-held scanner and discovered I could do a zine completely in-house (well, in-basement, this being Wax Trax).I would write it; scan a few images; format and lay out everything with MS-Pub, print out a few dozen copies on our fancy new laser printer (black & white only); design and print out a cover on colored paper; collate the individual copies; fold ’em; staple ‘em; and put it out on the counter.
The review below is from an issue of the last iteration of our zines, ‘Wax Trax Fax’. There weren’t many separate issues in this format, maybe 6 or 7 between 1994 and 1997. This one below, from January, 1997, may, in fact, be the very last one we did. We’ve never been good at this sort of record keeping, so let’s just call this the Last One. But it’s a good one, mostly written by me, JD Geddes and a contribution by Roswell – both these latter two were fellow toilers in the trenches of Wax Trax in the mid- and late-nineties.
You will not be surprised to learn that by the late nineties music was going through some dramatic changes. Hip Hop and Rap, had of course, become huge. Techno and some strange mutant forms of Rave, Dance and Electronic music had bubbled and burbled to the surface. JD and Roswell were onto this music early and deep and had a mission to get it into people’s ears. I tagged along behind them as best I could even though I was definitely still stuck in the eighties with Punk and Post-Punk. But that’s another story for another day.
Not sure who but one of these guys jacked me into the experimental labels, Mille Plateaux and Sub Rosa and their rosters of weirdo ambient and Po/Mo, theory heavy music/noise signal disruption. There were other labels, Staalplaat, Rephlex, Profan, etc., but let’s not get too complicated. Being a record store snob and faux intellectual heavily under the influence of the early and mid nineties British music press critics like Paul Morley, Ian Penman and Jon Savage, I was drawn to this music like T. Adorno to Schoenberg. As John Cleese once said, ‘Pretentious, moi?!?’
Out of all this came an interest in a style of avant-garde music of data leaks, disruptive innovation and the corruption of form and rhythm. What’s not to like, eh!
Oval’s CD (no one in this arena of recording would be so gauche as to release anything on vinyl in the mid nineties, but you can listen to it on Bandcamp today!) titled Systemisch is a classic example of what was then called Glitch or Clicks & Cuts music. Apparently, back then, I was convinced that the proper way to explain this oddly malfunctioning music was to summon Adorno, Bataille, Marinetti, Russolo, Cage, Muzak, Capital, the Unconscious, neutron stars, black holes and eventually the Heat Death of the Universe.
Nothing like keeping things in perspective.
Reading the piece thirty years on, I’m amused by its academic Sunday-best clothes, but I still see what excited me. Oval discovered something fascinating hiding inside technological failure. They heard the machine make a mistake and, rather than correct it, listened harder.
Beneath all my theoretical artillery, that remains the point: sometimes the crack in the record is where the music gets in.
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OVAL Systemisch (Thrill Jockey/US)
Oval is three Germans, Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, who take their start from their own definition of music: “Music means: Not to engage with meaning, but with the analysis of technical standards and the materiality of sound hardware in order to define a margin for aesthetic intervention.” (From Head Magazine, #6, 1994)
In practical terms, what this leads to is something like Brian Eno with a very bad stutter, a slow, dreamy music marred with the unpredictable graffiti of random noise, clicks and pops, hisses and purrs, a music in which the flywheel of rhythm is off-center, broken, wobbly.
The currently fashionable neologism for this kind of sound, illbient, though awkward, does emphasize the music’s contradictory effect: unease within the calm, the brooding of a background radiation of decay, the half-life of all melody as it dissolves into noise—and yet all this has its fascination, an hypnotic lulling of the senses, a darkening of attention, an abeyance of awareness—as though consciousness were lapsing into its constituent animality—the murmur of blood, the wheeze and wisp of breath, the mineral crack and creak of bone and ligament: being itself manifested at its most basic level, a minimalist ontology demanding that we jettison all the grandiose hallucinations of our fevered psychology in order to reveal a simple brutal truth: the harmonies of our Self, the song that we believe is our irreducible personality, will unbraid in the noise that is the universe, that everywhere, at all times, it is our destiny to join in the grand, disordered dance of particle decay, the general and implacable heat death of all those small economies we call ‘you’ and ‘I’….
Hmmm… All that on a single, hour long CD? Perhaps—and perhaps even more. This music in some ways demonstrates the subversion of Muzak, ‘illbient’ as a return of the repressed, an intrusion into a false calm by the disturbances of noise, the mutter of the Unconscious, a sound against the grain of Use. If the goal of Muzak is the pacification of Desire, is it possible that ‘illbient’ and other complex variants of ‘ambient’ are meant to crack the monolithic face of Muzak in order to allow a magma, dark and hidden, to surface?
Conditioned by a lifetime of Elevator Music, this recent surge of interest in Lounge/Ambient/Cocktail music points to a curiosity as to its effects, to efforts to reclaim these sounds for life, for expression.
Muzak (and here I mean not just Elevator Music, the smooth heartless rendering of popular music into ‘virtual hits’, denatured clones of songs that once held real life, real sound, but pop in general, what we are spoon-fed everyday on the radio) is music no longer pretending to be art: it reveals itself as pure coercion, pure affective power—it is music reduced to its Use. It is meant to placate, soothe, smother, it is music as pure instrumentality—an advertisement without content, the mind structured by the totality of Capital wherein the person becomes a monad, a smooth sphere in a field of spheres. All are reduced to their function and there is no remainder, nothing left over: you are only what your place in an administered world allows you to be.
Illbient confronts this contradiction head-on, it takes back the music, introducing subtleties and contradictions, tiny hemorrhages in the structures that insist on the Different within the Same (for Muzak is the epitome of the process whereby Capital converts everything with a possibility of being Different into the Same).
Oval requires, insists on, a different order of listening: careful or enhanced, the music demands an attention drawn away from function. Illbient introduces elements of uncertainty, anomaly, surprise into the order of Muzak, the order of pure Administration.
This effort of course is not new. It is the renewal of a long history of taking Noise back for the uses of Everyday Life (Marinetti, Russolo, Stockhausen, Cage, Eno, etc). This effort can be very strident (Neubauten) or subtle (Oval, Eno, Tortoise)—& its success is always temporary, flawed, defeated before it begins—which is why the effort must be repeated so many times. It goes on and on and on…
The effort may not be new, but it is nevertheless not an easy one. It has been written that ‘What we may call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand. He who wants to know it must think more, not less.’ (Adorno, NEGATIVE DIALECTICS, p. 189). Indeed, an aggressive contemplation, a grappling with the Object, a recognition of its dangers, attractions, ruses and seductions—a realization of its complexities and subtleties, of its interpenetrations with other objects, of how it becomes multiple and segmentary, how it connects and influences, how it radiates its powers and conversely how it yields, submits, surrenders, changes within the field of the Other’s powers—it is this kind of contemplation that is required in order for us to ‘think’ the Object so that we are not ‘thought’ by it, for there are Objects out there so powerful, baleful and benign, that they are like neutron stars or black holes, objects radiating influence, gravitational attractions, magnetic repulsions—art participates in this complexity by creating objects that mime this very complexity.
Oval, in the same interview in Head Magazine noted above, comment that ‘The most interesting manuals never get written; experimentation is a basic strategy when using complex digital machines. It is also the possibility to overcome the distinction between features and bugs and build an alternative semantic on top of this.’ They are then positing a kind of thinking, a meta-thinking, that transcends the opposition between ‘correct’ and ‘wrong’, between ‘functional’ and ‘disruptive’, between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable.’
The most obvious way in which they demonstrate this ‘thinking’ is in the erasure of meaning from the music they make, an erasure that owes its possibility to the irony that music, the most non-referential medium available, has, through its constant use in human society, become so overdetermined by that use that scarce two notes can be put together without an emotional or intellectual ‘meaning’ springing to our consciousness. Music is a shorthand, a calligraphy, a hieroglyphic, a scientific notation—at once obscure and lucid, as though, given the possibility that each note or rhythm could mean, literally, anything, it has come to pass that each of these units can only mean one thing and one thing only: music collapses in on itself at the very moment when it suddenly means the most to us.
This is tirelessly human: to discover the fascination in music to be its ‘meaning’ and then, in that very same bloated saturation of representation, to reverse the possibilities of depth, of meaning, in order to find ourselves caught in the seduction of surface, trapped in what we once considered the mere ‘materiality’ of music: its density, its resistances, its seductions. We cannot live at all times in the full glare of meaning—it wears us out, it makes us small and known and useful when what we want is to be gigantic, to be mysterious, to be ruinous.
To repeat: Oval say flat-out that ‘Music means: Not to engage with meaning…’—they flee the field of this encounter, quit the struggle, only to re-emerge, re-appear, in the play of sound, in the modulations of the ear, theirs, yours.
Nevertheless, beware my apocalyptic tone: Oval offer an ‘alternative semantic,’ a gently garbled speech; theirs is the whisper, not the scream, of disorder. If, as Bataille says, true communication can only take place through the union of two wounds, Oval are content to write their score on us in scratches—chaos leaks into our awareness but it does not flood us.
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