The Affinity between Music & Divinity: an Interview with Charles Mudede
Senior staff writer of the Seattle Stranger and Lecturer at the Cornish College of Arts. Charles Tonderai Mudede was born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and has a long and fascinating history as a filmmaker, writer, and critic. Charles is a dedicated Marxist and is highly learned in Frankfurt-School influenced theory, whose work explores the philosophy of religion, technology, music and film, and all of their rhizomatic intersections.
This interview was conducted online from Berlin to Seattle, July 2024, and was transcribed and collaboratively edited. We would like to offer Mr. Mudede the deepest gratitude for his time, his very original ideas, and his sense of humor and humanity. It seems, for Charles, the ball has really started to roll, and we can only hope that this contribution to Becoming can add to that momentum.
Palais Sinclaire:
So, I’ll stage the first prepared question, if anything just to be theatrical.
In a way, the point of our connection, or our meeting, let’s say, started with a particular song — you were giving a talk at HKW in Berlin, at AI: Ancestral Immediacies 2024 entitled “God after God”. You were invited there to speak about a meeting point between discourse around the religious instinct, human materiality and music, specifically relating to what I can call ‘UR-techno’; in the double sense of ur- and Underground Resistance. Within this talk about virtual and distributed deities, robot congregations and automated consumerism, you called upon the words of an iconic 80s electro track, Push the Button, by Newcleus, a band that is typically associated with the anthem... “but, oh, what was it called? How am I forgetting this...”
“Jam on it.” I blurted out, in a sort of mix of shy anxiety and furious excitement—this is my moment, all I’ve struggled for, I have no money, no status, no power, but I did know Jam on it at the right moment.
That’s how we met — we have spoken more since then, and in reflecting upon this way of meeting, you elaborated on how special that song really is, explaining that you had made the point of sitting down one day with friends or colleagues to deconstruct the production and expose its genius. Why don’t we start there? Let’s start in 1984, with a jam on Jam on it. What’s going on in this track?
Charles Mudede:
Okay, theatrical; well, I think I’ll go over things again and again, and you can edit it down to a take — theatrical questions, cinematic answers.
Back in 1984, Newcleus, a band from New York City that was part of what could now be characterized as Afrofuturism, released a track called Jam on it. It’s an electro-funk song, with a little rap in it—not a very good one mind you, it’s the 1980s and they’re doing this Sucker MC style.
What was particularly fascinating about the production of this track was the use of virtual elements and real elements, and how the track switches between them. The real being the elements you can hear, and the virtual elements being the ones you cannot hear but are nonetheless still present, still matter, are still there.
What Newcleus did was put each of the track’s elements (drum machine beats, bass line, sound effects, synthetic melodies, so on) into a channel on the mixing board and played them by raising or pulling down the fader.
PS:
Like Multitracking?
CM:
Yes, like Multitracking. Each channel had its own loop. So, when they need, say, the bass loop, they push up the channel’s fader so you can hear it; and if they need the UFO sound effect, they push that up; and if they don’t need the drum loop, they pull down the fader.
PS:
It sounds like a form of dubbing.
CM:
Yes, it is dubbing, but the analogy of dub is like this: King Tubby, the king of dubbing, transformed the mixing board into an instrument.
PS:
But I guess they’re not loops, they’re tracks that play out, whereas you’re talking about something similar but loops preloaded.
CM:
Yes! With samples—well, I wouldn’t say samples explicitly, but you could say they were sampling their own sounds. Sampling tends to mean “taking something from some elsewhere”, but they actually prerecorded all of the elements of the track, looped them, and distributed them across the mixing board. I think I counted around 10 or 12 channels, and the way the song is formed is in the way these channels are raised and lowered — the point being, even if you hear the bass leaving, it is still there. That was revolutionary to me.
PS:
Haha, yeah, it’s just on minus infinity, and in this context, it is very literally being limited by us, through the mixing board—we are literally holding it back, in an act of imposing a particular determination over what is and what isn’t present.
CM:
Precisely, there is a lot of discussion about virtuality from philosophers like Leibnitz or Deleuze, but in the specific case of Jam on it, it is Lee Smolin who comes to mind, a physicist who is known for his adventurous ideas concerning the ways that Einstein’s theory of gravity can be linked with the theories that we have developed in Quantum Mechanics in the early part of the 21st Century — and we still haven’t got a solution for this, for bringing Bohr’s and Einstein’s thinking together — so Smolin has been trying to come up with a framework that can resolve these two seemingly unresolvable concepts (or, as they are called in mathematics, formalisms).
Why is Smolin an influence in this regard? He has an idea called “be-ables”, and what he is trying to articulate through this idea is that what came to be known as “ensembles”, what appears in a reality, say protons, is the result of a relationship between other protons spread out non-locally and virtually — we’re just seeing the final result, an actual photon, but that doesn’t mean that all of these other relationships (or virtual interactions— or what Karen Barad calls intra-actions) that we don’t see aren’t present —they’re not ghosts, they’re very much real, and this is a difficult idea to handle: what is not there being as real as what is there for us, for our eyes, for our experiments.
As Deleuze writes about flows, reality, or rather actuality, what is heard in a given movement of Jam on it, is only what you hear. What you don’t hear is still there, still real. It is not an exhaustive report of all things in existence behind the limiters on the channel strips.
PS:
It’s interesting as well because they obviously have some initial Platonic idea of how the song is going to sound, in order to record all the necessary parts, then it’s just a matter of deployment.
CM:
That’s correct. They don’t let it all out at once. That would be schizophrenic.
PS:
Yes, quite literally, it would be like hearing all the lines of a play spoken on top of each other, with no structure. It is schizophrenic in the sense of Deleuze.
CM:
Yes — and this is important in general, they don’t give into this will of desire to have everything all at once, to unleash all the channels at once like a traditional studio would when mixing down a master. Instead, they’re carving realities. Andre Tarkovsky talks about Film as sculpting time, Newcleus, on the other hand, was sculpting realities, pure flow, into the actual — so the real means something more.
PS:
That’s a complete inversion of being, from saying “what is is what is”, to “what is is more defined by what isn’t” — you reach a point where language contradicts itself in the form of the actualisation “what isn’t, is; and thereby, what is, isn’t” —
a language can’t really claim to have any meaning when the word is and isn’t are in dispute.
CM:
This aspect, particularly when discussing existence/inexistence in the sense of Quentin Meillassoux, is important here — when [he] says that while God may not be here now, God may exist in the future, he is almost saying something similar to what I have just said — God is actually here, but it is as if the real channels for God are turned down but one. And as Meillassoux would have it, all of the channels are down right now. But one fader will go up in the future. Jam on God. The actual is a matter of realities, and we can at least learn from Deleuze that the actual is a composition of real elements. If you listen to Jam on it carefully, this is made very apparent, and it’s really very useful for displaying this idea, which is otherwise difficult to explain. It is especially useful when you’re dealing with things like Quantum Mechanics, which has to deal with explaining how potential is actualized. We use the word potential, and this in Quantum Physics, is in reference to the pilot wave, and the actual is the particle. Jam on it makes this concept very understandable.
PS:
I can even see this relationship of wave and particle played out across the original song and the extended instrumental variation. When I said once to you in another conversation that I have played Jam on it at DJ gigs or in radio shows, I realize it was always the instrumental version that I used, because it was more compatible, as it was this very well sequenced, minimalist variation that was easy to mix with, without the kind of cheesy rapping. So, I could say that for me, I used to think of the instrumental as the real, but in light of what you have said, I can say that the instrumental is also a tracing, a variation of a process that could exist in myriad arrangements—yet it feels to be a much more serious indication of what was going on behind the production and a better demonstration of both the philosophy of their work flow and your philosophical interpretation. The original is the face, it faces the voice and the semantics—but behind the face is something of a completely different character, a voiceless equivalent that appears to say much more.
CM:
Yeah, totally. The word “cheesy” is correct too. Rap back then was new, it was in fashion, so you didn’t really have to be that creative with your rap, you just had to do it, to make sure you hit the codes that could be recognized as this new thing, rap. For example, in the rap version of Jam on it, there is this whole thing about how “Superman came into town to see who he could rock”, well, Superman was a popular code during the early period of hip hop; everyone was always mentioning Superman, as if a rapper’s greatness could be demonstrated clearly by demolishing, mocking this iconic comic book figure.
There was of course an element of race, because it’s a black rapper and Superman is white, and has all these powers, white powers, so there is always this racial challenge — so if you go to something like Rapper's Delight by Sugarhill Gang — which is not the founding rap song, but definitely the one that really made rap popular — and what you hear is Big Bank Hank dissing Superman. So, Superman was just a strawman for early rap. Yes, the least creative element of Jam on it was the vocals, because they’re just biting directly what’s going on in the clubs of New Jersey, the Bronx, Queens and Money-Making Manhattan and recycling it. But, the music is where the real hip hop is. And hip hop has always meant to me a commitment to innovation. So, you’re correct to just focus on the instrumental.
PS:
Well that brings us pretty perfectly, actually, to the second question. Jam on it... Newcleus, 1984, what a moment in time. A time when Hip-Hop and Techno had not yet really been specified by the machinations of capitalist market machinery. You mentioned this song in your talk at HKW, simply as a way of placing the other song, Push the Button, into context, and you mentioned Push the Button because of a particular line in the song: “God would be mad, if he knew that we had given our lives over to computers”. It was here that you asked a question, a particular question which I have come to realize is almost a hallmark of your intellectual position: how did we reach a situation where someone could write the lyrics “God would be mad”—why would God be mad?
CM:
Okay, so here is the way I approach this. On the one side, that there is a reference to the Fall, as described in the Bible, in the Old Testament, as the Christians call it, and the fall of man — it’s about the curse visited on man that accompanies the fall, which is that we shall “make bread by the sweat of our brow”. You're gonna have to work hard to get food. Whereas in the Garden of Eden you had everything: food, shelter, and you name it. Then you had to go and do something we were told not to do, and for this stupid transgression (I gave you everything!) you were punished. The punishment, the curse, is labour; you have to work to eat. That’s the fall from paradise: labour. So, there is this way, in our times, our fallen times, of imagining technology: it’s, as the Pet Shop Boys put it, a sin. Why? It does the evil of resurrecting Eden. Why? Because the machines do everything for us. This is Paradise. The robots clean our clothes, they clean the house, they can bring us food. Isn’t it the case that this contradicts the punishment of God? So, we have this anxiety, and it’s expressed in that song very clearly, because the rapper is dealing with this idea of humans letting go, relieving ourselves of what makes us human, which is our curse, which is overturned through our deferral to the machine. So that line, “God must be quite mad,” refers, in my reading, to the fall from paradise, and the resurrection of paradise through technology, through human-made means, not God-given means. So, God must be mad at this, right; we must expect a second curse in the pipeline. And Push the Button ultimately sees the only way out of the second coming of the curse as nuclear devastation, a nuclear apocalypse; the button is a reset button, a button that returns us to where God had placed us after the Fall, where we have to farm, pick our fruit, fold our clothes, make our beds—I’m joking a bit here, but you see what I’m saying.
In post-apocalypse movies, what you see in film after film is everyone has to go back to surviving in the wild — preppers have this fantasy about preparing for the end of the world. When phones or electricity or some other necessity of modern life is no longer there for us, we’ll have to fend for ourselves, we’ll have to work, defend our property and so on — it’s a fantasy, but it’s also a liberation from having broken the terms of God’s punishment. But I am always interested in how we think about technology, what causes the anxiety. In Push the Button, the anxiety is that we have disobeyed God a second time, and there is gonna be retribution for this somehow. Instead of experiencing this punishment, nuclear annihilation is preferred.
The other way to look at it is demonstrated really well by a song from Cybotron, the Detroit duo. They’re were a part of the foundation of Detroit techno, but again, at this time (the early 80s), techno could really not be separated from electro. Techno sounded a lot like hip hop at that time, as both were influenced by Kraftwerk and Parliament and so on. With Cybotron, you have this alternative direction from the one Newcleus pictures. In the song Clear, Cybotron are asking for a different kind of reset, not the kind of reset we associate with rebooting a computer, going back to the beginning — in a world with racism, economic disaster, climate change, history of struggles and so on, we should use technology to effectively wipe out the past. This kind of thinking is radical.
One example that came up in the talk I gave at HKW, the one you referred to, concerns another discussion: AI in supermarkets or convenience stores. The person in the audience who asked about this said: “surely no one wants to work in a supermarket, so it is not a bad thing if people don’t do these jobs anymore.” I answered this by pointing out that labour isn’t being cut to liberate humans, but to cut costs, and the direction of technology is not, therefore, linked to our needs as humans. Newcleus is more saying: let’s bomb all of that to smithereens and start all over again. But Cybotron is saying: it’s not about going back to the beginning, to the gates of Eden, but erasing our past entirely.
While I agree with Clear more, I like to refer to Newcleus’ Push the Button because what you often find is that the deepest concerns of humans are expressed through the image of the robot, and this is seen in several art forms. Whispering Wind by Moby, imagines a robot that is sentimental, that has profound emotions about the past, and is looking at nature with a kind of longing that we are not capable of as human beings because we are too caught up in our consumer society. So, it’s interesting because we sort of displace our romantic feelings to the robot, and the robot is there looking at the forest, looking at the beauty of the leaves, hearing the wind, and this is in Moby’s song.
PS:
Ah, and this also relates to what you have been saying about displacing the religious instinct to machinery.
CM:
Yes, exactly, that’s what I’m referring to, God after God. What do you see in Wall-E? This robot working hard all day; but what does it do when at home? When done with work? The robot watches TCM [Turner Classic Movies]. Wall-E is a nostalgic robot. He returns to the past for comfort, for warmth. The 1930s, another era, an era before he ever could have existed, is where his heart is. Why is this robot so nostalgic? Why doesn’t he watch science fiction? Maybe The Terminator. That would make more sense.
Another example is with the music video of Björk’s All is full of Love, where we are dealing with another displacement, this time about the emotion of love. In the video, we watch the manufacturing of the Björk robot, and as it is being made, it is reaching for something beyond, something more than even carnal. The robot goes beyond carnal lust and achieves the greater or higher experience of Platonic love, pure love, spiritual love.
What are the robots doing in all of these examples? They are being what we want us to be. We are judging ourselves and also longing for what we think is truely ourselves. We feel we are incapable of feeling nature, warmth, love, but the robots can. This is the displacement. It is interesting to ask why this is going on; in films, music, advertisements; it just repeats, again and again. In the TV series
Battlestar Galactica, the robots have a better sense of God than we do. Humans are too disenchanted to get involved with the mystical, the great unknown, whereas robots apparently can access this mystery more than humans can, as though they are themselves enchanted.
As I have said before, the relationship between humans and machines in art and media is itself a grand sublation or deferral, an image that we project our deepest concerns onto — another example of this is actually found in that same Newcleus song, Push the Button, which has this theological side that we looked at before, about why God would be mad. But it has another side to it, which explores another form of anxiety about technology. In this song, the robots are our servants, they work for us, and the anxiety is that they may decide that they want their freedom. And who would they have to rise up against? Us, their masters. This was in Push the Button before it was in a number of Hollywood films. Even now, we are still spooked by rebellious robots. In 2023, there is an AI revolt in The Creator. The AI did all of our work, and they got tired of it, and they ran off into the woods to become freedom fighters. Again, the same situation happens in I, Robot, the same conflict. We, the masters. They, the resistance. This is again a displacement, like Moby’s sentimental robot.
It is the relationship between labour and capital that we struggle to express, and we are exploring these tensions through this dialectical relationship between humans and robots. We do this consistently, particularly in film, because it is much easier to make films based on these themes if we displace them. It is much harder to make a film about what is really going on. Humans exploiting humans.
Take Seattle, for example, where I am from. Amazon, which has a huge presence in Seattle, has started opening up all these businesses that apparently don’t require humans; AI does all the work — it checks you in, you pick up what you need, you pay automatically, all without encountering a person, all apparently without labour.
It is important to factor in here that these stores are monitored by remote workers in India; humans oversee and verify the work of the AI It’s a living self-checkout attendant, but one who operates from a distance via VR-enhanced camera feeds. Nonetheless, in America where jobs are treated as a deliverance, there is a genuine anxiety about technological development. Machines do not improve our lives, really; their function is to cut costs and increase surplus value for their owners. So, this anxiety is misplaced, because it is real in some respects, but in the case of Amazon, they really couldn’t get rid of the human element altogether—it’s a very funny Marxian joke. Capital cannot eliminate labour.
The fantasy of capital, which is expressed by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, this wonderful economist who doesn’t get enough attention because he wasn’t translated into English, although he was translated into German. Baranovsky, who was Ukrainian, and a member of a school called the Legal Marxists, had this idea that the perfect capitalist dream would involve a single person doing all of the production, as if all you needed was one single attendant, that’s the fantasy that we imagine capital wants to realize, a world where labour is completely removed. The Baranovsky nightmare, they call it. Yet, what we find instead, is the need for biological extraction, for real human labour, again and again. It’s not that I'm fantasizing about this, but for example we recently had a shipping accident in Baltimore, where a container ship crashed into a bridge. And of course, like all great accidents, it revealed a lot about our society, about what’s going on. In this case, what was exposed was the people working the container. They predominantly came from India. This revelation re-opened this question of why so many people on the ship were from India, and it’s simply because their labour is cheap — with all the automation in the world, they still need to bring in cheap labour, they can’t get rid of it. So, on the one hand, Amazon is setting up all these automated shops, and on the other hand, you still have a labour market dominated by cheap migrant workers.
Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary economist, took Baranovsky quite seriously, and a good section of her book The Accumulating Capital takes this into account, as well as Paul Sweezy, who went to considerable length to translate Baranovsky, in his book The Theory of Capitalist Development. In fact, most of us who read Marx and who have encountered Baranovksy, do so through Paul Sweezy, who was an important American Marxist. From Sweezy we get the famous definition of Baranovsky’s vision as: “Marxism gone mad”. Capital is constantly pushing for this maddening dream, but it cannot let go of low-cost labour. So, the question is: What is going on? Why can’t capital shake off what they call primitive accumulation, carnal accumulation. Not enough has been done to study the vampiric dependency capital has on living labour — why does it need to extract blood from humans, what is it about blood? The truth is that capital cannot extract this from a robot, it needs flesh and blood to get the real stuff, real surplus value.
PS:
That’s the curse of the fall, I suppose, that we will never escape that need for constant expenditure of blood.
CM:
Haha, yeah, well put. We can’t. We’re stuck. The curse of capital. There are so many other formulations and extrapolations of this, in science fiction, in this story, for example, of Autofac by Philip K. Dick, there is an automatic factory, running entirely with robots and AI, zero human labour. However, it produces way too much, and quite literally floods the planet with consumer goods, causing all kinds of environmental catastrophes, with the result being that humans are wiped out, become extinct. In a way that is quite comical, the factory is forced to start producing consumers. This is Baranovsky on steroids.
So, the whole revelation of the story, right, is that these people who think they’re humans, and they are trying to get rid of all this stuff that is coming to them from an Amazon-like company, all this clutter, only to learn that they themselves were made by the factory. You know, they peel off their skin and find wires and so on. So, it’s a nice idea, this factory that has to produce its own consumers, and as an answer to the question of how far can “Marxism gone mad” go? Philip K. Dick says “all the way to the consumers”.
PS:
Now, working with the time we have left, I would like to jump into a question about AI and music — we have spoken until now about displacing things to the machine, to God’s lament, but is that what is going to happen with music also? I am typically not technophobic, and we have published quite a lot of material on AI, such as the first book from Becoming, which offered the controversial view that, if something can be automated it should, as what can be automated is not art, it is not creativity, and if all art aspires towards music, it is the musical element that cannot be automated, if you see what I mean. In a sense, the author argues that AI would liberate art from the artist, or the artist would be free to do art again, with all derivative and commercial “art” being taken over by the machine.
To bring in another point of view, you mentioned once before about the religious instinct, and how our idea of God can be seen as a kind of phantom or shadow of our intelligence, and that a tree has a different intelligence, a distributed intelligence, so the religious instinct in a tree would “produce” a different kind of God that would be unrecognizable to us. Likewise, I could argue that an AI or a tree would have their own unique conceptualization of the musical instinct, which you may agree is tied to the religious instinct.
With this in mind, I am not sure that an AI can grasp music, and in another interview in this magazine, Rose Laurel talks about what it is that an AI could not grasp about music, and it is this element of music that an AI will fail to grasp in all arts, leaving this specific element of music and art in the domain of the human — but not because of the soul. So, an AI, if it tried to make music from its own position, would make something we do not recognise as music, or if it made something like our music, it would bring with it the question of, how is it that a robot is able to grasp our music so easily — this is something I would like to see play out.
CM:
Well, this also depends on something you mentioned before which is key — we have a notion of art in general, which includes music. Now, I can admit to myself that music is my favorite of them all, of all the arts, and I definitely agree with Walter Pater’s claim that all art aspires to the condition of music. So, what I always want to get rid of before coming to talk about AI, art, and music production, is the soul, because I think it gets in the way of clear thinking. People will listen to a piece of electronic music and say that the human feeling, the human touch, is gone or missing, and I don’t think we can make much progress in figuring out what AI can and can't do if we continue to believe in the soul, in the human touch.
PS:
And consciousness, too?
CM:
Yes, and both of them fall into what we might usually call Spirit, from the English translation of the Hegelian terminology. What I say is, let’s dump that; let’s not give it any importance or attention. Once we free our shoulders of this soul-baggage, we might be able to say more about what AI is doing, what it is doing with music, and more generally what music is about, without entering into these same conversations about the freedom of expression and so on, which I think are limiting. I think this is what Cybotron was saying with Clear, let’s get rid of that, clear your mind, that’s the line in the song, and this is interesting. The track’s robot says, first, “clear your mind”; and, next — and this is a funny line, the greatest ever, in all of techno — “clear your behind”. A wonderful pun because you know...
PS:
Your ass and your past.
CM:
Ha! Exactly! Your ass and your past, a very useful and productive pun. Clear it, clear how you’re dancing, clear your past, clear all these concepts we have about music. After all, how else could we appreciate anything like, say, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back? What Public Enemy were doing back then couldn’t have been appreciated without a certain clearing of expectations or traditions. You see this in all sorts of disciplines right, that some clearing is required for us to really appreciate what is going on with the technology, or maybe even with an encounter, with a new encounter, which doesn’t have to be with machines, it could be with other groups or cultures, and so on and so forth. If we are going to receive an encounter with the greatest amount of absorption, we need to clear our minds, and clear our behinds. That’s the philosophy I take from Cybotron, that’s why I really appreciate that song and refer to it so often.
PS:
That’s pretty clear. That suddenly reminds me of another story you told about the photon which changes its past — I wonder about the possibility of taking a moment to re-assess where we are in history, or to re-consider our past, if not to reconstruct the narrative, then to wipe that narrative clear. To make it make sense with an indeterminate present and a non-linear sense of time, or the privileging of the second law of thermodynamics as the primary axis of time.
CM:
Yes! So, this brings in Octavia Butler’s book Kindred, where the character is rewriting and interacting with history; history is not settled yet. This is very useful, and you can see this happening in the Delayed Choice Experiment by John A. Wheeler, the 20th century physicist. What this revealed was that the past is, at least on a quantum level, still undecided or undecidable. It’s as flexible as the future, and that’s important for us, because to accept this, the mind needs some kind of clearing because we are always told that the past is, well, it’s over; let’s move on! There is all this discourse amongst people who talk about racism, as if it happened in the past and it's over, that we should move on and get over it, and something like Kindred says: “No, we still have business to settle with the past”, so I like to theorize about the ways we can imagine a different kind of relationship with history, which is not one that just moves away from, but one that you go into, you visit. I say that the past can be haunted, and by this I don’t mean that the past haunts us, but actually that we haunt the past, which, by extension, would suggest that the future haunts us—it’s already here, haunting us as we haunt the past. Someone in the future is haunting us as we speak.
The second law of thermodynamics, as you mentioned, is a good example, because it basically says that we are moving into greater disorder and you can’t go back, and within this law is seemingly built the arrow of time, but I like to think that this process of haunting the past offers a way of escaping this order, this law.
Let me take this back toward AI and music though. With everything we have said about Clear, clear your mind, your past, clear the thermodynamic line. I once visited Exhibit 3003, a techno museum in Detroit. The museum, which is also the headquarters for Submerge, has all of these machines, all of these samplers, sequencers, synthesizers on display, and you really get a sense of how the music was shaped in the early days. But I was told a really fascinating story by the manager of Submerge, Cornelius Harris. He told me that when drum machines and samplers were coming out on the market, there was an organized resistance from session musicians and their union, and it was a successful resistance, and this caused the cost of these machines to drop. So, suddenly, this equipment became available to all these black kids in Detroit. On the one hand, their music education in school is being cut, so they have less and less access to classical instruments, but, on the other hand, their need to make music persists. And their music did come out but through these affordable machines. Do you see? There were all of these social factors — technological developments, worker movements, austerity, and so on — all, and more, coming together, seemingly by accident, like the falling price of the electronic instruments made in Japan, and somehow from within this a new art form emerges which makes music entirely with machines. This was Moroder’s dream come true. Total machine music. But his I Feel Love had to use a live drummer because drum machines were still, in 1976, too primitive. By 1982, they had arrived. From Japan.
With this in mind, I want to see how AI is going to play out in a future that is not closed. I don’t think it’s a closed case, as of yet. The first thing to do is clear our mind, get rid of the soul, then we can see better. It wouldn’t have been possible to have a track like Clear, if it wasn’t for these new emergent technologies, and to me, this music is as vital as anything made with classical instruments. You never know, the future isn’t closed—the other day someone was asking me about graffiti and I just said: “well, they didn’t invent spray cans with graffiti in mind; it was just a technology made to make painting easier, painting without a brush — if you throw something into human culture, it can go to all sorts of places”.
With the case of Hip Hop back in the 1980s, it went far beyond capitalism, which had to play catch up. Capitalism had no idea what to do about sampling, Public Enemy’s record or De La Soul’s album — capitalism didn’t know what to do about this new use of a new technology, it couldn’t predict it, so it struggled to form the framework to regulate it. It took them almost 10 years to get to a point where they could finally police sampling, with disastrous consequences for the art, sadly. So, when it comes to watching AI play out, I implore you: don’t give in to the authority of the soul, and the (imagined) authority of the past.
Thank you.
Reference List:
The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
Time without Becoming by Quentin Meillassoux
Sculpting in Time by Andre Tarkovsky
Cinema I-II by Gilles Deleuze
Modern Socialism in its Historical Development by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky
Theory of Capitalist Development by Paul Sweezy
The Accumulation of Capital by Rose Luxemburg
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Autofac by Philip K. Dick