MySpace a place for friends

Ahleuchatistas, Of the Body Prone
Review by Daniel Robert Siakel, copyright 2009
Originally posted at siakel.blogspot.com

§2
One would and should expect much of any group recording under the auspices of John Zorn's venerable avant-garde “New Music” label, Tzadik. One should expect even more from a collective whose name was forged, as Eugene Chadbourne explains, “out of a combination of ‘Ah-Leu-Cha,’ a vintage bebop tune featuring fascinating counterpoint between Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the Mexican revolutionary movement known as ‘Zapatistas.’” A collective, moreover, whose album titles explicitly connote the contentious conceptual articulations of Theodor Adorno (On The Culture Industry)—who will figure prominently in this review—and Emmanuel Levinas (The Same and The Other). Add to these expectations the Ahleuchatistas’ reputation as a tour de force both at home and abroad and one can, I think, get a sense of the pressure put on them to produce an artifact of adequate proportion—call it performance anxiety—in the face of the “performance principle,” as Marcuse would put it.

Listen after listen, Of the Body Prone unequivocally delivers on that—which is to say, its—promise.


§3
Of the Body Prone wisely and respectfully deviates from the formula expertly exacted earlier in On The Culture Industry (2003), The Same and the Other (2004), What You Will (2005), and Even In the Midst (2007). That formula, put (too) simply, expressly aimed to capture “the most intense…compositional rock complexity ever recorded.” Many consider the Ahleuchatistas to have achieved that aim.

There is a risk inherent to expert exactitude, execution, and virtuosity in musical production: namely, the fetishization and perversion of music in the true sense of the term. One finds this kind of fetishization and perversion exemplified by the more-beats-per-minute, odd-meter-driven, post-rock-jazz-star trash that all-too-frequently passes for and pretends to the advanced aesthetic and conceptual articulations of avant-garde, high-concept music. (Exemplars of this latter, respectful category are, on my reading, Roscoe Mitchell, sunn 0))), Nadja, ZS, and the like.) Music qua musicking—a term coined by musicologist Christopher Small to emphasize the agency at the heart of musical production versus music’s mere phenomenality qua spatio-temporal-aesthetic event—facilitates rhizomatic lines-of-flight borne of determinate circumstances that trace the outlines of further, unknown, and (crucially) incommensurable circumstances. Put differently, music in its essential movement instantiates an anarchic flow of becoming-other, deviations and deterritorializations from the arborescent refrains constitutive of that process. (Rhizomatic flows presuppose arborescent, stratifying structures.) What we call “music” rarely partakes of, or contributes positively or progressively to, this fundamental process.

This predominantly Deleuzian description should not, however, obscure the Adornian sense of fetishization and perversion that I mean to emphasize here—in part, because I want to ascribe a special status to the thought of the individual who inspired the title of the Ahleuchatistas’ On The Culture Industry; but also and more importantly because I believe that Adorno’s analysis of the fetishization of music will enable me to articulate precisely what I find to be so revolutionary about Of the Body Prone.


§4
In “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno describes in characteristic, vitriolic detail the structure underlying the enjoyment of virtuosic instrumental execution: viz., the commodity form. (We should understand the process of fetishization delineated here in a Marxist and not a psychoanalytic sense.) Adorno argues that the form of consumption inherent to the commodity form precludes contemporary listeners both from experiencing the quality or function of moments of sensual pleasure vis-à-vis the whole of a musical artifact, and from recognizing the fetish character of musical commodities as such. The fetishistic essence of the commodity form functions in such a way that the commodity’s fetish character remains concealed from the listener and producer alike. I trust that the reverence accorded to such contemporary “performers” as Dream Theater, Yngwie Malmsteen, et al. will aptly illustrate the pervasiveness of this kind of fetishization, one particularly prominent in so-called progressive or New Rock. Furthermore, I believe the prevalence of this kind of musicking gives us prima facie evidence of the plausibility of Adorno’s account, anachronistic and inappropriate as its invocation may seem here.

The principal feature of the “deconcentrated listener” is that s/he no longer produces any resistance to that which is offered up for his/her consumption. Fetishized listening encourages consumers to lose themselves in ecstasy that is not actually such, to lie to themselves about the completeness of their subordination to the rule of the reified mechanism of surplus value and the commodity form. (Consider, for example, the insatiable, miserly, obsessive tendencies of music consumption that came to prominence in the late 1990’s.) As such, deconcentrated listening, which Adorno takes to define regressive listeners’ relationship to their musical commodities, transforms potentially critical listeners into acquiescent purchasers, into subjects whose docility completes the domination inherent to commodity form. Consumption per se, not the actual sale, is what is at issue here.

Accordingly, by “fetishization” Adorno means the reduction of the synthetic musical whole of a work of art to individual, consumable moments, moments that encourage pleasure at the expense of critical reflection. The kind of synthesis one might experience while listening to the music of Bach (Adorno’s example), Schoenberg (Adorno’s example), or (if I may) sunn 0))) would reveal to the listener an image of the social condition in which the historical truth of his/her situation might become manifest, even undeniably so. The kind of critical reflection afforded by such a piece of musical art qua synthetic whole would potentiate the revolutionary capacity latent in the listener, precisely that revolutionary capacity which is devitalized by regressive consumption. Fetishized listening reduces this synthetic whole to specific sensual moments that regressive listeners consume in isolation, as commodities. (Think of the widespread attention accorded to Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, “Eruption,” for instance, which showcased little more than his rapid-fire finger-tapping technique.) Only in the proper, non-regressive mode of listening, in which the synthetic whole of a musical piece of art is allowed to function as such, may an image of resistance emerge as an immanent, transcendental, dialectically real possibility—as the possibility of new possibility.

In “Bach Defended Against His Devotees,” Adorno maligns so-called devotees of Bach’s music for fetishizing the technical flourishes contained within—which is to say, as irreducible moments of—the whole of each of his musical works. This fetishization of moments thereby perverts and subjugates the revolutionary potential that consideration of the whole, in its robust sense, might afford. One could, I think, level a similar kind of criticism against the vast majority of contemporary progressive rock; except that now—and here I allow Adorno’s pessimism to speak through me— musical production has been fetishized to an even further degree. It is this impasse that determines the situation of what Tzadik has aptly termed “The New Rock Complexity.” Thus, it is both within and to this situation that Of the Body Prone must speak.


§5
This abbreviated Adornian exposition tacitly registers a potential concern with the Ahleuchatistas’ earlier output; the worry being that the uncompromisingly difficult, technical compositions exacted therein might fall prey to structurally similar criticisms which are wholly applicable to progressive rock a la Dream Theater. The uncompromisingly political dimension of the Ahleuchatistas’ musickings, however, coupled with their commitment to texture and expression over and above mere technicality-for-technicality’s-sake, do, I think, save them from such a characterization. But fetishization is still at issue here; for it is precisely this fetishization that defines their field of determination and play, their aesthetic and conceptual horizon: the field of The New Rock Complexity.

These conditions give us all the more reason to laud the new expressed in Of the Body Prone.
The musickings of the album suggest a self-revolutionary dialectical critique—which, following Adorno, contains both immanent and transcendental aspects as dependent parts—leveled against the very form that grounds its multifarious articulations. (Here one might also invoke the tired Derridian term, “self-deconstruction,” but I think this may obscure rather than clarify the (political) point.) For the first time in their corpus, the meticulously composed sections of the Ahleuchatistas’ “songs” seamlessly fall apart and give way to improvisations that occur, as it were, in the cracks of what seem to be almost self-consciously over-determined compositions. The track titled, “Why can’t we be in Jamaica?” for instance, has no detectable trace of reggae or other Jamaican musical forms; yet it allows for intricate play both within and beyond the complex compositional structure that serves as its root.

Add pressure to a closed system and that system will tend towards its own destruction. Closed, consistent systems necessarily contain within themselves evidence of their own lack. (Think of metaphorical applications of Gödel sentences.) This is precisely what the Ahleuchatistas do consistently throughout the album: in-consist.

 
§6
A convenient way to mark this difference vis-à-vis their earlier material is with the arrival of master drummer Ryan Oslance, whom Sean Westergaard at AllMusic has compared to Tatsuya Yoshida, though “perhaps with another set of arms.” Oslance’s contributions to the energy and aesthetic of the album exemplify the radical conceptual shift described above; and yet that shift, appropriately enough, is irreducible to his uncanny arrival. Nor is it reducible to guitarist Shane Perlowin’s incorporation of effects and loop pedals, or bassist Derek Poteat’s increased attention to texture. Each of these elements is a dependent part of the whole; but we should, I believe, resist fetishizing these moments at the expense of considering that image which emerges from consideration of the synthetic musical whole. For it is that and that alone that conveys the revolutionary accomplishment here. 

I agree with the Tzadik propaganda that this is, indeed, The New Rock Complexity “at its very best.” I also want to attempt to articulate why it is the best. Of the Body Prone signals the end of a certain path that The New Rock Complexity has taken thus far. It uncooperatively proclaims where its music—and thus musical production itself—ought to go. This characterization, I hope, appropriately, accurately, and adequately registers its achievement.

That achievement will become revolutionary, however, only through non-regressive—which is to say, critical—listening. I trust that there are those open-minded and vulnerable enough to tread the path newly trodden here, if only to uncooperatively deviate and deterritorialize along the way. This is music in its truest sense, music that ought to be but perhaps will not be heard.

[On that note, one can purchase the album here, here, or through more familiar means.]