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Michel Henritzi hat die Einladung von Brandon LaBelle wörtlich
genommen und sich auf die Suche nach der der Musikproduktion inhärenten
sozialen Begleitmusik begeben. Wann ist ein Klang für uns Musik
und wann ist er einfach nur Lärm? Wie und welchen sozialen Kriterien
folgend definiert eine Gesellschaft, was einem musikalischen und somit
kulturellen Feld zugeordnet werden kann und was von diesem ausgeschlossen
bleiben soll? Auf diese und ähnliche Fragen konzentriert sich Henritzi
mit seinem Stück "Secret Sounds of Music" und stellt fest, Musik
heutzutage erfüllt in erster Linie die Aufgabe, jene Leere zu füllen,
die sich in unseren Leben als eine Begleiterscheinung der Spektakel-
und Konsumgesellschaft aufgetan hat. Sich mit einem bestimmten musikalischen
Objekt zu identifizieren lässt uns meinen, dass wir mit anderen
in eine soziale Beziehung getreten sind. Und doch sind Plattenläden,
so Henritzi keine neutralen Orte der Interaktion, sind sind viel mehr
die Schaufenster einer aggresiven liberalen Ideologie. Der Einzelne
wird in die Rolle eines passiven Konsumenten gezwungen. Wir meinen bloß,
selber eine Auswahl zu treffen, wenn wir eine Platte aus dem reichbestückten
Angebot wählen. Tatsächlich aber wurde längst darüber
entschieden, welche Musik uns zu gefallen hat. Für jeden Moment
des Lebens und für jeden Menschen-Typus stellt die Plattenindustrie
das richtige Album bereit, oft in kleinen überschaubaren Auflagen
um unserem Drang nach Exklusivität gerecht zu werden. Die Suche
nach der sozialen Begleitmusik der Musikproduktion, nach der "social
Music" eben, führte Henritzi in mehrere große Musikgeschäfte,
unter anderm der Firmen FNAC, Virgin und Leclerc und schließlich
hin zu einem Klang, der wohl wie kein anderer die heutige Gesellschaft
kennzeichnet: der Klang des Geldes - von diesem emsigen und unermüdlichen
Scheppern und Rauschen bleibt auch die Musikproduktion nicht verschohnt.
Michel Henritzi: "Gehen wir von der Idee aus, dass die eigentliche
Musik, die Musik des Geldtransfers, gewissermaßen eingeschlossen
ist in dem Objekt Schallplatte, dann wird für uns diese eigentliche
grundlegende Musik nur während der Kauftransaktion hörbar.
Angenommen also, die Schallplatte impliziert eine akustische Realität,
die über das Aufgenommene hinausgeht, dann ist der Plattenladen
ein Ort, wo unsere Beziehung zu Musik bereits vorbestimmt ist. Er wird
dadurch zu einem komlexen akustischen Raum, den wir uns aneignen müssen."
Michel Henritzi fängt den geheimen Klang des Geldes ein und sendet
ihn über das Radio in unsere Wohn- und Arbeitsräume - dies
stellt auch einen Akt der Wiederaneignung dar, denn gerade das Radio
spielt eine zentrale Rolle in dem Prozess der kommerziellen Vereinnahmung
von Musik. Musik und Werbejingles verschmelzen im Radio zu einem kontinuierlichen
Soundstream, der meist nicht nur die Ursprünge der verwendeten
Musiken leugnet, sondern auch jegliche Ecken und Kanten scheut, um sich
eben möglichst widerstandsfrei und unbemerkt in unser Bewusstsein
einzuschmeicheln und dort die gewünschten Kaufimpulse auszulösen.
Michel Henritzi: "Wenn Sendezeit einen Preis hat, wenn Musik hinter
der Werbung verschwindet, die sich ihrer bedient, dann müssen wir
die Rolle des Radios als politisches Medium herausfordern. Wir müssen
die verschiedenen Sound-Komponenten, die für das Radio benutzt
werden untersuchen, auch die normativen akustischen Standards und die
Programmierung der Musik im Radio. Dem süßen kleinen hi-fi
müssen wir ein low-fi entgegenstellen, Stille und Lärm. Konfrontieren
wir den Hörer mit seinen eigenen Beschränkungen, führen
wir ihm seine Konditionierung vor Augen, indem wir über das Radio
intervenieren. Sounds zu spielen, die eigentlich unakzeptabel sind für
das Radio, etwa im öffentlichen Raum aufgenommen ist der Versuch
eine Verbindung mit dem Hörer zu etablieren."
Kunstproduktion im allgemeinen und Musikproduktion im speziellen
passiert oft in einem isolierten Raum. Nicht selten versuchen sich Künstler
in ihrem Arbeitsprozess ganz bewusst von der gesellschaftlichen Realität
abzukoppeln. In der von ihm kuratierten Reihe "Social Music" stellt
der in Los Angeles lebende Künstler Brandon La Belle Künstler
und Musiker vor, die in ihren Arbeiten genau das Gegenteil versuchen:
gezielt Kontakt aufnehmen und ganz bewusst an gesellschaftliche Prozesse
anknüpfen, sie als ein Mittel zur Musikproduktion einsetzen. "Social
Music" versucht das Beziehungsgeflecht zwischen Produzent und Rezipient,
zwischen Individuum und Gesellschaft hörbar zu machen.
| Statement
von Michel Henritzi |
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"When is there music ? When is there noise ? How and why —
at a certain given moment in its history — a society defines what
belongs to the musical (cultural) field and what is alien to it , either
by being residual or simply already out of fashion ? This is a eminently
political question, since our era tries to force politics out of its
domain and right into the economic domain, replacing it with the deception
of communication and of free access to commodities. If economy becomes
the sole criteria in the organisation of our society, then the cultural
goods — "the ones which make us accept all the other ones"
— are its most efficient propaganda. The society of entertainment
("société du spectacle"), as Guy Debord defined
it, organises and accelerate the distribution of cultural products,
release them as the marketable representation of its silent propaganda
(that doesn’t say its name). What doesn’t belong to the mercantile
area - and its twin the media — will therefore have no chance to
reach an audience, to oppose some form of contradiction to the reproduction
of an instant falsely lived. Our identification with cultural objects
(most particularly the record) creates the fantasy that is our social
relationship with the others, whereas in fact it is a relationship between
the objects themselves, and we are banished from this interaction, being
only invited to its representation. The only thing that this diffusion
of those ever more numerous — and always identical - sonic merchandises
ever does is filling up the now empty social domain, empty since our
life has been taken away from us and replaced by its depiction. We are
the euphoric consumers of this.
In doing its normalisation and police work, the music industry encircles
the social space by diffusing commercial jingles that change our relationship
with music, programming it to serve its needs and criterias. The aim
of this aesthetic standardisation (as the aesthetic production of politics)
— from the pop starmaking process to the aesthetic of mixing, but
also through the definition of the acoustic qualities the sound is supposed
to have — is the triumph of the economic over the political (the
subordination of the social body to the financial demand), the refusal
of a critical discourse that renders art political for a moment, with
the promise of disorder it implies. Thus, anything that the medias can’t
make their own in order to use it as propaganda becomes noise —
a residual social noise which will be silenced. A propaganda whose use
is to make people believe in the unchanging order of the world, its
illusory harmony and its accomplishment in consumerism. And that includes
the use of a certain kind of noise in the latest youth-oriented musical
products (from rap to death metal, from techno to pop) that, far from
being a moment of political consciousness, emphasizes the separation
between art and life — the bodies that are immersed in a continuous
stream of sound that isolates them — and also the commercial division
of daily and nightly time tables. The biggest record companies are rated
at the Stock Exchange the fluctuations of the financial market being
their only artistic policy, the noise of the musical credit cards.
Music plays an ever bigger part in every moment of our life, in the
public as well as in the private domains ; to each moment of day and
night there is a corresponding music which satisfies a need created
by the business : the need to fulfil our vacuous social life. If there
is one thing that our era hates, it is silence, because it reminds us
of the emptiness where our existences are confined. Therefore, it is
necessary to overflow the eardrum with information and sounds so that
the acoustic space and its questioning both disappear, as if folded
into the record — object. Similarly, the entire social space is
dissolved in it.
When the phonograph was invented, it became possible to reproduce what
had initially been lived as a social experience and to separate art
from living a little more, transforming what had been lived as an unique
moment into a continuous sonic inconvenience nobody hears anymore in
the end. Thus turning this objectified music into a merchandise. From
there on, each time we enter a record shop and believe we chose a record
on the shelves, we establish a social relationship with an object that
has already be chosen for us. We will then have the illusion that we
listen to the music it carries in our bedroom, though we actually hear
its real music without noticing as soon as the electronic cash register
swallows our credit card. Each record is a social product whose secret
noise is money. Which implies that every recorded piece of music is
the product of a commercial social intercourse, despite the fact that
every musician works within a socially determined context.
You only have to see how the musical industry was able to exploit gansta
rap, although it seemed to be to most anti-social musical genre, the
farthest removed from the concept of the american way of life, and then
sell it back to the black community and its youth for its own profit,
making them pay a cheap price for the chance to dream of sonic riots,
leading them to share the real morality of capitalism, the morality
of money. Establishing clearly with this commercial deviation that every
single social intercourse has to be made through money, with no other
mediator. The act of buying — or stealing — a record establishes
a social relationship between the teenager and a fictitious, imaginary
community. Behind this show business-created illusion, a new relationship
arises, more real but paradoxically hidden, the relationship between
a merchandise and the need of it.
Record stores (like any other cultural product) are not neutral spaces
of interactions, they are the shop windows of an aggressive liberal
ideology, where the individual is turned into a passive consumer, branded
like an animal by a barcode. Exhibiting on their shelves look-alike
products with an ever shorter life span, while only their packaging
is being changed. You only have to walk around shopping centres to endlessly
hear a music "with no quality ", whose only purpose is have
the consumer stay a little longer by creating artificially a seductive
space, with changing moods. Shops all use music to attract the consumer
towards their window displays cluttered with identical trash. What the
people buy is an illusory moment of social relationship.
The other main vector of the normalisation of music is radio, where
it is conditioned to fit the aesthetic of the marketplace, with songs
and advertising jingles meshing together, even taking each other’s
place. Its definitions of acoustic standards and the preponderance of
the notion of melody, constitute a new facet of the normalisation process
of our listening and the subordination of our desires to familiar sounds.
It masterminds the advertising of this process, keeping us in a constant
repetition of the same things, in the duplication of feelings lived
by other people. Radio works at aligning our tastes so that they fit
the ways of the market, a permanent chill-out in order to hide the urban
noise. There again, the music broadcasted merges with the ads, it is
moneyed in order to support the promoting of some merchandise, blending
with it and therefore making it more desirable. The time notion is not
the concern of the musician anymore, but of the commercial director
of the radio station, frequently cutting down a piece of music to welcome
more publicity and increase his profits. Obviously, the principle of
remixing was not invented by DJ’s but by the ad-men of liberalism.
Radio maintains a social link between the listener and a faraway place,
broadcasting commercial messages (basically, all industrial music is
a carrier of those messages), singing the praises of the liberal organisation
of the world and the turning over of politics into economy. Everything
is set up in order to separate music from the political noise of life,
to prevent the examination of listening from being the focus of the
musical occurrence, to hide that fact that every piece of music and
its management is the source of social interaction.
Three stages can be loosely defined in the relationship that brings
together a musical production and a listener:
- production,
- diffusion,
- listening.
The artist and the audience are united only during the second stage
through the acquisition of the record, against a sum of money, that
often takes place after a series of commercial strategies that none
of them control, thus creating the delusion of some sort of social intercourse.
The production of music often takes place in a location that is cut
off from social life and urban noises ; as for the act of listening
it is solitary, or at least selective, isolating music from the social
noise.
"The secret noise of music"
Starting with the idea that the music actually confined within a record
— that of the credit card - is really heard when we make its acquisition,
that the record possesses an acoustic reality that oversteps the mere
music that is recorded, imprinted or encoded under its surface, the
record store —as a place where our rapport with music is pre-determined
— thus becomes a complex sonic space that we have to make our own.
The basis of this project of "social music" consists in making
sound recordings in various music superstores (FNAC, VIRGIN, LECLERC),
recording the miscellaneous atmospheres and noises of those shopping
centres. Those varied sounds have then been edited, mixed and distributed,
recreating the commercial zone in the listeners’ bedrooms, making
them confront their anxiety of withdrawal. As the recorded music played
in those commercial centres reveals itself to be an ambient noise, the
noises of social intercourse become music.
On the other hand, the idea was to play radios commercials not as promotional
devices but as the real soundtrack of the consumer society, since the
various announcers are more important that the music that is played.
If broadcasting time has a price, if music disappears behind his advertising
use, then we have to challenge the role of radio as a political media,
examine the various sound components used by radio, its normative acoustic
standards and its musical programming. To oppose the "sweet little
hi-fi" with low-fi, silence and noise, confront the listener to
his own limitations and thus remind him of his conditioning, to intervene
on his radio set. Playing sounds that are unacceptable for the radio
(taken in the public space) is an attempt to establish a social link
with the listener. When ads and jingles are displaced from one radio
station another, the radio becomes a-topical, and it is being asked
political questions : "When is there music ?", "When
is there social noise ?", "What actual power has the announcers’
money over programming ?", "What is the secret noise of music
?" (Michel Henritzi)
Production of art and especially of music often takes place in an
isolated space. Artists in their work process often sever their ties
with social reality intentionally. In this series Brandon LaBelle -
Los Angeles based artist - introduces artists and musicians working
with opposite methods: intentionally creating contacts and taking up
social processes, using them as means to produce music. "Social Music"
tries to make these relations audible: relations between producer and
listener, between the individual and society.
| Statement
from Michel Henritzi |
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