I haven't used this website in quite some time, and I feel a bit heartbroken over that. When I first started adding my art and links to my projects here, I had a grand vision of a new central hub that would completely excise any remaining desire to promote my work and express my thoughts through websites like Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, and RateYourMusic. The reasons I could point to for why my engagement here waned and I sank back into routine and familiar discomfort are vast, ranging from mental health struggles to being entrenched in working towards finishing a Masters program in library and information sciences, or perhaps the encroaching reality of my girlfriend finally moving in with me requiring more planning and mental and physical effort on my part to ready myself for this huge change while I help her make the final transitionary steps. Whatever it may be, I found myself preoccupied with other areas of life and saw my desires to express myself through verbose ramblings as a bit unimportant in the grand scheme of things. However, within all the recent chaos of my life, it seems I still am incapable of suffocating the compulsion inside of me to spew my thoughts into the void regardless of how few eyes ever witness them.
All of that I suppose is a bit of a long-winded way of explaining the rather trivial "why" of what led me back here, rather than properly explaining "what" I'm here to talk about today, so let me get on with it. As a long time user of the website RateYourMusic (been there 15 years now which is truly insane to think about in the context of my 34 years of life!) I often find one of my favorite tools of discovery is the genre tag system. Over the years, RYM has become really great at giving validity to a whole swath of musical scenes and artistic movements, offering more reverence and importance to not just the musical genres that occupy spaces in our road map of culture and history, but also finding a way to represent front and center the very philosophies and conceptual frameworks that drove the creative processes of the world's countless composers, sound artists, bands, singers, and more to try and truly create something new for the world to hear, or in the case of the form I'll be discussing today, to be felt.
Acousmatic music is a term that depending on who you ask, could have some varying degrees of a nebulous definition. At its most basic level, it is sound made to be heard on speaker systems, rather than in headphones or performed live by musicians. That description truly fails however to take into account the much more rich and fascinating ideas present in the most prominent "compositions" of this aural philosophy. To me, the most essential truth that can be yielded from acousmatic music is that there exists a deeply enriching and spiritual sensation of music and sound as a whole that cannot be wholly felt once you visually identify something about its origin, be it the presence of a person holding a guitar on stage, or the sight of a complex electronic system clicking and twitching away on its own in the corner of a museum's exhibit room. Even sounds we might feel we could easily infer the origin of like the mooing of a cow or the bubbling of a stream can become enshrouded in mystery through the removal of visual confirmation, generating a sense of doubt in our own senses and reasoning that surely echoes some primal memory locked within us of our ancestors in caves and dark forests, forced to at all times train their ears to map out their surroundings and ensure their survival. In some ways it evokes the playful remark of Magritte's La Trahison des images, "ceci n'est pas une pipe". This is not a sound. It is a recording of a sound. And within the unknown interim between that sound's conception and its transference to your ears, something has occured. It has found a way to unshackle its essence from itself, and has metamorphosized into an ambivalent poltergeist that cannot be seen, but can most certainly be felt.
While some of the basic ideas of acousmatic music can arguably be applied to our experience with any music we hear through a recorded format such as vinyl or CD, the essential difference lies in the insularity of a closed-world experience of sound through the medium of headphones, and the open, immediate reality of acoustic vibrations that interact with the dimensions of a room, and bounce their sound off the countless objects to draw their power and generate a more definite shape to its physical sound. Sound felt directly next to ones ears that exists in a 2 channel stereo format is a much different experience from a 5.1 surround sound system with speakers placed at various distances and heights that project themselves at you from any number of angles. Likewise, even a very loud noise on headphones can at most feel as if it is disturbing your hearing or causing discomfort to the immediate region of one's head, while sound projected into a physical space that you yourself occupy creates a much more intense and instinctive reaction as sounds swell and stutter and pop, producing frequencies that can wash over one's body and stimulate the sensory nervous system, temporarily generating a physical link between our bodies and our environments.
One of the composers most commonly affiliated with this concept of acousmatic music is the German-born Roland Kayn, an avant-garde thinker who explored the boundless possibilities of "cybernetic music", a complex network of electronic systems processing both their own internal voltages and external acoustic sounds. Through a very delicate and nuanced system of prompts and suggestions, Kayn's music was able to essentially play just as much of a role in its own materialization as he did, responding not just to the manual adjustment of knobs and triggers, but also internally processing its own sounds and modulating its own frequencies, creating a very esoteric form of sound art that defies traditional classification. Rather than compositions in the traditional sense, Kayn's works feel more like diverse ecosystems, wherein countless variables linked together by a complex web of wires and electronic impulses ebb and flow, scream and write, hum and sigh, sleep and wake altogether in strange symphonies of motion and resonance that feel like the electronic equivalent of peering into the deepest pockets of the ocean. Much like those strange creatures that may seem alien and totally new to us despite lingering out of sight for millennia, these sounds have technically always existed and been capable of existing. It is only in the last century or so that our advancements in technology have given us the capacity to properly capture and perceive these unique electronic expressions of sound. As his discipline for his work grew, his compositions became increasingly ambitious in their length and scope, eventually shedding the few remaining strands of identifiable origin to make way for a much more complex and ethereal reality of sound which called upon the unseen orders and structures of our universe to materialize it, surrendering an aspect of the creative process to the universe, entrusting these invisible systems with the final say in the expression of a piece.
Another composer who touched upon this capacity within sound for an ethereal, even rapturous experience was Eliane Radigue, a composer most often associated with the broader realm of "drone" music. Her compositions are glacial, long form swells of electronic hums that almost imperceptibly change over their lengths to guide the listener on a spiritual journey. That is not some fancy editorialization on my part either, Radigue herself acknowledged a deep bond between her music and her experiences with Buddhism. A recurring theme throughout many of her long-form compositions is the spirit transitioning from some form to another, be it states of consciousness or a total transfer from ephemeral life to eternal death. The minimalism of her pieces leans heavily into a singularity of purpose within each composition, not so much fascinated by a complex detailed narrative of spiritual exploration as they are by emitting the proper state of consciousness necessary for these experiences directly into the listener's immediate surroundings. I would argue her music has a deeply magnetic pull to it, something that increases in intensity as her pieces conclude, creating a sudden realization that despite the physical properties of the room remaining the same, the acoustics of the piece themselves have managed to draw their own definitions and edges onto the room, an effect that is only truly appreciated once the piece ends, returning one to a more lucid and grounded state of consciousness and urging a recognition of the ambient emptiness occupying one's home at any given moment. Through her precise control of frequencies and resonances, Radigue accomplished something truly unique, perfecting a form of minimal drone that even masters of electronic and experimental music like Coil struggled to match on wonderful releases like ANS and Time Machines, a form of aural psychedelia that can either enhance or for some induce a trance-like state that brings one into close proximity with the sacred origin of all things.
While the more formal and restrictive definition of acousmatic music would probably limit eligible pieces to those initially intentionally set and performed within some sort of museum or installation setting, I would argue that as music and aural art have transitioned more fully into the era of digital presentation, where artists are not as hindered by time restraints and physical limitations of recorded formats, these sound sculptors are finding new ways to more directly deliver the intended effect of these experiences to the avid listener who may not have as easy access to a museum or local art spaces, but still has a half-way decent sound system and steady internet connection.