Negative Space

Visual art has always worn its medium on its sleeve, or at least, its wall label. Digital audio, for all its possible forms and processes, doesn’t get the same self-imposed scrutiny. How can it? Sound without sight is a recipe for misapprehension and under-determination. It isn’t until you see the creaking door when you realise that it’s completely harmless, and not an intruder trying to sleuth through your home. Musicians don’t know what to do with media if it isn’t centre-stage, in plain sight for all to see. I’ve seen chamber concerts that describe a piece played from a .wav file on a laptop as “for fixed media,” “for digital playback,” “for laptop,” “for electronics,” “for diffusion,” “for concrete sounds,” or at its most egregious, “for tape.”

Maybe this is a good thing; maybe this diversity of names keeps media feeling alive and open to redefinition and reinterpretation. Maybe it reveals how hamstrung our comprehension of media are when we can’t see them, and have no visual clues into the process of making digital sound. It’s a common complaint, its most grating variation being the “they might as well just be playing off iTunes!” exhortation that inevitably accompanied the laptop performances of a few years ago.

It’s certainly true that sound enjoys a malleability, a penchant for witchery and obfuscation, that colour and light do not. But I’d suggest that it isn’t sound itself that’s enables this deception, but rather of the electric sound apparatus — more specifically, the sound recording apparatus. It’s easy to “compress” a long field recording into a much smaller duration with little more than a few well-placed crossfades — that’s all there is behind iconic works like Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien and Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma. These distortions in time are only possible thanks to multitrack audio editing, at first on the tape console, but even more transparently in the digital domain.

In fact, it’s easy to forget that the digital audio workstation (DAW) is a medium at all, giving sound these powers of deception. It operates with such a degree of transparency, we can’t hear that it’s there. We hear the content but not the medium. People try to hear it, but with an inaccuracy that tends towards statistical noise — go to any music production forum and find a thread asking which DAW hot-producer-XYZ uses. A run-of-the-mill Deutsche Gramophon record will have dozens to hundreds of splices. I’ve mixed piano recordings where I’ve adjusted the volume and decay envelope of every single note. A sound engineer friend of mine lamented the mind-numbing precision required when editing the guitar solo of a metal track.

The DAW in these situations perpetuates the myth of the perfect performance, which listeners then expect from actual live performance, human and fallible as it is. Classical music students tear themselves to shreds in anxiety, not realising that they aren’t competing against great performers, but rather against human performers augmented by Pro Tools. This all goes to show that the DAW does significant ideological work, but never appears to do so. It shapes and bounds its content, while maintaining the illusion of pure transparency. The DAW could be said, then, to occupy a negative space in the sonic zeitgeist.

Justin C. Meyers created Negative Space (1981–2014) after a life-threatening condition left him with “a physical affliction I will carry for the rest of my life.” His year-long recovery, he describes as “the negative space that defines my future.” On this ambitious album, one of the most imaginative and coherent of 2016, he gives varied and nuanced definition to negative spaces — not just in terms of his own body, but of digital sound itself.

Meyers’ previous release on his label Sympathy Limited, Aprés Garde, is a collection of meandering drones and lush arpeggios, evoking an at times domestic interiority, a bedroom on a wintery night. One track, “Two Windows,” even uses a recording reminiscent of the pitter-patter of slushy rain to suggest this kind of sheltered space. The recordings on Negative Space, while not as thoroughly representational as “Two Windows,” don’t seem all that different in theory, but where Aprés Garde’s invocation of domestic space is cloying and claustrophobic, on Negative Space it is affirmational, open and depthless. Opening track “Orientation” uses close recordings of a bowl and miscellaneous metallic objects. A monolithic chord sweeps in, and holds at a deafening volume. A moment passes, and it disappears.

Negative Space treats Meyers’ bodily affliction, his reduced ability to navigate “real life” space, as a catalyst to deep-dive into the abyss of the digital. Immersion and sinking are strong conceptual threads throughout the work — “Inharmonic Immersion” makes this immediately apparent, especially with its ending sequence: a downward Shepard-Risset glissando, a silence, then a splash, submergence. This leads to the centrepiece of the album, “Inhaler I,” a harrowing loop, cavernous and sinking further still, like re-living a drowning over and over.

One of the hallmarks of this particular digital space that Meyers has inhabited is its deafening silence. Every sound is so separate and distinguishable from each other, never muddy or blurry. There are rarely more than three different sounds playing concurrently. This works in contrast to the tendency of the contemporary post-internet aesthetic, bombarding the listener with, apparently, the voracity of the digital society built by capitalism. Here, it’s much more nuanced, almost kinetic, like you could trace the contours of each sound with your eyes, sitting next to each other, but never touching. Even the sounds soaked in reverb feel detached, operating through a spatial logic distinct to the handful of other bone-dry sounds, and the sparse yet intimate field recordings suggest a different spatiality still. Negative Space is made from chunks of audio, not from sound per se.

In the DAW, sounds are already detached, at least graphically. The linear representation of audio — its placement into “tracks,” which are little more than containers for sound and its manipulations over time — mean that they don’t and can’t mix. The de facto way to describe sounds in the DAW is that they’re “layered” or “stacked” over each other. It’s a design choice inherited from the multitrack tape console, and a tendency of the popular and progressive music of the 70's and 80's towards maximalism, filling up each channel with something, just because the capacity was there. What the development of the DAW couldn’t take from the tape console, however, was an indescribable and elusive by-product of tape channels running against each other: a sense of glued-ness, a subtle effect that gives the impression that each channel sonically and symbiotically alters every other channel — in short, “warmth,” that apocryphal and empirically undefinable characteristic of analogue. A hefty proportion of digital sound processing (DSP) tools are built with the intention of “gluing” several tracks together, to make their “edges” dull and less obviously discrete.

Alexander Galloway writes about the “edges” of artworks in his book The Interface Effect, coining the crude slogan “the edges of art always make reference to the medium itself.” Recording aesthetics for much of its early life until, say, 1966 (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Glenn Gould’s The Prospects of Recording, et al), tended towards work gesturing inward, works about the “centre” rather than the “edge.” Usually, this involved invoking liveness — the record was a vessel through which live performances were captured and distributed across time. Its aim was to “remove all material traces of the medium, propping up the wild notion that the necessary trauma of all thresholds [between media] might be sublimated into mere ‘content.’” The edges of sounds in Negative Space are so distinct and accentuated, everything about each sound gestures outwards towards the characteristics of its medium, its own exteriorisation, that is, its stance as a little coloured rectangle with a waveform, in a track, in the DAW. It “objectifies the trauma itself.” It’s edges all the way down.

But what makes this any more revelatory as an excavation of digital space than glitch music, a primary hallmark of which is its evacuation of air, the final mediatic frontier of music? Or even of the post-dance computer music that’s been surfacing in the wake of the likes of Mark Fell, some fine examples of which have been released through Meyers’ own Symapthy Limited? I think the answer lies in its programmatic character, how effectively Meyers explores his ill health through his perception of digital space. Tracks like “Structure Abstractions” and the closing track “Indifference Curve” evoke the horrible lethargy of illness, the oscillation of anxiety and activity, depression and distress, to startling effect. A few years ago I had a weeklong virus that made me nauseous when listening to music, looking at a screen, or reading a book. In this headspace, everything is flat. Relations between objects and bodies need to be completely reappraised, as a trip from your bed to the kitchen becomes a heady exercise in spatial-temporal cognition.

Perhaps a better metaphor can be made by way of another condition, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, that I get from time to time, just before or during sleep. My main symptom is the sensation of becoming small, and my surroundings becoming impossibly large, like a fisheye lens suddenly zooming out. These episodes often induce nausea, as this newfound perception of the world confuses and disorients. Negative Space is an invitation to reassess “real” and “virtual” spaces, and to reassess the necessity of that duality altogether, through the sensory affect of illness. It’s an affirmation of the place-making possibility of these spaces, that even the media we can’t see are, in fact, persistent and influential — if only we seek out the edges.