Devil’s Music by Nicolas Collins
LABEL: EM Records ||| Originally Released in 1985
“One evening, half asleep on a banquette in a bar, just for fun I tried to
enumerate all the languages within earshot; music, conversations, the
sounds of chairs, glasses, a whole stereophony... and no sentence formed,
as though that were the law of such a language. This speech, at once very
cultural and very savage, was above all lexical, sporadic; it set up in me,
through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity”¦ it was: what is eternally,
splendidly, outside the sentence.”
Barthes’ description in The Pleasure of the Text of a Tangiers thoroughfare sounds curiously similar to the experience of rapidly scanning the radio dial. Perhaps he would have found true jouissance in the work of Nicolas Collins, whose Devil’s Music of 1985 turned channel surfing into serious avant-garde strategy. It is, of course, wrong to speak of Devil’s Music as a singular entity; the composition has been performed by Collins hundreds of times, and no iteration is ever the same. Eschewing prepared loops, Collins sweeps across the AM/FM spectrum, picking up fragments of one second or less. They immediately stutter into activity, giddily phasing in and out of each other while subject to slight changes of duration or pitch. Needless to say, any “Devil’s Music” is mercilessly subject to contingencies of time and place; as Collins himself writes, “New York City was easier than Ghent.”
For the original Trace Records LP, Collins permitted himself a certain degree of liberty in making edits to the final sequencing of each mix; Side A emerges as a portrait of contemporary house, while Side B explores the interpolation of easy listening with true classical music. EM has appended two concert compilations, “Real Landscapes” A and B; the clandestine, scanner-based (and previously unissued) “Spark Heard ”˜Round the World”; a video of Collins working his magic on the stage; and downloadable “Devil’s Music” software, for those who enjoy audience participation. All the extra material is most welcome in getting a fuller picture of this schizoid classic. Nothing, however, can mitigate the role of chance in these works. Is there really a “getting-inside” of Devil’s Music? At every moment the listener feels propelled outward, forced into the pure presentness of sonic orgasm. As Barthes wrote, bliss cannot produce scholars, researchers or students, but only “practitioners”; orgasm does not involve reflection.
Structurally, the one-second limit employed by Collins is amenable to such glossoepiglottic play—each sample is maddening in its stammering repetition, yet just long enough to be distinguished as unit or phoneme. Deploying not only musical intervals and radio static but vocal morphology as well, Devil’s Music cannot stop itself from creating the occasional semblance of meaning: unknown to Collins, a Swedish performance once yielded the phrase “my boots are smelly” in that country’s native tongue. The piece is a container for world memory that essentially remembers nothing. The jackhammer rhythms emphatically deny our faculty for linear, creative thought. As the character Murray Jay Siskind intones in DeLillo’s White Noise (another 1985 milestone), “This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade”¦ people’s eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It’s a simple case of misuse.” Devil’s Music is an aesthetic of information overload carried to its furthermost extremes. Thankfully, once the sonic content is freed from the burden of meaning, only a pleasurable numbness remains. Though one could argue that its steroid-driven soundtrack of modern life merely reinforces negative habits of listening, it takes a brave first step in drawing our attention to them with structural rigor and unflagging tenacity.
These immersive experiences go beyond critical language, and I am not poet enough to write from within their maelstrom. Most beautiful is not their processual identity, in any case, but the unique gesture they make toward the listener’s own life praxis. Normally one channel surfs to evade, and thereby prolong, a lurking sense of boredom. It is something of an irony that we needed the artist all along to tell us that boredom is productive, exciting, and in itself an intervention—because boredom is the first sign of feeling left out, fed up, and disengaged from the dominant pabulum (or “dramatics”) of the closed circuit. Devil’s Music is but one of the ways we can turn the impotence of boredom into the pleasure of coming. Twenty-five years later, it still sounds as daring and inventive as it did in the first agonies of our postmodern world.
REVIEWED BY SETH WATTER
The 2009 re-issue is available as 2xCD or 2xLP via EM Records
Explore the man, Nicolas Collins, and more of his music on his website
