This is an essay I wrote for a pamphlet printed to go along with the Richie Hawtin show here last february. Rather than get into another pissing match with Fast, I'm just going to put this out for discussion.
The event was called "From Zero To One" and this is my essay on the topic, and on techno. Why Loop? The western concept of time: a linear sequencing of events in the physical universe. The arrow of time flies one way. Yet the equations that represent our best model of the universe work in some cases both forward and backwards in time. Time becomes a slippery thing to define in this context -- while it is a real dimension of the universe, it's also an undefinable and inescapable part of our condition. When people think of time, they point to a clock, but their thoughts are smeared in time -- humans can be so captivated with the idea of the past or the future they can imagine it more real than the present moment. While we perceive time as a unidirectional phenomenon, itcan also be viewed as circular. The human inventions that measure time work by repeating the same action over and over. The hands of the clock sweep a circle in the course of a day. The sun rises in the morning, draws an arc on the sky, and sets, and does the same thing again the next day. Most of human experience is repeating the same actions over and over again. We draw brackets around our repetitions called minutes, hours, days, and years. In the discrete mathematics that make computers possible, modulo arithmetic works like the hands of a clock -- you count from zero to a a particular number and then return to zero. The ASCII text you're reading now fits in seven bits, and comprises the numbers from 0 to 127. So our computers love to circle as much as we do. To the Hindus creation is comprised of Yugas -- after so long, every thing stops and time starts over. Part of the inspiration for Finnigans Wake by Joyce is a similar theory of circular history, and Joyce starts and ends the book in the middle of a sentence, inviting you to read it as a circular text. Techno music has been made possible over the past 12 years by the advent of computer controlled musical instruments. The Roland TR909 drum machines and related instruments construct songs from collections of one-measure patterns. Their initial vision of it's white-coated Japanese designers was for a song to be built up by stringing together a set of these patterns, imitating the repetition of live rock and roll drumming. But as William Gibson says, the street finds its own uses for tech. Minimal techno music has mostly used the 909 in pattern mode, where one drum pattern can be repeated indefinitely. The basic unit of repetition is the 16 step pattern. Song structure disappears. The goal is to provide just the barest elements of rhythm necessary to facilitate dancing. This reductive collapse down to cyclic patterns echos very strongly the tribal rhythms of Africa, which form the basis of the truly original musical forms of America -- Jazz, Blues, and Rock and Roll. Those forms incorporated the song form from European Folk Music, but retained repetetive, compelling rythms to propel them, and to propel the listener to dance. To that triumvirate of musical styles rooted in African American culture, we have to add techno, and indeed all of the dance music that has developed since the rise of Disco in the 1970s. The asymptotic limit, the end point of techno's progression is the perfect beat -- the loop that is infinitely compelling and need not be embellished to keep the listener's attention. Like Monty Python's Killing Joke or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the perfect loop would make it impossible not to dance. Indeed, there have been incidents around the world of people dancing themselves to the edge of death through physical exhaustion and dehydration. The beat is both an invitation to and a demand for dance. Instead of the cycle of days or hours, or minutes, you are caught in a cycle of a few seconds. When the loop of time closes so tightly it tends toward a singularity. If through the ecstasy of the dance you can get to this place where time stops, you experience through the physical movement of your body some taste of eternity. As to what is between zero and one: In the most literal sense there are two equally valid answers. To a binary computer, there is nothing between zero and one. The map of the real world inside the computer can only discriminate zero and one -- nothing in between. In the real, analog world, there is an infinity of numbers between zero and one. Cantor's diagonal theorem proves this, showing that between any two values there are an infinite number of other values. So the binary representation we depend on for nearly everything, by virtue of the proliferation of computers, can only make crude, discrete models of the continuous real world. As has always been the case -- humanity's grasp on reality is mediated by generation after generation of flawed models of the world around them. In 16th century America, witches flew through the New England trees and curdled milk still in the cow. To think otherwise calls a whole tenuous, yet demonstrably successful belief system into question. The assertion that we have a more perfect model now than people did then can only be proven provisionally. Germ theory, Calculus, and Physics have done a lot to make us safer and more comfortable. But what will people think of us in 500 years? We will look every bit as deluded and rough as the 16th Century looks to us now. Time and again the deep insights into the nature of reality this century have all focused and defined uncertainty in a particular domain. Where is certainty, when trying to know the truth affects what truth you come to know? The kind of people who feel they have an iron clad grip on reality are often the most dangerous and unpleasant. This describes most of the world leaders of the 20st Century. But it would be nice if in the next century we can come to a better realization of what we do know, what we don't know and what we can't know. It may be that the messy, analog, massively redundant systems that we humans are, combined with the more precise, yet equally innacurate binary computers that surround us, can come into a beneficial synthesis. We can only hope. Techno music fuses both the binary and continuous worlds together. Computer controlled, analog synthesizers, are both mechanically precise and continuously variable. A seminal work in this form is Plastikman's "Recycled Plastik." Mechanical drum patterns are filtered and effected in ways that continuously morph over a period of minutes. The relentless tatoo of "Spastik" fills any room with fused opposites -- the sound of machinery counting up modulo 16: 0..15, 0..15 fused with a spirit of barely repressed tension. When a DJ spins "Spastik", or Joey Beltram's "Energy Flash" there a visceral reaction on the dance floor. On the right night, it can bring people into that tight inner loop I spoke of above. I've heard that same "Spastik" tatoo both a African drumming re cord, and in a recording of industrial printing presses. In a sense it fuses those two opposites together, and provides a decent provisional map of reality, inhabited by an unmappable celebration through dance. kent williams -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mp3.com/chaircrusher -- tunes http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=chaircrusher -- mix
