Jan Heintz
Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated. Likewise, every system contains its dark precursor which ensures the communication of peripheral series. As we shall see, given the variety among systems, this role is fulfilled by quite diverse determinations. The question is to know in any given case how the precursor fulfils this role.” – Deleuze Difference and Repetition
The Force was always-there. When Mille Plateaux says, »when we look back it seems that MP was always dark. We never confirmed techno-utopism, accelerationism or Eshun’s afrofuturism.«, it sounds like a dark precursive dream working itself through, confronting intelligibility, without fully showing itself, subtracted from plain recognizability.1
A haunting rhythm – vibrating, pulsing, humming under the route of immanence, cutting through the concrete, when you listen close enough. The endeavour of Non-Music weaponized itself some time ago2 with the thought-synthesizing inventiveness3 and toolkit experimentality, so wildly performed by Deleuze and Guattari as a new generic mode of thinking and its ten thousand millions lines of flight, billion de/terretorialising wish-vectors – a conceptual bestiary sicced on the (geo)political, economic, aesthetic, cosmological and social problematics of their time. In a sense, D&G inaugurated a thought not cut off but deeply pierced, chaosmotically informed by the real, operating in, against, through, amidst it and becoming-other thereby.
On the other side: Non-Music experiences also how the ‘beautiful souls’ or pigs4 of our contemporary age, in their philistine ambitions, lace up one’s neck when they joyously whisper: we are different, but not opposed5… The celebration of difference, the search of immanence (the production of difference) bastardized into the cult of the new, myriad of lifestyles, ways of life and individuations locked up into narcisstic fever dreams whirling around in frenetic standstill.6
Toxic imaginative refluxes of Capital’s tendency to plunge everything into its horrible music of a harmonies-of-harmonies-in-the-last-instance: »The monstrous flesh of capital is the horizon, or the matrix, or the underlying location and container of our experience, as producers and consumers.«7 Society trapped in the chronosick cage of eternal capitalist malaise – accompagnied by the woke, numbing sound/procedures (standardized, well-calculated, dosed) of today’s automated, globalized techno-cultures and its proxies (club culture, sound production mechanisms etc.), stuck in a state of endless retro-necrophilia. Time is consequently whitened out, the world turned black.8
Against this backdrop Ultra-Black of Music speculates on the manifold ways in which the objective, inhuman soundworlds, which roar underneath humans’ sensological apparatus, pervade and smoothly colonize our humanoid-alien, affective and cognitive capacities – and how to construct ways out of the mess of the Master Rhythms of Sonic Thanaticist Capital and its stratagems of annihilation and pulpification.
Ultra-Black of Music is therefore also radical fictioning in a Laruellian sense: it is non-standard practice that encompasses artifact, performativity and construction, but in a non-expressive, non-representational and ultrablack sense.9 Speculative rhythm productions drive the mathematical ope-rationality and its decisional self-amputations to the edge and create the missing corporeality that rewires our affective capacities and inhibitions by un-mooring, alienating/de-realizing our relations to the killing abstractions (reductive Binarism, identitism/autism), the techgnostical mindset and its mystifications.10
Non-Frequency-Politics gears up for the Counter-Count.
Through all this, can there be a different relationality effactuated (sonically, theoretically, cosmotechnically) which alter the ways in which ‘we’ relate to that which ultimately lies outside of ‘our’ horizon? Does one not en-counter in the immense, uncontrollable sonic geologies/ecologies of Ultra-black a sonic vision of cosmos as radical alienness? Does one not hear in the gravity of Ultrablackness the immeasurableness of the real?
The strange nonhuman sonic fluxes listened to in Field Recordings touch the mimicry of Chaos,11 they »tell in an audible way about forces that are not audible. They make the music of the earth audible, which by its nature is raw, strange, intense.« This confronts and pushes us also into the experimentation with this nameless in-between, in which new temporalities can emerge whose winding paths and outcomes can neither be predicted nor guaranteed.
Ultra-blackness’ love is vigorously informed and fueled by the hate in ending this World, as we know, and sonically experience it.12
You never know in advance when Ultra-blackness strikes you like exploding thunderbolts.
1s. It is a blackness (in slight modification), »which no eye sees.«, s. Deleuze/Parnet (2009): L’Abécédaire (Letter Z).
2s. The deep affinities between Deleuze and Mille Plateaux write Shores and Yalçın in their contribution. See also: Szepanski, Achim/ Reynolds, Simon/ Diefenbach, Katja (2017): Technodeleuze and Mille Plateaux. Achim Szepanski’s Interviews (1994-1996).
3s.[Philosophy] is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).«, s. Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Félix (2004): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated by Brian Massumi). London/New York, p. 379.
4s. Châtelet, Gilles (2014): To Thinks and Live like Pigs. The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. Falmouth.
5s. Deleuze, Gilles (1994): Difference and Repetition (transl. by Paul Patton). New York, p. xx.
6s. Berger, Edmund (2020): Frenetic Standstill. reciprocalcontradiction.home.blog/2020/01/10/frenetic-standstill/
7s. Shaviro, Steven (2008): The Body of Capital.www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=641
8s. Mbembe, Achille (2017):Critique of Black Reason. Durham.
9s. p. 58.
10s. Pasquinelli, Matteo (Ed.) (2015): Alley of your Mind. Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas. Lüneburg.
11S. Szepanski writes in his NON-Essay Deleuze/Guattari und der Schizo-Attraktor: »Where music would no longer even [need to] be organized sound, but the diagrammatic constitution of a counterfactual space-time, which in addition enables a transformation of hearing within the possibilities offered by such a sound-music.«, s. Szepanski, Achim (2018): Deleuze/Guattari und der Schizo-Attraktor.non.copyriot.com/deleuze-guattari-und-der-schizo-attraktor-ultrablack-of-music-1/
12Galloway/Andrew Culp (2016): Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp, www.boundary2.org/2016/06/ending-the-world-as-we-know-it-an-interview-with-andrew-culp/