Example research essay topic: Compact Disk Popular Music - 1,485 words

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... d. It is always so associated with a Utopia, or more recently with anti-Utopia, so far lifted out of its environment, that its form tends to choke it. The question of the future, whether it might be in fact, nothing more than an abyss, is never really raised. Whilst resisting structures, resistant strains in popular music never seek to fundamentally question the actual structural foundations of the languages they speak, nor do they seek to radically historicism these structures. Too often, in grunge, seriousness becomes parody.

Irony becomes sarcasm, which becomes cynicism, which in turn melts into a hopeless despair (Kurt Cobain being the most obvious symbol of this). 8. But perhaps this is moving too closely to political speech. After all, dark ambient recordings are not yet asking about direct political motivation or goals, they are asking questions about the generalised structures of utopia, about the fundamental definitions of music, about the meaning of the listening subject within an environment; in this case, about the idea of travelling through time using tonal facilitation. 9. Perhaps this is a reason why dark ambient works are often engrossed with abyssal, massive and fantastic spaces: such spaces are fundamentally indeterminate. The cover of the Time Machines CD returns us to art as cultic symbolism: it is simply a black ellipse with the words TIME MACHINES above it, against a grey background. It recalls to me George Groszs comment on Dada: Our symbol was nothingness, a vacuum, a void.

But this isnt just about a nihilistic void, nor a nave void that would pretend to triumph by standing on its own, resisting any point of meaning. Rather, this void tries mostly not to fall back into what Barthes called the trap of essentialism (in Mythologies) unwittingly coming to represent what is being rejected, ie, the essence of things, by attempting to represent nothing. This void here, in any case, is placed below the words Time Machines, against a grey background signifying the highest state of entropy, of equilibrium. Here the void is firmly placed as a signifier within a system and structure but one that presents itself as something to be played around with: on the inside cover the theme is repeated, now the background is black, the ellipse is white, suggesting an egg, maybe, and in its centre is a sign whose meaning is indeterminate, it could be an astrological symbol for one of the planets, but it isnt. Nonetheless, the abyss is now given a momentary centre, perhaps from which to commence ones time travels, but the centres meaning is unknown: its signified is as wide open as that of the result when artefacts generated by the listening environment do in fact become an intrinsic part of listening, whether they be as mundane as the sound of the vacuum cleaner next door, or as exotic as the sound of ones heartbeat while under the influence of psilocybin. 10. Brian Lustmord is another charter of listening experiences, whose work is concerned with abysses, darkness, reverberation and space.

With Lustmord, we move closer to the idea of a project within listening of direct, discrete, even central affirmation. Not just concerned with notation itself, the album The Place Where the Black Stars Hang (1994) is concerned with... a very real need to uncover the magical graphs and ciphers that unseal the cells of... eldritch dimensions. Works prior to this (eg Heresy, Paradise Disowned) were concerned with what I would best term an aural deconstruction of western judeo-christian principles. The mingling and mixing of vastly reverberating christian chants with pipes, machinery, gongs, a shawn, noise generation, acoustic treatments and digital loops on Paradise Disowned re-configured and undermined traditional notions of canonical musics function as a mainly liturgical tool for godly worship and reaffirmation / reification of immutable dogma, while Heresy is a work so intense that it deserves an essay unto itself.

The Place Where the Black Stars Hang poses the challenge to orthodox scientific methodology as the new dogma and religion of the (post) enlightenment era, in invoking cosmological space, the space between space... and the infinite darkness thereof, where metaphysical transgressions prevail. Also invoked is microcosmic space, ... where DNA is the ultimate parasite, and life itself is but a vibration. This evocation of vast spaces, both cosmological and microcosmic, affirms absence rather than brute presence, vibration rather than expression.

In form also, the western musical tradition of tightly structured time signatures, clearly defined harmonies and melodious pitch variations, so enamoured of musicologists of the Canon, is utterly denied. It seems that Lustmord is (by negation) most clearly articulating (western) musics alignment and intimate relationship with ideological structures and practices. Rather than seeking to revolutionise these through force and violence (not that these do not have their own particular articulations within the genre, but that is another discussion... ) he is seeking to create, by way of abyssal, cavernous aural environments, a re-opening of the question of truth, of the future, of the course of human evolution usually taken for granted. This is not yet saying there is or there is not truth, or a future, or evolution, but is asking after, even interrogating the very structures which make such saying possible.

In making music out of deep space or metastatic resonance, one is taken to a very different place than by either traditional western classical or popular music. With Lustmord, it may be appropriate to talk of a Kristevian significance. In affirming the abyss, emptiness rather than presence, vastness as opposed to centre, in affirming metaphysical transgression, Lustmord, like other dark ambient composers may be said to be fundamentally unsettling the traditional syntax and order of western music, using a fundamentally radical way of creating music that actually goes beyond code transgression into a deep rupturing of the code itself. The traditional elements of the score, the orchestra, the band, the song, have all been replaced they have a completely different kind of presence.

In place of instruments we have thermal radiation, electron particle interaction, metastatic resonances a new language, for not many listeners could assign these instruments discrete semiotic meanings, let alone identify these sounds naturally (How to recognise hearing electron particle interaction? What should it signify, like the cello signifies this sad emotion, or the harp that gentle one? ) It is of note that one theme or device that is always employed in Lustmord's works is elaborate, lengthy reverberation, often with times of twenty seconds or more. But of course it goes without saying that this is just one interpretation... A music that appeals to a vast abyss must to an extent, remain that; as well as an open wound in discourse... 11. Similarly, David Myers of Arcane Device is concerned with such re-conceptualization of music, as can be heard on Envoi in Cumin (1993). Perhaps one of the most subtle works that may be classified dark ambient, the ellipsis here transforms itself into an infinitely polysemous loop, fascinatingly engaging itself with the idea, so current in contemporary theory, of the eternally sliding, slipping signifier.

Here the loop is closed, like the linguistic system, the producing device sees its own output as its input, it feeds upon itself, figuring itself according to Myers, as a snake eating its own tail, where as a result, ... the snakes body becomes not a single solid, but a vast interpenetrating web (liner note). For 75 minutes a single loop lasting between seven and fifteen seconds is repeated, but the loop, continuously fed by itself, is never the same a music is produced, for the system which encloses it also guarantees that infinite difference, unending variation ensues. Perhaps this is the most hopeful (in the traditional sense) and affirmative (in the deconstructive sense) of dark ambient pieces I have come across. After 75 minutes the loop fades away, much like an ellipsis. But it could well have gone on for ever, never repeating itself, never finding a centre, neither bowing to utopia, nor to homogeneity, but allowing electrons to create a self determined shape and dynamic, showing their place as an element of great nature, which might be a good analogy with what many humans would like to make of their own lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES Adorno T. W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory (eds. G. Adorno and R.

Tiedemann) (new trans. and ed. R. Hello-Kent) London: The Athlone Press. Derrida J. (1976) Of Grammatology (trans.

G. C. Spivak) Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Myers G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: a secret history of the twentieth century Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PHONOGRAPHIC REFERENCES Arcane Device (1994) Envoi in Cumin Compact Disk. Armada: Play Loud. Archon Stand (1994) In Shelter Compact Disk Waldassen: Dark Vinyl. Lustmord (1984) Paradise Disowned Compact Disk. Amsterdam: Soleilmoon. (1990) Heresy Compact Disk. Amsterdam: Soleilmoon. (1994) The Place Where the Black Stars Hang Compact Disk.

Waldassen: Side Effects. Time Machines (1999) Time Machines Compact Disk. London: World Serpent.

Research essay sample on Compact Disk Popular Music