«....per strada, c'è un mormorio che l’avvolge per intero; parimenti, egli si sente privo di libertà, come se attorno a lui fosse presente qualcuno; al caffè c'è come qualcosa di nebuloso attorno a lui ed egli sente un tremito; e quando le voci particolarmente frequenti e numerose, l’atmosfera attorno a lui è come satura di fuoco, e ciò che determina una specie di oppressione all’interno del cuore e dei polmoni, una specie di nebbia intorno alla testa»

E. Minkowski¹

«L’informe mondo, l’informale sete
d’esistere, ombra, monti, fiumi, verde,
sensi e occhi mai nati, orme inconcrete
d’una forza che in sé chiusa si perde,
forse un paese diviene, una pausa»

A. Zanzotto²

I.

Music flows like current, the intention settled on the riverbed. Music emerges through error, through occasion. The soundscape bursts through with an image: the silence, the pandemic.

The stigma of festivity, its correlated negative space and the Rave experience resonated with unspeakable clamour in the urban sensorium and in the political unconscious of that image. The promiscuity of dancing bodies, an experience of the impossibility and of death by contagion, assumed the unsettling traits of an old allegory: La Danse Macabre.

II.

riverrun…at night one could hear the moaning river under the rooftops. A hiccup chord travels through foundations, caressing surfaces, vibrating inside bodies lying down in a room. Like a lament. The city stays the same. Alone, it beats everything and everyone. And it all drags away.

It’s not only water that remains hidden.

When two began living under the same roof.

A shed made of sound. Boards, membranes, substances picked up from the riverbed. Echoes of a communal dream, the heart of night. A night of a wedding night.

The pattering footsteps; people get close; they alternate with the liturgical peace of heavy clouds occasionally hiding the sun. A post at the crossroad of three roads. Across a threshold, after a clearing between buildings, an ivy climbs up the wall.

A door; people stop to take a look, then carry on as though they’re guided by a familiar embrace; that soft weave of leaves and sprouts cherishes a secret. Every now and then it emanates dense, muffled sounds; an empty howl lies down on the cobblestones, between the railings, the terraces, the courtyards.

Some move along quickly, others linger; some hear, in the uproar that they themselves are, the sound: a comfort to their pain. It once had a voice, now it seems like a child, or maybe it’s the memory of the deceit itself. Ever latched on the everyday fatigue that eludes recalling.

A favourable halt point.

The ivy grows, the leaves fall.

It rains, it happens.

III.

A door, then another, and we enter a room. In this place, which we know as governmentless, the encounter with sound occurs. It is by a festivity that the access key to the secret is offered. Not in the discretion of the space, nor in the unspoken understanding of those who know how to get there, but within the festivity: inside the suspension of what is quotidian in the quotidian.

The festival happens, but it begins when it is imagined and ends weeks later, when the last one leaves and says goodbye. The cure holds the secret to its chest: the certainty of safe self-abandonment, dividing oneself and facing one’s own ego.

Even the most incessant sounds, after the set, buzz in the air still soaked in smoke. Memories and experiences settle down: we understand that the festival is the communion of a secret; it’s the experience of the other and the other that I myself am.

IV.

Within the situation the sound expands. It alters the density of emotions and the grain of space; new imaginative dimensions open: new habitats inside the urban uterus—always ready to counterfeit life with the lingua franca of re-use.

Someone lies down in the twisted perspective of the room, breathing rhythm changes, words communicate via intermittences. You look up, and the ceiling fan blades don’t help you understand any better what turn the night has taken.

The emotional geography of a T.A.Z. remains, but unlike the rave, the Soundsystem moves, disappearing from the centre. Sound irradiates from every side, bouncing; they are volumetric absences of source converging towards a centre. Here, the rave has an arching trajectory that articulates outwards, drifts off and comes back.

Nothing impetuous, no rush to exceed, no monumentality, no wall of speakers. Here, the Soundsystem is a mirroring device, amplifying, with the plasticity of an amorphous rhythm, what we are and what we’re about to be.

This ecosystem is Ambient Rave: it discloses ways of being and postures that are interstitial, and it does so in the low frequencies, in the hallucinatory palette, in the acid multiplying of time and space. Yet its profile travels well beyond the historicisation of the phenomenon and the aesthetic of Rave Culture. In his Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman says that if noise has indeed become one of the weapons of mass control used by power—already in the past century—it is also a weapon from an emancipatory perspective.

From the reflection, the substance of this sound is that of a collective body that arises from the room.

The afro-diasporic and minority-driven heritage heralds this to us: rhythm, body and device can become non-hegemonic musical configurations. They become this noisy ecosystem, this textural dance; they are dynamis vibratoria. Path and perimeter expanding, deviating.

V.

The gesture-driven noise of rave, the mystery of the acousmatic, and the devices of frequential and cognitive diffraction all coexist within Ambient Rave.

What is left of the beat, once the sound spectrum clears out, is the temporal grain of an affective substrate.³ The continuous flow of repetitive music meets non-periodic intensities, and thus, more than making us follow a traced path with our bodies, this music prepares us for change while, analogously, the dramaturgy of such psychoacoustic transfiguration also lives in altered states, since the setting of a certain psychic state orients its musical character upstream.

If the role of music is to expand experience—as Gilbert Rouget states about the relationship between music and trance—then music shouldn’t elicit the experience; rather, it should create the favourable conditions for its manifestation, regulating and maintaining it like a current does with a diapason oscillation, as long as it is tuned to the same frequency.

In the Ambient Rave set, music is a space for psychic chance-production; it is an announcement, a horizon where the acoustic landscape is a threshold between the vigil and altered states, between anticipation and memory.

The music can never be a pretext, says François Bonnet in his recent work defining the music to come. Music is thus more like a morphology, manifesting itself in the diaphanous pulsation between experience and infrastructure. It is related to today’s sensorium, the hypnocracy, the amniotic fluid of affective and cognitive erosion in which we are submerged. The non-identity of the river, the identity of flow, its dissolution, its drifts.

Substratus

«It is as if a love letter — or everything I have written — were to be torn up and the pieces scattered, in order to reach the beloved»

Waldrop⁴

The Ambient Rave eXperience is a sound that does not communicate with its own community but slowly modifies it.

A form of exodus which, like a drift, produces new sense. De Martino, in his posthumous work on cultural apocalypses, defined this kind of forking of collective experience as the ethos of the transcendental. You stop thinking about it after it happens. It is someone who comes to you, describing how, after the gig, they imagined people building a cathedral out of running water instead of stone.

Mundus Imaginalis.

As a result of that, an intention appears, not necessarily conscious, just like in the I-Ching hexagram that says clouds go and rain operates, and every single being flows towards its own shape.

In fact, the structure will never appear as a rigid grid or as an evident serial composition. The flow drifts: it is a continuous metamorphosis, without any evident narrative structure; the sound behaves like a liquid ecosystem, a perceptive river in constant mutation.

The wind rises over water; it scatters and dissolves it into foam and vapour.

A drink arrives, someone does a rail, two unfocused gazes meet, and then an act of empathy ensues.

Everything is produced through unstable morphologies, crossing thresholds, emerging and dissolving.

Then, you turn the volume down, move the mixer, unplug the cables.

On/Off: the mathematical and cosmic architecture of sound disappears.

Over the river, some automation, proportions and numerical clicks were applied.

Someone learned to keep a cathedral standing with flowing water.

The river has changed 1°degree|\.

The sound does not say anything; it modifies slowly.

Even after it is over. 

1. E. Minkowski, Le problème del hallucinations et le problème de l'espace, in «L'Evolution Psychiatrique», vol. 2, n. 3, 1932, p. 69 cited in E. De Martino, Come se finisse il mondo. Contributo all'analisi delle apocalissi culturali, Einaudi, Torino 2019, p 494: «…on the street, there is a murmur that envelops him entirely; likewise, he feels deprived of freedom, as if someone were present around him; at the café, there is something nebulous around him and he feels a tremor; and when the voices are particularly frequent and numerous, the atmosphere around him is as if saturated with fire, and this causes a kind of oppression within his heart and lungs, a kind of fog around his head.» ↩︎
2. A. Zanzotto, “Prove per un sonetto”, in Tutte le poesie, Milano 2011: «The shapeless world, the informal thirst / for existence, shadow, mountains, rivers, greenery, / senses and unborn eyes, intangible traces / of a force which, locked within itself, loses itself, / perhaps becoming a country, a pause.» ↩︎
3. W. Sha, Poiesis and enchantment in topological matter, MIT University Press, Cambridge ↩︎
4. Waldrop, “Stone Angels”, in Trascendental Studies, Mondadori, University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London, 2009 ↩︎