materiality of a sound-space

As such, the initial plan was to simply explore the materiality of a house—or a home if you will—as certainly a house may be conceived as an object on the most basic level, existing as it does as a tangible, perceptible entity.  And yet while it is something that stands before us, outside of us, almost by definition something exceedingly larger than ourselves, upon our entry into the structure the feeling of the typical object-subject divide becomes instantly more complicated.  Indeed, once inside, a strange dynamic emerges where we feel at peace with this typically strained juncture, we are inside this thing, enveloped and enclosed by these walls, these floors, this ceiling, yet there is never the feeling of wary distrust one might experience while attempting to understand or “communicate” with something as simple as a chair.  The house is a friendly thing, we have no quarrel with it, invested as we are in its ability to provide something uniquely for ourselves.

And yet, a house may provide a particularly unique situation due to two simple facts: 1) so much time is spent there that we have become desensitized to the object-subject relation, and 2) the home is so tied to our beings, that we view it as a blatantly subservient object, made to serve our emotional as well as physical needs for shelter. So, having considered this, I turned to the new music venue known as The Stone, a structure whose patrons encounter a similar “return to home” experience upon their visit there.           

The Stone is an unmarked building by the East River, there is no sign outside or above the door.  The building itself breathes and reeks of functionality, both through its interior and its exterior.  Supremely box-life and arising form stacks of bricks, with gray floors and low ceilings—the structure was previously used as a small Chinese restaurant before it was resurrected as a haven for new sound.  Now, it is simply a large room with a few dozen folding chairs scattered throughout (seating capacity of 80), there is no stage, and here the musicians convene to play.  There is no image being presented, there is no acquiescence to what an artistic venue should look like.  There is not even a telephone; people simply gather for performances here at eight o’clock, and at ten o’clock.  Every night of the week, almost every day of the year.  A non-profit organization, all money made goes directly to the musicians, with a small portion for the rent.  In this purely utilitarian structure, we have found a space created exclusively for sound.           

Here then, this humble building has been transformed: it has become a sanctuary for dedicated new music fans, of which there are admittedly few.  (Indeed, so small is the core audience for such concerts, that often it is only the same group who return again and again.  They recognize one another and perhaps make some brief exchange, but they do not know each other’s names, and outside of this space they are strangers.  Inside, however, they are the strongest of allies, defenders of this sound to which they are so committed).  Thus, it is through their unique position within society as a voluntarily marginal group that this gathering of artists and fans is able to metamorphose a building into a venue through the production of a very specific aesthetic; in other words, this is the house that sound built.           

Looking now to this transformative phenomenon as the main focus, I would hereafter like to investigate the two principle phenomena that any building, any contained four walls, might provide: the formation of an interior space as well as an exterior space.  In this sense, we might understand this interior as the formation of its own identity, and the exterior as its place within the larger cityscape, as well as the inevitable blurring that occurs therein.

Let us start on the outside so that we might work are way in.           

Remembering then that the Stone is an alternative music venue, one of its primary characteristics is that of an “underground” location, a subterranean space of sorts.  How does it achieve this status, however, when its material structure is clearly in view?  To analyze the contemporary concert-hall as a subterranean province requires one to relegate it to a domain of the unseen, bestowing upon it an imperceptibility beyond the borders of the public view.  The typical passerby does not know what goes on insides its walls; it is an undisclosed chamber beneath the surface at which mainstream society resides, therein allowing it to guard its inner workings.  In this respect, the building aspires to the simplicity of an enclosure, a space of austere self-containment where it may retain its air of secrecy and simply fulfill its function.  The proliferation of concerts held in unmarked buildings, abandoned warehouses, structures generally dedicated to some other practice, are indications of the implicit desire for such activities to remain cloaked and undetected. 

Indeed, the Stone appears and disappears almost simultaneously, descending into the alleys of the modern cityscape undetected.  And yet, along those same lines, it must be noted that as secretive as the audience and artists of the Stone may be, the outside world is really not at all invested or even interested in the brick building on the corner of Avenue C.  Outside of the economic pressures the venue faces, there is no struggle or immediate threat imposed against it, only a general sense of indifference.  This space is essentially irrelevant, and while the capitalist system has no use for it, it certainly does not feel endangered by such an innocuous place.         

Privileging subtlety over flagrancy, evasion over engagement with the public sphere,  an insistent question remains: why does The Stone employ such guerrilla tactics, or what is it precisely that such an elusive culture harbors, and why must it remain hidden at all costs?  As such, it is the answer to this question that hopefully may provide insight to the mysterious transformation of a building into a venue, and perhaps by extension, a house into a home. 

To this question I might answer that the exterior of this space, meaning the building’s role or position within the greater social sphere, assumes a unique air of the arational.  The structure is “rational” in that it provides a functionality, yet it is “irrational” in that the function is entirely disengaged from the capitalist system, neither productively nor antagonistically.  The audience further advocates this position, holding on to the belief that their beloved venue is a sacred, safe, and underground space, all the while oblivious to the city’s lack of concern with the building  (remember, this is a voluntarily marginal group). For its patrons, however, these brick walls are transformed into a fortress, the gradual metamorphosis of spatial parameters into a warehouse of artistic production, one not of political unrest but of aesthetic provocation.  (At this point, though, I have to wonder: what has become of the material? Has it been transcended? Romanticized? Is the audience completely delusional? While I would not attempt to answer this question fully right now, I would venture that at the very least it avoids being purely symbolic in that an actual physical space, again, at the very least, is still needed).            

Ultimately, I would propose that this arational space is not merely a reflection of alienated and lonely new music fans, but one of affirmative potential.  Thus, the proposition of a subterranean space concludes with a paradox: that, in the final scope, the sound-underground, while a hidden arena, also produces itself as an expanse, one that remains volatile and extends the boundaries of its own small space, as indefinite and unbound as the musical innovations it harbors.  As Gaston Bachelard notes: “When we dream of the heights, we are in the rational zone of intellectualized projects.  But for the cellar, the impassioned inhabitant digs and redigs, making its very depth active.  The fact is not enough, the dream is at work.  When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit…There, secrets are pondered, projects are prepared.  And, underneath the earth, action gets underway, we are really in the intimate space of underground maneuvers.” (Bachelard 18) For it is in this auditory lowground alone that the imaginative capacity may expand infinitely.

Corresponding to the verticality of the subterranean depths, the new sound movement elicits a spatial reconfiguration on the horizontal level as well, thus marking the emergence of a notion of exilic space.  Above all else, this exilic space is characterized by its inherent distance to the prevailing order of things, a site of pure marginality and dislocation that first and foremost renders a haven for those that would abandon existence at the center.  As a sanctuary for fugitive currents, the contemporary sound-space therefore begins from a point of rejection; it refuses and recants the injunctions of the everyday so as to overcome the incarceration of the social body.  To this extent, although eventually it will incite vitalism, the originary impulse of the new sound culture is one of relinquishment of connection, of historical disenchantment with what is.  Bachelard confronts this distancing process in his description of ‘the corner’, the quintessential refuge from the constraints of being-in-the-world: “A corner that is ‘lived in’ tends to reject and restrain, even to hide, life.  The corner becomes a negation of the universe.  In one’s corner one does not talk to oneself.  When we recall the others that we have spent in our corners we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts.” (Bachelard 137)  Hence, the initial function of the sound space is that of shielding the agents of detraction, those aberrant instincts that lead into a deviant individualism and therein to establish itself as a peripheral asylum.

Moreover, this state of exilic amnesty instantiates a new experiential modality: that of an ontological in-between, a chasm of suspended self-consciousness.  This halfway point, in turn, possesses two significant components for the contemporary sound context under investigation here: namely, the continually interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility.  The audience is solitary by virtue of its alienation from the outside masses, the stark incommunicability that has arisen between those who transgressed and those who remained behind.  Accordingly, the audience is also immobile due to the acute and exhausted concentration which it exercises while present in the sound-scape, such that “consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner produces a sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates immobility.  An imaginary room rises up around our bodies, which think that they are well hidden when we take refuge in a corner.”(Bachelard137)  For sure, both of these principles are formative reactions to the sudden exposure to exilic space, and will be overturned somewhat in and of themselves, but at present it is crucial to note the degree to which both solitude and immobility pervade the atmosphere of the new sound culture:  “To begin with, the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things that we prize most highly--immobility.  It is the sure place, the place next to my immobility.  It is the sure place, the place next to my immobility.  The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door.” (Bachelard 137) 

And still, this withdrawal inwards is not emblematic of a barrier but rather yields an inverse outcome; as Bachelard notes in his reference to the doorway, these exilic corners remain porous areas, vulnerable to infiltration and contingency.  As a result, the openness of the contemporary sound-space becomes a guarantor of its constant mutability, as the state of immobility gradually abrades and implodes towards proliferation.  A drastic shift occurs here, one that lays the tenuous groundwork for a new cultural anatomy, one of animation and saturation as the intimations of sound flood to fill the gaps.  As Bachelard analogously depicts in the following passage:

And all who live in corners will come to confer life upon this image, multiplying the shades of being that characterize the corner dweller.  For to great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities.  The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty.  A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited. (Bachelard 140) 

Consequently, the ontological in-between, once permeated by solitude and immobility, now resurrects itself as a space of sensorial effusion, one that perforates and effaces itself from every angle.           

As such, here we may see the moment in which interiority and exteriority collide, such that the dialectics of inside and outside, and perhaps even by some strange extension subject and object, are irretrievably dismantled.  In other words, when its “interior” function as a simple utilitarian space used for music performances overrides its complicated “exterior” function as a subterranean space, the sound-scape no longer exists as a negation of social reality and is able to escape this marginal binary.  The Stone is transformed from building to venue to sound-space.  As Bachelard again notes, “Outside and inside are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility…(Bachelard 217) By embracing this societal indifference and moving away from its position as a purely antagonistic phenomenon, the building may become a more autonomous entity, harboring an entire community, a culture inside that is no longer dependent on the larger social body.  In a sense, it is this way that the full spatial experience of The Stone may be achieved: a structure that only houses musical performances, but a completely autonomous community.           

Finally, let us enter inside The Stone to examine what we might hope to be its material interiority, and the most striking aspect here is certainly its diminutive size.  Again, purely utilitarian, some chairs and a microphone.  Not unlike its subterranean exterioirty, there is much potential to be had for small spaces.

To explain this, we might look to Bachelard’s theory of ‘intimate immensity,’ an idea where he essentially proposes the seizure or mastery of space.  He explains it as follows: “Representation is dominated by imagination…the cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.  But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature.  Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking.  One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.” (Bachelard 150)   Thus, here again we see a slight subversion of rationality and the emergence of paradoxes.  Let us clarify for a moment first, though: in a sense, it is because it is so contained that one is capable of feeling like one is able to comprehend it fully.  As such, though the contemporary sound-scape remains a marginal context, it nevertheless propels itself forward towards varying states of experiential vastness.  Each refracted tone or sound-wave emanates in a way to supercede the constricted nature of the physical space; an otherwise tightly-bound room ceaselessly extends itself, a venue at once self-contained (intimate) and uncontained (immense) in its aesthetic experience, and therein vindicating the immanence of sound.  (And yet, a difficulty remains in investigating such an experiment with immensity, for the minimalist manipulation of space exerts itself almost imperceptibly, and hence evading once again our discussion.) Thus, the minimalist physical interiority is able to translate into a heightened spatial experience, such that each expressive gesture, however localized, incrementally magnifies itself, becoming in the end nothing less than a traceless passage into immensity.           

And so, in conclusion, we may say that The Stone, like so many material entities, is at once highly dependent upon its material characteristics and yet endlessly excelling beyond such limits, at once subterranean and exilic, intimate and immense.   

works cited 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space.  Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994.

Kafka, Franz.  The Blue Octavo Notebooks.  Cambridge, MA: Exact Change Press, 1991.