Download divide by zero - Colin Johnco records

DIVIDE BY ZERO
Where to start has always been a problem for the Deleuzian philosophy. What makes it
radically different is its insistence on a rhizomatic structure which is both a structure and
not a structure at the same time. In other words, thought for Deleuze is not layered on a
binary structure – it is not tree-like, nor branch-like but root-like.
It questions the entrances and exits. And doing so, it raises questions about limits. For
example, how do you read a map? How do you transform your thought into a map?
Perhaps, it’s better to start with a life experience. When we started this project with
Yolande Harris, we started from a scratch. And this was an actual scratch. Yolande came
to my studio with a pen and a paper where she wrote N O I S E and we recorded the
sound of pen writing on paper.
I wondered then about the distance between the letters. I wondered about the
unpronounced sounds between the letters. For example, the distance between N and O
and I and S and E. Then I also thought about what it takes to reach the sound N? What
other sounds are eliminated in order to produce the sound which we know as “N”? And
not only to N but to all the other signifying letters … signifying sounds.
There are probably some other means of dealing with these questions but I thought
perhaps Xenon’s paradox could offer an entry to this map of sounds and an exit at the
same time.
Xenon’s paradox, as you might know it, problematizes the distance between two given
points. In other words, to reach from one point to another, from a to b, from 1 to 2, or
from 0 to 1 becomes problematique. Xenon takes a line, divides it into two, and then into
two again and again just to show the impossibility of reaching the required destination
unless one takes the limit of the smallest distance. And the limit in this scheme is only an
abstraction without which one can never reach this destination.
And now for the musical score. How to transfer this thought onto a musical score? Not in
an orderly but in a disorderly fashion? In other words, not as in a binary but in a
rhizomatic manner? So that entering the score remains a problem?
Remember, we had started from a scratch. Scratch as a trace. Any given score is never
empty but is haunted with sounds, traces of sounds, or scratches. A sound refers to other
sounds in order to be a sound. And the problem then was how to reach from one given
sound to another. We had started from a scratch and building on this scratch, made
experiments with playing instruments, with recording, and with composition.
Another day, Yolande came along with what she called “bloppings” which endlessly
divided the linearity of the score into unequal lengths. Xenon’s paradox, I thought, but in
a sonic and disorderly fashion.
As I was experimenting one day with collected sounds and recordings and loading the
software with different layers, my laptop crashed and gave me the following warning:
“Divide by Zero.” Normally, I like pushing whatever software I am using to a crisis so it
functions by dysfunctioning and vica versa. That was a perfect name for what we were
trying to do on a musical score: divide it infinitely so that any sound on it will remember
its trace as it aims to reach itself and as it extends to another sound.
And then other entries came along. This time dictionary entries on sound and noise
brought along and read by Yolande as the complexity of the question of entering a score
was not complicated enough. However, this diversity not only complicated the question
of entering but also any entry based on “sound” as in the case of starting from a scratch:
N O I S E.
What we produced in this album can be considered as another attempt at starting from a
scratch – that is, from the recorded scratches which we divided and mixed so as to force
them to the impossibility of dividing more: a process that culminated in what I call “desonance.” All because, what starting from a scratch means on a score that is presumed to
be haunted with sounds is nothing but confronting with the fact that we have already been
“scratching from the start.”
SIFIR