ONLY THE SUN KNOWS: COLLECTIVITY AND EXPERIMENTATION IN POPULAR MUSIC

Maximilian Georg Spiegel

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department

of Communication in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Chapel Hill 2021

Approved by:

Lawrence Grossberg

Jeremy Gilbert

Louise Meintjes

Michael Palm

Tony Perucci

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© 2021 Maximilian Georg Spiegel

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT

Maximilian Georg Spiegel: Only the Sun Knows: Collectivity and Experimentation in Popular Music

(Under the direction of Lawrence Grossberg)

This dissertation arises from an interest in collectivity, experimentation, and the relations

between them. Experimentation here denotes an embrace of the unknownness or unknowability

of a practice’s outcome. It therefore implies, or is aligned with, the potential for different futures

or worlds. The dissertation analyzes the contextually specific conditions, limitations, and

potentials of collective-experimental practices surrounding popular music; that is, it explores

how particular cultural formations articulate modes of experimentation and collectivity in

relation to—as responses to and reconstructions of—their respective conjunctural moments.

Chapter 1 concerns the “free folk” formation with its psychedelic, improvised musics, active in

the United States in the 1990s and early 21st century. Chapter 2 maps the British “industrial”

formation with its aesthetically and socially heterogeneous experiments, active from the 1970s

onwards. Chapter 3 analyzes the “epistemic” formation, a more recently emergent, transnational

assemblage of artists engaged in critical-reflexive, politically informed experimentation. Each of

these cultural formations is governed by a specific sensibility—a logic of lived experience or

“structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams). The dissertation gathers diverse materials (songs,

interviews, articles, and more) and analyzes them according to an expanded semiotic framework

in order to map the formations’ defining sensibilities. Free folk’s collective-experimental

sensibility privileges community, multiplicity, and transformation in response to an experienced

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flatness of the world and strangeness of the present. Industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility

negotiates a dominant sense of crisis in the United Kingdom of the 1970s by attempting to unveil

and/or embrace the hidden and the secret. The epistemic formation’s reflexive-experimental

sensibility responds to crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, and oscillations

of the political by investing in critical knowledges to re-articulate experimentation and

imagination. Following an evaluation of the potentials and limitations of modes of collectivity

and experimentation articulated by the three formations, the dissertation closes with a renewed

call for rigorous, careful, and collaborative engagement with experimental practices and the

realms of potential they attempt to access.

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To Kat, Val, and our shared realms of potential.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am endlessly grateful to my advisor, Lawrence Grossberg, for guiding me through the

process of writing this dissertation. Much of the work on display emerged from our

conversations; and whenever my thoughts on collectivity, experimentation, and the specific

cultural formations analyzed here risked sprawling ever-outwards, his ability to reterritorialize

my proliferating ideas ensured that I could convert them into an actual dissertation. The members

of my dissertation committee—Jeremy Gilbert, Louise Meintjes, Michael Palm, and Tony

Perucci—have all greatly impacted this project through our conversations, through their

listening, through the time they have offered. Always helpful and supportive, my mentors in

Vienna—Christina Lutter, Roman Horak, and the late Siegfried Mattl—set me on the path on

which I still am.

Through its stipend and interdisciplinary projects, the Royster Society of Fellows

sustained much of my time at UNC-Chapel Hill. In addition to providing intellectual sustenance

and community, the Department of Communication fostered my intellectual and professional

development through its teaching assignments; indeed, I am also grateful to my students, who

have taught me so much. The courses I took at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University allowed

me to develop a better understanding of what my project could and would be; I am especially

grateful for V. William Balthrop and Michael S. Waltman’s generous feedback on a paper from

which I developed my remarks on Animal Collective in Chapter 1.

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Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra, and Ted Striphas supervised and provided generous

feedback on articles that served as important steps towards or otherwise impacted this project. I

have presented work that either led towards or is drawn from this dissertation at various

conferences: Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! and its summer schools at the University of Porto

(2014, 2015, 2018, and 2021), Feminisms Here and Now: Communicating Alongside | Across |

Against at UNC-Chapel Hill (2016), the 12th Biennial Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference

at Shanghai University (2018), and the 17th Annual Cultural Studies Association Conference at

Tulane University (2019). I am grateful to the organizers, my fellow panelists, and our

audiences. Conversations with co-panelists, co-authors, and other peers have impacted the

dissertation in ways direct and indirect; though I am unable to list every one, I especially want to

thank my colleagues in the Off-Centre collective—Preston Adcock, Andrew Davis, Rachel Lara

van der Merwe, Douglas Spielman, and Megan M. Wood—as well as Keiko Nishimura and

Heather Suzanne Woods. Through hours of generous conversation over the years, my friend Iain

Campbell, a fellow scholar of experimentation, had a great impact on this project.

Though I have only rarely been able to see my European family in recent years, their love

and continued support has been crucial to my sustenance. I will see you again soon. I would not

have been able to finish this dissertation without the constant love and support I have received

from my wife, Kathleen Loeven. Our little Valerie came into our lives mere weeks before I

completed this project; she is present in all this, even though most of it was written before her

arrival.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................... xi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................... xii

INTRODUCTION: “ONLY THE SUN KNOWS” ........................................................................ 1

Stakes .................................................................................................................................. 5

Cultural Studies as conceptual framework ......................................................................... 7

Method and analytic .......................................................................................................... 10

Distinguishing “cultural formations” ................................................................................ 17

Cultural formations and subcultures ..................................................................... 18

Cultural formations, scenes, and milieus .............................................................. 23

Cultural formations and genres ............................................................................. 26

Cultural formations and experimentalist networks ............................................... 27

Formations and transformations ....................................................................................... 31

Three formations: a brief preview ..................................................................................... 38

CHAPTER 1: FREE FOLK—A COLLECTIVE-EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY ................ 42

Free folk and its musics .................................................................................................... 44

Free folk and the social ..................................................................................................... 61

Free folk and Diederichsen’s “horde” ............................................................................... 85

The sensibility of free folk ................................................................................................ 92

Enunciative assemblages of free folk ............................................................................. 106

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Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 122

CHAPTER 2: INDUSTRIAL MUSIC—AN ESOTERIC-EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY 129

The sensibility of the industrial music formation ........................................................... 131

Which “industrial”? ........................................................................................................ 139

Three modes of the hidden or the secret ......................................................................... 146

Control/power ..................................................................................................... 146

Potentialities of the body/mind/self .................................................................... 150

The esoteric or occult .......................................................................................... 154

Enunciative assemblages of the industrial sensibility ..................................................... 157

Paranoia............................................................................................................... 159

Vision .................................................................................................................. 183

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 210

CHAPTER 3: THE EPISTEMIC FORMATION—A REFLEXIVE- EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY ............................................................................................. 218

The epistemic formation ................................................................................................. 219

Crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, oscillations of the political... 229

The epistemic formation’s sensibility ............................................................................. 241

Thematizing collectivity ..................................................................................... 244

Power .................................................................................................................. 251

Identity, subjectivity, being-in-the world............................................................ 257

Temporality, history, ancestry, futurity .............................................................. 263

Enunciative assemblages of the epistemic formation ..................................................... 270

Semiotics of collectivity ..................................................................................... 271

Articulating rhizomes and radicles ..................................................................... 276

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Representations, concepts, titles ......................................................................... 281

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 288

“ONLY THE SUN KNOWS”: CONCLUSION ........................................................................ 292

Free folk .......................................................................................................................... 295

Industrial ......................................................................................................................... 302

The epistemic formation ................................................................................................. 309

A few concluding remarks .............................................................................................. 317

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 322

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TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Mixed enunciations ....................................................................................................... 11

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BwO Body without Organs

JOMF Jackie-O Motherfucker

NNCK No-Neck Blues Band

TG Throbbing Gristle

TOPY Temple ov Psychick Youth

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INTRODUCTION: “ONLY THE SUN KNOWS”1

This is a dissertation about music. More specifically, it is a dissertation about various

popular-experimental musics and the people who make them. It is also more than that: While this

project arises not least from a love of music and of music’s potentials, it understands music as an

entry point to questions that are simultaneously narrower and wider. These questions are

narrower because they concern particular concepts—collectivity and experimentation—that

appear more abstract, more “academic” than notions of “popular music” might suggest. They are

wider because they concern contextually specific matters of practice, ideology, feeling, politics,

and more that cannot be reduced to the realm of “popular music,” however that realm might be

conceptualized. Popular music is everywhere in this study, but it is simultaneously an entry point

into larger conjunctural questions, and into the mapping of particular practices and concepts in

their historical specificity. It is a dissertation that, like the musical and social practices it studies,

is invested in the heterogeneous realm of potential that Erin Manning (2016) calls the “more-

than.” It tries to tap into music’s potential and contingency and thereby attempts to generate its

own “more-than.” In this introduction, I will define the dissertation’s key concepts and outline

their relevance, elaborate the dissertation’s framework, and offer a preview of its case studies.

Building on an interest in the concepts of collectivity and experimentation, as well as the

relations between them, this dissertation explores how particular cultural formations articulate

modes of experimentation and collectivity in relation to—as responses to and reconstructions

1 “Only the Sun Knows” is a song by Six Organs of Admittance (2003), an important band of the “free folk” formation (the dissertation’s first case study) with ties to the industrial music formation (the dissertation’s second case study). The song appeared on the album Compathia.

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of—their respective conjunctural moments. Across three case studies revolving around but not

limited to music, I map three cultural formations’ constitutive engagement and investment in

collective-experimental practices in order to understand these practices as constituted by and

across their historical contexts. My interest in collectivity, experimentation, and their potentials

is itself contextually specific. It responds to an intellectual and political landscape across which

calls for collective experimentation and/or experimental collectivity circulate.

Historically, experimental practices have always been irreducible to any one formation,

but they have most commonly been associated with the sciences. Experimentation in the sense of

the controlled testing of hypotheses is foundational to scientific research and innovation. But

broader notions of experimentation have spread across a wide variety of fields. Scholarly,

activist, and artistic discourses regularly invoke experimentation and the conduct of experiments

as desirable:2 acts in which the outcome’s unknownness or unknowability is embraced

(Grossberg, personal communications, 2016–2018; modifying Cage, 1961/2011, p. 13). While

experimentation is often reductively conflated with the innovative, new, or creative, it is better

understood as opening to what Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual—“the realm of unrealized

but realizable capacities to affect and be affected” (Grossberg, 2010b, p. 36)—and thus as

aligned with Raymond Williams’s (1977, 1979/2015) notion of the pre-emergent—that which is

yet to be articulated fully.

How experimentation opens to the virtual cannot be known simply by its nature as

experimentation. Its nature as experimentation is defined by the ways it opens to or connects

with the virtual. The fact that it opens to or connects with the virtual cannot itself guarantee that

2 Many examples of such work connect to “post-structuralist” and other philosophies of difference—and provide important inspiration throughout this dissertation: e.g., Braidotti (2011b), Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), Gilbert (2014), Grossberg (2010b), Hegarty (2007), Joseph (2008), Manning (2016), and Moten (2003).

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a given mode of experimentation will result in a particular type of desired aesthetic or political

effect. A study of experimentation in music formations must thus analyze such formations’

understandings, experiences, and practices of experimentation.

Each of these case studies of experimentation is necessarily articulated to specific modes

of collectivity. Political, sociological, and even aesthetic writings foreground different modes of

collectivity (Gilbert, 2014), with emphases on collective decision-making, the importance of

collaboration in art or labor contexts, and more. They may be understood as always at least

potentially dangerous (consider the fascist mob) or as the precondition for radical democracy; as

undesirably restraining the individual’s capacities or as conditions of possibility for any potent

agency. A study of collectivity in experimental music formations must thus analyze how the

specific modes of collectivity these formations generate and consist of—the particular band

forms, modes of communal living, networks of care and support, and more—are enabled and

constrained by contextual forces.

Different contextually specific modes of collectivity and experimentation thus serve as

each other’s conditions of possibility; they are articulated by and to particular cultural

formations. A formation is “a configuration of practices that form a particular structure of unity

which transcends any single group’s relation to the practices. The configuration allows certain

practices to exist and to have power within its boundaries.” A formation is governed by a

sensibility, which “defines what sorts of effects the formation produces and what sorts of

activities and attitudes people within the alliance can undertake” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 398).

Grossberg understands formations in terms of their conditions of possibility and their

effectivities instead of their supposed essences; similarly, a sensibility is not simply something

that belongs to a formation but must be articulated by and to it. This project proposes that certain

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cultural formations are, at certain times, governed by sensibilities that privilege the potentials of

collective and experimental practice. It aims to map the articulation of these formations and their

sensibilities and identify the forces shaping them and setting their horizons. Grossberg’s notion

of sensibility draws on Raymond Williams’s concept of the structure of feeling as reformulated

in his later work (Williams, 1979/2015).3 According to Grossberg (2010c), the concept’s later

iteration “points to the necessary gap between the known and the knowable, experience and the

discursive, the lived and articulation, the gap that is the site of emergence and creativity” (p. 32).

The emphasis on this gap makes Williams’s concept, and consequently the concept of sensibility,

a particularly useful tool for the proposed study, but also one in need of clarification.

In this dissertation’s case studies (the American “free folk” formation of the late 1990s

and early 21st century, the British “industrial” formation that emerged in the late 1970s and early

1980s, and the recently emergent, constitutively transnational “epistemic” formation), collective-

experimental practices have often primarily consisted of the production (as well as distribution

and consumption) of music. However, collectivity and experimentation usually extend to the

organization of daily life, social relations, political movements, as well as other modes of

expression. These formations’ sustained success at inspiring and articulating people, as well as

generating experimental practices adequate to the context (according to criteria to be explored),

is not guaranteed; but their passion for collective experimentation is of particular interest

(beyond these formations themselves) in times of larger-scale disillusionment with dominant

modes of political mobilization, the resulting reactionary shifts, and perceived crises of culture

and imagination (Braidotti, 2011a, 2011b; Gilbert, 2014; Grossberg, 2010b).

3 Grossberg (1992) also draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1979/1984); for the purposes of this project (and in light of Bourdieu’s absence from Grossberg’s subsequent development of the “structure of feeling” and related ideas), I focus on the resonances of Grossberg’s “sensibility” with Williams’s work.

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Stakes

Experimentation and collectivity as central aspects of innovative democratic practice and

even ways of life often intersect in Jeremy Gilbert’s writings. Gilbert’s Common Ground (2014)

stands as a notable example and synthesis of current interest in collectivity and experimentation.

He criticizes dominant Euromodern thought’s impoverished understanding of collectivity,

reduced in different registers to the mere aggregation of individuals, homogeneous modes of

community, and liberal Leviathan logic (with its almost exclusive emphasis on vertical relations

and investment in a core idea or leader). These limitations are key elements of the current crisis

of liberal democracy and the inability to mobilize sustainable collective decision-making in the

face of the environmental and other crises. Gilbert posits the need for more complex and diverse

understandings of collectivity, as well as the need for the generation of new, radically

democratic, and experimental modes of collectivity. Such experimental collectivity and

collective experimentation are directed against institutional inertia, unjust power relations, and

possessive individualism.

A related articulation of experimentation and collectivity, also taken up cautiously by

Gilbert, is encountered in the music-oriented cultural formations this dissertation analyzes. They

generate and are constituted by relations that foster creative modes of collectivity (consider, for

instance, the collective improvisations of free folk, or its frequent articulation of musical practice

to communal living); and they establish experimental practice—an embedded-embodied interest

in experimental practice—for various reasons and in various, sometimes perhaps unexpected

domains (consider the ways popular forms of experimentation often refuse or challenge the

rarefied realm of high art). In such formations, new ways of caring, “new ways to love”

(Herndon, 2015), and new modes of collectivity are sought. Creative practice, mutual care and

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support, and often genuine (musical, social, economic) experimentation are not merely valued

but key to these formations’ self-perception, practices, and mattering maps (Grossberg, 1992). It

is this strong affective investment in both collective and experimental practices that makes them

particularly interesting. Crucially, such formations are also characterized by a complex but

strong (albeit sometimes denied) relationship to the popular that distinguishes them from certain

institutionalized modes of experimentation. Instead of relying on an “austere avant-gardism”

(Gilbert, 2008, p. 98), such formations may be more likely to “seek to widen their sphere of

effectivity, or at least to catalyse new becomings at their borders” (Gilbert, 2014, p. 198; also see

Gilbert, 2001). They do not serve as a vanguard, although they may be represented as such; they

can be humble but passionate and joyous laboratories of the search for the virtual in the actual

(Grossberg, 2010a).

Recent years’ events and the conversations surrounding them—such as the deadly fire of

December 2016 at a dance party in an Oakland warehouse and subsequent governmental

crackdowns and far-right hostility (Canon, 2016; Dougherty, 2016), as well as the many

difficulties faced and creatively engaged by experimental musicians during the COVID-19

pandemic of 2020 and 2021—have once again underlined the importance of collective-

experimental formations of this kind and implicated them in struggles across a variety of

interrelated political, economic, and cultural fields. Consequently, one part of this project’s plan

is to clarify such collective experimentation’s (potential) relevance to the current conjuncture. In

some cases, such experimental formations may be articulated into “cultures of survival” (Hall,

2016, p. 188); they may serve as havens by and for the marginalized. Such collective

experimentation can also be important for the generation of emergent (social, aesthetic…)

relations, maybe even for the generation of modes of emergence themselves. These formations

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may enact what Rosi Braidotti (2011b) calls “a sustainable ethics of transformations” (p. 61),

which emphasizes change over identity—not an unusual feature of such formations—and which

does so in a way that attempts to match the specific conditions of the context.

None of this is guaranteed: By definition, collective experiments can fail; and

experiments can turn paradoxically rote or devoid of contextual relevance. As some of this

dissertation’s examples show, collective-experimental formations may even find themselves

reproducing authoritarian, racist, or sexist power relations. However, as Gilbert (2014) writes,

echoing Williams’s later orientation of the structure of feeling towards emergence and creativity:

“There may right now be pockets of social and aesthetic experimentation which look isolated and

irrelevant but whose intensification, dispersal and interaction under new conditions might

quickly produce radical social change” (p. 215).

Cultural Studies as conceptual framework

This study’s framework emphasizes contextual specificity as crucial to an understanding

of collectivity, experimentation, and the contingent relations between them. Cultural Studies as

an inter- and transdisciplinary formation has materialized in a variety of contextually specific

ways. While this has often resulted in work squarely positioning itself within a realm of culture,

however defined, the tradition of authors such as Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, and Jeremy

Gilbert instead considers culture a potential (and itself contingent) entry point into an analysis of

context. Consequently, this dissertation enters its “problem-spaces” (Scott, 2004; also see

Grossberg, 2010) through the study of particular cultural formations and their sensibilities but

opens up beyond them by exploring them in their contextual relations. No element studied, no

practice or event can be understood outside of the relations that constitute it and which it

constitutes. Articulation is therefore located at the core of Cultural Studies. Understood as the

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generation and modification of relations and connections, articulation designates both the

processes through which actual reality (in its contextual specificity and its shifting power

relations) is produced and the work of Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies resonates with the call

of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory (2011b) for a double movement of critique and creativity.

The analysis and critique of power relations and their contingent emergence must be joined by

the (equally rigorous and hard) work of re-articulation. Contingency does not merely imply the

fallibility of current relations but also enables various modes of transformation, which

themselves must be engendered through the employment of appropriate tools and the telling of

good stories.

Cultural Studies’ primary conceptualization of context is the conjuncture, “characterized

by an articulation, accumulation, and condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different

currents or circumstances” (Grossberg, 2010b, p. 40). Cultural Studies constantly attempts to

engage with the (potentially) shifting demands of its conjuncture. This dissertation therefore tries

to differentiate the conjunctural specificities of its three case studies. To what extent do they

inhabit the same conjuncture, if at all? What are, to use Williams’s terms, a conjuncture’s various

emergent (and even pre-emergent), dominant, and residual forces? This project’s work of

articulation can be understood as a cartography or mapping of particular formations in/and

conjunctures. For the purposes of my case studies, such cartographies can be related to Branden

W. Joseph’s Deleuze-Guattarian notion of “minor history” (2008), which

opens categories to their outside, onto a field of historical contingencies and events that is never homogeneous and that is always political. … Against both extreme antinomies and homogeneous leveling, a minor history poses a field of continual differentiation: specific networks and connections. (p. 52)

In Beyond the Dream Syndicate, Joseph relates a variety of (experimental) musical and other

artistic practices to the contextually specific regimes of power they respond to or reconstruct. He

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provides this dissertation with a series of potent examples of how to approach its diverse

materials—although I focus more explicitly on affective-semiotic regimes than regimes of

power. Unsurprisingly, given their connections to a Deleuze-Guattarian lineage and emphases on

change and contingency, Grossberg’s “cartography of daily life” (1992, p. 63) and Joseph’s

minor history resonate with Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic theory” and its emphasis on mobility and

transformation. Braidotti (2011b) understands cartography as

a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the process of power relations. It fulfills the function of providing both exegetical tools and creative theoretical alternatives, so as to assess the impact of material and discursive conditions upon our embodied and embedded subjectivity.

Here, subjectivity is understood as distinct from individual identity. Instead, Braidotti sees it as

“a socially mediated process of relations and negotiations with multiple others and with

multilayered social structures” (p. 4). While Braidotti’s notion of subjectivity may appear

somewhat vague, it certainly underlines her desire to develop innovative and imaginative tools

appropriate to shifting contexts and the manifold transformations they engender. The

development of new “figurations” is key to Braidotti’s cartography. These “are not figurative

ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, embedded, and embodied

positions” (p. 13). Examples of such figurations include Haraway’s cyborg and Deleuze and

Guattari’s rhizome and nomad, the latter further developed by Braidotti herself as the nomadic

subject.

To let Braidotti’s figurations loose across Grossberg’s cartography is to further amplify

the latter’s dynamism; to (re-)articulate Braidotti’s ideas to Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization

of mixed enunciations, as reworked by Grossberg and Bryan G. Behrenshausen and outlined

below, is to make Braidotti’s analysis of contexts more robust, given that her work sometimes

appears to ignore semiotics. Joseph’s minor history, meanwhile, adds a sense of the music-

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historical in its contextual complexity—beyond genre. Carefully articulated to each other, these

cartographic approaches enable a richer exploration of the possibilities of collective-

experimental sensibilities without simply affirming or universalizing particular sensibilities.

Method and analytic

The project seeks to produce a materialist cartography of the emergence and effectivities

of cultural formations and their collective-experimental sensibilities. The discursive and social

heterogeneity of these formations calls for a pragmatic choice of method(s)—for a dynamic

analytic. In order to specify the modes of experimentation and collectivity present in the three

cultural formations, I analyze writings from and about these formations, musical recordings, and

interviews, as well as other materials relevant to the formations’ contextualization. The

dissertation required the selection, collection, and analysis of a large set of diverse materials

related to the three case studies; it is on the basis of these materials and the patterns they generate

that the formations are recognizable and analyzable in the first place. Due to their comparative

recency, the free folk formation and (especially) the epistemic formation are well-documented in

audio, video, and written form online. The industrial formation, meanwhile, elicits strong interest

and investment to this day, with scholarly and popular publications narrating, critiquing, and

theorizing its practices and trajectory.

The dissertation’s task, then, is not so much that of documentation and of foundational

ethnographic exploration, although it is strongly inspired by various more explicitly ethnographic

projects, builds on and responds to past ethnographic studies I have conducted (Spiegel, 2012,

2013), and is also informed by (auto-)ethnographic reflection of my own presence in (or in

relation to) these formations. Instead, the primary methodical-analytical task of this dissertation

is to assign the different materials (songs, videos, album reviews, interview quotations,

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autobiographical remarks, scholarly analyses) to their proper (contextual) level of abstraction—

to work through and with them in constructing contextual maps of the three formations. The

dissertation reads (and listens to, and watches) its materials closely not to simply analyze a

discursive element itself in detail, but because it understands any statement in its contextual

specificity—its discursive-material-social relationality—first and foremost. As I will show

below, this dissertation’s work of specifying statements in their contextual complexity, studying

emerging patterns across these statements, and mapping the formations’ dynamic emergences

and effectivities can also be understood in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) call

Pragmatics.

Figure 1: Mixed enunciations (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016, p. 1014).

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This project’s cartographic practice starts with Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s

refinement of Deleuze-Guattarian semiotics—or, more appropriately, of Deleuze and Guattari’s

theorization of mixed enunciations (Figure 1). Grossberg and Behrenshausen (2016) identify

several enunciative or expressive practices (formations or regimes) that differentiate and

organize reality. Although it would be dangerous to assume that any one process and practice in

this framework is temporally prior to others, one may, for the sake of accessibility, start out from

unformed matter and thus the unorganized realm of potential—the virtual. In what is only

analytically a “first” step, the (contextually specific) diagram, an abstract and dynamic

organizing apparatus, produces actual reality out of the virtual—the realm of potential. The

diagram is, so to speak, a specific historical context’s dominant set of dynamic blueprints, or

perhaps maps, for actual reality. One may consider here, for instance, Foucault’s diagrams of

power—e.g., disciplinary and sovereign power and their conjunctural combinations (Deleuze,

1986/1988). Note that these dynamic “blueprints” are themselves always contingent and

embedded in the world, not simply abstract impositions “from outside.”

The diagram brings actual reality into being and configures it into two different

populations of active bodies, one of which (expression) can also act upon the other (content).

Content includes materially distinct and spatiotemporally bounded milieus—distinct spaces, or

space-times, that have not yet been turned into lived places. These milieus are always articulated

to expression: to various enunciative practices that, again, are specific to their historical context.

Enunciative practices configure the milieu and transform it into a lived territory, a field of

possibilities. They turn the space(-time) of the milieu into a place that affords modes of

belonging, of moving, of engaging with the world.

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Among these enunciative practices, rhythms order the territory and differentiate it from

its outside through repetition. Consider, for instance, the ways music can shape and color lived

reality; or consider the rhythms of a city, which depend on various economic-infrastructural

parameters. Meanwhile, signals set in place particular relations between bodies. To continue in a

musical register, consider seemingly “natural” reactions to specific sounds (e.g., the shock of

dissonance, the movement inspired by dance music’s bass). Despite their experienced directness,

these reactions are themselves discursive-material-social articulations that are the temporary,

sedimented results of long histories of musical practice amidst shifting power relations.

From the territory, the plateau of culture (the realm of the discursive) is configured

through semiotic regimes—specific organizations of signs. Semiotic regimes may involve a

variety of signifying semiotics. These are characterized by (often conventionally reinforced) self-

referentiality: Signifier refers to signifier refers to signifier; signs are unlinked from the non-

semiotic and caught in “circles of meaning, consciousness and subjectivity” (Grossberg &

Behrenshausen, 2016, p. 1008). For instance, many acts of the industrial formation are

characterized by a paranoid orientation that keeps tracing disembodied signs, always expecting

further depth behind every signifier, further hidden meanings to unveil. However, semiotic

regimes may also involve a vast variety of a-signifying semiotics which work on and through

semiotic substance (e.g., sound) but precede, bypass, or even resist the dominance of the

signifier. For instance, many free folk acts engage in polyvocal, distorted, wordless vocalizing

that does not operate according to conventional patterns of signification and does not rely on

strict meaning-making.

These regimes are articulated into specific collective assemblages of enunciation,

composed of some selection of specific enunciative practices including possible diagrams,

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rhythms, signals and semiotic regimes. A collective assemblage of enunciation is a cultural

formation when it produces a sensibility.4 For the sake of simplicity, I depart somewhat from

Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s terminology with regards to “semiotic regimes”: Given the

constitutive hybridity of the “regimes” I am discussing, as well as the fact that some of them

push the limits of what can be called “semiotic,” I refer to them more broadly as enunciative

assemblages. These operate at different scales—at different levels of contextual abstraction; any

cultural formation is an enunciative assemblage that is itself constituted by and across various

enunciative assemblages of a different order. For instance, the third case study’s epistemic

formation is a specific enunciative assemblage that draws on and articulates different but

interrelated enunciative assemblages that operate on a larger scale: a “rhizomatic” assemblage

that fosters the articulation of multiplicities of sound, musical structure, and expression; a

“radicular” assemblage that privileges musical fragmentation and the persistence of political

“hauntings,” such as histories of racist violence, in the formation’s artistic expressions; and a

“representational” assemblage that relies on a comparatively straightforward mode of

signification, prioritizing the attempted transmission of specific meanings or messages.

Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s theorization of mixed enunciations has various

implications for this study’s interest in the contextual nature of sensibility as related to

Williams’s structure of feeling. The revised Deleuze-Guattarian framework provides Grossberg

(2018b) with tools for his investigation of affective landscapes:

An affective landscape describes a complex social way of being in the world, a densely textured space within which some experiences, behaviors, choices and emotions are possible, some “feel” inevitable and obvious, and still others are impossible or unimaginable. It defines what is allowed and what is forbidden. And it is where the struggle to make new and emergent experiences livable and knowable is carried out. (p. 91)

4 Not all enunciations are expressive; but all cultural formations are expressive in that they produce sensibilities.

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In this framework, Grossberg conceptualizes structures of feeling as “the components and

expressions of an affective landscape, translating it into moods, defining the tonalities of our

behavior, and mattering maps, defining the forms and sites of investment and caring, of

attachment, attraction and distanciation” (p. 93). It is useful to think of sensibilities as a type of

structure of feeling, part of—a response to and expression of—an affective landscape; perhaps

this is the starting point for a conjunctural analysis. Sensibilities corresponding to specific

cultural formations are shaped and constituted by and across a variety of enunciative

assemblages, which must be specified in analysis. Thus, Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s theory

of the multiplicity of enunciations provides an important analytic tool for my attempt to specify

the practices of experimentation in each of the case studies, and to link them to forms of

collectivity on the one hand, and the conjuncture on the other.

As mentioned above, experimentation can open or connect to the virtual, but the modes

of opening or connecting must be specified through analyses of the collective-experimental

practices of the particular cultural formation. Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s framework points

towards some of the stakes of this specification. Various forms of enunciation access the virtual

in different ways and through different practices of experimentation, and they will have different

relations with and effects on other expressive and semiotic dimensions. The specific constitution

of these effectivities and their complex mediation through a variety of apparatuses and forces

determines the types of potential accessed through experimentation; it enables and constrains the

search for the virtual in the actual. Specific practices and even specific modes of enunciation do

not necessarily play the same role in different contexts: To use a comparatively salient example,

representational enunciations are present both in free folk and in the epistemic formation, which

is unsurprising, given the importance of representation to Euromodernity. However, a musician’s

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(seemingly) straightforward description of an aspect of their work—an explanation of the

process of working on a piece or an outline of the specific intentions encoded into that piece—

cannot be given the same weight or assigned to the same register in both formations. In free folk,

such a self-representation of a musician’s work may be a humble addition to or

reterritorialization of a sprawling, improvised piece characterized by a radical enunciative

multiplicity; the representational assemblage that shapes the musician’s description is at best

secondary to the “presignifying” assemblage that dominates free folk’s collective-experimental

sensibility. In the epistemic formation, on the other hand, a reflexive-experimental sensibility

assigns the representational much more weight: An explanation of, for instance, a theoretical

framework that inspired a specific performance is itself crucial to a musician’s experimental

practice and that practice’s relation to lived experience. Therefore, even as specific “sources” or

“materials” related to different case studies may resemble each other in format (both of these

examples could be answers to interview questions), their specific placement on—or trajectory

across—maps of their respective formations are bound to differ.

Given this study’s interest in particular cultural formations, it often centers on “culture,”

or the discursive. However, culture relates in complex ways to other dimensions or plateaus,

including the material, the lived, and the social. Similarly, sensibilities and/or structures of

feeling may themselves “travel” across various formations and collectivities. Consequently, their

shifting articulations must be analyzed, and their effectivities and agencies—which may be

irreducible to any given person or collectivity—must be understood in their (potential)

dispersion, mediation, and sheer multiplicity. Ultimately, this exploration resembles Deleuze and

Guattari’s “Pragmatics,” which studies four components of enunciation: particular hybrid

semiotics; semiotic “transformations-translations”; the “abstract machines” (Deleuze & Guattari,

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1980/1987, p. 162) of the diagram; and, finally, the “concrete assemblages” (p. 161) that

formalize expression and content as specific effectuations of the diagram’s blueprints. Much of

this dissertation’s legwork pertains to the first two components, the exploration of semiotic

regimes or enunciative assemblages in their mutual constitution; but it is in relation to the third

and fourth component, by studying these formations’ constitutive relationship to larger

contextual apparatuses, that the dissertation opens itself most explicitly to difficult questions of

these formations’ potentials and limitations—to their contextually specific import and relevance.

For instance, the two most recent formations—free folk and the epistemic formation—both

struggle with, respond to, and sometimes reify individualizing apparatuses of capture. These are

most clearly perceptible in the form of culture-industrial imperatives to be conventionally

recognizable as an individual artist, but they are themselves the dynamic outcomes of struggles

over contemporary conditions for different articulations of the individual and the collective.

The dissertation thus explores how experimentation may be the result of particular hybrid

enunciative assemblages, how these constitute forms of culture and collectivity, and how these

formations and the sign behaviors enabled and constrained in them are related to larger

conjunctural affective landscapes. These cultural formations are remarkable in their explicit

embrace of “the struggle to make new and emergent experiences livable and knowable”; but

what defines this embrace? Why would anyone want to invest in such risky embraces of the

“more-than”? This study attempts to provide some answers.

Distinguishing “cultural formations”

The concept of “cultural formation” is distinct from various other terms regularly used in

academic and popular contexts to describe musical-social (and related) assemblages. These other

terms can often helpfully describe certain dimensions of particular cultural formations. However,

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the notion of “cultural formation” itself provides considerable flexibility and serves to define the

assemblages to which it applies without reductively disembedding them as “essentially” musical

phenomena, while nonetheless allowing for the specification of music’s real importance. I want

to argue not so much for the “superiority” of the concept in comparison to these other storied,

influential terms; but I want to foreground its appropriateness as a dynamic tool primed for

contextual analysis.

Cultural formations and subcultures

As a project that investigates the emergence and practices of social assemblages engaged

in musical (and music-related) practices, this dissertation can be related to scholarly work on

“subcultures” that has been influential in the study of popular music. Early pioneering Cultural

Studies work on British post-World War II subcultures (Hall & Jefferson, 1975/2006; Hebdige,

1979; Willis, 1978/2014) is of particular importance here. Subcultures are defined by specific

styles and rituals that set them in a subversive relation to hegemonic ideologies. Dick Hebdige’s

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) famously explores subcultures’ negotiation of several

challenges: the dissolution of the post-war social contract and larger-scale demographic changes

during a time of mass immigration from (former) colonies. Without necessarily verbalizing their

resistant practices as such, punk and other subcultures challenged the naturalizations of

hegemonic ideology—at least until their stylistic (musical, visual, lingual, sartorial) challenges

were recuperated into dominant commercial discourse, a cyclical inevitability that supposedly

drained them of their potency, according to Hebdige.

The cultural formations discussed in this study share some features with “subcultures” as

understood by Hebdige and his peers. Most generally, one can certainly find shared sets of

values that dominate these formations; and all of these formations harbor some sense of

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“resistance” against modes of exclusion and oppression, whatever their exact articulation.

However, there are significant divergences. Notably, all three case studies lack the stylistic

cohesion that Hebdige detects in subcultures. This does not mean that there are no style-based

modes of exclusion in this study’s cultural formations. A polished business suit would look out

of place at a free folk show; a police uniform would likely be cause for alarm at a club night of

the epistemic formation (although one could, for instance, imagine the ironic presence of such

attire in certain manifestations of the industrial formation). But such exclusions are not primary

defining traits of any of these cultural formations. Simultaneously, some of their “positive”

aesthetic-stylistic traits are too common, too general to clearly signify subcultural belonging

(e.g., the somewhat nondescript, leisurely, post-Neil-Young-via-grunge clothes of free folk or the

casual sartorial eclecticism of the epistemic formation); and certain other traits are unable to

define the formation as a whole despite being characteristic of some of its key protagonists (e.g.,

the mechanic murkiness of some early industrial music, or the extended cosmic folk songs of

some free folk artists).

In the case of the more recent cultural formations (free folk and the epistemic formation),

this lack of stylistic cohesion is, among other things, an outcome of the general weakening of

subcultural belonging in Hebdige’s sense, resulting from information technologies, shifts in

music’s political economy, and other forces’ erosion of the outwardly “spectacular” (Hebdige,

1979) character of subcultures as well as their ability to police their own boundaries (Rojek,

2011). However, even the industrial formation, whose emergence was contemporaneous with

that of punk, was defined by a shared esoteric-experimental sensibility as opposed to a shared

style. It is certainly true that some musicians and (perhaps especially) fans of early industrial

music also moved in punk circles. Still, that there was a relatively close (if difficult and

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contradictory) relationship between punk and industrial does not mean that punk (as a

subculture) and industrial (as a cultural formation) were, let alone are, musical-social

assemblages of the same kind. In fact, for the purposes of differentiation, industrial and the other

case studies presented here may be more fittingly—if also problematically—aligned with the

countercultural as described by Hebdige (1979): “The term ‘counter culture’ refers to that

amalgam of ‘alternative’ middle-class youth cultures – the hippies, the flower children, the

yippies – which grew out of the 60s, and came to prominence during the period 1967–70” (p.

148, n. 6). Drawing on Resistance Through Rituals, the edited volume presenting the

foundational work on British subcultures conducted at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural

Studies in Birmingham (Hall & Jefferson, 1975/2006; especially Clarke et al., 1975/2006),

Hebdige (1979) writes that

the counter culture can be distinguished from the subcultures we have been studying by the explicitly political and ideological forms of its opposition to the dominant culture (political action, coherent philosophies, manifestoes, etc.), by its elaboration of “alternative” institutions (Underground Press, communes, co-operatives, “un-careers”, etc.), its “stretching” of the transitional stage beyond the teens, and its blurring of the distinctions, so rigorously maintained in subculture, between work, home, family, school and leisure. Whereas opposition in subculture is … displaced into symbolic forms of resistance, the revolt of middle-class youth tends to be more articulate, more confident, more directly expressed and is, therefore, as far as we are concerned, more easily “read”. (p. 148, n. 6)

Similarly, Willis (1978/2014) portrays the “hippies” encountered in his influential study Profane

Culture as emerging from “a middle-class tradition of the bohemian intelligentsia” that differs

considerably from the “‘rough’ working-class themes” re-articulated by the “motor-bike boys”

(p. 11), his book’s other case study. All three case studies of this dissertation exhibit some of the

countercultural characteristics distinguished here: the ideological explicitness, the counter-

institutional impetus (though often drawing on a punk-derived DIY ethos), the explicit

articulation of art and life. There is, indeed, also a stronger middle-class alignment to be found in

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these experimental formations (though post-fordist precarity tends to blur traditional class lines

here). Still, there are some problems with an assignment of these formations to the

countercultural: Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, the dissertation’s cultural

formations all are distinct from the countercultural “amalgam” mentioned by Hebdige. Even as

they draw on many of its practices, they have tended not to form the large-scale alliances found

in at least some areas of the (especially American) counterculture. Additionally, this dissertation

assumes that the “more articulate” expression of these formations’ ideologies does not guarantee

their straightforward legibility, despite Hebdige’s claims. Instead, ideology is merely one

dimension of more complex and contradictory assemblages.

The study of subcultures as a theoretical framework risks fetishizing ideology as a key

realm of struggle and belonging at the expense of affect. This dissertation does not dismiss

ideology but seeks to further contextualize it in relation to forces that are perhaps less

immediately apparent. Thus, a recurring theme across all three case studies is the negotiation of

the relationship between affect and ideology. Ideology always carries some degree of affective

charge; affect is never merely a natural, unmediated force but is instead shaped by many other

contextual elements, including ideology. Affect’s “mattering maps” and ideology’s “maps of

meaning which are taken to represent reality” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 398) cannot easily be thought

apart from each other in analysis. Neither should be fetishized at the expense of the other. In this

dissertation’s framework, mattering maps and maps of meaning are both consistently produced

across heterogeneous affective-semiotic landscapes—across different hybrid assemblages of

enunciation. Different cultural formations articulate affective and ideological dimensions across

and into these enunciative assemblages, and cultural formations themselves are constituted by

ideological and affective forces; but mattering maps and maps of meaning cannot be presumed to

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be in a homological relation to—to be easily mappable onto—each other. The industrial

formation, for instance, at times foregrounds ideological matters and has been analyzed

accordingly; however, it is far more ideologically diverse than the statements of its best-known

protagonists might suggest. Additionally, the oft-cited ambiguity of industrial music’s politics

(e.g., in its references to fascism) can itself be understood in relation to the formation’s esoteric-

experimental sensibility, which at times (problematically) favors the probing of boundaries

through “transgressive” practices and imageries regardless of their political alignment. In free

folk, an individualist ideology of artistic creativity clashes with an almost anti-ideological, anti-

representational desire for immersion in the social-sensorial. In the epistemic formation,

ideology expresses a widely shared investment in knowledge and reflexivity, mediated by a

simultaneous, contradictory reliance on and orientation away from the representational.

Profane Culture by Paul Willis (1978/2014), another key subculturalist work, elaborates

the notion of homology as its framework for the study of motor-bike boys and hippies. In

Willis’s case, a homological analysis “is concerned with how far, in their structure and content,

particular items parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of

the social group” (p. 250). This homological approach helped shed much-needed light on the

easily dismissed and overlooked significance of “profane,” “everyday” cultural practices.

However, it has considerable limitations that also make themselves felt in Hebdige’s Subculture

and in some of Raymond Williams’s work (Grossberg, 2010c)—thereby haunting Cultural

Studies work that engages directly with cultural expression. Although it is tailored to “the study

of relationships between elements in a whole way of life” (Williams, 1961/2011, p. 67), this

framework by design too often presumes correspondence between different contextual and

experiential levels. It traces specific relations onto other sets of relations and practices, thereby

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reducing multiplicities to unities that are not always appropriate to the complexity of formations

and their contextual constitution. In contrast, this dissertation attempts to map the complex

relationships between different contextual levels and enunciative practices. Even where

correspondence appears, it is itself contingent and embedded in irreducible hybridity; it cannot

be assumed to be the result of a matrix molding all of a formation’s practices. Thus, these

formations’ constitutive sensibilities are themselves hybrid articulations that do not always

operate in the same way, or always carry the same power, across all parts of their respective

formations.

Cultural formations, scenes, and milieus

One key concept that has at different times either augmented or replaced the term

“subculture” in the “subculturalist” tradition (Rojek, 2011) is that of “scene.” While this term

echoes colloquial notions of “scenedom,” which bear connotations both positive (a creative

space of belonging) and negative (exclusionary cliques), it has been thoroughly theorized by Will

Straw (1991). A scene is, most basically, “that cultural space in which a range of musical

practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and

according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (p. 373); and scenes

“actualize a particular state of relations between various populations and social groups, as these

coalesce around specific coalitions of musical style” (Straw, 1991, p. 379). Additionally, Andy

Bennett (2004) and Richard A. Peterson distinguish between local, trans-local, and virtual

scenes. A local scene is closest to the traditional meaning of “scene,” clearly delineated in spatial

terms, though also potentially heterogeneous and contradictory. A trans-local scene connects (or

moves) musicians—and sometimes entire local scenes—across a wider landscape (e.g., think of

U.S. free folk musicians knowing which peers to contact in other towns when planning a tour). A

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virtual scene either primarily constitutes itself across spatial distance through specific media

(especially on discussion boards, social media, and so on) or is identified as a scene from the

outside only (e.g., German “krautrock” of the 1970s, many of whose main protagonists did not

have much to do with each other). Of course, it appears unlikely that any musical-social

assemblage would only ever match one of these types. Generally, these three types of scenes

tend to intersect or mutually constitute each other.

The concept of a scene is highly useful insofar as it complicates understandings of

musical-social assemblages while refusing to reduce musical movement to matters of class, a

problem that has consistently plagued theories of “subculture” (Bennett, 2004). Thinking of

specific assemblages as “scenes” enables the conduct of detailed, ethnographic research (e.g.,

Bennett & Guerra, 2019; Cohen, 1997). I have employed Bennett and Peterson’s three-part

system in the past in order to describe free folk as a complex, heterogeneous set of local, trans-

local, and virtual scenes, defined simultaneously by identifiable local spaces and country-wide

(and sometimes even international) networks (Spiegel, 2012, 2013, 2019a). However, this use of

“scene” pushes the concept to its breaking point and puts into question its specificity. The

advantage of the concept of a scene is most obvious in its local specificity. The further one

moves from that, the weaker the concept becomes. On the other hand, the notion of a “cultural

formation” always carries multi-layeredness and complexity within it and is irreducible to scale.

Additionally, more than “scene,” it is a concept that has been explicitly formulated so as to

foreground radical contextualism. A cultural formation articulates, and is articulated to, a

sensibility, which itself can only be understood in relation to larger, contextually specific

structures of feeling.

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Another, related concept that arises from sociological engagement with the subculturalist

tradition of Cultural Studies is that of milieus, or “milieu cultures,” as outlined by Peter Webb

(2007). The concept is especially worth mentioning in this introduction because of Webb’s case

study of neofolk, a specific milieu associated with the industrial formation of this dissertation’s

second chapter. Webb affirms Jörg Dürrschmidt’s definition of “milieu”; for Dürrschmidt

(2000), drawing on the work of Richard Grathoff, the term denotes

a relatively stable configuration of action and meaning in which the individual actively maintains a distinctive degree of familiarity, competence and normalcy, based on the continuity and consistency of personal disposition, habitualities and routines, and experienced as a feeling of situatedness. (pp. 18–19)

For Webb (2007), the research of Hebdige and several other Cultural Studies scholars omits “a

self-articulation from the actors and agents in the subculture and a sense of their life histories and

the cultural currents and developments around them” (p. 20)—“self-articulation” here referring

more to subcultural (self-)consciousness than the Cultural Studies notion of articulation. In

Webb’s view, this aloof position results in a fetishization of class. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu

and Loïc Wacquant’s work, Webb foregrounds “relations and process rather than structure and

semiotics” (p. 1). Through interview materials and considerable ethnographic detail, Webb’s

neofolk case study does indeed present the outlook of key protagonists of this milieu without

subsuming them to the supposed demands of theory. This turns Webb’s chapter into a rich

repository of biographical detail that is useful for an understanding of individual musicians’

backgrounds and motivations. However, by abandoning the milieu’s theorization and rarely

venturing beyond the descriptive, Webb also voids his case study of any noticeable stakes

beyond “show[ing] the fertile nature and agency-producing state of such cultural production” in

the “temporary autonomous zone” of exploration that the neofolk milieu provides. He claims that

the “many questions that spring from this in terms of the political and cultural implications of a

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scene such as this … are outside of the remit of this book” (p. 105). This claim is correct;

Webb’s study is unable to engage in-depth with this milieu’s notoriously “ambiguous” (or

worse) relationship with fascist aesthetics and ideology, which I discuss in this dissertation’s

chapter on the industrial formation. Following public criticism of his neofolk case study, Webb

(2010) clarified his political position and outlined a critique of the milieu’s politics. Still, this

dissertation takes a different route. What Webb calls a “milieu” is perhaps closer to the

“territory,” the lived place of belonging, of Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s framework; but,

more to the point, my project decenters individual-biographical trajectories, re-embedding them

in the larger-scale contexts that shape them. The dissertation is more invested in the political-

critical theorization of music’s worlds. However, it still takes musicians’ “self-articulations”

seriously, embedding them into their formations’ broader enunciative practices as (often

particularly telling) expressions.

Cultural formations and genres

Moving to a more explicitly temporal axis, it is worth distinguishing the study of cultural

formations from histories of specific genres—and to outline the three cultural formations’

difficult relationship to genre. I understand “genre” here as a shared set of aesthetic constants.

This notion lends itself to the construction of “major histories” (Joseph, 2008) that chart a

genre’s emergence and development over time, focusing on specific generic traits (although

these may be modified, augmented, re-articulated over time). While such genre histories might

provide interesting insights into the three cultural formations of this dissertation, they would not

address the questions posed here.

For instance, a history of acid and psychedelic folk that traces certain generic traits across

several decades (Leech, 2010) might productively integrate discussions of some free folk

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musicians; but the free folk formation is not limited to these musicians, who rarely engage

exclusively in psychedelic folk anyway. Meanwhile, a history of industrial music as a genre

(Reed, 2013) will likely engage in some detail with those experimental musicians who played a

role in articulating industrial as a genre in the first place. However, this history traces the genre’s

primary aesthetic and ideological traits across different formations with often quite different

sensibilities, only some of which are “experimental.” Finally, it can be instructive to think

through the work of certain artists of the recently emergent epistemic formation with the help of

generic terms that have been ascribed to them—from “deconstructed club” to “conceptronica”

(Reynolds, 2019). However, regardless of these terms’ specific merits and problems as (sub-)

genre names, they all remain too limited when it comes to identifying the formation itself, which

is defined by a specific reflexive-experimental sensibility that is consistently re-articulated and

expressed in different ways but does not attach itself definitively to any specific generic traits.

As these examples suggest, this dissertation is not about musical genres, even though it

sometimes invokes them strategically—to describe particular musical articulations of a

sensibility, or to distinguish a cultural formation from a genre. Historically, genre often haunts

cultural formations (as in the case of free folk’s contradictory relationship with actual “acoustic,”

“traditional,” guitar-based folk musics as understood from the perspective of a rock tradition).

While genres can afford opportunities for productive experimentation (as in the epistemic

formation’s creative “deconstruction” of club music tropes), genre alone cannot adequately

describe cultural formations or explain their emergence.

Cultural formations and experimentalist networks

In his influential Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut (2011) employs a

Latourian Actor-Network Theory (ANT) framework in order to follow the manifold connections

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and translations that constitute American “experimentalism” (a term he uses interchangeably

with “avant-garde”). In lavish detail, Piekut narrates and contextualizes several contentious

encounters (between John Cage and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Henry Flynt and the

New York Avant-Garde, the Jazz Composers Guild and New York as the space it engages, and

Charlotte Moorman and Cage). He thereby articulates a dynamic and complex assemblage that

showcases the contradictory potentials and limitations of American “experimentalism” as

categorized in dominant music-historical discourses. Piekut interrogates this very categorization,

its prevalence, and its exclusions.

Piekut’s project and this dissertation are related in several key aspects. Both studies

affirm complexity and multiplicity; this includes both studies’ desire not to take for granted what

“experimental music” is, as well as their shared interest in imagining what “experimental music”

can be. However, Piekut’s work centers on the power relations and discursive maneuvers that

made the formation of “experimentalism” what it is, in the sense of the dominant understanding

of American experimental music. For Piekut (2011), there is no point in defining

“experimentalism” according to stylistic constants or an “experimental spirit.” He attempts to

avoid any essentialization of “experimental music”:

To explain what experimentalism has been, one must attend to its fabrication through a network of discourses, practices, and institutions. This formation is the result of the combined labor of scholars, composers, critics, journalists, patrons, performers, venues, and the durative effects of discourses of race, gender, nation, and class. The continuing performance of this network—and not an experimental “ethos” or “spirit”—explains the extension of experimentalism through time. (p. 7)

My own project, as should be clear already, starts from a very different perspective. Piekut’s aim

is to outline a specific dominant notion of experimentation, or “experimentalism,” in its

contingency. My study, on the other hand, centers on a pragmatic exploration of experimental

practices and orientations, largely ignoring questions of canonicity. Consequently, the

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“experimentalism” of Piekut’s study is a specific, contingent, discursive effect; the

“experimentation” of this dissertation is any practice that embraces an opening to the unknown

or unknowable, studied in relation to cultural formations that are particularly eager to perform

such an embrace. Piekut is

hesitant to detach a concept like “experimentalism” from the limited and situated conditions of its emergence. To do so risks reifying “experiment” as the unchanging quiddity of “experimentalism,” and thereby losing sight of the practicalities that were involved in enacting the reality of experimental music. (p. 18)

From this point of view, my study’s foundational definition of “experimentation” risks such a

reification. However, what exactly “experimentation” consists of very much depends on the

specific cultural formation and its sensibility; part of the dissertation’s very point is the

constitutive embeddedness and embodiment of popular-musical experimentation in the everyday,

in larger contexts, and not just in historically accepted and seemingly rarefied realms.

Experimentalism Otherwise benefits from a remarkable level of detail. At the same time,

though, the book prioritizes “actually existing” connections between the constituents of what

Piekut (2011) calls “actually existing experimentalism” to the point of resembling a sociological

positivism that is disinterested in any advanced theorization, including the concept of a “structure

of feeling.” It appears that studies of sensibilities and aesthetic concerns would risk aligning with

“critics in thrall to idealist, or imaginary, experimentalism” (p. 195), against whom Piekut

positions his “actually existing experimentalism”; but this dissertation emphasizes the

importance of sensibilities, albeit historically contingent ones. Indeed, Piekut writes of “the

network of discourses, practices, alliances, and material arrangements of knowledge production

that produce musical style and condition an attitude toward innovation” (p. 197). However, such

attitudes in all their complexity surely are just as much already parts of heterogeneous

assemblages of the type Piekut describes. Piekut is right that attitudes, affect, structures of

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feeling, and similar dimensions cannot explain on their own the durability and maintenance of

dominant notions of “experimentalism.” However, these dimensions condition and are

conditioned by specific types of cultural formations that do not necessarily match those defined

by major or dominant histories.

ANT lends itself to studies “in which everything can be described as a network”

(Grossberg, 2015, p. 93) at the expense of other relationalities and assemblages and thus of

contextual complexities—and at the expense of appropriately complex abstractions. As Iain

Campbell (in press) argues with regards to ANT’s potentials and limitations for research on

improvisation and indeterminacy, its “principle of de-reification risks missing how abstractions

operate and contribute to the constitution of a network.” The potency of ANT’s “local

investigations” is directly related to ANT’s difficulties in accounting for abstractions (gender,

race, capitalisms) and in articulating what Campbell calls “critical distinctions.” (One of his key

examples is George E. Lewis’s distinction between historically specific “Afrological” and

“Eurological” modes of improvisation, which I take up in the “free folk” chapter). In Piekut’s

case, this also leads, in the most extreme instance, to the homological discovery of the great in

the small, as when Piekut (2011) claims that “the strength of [Cage’s] Atlas Eclipticalis lies … in

how clearly it demonstrated the ideological struggles of its historical moment and the decades to

come” (p. 64). This dissertation attempts to steer clear of grand homologies between formations’

contradictions and world-historical struggles, instead tying the different contextual layers

together in more contradictory ways that suggest particularly messy, affective-semiotic

landscapes.

At the same time, Piekut’s (2011) study and this dissertation share an investment in the

alignment of the experimental with a sense of potential: “It seems to me that this restless desire

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to be elsewhere, this searching for an otherwise, might be the closest thing to an ‘essence’ of

experimentalism that we will ever get. … Experimentalism is where the everyday and the

otherwise converge in an arena of grounded possibility” (p. 19). Is this the search for the virtual

in the actual, the study of the pre-emergent? In this sense, both projects affirm the potentials of

creativity, difference, and transformation; both projects refuse to take these for granted,

preferring to investigate their conditions and limitations. Both studies are themselves expressions

of specific experimental sensibilities.

Formations and transformations

The concept of a cultural formation is distinct from (if heterogeneously related to)

subcultures, scenes, milieus, genres, and networks. Despite certain appearances, the concept

foregrounds questions of change in specific formations. The dissertation’s focus on the analysis

of contextually specific sensibilities as the defining dimensions of cultural formations might lead

one to see this study as purely synchronic; I do not narrate the formations’ histories in any linear

sense, and I tend to focus on those historical forces that conditioned the formations’ respective

sensibilities in the first place. Simultaneously, though, I draw examples from across the

decades—an approach that is particularly necessary and fruitful in the case of the industrial

formation, given its emergence in the 1970s and its ongoing history and vitality.5 The point,

then, is not to suggest that formations do not change over time; they do. They express their

constitutive sensibilities in ever so many ways from the moments of their emergence; and these

sensibilities keep being re-articulated in contextually specific ways. Many different forces may

shape such re-articulations. For instance, emergent technologies and economic constraints have

5 For this reason, and for the sake of consistency, I also write of these formations and most of their artists in the present tense, except where specific reasons (a particular historical event, an artist’s passing) demand the use of the past tense.

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posed challenges to the free folk formation’s expression of its collective-experimental sensibility

in sprawling improvising ensembles, leading to an increased engagement in solo projects that

nonetheless retain a collective, polyvocal semiotic even as their social-material character shifts.

Elsewhere, the industrial formation’s esoteric-experimental sensibility opened up from primarily

“paranoid” articulations onto what I call “visionary” articulations as it reached the limits of its

initial creative bursts (while other artists drew on early industrial style but jettisoned the

formation’s experimental vector in favor of a different, oddly conservative sensibility).

Thus, even if this dissertation does not exactly tell a history, it nonetheless has certain

stakes in the historicization of cultural formations. Notably, it is directed against cyclical models

of subcultural existence (as resistance and co-optation) and similar (romantic, rockist) models of

individual artists’ career arcs. This does not mean that there are, e.g., no musical-social

assemblages that emerge as vital-resistant forces only to be recuperated after a while, or that

there are, e.g., no artists whose early music is their most creative or innovative work and who,

after a phase of relative success, then appear to lose that innovative “spirit.” However, this study

does not take such cyclical models for granted. More often than not, they simply reinscribe well-

worn clichés, neglecting the complexities of collective (and “individual”) creativity while

misinterpreting cultural formations’ contextuality. To suggest that cultural formations are often

best understood in relation to the specific historical contexts in which they emerged, and to

which their constitutive sensibilities initially responded, does not mean that its protagonists are

necessarily at their most “vital” or “innovative” in that historical moment. For instance, former

Coil members Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower (as Cyclobe), Tim Lewis (as

Thighpaulsandra), and Drew McDowall all, in one way or another, remain invested in the

esoteric-experimental sensibility of the industrial formation that first emerged in the mid-to-late

33

1970s; but they have all released highly unique recordings over the course of the last decade, at

times clearly continuing the lineage of their earlier peers, at times re-articulating the industrial

formation’s sensibility to other, more recent formations that themselves have re-articulated

elements of the industrial formation’s sensibility into their own practice.

Two (sets of) concepts are particularly useful for how this dissertation approaches the

problem of change and dismisses prefabricated models of “subcultural” life and/or artistic career

arcs. The first of these is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari,

1980/1987; Grossberg, 2014). Lines of flight are forces that transform any specific assemblage,

either through partial reconnection to the virtual (relative deterritorialization) or through an

unobstructed flight into the virtual (absolute deterritorialization). Cultural formations may be

understood as a) themselves lines of flight or b) generative of lines of flight. Regarding the

former possibility, these cultural formations themselves—as formations centered on collective

experimentation—can abduct sets of musical and social practices, specific structures of feeling,

specific genres, and other elements, (re-)opening them to the realm of potential, leading to their

re-articulation in new and previously unknown or even unknowable ways. Regarding the latter

possibility, practices and forces specific to the experimentalist formation in question may serve

to deterritorialize parts of the formation or its sensibility, drawing them away from prior

practices or attitudes; new practices and orientations may be articulated that still carry key

elements of the formation’s sensibility. Of course, it is at least as possible that other parts of a

formation ossify, blocking certain lines of flight, thereby disallowing some modes of

transformation and ultimately even changing the formation’s character by jettisoning the

experimental. No lines of flight, and no blockages, are guaranteed in advance; they are

historically contingent. That said, perhaps these formations’ experimental sensibilities prime

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them for the prolific affirmation of new lines of flight—for an affinity with transformation

towards new modes of experimentation, new modes of connecting to the unknown or

unknowable.

The second concept, or more accurately a conceptualized set of terms, that helps

conceptualize change in cultural formations is Raymond Williams’s (1977) distinction between

emergent, dominant, and residual forces—though these terms, too, need to be handled with care.

Emergent forces are aligned with the new, bringing (potential) change; dominant forces are, in

one way or another and to different degrees of stability, established and particularly determinant

in their specific context; and residual forces stay present within and/or as remnants of older

formations, nonetheless remaining effective or re-articulable. The main danger related to the use

of this trio of terms in a Cultural Studies context is that of re-inscribing them into linear or

straightforwardly cyclical narratives. The emergent then appears as the vital, exciting, and new

that is stabilized in the form of the dominant and finally loses its vitality, excitement, or capacity

for resistance and change as it becomes the residual. Alternatively, the emergent’s newness is

essentialized, perhaps in the form of the “future,” which follows the dominant forces of the

“present,” which themselves supersede the now-residual “past.” Such a use robs Williams’s

terms of their potency. As Stuart Hall (1981) writes:

The important thing is to look at [Williams’s schema] dynamically: as an historical process. Emergent forces reappear in ancient historical disguise; emergent forces, pointing to the future, lose their anticipatory power, and become merely backward looking; today’s cultural breaks can be recuperated as a support to tomorrow’s dominant system of values and meanings. (p. 236)

Residual elements may be “rediscovered,” re-articulated to and into the apparently new, the

emergent, even the pre-emergent. Depending on one’s (an individual, a collectivity, a formation,

a study’s) situatedness, that which appears new in one moment may belatedly reveal itself as the

barely transformed residual. The “dominant,” meanwhile, is merely one modality of the

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“present”; different contextual layers may reveal different modes of dominance, and that which

is dominant does not necessarily slide into the supposed obscurity of the residual. Dominant

forces may sustain themselves through the recuperation of the emergent, through the reinvention

of the residual, through sleights-of-hand that make the dominant appear differently. Pasts are

rewritten not just by dominant forces but also by emergent ones that re-articulate certain

residuals, and so on.

For instance, due to some of its practitioners’ stylistic connection to the 1960s

counterculture, the emergent free folk formation was easily pigeonholed as a residual, nostalgic

phenomenon, even as it articulated psychedelic rock and free jazz elements to contemporary

electronics in an innovative manner. Meanwhile, the industrial formation, though generally eager

to distance itself from dominant ideologies and to disturb and deconstruct received wisdoms in

the spirit of many avant-garde movements, also at times reproduced a dominant “paranoid”

structure of feeling of the 1970s and 1980s and spawned several “neofolk” groups whose

eagerness to go beyond the contemporary given led them to a reaffirmation of stale, rigid, and

even racist romanticisms. Several decades later, consider the ease with which protagonists of the

apparently residual industrial formation, such as former Coil member Drew McDowall and Coil

and Current 93 collaborator Little Annie Anxiety, have collaborated with musicians of the

emergent epistemic formation such as Hiro Kone (Nicky Mao)—that is, the ease with which

these artists from an older generation have articulated their own work to that of their younger

peer. Mao’s collaborations with both of these musicians illustrate the use of pragmatically

selected (rather than generalized) terms taken from different intellectual traditions mentioned

above: In the context of a specific local scene (the New York noise/experimental/electronic

music realm), certain elements of the industrial formation—the darkness, the portent, the vision

36

often conjured by its esoteric-experimental sensibility—are articulated to, perhaps (in ANT

terms) translated into, the more recent epistemic formation’s reflexive-experimental sensibility.

After all, the epistemic formation’s investment in knowledge-as-political is sometimes expressed

in similarly portentous, dramatic sonic interventions into a world always experienced in terms of

ubiquitous, dangerous, but also mutable power relations.

This study also equates neither formations invested in experimentation nor emergent

formations in general with the “avant-garde,” or even a default claim to vanguardism. Although

this conflation is historically common and powerful, its affirmation risks simplifying the

cartographies of cultural formations by always assigning them to, or locating them in desired

proximity to, the “cutting” or “leading edge.” Only some parts of some cultural formations in

this case study consider themselves “avant-garde”; only some of them draw a connection to the

historical avant-gardes that is strong enough (as in the case of many early industrial musicians)

to justify a focus on their vanguardist connections. Consequently, Williams’s concepts allow this

dissertation to avoid the fetishization of vanguardism without denying the historical importance

of vanguardist discourses.

In light of the fluidity of cultural forces, Williams’s terms must be taken in all their

complexity, which is further augmented and exemplified by Williams’s formulation of the “pre-

emergent” as that which is yet to be fully articulated:

There are cases where the structure of feeling which is tangible in a particular set of works is undoubtedly an articulation of an area of experience which lies beyond them. This is especially evident at those specific and historically definable moments when very new work produces a sudden shock of recognition. What must be happening on these occasions is that an experience which is really very wide suddenly finds a semantic figure which articulates it. (Williams, 1979/2015, p. 164)6

6 Though Williams writes of “a particular set of works,” this dissertation does not focus only on what might traditionally be understood as “works” (e.g., specific albums or songs) but also analyzes other elements, including

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By aligning the very concept of the structure of feeling with the “pre-emergent,” Williams

foregrounds potentiality and (contingent) transformation—the consistent generation and

regeneration of reality, the complex effects of different forces and their intermingling. To study

music’s opening to the pre-emergent is not necessarily the same as to affirm Jacques Attali’s

claims to the prophetic power of music. Attali (1977/1985) assigns music a privileged role in the

expression of imminent changes in the mode of production, a suggestion that appears to

acontextually fetishize sound’s considerable power (Grossberg, 1997b; Rojek, 2011). This

dissertation is more humble in its understanding of music. Music is not necessarily more

prophetic than other modes of expression. If music is assigned any privilege, it is to be found in

the (contextually specific) role of post-World War II popular music as a realm of people’s

affective investment (Grossberg, 1992).

The dissertation, then, is invested in the contingent ways in which music has provided a

space for a collective-experimental access to realms of potential—to the pre-emergent, to

opportunities for transformation. It tries not to take music’s powers for granted, or even to

glorify the contextually specific openings that music helps articulate; but it takes seriously the

messy joy of aesthetic and social experimentation that arises around music. Beyond these

formations’ own transformations, the dissertation is interested in the transformational potentials

of the formations’ practices—and what to make of them in their respective contexts. Thereby, the

project does not just seek to contribute to the contemporary study of and investment in

experimentation but also to draw its “case studies,” the three formations, closer to these

debates—to (hopefully) learn from them and thus set the scene for new careful but courageous

openings to a sustainable, just, critical, and creative more-than.

musicians’ self-representation in interviews—in awareness that these operate in different registers and are relevant at different levels of abstraction.

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Three formations: a brief preview

The American free folk formation coalesced in the 1990s and the first few years of the

21st century. It consists of a wide range of projects, a diverse set of social mediations (Born,

2017): from sprawling improvising collectives (Jackie-O Motherfucker, No-Neck Blues Band,

Sunburned Hand of the Man) to “solo” acts that present an aesthetics of collectivity through the

looping and altering of a multiplicity of voices (Fursaxa, Grouper, Inca Ore, The Skaters). This

formation is characterized by a collective-experimental sensibility. It privileges an embrace of

the unknown that is best-actualized in an emphatically collective manner—an affective

investment in collectivity and community that stands in tension with free folk musicians’

ideological investment in an expressive individualism. In addition to countering a residual

suburban boredom that already shaped the initial decades of rock music, free folk responds to

crises of (affective) investment of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Grossberg, 2010), in

which the world appears flat, by reinvesting in the unknown, in immersion and transformation.

In its improvising collectives and its poly-vocal aesthetics of multiplicity, free folk articulates the

social to the sensorial, drawing especially on free jazz (Moten, 2003). In the face of a structure of

feeling of temporal alienation (Grossberg, 2018b) that appears to disarticulate past, present, and

future, and contrary to efficiently structured, homogeneous temporalities of work and leisure,

free folk articulates several “cosmic” temporalities. The sustained tones of drone acts such as

Double Leopards and Pelt open to an unstratified time of becoming; the free improvisation of so

many free folk acts re-articulates past, present, and future through a “being in the moment” that

privileges aesthetic-social complexity (Braidotti, 2011b; Gilbert, 2004). This complexity is

articulated across a genuine enunciative multiplicity—a hybrid assemblage that decenters

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representation, privileges transformation, and attempts to shield free folk from the imposition of

aesthetic conventions associated with dominant forces of the cultural industries.

The British industrial music formation initially emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s. This

aesthetically heterogeneous assemblage encompasses improvised, abrasive electronics, unsettling

guitar-based folk, surrealist tape-loop collages, psychedelic pop, aggressive dance beats, and

performance art across various interrelated projects, many of which emerged from influential

group Throbbing Gristle. The formation is governed by an esoteric-experimental sensibility that

privileges and invests in the hidden and the secret. It both challenges and often reproduces two

interrelated structures of feeling that constitute a lived sense of “crisis” in the United Kingdom of

the 1970s and early 1980s: generalized paranoia and a sense of decay (Hall et al., 1978;

Hebdige, 1979). In this damaged world of lurking danger, industrial engages with three key

modes of the hidden or secret. It seeks to expose the insidious machinations of power, usually

formulated as “control”; it explores and attempts to fulfill the hidden, repressed potentials of

body, mind, and self; and it immerses itself in the study of “secret,” esoteric-occult knowledge.

An analysis of industrial’s enunciative assemblages suggests that industrial articulates the hidden

and the secret through two heterogeneous orientations to aesthetic and social experimentation.

One is a paranoid orientation that attempts to uncover lurking powers through the deconstruction

of sound and language while fortifying itself through cult-like, hermetic living and technological

experimentation. The other is a visionary orientation that emphatically embraces realms

beyond—spiritual, magickal, aesthetic—which may lead both to a cosmic sense of wonder or to

the reactionary search for idealized European “roots” in neofolk groups such as Death in June.

Industrial’s fetishization of individual artists as paranoid interpreters and/or as visionaries masks

and limits the constitutive collectivity of its experiments. In some of its most potent moments,

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industrial combines the paranoid and the visionary into complex expressions of simultaneous

portent and wonder (as in much of the music of Coil, Cyclobe, and The Legendary Pink Dots).

The third case study analyzes the recently emergent epistemic formation, a particularly

heterogeneous, transnational set of (often, but not exclusively, electronic) experimental musics

invested in cultural theory and political activism. The formation’s most visible artists include

Holly Herndon, whose exploration of human-technology relations draws on Donna Haraway’s

cyborg feminism, the NON Worldwide collective’s explorations of identity and resistance across

the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy, 1993), the many endeavors of Afrofuturist poet Moor Mother, and

Elysia Crampton Chuquimia’s articulation of a unique collaborative-decolonial practice that

draws on her Aymara heritage. The epistemic formation is characterized by a reflexive-

experimental sensibility that privileges experimentation with, through, and on various sets and

modalities of knowledge while assigning a heightened political charge to imagination. It

responds to several conjunctural tendencies (Grossberg, 2010, 2018a): The formation engages

with crises of knowledge by investing in postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial cultural theory;

it counters enclosures of popular imagination (the limiting of imagination’s range and the

dispersal of its potency) by foregrounding the experimental search for the new and unknown; and

it responds to oscillations of the political—the vagueness and multiplicity of definitions of the

political and the perceived ubiquity of power relations—through the re-articulation of the

political to knowledge, negotiated through musical and other artistic experimentation. The

epistemic formation works across four interrelated areas of knowledge and investment. It

reflexively thematizes and enacts collectivity while expressing it in semiotics of collectivity and

heterogeneity. It detects power everywhere but also highlights its contingency and resulting

openness to transformation through artistic and social experimentation. The formation explores

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identity through engagement with heritage, systems of oppression, and more broadly being-in-

the-world. It also complicates and diversifies time, notably in its critical-reflexive re-articulation

of historical horrors and potentials through Afrofuturist and related techniques. The epistemic

formation articulates a rhizomatic assemblage—sprawling, heterogeneous, a genuine multiplicity

of aesthetic expressions—and a radicular assemblage—cut and cutting, shattered, emphasizing

fragmentation—to each other, resulting in considerable enunciative heterogeneity; these

assemblages relate in complex and contradictory ways to representation, as encountered in

musicians’ interview statements, press releases, and song titles.

A concluding section focuses on the contextually specific limitations and potentials of

these three articulations of experimentation and collectivity. It highlights free folk’s “ethics of

relaxation” (Diederichsen, 2005b, p. 37), industrial’s embrace of radically multi-dimensional

experimentation, and the epistemic formation’s centering of the affective charge of intellectual

engagement—alongside all three formations’ difficulties in constructing sustainable alliances. It

closes with a renewed call for the careful, rigorous, and collaborative search for the virtual in the

actual.

7 Translations of this and other German-language texts are mine.

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CHAPTER 1: FREE FOLK—A COLLECTIVE-EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY

In the late 1990s and the first few years of the 21st century, a distinct cultural formation

emerged in the United States that centered on the performance of a range of psychedelic,

experimental, often improvised musics. This formation is characterized by manifold

collaborations across generic borders and different group formats. David Keenan’s (2003) cover

story for experimental music magazine The Wire on Sunburned Hand of the Man (Sunburned)

and the “New Weird America” remains the central journalistic text on the highly diverse musical

practices analyzed in this chapter. Keenan reports from 2003’s Brattleboro Free Folk Festival in

Vermont, a gathering organized by Matt “MV” Valentine and Ron Schneiderman. The

sprawling, improvising collective Sunburned, of which Schneiderman is a member, and

Valentine’s own projects—the psychedelic folk of MV & EE with partner Erika Elder and

guests, and the more collectively oriented, partially improvising group Tower Recordings—were

joined at this festival by other key exponents of the formation. These included the free jazz duo

of Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty in collaboration with Scorces, the intimate psychedelic drone

project of Christina Carter and Heather Leigh, both of whom also performed as part of

Charalambides with Tom Carter. Boston hardcore singer turned psychedelic folk explorer Dredd

Foole and folk musician Joshua Burkett, joined by Sunburned members, also performed, among

others.

This list of bands already conveys some of the diversity of musics in this cultural

formation. Keenan (2003) himself writes that “much of the music draws inspiration from

American folk and roots …. But improvisation and the application of the drone open up these

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new folk musicians to the roar of the cosmos.” Keenan’s description of Sunburned’s set may

well stand in for the entirety of the festival: The group’s improvisations “dra[w] from mountain

music, Country blues, HipHop, militant funk and psychedelia as much as free jazz” (p. 34).

Referencing various American folk musics, experimental rock from New Zealand, and Japanese

electro-acoustic improvisation among others, Brent S. Sirota (2021b) calls the formation’s

articulation of heterogeneous influences “a veritable head music awakening. Loft jazz and

European free improv, Xpressway and Takoma, Jandek and Elizabeth Cotton [sic], the Taj

Mahal Travelers and the Grateful goddamn Dead” (para. 1). The formation’s experimental-

musical practices are characterized not just by stylistic diversity but also by multiple group

membership (the term “side project” does not apply here), manifold collaborations, and prolific

recorded output on a variety of formats. The musical projects of this formation vary considerably

in composition. They include various types of solo projects (from acoustic instrumentalists to

one-person “bands” employing loop and delay pedals), shifting and sometimes one-off duo and

trio collaborations, more conventional rock band formats, and sprawling improvising collectives

(see Spiegel, 2012, 2013, 2019a). Despite the fact that the formation was at its most visible

during the years immediately following Keenan’s article, many of its key participants continue

their experimental-musical practice to this day.

In this chapter, I will first present an overview of free folk’s heterogeneous musical and

social dimensions. As free folk’s experimental practices are the most affirmatively collective of

any of the three case studies, this chapter pays particular attention to the formation’s social

dimension. I will then analyze free folk’s specific articulation of music to the social in order to

understand the formation’s articulation of modes of experimentation and collectivity. This will

allow me to work towards the dissertation’s first example of a sensibility at an appropriately

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slow pace, whereas later chapters will more eagerly lay out the components of sensibilities from

the very beginning. Free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility privileges an immersion in the

richness of the social and the musical. In response to a world that appears flat and a present that

feels strange, it reinvests in community, multiplicity, and transformation, and it experiences

creative and supportive collectivity as the key to an actualization of the world’s potentials. The

chapter’s later sections will specify the sensibility’s affective dimension and constitutive

enunciative assemblages.

Free folk and its musics

The phrase “free folk” was introduced by Matt Valentine himself, denoting “free thinking

folk” (Keenan, 2003, p. 34) or “liberated people” (Keenan, 2007, 03:44) instead of a clear-cut

musical genre. This aligns with the stylistic diversity of the cultural formation, as well as its

constitutive openness (or sense of openness): Folk is articulated to the social and not necessarily

to a fixed aesthetic. Social freedom is aligned with, implies, or engenders aesthetic freedom.

However, much musical discourse employs “folk” as a signifier of a particular musical genre

characterized by singer-songwritership or balladeer practice, acoustic guitars (or related, usually

unamplified, instruments), as well as “traditional” musical elements derived from or mediated by

Appalachian music, bluegrass, blues, country, and so on. The constitutive aesthetic multiplicity

of free folk is only inadequately reduced to “folk music.”

Nevertheless, different conceptualizations of free folk’s relationship to folk vary

considerably in terms of their adequacy to the formation’s actual composition. Phil McMullen

(as cited in Spiegel, 2013) is the former editor of British music magazine The Ptolemaic

Terrascope and organizer of the Terrastock festivals, both of which have played important roles

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in the formation’s articulation. He is not particularly invested in the term “free folk” but defines

it as follows:

I think my interpretation of “free folk” is that folk music has its traditions, English folk, and the various different American folk, Appalachian folk and folk blues and all the various other things, there are traditions and there’s certain things you don’t do outside of those constraints the tradition dictates you mustn’t do, free folk gives you the freedom to go apeshit on electric guitar and some tambour stuff partway through it, … you play your folk music and then go mad... and maybe bring a bit of jazz in or whatever, and that, that’s the freedom that it allows you. (p. 63)

McMullen’s understanding of free folk matches the musics of, for instance, Irish group United

Bible Studies (McMullen’s own example), as well as much of Matt Valentine and Erika Elder’s

work. “Free folk” is thus reduced to an aesthetic descriptor largely devoid of Valentine’s social

articulation, but McMullen is also not interested in reducing the formation’s music at large to

“free folk.” “Free folk” is simply not a particularly important term to McMullen. In a related

register, Jeanette Leech’s Terrascope-aligned Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and

Psychedelic Folk (2010) places certain free folk acts—including MV & EE, Dredd Foole, and

Black Forest/Black Sea—in its titular lineage. These artists are thus integrated into a thoroughly

researched chronicle told according to stylistic constants,8 although one constant, in addition to

acoustic instrumentation and certain traditional elements, is a certain “more-than” (Manning,

2016) of, or excess beyond, “folk.”9 Leech thereby traces certain stylistic lineages that are key to

specific practices and bodies of recorded work in the free folk formation, but steers clear of

investigating the formation in its totality. Instead, selected free folk musicians become part of

8 This is what Joseph (2008) calls a “major history,” as opposed to a “minor history” that affirms heterogeneity and continuous variation. 9 Seasons They Change gets closest to a basic definition of “folk music” when Leech (2010) writes that Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s 1964 album Folk Roots, New Routes “was a folk album, since an album largely comprised of traditional material performed acoustically could not reasonably be called by any other name, but it was also something else” (p. 23).

46

one particular moment in Leech’s cyclical history, helping to make psychedelic folk audible and

visible again in the 1990s and early 2000s after the apparent dearth of the 1980s.

Simon Reynolds (2010), too, emphasizes folk lineages but arrives at a more problematic

conceptualization of “the American free-folk movement (sometimes known as freak folk or wyrd

folk)” in his widely circulated Retromania:

These young minstrels – performers like Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, MV & EE, Wooden Wand, Espers – venerate the same late-sixties and early-seventies heyday of British folk during which Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson made their name, but they fixate on the more kooky figures from that time such as The Incredible String Band and Comus, or obscure artists like Vashti Bunyan. The free-folk outfits fetishise the acoustic and the analogue: they take great pains to get a vintage sound and use the right period instrumentation. … Where Eliza Carthy wants to update folk music and make it appeal to contemporary audiences, the freak-folk outfits want to bring the past into the present, like time travel. … They have zero interest in contemporary practitioners like Carthy or even in the current activities of veterans of the original late-sixties/early-seventies Britfolk era like Richard Thompson. (pp. xxxiii–xxxiv)

Reynolds writes more accurately about free folk in one of Retromania’s later chapters. Here, free

folk musicians draw on “Folkways-style field recordings of traditional music, outsider minstrels

and maverick composers like Robbie Basho and Angus Maclise [sic], obscure acid rock and

esoteric improvisation and drone groups” (p. 344). However, he does not explicitly contradict the

earlier section’s reduction of free folk to generic markers of “folk music.” Reynolds’s reductive

move fails to acknowledge the constitutive role of free folk’s experimental sensibility (which

explains free folk musicians’ interest in specific folk musicians who were active in or aligned

with experimentalist formations of the 1960s and 1970s) as well as the “pan-generic” (Coley

2005, p. 23) character of free folk musics (expressed not least in free folk musicians’ interest in a

variety of experimenters unrelated to “folk music”). Reynolds also ignores that his free folk

examples, MV & EE and Wooden Wand, tend to align more with experimental rock, free jazz,

and noise acts such as Magik Markers, Corsano and Flaherty, and Double Leopards than with his

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other examples, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, whose work is more easily discussed as

acoustic, song-based folk than the music of these other peers.10

But the task of disarticulating the free folk formation from the “folk” signifier’s

discursive dominance is made even more difficult by the proliferation of sub-generic

designations. As Amanda Petrusich (2008) writes:

Following Keenan’s article, most of the artists and albums included in his piece were tucked under the umbrella of “New Weird America,” which flowed into the slightly more descriptive “free-folk,” which became “freak-folk,” and subsequently devolved, as more and more diverse artists were swept up in the wave, into the catchall “indie-folk”—even though the differences between psych-infused free-folk like MV & EE and acoustic indie-folk like Iron and Wine generally seem profound enough to warrant at least two distinct, hyphenated prefixes. (p. 239)

Similarly, John Encarnacao (2016) adds:

“Avant-folk”, “freak folk”, “psychedelic folk”, “neu-volk”, “free folk”, “progressive folk”, the “New Weird America”: this is a brief selection of categories created by the music industry (both music press and record labels) since the late 1990s to describe independent artists who utilise acoustic instrumentation and/or elements of “folk” material or techniques. (p. 10)

Various signifiers and subgenres of “folk music” proliferate and align practices and protagonists

of the free folk formation with other fields, often in ways that are inconducive to a robust

understanding of the formation. One important task in an analysis of the formation’s conditions,

potentials, and effectivities is thus the specification of the place of folk-musical elements in the

strange assemblage of free folk.

In Punk Aesthetics and New Folk, Encarnacao (2016) understands free folk as a genre, a

set of commonalities across individual styles. This genre feeds into a larger “new folk” milieu,

constituted by wide-ranging “meaningful connections” (p. 25) between like-minded

practitioners. Encarnacao “use[s] the term ‘folk’ to denote acoustic tendencies and the use of

10 Reynolds’s fifth example, Philadelphia-based group Espers, is a liminal case easily assigned to either set of examples.

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traditional, pre-Tin Pan Alley song forms and techniques in rock practice” (p. 8), thereby

supplying a helpful definition of “folk” as understood in much rock-musical discourse. He

subjects several of this milieu’s key recordings to a broad musicological analysis and identifies a

“punk aesthetics” at play in various key recordings from the different subgenres constituting

“new folk”:

Punk aesthetics is active in practices that place a premium on independence, domestic activity, rawness and spontaneity, and participation and inclusion. These attributes are often related to displays of amateurism and a disregard for the dimensions and polish of commercial product. (pp. 8–9)

Encarnacao acknowledges that these attributes are far from exclusive to punk, but justifies his

focus through reference to punk’s role in “assembling, codifying, and amplifying them,” as well

as to many new folk artists’ “history of involvement with, or interest in, punk and hardcore

scenes” (p. 9). While such connections exist in the free folk formation as I understand it, and

while Encarnacao is right to detect aesthetics and discourses of spontaneity, inclusion, and more

in free folk, his outsized attention to punk does not quite do justice to the strange quilt of

influences informing free folk.

Nonetheless, Encarnacao’s work is highly useful in its analysis of free folk recordings

according to three parameters: sound, timbre, and fidelity; voice; and structure. For Encarnacao,

free folk is particularly conducive to a musicological analysis that does not rely on conventional

analytical frames privileging predefined musical forms. He singles out three acts:

Charalambides, the duo of Christina and Tom Carter (a trio with Heather Leigh on one of

Encarnacao’s examples, the 2004 album Joy Shapes); Six Organs of Admittance, the project of

vocalist and guitarist Ben Chasny (sometimes on his own, sometimes with other musicians); and

Animal Collective, a shifting group consisting of any combination of pseudonymous musicians

Avey Tare, Deakin, Geologist, and Panda Bear (and sometimes additional collaborators). The

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albums analyzed by Encarnacao all share a reliance on guitars and voices, as well as an absence

of actual drum kits (as opposed to other percussive instruments). This suggests a compromise on

Encarnacao’s part: Animal Collective and Six Organs of Admittance have released albums

featuring full drum kits; and Animal Collective in particular has11 foregrounded electronic

instrumentation on various albums across the group’s career. Encarnacao (2016) correctly points

out that

Animal Collective formed something of an experimental axis with the groups Gang Gang Dance and Black Dice in New York City in the early 2000s, all three groups known for their interest in improvisation and the combination of electronics and “real” instruments. (p. 218)

For the purposes of his study, however, he exclusively analyzes Campfire Songs (2003) and Sung

Tongs (2004), both of which rely on acoustic guitars in a manner that is more compatible with

generic notions of “folk music,” however unconventional the instruments’ employment may be.

Despite this reduction of free folk’s heterogeneity, many of Encarnacao’s insights apply to other

parts of the formation as well. For instance, he argues that this music “pursues experimentation

with timbre such that it often becomes more important to the articulation of structure than

rhythm or harmony” (p. 219)—indeed, “the artists discussed here explore sound itself with a

concentration often reserved for harmony, rhythm and permutations of song form” (p. 220).

Examples of this include some of the long-duration pieces of Charalambides and Six Organs of

Admittance, which focus on timbre and texture more than any discernible verse/chorus/bridge

structure or rhythm. Vocally, these artists often either obscure or exclude lyrical content. Animal

Collective’s layered vocals yet again center on timbre, with a “‘wild’ approach to vocal

articulation” involving “vocal elements that at times resemble flocks of birds or chattering

11 For the sake of consistency, I treat band names as singular unless they already are plural: Sunburned is, but Double Leopards are. This may appear to contradict my dissertation’s focus on and investment in collectivity, but also could be interpreted as highlighting the complex relationship between unity and difference.

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monkeys” (p. 222). Encarnacao understands the vocal-timbral experimentation of Animal

Collective and Christina Carter’s singing in Charalambides as absolving vocalization from

meaning-making, and as an invitation for listeners to reflect on their habitual mode of listening,

usually shaped by more representational approaches.

Often, these artists employ their voices as additional instruments, distinct from their

privileged role in much song-based music. In Animal Collective’s case, Encarnacao (2016)

understands this as part of an overall tendency to blur the distinctions between different

instrument groups. Going beyond Encarnacao’s study, similar things may be said about other

musics of the free folk formation—from the murky, electric, often imperceptibly vocal-based

drones of Double Leopards to some of Sunburned’s more frantic ensemble improvisations.

Additionally, the limitations of recording technologies are integrated as an important dimension

of the music, for instance in “the particular feeling of claustrophobia and airlessness” (p. 227)

engendered by the layering of sounds to the point of distortion on “Creation Aspect Earth

(Reprise)” (1999) by Six Organs of Admittance. Structurally, Encarnacao finds “immersive

forms,” with timbral and other aspects taking primacy over sectional distinctions in pieces of

music, and “montage forms,” with pieces of music made up of often highly disparate elements

and recordings, in the recordings of Animal Collective and Charalambides.12 Both of these forms

“are capable of invoking … the psychedelic experience, in that they offer a dislocation of our

experience of time” (p. 22) through absence, change, or diversity of pulse, and a lack of

distinction between, or overlap in, sections of a piece or album. I will return to the matter of time

when detailing free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility. For now, it is worth highlighting

12 Montage forms are more present in the early work of Charalambides, and immersive ones in the group’s later recordings.

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free folk’s psychedelic powers of “dislocation” as outlined by Encarnacao; they characterize free

folk’s investment in alternative experiences of time.

The constraints of conceptualizations of free folk that foreground “folk-musical” styles

are visible in both Encarnacao (2016) and Leech’s (2010) decisions to limit their respective

discussions to the two Animal Collective albums most reliant on acoustic guitars, Campfire

Songs (2003) and Sung Tongs (2004). Thereby, they exclude such largely electronic releases as

Ark (originally titled Here Comes the Indian,13 2003) and Strawberry Jam (2007). This is a valid

decision for Encarnacao’s book, which attempts to analyze a stylistic field; and it is a valid

decision for Leech’s book, which traces stylistic-generic elements—a lineage defined by its re-

articulation and expansion of Euro-American folk musics—across recent history. Such tracings14

nevertheless can only describe certain elements of the heterogeneity of free folk. Olaf Karnik

(2003) correctly points out:

One may employ analog and acoustic instruments, yet the so-called liberated music is nonetheless informed by the achievements of electronic sound production. For instance, the neglect of dramaturgy and structuring as well as the duration of many pieces are more reminiscent of recent years’ experimental electronics than of the most recent, dramaturgically conventional rock updates. (Wahnwitz und Gemeinschaft section, para. 3)

Karnik’s key example here is Animal Collective’s Ark/Here Comes the Indian (2003), which

“bundles permanent beginnings and ruptures, shamanist chants, moments of ‘silence’ (Cage) and

sublime noise, folklorist techno, electro-acoustics, and digital sound treatment in structured

chaos” (Wahnwitz und Gemeinschaft section, para. 4). Still, Karnik sees these musics as

avoiding an excessive aestheticization of the place of the electronic in contemporary life. As

13 In 2020, Animal Collective (2020) announced the retroactive change of the album’s title, acknowledging that “our record title sends the wrong message by objectifying the American Indian people which is not what we were intending with the music” (p. 2). 14 Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987; also see Grossberg, 2014) distinguish between dynamic maps that affirm heterogeneity and multiplicity and static tracings that rely on constants or reinscribe the pre-given.

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examples of this avoidance, Karnik mentions the artwork of Ark/Here Comes the Indian,

depicting the band in a forest, as well as a note from the sleeve of Sunburned’s The Trickle Down

Theory of Lord Knows What (2003): “Come on over sometime. We’re at 7 Sherman Street in

Charlestown, Massachusetts,” which foregrounds in-person sociality at the expense of digitally

mediated relationships. I will return to these social-aesthetic aspects of free folk later in this

chapter. For now, Karnik’s remarks support the argument that, while guitars are among the

formation’s most frequently employed and investigated instruments, and some practitioners

routinely draw on folk-musical elements, these latter elements are not central enough to justify a

reduction of free folk’s diversity to a generic lineage of folk music.

One easy starting point for the complication of an understanding of free folk’s aesthetics

might be the strong presence of field recordings in free folk, an interesting instance of free folk’s

reliance on diverse contemporary technologies. The integration or employment of field

recordings does not necessarily point away from notions of “folk music,” but hints at the

relevance of electronic devices. In the work of such artists as Jewelled Antler Collective member

Loren Chasse, field recordings even take on a central role. Encarnacao (2016) himself connects

free folk musicians’ use of field recordings, including of outdoor sounds, to a variety of

traditions: the field recordings of folk music by the likes of Alan Lomax, “the idea of

environmental music, be it Brian Eno’s ambient works or John Cage’s 4’33”” (p. 226), and the

“punk aesthetics” of rawness and imperfection that Encarnacao himself traces throughout his

book. The invocation of “nature” through field recordings can reinforce certain notions of

authenticity and perhaps of organic, traditional community associated with folk musics, but

points as well towards diverse lineages of experimental music, including “academic” ones, which

integrated or even centered on field recordings and “found sounds,” and which were at best

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tangentially related to notions of folk music. Consider, for instance, the Jewelled Antler

Collective’s Glenn Donaldson (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) and his peers, who asked:

What would Einstürzende Neubauten sound like in San Francisco, they would probably go out to the beach instead (MS laughs), it would be this very different thing, but we had this idea that it was like industrial music, but it’s like in the forest, so, it’s more gentle, open and spacious, and almost folky kind of music. (p. 139)

Einstürzende Neubauten, a German industrial music group, are known for experimental music

played on metal objects and other industrial debris (Hegarty, 2007; Reed, 2013). An “almost

folky kind of music” here is articulated to industrial-musical experimentation not merely through

a shared “punk aesthetics,” but through the active establishment of a connection between free

folk and the industrial lineage.

From here on, it is useful to outline some interrelated uptakes of contemporary

technologies and stylistic elements that do not merely embellish or alter supposedly guitar-based

music but instead are of central importance to artists’ sound worlds. Elsewhere (Spiegel, 2012,

2019), I have discussed the importance of loop and delay pedals to musicians of the free folk

formation in greater detail. As these devices have become increasingly accessible and affordable,

key free folk projects such as Double Leopards, Fursaxa, Grouper, Inca Ore, and The Skaters

have been recording particularly rich-sounding and enveloping musics based on the looping,

altering, and layering of sometimes quite simple vocal elements, building on a wide variety of

musics, from Hildegard of Bingen’s vocal compositions to the ritual music of early Velvet

Underground member and poet Angus MacLise. This often results in sonic assemblages quite

removed from any representational, conventionally gendered, or “human”-sounding vocalization.

Keenan (2007) likens the “vocal magic” of these “massed voices” to traditional Gaelic psalm

singing.

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Many of the free folk artists conjuring a “vocal magic” create drones—sustained tones

that may well be foregrounded (as in Double Leopards’ music) or may be one striking part of the

musical assemblage, as in some of Fursaxa’s songs. The latter at times call to mind the solo

albums of Velvet Underground affiliate Nico, on which Nico’s harmonium and John Cale’s viola

articulate drone elements of traditional musics to the drone-based minimalism of their own

experimentalist formation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The importance of such elements is

often overlooked by writing that emphasizes the folk-musical aspects of free folk. Encarnacao’s

(2016) writes: “Drone permeates much of the music of [Charalambides and Six Organs of

Admittance] and the fact that many of their tracks feature a drone on D is attributable to a range

of guitar practices common in folk and rock” (p. 220). But Encarnacao’s continued centering of

folk music does not quite give drones their due. When they are mentioned, drones either are

understood as a latent element of folk music or as an element that embellishes, is added to, folk

music. In this sense, drones are part of what makes free folk something more than, or in excess

of, folk music in writings such as Leech’s. But various groups of the free folk formation, such as

Double Leopards and Pelt, have focused on the drone to such a degree that any analysis of their

aesthetics must consider the lineage of drone-based minimalist music from the 1960s onwards to

arrive at a historically adequate understanding. Pelt is, in fact, a particularly instructive example

that connects to the music of early minimalists Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, and others.

While some of the group’s releases, and certainly the solo and other projects of some of its

members (Nathan Bowles, Jack Rose, The Black Twig Pickers, et al.), have very clearly and

emphatically connected to a variety of acoustic instrumentalist and bluegrass traditions, lengthy

pieces such as “Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky No. 2” (from 1999’s Empty Bell Ringing in the

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Sky) and “Ashes of a Photograph” (from 2012’s Effigy) are uncompromising in their drone-based

minimalism.

In light of Pelt’s articulation of traditional folk and bluegrass elements to radical drone,

some writers (e.g., Keenan, 2013; Neilson, 2015) have called the group the “hillbilly Theatre of

Eternal Music.” This refers to the influential New York-based Theatre of Eternal Music that, for

part of the 1960s, consisted of John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and

Marian Zazeela, and has become a crucial historical signifier of drone music. It is worth noting,

even if just anecdotally, that Pelt has performed with Conrad and has released an LP called A

Stone for Angus MacLise (2009). The articulation of drone to bluegrass has a predecessor in the

“avant-garde hillbilly and blues music” of Conrad’s associate Henry Flynt (2002). It is perhaps

particularly apt to cite prolific experimentalist Jim O’Rourke (as cited in Lowenthal, 2014), a

sometime member of Sonic Youth and collaborator with some free folk musicians, on his interest

in John Fahey, the “American Primitive” guitarist mentioned frequently as an influence on the

likes of Six Organs of Admittance and Pelt:

Fahey isn’t an Americana thing for me, although I understand that it’s really the roots of the music …. But it’s this other part, the minimalist aspect that he tapped into, that was really important to me. I don’t think he knew what the hell I was talking about, but he understood that I didn’t think of him in the context of [blues musician] Bukka White. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff, honestly. (p. 156)

O’Rourke is a key successor of the minimalist lineage of Young and Conrad, having collaborated

extensively with the latter. Even as some of O’Rourke’s recordings, such as the majority of Bad

Timing (1997), exist in the same realm as Fahey’s distinctive fingerpicking style, O’Rourke sees

Fahey more as an uncompromising and unique artist paralleling the radical minimalism of

Conrad. In this, O’Rourke strongly resembles many of his peers and contemporaries in the free

folk formation. They may well be more interested in Bukka White (and many other blues

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musicians) than O’Rourke is, but it is the transversal line they draw across seemingly disparate

formations that is of particular importance here.

Meanwhile, some of the artists engaging in Keenan’s “vocal magic” are particularly

interesting guides down certain other music-historical paths. Just as parts of the free folk

formation (e.g., Espers and Animal Collective’s acoustic guitar-based records) are relatively

easily aligned with the “freak folk” or “new folk” of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom,

other groups such as The Skaters, with their murky, immersive, and confusing assemblages of

layered and treated vocals, fit in quite well with the (primarily electronic) “noise” formation of

the United States and beyond that builds more clearly on the noise/power electronics legacy of

early industrial music. Notably, groups such as Wolf Eyes and Yellow Swans, while most often

categorized as “noise,” have a long history of collaboration and affiliation with the likes of

Charalambides, Grouper, Inca Ore, and others. If anything, the free folk and noise formations

flow quite organically into each other and are not always clearly distinct. Musicians of the free

folk formation may rarely engage in a sustained manner with the more extreme practices of

“harsh noise” with its purposefully impenetrable walls of feedback, and they are also not likely

to sustain the foregrounding of aggression and (social) transgression of many “power

electronics” acts. However, free folk and noise share parts of the histories of experimental and

“underground” music to which they connect (with the industrial formation as a shared

cornerstone), a tendency towards sensory overload or at least immersion, a timbral and

technological “rawness,” a disregard for conventional song form, as well as venues, a punk-

derived DIY ethos, and more.

Free folk is also often described as or equated to psychedelic music, and the label is often

applied to, and even self-applied by, acts within this formation. Discussing notions of

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psychedelia in awareness of the term’s polysemy, Eric Arn (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) speaks of

ideas

of a different state of mind, right, however it’s induced (laughs), and what the potential of it is, and … how that can improve a person’s life or outlook or, and through them, society in general or who knows what else (laughs). (p. 139)

Also consider, for instance, The Skaters’ Spencer Clark (as cited in Spiegel, 2013), who says that

fellow musicians

probably did drugs and listened to weird music and were like, “I wanna do that eventually”, and you’re reexperiencing taking drugs by doing music, or I don’t even know if people will do that, but I think that that’s a possibility, like it’s psychedelic music. (p. 134)

However, while Clark produces particularly idiosyncratic music divorced from conventions of

songcraft in folk and rock music, some artists, including Arn, more clearly connect to histories of

psychedelic folk and rock. Both Leech and Encarnacao attempt to situate the likes of Six Organs

of Admittance, Animal Collective, Black Forest/Black Sea, and Charalambides in relation to

psychedelic and acid folk lineages; but the taking-up—and taking-to-the-limit—of psychedelic

rock tropes in the work of groups as diverse as Bardo Pond, Comets on Fire (featuring Ben

Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance), Sunburned, and Arn’s own Primordial Undermind

demands some emphasis. Here, the guitar takes center-stage again; but while connections can be

made to earlier bands such as Pink Floyd, 13th Floor Elevators, Funkadelic, or even Black

Sabbath, these free folk groups often tend towards even greater extremes in song duration and/or

volume. Historically, they might be best compared to such krautrock bands of the 1960s and

1970s as Ash Ra Tempel and Can. Contemporaries such as New Zealand’s The Dead C as well

as Japanese bands Acid Mothers Temple, Fushitsusha, Ghost, and Suishou no Fune similarly dis-

and re-articulate, and sometimes take to the extreme, various traditions of (psychedelic) rock

music.

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Arguably the most problematic omission in many writings centered on free folk’s folk-

musical elements is that of free jazz, alongside other Black experimental musics. As George E.

Lewis (2008) points out, Black experimentalism has regularly been written out of histories of

experimental music. Free folk relates to Black experimentalism in strange ways: Its practitioners

are overwhelmingly white, yet they draw on work from the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Sonny and

Linda Sharrock, and Archie Shepp to the diverse performance practices of the Art Ensemble of

Chicago and Sun Ra. They also tend to acknowledge these influences very explicitly, sometimes

to the point of seeking out collaboration. For instance, prolific free folk drummer Chris Corsano

has collaborated with free jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, who has been active since the

1960s; Matt Valentine and Erika Elder curated concerts by McPhee’s contemporaries Charles

Gayle and Rashied Ali at Manhattan venue The Cooler (Spiegel, 2012); Daniel Carter guested on

Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice’s Gipsy Freedom (2006); and so on.

Much free folk shares with free jazz an emphasis on improvisation, but other experiments

with form and timbre also resemble or connect to experimental jazz (and related) musics of the

1960s and 1970s. The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra’s Arkestra are not exclusively

improvising ensembles but work with a variety of approaches to composition and improvisation,

at the same time undermining any dichotomy between the vernacular and the experimental

(Lewis, 2008; Moten, 2003) by articulating popular song and long-form improvisations. Other

elements of the Art Ensemble and Sun Ra’s work suggest a direct line of influence to the

richness and unpredictability of performances by the No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK) and

Sunburned. These elements include their employment of a diverse range of instruments, from

Sun Ra’s characteristic synthesizer to Roscoe Mitchell and other Art Ensemble members’ “‘little

instruments’ … including large arrays of harmonicas, tambourines, whistles, bells, homemade

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and found instruments, gongs, washboards, and other miscellaneous percussion” (Lewis, 2008, p.

142), and their respective engagement in elaborate, at times absurdist, on-stage performance and

costumes.

This drawing on experimental jazz relates to the primacy of improvisation in free folk as

stressed by Keenan (2003) and others. Eric Arn (as cited in Spiegel, 2013), while aware that

improvisation by itself is “not a magic ticket to anything,” comments on its importance to

notions of freedom in free folk:

Well, I think that’s directly tied to the idea of improvisation, which is very much tied to these ideas … when you’ve memorized something and repeated it so many times, it takes a different part of your mind to do it than if you’re in the moment and forced to pay close attention and create your response to what’s happening in that second as it happens. (p. 123)

Arn is an accomplished improviser as well as an experienced songwriter. His work as a solo

artist and with his band, Primordial Undermind, mixes modes of improvisation and composition.

Meanwhile, sizeable and stylistically heterogeneous groups such as Jackie-O Motherfucker

(JOMF), NNCK, and Sunburned particularly draw on the kinds of often egalitarian group

improvisation encountered in some free jazz. For instance, NNCK has been noted for “deal[ing]

almost solely in real-time collective improvisation” (Masters, 2009, p. 28), although recordings

such as Clomeim (2008) may involve some degree of editing.

The case of Sunburned can also be instructive here. The group is known as an

improvising collective, but what improvisation itself entails is regularly renegotiated. Even when

a concert does not involve already existing pieces of music (for instance, the title track of 2000’s

Jaybird reappeared on the band’s 2016 tour), there can be certain predeterminations of an

improvisation—though these may swiftly be jettisoned in the actual performance, as suggested

by John Moloney (as cited in kris, 2004):

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What we’ll say is, “Alright, you guys start our [sic] w/this [sic]—just shake it up a bit, then we’ll give it a little grunts-and-moans. And then Phil [Franklin], you play drums first and I’ll play drums second. Or I’ll play drums and then you come around. [Marc] Orleans, you just chill until you get the signal”—which is just words because there is no signal—it’s just the way to keep him under control, because he’s a fiend. And then “Cousin Rich, why don’t you go up there and start out w/a [sic] couple of chords.” That’s it. And then sometimes that doesn’t even happen. Most of the time we do try to… What will happen is I’ll set everything up on stage, plug everybody’s shit in, get everybody going. Most of the stuff, because most of the shows we’ve played, someone will forget a battery. Or Chad [Cooper] will be playing a certain setup at the house for five weeks and it’ll sound really good and we’ll have some really stellar shit going on. And then we hit the stage and we couldn’t find a couple cords. So it could be like, “What the fuck.” It wouldn’t be what we’ve been doing for a while. So we’ve really wrecked our heads going up on stage. (p. 34)

Moloney’s remarks illustrate Sunburned’s investment in improvisation and serve to highlight a

certain “wildness”—a rawness, a lack of polish, a tendency to overwhelm—also associated with

the group’s live performances. They also show that the specifics of the group’s improvised

practice are themselves open to renegotiation, chance, and accident. The group, in whichever

configuration it appears, does not improvise in a vacuum, free of constraints. It may even attempt

to set itself certain constraints. Most importantly though, Sunburned opens to a realm of potential

conditioned by diverse factors—aesthetic, technological, personal, and more. The group

embraces this opening and constitutes its practice around it.

In the end, sheer stylistic heterogeneity, even within the work of just one act, is a more

defining feature of the formation than adherence to one established genre. Consider Pouncey’s

(2002) description of JOMF’s music as

an intoxicating psychedelic brew distilled from rock, free jazz and roots music from the blues to itinerant folk. The sound elements they tap from existing sources through thriftshop turntables and crude sampling tools devised from obsolete eight-tracks, [sic] are the catalysts for the thrilling alchemical experiments Jackie-O have been pulling off live. (p. 27)

Even though folk music in the generic sense may be just one (certainly important) element of the

free folk formation’s musical practice, it is also worth noting that it would be naive to understand

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Valentine’s social articulation of “free folk” as devoid of any trace of such generic notions of

“folk music.” There is enough (acoustic, traditionally oriented) folk music in Valentine’s own

discography and performance history to allow for folk music to play a somewhat privileged role

in, or at least to persistently haunt, parts of the formation. If “free folk,” in Valentine’s definition

above, is about the social, this is a social imaginary that draws on and references a sociality

perceived as inherent to folk music as rock discourse understands it.

Free folk and the social

Georgina Born (2017) works towards a social aesthetics of music (specifically

improvised music) and criticizes tendencies to conflate different modes of sociality in music

research. She proposes four planes of music’s social mediation that ought to be analyzed in their

distinctiveness as well as their specific mutual articulation: 1. Music generates certain

microsocialities and embodies certain local social relations; 2. music calls forth and circulates in

particular imagined communities; 3. music refracts wider, contextually specific social relations;

and 4. music relates to institutional frameworks. These four planes are not to be understood as

homologous by default. Instead, they usually relate in more complex ways.

On Born’s first plane, musical practice generates various socialities “in the immediate

microsocialities of musical performance and practice and in the social relations embodied in

musical ensembles and associations” (p. 43). I will discuss this plane at particular length here, as

free folk’s sensibility strongly foregrounds it. As mentioned above, the free folk formation is

home to a wide variety of group structures. Musicians’ tendency to engage in multiple projects of

varying longevity, activity level, and stylistic focus means that even those playing in more

conventionally structured bands (featuring some combination of vocals, guitar(s), bass, and

drums) rarely limit their entire practice to such formats. Musicians’ investment in improvisation

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engenders one-off, or similarly rare performances by groups of two, three, four, or more

participants. Some develop into long-time partnerships. One of the most prominent of these is the

ongoing collaboration of saxophonist Paul Flaherty and percussionist Chris Corsano, which

builds on the precedent of various radical free jazz duos (e.g., Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe, Peter

Brötzmann and Han Bennink, Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell). Characteristically, the Flaherty-

Corsano Duo sometimes expands into slightly larger groups, be it by performing in trios with

such peers as C. Spencer Yeh, Wally Shoup, Thurston Moore, and Mette Rasmussen, or through

the two musicians’ integration into broader groups such as Dream/Aktion Unit (again with

Moore and others) or Sunburned.

Such flexible configurations emerge quite regularly in free folk. In the case of groups

such as Magik Markers, MV & EE, and Six Organs of Admittance, core soloists or core duos

sometimes involve other musicians in their live performances or on their recordings, be it to

improvise or to perform compositions, depending on the situation. The very presence of core

figures (often themselves songwriters) in these cases suggests that these groups are more likely

to be structured in a comparatively clear, hierarchical manner, although this type of “‘hired guns’

set-up” (Brown, 2013, p. 45) is very much about musicians supporting a friend’s, or two friends’,

“vision” (Samara Lubelski, as cited in Spiegel, 2019a, p. 203). Ben Chasny’s Six Organs of

Admittance project is a particularly useful example of free folk’s investment in different modes

of collectivity, even in apparent solo projects. While concerts or recordings by Six Organs of

Admittance will sometimes feature several musicians, the project nonetheless revolves around

and depends on Chasny himself. Keenan (2003) quotes Chasny:

I kept having problems with band members, and the autonomy of a solo unit was appealing, even though the social aspect of a collective was beautiful as well. That is why I have structured the Six Organs to be able to pick up people at any time to play music. Often we will only practise for a few minutes before a show. Sometimes there will be no

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practice at all, such as when I picked up Chris Corsano to play drums one night at the Sunburned loft. (p. 40)

Even as it is clear that Six Organs are, in one register, Chasny’s “solo unit” and always defined

by his own participation, Chasny highlights free folk’s investment in sociality, here articulated to

an unconventional, partially improvisational practice that values collective experimentation more

than a conventional rock-musical “tightness.”

Many of free folk’s most visible projects over the years have involved both fewer and

more people than most of the projects just described. I have written more extensively about solo

projects such as Fursaxa, Grouper, Inca Ore, and others elsewhere (2012, 2019) and have already

invoked their “vocal magic” earlier. It is worth revisiting Glenn Donaldson’s (as cited in Spiegel,

2019a) remarks on the role of loop and delay pedals:

The advent of the loop[/]delay pedal has enabled people … to make their own one [person] show, because you can, it’s very easy now, they built some great pedals that enabled you to loop effectively live, and layer sounds, so you have someone who’s singing or playing guitar or [an]other instrument and they create a whole sound world, without having a band … On those two pedals [Line 6 and Boss], you can really control the loops, so you can create live something that normally you had to do in the studio … And also it’s a way for people that frankly don’t have a lot of traditional musical skills to create a whole world of sound with loops … (p. 199)

As Donaldson points out, this also helps musicians avoid the pitfalls of bands’ internal politics. It

is thus not a surprise that free folk has spawned a vast number of one-person projects. Solo

projects generally have become the norm in much DIY music in recent years, not least because it

can be harder to get an entire group on the road in times of financial insecurity (Brown, 2013).

Perhaps predictably, the often-larger groups that I will discuss next all decreased in

visibility and activity level towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century, around the time

of the global financial crisis. Nonetheless, they remain central to an understanding of the

formation and its sensibility. Free folk’s (partially) improvising collectives such as JOMF,

NNCK, and Sunburned have received, or used to receive, considerable press coverage, at least in

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comparison to many of their peers. They share, among other similarities, a tendency to

incorporate a relatively large number of members, be it over time or on one stage. Still, if one

studies their specific organizations in detail, they can differ quite significantly. For instance, the

line-up of JOMF has been shifting consistently; nonetheless, Tom Greenwood remains the

group’s center and lone constant. Many key figures of the free folk formation have played in

JOMF over the years, including Jeffrey Alexander (Black Forest/Black Sea, The Iditarod, Secret

Eye Records), Samara Lubelski (Tower Recordings), Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood), and Eva

Saelens (Inca Ore). Greenwood (as cited in Pouncey, 2002) describes the flexibility of JOMF’s

membership, at least in the group’s early years: “If somebody doesn’t want to do it any more,

stop doing it. It has somehow held itself together with tacks and duct tape for eight years now.”

Additionally, he claims that “nobody’s the leader either …. You come in and nobody will tell

you what to do, but if it doesn’t work you’re probably not going to have much fun” (p. 28).

Byron Coley (2003), too, understands JOMF as not hierarchical and emphasizes the group’s

“horizontal action” (p. 92). One might best understand the group as horizontally organized in

performance, yet vertically organized in the continuity of its distinct project. “Horizontal action”

thus appears somewhat constrained and, in this case, dependent on vertically secured continuity.

NNCK had a rather stable line-up over the years, though one that is more expansive than

that of most conventional rock bands. Between the departure of John Fell Ryan (who went on to

found Excepter) in 1999 and what appears to be the unannounced ceasing of the group’s

activities at the start of the 2010s, NNCK consisted of seven musicians and required the presence

of all seven for a NNCK performance to go ahead (Masters, 2009). Notions of democracy or

horizontality are sometimes emphasized in writing on NNCK’s performances. Marc Masters

(2009) writes of “the peculiar magic of their improvised, leaderless music” (p. 28); Edwin

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Pouncey (2003), reviewing a NNCK performance, praises the group’s “instinctive internal

democracy …, with each player conscious of what the others were doing and responding

accordingly” (p. 89). NNCK’s members themselves, while rarely commenting in public, tend to

affirm such notions. Dave Nuss (as cited in Masters, 2009) claims that “no one has been able to

assert his or her control over things.” Describing the group’s members as “recalcitrant

motherfucker[s],” Nuss acknowledges that the group’s refusal to impose any one voice or vision

“can be really frustrating, because it can feel like it’s all out of control. On the other hand, that’s

what makes it magic, in a way. We’ve kept a certain fire through the tension of musical

democracy” (p. 28). Interestingly, while Diedrich Diederichsen (2004b) has claimed that the

group’s music “does not become expressive” (para. 6) at any point in the sense of being traceable

back to a specific subject, this does not necessarily match the group’s perception of its own

work. David Shuford (as cited in Masters, 2009) claims: “We may do one thing, but we’re very

individualistic within this one thing …. It’s not like a loss of identity. I think everyone is very

clearly expressing their identity at all times” (p. 28). Ideologically, many free folk musicians

voice an expressive individualism that stands in tension with (and at times directly contradicts)

the formation’s privileging of collectivity.

Additionally, NNCK’s members have been involved in countless, highly diverse solo and

group projects over time, such as Decimus, Enos Slaughter, Rhyton, and Sabbath Assembly.

NNCK’s Keith Connolly (as cited in Masters, 2009) understands these as “pressure release

valve[s] from NNCK” (p. 31), serving the expression of those ideas that cannot be sustained

within the group itself. But the “recalcitrant” expressivity of NNCK’s members also appears to

have played a role in the group’s ceasing of activities. Only three years after Connolly’s remark,

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Pat Murano (as cited in Spicer, 2012) at least seems to suggest as much when stating that “right

now we’re not really functioning. We’re like a family… there’s a lot of personalities” (p. 11).

NNCK has at times been described as Sunburned’s “sister group” (Keenan, 2003, p. 39),

and the two groups or some of their members have collaborated, notably on Live at Ken’s

Electric Lake (1998), credited (in characteristically obscure manner) to The No-Neck Blues

Band Meets the Clear People With Mystery Gypped. However, their group structures differ

markedly, as Sunburned has a far greater cast of sometimes one-off, sometimes regular members.

Based primarily in Massachusetts and Vermont, the group has been active since the late 1990s

and is notorious for its shifting line-up. Counting Sunburned’s members over the course of the

band’s existence, founding member John Moloney (as cited in Kitching, 2016) arrives at “56 or

58. We don’t recruit, people find us” (Many Hands Make Light Work section, para. 2).

Depending on circumstances, a Sunburned performance may involve as few as two and as many

as a dozen members, or more. Julian Cope (2002) writes that Sunburned “ain’t a band so much

as it’s a scene of people coming and going” (My Swampy Massachusetts Home section, para. 7).

While membership is in near-continuous flux, Moloney (also a collaborator with Thurston

Moore and others) has been a constant presence, and co-founder Rob Thomas is another key

member. Moloney’s percussion, Thomas’s bass, and their respective vocals and stage antics are

often singled out, although their relevance does not always equate to “leadership” in a group

whose work “might be a completely non-hierarchical, democratic affair” (Herrington, 2004, p.

50). The membership’s flexibility seems to have allowed Sunburned a greater longevity. Despite

periods of lesser activity,15 versions of Sunburned have consistently toured and released music

15 Rob Thomas (as cited in Kitching, 2016) quips that, when it comes to joint touring, he and John Moloney “took the Obama administration off. Now we’re getting antsy again with the thought of a Trump administration” (Sunburned Hand Rides Again section, para. 3). Still, versions of Sunburned, involving Moloney, were active during those years.

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for the last two decades. While Moloney’s role in Sunburned is not quite as central as that of

Tom Greenwood in JOMF (one could perhaps imagine a Sunburned concert without Moloney

but not a JOMF show without Greenwood), he has been a near-constant presence in the band and

has at times been its main mouthpiece. If Moloney does indeed “set everything up on stage, plug

everybody’s shit in, get everybody going,” this suggests a heightened level of involvement and

responsibility. It is therefore important to arrive at an understanding of the band’s composition

that reduces it neither to the horizontal nor to the vertical. Instead, the shifts in the band’s line-up

suggest different modes and degrees of mutuality, of hierarchy, and more. Sunburned involves

diverse negotiations, diverse shifting constellations, and thus fluctuations in what may otherwise

be perceived as the group’s “non-hierarchical, democratic” horizontality. Sunburned presents,

perhaps, one of free folk’s most complex and unique articulations of collectivity—not

necessarily a mode of collectivity that can by default serve as a “model” of democratic practice,

and certainly not one free of exclusions and devoid of hierarchy, but a set of genuine

experiments in collective practice that highlight the considerable joys of expressive collaboration

as well as its struggles.

Born’s first layer of music’s social mediation hosts not just the microsocialities of

musical performance, but also the communities, scenes, or other social-material relationships

generated by or in relation to music. Many of the specific relations I have described—groups’

shifting membership, the multiplicity of one-off or longer-running collaborations, the important

social roles played by certain key figures—suggest that, socially, much of the free folk formation

can be described as a network—at least on a level of abstraction that prioritizes free folk’s social

relations (Spiegel, 2012). In the simplest terms, a social network can be described as “a set of

socially relevant nodes connected by one or more relations” characterized by specific “pattern[s]

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of connections” (Marin & Wellman, 2011, p. 11). Here, nodes may be individuals, groups, or

institutions; the free folk formation involves a variety of shifting key nodes. Specific projects

may serve as nodes; specific musicians can themselves be particularly important nodes.

Consider, for instance, Tom Greenwood and John Moloney’s respective roles in JOMF and

Sunburned: Different though they are, they play key parts in assembling and reassembling these

projects every few months or years, drawing from scenes local and far. But these projects

themselves move across a richly populated landscape containing other nodes, often of a different

order. One might consider certain festivals as nodes (Spiegel, 2012): the aforementioned

Brattleboro Free Folk Festival as well as the Stone For festivals and similar events in Western

Massachusetts that preceded the Free Folk Festival; crucially, the Terrastock festivals in both the

United States and the United Kingdom; the Pasture Festival in Wisconsin; the DeStijl and

Freedom From Festivals in Minnesota; and more. These serve to bring musicians together in

space, to strengthen existing connections, to articulate and strengthen “affective alliances”

(Grossberg, 1992) characterized by a passion for collective experimentation, for the

heterogeneity and multiplicity of sound and the social. David Keenan’s (2003) feature on the

Free Folk Festival highlights the aesthetic and social importance of such meetings:

This culture has sprung up around live music, with the various recordings coming out of it serving more as rough-ass archival snapshots or documents of work in progress than “finished” commercial product. Indeed, events like the Free Folk Fest feel more like social get-togethers than festivals. Everyone seems to know each other, and most of the musicians have played together before. Over two days, members are shed and traded, line-ups bolstered and diminished. (p. 34)

Festivals thus provide opportunities for the expression of what Encarnacao (2016) would call

free folk’s “punk aesthetics”—materialized in Keenan’s “rough-ass archival snapshots or

documents of work in progress”—and for the articulation and re-articulation of free folk’s

investment in sociality. Beyond the mere fact of musicians’ shared festival experience, the

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mutual augmentation of group line-ups shows this cultural formation’s heightened investment in

collective creativity, in the joy of collaboration.

Magazines such as The Ptolemaic Terrascope and Forced Exposure, too, have served a

rallying or connecting function—to the point where the Terrascope and its associated series of

festivals gave rise to a loose network of affinity self-described as the “Terrastock Nation”

(Leech, 2010; Spiegel, 2012, 2013). Perhaps most visibly, record labels, including Eclipse,

Ecstatic Peace!, Jewelled Antler, Not Not Fun, Secret Eye, Siltbreeze, Three-Lobed, and Time-

Lag, have brought together a large number of projects both stable and temporary. With these

labels, usually run by friends of musicians or even musicians themselves, as well as even smaller

micro-labels that focus on home-burned CD-Rs and cassette tapes instead of industrially

manufactured CDs or vinyl LPs, the production and distribution of releases is part of a larger

web of sociality. Bruce Russell (2009), a member of the highly influential New Zealand band

The Dead C and theorist of improvised music, understands this circulation in situationist terms as

a fertile mode of gift-giving: “The gift occurs most characteristically in the realm of

collaboration in artistic creation. Usually gifts of recordings are given to initiate collaborative

work. More important is the subsequent aesthetic exchange of the act of creation” (p. 15). A

hands-on exchange of cultural artifacts plays into the establishment and maintenance of

friendships and other affiliations.

Living spaces have played a particularly important role in the free folk formation

(Spiegel, 2012). Musicians’ own apartments or houses not only serve as spaces for rehearsals or,

simply, music-making (with the “bedroom” an emergent key space, facilitated by devices from

the aforementioned pedals to laptops); they are also preferred concert venues for ubiquitous

house shows, and thus potentially strong nodes. These fairly obviously signify free folk’s sense

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of friendship and camaraderie—and the very sensibility defining the formation, with musical

experimentation taking place in an uninstitutionalized, “everyday” manner. This is, yet again,

emphasized by Russell (2009), who optimistically understands such spaces in situationist terms

as temporary, prefigurative, “unitary ambiences” (p. 13). All this is heightened in situations that

involve several musicians living together in an apartment, house, or housing complex. The free

folk formation is not quite as well-known for strongly conceptualized or widely publicized

experiments in communal living as countercultural predecessors such as, e.g., actionist Otto

Muehl’s Friedrichshof commune, the infamous spaces inhabited by Throbbing Gristle and

related industrial music projects, or the Munich commune that spawned the krautrock groups

Amon Düül and Amon Düül II so beloved by free folk musicians. Still, there are certain

communal living situations that have played a notable role and even received a certain reputation

as interesting and fertile places for free folk (Spiegel, 2012, 2013). At one point, members of

Skygreen Leopards, The Skaters, Magik Markers, and Comets on Fire all lived in the same area

(and even house) in San Francisco. In Philadelphia, at the height of the formation’s public

exposure, the likes of Tara Burke, Eric Carbonara, David Keenan, Heather Leigh, Jack Rose, and

Brooke Sietinsons (Espers) lived in the Honeymoon Music compound in Philadelphia, PA. Here,

house shows took place, and food and artistic practice were shared—certainly with a political

undercurrent, aiming to sustain “networks … of like-minded people” (Carbonara, as cited in

Spiegel, 2013, p. 103) and decrease dependence on corporate frameworks of musical practice

that are experienced as exploitative and stifling. These experiments do not always last long, but

they are among the clearest expressions of free folk’s investment in certain notions of expressive

autonomy.

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Sometimes, the very existence of specific bands is enabled or at least facilitated by their

members’ shared living situation. Some NNCK members lived at the group’s New York

rehearsal space, the Hint House (Penn, 2012); and writings on Sunburned often mention the

group’s “Loft” in Charlestown, Boston. For several years, it served as a living, practice, and

recording space for most of the group’s early members, as well as a venue for intimate concerts.

As John Moloney (as cited in kris, 2004) says: “Lots of people have been in this place. Lots of

people have slept here, anyway. It’s like a flophouse. A flophouse on the borderlands—take a

right at the garbage truck” (p. 29). The association with the cheap and the dirty may not suggest

much fondness for the Loft, but it matches the self-deprecating, punk-inspired sense of

outsiderdom of many of Sunburned’s pronouncements. Rich Pontius (as cited in Jean-Pierre,

2006) considers the Loft his favorite performance venue because “having a slightly less

structured environment is always more relaxed for everybody” (para. 11), presumably fostering

an exploratory looseness. It is a strange place of many voices where “you can meet the ‘oracle’

and consult with the white wizard in a white powder truth session …. We throw good parties

though” (John Moloney, as cited in Jean-Pierre, 2006, para. 31). Sunburned harbor, or have at

times harbored, a fairly clear sense of place centered both on the Loft and Boston more

generally:

John [Moloney]: The similarities I see between us and [NNCK] is that they’re local New York kids, most of them. Us, we’re local kids too.”…

Rob [Thomas]: … they knew each other since they were in high school. And it’s sort of the same in this band, you know? My cousin and Moloney and [Chad] Cooper—long standing members—we’ve all known each other for years and years. So it’s like a really close bond, and it adds to some sort of developing telepathy that can be perceived by other people sometimes. (as cited in kris, 2004, p. 27)

This sense of locality is presented as one from which the group itself benefits through its

members’ closeness. It is distinct from a sense of immersion in a local “scene.” At least that is

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how it is presented by Thomas (as cited in kris, 2004), who adds that “we’ve isolated ourselves

in this town a lot …. And I think that’s really good for us developing something unique unto

ourselves” (p. 27). While this claim may be overstated (Sunburned’s many members have played

in a variety of local projects), Thomas here makes clear that the relations to like-minded

musicians at greater geographical distance may well be more important to Sunburned’s practice

than local involvement.

In a recent mutual interview for The Wire, Marcia Bassett (of Un, Double Leopards, and

Zaïmph) and Samara Lubelski (of Hall of Fame, Tower Recordings, and Chelsea Light Moving)

discuss the early 1970s music of krautrock groups such as Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel:

SL: Why do you think we’ve had such a strong connection to the music of this era?

MB: I think there is a similar desire to connect on a communal musical spiritual plain heavily influenced by psychedelics. It’s something we experimented around with a lot, and so did these groups. When I was younger, the idea of living communally and making music and having that be your main focus was the dream. And it was connecting on a communal level, less about going out and more about an inner connection… a collective arts project.

SL: Then obviously the drugs, a vehicle towards oneness, and getting to the same place. For instance No-Neck always provided food at Hint House events, to bring people a little closer together.

MB: Un did live together, and so did Double Leopards for a while. We also had the freedom of not having to go to our daily jobs. We didn’t live in a remote barn.

SL: The city allows for that larger community that we were all looking for. (Lubelski & Bassett, 2020, p. 25)

Bassett and Lubelski here articulate the social to the spiritual, the aesthetic, and the psychedelic-

experiential. These are all part of an exploration of the (potential) heterogeneity and multiplicity

of free folk’s lifeworld. Prior experiments—aesthetic and social—in the history of popular music

serve as resources for contemporary experiments and even elicit a sense of transhistorical

kinship.

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Born’s second plane of music’s social mediation is that of imagined communities. In free

folk, as elsewhere, these are never purely of the imagination, but rather engender actual

interpersonal encounters or communication. To start with, sooner or later, anyone invested in

free folk musics will likely be in direct contact with other fans and/or musicians (which often are

the same). Free folk has audiences and practitioners, or at least peers from related formations,

worldwide. However, this seemingly commonsensical or banal observation itself is not without

problems. While I have discussed free folk as a predominantly (U.S.-)American formation, it has

to be understood as internationalized. The United States is central to free folk, but it is not

necessarily a singular point of origin; free folk musicians’ collaborators and friends in Germany,

Finland, Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere were not necessarily inspired by their American

peers in the first place but were themselves already articulating related and similar expressions

before personally encountering and/or being articulated in music-journalistic discourse to peers

elsewhere. Over the years, this has engendered a proliferation of international contacts and an

awareness of the opportunities they open up. Sunburned member Paul Labrecque (as cited in

Spiegel, 2019a) comments on his musical-social relationships, which he describes as “our own

natural network” (p. 198), a nonhierarchic assemblage that had emerged over the preceding

decade:

Like Eric [Arn of Primordial Undermind], he’s one of those guys, he’s been around for a long time and you know, everybody, people know him and we just trust him. We all put each other up … we all support each other, no matter what the other person does, and there’s this kind of comfort when we all get together or when we’re all in the same room, whether it’s like three or four of us or 50 of us like this, that we’re not being judged by anybody else. I mean, yes, there’s some cynical people and people always say stupid things about other people (MS laughs), and there’s always, you know, little things, but … nobody’s trying to hurt each other, you know what I mean … They do nothing but push you to do bigger and better things, and their energy interacts with yours and makes you wanna do bigger and better things. (Labrecque, as cited in Spiegel, 2019a, p. 198)

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Labrecque’s quote shows an awareness of and investment in a transgeographical web of friends

and potential friends. All of them are understood to be invested in unconventional artistic

practices known (and appreciated) by a relatively small number of people. This suggests a strong

articulation and oscillation of Born’s first two planes. The microsocialities of free folk that are

visible and audible in musical performance and the everyday life of “local scenes” (Bennett,

2004) are always already part of an expanded, geographically dispersed set of “imagined”

relations that are actualized in musicians’ tours, in festivals that serve as nodes accumulating and

intensifying friendship and collaboration, and in musicians’ personal mobility. Samara Lubelski

(as cited in Spiegel, 2012) says that “there’s just this commonality that’s running through and

someone whose name you heard ten years ago then becomes a part of your life” (p. 132); many

free folk musicians trust that their potential peers are “of a like mind” (Lubelski, as cited in

Spiegel, 2013, p. 72) and similarly invested in mutual support as well as (experimental) aesthetic

potentialities—in music’s ability to open and be opened onto something beyond the

conventional.

The free folk formation does not feature a clear-cut artist-audience distinction. As with

other related formations (such as the American noise formation), it is not unusual to attend a free

folk-aligned festival whose audience consists to a large extent of the musicians playing the

festival itself. It is telling that many free folk recordings of the mid-2000s were released as

home-burned CD-Rs in editions of a hundred copies—or fewer. Rob Hayler (2015), musician

and writer in related circles, calls this type of formation “no-audience underground,” which

denotes a sub-section of the noise and experimental music scene which is largely self-sufficient due to its members being prepared to take on the roles necessary to get things done in a fluid manner, being receptive to the exchange of goodwill in the absence of money, being driven to create for reasons other than the standard measures of success and being largely indifferent to the mainstream, however you wish to define it. Oh, and the

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number of people interested is enough to sustain it, more or less, but very small. (In Summary… section, para. 1)

Hayler depicts a music liberated through autonomy from, or even disinterest in, the mainstream.

If applied to the free folk formation, the concept is useful in its suggestion that such music is not

necessarily—or at least not explicitly—directed against “the mainstream.” This is not to say that

there is no attempt at distancing oneself from, or even countering or criticizing, a perceived

mainstream; but such oppositionality is not the formation’s main operating principle. In

Raymond Williams’s (1980/2005) terms, free folk presents an alternative, rather than an actual

opposition, to dominant forces; and while Hayler may affirm this, such an alternative way of life

is more dependent on (technological-economic) processes and tools of the supposed mainstream

than a notion of self-sufficiency might suggest. With Stephen Graham (2016), one might also

consider free folk’s space “anintermediated”—that is, many traditional culture-industrial barriers

do not apply here, as “little division [exists] between musicians and other musicians, labels, and

audiences.” For the purposes of this dissertation, Graham’s description of a “flattened,

participatory set of relations” (p. 12) may be more appropriate or desirable; a formation’s (self-)

definition as a “no-audience underground” may doom it to “only constitut[ing] defensive

enclaves” as opposed to “seek[ing] to widen their sphere of effectivity, or at least to catalyse new

becomings at their borders” (Gilbert, 2014, p. 198). However, Hayler is correct in identifying

goodwill (as present in Labrecque’s statement) as carrying great value in free folk’s

microsocialities and imagined (geographically dispersed) community—a goodwill and

generosity that enables free folk to retain a considerable openness, even as it does not reach out

particularly strongly to other formations.

Less obvious, yet more conventionally “imagined,” than free folk’s transgeographical

community is the transhistorical or transgenerational imagined community articulated by and

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across the formation. Free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility ensures that this is not

merely a canon or tradition but should instead be understood in its sociality, as something that

itself resembles a community or an affective alliance. It would be easy to discuss this articulation

as primarily aesthetic: as one of stylistic “influence,” situating free folk as a descendant of other

related musics. But free folk musicians’ interest in earlier artists must also be understood as the

active creation of lineages of aesthetic and ethical inspiration that are ideally actualized through

collaboration. Much is made of free folk’s often explicit re-articulations to and of the past, from

Reynolds’s remarks in Retromania to Byron Coley’s (as cited in Petrusich, 2008) claim that free

folk is “record collector music, in a way” (p. 246). It is useful to understand this cultural

formation as having partially emerged out of (indie) formations that value the knowledge

associated with the collector’s pursuit of rarities (Bannister, 2006), but also as emerging in

tandem with a shift to internet downloads as one of the primary means of accumulating musical

material. Many artists routinely cited as influences on free folk musicians were fairly obscure in

the early 1990s (Spiegel, 2013). Just as their works were coveted by record collectors, they were

soon sought out by those scouring file-sharing services for interesting, unusual musics.

More importantly, many of these impactful predecessors are irreducible to either

folk/popular or “avant-garde”/experimental canons: Albert Ayler, Syd Barrett, Can, John Fahey,

Faust, Angus MacLise, Yoko Ono, Catherine Ribeiro, Patty Waters, and other free folk favorites

subverted any such dichotomy through the integration of diverse and seemingly disparate

practices and/or through specific steps they took that blurred the boundaries between the several

fields they operated in. It is noteworthy that free folk musicians often actively seek out personal

contact and artistic collaboration with their diverse perceived predecessors. They thereby once

again strengthen the articulation of Born’s first two planes of social mediation and personally-

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materially actualize and expand their imagined communities across and beyond the formation.

Free folk musicians place themselves in quite diverse lineages of artistic experimentation. They

imagine communities across time and are empowered by the diverse sets of techniques and

aesthetics articulated in these imagined communities, which become a realm of considerable

affective investment. As expressed by Matt Valentine (as cited in Keenan, 2003), free folk

musicians identify with those

people who I think of as being part of … the sub-underground, this periphery that’s known in certain circles but aren’t seen as being linked to any particular music. … [Paul Flaherty and Michael Hurley are] both still doing the same thing they were doing back [in the 1960s and 1970s] and that’s what I think the free folk ethos is, people who have just stuck to their laurels, producing the most completely independent music …. (p. 34)

Free folk is invested in aesthetic potentialities and their multiplicity and hybridity; it

simultaneously co-constructs this hybridity in its specificity. It is enabled to do so in part by

historical shifts in information acquisition and accessibility that afford an unprecedented digital

availability of recordings from diverse historical moments and cultural formations; and it

intervenes in these shifts by constructing an alternative canon built on the key spots of its

mattering maps. Additionally, it is not just recordings that are available (although these may be

primary). Free folk connects to an unprecedented accessibility of orientations to sound and its

contexts, from free jazz’s connection to and expression of its socio-political context (the civil

rights movement, Black Power) to the Cagean opening to non-musical sounds (Joseph, 2008);

from the spiritual charge of La Monte Young’s drone musics to vast archives of ethnographic

research on non-Western musics. Free folk is characterized by interest and affective investment

in the multiplicity and transformations enabled by this contemporary predicament, articulating

imagined communities across space and time in response.

The third plane of music’s social mediation is that of wider social relations refracted in

music. Free folk musicians tend to be of middle-class background (Spiegel, 2012), though what

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“middle-class” means in a United States context is not always clear—and leaves room for

significant variation. Free folk musicians’ backgrounds differ, but are augmented by a generally

strong relevance of higher education. Time spent at college often resulted in musical and other

discoveries. Petrusich (2008) thinks of the musicians as “intellectual eccentrics, removed from

the working-class everyman-ness of more ‘down-home’ acts like the Carter Family or Woody

Guthrie” (p. 240). This implies different but interrelated articulations of authenticity. Free folk

musicians and the folk-musician forebears they connect to may be of different class

backgrounds, but the free folk formation is drawn to earlier folk acts due to their perceived

directness and individuality of expression. If free folk’s investment in experimentation suggests a

distancing from the perceived boredom of middle-class suburbia that has long been a

foundational trait of the post-war rock formation (Grossberg, 1992), Petrusich’s “down-home”

characterization highlights an aspect of free folk’s social aesthetic that simultaneously distances

the formation from the rarefied realms of institutionalized experimental music.

However, the story of free folk is not simply one of a middle-class appropriation of

working-class aesthetics (even if one ignores the wide variety in social background of free folk’s

influences beyond those mentioned by Petrusich). Free folk musicians often find themselves in

quite precarious living conditions (Spiegel, 2012) without much of a conventional, non-musical

career. This is, of course, not exclusive to free folk, but part of a broader tendency towards

precarization, characterized by “atypical and irregular work relations” (Papadopoulos,

Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008, p. 226); and as in the case of Willis’s (1978/2014) hippies, the

choices free folk musicians make sometimes lead them to “tur[n] their backs on the supposed

material and cultural advantages of a middle-class life-style” (p. 9). Free folk musicians have

often sought out music-related jobs, notably in record stores (Spiegel, 2012) or as music writers.

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The affordability of DIY formats, notably CD-Rs and cassette tapes, has often assuaged certain

economic constraints and allowed for easy and relatively cheap distribution. Similarly, the

affordability of spaces such as Sunburned’s Loft and NNCK’s Hint House has helped sustain

rather unprofitable pursuits, but this is itself a precarious sustenance. For instance, NNCK had to

desert the Hint House when Columbia University’s expansion into the space’s Harlem

neighborhood resulted in the sale and, ultimately, demolition of the building (Cohan, 2012). The

loss of this space clearly impacted NNCK’s activities and sustenance, depriving the group of its

regular meeting, performing, and (in some cases) living space.

As I have discussed elsewhere (Spiegel, 2012), free folk is comparatively “balanced” in

terms of the traditional gender binary. There is a strong presence of female solo musicians in

particular, and various factors foster women’s participation, such as the centrality of the voice,

and of experimentation with the voice (the aforementioned “vocal magic”), which has

traditionally been less foreclosed to women than other key instruments and practices, at least in

rock music (Bayton, 1998). Still, a sense of being “the Other”—be it in media coverage or in the

intensity of the tour environment—often prevails. Additionally, free folk’s larger improvising

groups have included a relatively small percentage of women and reproduce men’s dominance of

traditional rock bands, however unconventional the group structures may be in comparison. If

free folk undermines the traditional gender binary, it is primarily in its deterritorialization of

voices’ gendered connotations through vocal experimentation. In many free folk musics, it is

impossible to clearly trace back treated, massed voices to conventionally masculine or feminine

traits. However, in terms of visual “style,” free folk musicians often reproduce existing

masculinities and femininities. In fact, male musicians in free folk often present a certain rugged

masculinity at the intersection of hippie and grunge styles (perhaps unsurprisingly, Neil Young’s

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music has a strong presence in free folk). Some of free folk’s more traditionally folk-oriented

female musicians have, in turn, at times been described as “folk elves” whose sartorial choices

(e.g., long flowing dresses), long hair, and even musical style (e.g., “ethereal” vocalizations)

reinforce stereotypical femininities associated with hippie subcultures, but Holger Adam (2009)

has pointed out some of the problematic dimensions of critiques that characterize such stylistic

choices as regressive and thereby undervalue the everyday, off-stage labor of these musicians

(Spiegel, 2012). To reduce female free folk singers to their supposed reproduction of gendered

stereotypes denies or at least unduly simplifies their aesthetic agency as well as the complexities

of their lives as working musicians.

Most free folk musicians are white. This is perhaps best explained through a combination

of social and aesthetic factors: If free folk is often accessed by people of a middle-class

background, then a common American articulation of non-whiteness to poverty may well steer

many minorities away from free folk, however “open” its practitioners are. Aesthetically, free

folk has tended to mostly ignore (though perhaps increasingly less so) Black musics that

emerged into visibility after the 1970s. Free folk draws on a wide range of “Others”: selected

Black musics from blues to free jazz, Native American imagery, diverse Middle-Eastern and

East-Asian musics, and more. Their integration into free folk’s bricolage does not always work

in the same ways, ranging from vague “ethnological forgeries” (as produced by krautrock group

Can, a key influence on free folk) to the very explicit dedication to, for instance, the rigorous

exploration of Indian musics in the work of MV & EE and especially Eric Carbonara (Spiegel,

2012). Either way, in the bigger picture, free folk continues the rock formation’s residual

investment in the perceived authenticity of “the sounds of those who have no everyday life”

(Grossberg, 1997b, p. 100); and in the aesthetics of those (Native Americans, “Eastern” cultures)

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who have historically been articulated in much rock discourse and beyond as maintaining a more

authentic, even “direct” relationship to the natural and/or spiritual—consider album titles such as

Animal Collective’s Here Comes the Indian (2003) and Sunburned’s Headdress (2002), or the

(however tongue-in-cheek) band name Pocahaunted. Still, at least until certain shifts among

younger performers’ aesthetics (often affiliated with Not Not Fun Records) occurred in the late

2000s, much of free folk seemed quite happy to perpetuate an (indie-)rockist exclusion of post-

free jazz/post-funk Black musics—a “suspicio[n] of the perceived rate of change (technological

and other) in black music, which served as damning evidence of its technologisation and

commodification, very much like the folk music critique of mass culture” (Bannister, 2006, p.

89). Sunburned may profess a love for hip-hop—“if you think about how the bass works, that’s

the reason” (Moloney, as cited in Kitching, 2016, From Shit Spangled Banner… section, para.

3)—and arguments can be made for the influence of hip-hop’s reliance on sampling; but even its

more experimental practitioners are rarely mentioned among free folk’s key influences. Techno

and other popular electronic musics have certainly had a notable influence on acts such as

Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance, but one would have difficulties locating a techno

influence in the New England circles of MV & EE and Sunburned Hand of the Man.

To finally arrive at Born’s fourth plane: How does free folk relate to institutions? At first

glance, free folk exhibits a strong desire for autonomy and an anti-authoritarian bent. Both of

these would lend themselves to a description of the formation in horizontalist terms inflected

with the (post-)Deleuze-Guattarian notion of the “molecular” that emphasizes an ontologically

grounded fluidity and heterogeneity at the expense of the comparatively more constrained-

constraining “molar” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Such an articulation of the horizontal and

the molecular is not entirely off the mark as a tracing of free folk. The precarity of DIY artistry

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does not lend itself particularly well to the establishment of lasting institutions; group formations

remain diverse and fluid; and the rhetoric of many free folk musicians and writers emphasizes

modes of autonomy, freedom, and DIY ethics, as known in one way or another from diverse

affective alliances of rock, from 1960s undergrounds to punk.

For instance, Matt Valentine (as cited in Spiegel, 2013) not only sings the praises of DIY

cottage industries as exemplified by his and Erika Elder’s Child of Microtones and Heroine

Celestial Agriculture labels. As part of his personal history, he also emphasizes his attendance at

“a high school that didn’t have walls, it was set up … originally by a lot of people who were like

Vietnam … veterans or dodgers of the war, total protesters of the war.” There, Valentine “had

the freedom that you would normally not get until college, for some people not even till your

sophomore / junior year of college” (p. 101). Keenan (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) “would say that

I think the majority of people are kinda self-educated … rather than products of universities and

colleges and things like this.” They may have attended such institutions, but “they have sought

out their own culture and taught themselves and read and educated themselves culturally, on

their own, and have discovered that themselves, when I say self-educated that’s what I mean by

that” (p. 111).

While these claims are interesting expressions of the formation’s ideology, they do not

tell the whole story. Perhaps they even suggest a contradiction between the formation’s aim for

autonomy, at times resulting in a performative disavowal of institutions, on the one hand, and the

formative importance of institutionalized knowledge for some practitioners on the other. In

Keenan’s case, one might want to read claims to radical independence or self-sufficiency in the

context of his libertarian-individualist ideas on radical artistry (Fifteen Questions, 2013; Keenan,

2015). He tends to privilege the ideal of the authentic-eccentric self-made artist. Valentine,

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meanwhile, emphasizes freedom, but this does not exist in a vacuum: He does not argue for the

abolition of school, but rather highlights modes of deterritorialization of an extant disciplinary

institution—finding the molecular in the molar, so to speak. Educational institutions have played

important roles in many free folk musicians’ lives, providing them with crucial resources,

cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986), and friendships, even if the aesthetic and spiritual

knowledges favored in much of the free folk formation tend to be more esoteric than what is

taught in such institutions.

The free folk formation is not particularly known for explicit engagement with political

institutions, at times even appearing somewhat quietist (Spiegel, 2013). Individual participants

have shown various degrees of activism, although not necessarily in any close relation to their

music. There are, however, several strong examples of the harnessing of free folk music for the

purpose of protest, notably in the case of concerts and tours set up by Thurston Moore and Byron

Coley, directed against the Bush administration and its war state (Masters, 2008). Diffuse though

the formation’s politics can be at times, there is a strong (and unsurprising, although not

predetermined) sense of shared disgust at the perceived pro-war and pro-corporate politics of the

heterogeneous right-wing alliance of the United States, as well as (to a lesser extent) a

disillusionment with conventional-institutional politics.

Thus, one often finds an anti-corporate sentiment in free folk that is arguably typical of

American countercultural lineages and especially socio-political activisms of the late 20th and

early 21st century. Free folk musicians’ dislike of “corporate America,” perceived as a dominant

and homogenizing force, is emphasized regularly by commentators as well as some of the

musicians themselves (Karnik, 2003; Keenan, 2003; Spiegel, 2012, 2013). Even though this

relationship may seem banal or generic in light of a history of rock ideologies of authenticity

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(Auslander, 2008) that value independence and rebelliousness, it should not be dismissed. Ben

Chasny (as cited in Keenan, 2003) is among those free folk musicians happier to (however

tentatively) articulate a strongly anti-corporate impulse to his practice, “say[ing] ‘fuck you’ to

corporations who suck the magic out of life and music” (p. 40). Pouncey (2002) strongly

emphasizes JOMF’s “anti-corporate banner” (p. 27) and “utopian desire to inoculate music

against the destructive urge to make a career out of it” (p. 28); Eva Saelens (as cited in Spiegel,

2019a) of Inca Ore and JOMF is interested in the creation of “communities and lifestyles outside

of capitalist failures, outside of mainstream life” (p. 204).

The establishment of various labels (as well as publications, venues, festivals, and more)

as key nodes in a shifting musical-social network enables a certain degree of autonomy from

larger-scale economic actors, especially in relation to “artistic freedom” understood as individual

or collective expression free from direct corporate interference. These labels, often run by

musicians themselves and/or their friends, allow for more direct, familial communication quite

removed from corporate hierarchies. In many cases, they allow for a thoroughly relaxed

approach to the circulation of recordings, free from the pressure of conventional music-industrial

album release/promotion cycles. Yet, simultaneously, labels rely on various IT industry

frameworks, postal services, and more; this is not full autonomy, whatever that would entail. The

labels themselves can be conceptualized as molarities, however temporary they may be; the free

folk formation is, to state the obvious, not in pure flux. The very existence of labels, festivals,

magazines, and so on implies certain modes of gatekeeper- and curatorship, however low-stakes

the release of a hundred CD-Rs may be in comparison to involvement in a major label’s

production, promotion, and distribution apparatus. The free folk formation is certainly not

exclusively horizontal. It is not merely an articulation of clearly delineated horizontal and

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vertical elements either; the multiple roles played by so many of its protagonists (as musicians,

writers, label owners, organizers, and more) point towards a variety of emphatically transversal

relations that cut across diverse registers. Free folk’s network of support thrives on this: Certain

protagonists may be more capable of supporting their peers at one point, others may be at

another. Its transversality is still slanted more towards the horizontal, enabling an egalitarian if

somewhat precarious interplay of artistic-economic fluidity and temporary institutionalization.

Free folk and Diederichsen’s “horde”

The preceding sections have described the modes of aesthetic and social experimentation

in which free folk musicians engage. The free folk formation articulates these modes to each

other; they mediate each other. Their articulation and mediation are not given in advance. They

are contextually specific and must be analyzed accordingly. The key question for understanding

free folk’s collective experimentation, then, is how this articulation comes to be. However, most

writings on free folk never arrive at this question since they generally fail to account for the

formation’s hybridity and are largely unconcerned with the specifics of its social dimension.

Diedrich Diederichsen’s discussion of groups such as JOMF, NNCK, Sunburned and (to a lesser

extent) Animal Collective as “hordes” (Horden) is a rare attempt at analyzing the ways in which

at least certain parts of the free folk formation articulate aesthetic experimentation to its modes

of social collectivity.

Writing in the wake of free folk’s emergence into wider visibility, Diederichsen (2004a,

2004b, 2005a, 2005b) detects a “return of the collective” (2005b), or rather a heightened degree

of reinvestment in modes of creative collectivity. For Diederichsen (2004a, 2005a), the hordes of

the early 21st century—including the likes of Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple and the UK’s

Vibracathedral Orchestra in addition to Diederichsen’s American examples—articulate musical

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improvisation to social forms (Lebensformen, literally “forms of life”). This is an ethical,

potentially even political, project: a “social-musical task” (sozialmusikalische Aufgabe;

Diederichsen, 2004a, p. 249). To specify this articulation, Diederichsen positions these groups in

a historical lineage that includes, among others, the radical free improvisation of AMM, the

communal living and playing of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and the roaming collectivity of the

Grateful Dead’s most dedicated followers. Historically, this lineage has posed and tackled

several problems. In Diederichsen’s history, (Western) free improvisation aimed to get rid of all

set musical parameters—for formal-musical reasons; simultaneously, it aimed for

unpredictability. Diverse improvisers of the early 1970s (from AMM to the Art Ensemble of

Chicago) articulated these aims beyond the musical, to the social (and more): “The purely

musical, formal freedom is, so to speak, a purely artistic freedom and thus different from, yet at

least dependent on, the real freedom, however one may want to describe it in individual cases—

economic, legal, political” (p. 250). But to understand the social-musical articulation and its

stakes, Diederichsen introduces musicians’ interaction as a mediating term. For the lineage

Diederichsen describes, musicians’ interaction can embody a utopian notion of the relationship

between social change and formal-artistic invention. The dismantling of communicative

constraints in music emerges as a key task, directed towards a desired mode of communication,

musical or otherwise, that is perceived as more authentic (immediate, uncorrupted by outside

influence) as well as more democratic. Here, the striving for social change, towards better

communication and a better world, provides (utopian) legitimation for formal-artistic invention,

with musical interaction taking on a prefigurative role.

Diederichsen (2004a) outlines two challenges to this articulation of the musical and the

social through musical interaction. Historically, the articulation stood in tension with the

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valorization of the amateur in punk and other DIY-centered formations that attempted to broaden

access to musical practice, as opposed to the original free improvisers in Diederichsen’s

lineage—from AMM to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s core members—who tended to be

musically trained (and male) virtuosos. Simultaneously, artistic postmodernism and its centering

of the complexities of mediated experience challenged radical improvisers’ interest in

dismantling conventional musical forms, which was meant to engender a supposedly more

authentic or immediate mode of musical interaction and social life. This authenticity and

immediacy was put into doubt by postmodernism’s anti-foundationalism.

Diederichsen (2004a) sees the new hordes emerging in the wake of the DIY challenge

and the postmodernist challenge. In response to the former, hordes espouse a DIY ethos that does

not preclude virtuosity but also does not require it as a precondition of musical practice. Free

folk music in its hybridity does not depend on the attainment of any traditional level of skill

(Spiegel, 2012). In response to the latter, instead of striving for immediacy by dismantling

conventional form, free folk musicians “accumulate” (Diederichsen, 2004a, p. 254) diverse

modes of musical practice. That is, they do not seek ways to unlearn conventions; instead, they

seek out multiple techniques and approaches across generic lines (e.g., consider the sheer breadth

of influences on Sunburned’s practice), although some ideas may still be dismissed after having

been tested in group practice. Musical formlessness and unpredictability, beyond conventions of

how musical pieces are to be structured and played, are not elevated to the status of ideals to be

followed at any cost. Instead, groups such as Sunburned and NNCK like to take their time for

exploration, leaving the duration of their pieces wide-open: “After all, the true abolition of stress

exists precisely in the refusal of prescriptions as to the forms freedom may take” (Diederichsen,

2005b, p. 5). In Foucault’s (1994/1997; also see Goldman, 2010) terms, free folk musicians do

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not necessarily practice specific acts of radical liberation; instead, they seek out “practices of

freedom” that have yet to be explored. There is no clear road map to musical freedom that would

suddenly arrive at full independence, but a pragmatic experimentation with that which is at hand.

Unlike some of their predecessors (from the roaming hippie crowds of the Grateful Dead

and their followers to the monastic-disciplined Sun Ra Arkestra), the new hordes do not

articulate the musical and social in a way that requires adherence to a specific lifestyle, although

a variety of social forms (communal living, for instance) may emerge in relation to the hordes’

shared musical interests and practice. Theirs is “a more artistic than social model … but one that,

purposefully, is socially connoted and legitimated” (Diederichsen, 2004a, p. 255). Various

notions of collectivity may inform groups’ aesthetics. Their music or artwork may represent or

signify modes of collectivity or social interrelation that do not match the social as it is lived by

these groups. Sprawling collectives engaged in communal lifestyle (consider Sunburned and

NNCK’s respective lofts) exist, but groups such as Animal Collective (which more often than

not consists of somewhere between two and four members, spread-out geographically) work

with signifiers of collective ways of life. Animal Collective’s lived modes of sociality do not

appear as radical as those of Sunburned or NNCK, let alone as those of certain predecessors.

However, the layering of vocals in much of Animal Collective’s work, the diverse bodies and

faces found in the artwork of releases such as Feels (2005) and the Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit

They’ve Vanished/Danse Manatee reissue (2003), and, of course, the group’s very name evoke

notions of collectivity or multiplicity, regardless of the band’s actual composition. For

Diederichsen (2005b), the group “is more interested in the musical symptoms of such social

forms and in the latter’s simulation, less so in the authenticity of the hippie loft” (pp. 3–4), one of

the conventionally invoked examples of communal living in relation to popular music.

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According to Diederichsen, what makes such an investment in collectivity—be it as a social

commitment or as an aesthetic element—attractive to these musicians is the “absolute absence of

this spiritual resource, ‘collectivity’” (p. 4) in the wider realm of music. He posits a historically

specific lack or impoverishment of social interrelation that calls forth new modes of collectivity.

If the music industry sets certain constraints on modes of interrelation (presumably through

commodification and individualization), one may well “do it oneself” and will new collectivities

into being—through the material assembling of human collectivities, or through their discursive

invocation.

Diederichsen’s notion of the horde takes important steps towards the specification and

analysis of free folk’s articulation of the aesthetic and the social. Diederichsen manages to

outline key aspects of these groups’ aesthetic and social practices in their music-historical

specificity. Still, he may be going too far in his employment of the “horde” figuration, which

often does not quite match the actuality of free folk’s social mediations. In fact, Diederichsen

generally is less interested in free folk’s social-material dimension. To return to Born’s social-

aesthetic abstraction:

First, Diederichsen largely focuses on the microsocialities of free folk’s more expansive

groups. He shows a magisterial understanding of the aesthetics articulated to these

microsocialities but somewhat reductively homogenizes this dimension of free folk’s social

mediation. Diederichsen’s understanding of the horde resembles, and may well be inspired by,

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) notion of the nomadic war machine. This dynamic and

roaming assemblage is to be understood in relation to the bureaucratic State’s apparatus of

capture, against which it is directed and which attempts to integrate it. Later in this chapter, I will

argue that the horde or war machine indeed serves as a useful figuration: It maps the sprawling,

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hybrid aesthetics of much free folk, which are sometimes directed against the corporate

dimension of the cultural industries and appear largely immune to incorporation.

Second, Diederichsen gets at this when emphasizing that there is no definite social form

articulated to free folk, and that a horde-like, nomadic existence is often signified rather than

lived. He thus provides a fresh perspective on one dimension of free folk’s imagined

communities: the imagery of collectivity, of sprawl, of multiplicity. But by designating

Sunburned, NNCK, and their peers as “hordes,” Diederichsen risks jettisoning the advances he

has made towards the analysis of free folk’s aesthetic-social articulation. He retains a figuration

too suggestive of a homology between the aesthetic and the social, or of a conflation of free

folk’s microsocialities and its imagined communities. The communities and collectivities

discursively invoked by free folk musicians in performance, the presentation of recordings, and

more do not always map neatly onto the actual social-material relations of free folk, be it “scene”

structures, networks of support, or even bands’ own composition. NNCK and Sunburned have

tended to be more “local,” more sedentary than the notion of the “horde” might suggest; much of

JOMF’s music may be radically improvisational, but the band has long remained centered on

Tom Greenwood’s leadership. A horde is not a network.

In a different register, Diederichsen’s articulation of free folk to the long history of free

improvisation usefully opens his work up to the trans-historical imagined communities that free

folk musicians situate themselves in, but stops short of mapping them in their breadth and

diversity. The free folk formation’s practices must be understood in relation to AMM and Sun

Ra; but they must also be understood in relation to John Fahey, Yoko Ono, Pearls Before Swine,

Sonic Youth, and more. This points towards the limits of Diederichsen’s contextualization of the

horde. Not only does this contextualization remain almost exclusively musical-historical, but this

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musical-historical contextualization itself, while instructive, leaves out or only hints at important

inspirations.

Third, Diederichsen offers only glimpses of the larger social relations refracted and

negotiated in free folk. Beyond suggesting a reaction to a perceived absence of creative

collectivity in the cultural industries, his writings on the horde remain silent on the specific non-

aesthetic conditions of the free folk formation’s aesthetic and social practices. This is not

surprising, given that these writings only consist of a few relatively short articles. Elsewhere,

Diederichsen (2007) quips that the “New Weird America” (as understood in relation to the free

folk formation, rather than the “freak folk” of Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie, and others) largely

consists of “young men with idiosyncratic knots and tangles in their hair, and not always the very

best bodily hygiene” (para. 1). It is true that the larger groups that Diederichsen calls hordes

mostly consist of men and, despite their size, rarely incorporate more than one woman at any

given moment. It is also true that many of these men have tended to adopt a hippie- and grunge-

derived sartorial style that suggests a rugged-rebellious masculinity. However, Diederichsen’s

reduction of free folk’s social composition to men’s dominance implies a neglect of the

formation’s many non-“horde” projects, which are characterized by a remarkably strong

presence of women—especially in comparison to certain other cultural formations from which

free folk has historically emerged. While Diederichsen points towards an aesthetic and social

egalitarianism in their improvisational practice, he misses other socio-politically relevant

dimensions of free folk, such as the potentials of its gender politics (Spiegel, 2012).

Finally, Diederichsen takes free folk’s desired autonomy from conventionally

institutionalized realms of the music business for granted, hardly thematizing them. Certainly,

free folk connects to a well-established history of the DIY (if still capitalist) production,

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distribution, and consumption of music. Keenan (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) would presumably

affirm this: Free folk’s music is “not really legitimized by the culture police, the cultural

guardians at large” (p. 122); and it is distributed through “illegitimate media” (Keenan, 2009,

16:49), notably CD-Rs and cassette tapes which “dispense with any notion of permission

altogether” (Keenan, 2008, p. 41). Keenan’s thoughts align with Hayler’s notion of the “no-

audience underground” and, of course, the long lineage of DIY-based punk and post-punk

musics. His comments reproduce a binary of legitimate (mainstream) and illegitimate

(alternative) cultural forms that, through reference to the aesthetic, elides political matters of

exclusion and discrimination. Still, given that free folk musicians, according to Diederichsen,

engage in relaxed and unprescribed improvisational practice, one might suggest that their

investment in aesthetic autonomy from the perceived dictates of the cultural industries or

dominant cultural formations easily maps onto free folk’s investment in institutional autonomy.

This articulation of aesthetic “freedom” (a sense of not being shackled by external rules) to

institutional “freedom” (a reliance on easily managed, self-subsistent cottage industries) is

perhaps too “obvious”; if there is a homology here, it is one that articulates two ideological

registers (aesthetic and counter-institutional values) to each other, rather than one between free

folk’s aesthetics and its relations of production. Either way, perhaps the proliferation of such

homologies explains why Diederichsen tends to neglect free folk’s economic-institutional

dimension; in some ways, its reliance on DIY and investment in autonomy are fairly obvious in a

post-punk context.

The sensibility of free folk

Diederichsen’s analysis of free folk is instructive and original, but it is necessary to go

beyond his reduction of free folk’s contexts to the history of free improvisation. I want to

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propose that it is through an analysis of the formation’s sensibility that free folk’s contextually

specific articulation of modes of collectivity and experimentation, and its articulation of aesthetic

and social experimentations, are best understood. To remind you, according to Grossberg (1992),

a sensibility is “a logic of articulation which governs a specific formation or alliance. It defines

what sorts of effects the formation produces and what sorts of activities and attitudes people

within the alliance can undertake” (p. 398). A sensibility “identifies the ways the formation

empowers the groups existing within its spaces, and simultaneously, the ways these groups

empower the practices of the formation”; and a sensibility “identifies the specific sorts of effects

that are produced, the relationships between the practices and the structures of daily life that are

enabled” (p. 73). In Raymond Williams’s terms, a sensibility is a type of structure of feeling that

negotiates between the historical present and a sense of presence, between the lived and the

articulated (Williams, 1979/2015; Grossberg, 2010c). I will specify the characteristics of the

formation’s sensibility and relate it to larger affective landscapes and enunciative assemblages.

The free folk formation is governed by a collective-experimental sensibility that privileges

community, multiplicity, and transformation.

Free folk’s emergence can be understood in relation to the emergence and dominance in

the United States of what Grossberg (2015), drawing on Walter Benjamin, calls an “organization

of pessimism.” Many of the formation’s participants were socialized musically and politically

during the 1980s and became fully immersed in (experimental) musical practice in the 1990s

(Spiegel, 2012). Free folk’s sensibility can be seen to some extent as shaped by and responding

to the affective organization of this time. Grossberg (2015) lays out several of the organization’s

most relevant, interrelated structures of feeling. I will refer to three of these. The first is a sense

of “radical equivalence” through which the world appears “flattened out and the only way that

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anything can matter is with some degree of irony or cynicism” (p. 118). This stands in relation to

the second structure of feeling, “a historically constructed experience of the autonomy of affect”

(p. 119), where affective investment is grounded in the absence of other senses of intrinsic

meaningfulness or value. The third structure of feeling that free folk responds to and negotiates is

a sense of temporal alienation: the feeling that time has become strange, that past, present, and

future are disarticulated from each other. I will discuss the first two in their constitutive

interconnectedness while assigning the third its own space in this chapter.

The first of these structures of feeling, the sense of radical equivalence described by

Grossberg (2015, 2018b), appears to flatten people’s mattering maps: What is there to truly care

about? Investment is filtered through layers of irony; no sense of belonging can truly be taken for

granted. Grossberg understands this structure of feeling as connected to crises of knowledge and

commensuration. These mutually constitutive crises involve both a multiplication and a

dissolution of modalities of knowledge; and they involve the concurrent (seeming) impossibility

of adjudication and evaluation between different claims, different statements, different

investments. The free folk formation is far from devoid of irony or even cynicism, sometimes

expressed in the choice of song titles; and, as I will show later, it tends to shy away from clear

meaning, from explicit representation. Still, free folk musicians are more likely to express

cynicism through absurdist performance art reminiscent of their peers and predecessors in Sun

City Girls (consider the bizarre, sometimes mocking rants of Sunburned’s Rob Thomas) than in a

generally disaffected stance. One way of highlighting this dimension of free folk is through a

comparison with the sensibility of the indie rock16 formation of the 1980s and early 1990s, as

well as with punk, to which both formations respond.

16 As defined by Bannister (2006): “Indie guitar rock is a postpunk subgenre of independent or alternative rock, featuring mainly white, male groups playing electric guitars, bass and drums … to primarily white, male audiences,

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Punk partakes in both challenges to which, according to Diederichsen, free folk’s

improvisers respond; but these challenges exceed the history of free improvisation. In its DIY

ethos and practices, punk attacked music-educational and economic barriers defining the

production and distribution of music. In its aggressive, deconstructionist impulse, punk

“undermined every relevant discourse” (Hebdige, 1979, p. 108), thereby feeding a dismantling of

certainty, a subversion of belonging and (received modes of) authenticity (Grossberg, 1986;

1997b). Grossberg (1997b) writes:

A disciplined mobilization signals the triumph of an unconstrained mobility that is nothing but a principle of constraint. … We might consider that punk’s self-referential attack on rock helped to undermine rock’s ability to establish any place. In a sense, punk transformed rock into a disciplined mobilization of sorts (and in that sense, may have unintentionally played into the hands of the contemporary forces of conservatism and capitalism). (pp. 97–98)

Punk fed into an emergent sense of radical equivalence (and was itself shaped by this

emergence). One particular post-punk formation of note here is indie rock to which free folk has

strong historical ties through its affiliation with the likes of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.; indie

appeared to express a sense of flatness and boredom in the disaffectedness and irony of much of

its music and lyrics. Additionally, Matthew Bannister (2006) argues that the reverberation

employed by some of indie rock’s noisier, more psychedelic groups (e.g., My Bloody Valentine

and Spiritualized) “‘muddies’ the sound and de-emphasises individual elements and voices,

tending towards a total, enveloping, homogeneous noise.” This wall of sound “tends towards

disembodiment” (p. 89)—perhaps another way of negotiating this sense of disaffectedness.

Whereas punk’s aggression helped pave the way for a sense of radical equivalence, much indie

recording mainly for independent labels, being disseminated at least initially through alternative media networks such as college radio stations and fanzines, and displaying a countercultural ethos of resistance to the market” (pp. 77–78).

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rock was doomed to wallow in it, traversing a seemingly flattened landscape, unable to forcefully

establish a place, a sense of belonging.17

Free folk, in turn, both draws on and counters indie rock’s aesthetics. The free folk

formation’s acts consistently aim for a pronounced intensity, for a sense of immersion, be it in

the skeletal long-duration pieces of Charalambides or the “sonic chaos aesthetic” (Conlon, 2018)

of Sunburned Hand of the Man. Many free folk acts draw on, resemble, or otherwise connect to

the aesthetics of some of indie rock’s noisier acts, but the formation also complicates the

applicability of Bannister’s analysis through the bodily impact of sheer heaviness (Bardo Pond’s

walls of distorted guitar), the sociality and heterogeneity on display in free folk’s improvising

ensembles, as well as corporeal intensity, as Sharon Cheslow (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) suggests

with regards to Christina Carter and Heather Leigh of Charalambides and Scorces: “What it was

all about was being in the moment, and just being spontaneous, and being in your body” (p. 120).

Even when Bannister’s analysis appears to apply straightforwardly, as in the distanced, floating,

reverb-laden music of Grouper with its resemblance to My Bloody Valentine and early

Spiritualized, the enveloping and immersive effect must be understood in relation to the sensorial

richness of other free folk musics, not merely the passivity and disaffectedness Bannister

ascribes to indie rock. Free folk can also involve anger and aggression, but it is ultimately

deemphasized and drawn back into an affective multiplicity.

Free folk’s immersion and intensity is not exactly the same as the contemporary affective

hyperinflation outlined by Grossberg (2015), which reacts to crises of investment, of mattering,

17 This is, of course, a particularly sweeping assessment of indie rock that, by default, is unlikely to map easily onto every single group affiliated with the formation. It seems particularly pertinent here to point out that Sonic Youth, while devoid of neither disaffectedness and irony, previewed and paralleled free folk by reinvesting in practices and lineages of experimentation—which the group found especially in the perceived authenticity and intensity of free jazz. This becomes particularly audible in some Sonic Youth members’ collaborative projects with free folk musicians, which often tend towards the improvisational (e.g., Body/Head, Caught on Tape, and Dream/Aktion Unit).

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through recourse to fundamentalism or fanaticism and the security of inerrant judgment. Instead,

free folk is conditioned by the processual “ethics of relaxation” identified by Diederichsen

(2005b, p. 3). Sunburned, NNCK, and their peers leave their improvisational practice wide-open

to highly diverse ideas and techniques, and notably to their negotiation in group practice. This

often engenders intense moments, but they are carefully embedded in the musical practices of

free folk’s microsocialities. Affective intensity is sought out, but it is directed towards an

aesthetic register more than a fundamentalism that maps onto the ideological.

However, like Grossberg’s hyperinflation, free folk’s orientation must be thought in

relation to—primarily responding to rather than reinforcing—the second structure of feeling: a

contemporary experience of the autonomy of affect, in which affect is grounded in itself, in its

own intensities. An intensity of investment is sought in a world where everything appears to be

of equal value and no yardstick for commensuration is in sight:

Crises of investment (of the popular) … are the result of active struggles, defined not by the commodification of affect but by its quotidienization in ways that seem to “flatten” affect, to circumscribe it and apparently create a border of everyday habit that separates imagination and experimentation. The result is, in part, a search for affective intensities, whether in religion or popular culture …. (Grossberg, 2010b, p. 225)

In this affective landscape, shaped by cultural-political struggles over what matters and what can

matter, people know that “other worlds are possible”—but that they even have to voice this

knowledge suggests a decreased ability or opportunity to feel this possibility (Grossberg, 2015).

In other words, an organization of pessimism dominates. Imagination still exists, of course, but it

is more difficult to articulate to a leap into that which is not yet known (Grossberg, 2010b). Free

folk thus arises in a historical moment characterized by specific enclosures of popular

imagination—by stifling boundaries that are based in the structures of feeling of radical

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equivalence and affective autonomy and that simultaneously reinforce them.18 Free folk

particularly projects this onto the “corporate”—the perceived forces of homogenization that

stand in opposition to the radically creative authenticity that free folk articulates ideologically

and in which it invests affectively.

In the face of both crises of investment and a residual suburban boredom to which post-

war popular music responded in the first place (Grossberg, 1992), free folk reinvests in a broad

sense of experimental creativity. It aims for affective immediacy (not to be confused with

stylistic accessibility) and intensity—for immersion, for an often nonrepresentational,

asignifying weirdness and incomprehensibility that is less a provocation to the “normal” world

than an enriching of experience and a re-articulation of imagination to experimentation (not least

through this expansion across various nonrepresentational domains). It is this articulation that

free folk particularly values and invests in. Free folk’s mattering maps pinpoint key places of

investment where (especially) aesthetic experimentation is found. The “pan-generic” character of

free folk, the hybridity structuring it, is (perceived as) unpredictable, both in its eclecticism and

in the specifics of its often-improvisational approach. The world may feel flat, but new and real

excitement is found here: in hybridity and unpredictability, in community, multiplicity,

transformation and the other worlds and other feelings to which they open.

The aural here takes on a key role, but it is heterogeneously articulated to other sensorial

domains, just as music is articulated to other art forms for many free folk musicians who design

handmade CD-R sleeves, soundtrack films, integrate performance art techniques into their live

shows, and more. Music—instruments, the voice, technologies, musical forms, styles, specific

works and catalogs—is experienced in terms of its capacity to open up beyond the well-known,

18 I will discuss the enclosures of popular imagination in greater detail in the dissertation’s chapter on the epistemic formation.

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to other sounds, to a realm of aesthetic potential. Although free folk has articulated an ideology

of authenticity that cherishes the individual’s unique creativity and expressive potential, free folk

musicians are not just aware of but feel and live the importance of friendship, community, and

collaboration to such expression. Karl Bauer (as cited in Spiegel, 2012) of Axolotl argues that

improvisation involves “a musical organism where there is no subject really, where everybody

becomes this one thing” (p. 107). The world as engaged with by free folk’s collective-

experimental sensibility, which serves as the formation’s logic of social mediation, is thus full of

aesthetic potential that is actualized in collectivities, even as it is sometimes articulated to

individual creativity. Consider, for instance, NNCK’s insistence on individual expression but

awareness that the group’s improvised musics are irreducible to the sum of individual members’

contributions (Masters, 2009). The support of a local scene or a “network” on the one hand, and

collaborative musical practice on the other, actualize these potentialities in different ways and

different registers: through material support on tour, through shared negotiation of knowledges,

through a sense of comfort—and especially through the exhilaration and fascination of

collaborative practice and its chance meetings.

Free folk musicians regularly emphasize and foster the diverse microsocialities and

imagined communities described earlier. Grossberg (2005) describes the American “struggle

over family values,” contemporary with free folk’s emergence, “as a struggle over the location

and existence of the social bond.” Free folk, too, lives this struggle by foregrounding a creative,

nourishing sense of community, which (like Grossberg’s example, familialism) serves as “an

affective map of the necessity of the social bond. It is a recognition … that society is always built

on affective—powerfully emotional—social relations, which precede and make possible the

illusion of rational individuality underlying the capitalist marketplace” (p. 102). Consciously or

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not, free folk engages in this struggle, countering a conservative re-articulation of individuality

in which “collectivity is always subordinate to individuality and freedom, agency, and

responsibility” (p. 295)—or which perhaps aims to “brea[k] up any collectivity that cannot meet

the criteria of corporate individuality” (p. 301). Free folk’s articulation of a creative-expressive

individuality never goes that far; to the contrary, creative expression requires a supportive

community. Superficially, free folk’s countercultural distrust of the state and its institutions may

resemble the conservative call for apparent autonomy—“freedom”—from the state; but free folk

radically contradicts this conservative articulation of freedom and individuality. Free folk’s

experienced freedom must be social, must be collective, even when one of its ideological key

markers is the authentic expression of the creative individual, and even though its cottage

industries rarely challenge the economic structures with which the conservative articulation

aligns individuality (Spiegel, 2013, 2019a). Grossberg’s articulation of the social as affective

parallels and intersects with Diederichsen’s notion of collectivity as a “spiritual resource” absent

from the contemporary realm of popular music with its economic and ideological investment in

individual recognizability. Free folk responds to this music-industrial eviction of collectivity but

also partakes in larger struggles over the social.19

Going beyond a mere favoring of community, much free folk—from solo projects

engaging in “vocal magic” to wild improvisational ensembles—sidelines the representation of

individual creativity in favor of sonic—and sometimes on-stage, human—assemblages that

exceed dominant notions of the human by branching out to a sense of the cosmic, to

19 None of this is to suggest that what free folk resists is an ultimately victorious (neoliberal) reduction of all relations to market relations, or an overbearing “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) that has successfully captured and constrained popular imagination; reality is more complex (Clarke, 2010). However, such a reduction of relationality is at the very least a powerful discursive element of struggles over the social—and thus an element of the conjunctural moment to which free folk’s reinvestment of the collective responds.

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heterogeneity and multiplicity, to “nature” and animality (more on which below). It is in relation

to this sense of multiplicity that free folk’s aesthetic experimentation is most visibly and tellingly

articulated to the social, or specifically to its microsocialities. The aesthetic multiplicity I have

described spreads out to and is shaped by a richness of sociality. Consider one notorious example

of free folk’s foregrounding of the social: In 2003, Sunburned scheduled an entire West Coast

tour around members Paul Labrecque and Valerie Webb’s wedding in Alaska, serving as the

wedding band. Excerpts from show recordings before the wedding and the actual wedding itself

were collected on the double-LP Wedlock (2005). The record articulates environmental sounds, a

preacher’s words, and a concluding wedding toast to pronouncedly raucous funk and psychedelic

rock improvisations involving a variety of spontaneous guests, such as six-year-old “Agent 2”

and three-year-old “Agent W” on percussion (kris, 2004). Its sleeve art collects photos from the

wedding and surrounding happenings. Sunburned and the group’s peers here explicitly present a

set of collaborative practices as collective—and this is, notably, a mode of collectivity that is

irreducible to a clear group identity, let alone a hierarchic “Leviathan logic” (Gilbert, 2014) that

depends on identification with a leader or transcendent concept. Instead, this heterogeneous and

transversal sociality is articulated to an aesthetic investment in unpredictability and immersion.

This investment implies an eagerness to do away with (or perhaps override, through

Diederichsen’s accumulation of practice) conventions of genre, style, or reasonable-rational

artistic involvement—as suggested by the invitation to “go nuts” or “crazy” heard on Wedlock’s

“Double Invincibility.”

Through the album’s composition (and the tour itself), Sunburned explicitly centered the

foundational social dimension of free folk (Valentine’s “liberated people” or “free thinking

folk”) in a manner that recalls Fred Moten’s (2003) articulation of the “ensemble of the social”—

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a complex, never-complete collective “whole”—to the “ensemble of the senses” in its richness—

which exceeds the ocularcentrism, the fetishization of the visual, that Moten detects throughout

Euromodernity. Moten foregrounds this articulation of the social to the sensorial in free jazz as a

key expression of Blackness in its heterogeneity and irreducibility to Euromodern categories.

Free folk’s articulation of these two “ensembles” once again reinforces the formation’s

privileging of free jazz, but it is an articulation troubled by differing histories and questions of

appropriation: Throughout its history, rock music has drawn on the work of those who were

denied an everyday life (Grossberg, 1997b). Much of free folk’s power resides in its free jazz-

derived articulation of the social and the sensorial, going beyond “Eurological” modes of

improvisation that evict the personal and historical while explicitly connecting to the popular

(Lewis, 1996). But if this is an “Afrological” mode of improvisation, free folk nonetheless meets

some of its limitations in those unresolved tensions generated by its comparatively unreflected

appropriations and exclusions. Black experimental musics’ “whole” as described by Moten is

what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987; cf. Grossberg, 2014) would call a “radicle,” or the

“radicular”—directed against all unity and completeness, always cutting into the dominant. In

turn, free folk appears more “rhizomatic”—sprawling, unhaunted. This is enabled not least by

free folk’s alternative (rather than oppositional) self-placement “outside” of histories of and

struggles against oppression. I will return to this conundrum when discussing free folk’s

experimental-political potentials and limitations in the dissertation’s conclusion.

It is tempting to suggest a homology between Sunburned’s microsocialities and the

group’s “sonic chaos aesthetic,” between a supposed social horde and an aesthetic horde, but this

becomes harder to maintain when one considers this group’s composition and social dimension

in detail; and such a social-aesthetic homology certainly cannot be maintained in the case of the

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formation as a whole. The ensemble of the senses—the sheer sensorial multiplicity and hybridity

of, in this case, Sunburned’s on-stage performances—is articulated to the ensemble of the social,

but group structures differ too much and often do not maintain a fluidity or mobility comparable

to the music’s. In other words: The aesthetic horde, an imagined community, a fluid and highly

eclectic assemblage, is not—and does not have to be—matched exactly by an actual social horde.

However, the aesthetic horde and the material collectivity may augment each other: A group of

people engaged in “sonic chaos” on stage may well appear wilder, even scarier, than the same

group of people off-stage; such on-stage sonic chaos may well appear even more chaotic when

the collectivity generating it (and immersed in it) consists of twelve people and assorted objects

instead of a clearly defined four-piece rock band. Most obviously and pragmatically, even in

times of one-person “groups” that summon a multiplicity of voices with the help of loop pedals

or other devices, assembling a greater number of people may well facilitate the production and

articulation of a greater number of musical elements. The aesthetic intimation of collectivity, and

its actualization in group or even community form, thus feed free folk’s richness and intensity.

When this is not possible, free folk’s solo-polyvocalists nonetheless invoke a crowd, a horde, an

undefinable sprawl—often beyond the human, into the realm of the ghostlike or animalistic.

Having arrived at an understanding of free folk’s sensibility as articulating the social to a

quasi-holistic aesthetic assemblage, reinvesting in collective experimentation and experimental

collectivity to counter a perceived “flattening” of the world and an experienced dearth of viable

modes of collectivity, I want to return to the third structure of feeling outlined by Grossberg

(2015, 2018b; also see Grossberg, 2005). In particular, this leads me to the formation’s

relationship with temporality. Grossberg describes a contemporary sense of temporal alienation,

an increasing weirdness of time. Here, the present has become strange—has lost its presence—

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and has been disarticulated from past and future, not least through (e.g., “neoliberal”) attacks on

the present’s responsibility to the future, to be seen in the strategic shortsightedness of fiscal and

environmental politics. For Grossberg, this inhibits affective investment in and rigorous

experimentation with future worlds: Future can only matter in fairly limited ways when it is

largely disconnected from the present and articulated primarily as a marker of desired economic

success, an apocalyptic break, or a realm of radical uncertainty that is not merely unknown but

unknowable. Free folk reinvests and/or re-articulates time in several registers. Returning to

Encarnacao’s “immersive” and “montage” forms and their capacity for the “dislocation of our

experience of time,” one might claim that time becomes weird in much free folk, but in a

pleasurable way. Perception shifts; a temporary transformation is experienced that has more to

do with a sense of wonder and richness than with a precarious sense of being lost in the world.

But there are at least two modalities of temporal “weirdness” at play in free folk, best

exemplified by its drone and free jazz-aligned musics, respectively. Keenan’s (2003) claim that

“improvisation and the application of the drone open up these new folk musicians to the roar of

the cosmos” (p. 34) is correct in several ways. Free folk opens up to sonic and temporal

potentials. Consider its drone musicians, such as Pelt and Double Leopards:

It is clear that what is necessary to make sound travel, and to travel around sound, is very pure and simple sound, an emission or wave without harmonics (La Monte Young has been successful at this). … To be an artisan and no longer an artist, creator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the moment the artist connects a material with forces of consistency or consolidation. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 380)

Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps too eager to “leave the milieus and the earth behind” in this

paragraph and thereby risk neglecting their own warnings against the most extreme

deterritorializations; but their remarks are nonetheless useful for a study of free folk. If Pelt is the

“Hillbilly Theatre of Eternal Music,” very much in the lineage of La Monte Young’s exploration

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of sustained tones, it is also true that the group’s highly immersive, long-duration pieces open up

to a molecularity of sound and to a cosmic temporality. Drawing on Deleuze, Braidotti (2011b)

calls this “Aion, the dynamic and internally contradictory or circular time of becoming” (p. 228)

which is distinct from Chronos, linear time. Meanwhile, the improvisational moments of free

folk drawing on free jazz—often in some of its most frantic modes, from Albert Ayler in

Greenwich Village (1967) to Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun (1968)—could be described with

Jeremy Gilbert (2004) in terms of an “ecstasy of complexity” (p. 126) and as “opening onto a

‘cosmic’ space of infinite possibility” (p. 135) that is not just a cosmic space but also a cosmic

time. In order to reconstruct “presence” in a present that feels distant, free folk thus articulates

alternative temporalities that are irreducible to linear time, with its straightforward sense of

progression, and to the standardized, pulsed time of work and leisure. The classic claim to “being

in the moment” here implies a re-articulation of the relationship between past, present, and future

in the intensity of improvisational practice, against temporal alienation. For all these modalities

of free folk’s temporal experimentation, consider Diederichsen’s remarks on free folk’s

willingness to leave duration flexible or undefined. This offers opportunities for an unhurried

(yet potentially intense) exploration of time in its molecularity, its transformation, its becoming,

its complexity.

Free folk also re-articulates temporality in a historical-social register. The formation

notably constructs lineages of artistic experimentation across different genres and cultural

formations. With this canon—and beyond canons, with this odd imagined community—free folk

carves several interrelated series of creative practice out of the past and thereby reinvests an

experientially “distant” present with the help of a rich tapestry of authentic experimentalisms.

Imagination may be perceived as disarticulated from experimentation in the present; but the

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works of these (more or less) obscure predecessors, with whom free folk musicians feel a strong

affinity, “proves” the continuity of experimental explorations across the past and present—and

beyond. Ideally, free folk musicians connect to the protagonists of this canon in person, through

musical collaboration and friendship, or at least through their presence at festivals organized by

free folk musicians and label owners. In a sense, this social-material co-presence guarantees the

persistence of Valentine’s “sub-underground” as a transhistorical affective alliance.

Enunciative assemblages of free folk

The free folk formation is involved in articulating, and is itself articulated to, a hybrid

enunciative assemblage that resembles what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) call the

countersignifying and presignifying regimes of signs. The countersignifying regime or

assemblage articulates a warlike machine drawing “a line of abolition that turns back against the

great empires” (p. 131), the State apparatuses that attempt to capture the dynamic machine of the

nomads evoked by Deleuze and Guattari. In its dynamism, the war machine challenges more

static assemblages, even as those static assemblages draw on it to renew themselves.

Diederichsen’s “hordes” may not be hordes in the social-material sense, but their “sonic chaos

aesthetic” is often direct against a (perceived) culture-industrial homogenization and

individualization. The social notion of the horde may appear problematic in relation to the social

experimentation of Sunburned, NNCK, and their peers, given that these groups operate more like

networks than roaming, warlike collectivities. However, their forceful aesthetic modes of

collective experimentation enact a manifold and dynamic dispersion or transformation of

conventional musical-performative forms.

This is not to say that free folk does not have conventions of its own, or evades any pre-

existing conventions; but free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility does not prioritize

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convention. Instead, it privileges that which is perceived as unconventional, or as exploding the

conventional. It is also not to say that free folk’s work has never informed or been “captured” by

less emphatically experimental formations. As I will discuss in greater detail below, Animal

Collective’s trajectory led the group across enunciative assemblages that both were receptive to

certain elements of its experimental practice and drew it into a particular type of career trajectory

that required greater adherence to specific aesthetic conventions. Still, the likes of Sunburned,

NNCK, Charalambides, and Fursaxa have never quite been normalized through integration into

existing canons. To some degree, these artists have—for better or worse—fortified their practice

against certain types of capture (which is not necessarily to say that they have been successfully

“resistant” beyond the aesthetic dimension and that their practice should by default be considered

a model for “radical” aesthetic-social experimentation). The cultural industries, as encountered

by free folk, tend to serve as individualizing apparatuses of capture that demand recognizability;

they are, additionally, experienced as homogenizing apparatuses of capture whose specific

modes of individualization clash with free folk’s ideology of authenticity. Ideologically (through

a more “rugged” individualism) and affectively (through its investment in multiplicity and

transformation), free folk seeks to evade such apparatuses. This is, however, not simply the old

story of DIY autonomy against corporate scheming; culture-industrial apparatuses themselves

are contradictory machines in the struggle over individuality and collectivity, generating images

of creative individuality not always far removed from free folk’s ideological articulations while

largely proliferating—through economic “imperatives”—modes of corporate individuality that

disperse or mask collective creativity.

Perhaps even more important to free folk’s hybrid assemblage of enunciation is the

presignifying regime or assemblage, which “fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of

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expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves expressive forms

particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist

heterogeneously with the vocal form” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 130).

In other words, this enunciative assemblage privileges multiplicity. It cannot possibly be

reduced to the articulation of a signifier to a signified, let alone to the seemingly endless chains

of meaning present in the case of a “power takeover by the signifier”; but it may well contain

signifying practices, among many others. For instance, free folk sometimes actively signifies

collectivity, as in the band name “Animal Collective.” Regardless of the number of band

members present on any given recording, the name evokes collectivity, sociality, group

formation—beyond the human, even. As Diederichsen suggests, Animal Collective works with

imagery of collectivity, even as the group is not as radical in its social articulation of collectivity

as Sunburned, for instance, tends to be. A specific signifier—two words—points towards a

signified—a certain notion of collectivity, perhaps a group of animals. However, signification is

merely one mode of enunciation among many in free folk. Most remain asignifying first and

foremost: The spectral dronescapes of Double Leopards and the raw drones of Pelt do not refer

to anything in particular but instead generate immersion, open to different temporalities, and

invite different ways of listening that are perhaps more attuned to minute shifts in pitch or

timbre. Albums by Charalambides, especially after the 1990s, tend to dislocate any stable point

of reference, gliding, shifting, and delaying experience into liminal spaces and times—the

“psychedelic experience” that Encarnacao writes about. Recordings by Fursaxa, Inca Ore, and

The Skaters amass loops, especially of (often treated) voices and other elements to the point of

arriving at an unidentifiable, multi-dimensional sprawl that prohibits reduction to any specific

gendered (or even human) origin. Sunburned’s relentless rhythm section and the extreme volume

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of Bardo Pond’s live shows act on the body’s materiality (well beyond the ears) in a particularly

pronounced manner—perhaps even making it dance in Sunburned’s case, making it tremble in

Bardo Pond’s case, enveloping it in both. Animal Collective’s music is noted for its vocal

polyphony, again at times invoking the non-human and blurring the lines between the voice and

other instruments (Encarnacao, 2016). Simon Reynolds (2005a) writes:

Vocal extremism is an Animal Collective hallmark, and Here Comes The Indian teems with unhinged incantations, animalistic throat noise, heavily processed voices and grotesque lattices of harmony. The standout track “Panic”, made almost entirely out of vocal sounds, seems like an attempt to capture the vertigo and paralysis of an anxiety attack. (p. 30)

Free folk’s “prevent[ion of] any power takeover by the signifier” also involves a relative

disinvestment from representation. This is perhaps one of the points where free folk’s grappling

with post-punk and post-Reaganite crises of investment becomes particularly salient—and

paradoxically well-aligned with dominant structures of feeling. Free folk is actively invested in

enunciative multiplicity but unable to unironically embrace representation. Free folk’s

nonrepresentational richness is one of its main strengths; but its disinvestment from seemingly

trite representation can make its politics illegible—and, worse, can contribute to a disinvestment

from politics itself in favor of the richness of the aesthetic-experimental (Spiegel, 2013). Still,

there is much to be learned from free folk’s affirmation of multiplicity, from its asignifying and

nonpresentational investments and techniques.

Free folk’s sources for all these techniques are manifold. The formation practices a quite

remarkable eclecticism across perceived cultural borders. Given that it also responds to a residual

sense of suburban boredom, it is not surprising that some of its techniques for immersion in the

(perceived) weird draw on older rock formations. Free folk’s affective investment in the

potentialities of the weird and of hybridity extends and heightens the exoticist tendencies of

much (especially psychedelic) rock music. The “intellectual eccentrics” of free folk attempt to

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diversify and intensify what is perceived as a flat world—that is, a lifeworld characterized by the

proliferation and enclosure of popular culture and, in Grossberg’s words, the “quotidienization”

of affect—through such exoticist articulation. For all intents and purposes, free folk articulates

the experimental, the weird, the Other, and similar categories on a continuum rather than as

distinct realms accessed separately from each other. They all are experienced as opening onto a

more-than, to a realm of potential beyond a perceived dominant aesthetic and relation to the

world. This is even noticeable in free folk’s moments of signification: Album titles such as Here

Comes the Indian or A Stone for Angus MacLise are highly distinct in the actual histories they

reference; yet ultimately they serve a similar purpose: the articulation of a rich realm of potential

that is to be actualized in the music. Ultimately, free folk contradictorily both opens up beyond

the “major,” dominant, exclusionary standard and reinforces it through the flattening of

difference at the expense of those whose stories are already undertold, whose expressions are

rarely acknowledged.

There is a richness of experience that is sought here through alignment with the Other,

the non-human, and the (apparently) strangely human, as is also seen and heard in the work of

those free folk practitioners who, like Fursaxa, Six Organs of Admittance, and The Skaters, show

an interest in occultist-magical imagery and practice. The exotic and the aesthetically

unconventional are articulated into a richer, expanded, “more-than” experience. This is aligned

with, and historically connected to, free folk’s psychedelicism, with its interest in the expansion

of minds and the shifting of perception. Consider the title of Albert Ayler’s piece “Universal

Indians,” taken up both as the name of the predecessor project of noise-rock band Wolf Eyes and

in David Keenan’s (2007) remarks on the aesthetics of free folk. This phrase is suggestive of a

cosmic outsiderdom, perceived (however unconsciously) as heightened by Ayler’s own

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Blackness, musical experimentation and intensity, and famed spirituality. Free folk musicians

invest in an eclecticism of the weird, the cosmic, the experimental; it is from these that artists’

imaginaries are drawn (and where free folk’s ideology detects “authenticity”). In free folk,

“everyone really creates their own worlds” (Labanna Babalon, as cited in Spiegel, 2013, p. 73).

Every free folk musician is understood as containing worlds; and these are not conventional

everyday worlds, even though they are consistently produced in the everyday. There is a desire

to differ, to expand, to transform, to imagine otherwise, to at least go beyond conventional

understandings of clear identity.

This plays out in somewhat contradictory ways. Free folk’s ideology partially draws on a

subjectifying assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) that reterritorializes the weird worlds

of free folk on specific individuals (whose very individuality is thus articulated by the operations

of this subjectifying assemblage in the first place). Here, perceived markers of creativity become

points of subjectification: The creativity that is perceived as a record is heard or a performance is

attended is personalized, individualized, in a re-articulation of romantic ideals of artistry and a

simultaneous drawing on contemporary articulations of subjectivity that privilege individuality at

the expense of most modes of collectivity (Gilbert, 2014; Grossberg, 2005). However, free folk’s

sensibility far exceeds such reterritorializations, drawing instead on the presignifying and

countersignifying assemblages in their dynamic multiplicity and thereby enabling

transformations irreducible to the individual. Although it might be tempting to trace the tensions

between the formation’s ideology and sensibility onto dichotomies of the residual and the

emergent, the regressive (individualism) and the progressive (experimental collectivity), it is also

worth noting that free folk’s ideological privileging of personal creativity aligns it with

Afrological modes of improvisation against the eviction of the personal that George Lewis

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(1996) detects in Eurological improvisation. The belief in personal creativity is thus not

necessarily inhibitive of collective experimentation, let alone an instance of individualist false

consciousness in the face of irreducible collectivity; it can itself be a part of, perhaps even a

conduit for, some of free folk’s practices of multiplicity and transformation. The affective charge

of apparently personal “worlds,” whatever their ideological articulation, may fuel the formation’s

sociality and increase the formation’s capacities for transformation.

This investment in the transformative is most visible in free folk’s oft-cited relationship

to (non-human) nature, be it in its inclusion of field recordings or its references to plant and

animal worlds (Büsser, 2007). For instance: Sunburned’s album and song titles include Earth Do

Eagles Do, Get Wet With the Animal, “Hoof Trip,” The Jaybird, “Owl-Town Spaceout,”

“Ratmap,” Schmetterling, “Serpent’s Wish,” Unmuzzled Ox, and, tellingly, Wild Animal. Büsser

describes this as an anti-consumerist essentialism, presumably suggesting that, in free folk,

“nature” is the authentic, the real, the essence of things. To connect to nature is to reconnect to

something originary that has been marred, homogenized, or hidden by consumerism. However,

in his view, this is an essentialism that is never directed towards purity,20 as the natural, the

essential, is itself heterogeneous. The musical expression of this unconventional essentialism is

always contaminated in and by its aesthetic diversity. But beyond free folk’s anti-consumerism,

and beyond notions of “essentialism” (a term that Büsser might well be expanding unduly), such

references can be thought in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal,” another

concept that Büsser invokes.

Jeremy Gilbert (2006) summarizes “becoming” as “a kind of vector of transformation

which, properly understood, has no point of departure and no final destination. Becoming thus

20 On the other hand, the Eurocentrism of “neofolk” groups such as Death in June is in fact directed towards such purity—see the chapter on the industrial formation.

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conceived is never ‘pure’ flux: it always has direction, but direction is not the same thing as

destination” (p. 184). As a concept, “becoming” is directed against stable notions of “being,”

against unitary notions of identity. It is, instead, aligned with transformation. For Deleuze and

Guattari (1980/1987), it always leads away from the majoritarian Euromodern ideal of the

rational, white, male, heterosexual, property-owning (etc.) subject (Braidotti, 2011b). This ideal

cannot contain the countless becomings regularly undergone in a variety of contexts and

situations. As becoming leads away from the (only seemingly) stable ideal imposed on the

complexity of reality, it leads through those terms excluded by the ideal: becoming-woman,

becoming-child, becoming-animal, and so on.

However, this is not a process that literally ends in one’s “being” a woman, child, animal,

or otherwise. It is also not about an imitation of these, or even a structural analogy to these. It

privileges affinity over identity. Therefore, there is no point in claiming that Sunburned, NNCK,

or their peers (aim to) turn into animals, or even imitate them through their strange sounds, the

masks they wear, the proliferation of references to animality, and so on. Instead, the on-stage

performance involves much stranger transformations opening to a richness of unusual and

sometimes unknown experience; the many titular animals and plants suggest immersion, perhaps

even an imagined community beyond the human. In the case of the most alien soundscapes of

free folk (as in the work of The Skaters and Double Leopards, much of Inca Ore’s music, and

Fursaxa’s album Kobold Moon from 2008), one might even speak of a “becoming-insect” that

points towards “the inaudible, the imperceptible, that roar which lies on the other side of silence,

the cosmic buzz” (Braidotti, 2011b, p. 106). Human voices here appear to dissolve into

something else that appears impossible to anthropomorphize, perhaps a “rhizomatic music [that]

aims at deterritorializing our acoustic habits” (p. 109) and remains embedded in a non-human (or

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rather not-only-human) world. The hybrid enunciative assemblage that conditions free folk’s

collective-experimental sensibility is rhizomatic: an irreducible multiplicity that enables a myriad

of possible modes of expression. For Braidotti, “the becoming-minoritarian of music produces a

practice of expression without a monolithic or unitary subject that supervises the operations and

capitalizes upon them. It literally brings the cosmos home” (p. 110). As imagination is under

attack in a seemingly flattened world, perhaps free folk’s “social-musical task” (Diederichsen,

2004a) is the bringing-home of the cosmos, after all.

One instructive example of the powers and limits of free folk’s enunciative constitution is

the career of Animal Collective, probably the most visible and (in market terms) successful

group to emerge from the formation. In its very success, the group traversed enunciative

assemblages whose composition differs considerably from those defining the free folk formation.

Though rarely discussed in relation to the likes of Sunburned and NNCK, Animal Collective has

strong ties to acts such as the drone-centric Axolotl and the noise-aligned Black Dice, as well as

Gang Gang Dance, a group whose move from “noisier” beginnings to hybrid, pluralist pop forms

resembles Animal Collective’s. Though its ascent was charted in and aided by broadly “indie”-

centric publications such as online magazine Pitchfork, the group thus emerged from a specific

New York-based scene involved in the free folk formation.

Animal Collective consists of any combination of core members Avey Tare (Dave

Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb), and Geologist (Brian Weitz),

alongside occasional guests. Martin Büsser (2007) suggests that the pseudonyms used by Animal

Collective’s members mark the group’s dissolution of clearly delineated identities into parts of a

pack or swarm. One element of Animal Collective’s stage presence in the earliest years of the

21st century adds to and complicates Büsser’s thesis. To quote Reynolds (2005a):

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Although [Animal Collective, Black Dice, and Gang Gang Dance] are very different entities, all have a commitment to – and reputation for – turning gigs into events, with a vibe that’s electric, verging on shamanistic. “Our way of doing that was wearing masks, to portray the names we had,” explains Portner. According to Dibb, the masks and make-up weren’t theatrical (à la Caroliner Rainbow, an outfit AC are often compared to), but something they did for themselves more than the audience, a way of signalling they were crossing into a “special space”. More recently, though, AC have dropped the dressing up, except for Geologist, who still sports a headlamp of the type worn by miners and spelunkers. (p. 28)

For Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), masks are not necessarily directed against dominant

modes of subjectivity, which are characterized by the idealized human face. Instead, masks can

“assur[e] the erection, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body,”

which may match Portner’s remark on the portrayal—the representation—of individual names.

But when articulated to the group’s sonic multiplicity and its psychedelic, potentially dislocating

concerts during these early years, masks more likely “assur[e] the head’s belonging to the body,

its becoming-animal” (p. 201); or at least this example displays the sheer multiplicity of

enunciative practices afforded by the presignifying assemblage and thus free folk’s collective-

experimental sensibility, which can perfectly well accommodate signifying practices without

foregrounding them at the expense of other modes of enunciation. Early Animal Collective thus

enacted a potential, partial dissolution or at least dislocation of individual identity, directed

against notions of a unitary subject. A set of animal-becomings—including Encarnacao’s “flocks

of birds or chattering monkeys”—is the group’s most salient mode of transformation, articulated

to and into the dense and kaleidoscopic sound of so many of its releases over the years. Animal

Collective’s investment in transformation, in sensorial immersion, is also present in the recurring

lyrical and visual references to food (2007’s Strawberry Jam and its illustrative cover, 2012’s

“Applesauce”), in the group’s psychedelic film collaborations (2010’s ODDSAC, 2018’s

Tangerine Reef), and recurring lyrical and sonic evocations of water (Szatan, 2018). Similarly,

the group’s investment in transformation draws on the non-human, but also on the not-quite-

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human. When Animal Collective draws on childhood, the childlike, or play, as in the story of

young boys “mak[ing] the music of childhood” in the notes accompanying Spirit They’re Gone,

Spirit They’ve Vanished (Avey Tare & Panda Bear, 2000) or in songs such as “Meet the Light

Child,” “The Living Toys” (both 2001), and “We Tigers” (2004), the group often does not so

much imitate childhood or play at being children in an unproblematic, straightforward way but

instead articulates the innocence and imagination ascribed to childhood into something more

complex and even sinister:

The marriage of psychedelia and fairy-tale imagery goes back at least to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Dead’s Aoxomoxoa: the first flowering of psychedelia was joyously regressive, celebrating juvenilia as the antidote to modern rationality. Yet what was indelibly excised was menace-- [sic] what the gnomes and newspaper taxis conceal.21 Remember the boat ride through the tunnel in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? In the middle of this sucrose wonderland, there’s something fucking awful. … Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished is a masterful piece of electro-acoustic fairy-tale music; yet its squealing electronics, and vitrified rhythms suggest something darker. (Sirota, 2000, paras. 2–3)

Even as some early releases already deployed comparatively conventional song forms, the group

articulated free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility into something particularly immersive.

Childhood here is not something to be imitated, but a complex—partly romantic but not fully

romanticizable—gateway into an experimental mode of imagination.22 In the face of enclosures

of imagination and utilitarian-capitalist mobilizations of play (Grossberg, 2005), Animal

21 Sirota is perhaps too quick to assert the “indelible” excision of menace from early psychedelia’s articulation of the childlike. On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Pink Floyd, 1967/2007), for instance, the deliberately simplistic lyrics barely conceal portent (as in the one-sided hide-and-seek of “Flaming”) or the sheer weirdness of emerging sexuality (as in the bizarre collage following the last verse of “Bike”). Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished emerges from a less optimistic structure of feeling and intensifies the fairy-tale darkness and weirdness, but it is not a radical departure from Piper in this regard. 22 Diederichsen (2007) makes a related point in his review of Strawberry Jam, which he interprets as complicating mutual articulations of innocence, sexuality, and utopianism so as to avoid the infantilism and regression that could easily be ascribed to Animal Collective’s music.

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Collective draws on residual articulations of childhood that, not unlike Diederichsen’s hordes,

leave play undetermined in advance.

In a different register, the group’s initial release patterns also match the free folk

formation’s orientation well. Here, the release of music can be characterized in terms of the

relaxation and generosity described by Diederichsen’s “horde” writings. Many free folk acts are

known for their sprawling output and their willingness to publish recordings of very low fidelity.

The album format here is not necessarily a vehicle for grand statements, for albums that resemble

what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) call “the unique book, the total work, all possible

combinations inside the book, the tree-book, the cosmos-book: all of these platitudes so dear to

the avant-gardes” (p. 141) in their description of the “postsignifying” (or subjectifying)

assemblage. Even if some free folk embraces this modernist investment in the album as a distinct

and largely self-contained artwork, the formation is much more characterized by a relaxed

approach to recorded output. In Animal Collective’s case, this becomes more obvious

retrospectively, in the decision to reissue the first few albums made by members of the group—

Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (2000), Danse

Manatee (2001) by the same two members and Geologist, and the self-titled album by Campfire

Songs (2001)—under the name Animal Collective. The imposition of this certainly evocative

name strengthened a distinct group identity and added a form of recognizability that marked a

notable shift from earlier, more obfuscatory naming practices (Leech, 2010; Reynolds, 2005a).

As the group garnered fame with the release of the playful psych-folk of Sung Tongs

(2004), the shimmering rock of Feels (2005), and the “funfair electronics” (Diederichsen, 2007)

of Strawberry Jam (2007), it was increasingly articulated to a broader (“indie”) formation

characterized by signifying and subjectifying elements. Its individual members became more

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distinct, were granted authorship, became individual artist-subjects. At the more acclaimed end

of the spectrum, Panda Bear emerged as a much-praised solo auteur with his 2007 album Person

Pitch, which received a coveted 9.4 rating from Pitchfork (Richardson, 2007a) and was named

the site’s album of the year (Pitchfork, 2007). It was now that the “construction of the face” truly

took place and the group’s pseudonyms became markers of an individualized subjectivity.

Simultaneously, an adaptation of expectations for the album format to a rockist or maybe

modernist ideal, “all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes,” was taking place: A

statement is expected, one masterpiece every two years (rather than, say, Sunburned’s dozens of

homemade CD-Rs potentially released in the same timespan), a codified vitality that is

understood to make artists and listeners reach the highest peaks of creativity (and rating) while

nonetheless normalizing the artistic practice. Beyond this, a cyclical model of artists’ creativity

and vitality is often adopted and imposed in evaluations of artists’ output—comparable to the

rock formation’s “ideology of authenticity” as outlined by Grossberg (1992), where “the history

of rock is always seen as a cyclical movement between high (authentic) and low (coopted)

points, although different fans will disagree over which moments constitute the high and the low

points” (p. 207). Grossberg does not discuss individual artists here, but this cyclical model is

often applied to artists’ trajectories as well. The reception of Animal Collective’s music has

followed a remarkably predictable trajectory. It peaked in 2009 with the release of Merriweather

Post Pavilion, a colorful and immersive collection of electronic psych-pop songs that received a

rare 9.6 rating from Pitchfork (Richardson, 2009), topped the website’s album of the year list

(Pitchfork, 2009), and reached number 13 on the Billboard 200 U.S. album charts (Billboard,

n.d.). The album had been anticipated enthusiastically (Szatan, 2018); in the Panda Bear

composition “My Girls,” it delivered the closest the band had come to a “hit.”

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Even as its albums turned increasingly accessible (more song-based, less likely to involve

extreme frequencies) and successful, the group embarked on many unpredictable, hard-to-codify

projects over the years. Now that the steps of the group’s finally-recognizable members were

scrutinized as individual trajectories—individualizations different in degree to free folk’s own

creative individualism—these stranger projects were evaluated quite differently than they would

have been during the group’s early years. If NNCK had published a selection of inverted pieces

of music, running backwards from finish to start, few would have taken notice or complained;

when Avey Tare (with his then-partner, Kría Brekkan) did so, remarkably negative reviews

(Richardson, 2007b) and fan-made corrected versions appeared. Still, such a perceived misstep is

easily forgiven as a vanity project if Animal Collective itself, as the now identifiable main

project (because everything else is now perceived as a “side project” rather than part of a

multiplicity of projects engaging in everyday experimentation), stays on track. Animal

Collective’s success gave the group the opportunity to branch out and rely on resources far

exceeding those of the formation it emerged from; at times, other artists of the free folk

formation and related experimental-musical realms have joined Animal Collective on tour as

support acts. The band thus retained a clear connection to the formation it emerged from and

enabled greater exposure for largely obscure peers. However, anecdotal evidence—e.g.,

inattentive audience chatter during a support set by Finland’s Islaja at a 2007 concert in Dublin

or dismissals of Grouper’s more free-form music on a 2009 tour (There Was No Sound,

2009)23—suggests that segments of the band’s evolving audience associated Animal Collective

23 This review of a show in Toronto notes: “[Grouper] has the psych-folk element to her music that makes her a logical connection to the headliners, but last night’s audience was made up of people wearing keffiyehs soaked in LSD who had no interest in droney psychedelic music with no beat to it” (There Was No Sound, 2009, para. 2).

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less with the free folk formation than with a broader “indie” formation articulated to a different

hybrid enunciative assemblage with a stronger subjectifying dimension.

Despite, or because of, Animal Collective’s success, these transformations in fame and

status—as well as transformations in band members’ personal lives, as they now live far apart

from each other—came with strong shifts in the group’s practice and reception. Reactions to

2012’s dense and occasionally harsh-sounding Centipede Hz were far more mixed (e.g., Berman,

2012) than reviews of Merriweather Post Pavilion had been. As Geologist (as cited in Szatan,

2018) says:

I remember when we were making Centipede Hz, Noah said something to me about the way [Panda Bear solo album] Tomboy had been received in relation to Person Pitch. When he started playing the Tomboy material first, someone actually screamed they wanted their money back because they didn’t hear anything from Person Pitch. He just made a comment like, “When you make something that all of a sudden has become so iconic, there’s very little you can do after that. Whether people like the new record or they don’t, we now have expectations.” (2012-2018 section, para. 3)

Merriweather was the group’s first album to lead to a promotional tour in the conventional sense.

Just as the setlists for the concerts following the release of Sung Tongs had consisted largely of

previewed Feels material, and the setlists for the concerts following the release of Feels had

consisted largely of previewed Strawberry Jam material, songs from Merriweather had been

performed in concert well in advance on extensive tours around and following the release of

Strawberry Jam. But in Merriweather’s case, the group continued touring the material following

its publication, then proceeded to do the same for Centipede Hz, and fully arrived at a

conventional cycle with 2016’s Painting With (note the increasing gaps between album releases)

—an album release followed by a tour dedicated primarily to material from that album, which

had not been performed before.

Not only did this normalization take place, but reactions to Painting With suggest that the

group has been fully inscribed into a cyclical model in many listeners’ perceptions, failing to live

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up to the supposedly zeitgeist-expressing highs of Merriweather and now constituting a slightly

embarrassing reminder of other times. Not only did Painting With receive the group’s lowest

Pitchfork score since Danse Manatee (Powell, 2016; Sirota, 2001), but British website The

Quietus published a gleefully negative review (Arizuno, 2016) that, while praising some past

work, mocked the band’s recurring childlike imagery, including the members’ pseudonyms—not

the only source expressing such sentiments. The evocations of and connections to childhood,

which Animal Collective embraced more than most other free folk acts, are best understood as

embedded in a series of interrelated becomings in a rhizomatic, presignifying assemblage.

However, they are reduced to the apparent signification or even representation of childhood, and

thus to triteness and naivety, when translated by and into pessimistic and nihilistic structures of

feeling (Grossberg, 2018b). Free folk’s joyous abandon has often risked tending towards the

quietist (Spiegel, 2013); in light of a broader cultural doubling-down on irony and cynicism in

particularly dark times, invocations of childhood that are not explicitly aligned with political

positions (and represented as such) perhaps appear as the very definition of apolitical naivety.

Meanwhile, the album’s Pitchfork review paints a picture of a band that has changed, also

through band members’ parenthood, and at least temporarily lost some of its vitality:

As someone who has no hangups about admitting that this band changed not only how I think about music but how I thought about life, it’s easy to wonder if Painting With and Centipede Hz signal an ending, or at least a consequential lull. … Work can be scheduled, magic can’t. (Powell, 2016, para. 7)

A normalized, rockist-heroic type of career arc or cycle has been attributed to the band. Animal

Collective’s articulation to different cultural formations molded the group’s trajectory into a

productive yet also restrictive one in the image of a cyclical model; perhaps a 2018 tour on

which the group’s duo version of Avey Tare and Panda Bear performed Sung Tongs (2004) in its

entirety (Monroe, 2018), thereby confirming its canonization as a definitive masterpiece, is the

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clearest expression of this incorporeal—discursive rather than bodily—transformation (Deleuze

& Guattari, 1980/1987). The collective-experimental character of many free folk projects is in

tension with individualizing and normalizing tendencies encountered in parts of the cultural

industries, to which the formation is less well-attuned; indeed, free folk’s sensibility was partly

articulated in response to these same tendencies. Its aesthetic “war machine” may well have

reached one of its limits in Animal Collective’s case, restricted by a more established apparatus;

but for how long? Animal Collective’s recently re-emphasized improvisational orientation and

pre-pandemic return to the testing of unreleased songs on tour may point towards a more

comfortable negotiation of the group’s unique situatedness, perhaps leading out of the impasse of

culture-industrial and critical overcoding. As on the group’s EP Meeting of the Waters (2017),

sometimes it is good to just let the water flow as you play.

Conclusion

Sunburned Hand of the Man might be the last of the great American free rock collectives. There was a time, not too long ago, when every region of this great republic could boast of its own visionary troupe of seekers and improvisers, thrumming at the frequency of the illuminated world. … It was a glorious time to be a weirdo, even amidst the smoldering wreck of the George W. Bush administration. … It felt to me like the mystical democracy of Walt Whitman. It was never arch or jittery or wiry; it sprawled like the continent and massed like the seas. … Most of those groups have since gone dormant—disbanded entirely or decomposed into smaller units and solo projects. But the Sunburned Hand of the Man remains. (Sirota, 2021b, para. 1)

Historian and music writer Brent S. Sirota’s liner notes to Sunburned’s Pick a Day to Die

(2021) are a potent expression of the free folk formation’s collective-experimental sensibility

with its investment in multiplicity and immersion (“it sprawled like the continent and massed

like the seas”), its embrace of “weirdness,” and its affinity with a romantic mysticism carrying

political—“democratic”—implications. Sirota’s remarks also represent some important

discourses surrounding free folk’s history. Free folk, here, is contemporaneous with the Bush

era; and there is a somewhat melancholic sense that the formation’s heyday has long passed. This

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chapter has attempted to avoid anchoring free folk in its period of greatest visibility and in its

relation to the Bush-era war state of the same period. Instead, I have connected the formation’s

sensibility to longer-term structures of feeling that precede the attacks of September 11, 2001,

and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, it can be instructive to take a look at free folk’s

complex relationship with this period—and beyond, so as to counter all-too cyclical

periodizations of the formation’s creative practice.

Regardless of the formation’s emergence over the course of the 1990s, it was indeed from

(approximately) 2003 to 2007 that free folk was at its most visible as a formation, as distinct

from individual free folk-affiliated acts such as Animal Collective and Grouper, whose status

would continue to grow over the following years. For instance, in 2003, The Wire published

Keenan’s report from Brattleboro; in 2004 and 2005, Diederichsen wrote his “horde” pieces for

several (academic and popular) German-language publications; in late 2006, the All Tomorrow’s

Parties festival in Minehead, Somerset, curated by Thurston Moore, felt like a great free folk

(and noise) “sub-underground” meet-up, with Bardo Pond, Charalambides,

Corsano/Flaherty/Yeh, Double Leopards, Fursaxa, Inca Ore, Magik Markers, MV & EE, NNCK,

Six Organs of Admittance, The Skaters, Sunburned, Sun City Girls, Wolf Eyes, Wooden Wand,

and many others all present alongside international peers such as Ashtray Navigations, Taurpis

Tula, Richard Youngs (UK), Islaja, and Kemialliset Ystävät (Finland) as well as groups from

more or less related formations such as industrial surrealists Nurse With Wound, classic free jazz

duo Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink, and reunited proto-punks (and noise-rock progenitors)

The Stooges. Although this festival “only” had space for a few thousand people and was not

necessarily itself a defining moment of the formation, it retrospectively “feels” like further

indication that free folk achieved peak visibility or peak (visible) activity around 2006.

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The genesis of free folk’s sensibility is best situated in an affective landscape more

specific to the 1980s and 1990s. This conjuncture was characterized by an emergent sense of

“flatness” (crises of investment), contextually specific enclosures of imagination, and temporal

alienation, as well as a perhaps more obvious alienation from an apparently triumphant

“corporate America.” This alienation and this apparent triumph do not simply imply a culturally

and economically oppressive dominance of specific corporations but instead feed into and arise

from large-scale struggles over and reconfigurations of individuality and collectivity (Grossberg,

2005). However, it is not surprising that some critics emphasize free folk’s relation to the dread

and authoritarian tendencies of the post-9/11, Bush-era United States. This is when the formation

coalesced into wider perceptibility, helped by increasingly globalized music media—print and

digital, including various social media platforms of the pre-Facebook generation. It is not exactly

wrong to approach free folk from this angle. The perceived wildness of free folk’s collective-

experimental character and presentation, with its complex, misleadingly obvious connections to

the 1960s counterculture, appeared to (and to some degree did) offer a counterpoint to an

administration that, in league with corporate peers, was happy to mobilize advanced techno-

economic apparatuses to murder racialized Others abroad and employ nationalist discourses and

fear to quell dissent at home. Earlier in 2006, Tom Rapp, another beloved predecessor of free

folk and primary member of (explicitly anti-war) 1960s psychedelic folk band Pearls Before

Swine, joked about George W. Bush during his set at the sixth Terrastock festival; of course it

was clear that we, the few hundreds attending this cozy gathering of often experimental musics

in Providence, Rhode Island, were the right audience for such quips, even as free folk itself was

rarely as explicit (and representational) in its politics as many of its countercultural heroes had

been. Additionally, surely no one should be surprised by conceptualizations of free folk as

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responding to nationalist tendencies when, for instance, one of the formation’s most important

bands (Sunburned) emerged from a prior group called The Shit-Spangled Banner.

If this chapter maintains that free folk and its sensibility cannot be reduced to the most

salient cultural-political trends of the mid-2000s, that is not to claim that free folk simply carried

an unchanged 1990s sensibility through its years of wider exposure. Instead, I want to suggest

that those years saw minor transformations in free folk’s sensibility, in that its already existing

sensibility was quite easily articulated to affective landscapes and ideological concerns of the

Bush era. Drawing on a presignifying assemblage, free folk invested in multiplicity and

transformation and offered opportunities for challenging but also comfortable multi-sensorial

immersion in community, in music, in imagination. Its already existing, lived attempts at

embracing the richness, weirdness, and comfort of collectivity appeared at odds with explicitly

articulated post-9/11 anxieties and demands to rally around the flag. Even as free folk’s embrace

of the Other in so many guises reproduced stereotypes and exclusion, it appeared notably

incompatible with the callous destruction of the Other that took place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Perhaps most conducive to free folk’s articulation to an anti-war, anti-Bush oppositionality were

those tendencies it drew from a counter-signifying assemblage: The stubborn, at times raucous

multiplicity of its aesthetic experimentation was designed to shield it against culture-industrial

capture but lent itself to the homological ascription and performance of something more socially

“warlike.” The aesthetic war machine thus looks like a socio-political war machine directed

against capture by authoritarian State forces—even though this is mostly not what free folk is.

Simultaneously, free folk’s nonrepresentational aesthetics can also make it appear quietist or

escapist; and while there is truth to that (Spiegel, 2013), it does not tell the whole story of free

folk’s cultural-political potentials, which I will return to in the dissertation’s conclusion. Either

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way, free folk lent itself to discursive re-articulation in, to, and into the Bush years; but at the

same time, free folk is not defined by these years. More importantly, it responds to what could be

somewhat reductively called a “neoliberal,” post-Reaganite context.

Nor does the end of the Bush era mark the end of free folk’s story, or at least the

beginning of an inevitable decline. As Sirota points out, the formation’s improvising collectives

have certainly become less active in the time since. Economic and technological transformations

can play a part in shaping and inhibiting certain key expressions of a sensibility, in this case

resulting in the decreased viability of group practice in relation to solo projects. However, even

at the time of writing (October 2021), the last two years have seen new releases by Marcia

Bassett and Samara Lubelski, The Black Twig Pickers, Magik Markers, MV & EE, The Reds,

Greens & Purples (Glenn Donaldson of the Jewelled Antler collective), Six Organs of

Admittance, Spires That in the Sunset Rise, and Sunburned, among others—most of these during

a global pandemic, no less! Jeffrey Alexander of The Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea, one

of the key protagonists of Leech’s psychedelic folk chronicle, has been as active as ever solo and

with his more recent Dire Wolves project; Chris Corsano, Heather Leigh, Samara Lubelski, Six

Organs of Admittance, and Wooden Wand have never quite slowed down. Double Leopards and

NNCK are long gone, but many of their individual members (e.g., Marcia Bassett and Pat

Murano, respectively) remain highly active. It is true that Fursaxa and Inca Ore only rarely

release music these days, if at all; solo guitarist Jack Rose and Sunburned member Marc Orleans

have passed away; and JOMF only seems to return intermittently. Still, many free folk musicians

seem to be enacting Valentine’s call for the stubbornness and persistence of the “sub-

underground”—a different type of subjectification that values and enacts continuous if

sometimes imperceptible long-time engagement over the significant and over-signifying highs

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and lows of the cyclical. A cynical reading could simply dismiss this investment in apparently

undiluted, eccentric, individual creativity as symptomatic of a romantic ideology. Still, this

investment produces actual effects of its own. Even though it is sometimes articulated to

individualist-ideological elements, free folk’s affective investment in creativity is ultimately also

an investment in collectivity that fosters the building of long-term relationships of mutual

support and empowerment. Free folk struggles in its own ways with a subjectifying assemblage

that values the “statement” album more than seemingly fragmentary activity; Sirota (2021b) and

Gardner (2021) correctly point out that Sunburned’s new album feels like the group’s first album

proper since 2010’s “A,” even though it has released various characteristically smaller-scale

works on CD-R, cassette tape, and as digital downloads in the years since. Sometimes, as in the

case of this album’s promotion, free folk accepts its interpellation by and into such narratives;

but mostly, it just keeps going, messily and unpredictably (which, of course, is a narrative of its

own).

The mere persistence of free folk musicians as musicians does not necessarily counter the

narrative that free folk peaked in the first few years of the 21st century. After all, an investment in

stubborn, persistent “sub-underground” practice could also be understood as a call for stylistic

stasis. However, free folk’s investment in the weird, the unconventional, the richness of the

world does favor a certain degree of (experimental!) risk-taking, even when there are stylistic

constants to be found. Matt Valentine’s Preserves (2019) is recognizable as a Matt Valentine

album, and would have been in 2003, thanks to its cosmic themes, psychedelic guitar, and

Valentine’s characteristically nasal vocals; but its dubby, cosmic viscosity also adds further

dilatory and dislocatory shades to an already sprawling œuvre. Marcia Bassett (Zaïmph) and Pat

Murano (Decimus) have successfully intensified free folk’s temporal experimentation through

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industrial-inflected drones that are often more emphatically “electronic”-sounding than they

would have been in the early 21st century, when free folk’s reduction to an acoustic naturalism

was more easily tenable (if just as dubious). Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance has built

additional unpredictability into his (and others’) music by creating the “Hexadic” system of

playing card-based aleatoric composition (Calore, 2015; Riley, 2017). Among the most notable

evolutions in the free folk formation, one finds Spires That in the Sunset Rise, who were, in the

mid-2000s, a disquieting psychedelic folk band in the eccentric tradition of Comus and perhaps

Current 93, but whose core duo of Ka Baird and Taralie Peterson has since embraced reeds and

extended vocal experimentation at the expense of their prior guitar-based work that, while

idiosyncratic, fit more neatly into the “folk” framework prioritized by so many commentators on

(parts of) the formation. In her solo work and various collaborative endeavors, Baird has also

further embraced electronic instruments and theatrical elements, making her perhaps one of the

most recognizable artists in current popular-experimental musics of the United States.

Aesthetically, her current work may not always resemble what free folk is best-known for

stylistically, but it maintains free folk’s investment in immersion, multiplicity, and

transformation, enacting radical and alien becomings, multiplying (or rather articulating a

multiplicity of) the voice. In the dissertation’s conclusion, I want to return to free folk’s

becomings and what they suggest about the formation’s potentials; for now, it is time to move

back several decades (and, mostly, across the Atlantic) in order to analyze a formation that was

among free folk’s key predecessors—even though it differed considerably in its sensibility.

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CHAPTER 2: INDUSTRIAL MUSIC—AN ESOTERIC-EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY

The industrial music formation, as this project understands it, emerged in the mid-to-late

1970s in the United Kingdom—simultaneous with the emergence of both Thatcherism and punk.

Its best-known initial protagonists include London-based Throbbing Gristle (TG) and Cabaret

Voltaire from Sheffield. These groups are known for their embrace of dissonance, “noise,” and

electronic experimentation, resulting in a low-fidelity, somewhat undifferentiated, sometimes

“excessively overdriven or murky” (Hegarty, 2007, p. 109) sound with connotations of decay

and darkness; some artists and commentators regularly set this sound in relation to the decay and

perceived darkness of British (post-)industrial cityscapes. TG’s own label, Industrial Records,

gave the formation and the genre of industrial music its (potentially misleading) name and served

as a key lightning rod for the formation’s constitution. The music of many artists who emerged

from TG’s milieu differs greatly from these early groups’ recordings and live performances, at

times embracing various types of psychedelic pop and folk, drone, techno, synth-pop, and other

styles, while sharing and re-articulating their predecessors’ sensibility.

This formation is not the same as the genre of “industrial music,” which has proliferated

and expanded dramatically over the decades. The best-known acts to be regularly described as

industrial music include Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, both from the United States, and

Germany’s Rammstein. All of these groups have had considerable commercial success since the

late 1980s and especially from the mid-1990s onwards. They have drawn to different degrees on

early industrial musics, and Nine Inch Nails have even collaborated with post-TG project Coil.

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However, while these successful acts can easily be included in the genre of industrial music, this

case study instead analyzes a specific cultural formation engaged in collective experimentation.

This formation has played an important role in the articulation of the genre of industrial music

but cannot be analyzed adequately in terms of a genre history. I will argue that the specific

experimentalism of this cultural formation must be understood contextually in its complex and

contradictory relations to the volatile cultural-political atmosphere of the United Kingdom in the

1970s and early 1980s in particular, notably expressed in a specific sensibility. Many of the

formation’s key protagonists are active to this day and have considerably transformed their

artistic approach; however, even their current work often connects to and re-articulates the

sensibility or structure of feeling that already governed this formation in the days of Industrial

Records.

This structure of feeling is an esoteric-experimental sensibility that privileges and invests

in the hidden and the secret, which are accessed through various modes of artistic, intellectual,

and social experimentation. Following an introduction to the industrial music formation’s

sensibility, I will specify its affective-semiotic articulation of three key modes of the hidden or

secret: the pervasive yet masked machinations of control apparatuses or other insidious

manifestations of power, the hidden potentials of the body-mind assemblage or the self, and the

secret knowledge and powers of the esoteric or occult. I will then map several hybrid enunciative

assemblages (or regimes of signs) that constitute this sensibility. Most notably, industrial’s

investment in the hidden or the secret draws on a paranoid and a visionary assemblage,

articulated variously to each other and to a diverse range of other enunciative assemblages.

Along the way, I will outline how industrial’s individualist fetishization of what I will call

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“interpreters” and “visionaries” masks and sometimes limits the modes of collectivity the

formation generates.

The sensibility of the industrial music formation

This study understands the industrial music formation as a specific “configuration of

practices” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 398) that emerged in the United Kingdom from the mid-1970s

onwards. This cultural formation has articulated certain distinct styles, especially of electronic-

experimental music, and some of its protagonists are famously invested in an explicitly

oppositional ideology as well as themes of power and technology. However, I want to argue that

the formation is not characterized primarily by such stylistic, ideological, or thematic constants,

but by its esoteric-experimental sensibility.

Fundamentally, the sensibility serves as a mode of social mediation. Protagonists of the

industrial music formation experience life (from which artistic practice is rarely disarticulated in

this formation24) in terms of the presence of the hidden or the secret, which are realms to be

unveiled or in which to immerse oneself. The formation accesses—engages in or reveals—these

realms through experimental practices. Industrial perceives the hidden and the secret as lying

beneath the industrial-urban decay, described by the likes of Hebdige (1979) and Savage (1983),

and the capitalist materialism of modern Britain. Indeed, it variously experiences the hidden and

the secret as repressed by normalcy, suppressed by authoritarianism, or concealed by insidious

control powers. The hidden and the secret; the occulted, the subconscious, the submerged, and

the haunted: All of these imply potential. In Deleuze-Guattarian terms, they are the virtual in the

actual (Grossberg, 2010a), as-yet unactualized potentials that the industrial formation seeks or

24 In fact, Steirer (2012) argues that “with Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Culture the very concept of the everyday was expanded … to include events and experiences (murder, radiation, pollution, boredom, etc.) that are usually seen as waste products of industrial society and thus out of bounds to art’s distinction-granting gaze” (From Social Art… section, para. 18).

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finds in actual reality. In order to do so, industrialists collectively improvise music and push

beyond aesthetic conventions to arrive at unheard or unwanted sounds; they combine unrelated

musical elements in disquieting collages to arrive at novel responses; they re-articulate language

to combat secret forces’ hold on the everyday; they test technologies old and new for their

strange potentials; they modify their bodies and push them to extreme states; they build novel

networks geared towards the dissemination of knowledges they perceive as marginalized or

excluded.

Perhaps ironically, this experience of the hidden or the secret connects in contradictory

ways to the populist proliferation of moral panics of the historical context in which industrial

emerged (Hall et al., 1978).25 For the researchers at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies (CCCS), this conjuncture—which leads up to the rise of Thatcherism—is

characterized by “a crisis in the hegemony of the ruling class”—that is, considerable breaks in

the equilibrium of consent in post-World War II class relations. Here, “the dominant classes

retain power, but their ‘repertoire’ of control is progressively challenged, weakened, exhausted”

(Clarke et al., 1975/2006, p. 30). The most visible expression of this crisis includes the

disaffiliation of so-called “youth cultures”—distinct working-class subcultures and the middle-

class countercultural milieu. These respond to “the post-war reorganisation of the technical and

productive life of the society, and the unsuccessful attempt to stabilise the mode of production at

this more ‘advanced’ level” (p. 50). The dominant “control culture” and its “moral

entrepreneurs,” however, frame subcultures and countercultures as carriers of a “crisis in

authority” (p. 48) and fan moral panics that legitimize escalating law-and-order crackdown.

25 In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall et al. (1978) analyze the articulation of such moral panics in the 1960s and 1970s in considerable detail.

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Industrial’s complex and contradictory relations to these large-scale cultural shifts and

political responses are best understood by re-embedding the formation in the subcultural and

countercultural landscape of its early years. Although the aggressive, self-consciously militant

aesthetic of some industrial acts (especially TG) almost seems designed to obscure industrial’s

connections to an apparently residual “hippie” counterculture, the formation emerges at least

partially from the fragmented countercultural milieu of the 1960s and 1970s. COUM

Transmissions, the radical performance art group whose members founded TG, started out in the

realm of countercultural street theater (Wilson, 2015) and infamously served as space-rock band

Hawkwind’s support act at a show in 1971 (Ford, 1999).26 Simon Reynolds (2005b) emphasizes

that the musical tastes of COUM (and later TG) member Genesis Breyer P-Orridge matched

those of a “head,” as did h/er27 hairstyle; fellow COUM and TG member Cosey Fanni Tutti was

“a flower child” (p. 226). Their future bandmate “[Chris] Carter’s road-to-Damascus experience

was seeing Pink Floyd in 1968 while tripping on LSD” (p. 227). Steven Stapleton of Nurse With

Wound, one of industrial’s most relentlessly experimental acts, traveled to Germany as a

teenager to visit and work as a roadie for hairy krautrock bands Guru Guru and Kraan (Keenan,

2003/2016). As late as 1980, The Legendary Pink Dots, always one of industrial’s most

emphatically “psychedelic” bands, formed following a musical epiphany at the Stonehenge Free

Festival (Turner, 2013).28 In Profane Culture, Paul Willis (1978/2014) details his hippie or

26 COUM self-marginalized even within this countercultural formation. According to Ford (1999), the members of Hawkwind were surprised that COUM’s performance “was unassisted by either drugs or alcohol” (p. 2.7). 27 P-Orridge, who passed away in 2020, had a long history of creative engagement with language in general and personal pronouns in particular. Engaging in the “pandrogeny” project, which employs bodily modification and other techniques to go beyond conventional manifestations of gender, s/he usually preferred the pronouns “s/he” and “h/er”; I will use these throughout the text. 28 It is important to note that the Stonehenge Free Festival itself was not homogeneously “hippie”-countercultural; notably, anarchist punk band Crass were scheduled to perform the same year, drawing a large crowd of punks who, in turn, were apparently attacked by bikers (Stonehenge Free Festivals Chronology, n.d.).

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“head” interlocutors’ “ontological insecurity” (p. 110), an investment in spiritual realms beyond

a false world of rationalism and materialism; this resembles a less bloody-minded version of

industrial’s articulation of the virtual.

However, as the counterculture splinters further and the “control culture” identified in the

studies of the CCCS escalates its attacks into “more organised and orchestrated public

campaigns” in which “politicians, chief constables, judges, the press and media joined hands and

voices with the moral guardians in a general ‘crackdown’ on ‘youth’ and ‘the permissive

society’” (Clarke et al., 1975/2006, p. 58), early industrialists’ countercultural attitudes harden

into something more jaded and, notably, paranoid.29 Industrial is contemporary with and at times

directly connected to punk, one of the most antagonistic and antagonized subcultures. Industrial

shares many of punk’s aggressive, contrarian, and deconstructionist impulses. Unlike punk, the

industrial formation never becomes a large-scale subculture of the type Hebdige (1979), focusing

on punk’s working-class sociality, describes. Perhaps tellingly, it connects particularly well to

punk’s more explicitly “artistic,” bohemian strands and to the libertarian anarchism of punk band

Crass.30 It thus shares a historical moment with punk; it turns against its own countercultural

orientation by sharing in and heightening punk’s semiotic deconstruction of popular-cultural

certainties (Grossberg, 1986). In its escalation of punk’s impulses, industrial draws on historical

avant-gardes already important to (parts of) the counterculture and punk: dada, surrealism,

situationism, the beats. However, industrial never jettisons its countercultural inheritance

29 In fact, the morbid, depressing epilogue to Profane Culture, written by one of Willis’s hippie contacts and dated to 1976 and 1977 (Willis, 1978/2014, pp. 239–246), greatly resembles the Burroughsian “techno-paranoid” (Reed, 2013) orientation of much early industrial. 30 Hegarty (2007) considers (at least early) industrial “almost the polar opposite of Crass, in that it was too late for a new society” (p. 106). However, in addition to social connections between some industrial artists and Crass, industrial’s re-negotiation of the more paranoid elements of its sensibility in favor of a more “visionary” orientation, as discussed later in this chapter, perhaps puts the starkness of Hegarty’s comparison in question.

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entirely. Instead, it complicates and transforms it, turning the hidden and secret realms beyond

into something less certain, more problematic, even more threatening.

Despite its re-articulation and radicalization of countercultural and punk tendencies, the

industrial formation does not simply cut itself off from the dominant forces it appears to counter;

its esoteric-experimental sensibility, though offering an alternative to dominant structures of

feeling and sometimes outright opposing dominant ideologies, is not fully separate from or

incommensurable with these. Instead, it also draws on them. Without invoking Williams’s term,

Hall et al. (1978) identify one such structure of feeling in their discussion of the various

“phenomenal form[s] which the ‘experience of social crisis’ assumes in public consciousness.”

As many moral panics (regarding race, violence, sex, youth subcultures, and more) converge,

the demons proliferate – but, more menacingly, they belong to the same subversive family. They are “brothers under the skin”; they are “part and parcel of the same thing”. This looks, on the surface, like a more concrete set of fears, because here social anxiety can cite a specific enemy, name names. But, in fact, this naming of names is deceptive. For the enemy is lurking everywhere. He (or, increasingly, she) is “behind everything”. This is the point where the crisis appears in its most abstract form: as a “general conspiracy”. It is “the crisis” – but in the disguise of Armageddon. (p. 323)

The industrial formation emerges at the same time as these moral panics escalate and are

generalized. Similarly, Savage (1983) writes of

the superheated atmosphere of London in 1977, when 1984 (if not armageddon [sic]) appeared round every crumbling corner; when arrays of dark glasses hid clinical paranoias; when the fabric of English society appeared to have been unraveled, by punk rock, into vicious threads of sectarian in-fighting, fascist and leftist violence on the streets, and financial crises …. (p. 4)

Perhaps two interrelated structures of feeling are at play here. The first is a structure of feeling of

generalized paranoia—the outcome of a successful “control-cultural” articulation of crisis as

lurking terror, as conspiracy. Industrial at least partially shares this paranoid, perhaps haunted,

sense of lived experience. Certainly, industrial musicians distrust or explicitly oppose many of

the political and cultural forces shaping the moral panics (political and moral authorities, news

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media) directed against subcultural, countercultural, and other elements. Nonetheless, industrial

often reproduces the paranoid affective logic of these moral panics in the formation’s experience

of hidden dangers; and it often reproduces some of the ideological elements woven into these

moral panics by assuming that hidden, sinister forces attempt to control people’s lives and minds.

The “crumbling corners” of Savage’s reminiscences of 1977 point towards the second, closely

related structure of feeling: a sense of decay, decline, unraveling. This is a profoundly negative

experience of change or of unsettlement as downfall; a “gloomy, apocalyptic ambience”

characterized by “highly publicized decay” detectable in “increasing joblessness, changing moral

standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression, etc.” (Hebdige, 1979, p. 87). Industrial,

despite its perceived oppositionality, shares many of the dominant social anxieties of the 1970s;

it partakes in the general sense of decay and darkness leading up to the British “Winter of

Discontent” of 1978 with its “embarrassingly public fallout from a string of union disputes and

industrial actions” (Daniel, 2008, p. 79), which Thatcher’s Conservatives successfully harness

and articulate in the run-up to their 1979 election victory. Consider TG member Peter

Christopherson’s remarks in a conversation with Drew Daniel:

For myself, at that time I think that the Labour government was seen as the bad guy. They had been the cause of many of the social problems that we had railed against. There had been a long period where garbage wasn’t collected and there were mountains of garbage everywhere. That had been the backdrop to the earlier period of TG. (Christopherson, as cited in Daniel, 2008, p. 78)

Simultaneously, though, this sense of social anxiety, crisis, and “antagonism lurking

within the ambient despair of late-seventies Britain” (Daniel, 2008, p. 80)—the articulation of

these two dominant structures of feeling—does not exactly translate into a conservative

affirmation of law and order for TG and related projects. Instead, industrial re-articulates the

paranoid structure of feeling, among other elements, into the formation’s sense of presence of the

hidden and the secret. Industrial musicians certainly see enemies “lurking everywhere,” but they

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recognize the existence of these spaces beyond, in which enemies might lurk, as indicative of

vast hidden realms in general. Beyond the despair of the second structure of feeling, intrepid

researchers team up to investigate and harness the secret potentials of language and technology

against the forces by which they feel constrained; sonic and performative adventurers test their

own bodies and aim to expand their own consciousness; idiosyncratic savants scour forgotten

literatures for arcane techniques and for the stories of deviant sages who mastered these

techniques. Despair and anxiety take their toll, but the sense of crisis also calls for the

uncovering of unknown troves of potential. Industrial re-articulates a countercultural investment

in a hidden realm of potential to and against or, perhaps more accurately, through a paranoid

structure of feeling shared in diverse ways by vastly different formations of the 1970s. At various

times, the resulting sensibility heightens, deconstructs, and/or counters both its countercultural

inheritance and the control-cultural panics through which the formation (alongside its estranged

sibling, punk) lives.

Grossberg (2010c) paraphrases Raymond Williams’s reworking of the concept of the

structure of feeling as “the endless construction and deconstruction of the difference between the

known and the knowable, between culture and experience, between history and an ontological

presence, but even that ontology is a historical, a contextual one …” (p. 24). Industrial music’s

structure of feeling, its esoteric-experimental sensibility, is not oriented towards a jump into the

future out of crisis. Instead, feeling the crisis, it seeks what else may have been there, or what is

there but invisibly so. It does not so much sprawl outwards in its proliferation of experimental

practices but primarily basks in and re-articulates a multiplicity of hauntings. Industrial’s world

does not feel “flat” like the contexts that shape free folk. Where free folk aims “to accumulate

practice” (Diederichsen, 2004a, p. 254) and enacts transformations in order to reinvest the world,

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industrial taps into an unknown-but-knowable that it knows has always already been there. The

industrial formation articulates as presence the diverse modes of the hidden or the secret that it

experiences in the world. This is also why so much of the music of this formation sounds

portentous or apocalyptic: Strange, hidden forces—ghosts, sexual energy, subjugated

knowledges, control machines, surveillance, the eternally suffering body of Christ—are always

nearby. In response to an overbearing sense of social anxiety, to economic decay, widespread

pessimism (consider punk’s “no future”), as well as an anti-deviant law-and-order

authoritarianism in 1970s Britain, industrial seeks to construct a different home in the esoteric.

The industrial formation invests in, disinvests from, reveals, conceals, and protects the

hidden or the secret in numerous, sometimes contradictory ways. Industrial’s esoteric-

experimental sensibility is a complex affective assemblage with the hidden or secret at its core,

from which industrial musicians alternately and simultaneously derive anxiety (about, e.g., the

presence of hidden forces, surveillance, oppression), vanity (in light of one’s rarefied awareness

of the hidden), focus (in one’s musical, bodily, magickal, or other experimentation), pain (of

those feeling subjugated, or a pain purposefully inflicted on oneself or others through

experimentation), pleasure (of creativity, of performance, of knowledge, of pain), confusion (at

the world’s strangeness), sadness (at the world’s perceived decline), arousal (in sexual

experimentation), and more.

Industrial’s heterogeneous semiotic dimensions are inseparable from its affective

dimension. The formation draws on a variety of—sometimes apparently contradictory—

enunciative assemblages and articulates them into its esoteric-experimental sensibility. While

industrial music is sometimes read as homologous in its relation to “the decaying English

environment” (Savage, 1983, p. 4), it does not simply reproduce and represent this structure of

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feeling, this sense of decay; it relates to its world in many different ways. It goes beyond

signification and representation to access hidden, perhaps both scarier and more rewarding

modes of expression; in its investment in the dissemination of “information,” primarily in the

form of subjugated knowledges, it is also fundamentally representational. Still, elsewhere, it even

aims beyond the semiotic in its (a-semiotic) attempts at unmediated corporeal impact. Consider,

for instance, TG’s sometimes violent experiments with the effects of extreme frequencies on the

body, as well as the ritual musics of Coil (Christopherson’s later project with John Balance),

which were aimed at the transformation of human perceptual apparatuses. I will discuss and

conceptualize these enunciative dimensions later in this chapter, following some preparatory

remarks on this dissertation’s understanding of “industrial music” and an outline of the specific

modes of the hidden and the secret that the formation explores.

Which “industrial”?

To focus on industrial as a cultural formation defined by a specific esoteric-experimental

sensibility is also to bypass other conceptualizations of the music and/or musicians found in this

formation. In an insightful summation of early industrial music for RE/Search Publications’

Industrial Culture Handbook, Jon Savage (1983; also see Reed, 2013) retrospectively identifies

five key characteristics of “industrial” (p. 5). As I will show, Savage’s identification of these

commonalities is lucid and appropriate; but for the purposes of this study, it still appears

simultaneously too reductive and too broad. The first shared characteristic, “organizational

autonomy,” entails bands’ reliance on their own or others’ independent labels such as TG’s

Industrial Records or Nurse With Wound’s United Dairies (and, by extension, the international

cassette tape network). Industrial music’s cottage industries—a key element of the institutional

layer of industrial’s social mediation (Born, 2017)—intersect with those of punk (Cogan, 2008)

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and allows for the surprisingly widespread dissemination of unconventional musics and

transgressive imagery.

Second, according to Savage (1983), “access to information” implies “that the struggle

for control was now not territorial but communicatory” (p. 5). Savage here invokes general shifts

in struggles over power, away from traditional politics towards (seemingly) immaterial realms of

ideology and affect; but, crucially, he also references writer William S. Burroughs’s notion of

control, which foregrounds subjects’ supposed conditioning through language (or culture in

general) and technology, as opposed to the coercive violence of what Foucault (1976/1978) calls

“sovereign power” (p. 135; also see Foucault, 1975/1977, and Joseph, 2008). Burroughs’s ideas

became crucial to industrial ideology; industrial artists wage an “Information War” that involves

the attempted disruption and deconstruction of dominant ideology and the dissemination of

sometimes quite obscure information on technology, esoterica, and art, for instance through zines

such as TG’s own Industrial News. In Savage’s (1983) words, “taboos were being openly

examined; control, in a small sphere, challenged” (p. 5).

Third, Savage highlights industrial artists’ “use of synthesizers, and anti-music” (p. 5).

This simultaneously points towards the key role of electronic instrumentation in early (and later)

industrial music and towards musicians’ investment in sound that counters and/or goes beyond

established understandings of music. Much (though, as this chapter will emphasize, far from all)

of their work is devoid of traditional melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements and, instead,

centers on a disruptive or at least disquieting ugliness—on the negativity of “noise” (Hegarty,

2007). Simultaneously, groups such as TG and Cabaret Voltaire tested the capacities of their

electronic devices, at times employing self-built gear to achieve the desired results. Fourth,

according to Savage (1983), “extra-musical elements” (p. 5) include writing (not least in the

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aforementioned zines) and experiments with television, all of which contribute to the formation

of small- and large-scale networks. For instance, in 1981, Christopherson and P-Orridge founded

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), a cult-like network with a musical arm, Psychic TV.

TOPY distributed writings and video material to its members, who constituted an international

network of peers and enthusiasts.

Finally, “shock tactics” (p. 5) serve to make industrial more visible and audible, although

they are, for Savage, among industrial’s more superficial elements. These tactics include the

generation of extreme volume, the controversial themes (e.g., genocide, murder, abuse) taken up

in some industrial acts’ lyrics or artwork, and the at times confrontational stage personae of P-

Orridge and others. Simon Ford’s (1999) biography of TG and COUM foregrounds P-Orridge’s

expertise at eliciting mass media engagement and controversy, which most famously resulted in

extensive press coverage of COUM’s “Prostitution” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary

Arts in London in 1976. Elsewhere, Marie Thompson (2017a) analyzes a “poetics of

transgression” at play in much of TG’s (particularly early) work and in the recordings and

performances of notoriously confrontational industrial/“power electronics” group Whitehouse.

Savage’s list foregrounds a set of commonalities that will recur throughout this chapter,

but it also calls for clarification. In the context of this study, there is a tension between, on the

one hand, industrial as a stylistically defined genre (as invoked colloquially and in various

studies) and, on the other, the industrial music formation as a specific “configuration of

practices” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 398), a “unity in difference” (Hall, 1985, p. 92; cf. Grossberg,

1992) that participated in the genre’s articulation but is neither necessarily representative of the

genre as a whole nor reducible to a specific time period in the genre’s history. Savage’s list also

points towards the primacy of the ideology and practice of certain artists, notably TG, in much

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coverage of industrial music. Savage’s characteristics apply more to early TG and Cabaret

Voltaire than to some other projects that were and are part of the industrial music formation—

perhaps unsurprisingly so, given that Savage wrote the list before many of the acts discussed in

this chapter had hit their stride. Notably, much of the (especially later) work of acts such as Coil

and Current 93 cannot be reduced to shock tactics and “anti-music.” Instead, they patiently

engage with various spiritual and personal matters, often in something at least resembling

conventional song form, however expanded. This may suggest that these groups dissociated from

industrial music as a genre, but not necessarily from the formation itself.

The formation cuts across the genre and is entangled in its history. Simultaneously, it

cannot be reduced to the genre, and genre histories consequently do not always include some of

the artists, or at least some of the recordings, discussed in this chapter. A genre history traces

“industrial music” according to a set of constants (Joseph, 2008), which may be aesthetic,

ideological, and/or practical. As S. Alexander Reed shows in Assimilate (2013), a comprehensive

“critical history” of the industrial music genre, the genre may in fact be perpetuated according to

more ideological constants (e.g., groups’ self-definition in opposition to dominant but hidden

powers) in some moments, and according to more aesthetic ones (e.g., loud, distorted,

electronically generated sounds) in others. Reed invokes Jennifer Lena and Richard Peterson’s

four stages of genre development: “from avant-garde to scene-based to [recording] industry-

based to traditionalist.” He suggests that it is not quite clear “whether industrial music ever fully

became an industry-based genre” (p. 15), but certainly identifies commercializing and

traditionalizing tendencies within industrial music. Although Reed qualifies and complicates this

structure enough to keep it from sliding into its most reductionist form, and although he affirms

the possibility of a genre’s re-articulation away from traditionalism back into innovation, the

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model reinscribes certain stereotypical, cyclical models of (sub-)cultural history that expect a

fairly straightforward sequence of resistance and recuperation.

Simultaneously, the model does hint at the great diversity of approaches and foci

described by Reed and practiced by industrial musicians. This is a valid approach; but instead of

analyzing industrial music as a whole genre, which would include, among others, particularly

famous later practitioners such as Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, this chapter focuses on a

specific cultural formation defined by experimentation, which is not the case for all industrial

musics. However, the chapter also tries to evade the danger of identifying the industrial music

formation as the genre’s “avant-garde stage,” instead understanding the formation in the

complexity of its specific articulations over the years.

I will outline industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility in greater detail over the

course of this chapter. My main examples will be taken from a relatively clearly delineated,

recurring set of groups or projects. In spite of its contextually specific emergence, the esoteric-

experimental sensibility carries onwards over several decades—and remains active. This

chapter’s examples are thus not exclusively drawn from the early years of industrial music as a

genre. The structure of this chapter’s analysis of the industrial music formation diverges from the

preceding chapter’s analysis of the free folk formation for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most

importantly, the free folk formation’s key articulation of the aesthetic and the social differs from

the industrial music formation’s operations. Industrial foregrounds collectivity less clearly, or in

more contradictory ways.

The formation is also characterized by a stronger artist-audience divide than free folk.

Industrial bands have notoriously obsessive long-time fanbases (matching the series of

obsessions running through many industrial musicians’ work, as discussed later in this chapter).

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However, even though members of industrial’s international cassette distribution network were

likely to start musical projects of their own (Reed, 2013), and even though, for instance, Coil’s

John Balance himself started out as a passionate fan of Throbbing Gristle, the bands themselves

are more clearly defined than in free folk’s case. If free folk group Sunburned Hand of the Man,

discussed in the previous chapter, consists of more than a dozen people during a concert, that is

because the group’s boundaries are remarkably porous in a way that can entirely change the

group’s sound and performance on any given day. If industrial/“apocalyptic folk” group Current

93 consists of more than a dozen people during a concert, that is because David Tibet, the

group’s sole constant member, has invited his collaborators to join in and support his particular

vision—his particular articulation of industrial’s sensibility.

Still, industrial almost exclusively attempts to access the hidden or the secret through

collaborative experimentation. For Hegarty (2007), “groups like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret

Voltaire consciously adopted the thought-form of the experiment, testing their strategies” (p.

105) in a variety of situations. Steirer (2012) calls TG’s work “a libertarian form of behavioral

science” (para. 9). Groups such as TG and Coil have often operated—and presented

themselves—in a manner reminiscent of (popular depictions of) rigorous research teams;

Hegarty (2007) suggests that “industrial music cultivated a collectivist, anonymous aesthetic” (p.

114) as seen in the manifesto-like texts of such groups as COUM, TG, and Test Dept., the use of

specific symbols as band “logos,” the sometime-use of uniforms (for instance by TG at the end

of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s), and more. Musically, from TG to The Legendary Pink

Dots, many of the formation’s practitioners have a history of collective improvisation. Daniel

(2008), for instance, describes TG’s improvisation on the ambient piece “Beachy Head” (1979)

as an industrious, pragmatic, “collective pursuit of an intuitive, organic outcome” (p. 53) as

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opposed to more traditionally dialogical or competitive modes of improvisation. However,

despite this reliance on decidedly collaborative practices and, in many cases, on an initially

“anonymous aesthetic” that did not appear to center on specific recognizable artists, the

formation’s strong investment in the esoteric has lent itself to a foregrounding, even a

fetishization, of specific individuals. These were and are perceived as eccentrics, sages, prophets,

and iconoclasts even—perhaps, as I will argue later, primarily as visionaries and paranoid

interpreters.

Although TG, the band most readily associated with “industrial music,” split up twice—

first in 1981 and then following a fraught second period that lasted from 2003 to 2010 (Tutti,

2017)—many key industrial projects existed for several decades. Indeed, some have existed for

close to or more than four decades at the time of writing. The longevity of many industrial

projects is partially owed to their reliance on one constant member (on this, also see Reed, 2013),

in the service of whose vision (because they are indeed perceived as visionaries) various

collaborators work. This applies to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in Psychic TV (h/er long-running

post-TG project), to David Tibet in Current 93, and to Steven Stapleton in Nurse With Wound.

Elsewhere, Coil’s John Balance, The Legendary Pink Dots’ Edward Ka-Spel, and even P-

Orridge in TG itself are sometimes perceived as similarly central to their groups, even though

these last three groups have, or had, more than one consistent core member.

Generally, the industrial formation was and perhaps is primarily constituted of white

men, often of middle-class backgrounds. With some exceptions, this is reflected and reproduced

in its own hierarchies and in the canons it constructs, although the latter simultaneously tend to

be characterized by the queerness of their constituents—their deviation from and exceeding of

sexual, aesthetic, and spiritual norms. That said, the most salient example of an individual’s

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elevated role complicates easy assumptions of social identity and stretches not just across

particular groups but, perhaps, across large parts of the formation. P-Orridge has historically

dominated or at least strongly inflected all histories of TG, and perhaps of industrial in general.

TG was very much a collaboration between (and, given the group’s many peers, beyond) four

core members, all of whom have attained strong cultural capital in the formation:

Christopherson, P-Orridge, Chris Carter, and Cosey Fanni Tutti. However, P-Orridge’s voice

tends to be heard most loudly, not just because of h/er role as singer; P-Orridge was a notoriously

fascinating and eloquent narrator (Daniel, 2008), though also—as has become clearer in recent

years (Siepmann, 2019; Tutti, 2017)—not always a reliable one. It is thus important to know that

while P-Orridge’s specific radicalism, eloquent storytelling, and inspirational rhetoric have been

highly influential within the formation, the formation should not be reduced to it.

Three modes of the hidden or the secret

Control/power

Most stories of industrial music—and particularly those that center on the formation’s

primary ideologues, TG—foreground notions of “control,” and of power in general, as

industrial’s key object. However, it is beneficial to first take a step beyond industrial’s

ideological formulation of power, into larger structures of feeling across which the formation

was articulated. For industrial, dangerous and oppressive forces lurk around every corner, ready

to manipulate, constrain, stifle, or destroy—a re-articulation of the paranoid structure of feeling

described by Hall et al. (1978). British life in the 1970s is not merely characterized by sadness

and alienation (this would, perhaps, merely be the second structure of feeling: the sense of

decay), but by dangerous forces lurking beneath and shaping that very sadness and alienation.

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In 1976, P-Orridge introduced TG’s performance at the opening of COUM’s

“Prostitution” exhibition (also see Ford, 1999) as

a one-hour set called Music From the Death Factory. It’s basically about the post-breakdown of civilization. You know, you walk down the street and there’s a lot of ruined factories and bits of old newspaper with stories about pornography and page 3 pin-ups blowing down the street, and you turn a corner past the dead dog and … you sort of see old dustbins and then … over the ruined factory there’s a funny noise. (Throbbing Gristle, 1979)

What Daniel (2008) describes as “the clammy, weedy, thin, unpleasant sounds of Throbbing

Gristle’s needling high-end and the dull ache inspired by their relentless low-end throb” (p. 12),

often delivered in the shape of “spontaneously improvised noise-jams recorded in a lo-fi

manner” (p. 13), appears to lend itself to a discussion in terms of homology. As introduced by P-

Orridge, TG’s music would then express a thinly disguised, decaying, post-industrial Britain

actually contemporaneous to TG’s work; a direct representation of this environment, or perhaps a

representation of the dominant sense of decay. However, this characteristic, homologous

“interpret[ation of] such music in mimetic terms” (Steirer, 2012, From Social Art… section,

para. 931) only goes so far in specifying the aesthetics of TG and related acts. The menace and

portent of many of these musics suggest not merely a sense of decay, but rather an articulation of

this sense of decay to the generalized paranoia laid out by Hall et al. (1978): “For the enemy is

lurking everywhere. He (or, increasingly, she) is ‘behind everything’” (p. 323). The decay is not

only decay, but includes or expresses the presence of a larger threat; the paranoid structure of

feeling takes primacy over the sense of decay and reshuffles it. Certainly, “over the ruined

factory there’s a funny noise,” but such funny noises appear to run across and through culture at

31 Steirer’s (2012) critical remark primarily concerns the dubious relationship of this music to the actual soundscapes of industrial labor—e.g., machines found in factories. However, the connection to decay and decline is made explicit in a comment by Jon Savage that Steirer singles out to exemplify problematic claims that TG’s music is representational.

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large. Something unsettling or insidious is present, or potentially present, in language, in

meaning, in morals, in aesthetic and social conventions, in new technologies. Conventions carry

oppression, stifle agency and expression, and danger is everywhere.

Crucially, TG and other industrial projects thus connect to a larger-scale paranoid

structure of feeling but are positioned differently in relation to it than many other formations

drawing on this structure. After all, industrial musicians were themselves among those identified

as “deviants” by hegemonic forces. Most famously, when London’s ICA hosted COUM’s

“Prostitution” exhibition in 1976, the group’s display of used tampons and other performance

accessories as well as pornographic photos of Tutti generated a vast media outcry and played

into Conservative criticisms of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s funding policies. Infamously,

Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn denounced COUM as “the wreckers of civilisation” (as

cited in Ford, 1999, p. 6.22) and articulated the supposed perversity on display to other perceived

evils of a culture in moral decline. To revisit Hall et al. (1978), “the demons proliferate – but,

more menacingly, they belong to the same subversive family” (p. 323). If COUM and TG were

perceived to be among those insidious forces bringing about Britain’s decay (Daniel, 2008), they

themselves, though happy to foster such a perception, sensed real dangers elsewhere: in the very

institutions of power that attempted to enforce conventions against industrialists’ supposed

radicalism; and, more importantly, in the ubiquity of those very conventions that were most

visibly enforced by said apparatuses, but that also appeared to govern everyone’s lives,

restricting and subjugating people’s aesthetic and social potentials. This is where, for industrial,

questions of power become explicit. The murkiness, darkness, and unpleasantness of TG’s music

connects not just to a sense of decay and sickness, but to the deeply ingrained forces that

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generate the world as it exists: “… can the world be as sad as it seems?” asked TG (1980/2011b),

quoting Charles Manson, on the sleeve of Heathen Earth.

The most famous examples of industrial’s paranoid lived experience articulate the

formation’s anxieties to the thought of William S. Burroughs. While this study attempts to

decenter and recontextualize industrial ideology, the adoption of Burroughs’s ideas by TG and

some of the group’s peers sheds some light on, and offers useful language for, an understanding

of industrial’s relation to supposed hidden powers. As Burroughs’s key contributions to

industrial, Reed (2013) notably singles out “the alignment of authority figures and controlling

agencies into one metaphorical identity of the machine, and … an artistic means of exposing,

questioning, and subverting humankind’s mechanized enslavement to this machine” (p. 26).

Burroughs and his industrialist followers and peers sought to challenge control’s stability—“to

bypass the authorities of language and thought to which prose and readers alike are hosts,

unbeknownst and addicted” (p. 29). It seems that a Burroughsian ideology offers industrialists a

means of articulating their sense of anxiety, oppression, and alienation into a specific set of

practices that appears adequate and particularly attuned to an insidiously threatening world.

The unfathomable ubiquity of control machines inspires sadness and fear. It casts a pall

of negativity over the world, giving a dull sense of decay an especially morbid and dangerous

tinge. In this context, anything is suspicious: language, received knowledge, living arrangements,

institutions, political parties, and more. Meanwhile, deviancy is threatened by authority—

restricted by control. For industrial, certain social and aesthetic modes of deviancy thus carry a

particularly positive, empowering charge, and others are at least met with sympathy. TG’s first

performance took place in July 1976 at “Crime Affirms Existence—High Crime Is Like High

Art” (Ford, 1999, p. 6.16), an event titled and curated by P-Orridge, who was happy to evoke

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something akin to Hall et al.’s “same subversive family.” Beyond sadness and fear, industrial

musicians also derive a certain sense of creative affirmation from their surroundings; and their

self-aware “knowledge” of oppressive control apparatuses feeds a dark, knowing sense of humor

as well as a certain narcissism or vanity, perhaps well-expressed in Psychic TV and Coil

associate John Gosling’s mocking introduction to a 1983 show by Zos Kia (1984/2017): “We’ve

been witnessing your many and varied forms of control today. They’re very effective. Very

pretty!”32

Potentialities of the body/mind/self

For industrial artists, nefarious modes of power lurk across culture: hidden control

apparatuses that rely on their own hidden-ness to function efficiently, unlike more visible,

spectacular, “sovereign” modes of power. But while control itself is experienced as hidden, it

also serves to hide that which could counter its dominance. Musicians of the industrial music

formation invest in apparently hidden bodily-material, mental, and creative-personal

potentialities, which they articulate to and disarticulate from each other in diverse ways.

The industrial formation investigates material potentials with a particularly rich set of

techniques. One key component of the formation’s investment in the hidden powers of human

bodies is their relationship to sound. Extremely high volume and extreme frequencies themselves

impact human bodies in unknown and unexpected ways that industrial musicians—especially

TG—are eager to explore and experience. This ties in with an exploration of the properties and

potentials of technological devices themselves for aesthetic and counter-power purposes. Beyond

the sonic, bodies also harbor organs and fluids not usually exposed in polite society. The

32 Keenan (2003/2016), discussing the Zos Kia recording, points out that Gosling’s “lightly mocking tone leaves him sounding uncannily like P-Orridge. Clearly they had a long way to go to escape their mentor’s shadow” (p. 150). As radical as some of industrial music’s experimentation is, there are numerous examples of “tracks border[ing] on Industrial pastiche” (pp. 149–150) even from key figures of the formation.

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abject—the expulsed that is incommensurable with conventional and clearly defined selfhood,

with a stable border between inside and outside (also see Kristeva, 1980/1982)—is itself a

substance full of potential. Although COUM had played experimental music in the early 1970s

and ultimately returned to it with the founding of TG in 1976, the group is notorious for its (at

the time) outrageous presentations of corporeality, from nude performances involving the

extraction of various bodily fluids to the used tampons on display in COUM’s “Prostitution”

exhibition at the ICA. In many of COUM’s later performances, the group accessed different (and

usually privatized) bodily states by engaging in masturbation, simulated self-mutilation, and

other experiments on the bodies of P-Orridge, Tutti, and their peers. (Ford, 1999; Hegarty, 2007;

Wilson, 2015) As Wilson (2015) suggests, COUM articulated a “queer aesthetic” that

destabilized dominant notions of gender, partially through the transgressive mobilization of such

material(s). However, these were not just modes of deconstruction, let alone straightforward

shock tactics. They were just as much about an exploration of the body and its potentials—even

though, as Hegarty (2007) points out, these practices were not necessarily described as such.33

COUM’s focus on the body continued in TG with the band’s exploration of the effects of

extreme frequencies on the body, and then, in different ways, in TG’s follow-up projects and

those of many of their contemporaries. For instance, Chris & Cosey, Coil, Psychic TV, and

Cabaret Voltaire all engaged at different points in electronic dance musics that have historically

been associated with intense corporeal investment—in clubs, at parties, and beyond. Meanwhile,

TOPY explored certain forms of bodily modification that appeared beyond the pale of dominant

culture, making them fertile ground for exploration. Additionally, TOPY very knowingly

33 Hegarty (2007) writes of COUM’s “extreme physical actions”: “Unlike the Austrian Aktionists, there seemed little overriding purpose. Instead of being a comment on taboos on physicality and a testing of the limits of the body as exploration, here there was little comment” (p. 108).

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fetishized bodily fluids and turned them into a key element of the group’s rituals. P-Orridge

explored bodily secrets and potentials for the entirety of h/er career, most famously in the

“pandrogeny” [sic] project: P-Orridge and h/er late partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge

underwent plastic surgery and various other bodily modifications in order to adapt their bodies to

each other and become one experimental being, Breyer P-Orridge, the “pandrogyne” (P-Orridge,

1994/2010).

For Hegarty (2007), industrial, with its Burroughsian attacks on control and its

experimentation on the body, attempts to (however temporarily) deconstruct the Cartesian

“division into mental self, soul or spirit on one hand and body on the other,” leading to “an

exacerbation of existence, of an excessive cycling back and forward between what seemed

opposites” (p. 107), whereby industrial’s extreme musics work on the body and thus the entire

“self.” However, in some industrial cases, the body-mind dualism is reinforced. Notably, not all

industrial groups are particularly invested in the body’s materiality. Groups such as Nurse With

Wound and The Legendary Pink Dots focus on specific interiorities, often expressed as the

human mind. Nurse With Wound is an explicitly surrealist project. Through collage and

sampling, the strange bricolage of Steven Stapleton and his collaborators is meant to connect to

an inner hidden realm: the subconscious. According to Keenan (2003/2016), “[Stapleton’s]

notion of ‘surrealism in sound’ involves channelling the murky subconscious into music that

provokes unpredictable reactions and tests particular mental states” (p. 68). Relatedly, in a

documentary from the late 1980s, John Balance (as cited in Oey, 1988) of Coil claims:

We ignore most contemporary sources and go back to the surrealists, you know, and what they were dealing with was the subconscious on the personal level, and expanding and just plummeting the depths of it. And that’s just a very simple act, which takes a huge amount of effort and has amazing consequences if you can do it. You know, it’s just unleashing something. (20:34)

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Christopherson (as cited in Daniel, 2008) distinguishes TG’s improvisational practice with its

“more direct, intellect-free connection of the subconscious to the sound” (p. 44) from what he

considers the “sophisticated” foundations and “very intellectual” (p. 43) character of jazz

improvisation. Here, too, the “subconscious” is understood as containing creative powers

irreducible to deliberation, convention, and representation; and these powers can be unleashed

through specific techniques. Dreams, too, tend to play an important role in many industrial

musics—especially those of artists such as Coil, Current 93, The Legendary Pink Dots, and

Nurse With Wound, whose work has, as I will show, a particularly strong “visionary” element.

Sometimes, industrial’s mental and/or corporeal investigations are part of an exploration

of and investment in the self, which in turn is articulated to, and expressed in, an easily

overlooked ideology of authenticity—or, perhaps more accurately, an ideology of immediacy

(also see Reed, 2013). Just as the body has hidden, repressed potentials that COUM’s radical

performance art actualized, and just as the subconscious-sound relation has the potential to be

made “direct, intellect-free,” the human self has a potentially unwieldy core hidden by aesthetic,

moral, political, and other conventions. Through deconditioning, some industrial artists seek to

strip away these layers of convention and experimentally excavate the hidden, true core.

Relatedly, Cosey Fanni Tutti (Fusco & Tutti, 2012) claims that “my work is based on total

honesty” (p. 18) and that “TG was all about honesty and truth” (as cited in Reed, 2013, p. 140).

Reed (2013), discussing a COUM performance in Los Angeles in 1976, writes that “Tutti’s

performance seems extreme because it presumes that only outside of the hegemonically

controlled territory of behavior can one find honesty—that mythical, uncontaminated condition

beyond cultural mediation and separate from class-based ‘authenticity’” (p. 77). It was, perhaps,

in TOPY that this investment in and ideology of unmediated truth, to be rescued from dangerous

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forces, was most clearly foregrounded. As I will show, TOPY’s propaganda and rituals promoted

radical, and radically individual, self-actualization in the face of disempowering control

mechanisms.

The esoteric or occult

The industrial formation also features pronounced spiritual tendencies, although these are

not cohesive across the formation. However, they all point towards hidden forces transcending

the material world and scientific (as well as common-sensical) understandings of it. These may

include magickal relations that can be actualized through ritual, spirits that can be accessed

through specific modes of communication, the ghosts of loved ones or predecessors, or a larger-

scale undercurrent of God’s presence.

Parts of the industrial formation engage in magickal or ritualistic practice. TG

increasingly introduced explicitly magickal elements near the end of the group’s original run. For

instance, according to P-Orridge (as cited in Daniel, 2008), the lyrics to “Six Six Sixties” (1979)

are “a transcript of a séance” (p. 155) with a spirit called Mebar. Later, TOPY and Psychic TV

further highlighted such magickal elements. A continued explicit interest in deconditioning was,

here, joined by collective experimentation towards the actualization of one’s desires. In TOPY,

sigils were conceived as means of linking together the community of the Temple in an ongoing, committed practice of focusing the will and effecting personal change through art, prayer and ritual. In order to join or remain an official member of the Temple, each month one had to meditate upon one’s true desire, and then after giving the matter careful thought, create a visual manifestation of that desire in the form of writing, collage or artwork, which one fashioned into a magical “sigil” by marking it with one’s blood, semen or other bodily fluid. The resulting sigil was then mailed to the T.O.P.Y. headquarters, where it entered a vast and sticky archive of thaumaturgic souvenirs. (Daniel, 2008, pp. 60–61)

This immersion in secret, arcane knowledges extended to the ritual function of some of Psychic

TV’s music. In particular, the recordings on Themes (1982), like 23 Skidoo’s The Culling is

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Coming (1983) and Coil’s How to Destroy Angels (1984), explicitly served ritual purposes

(Hegarty, 2007).

Death and the afterlife are ubiquitous themes in the industrial formation, and the music

often feels haunted. David Tibet’s lyrics in Current 93 are haunted by the past, be it the pervasive

sense of lost innocence or, for instance, the respective deaths of his parents, which inspired

2000’s Sleep Has His House and 2018’s The Light Is Leaving Us All. He is an unorthodox

Christian who believes in the imminent end times and in the exclusive reality of the continued

suffering of God—as Christ—on the cross. Tibet (as cited in Keenan, 2003/2016) has described

this worldview as follows:

For me the last track [“Patripassian” on All the Pretty Little Horses (1996)] makes the point that all of this trilogy [The Inmost Light], and all of existence generally, is lived out under the passion of Christ …. Therefore we’re all merely acting out some strange, dreamlike play …. So we are living under an Imperium and the forces of Satan and evil are at loose. (p. 366)

For Current 93, especially in the group’s work before the mid-1990s, a decadent (and decaying)

modern world is disempowering. In a sense, this decadence and materialism is out in the open,

but it is in people’s indifference to it—and to the wonders of the world, too—that the tragedy of

(contemporary) human existence lies. But just as there is an “inmost night,” there is an “inmost

light” (a phrase taken from mystic and writer Arthur Machen) that can be felt, and perhaps

attained, in the world.

I think in fact that The Inmost Light is the reality that permeates everything, it’s the fundamental nature of this physical world, of all the worlds that are existing at this moment. … If we don’t realise how quickly time is running out for all of us and don’t at least attempt to see The Inmost Light, then that’s it. (p. 342)

Some industrial groups, like the pre-Christian Current 93 of the late 1980s, turned to a

portentous, largely acoustic guitar-based “neofolk” sound with martial connotations. For many of

these, hidden connections to pre-modern European roots became a crucial metaphysical secret.

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Death in June and Sol Invictus share a pagan outlook set “against the modern world”—the title

of one of Sol Invictus’s releases.34

Coil, meanwhile, joined TOPY and Tibet in exploring a variety of arcane lineages—in

their cases running specifically through a very English, queer, white-male history of deviants,

many of whom shared an interest in the magickal and the discovery (or re-articulation) of

perceived ancient forces: insider knowledge of the secret (Keenan, 2003/2016). Many

industrialists were and are invested in a British paganism, often filtered through more recent

writings (not least by occultist horror writers such as Arthur Machen) that postulate the

continued presence of mystical-natural forces underneath the perceived artifice of modernity.

Consequently, “The Great God Pan” (the title of another short story by Machen), transposed into

English and Welsh hills, stalks numerous industrial recordings, from Coil’s “Panic” (1984) to

“The Woods Are Alive With the Smell of His Coming” (2010) by Cyclobe, itself a duo of two

former Coil members. As much as industrial invokes the metaphor of the “machine” and deals

with the powers and dangers of modern technology in general (Reed, 2013), its sensibility also

allows for the articulation of an enchanted, authentic “nature.”

Groups such as Coil, Current 93, and Cyclobe are notably well-versed in occultist

literature on magick and the spirit world. Still, they, and many of their peers, also are notorious

record collectors. Esoteric records created by particularly strange, unique, apparently forgotten

artists can play a role similar to more traditional esoterica. This is particularly visible in the case

of Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton, whose work is far less invested in the spiritual than

that of his friends and collaborators, but whose notorious record collection takes on a talismanic

function. In fact, references to the “talismanic” and similar concepts abound throughout the

34 This move against modernity carries racialized connotations—and racist implications, as I will show later in this chapter.

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industrial formation. This points towards many industrialists’ fetishization of non-Western

spiritualities. Industrialists have at times articulated, e.g., Tibetan, Indian, Vodou, and other

spiritualities to Western occultist canons (Keenan, 2003/2016; Reed, 2013). They turn these

hybrid belief systems into antidotes—inspirational, threatening, or both—against a perceived

spiritual decline or shallowness of the “West,” and against the perceived corruption of the West’s

own spiritual institutions (Reed, 2013). In the aforementioned documentary from the late 1980s,

David Tibet (as cited in Oey, 1988)—then not yet a heretic Catholic—states:

You watch the people walking along who are just… their shoulders are bowed in defeat. They realize that they’re living completely meaningless lives and that there’s nothing, nothing for them to look forward to. They kill themselves by the admission of their defeat, by refusing to explore, by refusing to question. They want the easy life, the easy option. They want to be left alone, to carry on doing what they’re doing, which is always nothing whatsoever. … Perhaps the … only way out is if you actually go up to them and give ’em a good kicking and say “why [don’t] you fucking wake up?” (09:31)

A passionate yet wry Tibet expresses an elitist disgust at a degenerate popular culture and the

ignorant masses engaging in it. Like some of his “neofolk” peers, though at the time increasingly

oriented towards romanticized Buddhist legacies, Tibet seeks the authentic and true in those

realms unspoiled by “Western” modernity and its insidious suppression of creativity and

individuality. As examples throughout this chapter will show, industrial’s engagements with and

appropriations of non-Western spiritualities are quite diverse, including vague orientalist

signifiers inherited from psychedelic rock, the rigorous study of ancient belief systems, the

reinforcement of racist stereotypes of a threatening, “exotic” Other—and only rarely an explicit

engagement with non-white or immigrant communities and the racism they face (Reed, 2013).

Enunciative assemblages of the industrial sensibility

The industrial music formation’s esoteric-experimental sensibility is articulated across

several regimes of signs or enunciative assemblages, whose specific combinations and

effectivities may differ throughout the formation, but which consistently tend to feed and encode

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industrialists’ investment in some mode of the hidden or the secret. I will focus on two

assemblages that, variously articulated to each other and to other enunciative assemblages, play a

key role in the constitution of the industrial formation’s sensibility. One is a paranoid assemblage

specific to the United Kingdom of the 1970s and 1980s, strongly drawing on that context’s

dominant paranoid structure of feeling; the other is a visionary assemblage, which is the outcome

of the paranoid assemblage’s mediation through a subjective-passional assemblage that draws

more affirmatively on residual countercultural orientations. These two assemblages—two

articulations of industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility—both constitute and express this

sensibility. I will first map the paranoid assemblage’s articulation to several other relevant

assemblages. I will then proceed to similarly map the various articulations of the visionary

assemblage, and will finally focus on the mutual articulation and interdependence of the paranoid

and visionary assemblages. I will outline these diverse assemblages and their mutual

articulations in considerable detail to emphasize industrial’s willingness to experiment in a large

number of different registers, while distinguishing this enunciative heterogeneity from free folk’s

rhizomatic sprawl. Free folk’s sensibility privileges an apparently all-enveloping multiplicity,

shaped in particular by a presignifying assemblage that decenters representation; in comparison,

industrial’s enunciative heterogeneity appears more fragmented, more open to reflexivity and

negativity, more eager to bloody-mindedly follow paranoid spirals and passional lines. At the

same time, this focus on industrial’s enunciative assemblages in their particularity and diversity

also distinguishes this chapter from studies that center the—indubitably crucial—“noise” and

negativity of TG (e.g., Hegarty, 2007) at the expense of other aesthetic and social practices of the

formation.

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Paranoia

As I will show in various examples below, paranoia is often expressed explicitly in

industrialist lyrics or public statements. However, these do not necessarily constitute a paranoid

assemblage by themselves; they are merely one set of specific (often representational)

articulations of a paranoid assemblage. Through many different types of sign behavior,

musicians express and respond to the consistently sensed presence of hidden, disempowering

forces. Industrial draws on and is influenced by the proliferating moral panics and social

anxieties of 1970s Britain, but it re-articulates—affirms, counters, transforms—them in unique

ways. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) associate paranoia with the “signifying regime of the

sign” in which “every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum.” In a

cultural context characterized by the signifying regime, “the sign has already attained a high

degree of relative deterritorialization; it is thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of

referral from sign to sign” (p. 124). The signifier is not locked to the signified in a comparatively

self-contained unit. As ever so many things appear to signify something else, the industrial

formation expects danger lurking around ever so many corners, in the conventions of language

that appear rigged against creativity and self-actualization, in technologies that fascinate but may

well have been constructed for purposes of manipulation, corruption, and oppression, and whose

powers may be activated by hostile forces at any point. However, the formation is not reducible

to this sense of paranoia, to a negative and threatening experience of the esoteric: It experiences

the hidden and the secret as full of potentials. Most fundamentally, for Deleuze and Guattari, the

paranoiac of the “paranoid despotic regime” feels able to predict and escape the enemy’s steps:

“I have power even in my impotence” (p. 125). In the case of TG and many of the group’s peers,

fear of hidden powers is joined by the vanity of awareness. To know secrets, and to know that

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one knows these secrets, can be empowering. One can become the keeper of the secret, but also

its disseminator and even its admired revelator. One may feel alienation from those not in the

know, or those not invested in knowing (remember David Tibet’s scathing remarks on those who

“kill themselves by the admission of their defeat”); or one may feel sympathy for those not in the

know.

Industrial articulates elements of the signifying regime or paranoid assemblage described

by Deleuze and Guattari to other assemblages and into hybrid assemblages that differ quite

drastically, even as they overlap and retain certain paranoid-signifying characteristics. The work

of master-paranoiacs TG in particular, but also that of many of TG’s peers, suggests that the

industrial sensibility variously articulates the paranoid to, among others, 1. a diagrammatic

machine, 2. a radicular assemblage, 3. a countersignifying assemblage, 4. a representational

assemblage, 5. a presignifying assemblage, and 6. several a-semiotic encodings.

Paranoia and the diagram. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the signifying assemblage

institutes a signifying chain in which sign leads to sign leads to sign, everything pointing to

something else—hence the paranoia. But industrial paranoia is often articulated into, expressed

by, and in turn shaped by a Burroughsian ideology of control that understands control as

particularly deeply embedded in and foundational of consensus reality. This articulation suggests

a different, or perhaps expanded interpretation of industrial paranoia, where industrialists

arguably do not just trace sign to sign to sign, but rather trace a sign, or perhaps a chain of signs,

“directly” into the diagrammatic realm: the constitutive apparatuses that distribute actual reality.

The diagram is, so to speak, the blueprint (or set of blueprints) of actual reality in a given

moment. Perhaps the world constructed by control is false or unreal, as suggested by industrial’s

re-articulation of what Willis (1978/2014) calls hippies’ “ontological insecurity” (p. 110); but

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control itself, however hard to grasp, undefined, and hidden, provides the underlying logic of the

constitution of reality as we know it. Industrial paranoia is thus not necessarily reducible to the

incessant play of signifiers. Instead, it often draws a line into the apparent heart of reality and

interprets the center of the signifying chain as generative of contemporary reality.

This can once again be understood through recourse to Deleuze and Guattari

(1980/1987), even as industrial’s own interpretation of its historical moment stands in

considerable tension with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis. Deleuze and Guattari see the despotic

signifier, “the despot-god” (p. 127), at the core of the signifying assemblage. The despot-god’s

interpreter-priests, those privileged in relation to the constitution of dominant meanings,

administer the assemblage’s principle: “faciality.” This notion does not so much imply that there

is a literal face at the center of the signifying assemblage. Instead, it suggests that there is a

majoritarian ideal, abstracted from human reality, against which one is measured (Morris, 1998;

O’Sullivan, 2006), or—perhaps more crucially in industrialists’ case—which one experiences as

the standard of measurement, however diffuse and wrongful. Industrial experiences the existence

of this face, this standard; but instead of contextualizing faciality in its historical contingency,

industrial draws on the structure of feeling of generalized paranoia to invest faciality with a

generalized type of agency, conflating the signifying chain that shapes the formation’s own

paranoia with reality-as-falsehood.

The structure of feeling of generalized paranoia operates as a paranoiac machine that

captures industrial and sends it down the signifying chain. It ensures that, for industrial,

everything refers back to a presence—the signifier experienced as an almost godlike control

agency—that is standardizing and always active, consistently reconstructing a world rigged

against justice and creativity. Industrial musicians, and especially the formation’s most

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outspoken and erudite protagonists (such as P-Orridge), are interpreters or interpreter-priests in

Deleuze and Guattari’s sense who administer the principle of faciality, but they imbue this role

with a sense of resistance: They are perceived as privileged in their relation to the central face,

but this relation is articulated as negative. Drawing not least on the historical avant-gardes,

industrial seeks to subvert the dominant powers of consensus reality; but the formation’s analysis

of power is shaped by a paranoiac machine whose conditions and operations industrial fails to

fully grasp. More often than not, early industrial was thus keen to articulate a generalized

resistance to a generalized enemy, not pragmatic alliances that would have countered the specific

forces working towards a law-and-order authoritarianism.

In their own generalized paranoia, TG and other industrialists must draw a line into

reality’s constitutive apparatuses, which they experience as facialized. Control is not just behind

everything; it actively constructs everything. This line is bold in its apparent directness, but TG’s

actual attempts at intervention into these apparatuses are mediated by other assemblages, as I

will show in subsequent sections. But to even arrive at experimental techniques of intervention

(e.g., modes of musical collaboration, magickal practices, or the appropriation of specific

technologies), industrialists must research the histories and conditions of possibility of these

techniques. This is by default a collaborative endeavor that requires not just the exchange of

relevant information but the formation of active collectivities of experimenters doing

interdisciplinary, multi-modal work. Especially in its early years, the industrial music formation

often sought refuge from “control” and space for interventions in collective-experimental living

arrangements. These enabled the construction of a territory both topographical and affective—a

home for industrial’s “microsocialities” (Born, 2017) temporarily sheltered from control’s worst

excesses. TG benefited from, and was involved in, the London squatting scene. Even after the

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end of TG, the group’s headquarters at 50 Beck Road remained a key spot for TOPY and other

affiliates. For a while during TG’s final years, it had been a fortress, as I will discuss below; by

1982, “Beck Road was pretty much an open house …. Members of 23 Skidoo were living in

legalised squats I had arranged in numbers 48 and 52” (P-Orridge, as cited in Keenan,

2003/2016, pp. 52–53). It remained a space for experimentation for another decade—until 1992,

when it was subject to a police raid on the basis of tabloid-driven (and later discredited)

accusations of Satanic abuse, which resulted in P-Orridge fleeing the country (Keenan,

2003/2016). Still, for those years, it served as a space that enabled collective experimentation

directed towards and against an experienced diagrammatic mode of control.

Paranoia and deconstruction, or a radicular assemblage. The industrial sensibility’s

diagrammatic dimension would suggest that even those who are “conscious” of power’s

insidious machinations surely are helpless in the face of such constitutive manipulation. But like

Deleuze and Guattari’s paranoiac, industrialists counter the hidden forces they sense across

culture through various techniques. Grim despair is countered through cunning creativity, that

rare source of empowerment. Most prominent among these techniques is William S. Burroughs

and Brion Gysin’s “cut-up,” which involves the cutting of a text (or other element) into several

smaller pieces and subsequent rearrangement into a new work (Burroughs & Gysin, 1978).

Through the re-articulation and recontextualization of words, images, and sounds, groups such as

TG and Cabaret Voltaire aim to expose and highlight modes of conditioning operational in

contemporary culture; and to decondition the human hosts of control’s machinations. The cut-up

engenders an autonomous “third mind”: New structures, new meanings emerge, while existing

ones—in this view—are subverted (Reed, 2013). Perhaps it is not coincidental that the “third

mind” is industrial’s favored ideological expression of collaboration or collectivity. It suggests

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creativity, experimentation, and empowerment while remaining disembodied enough to keep at

bay more radical, anti-individualist conceptualizations of collective creativity that would put into

question the formation’s investment in the potentials of the true self.

In its adherence to certain unities, however deconstructed (the unity of language) and

unconventional (the third mind), industrial articulates its paranoia to what could be called a

“radicular” assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987; Grossberg, 2014). In Deleuze-

Guattarian terminology, such an assemblage differs from a more traditionally hierarchic,

“arborescent” assemblage in that it deconstructs or eradicates any central element (a set of roots)

constitutive of its unity, yet remains haunted by such unity, always referring back to the aborted

center. Industrialists’ paranoid, anti-authoritarian deconditioning accesses the realm of potential

to unveil and potentially counter, or at least partially evade, the forces steering our lives, but

these forces remain present. In Burroughs’s cut-up, a radicular assemblage is at play and

suggests an underlying unity and reality, however obscured it may be:

Take William Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another,35 which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 6)

Many industrialists thus seem unable to ever fully escape the linguistic-semiotic machinations of

insidious forces. They keep returning to the overpowering machinations of control, while

exploring ever so many new ways of disturbing them. If the industrial formation is haunted by

fragmented unities, it rarely attempts to fully exorcise its ghosts.

Ghosts, after all, can be creative companions; hauntings can generate creative responses.

Industrialists perceive language, itself crucial to the conflated control machines challenged by

35 Deleuze and Guattari here seem to reference “the fold-in method,” which Burroughs (1978) calls “an extension of the cut-up method” (p. 95): “A page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other” (pp. 95–96).

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Burroughs, not only as a Burroughsian virus engendering conformity and control (Reed, 2013). It

is also a magickal set of tools full of strange potential, with “Still Walking” (on 1979’s 20 Jazz

Funk Greats) serving as an example of TG’s experimentation. On this song, “the four separate

personalities of the members of TG dissolve into an indistinct crowd of deadpan mutterers, a

nonspecific gathering of males and females intoning staggered versions of what is gradually

revealed to be the same text” (Daniel, 2008, p. 57). Daniel continues: “Letting their cut-up words

and distorted sounds ferment and recombine and overwhelm the listener, TG’s overdetermined

scribbles of synthesis and language are consciously designed to bypass consciousness” (pp. 61–

62). Language and technology are secret tools of control, but they also have secret powers that

can be harnessed otherwise. They can be mobilized to disturb or at least to reveal control

machines, and for the purpose of people’s inoculation against control’s viruses (also see Reed,

2013). As another example of the generative powers of language, P-Orridge (as cited in Daniel,

2008) offers TG’s “What a Day” (1979/2011a), a song characterized by the repetition of a dull,

grinding loop and P-Orridge’s hectoring, screamed vocals:

[Burroughs and Gysin] taught me the infinitude of permutation, that by the repetition of certain phrases, there is a subvocal resonance of meaning that is inarticulable with straightforward langauge [sic]. It exists in the actual act of repetition rather than in the linear sense of meaning. … [All words] have the ability to create and pressure people to bend and manifest the agendas of those very words. (p. 146–147)

Language, then, is active, and industrialists consistently wrestle with it, seeking to undermine

and disturb its “agendas” through juxtaposition, rearrangement, repetition, and other techniques.

Similarly, industrial’s notorious play with symbols resembles and at times radicalizes

punk’s deconstructionist practices. As punk’s articulation of seemingly incongruous elements,

from safety pins to Union Jacks and swastikas, “undermined every relevant discourse” (Hebdige,

1979, p. 108; Grossberg, 1997a), many of industrial’s most confrontational artists eagerly

proliferated symbols of fascism, violence, and other disturbing elements without clear

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explanation. TG adopted a stylized lightning bolt as the group’s logo, resembling the logo of the

British Union of Fascists (Daniel, 2008). The group’s Industrial Records label released records

by The Leather Nun and SPK whose artwork included graphic photos of a burn victim and a

mutilated penis, respectively (Ford, 1999). The controversial “power electronics” project

Whitehouse named albums after concentration camps (Buchenwald, 1981) and serial murderers

(Dedicated to Peter Kürten, 1981) and was dismissed even by P-Orridge (Ford, 1999; Hegarty,

2007) as merely invested in shock value. All this imagery, it seems, “was guaranteed to shock”

(Hebdige, 1979, p. 116); but only rarely did it reach the eyes and ears of the “moral

entrepreneurs” (p. 88) outraged by punk’s style. Certainly, when it did, as in the aforementioned

“satanic panic”-style attacks on TOPY, it could lead to particularly severe consequences. Outside

such rare cases, however, industrial primarily disarticulates control’s unity in a sphere consisting

of its own artists and audiences—preaching to the converted (Reed, 2013; Thompson, 2017a).

Ultimately, the radicular assemblage is among the most prominent components that

constitute the industrial formation; it is from articulations of the paranoid and, as I will show, the

visionary to the radicular that many of industrial’s most characteristic and salient tools emerge;

and it is not least from this deconstructive-radicular moment that industrial’s identification with

“noise” (as a disruptive, disturbing element) and transgression arises. Building on and

exacerbating the transgressive impulse of historical avant-gardes (Hegarty, 2007), industrial

consistently strove (and often still strives) to interfere in any existing unity, any sense of

certainty—even though, as I want to argue, the industrial formation is too heterogeneous in its

modes of enunciation to be reduced to the radicular.

Paranoia and a countersignifying assemblage. One apparent contradiction encountered

by an analysis of the role of a paranoid, signifying assemblage in the industrial sensibility

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concerns the ubiquity of the hidden or the secret, which this study claims as central to the

formation’s sensibility. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), in the paranoid-despotic

assemblage, “everything is public …. Lies and deception may be a fundamental part of the

signifying regime, but secrecy is not” (p. 128). In the industrial formation’s case, control—the

forces that hide beneath and construct consensus reality—is at least potentially able to see

whatever exists in the world. Simultaneously, control itself, while hidden, must at least be known

publicly in its effects. Its subjects may not know control’s nature, but they adhere to the

conventions it sets—conventions that industrial seeks to disturb, or whose nature it seeks to

unveil. But just as much of industrial seeks to subvert the machinations of power, to deconstruct

the face governing reality, it also seeks refuge in the establishment of secrecy.

For the industrial sensibility, secrets are of course everywhere, hidden in public; it takes a

superior interpreter (Burroughs, P-Orridge, or other sages—other “interpreter-priests”), though

one who is paranoid and apparently oppositional,36 to realize the public nature of power’s

secrets. These same paranoid interpreters themselves create new secrets, constantly articulating

new secret knowledges that they keep out of the view of the very face they attempt to

deconstruct. For Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), the “countersignifying” assemblage, with its

roaming war machines in consistent tension with more static powers, practices “secrecy and

36 A particularly rigid reading of Deleuze and Guattari—or a particularly exuberant reading of the industrial formation—might suggest that this is an unsustainable paradox. In their polemic acclamation of the Body without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) appear to oppose experimentation to interpretation: “no signifier, never interpret!” (p. 177). However, to derive from this the idea that industrialists and Burroughsians cannot be interpreters as they are experimentalists and/or minoritarian and/or oppositional, or that they cannot be experimentalists if they are interpreters, would be to posit a binary between pure experimentation and acontextually oppressive interpretation that leaves little space for the strategic articulation of hybrid practices. The likes of P-Orridge and Burroughs might be better understood as counter-interpreters (and sometimes, as I will show, visionaries) in a complex relationship with dominant regimes of power and signs: simultaneously shaped by these regimes and consistently driving oppositional interpretations and diverse social and aesthetic experiments against and past them, while engaging in their own modes of countercultural hierarchization. Consider, for instance, the tension between P-Orridge’s very real impact as a participant in and inspiration of various radical modes of aesthetic and social experimentation and cultural-political interpretation, on the one hand, and h/er fetishization as a singular originator despite a history of alleged abuse and narcissistic deceit (Siepmann, 2019; Tutti, 2017), on the other.

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spying” (p. 131). Many of the more ambitious and perhaps rigorous experimenters of the

industrial formation have attempted to build just such a machine as part of their “information

war” against control—hence their dealing in subjugated knowledges, obscure information

(scientific, occultist, aesthetic, or otherwise), and the building of potent transnational

collectivities with constitutive secrets. This is a key element of industrial’s relationship to the

institutional—pertaining to Born’s third plane of music’s social mediation. Though COUM

practiced a parasitic-subversive relationship to arts institutions (simultaneously aiming for

funding and critiquing institutional practices and limitations), industrial more often attempts to

set up its own counter-institutional machines. The international cassette tape network of the late

1970s and 1980s involved a great proliferation of small-scale industrial music labels—some run

by artists themselves, some by other affiliates, busy to the point of rivaling the sprawl of free

folk’s CD-R releases two decades later (Reed, 2013). It is a story that has been told many times:

a story of post-punk DIY networks circulating zines and musics that are known primarily to

connoisseurs and comparatively unlikely to be released by larger labels. Here, audiences are

mobilized into activity, sometimes on the same plane as the bands themselves, trading and

sharing and creating conditions for creative practice.

However, the case that most interestingly speaks to the industrial formation’s particular

sensibility (as opposed to larger-scale, cross-formation networks) is that of TOPY, whose

ritualistic network articulated, maintained, and practiced certain esoteric techniques and

knowledges for the purposes of deconditioning and self-actualization. TOPY’s propaganda

foregrounded the empowering aspects of the cult’s ritual practices alongside disempowering

control mechanisms:

We have been conditioned, encouraged and blackmailed into self-restriction, into a narrower and narrower perception of ourselves, our importance and our potential. …

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Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth has been convened in order to act as a catalyst and focus for the Individual development of all those who wish to reach inwards and strike out. Maybe you are one of these, already feeling different, dissatisfied, separate from thee [sic] mass around you, instinctive and alert? You are already one of us. The fact you have this message is a start in itself. …. You are going to have to find out your Self, we offer only the method of survival as a True Being, we give you back to yourself, we support your Individuality in which the Spirit and Will united burn with passion & pride. (Temple ov Psychick Youth, as cited in P-Orridge, 1994/2010, pp. 33–34)

TOPY, as a transnational network, was an experimental collectivity that engaged in magickal

and musical practices of collective experimentation at long distances. TOPY clearly attempted to

foster something akin to an empowering community spirit, or a sense of belonging (“You are

already one of us”) and presented itself as non-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian. Simultaneously,

TOPY was oriented towards a radically individualist actualization of one’s self. Note the

capitalizations in the above excerpt: Individual, Self, True Being, Individuality, Spirit, Will.

TOPY denied or denounced “society,” but offered up a notion of the individual that was

decidedly different from that of Thatcherism: deviant, adventurous, more authentically and

creatively expressive.37 As a collectivity, TOPY adopted certain anonymizing techniques (e.g.,

the adoption of the names “Eden” and “Kali,” the proliferation of Tibetan monastic haircuts), but

simultaneously denied this collective character by inviting its members to actualize and hone

their irreducible, deeply personal “selves.” Carl Abrahamsson writes:

The status of “Eden” for the actively sigilising men and “Kali” for the women signified an even stronger internal bond. That is, if one wanted to. There were never any demands on Kalis or Edens to do or achieve anything, except possibly to be truer to themselves than they had been up to that point. (P-Orridge, 1994/2010, foreword by Abrahamsson, p. 12)

37 Hegarty (2007), in contrast, emphasizes that “industrial music is very often antisocial, isolationist.” He is not wrong to foreground this isolationist orientation and to distinguish it from Thatcherist individualism; however, this applies much more to early industrial than to what Hegarty considers industrial’s “second phase” (p. 106). TOPY, then, while not TG’s antithesis, re-articulated TG’s negotiation of the relation between collectivity and individuality into more affirmatively individualist ideological patterns.

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Finally, P-Orridge was quite literally the keeper of the secret, notoriously keeping an archive of

the sigils sent to the cult’s headquarters—the network’s key node, its bulwark of secrecy. The

potentially radical, transnational collectivity of TOPY also appeared to suffer a fate similar to

that of many other cults. Christopherson (as cited in Keenan, 2003/2016) says that, to him and

Balance, TOPY became “a cult of personality focusing on a leader” (p. 64). This ran contrary to

what he considered the organization’s original impetus; it contributed to his and Balance’s

departure. As much as TOPY was an attempt to generate, through artistic and social

experimentation, an unpredictable anti-authoritarian collectivity, and as much as this did indeed

lead to unexpected outcomes and inspirational practice, it also reterritorialized on one

interpreter-visionary’s persona and subjectivity. Worse: According to Dan Siepmann (2019),

TOPY and P-Orridge’s knowing adoption of cult iconography and organizing principles quickly slid from satiric emulation to full embrace, and many Temple apostates describe years of escalating exploitation: a guru with a sycophantic following; the systematic breakdown of individuality and autonomy; rigid hierarchies, disciplinary regimens, and incessant bullying; preying on the suggestible and vulnerable; explosive, tyrannical outbursts; and the appropriation of others’ creative voices and ideas. (p. 1)

TOPY was a particularly complex assemblage of collective experimentation and experimental

collectivity—leaving behind crumbs of inspiration but only after re-articulating itself as a

collectivity of the disappointing type, a failed experiment that subordinated difference—

including, ironically, “individual” difference—to a hierarchic investment in a leader’s ideas and

status.

Paranoia and representation. Much industrial music denies and/or exceeds

representation, especially in the striking textures of some of TG’s less conceptually determined

pieces, the more expansive improvisations and drone musics sometimes practiced by Coil,

Cyclobe, and The Legendary Pink Dots, the collage aesthetic of Nurse With Wound, and the

extreme electronic noise of groups such as Whitehouse. Nonetheless, industrial’s paranoid

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assemblage has at times reterritorialized on representational modes of expression. Many of P-

Orridge’s projects at some point fixed their shifting conceptual frameworks into manifestos that,

while sometimes tongue-in-cheek, quite straightforwardly explained the practices of COUM,

TG, TOPY, and Pandrogeny. Daniel (2008), for instance, cites as “the most explicit articulation

of a TG political stance” (p. 81) a text by P-Orridge called “Assume Power Focus,” written in

1975. It includes the claim that “every society has within it a corrupt and malignant cabal. A

dismal and malevolent bureaucracy that instills fear deeper than any medieval subjugation and

illuminates the diminished return of a distressed and pandering economic dictatorship”

(Throbbing Gristle, 1995). “Assume Power Focus” is not as subtle as P-Orridge and h/er peers’

less personalized Burroughsian claims about control: Does language, as a virus, require a clearly

defined “cabal” at its origin? Still, it explicitly expresses and represents a form of paranoia,

alongside the anxiety—and vanity of knowingness—this paranoia generates.

It is true that much of early industrial’s “transgressive” status relied on a frequent,

perceived absence of explanation, with COUM and TG “endlessly preventing their own ideas

being functional, clear oppositional stances” and their “sloganeering … offer[ing] something

more like a disconnect than an explanation” (Hegarty, 2007, p. 108). However, it would be a

mistake to dismiss the representational element of such texts as “Assume Power Focus” or the

copious explanatory and expository statements of industrialists in interviews on this basis—even

if these are often retrospective explanations. The desire to make work accessible and explicable

through representation was never truly buried, even in industrial’s earliest incarnations. A

manifesto’s representational character might be undercut by the music or performance “itself” or

appear secondary to the music or performance; but the representational powerfully circulates

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through the industrial formation and cannot fully be masked or deflected by industrial’s noise

and its proclivity for the severance of signifier from signified.

Crucially, and in tandem with such manifestos, industrialists’ engagement in an

“information war” relies on representation. Industrial musicians perceive secret forces and secret

potentials. However, to enable industrial to fight these forces (through further unveiling) and

actualize these potentials (in collaboration), word has to get out—specifically, “information”

about these forces and potentials. For instance, TG’s Industrial News periodical regularly

contained information on control techniques (Savage, 1983), figures such as Burroughs, fellow

artists, and potentially controversial topics:

In place of the official fan club publications of other labels, which feature pin-up photographs and teen-oriented interviews with musicians, Industrial News consisted primarily of quasi-scientific news: descriptions of venereal disease, reports on abnormal psychology, technical instructions for survivalists, illustrations of medical procedures …, studies on the effects of radiation, and numerous articles on serial killers. … This emphasis on research eventually came to be one of the dominant features of Industrial Culture itself. (Steirer, 2012, From Social Art… section, para. 11)

Like TOPY’s later videos and texts, the “popular information-aesthetics” served the generation

of a specific collectivity, what Steirer calls “a DIY research community whose existence

challenged both the monopolization of research and the progressive use to which it was put by

professional technocrats” (From Social Art… section, para. 18). Simultaneously, Steirer sees this

“model of community” as one that

rejected communitarian values (which the band viewed as both overly conservative and excessively utopian) in favor of those stemming from aesthetics and radical subjectivity. In place of personal communication, Industrial Culture privileged the exchange of useless information: of non-purposive texts (informational trash), citations, and prompts for research. Such exchange, though occasionally also leading to the formation of personal relationships premised upon intimacy or inter-subjective familiarity, was directed primarily towards the enabling of aesthetic experiences and DIY (a practical ideology whose name itself is at odds with traditional notions of community) activities that are fundamentally individual or mono-subjective in orientation. (Steirer, 2012, From Social Art… section, para. 25)

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The individualized research and ritual practices (e.g., the creation of sigils through masturbation)

of TOPY members, too, fit this description to some degree. Certainly, knowledge was often

accumulated and generated collectively; but at least at the time, the DIY “third mind” of

industrial networks largely assumed that community, here, was primarily the articulation of

already existing, clearly defined or definable individuals to each other. The industrial formation

is simultaneously quite radical in its collective experimentation and characterized by an

ideological self-limitation to relatively reductive notions of collectivity and its relationship to

individuality. Industrialists know well the potentials that the CCCS located in countercultural

disaffiliation from “dominant culture”: “Invest in the technical means for expanding

consciousness, and consciousness may expand beyond predictable limits. Develop the means of

communication, and people will gain access to print and audiences for which the web-offset litho

press were never intended” (Clarke et al., 1975/2006, p. 53). However, industrial has all too

often reterritorialized expanded consciousness on the fetishized individual and remained oddly

uneager to break through the self-imposed limitations of its considerable communicative

innovations.

Meanwhile, paranoia is often explicitly signified in some industrialists’ lyrics, and other

text (e.g., sampled voices) embedded in their songs. Edward Ka-Spel of The Legendary Pink

Dots is a storyteller, strongly influenced by science-fiction literature. Some of the stories told in

the group’s songs involve actual surveillance by authoritarian powers or people’s fear of such

surveillance, as on 1984’s The Tower and 1986’s Island of Jewels, a pair of anti-fascist concept

albums. Industrialists’ fears do not always seem to pertain to particularly invisible or insidious

types of power; but where they express anxieties about more traditionally authoritarian,

repressive, “sovereign” modes of power (Foucault, 1975/1977, 1976/1978; Joseph, 2008), a

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sense of portent or foreboding nonetheless mediates such power’s presence. The Tower depicts

an openly neo-fascist, carceral Britain intent on subjugating all deviancy. The group did not

necessarily believe that the United Kingdom had already become clearly and fully fascist under

Thatcher, but it saw this fascism waiting just around the corner as a logical outcome of continued

Conservative dominance. As Ka-Spel sings on “Break Day,” an ironically jaunty synth-pop waltz

punctuated by abrasive distortion and finally undermined by proliferating, accusatory ghost-

voices: “You recognized the symptoms/Smelled the hatred in the air” (Legendary Pink Dots,

1984/2006). Here, the threat of fascism has not yet been actualized, but lurks as a barely hidden

virtual in the contemporary actual. Resembling TG’s sometime-focus on the most violent

tendencies lurking in everyday life (Reed, 2013), the Pink Dots sense danger in normalcy, which

relies on fear of and, ultimately, the oppression of that which is not normal. Consequently, The

Tower was “dedicated to the deviant (we must stick together)” (Legendary Pink Dots, 1984). In

other cases, Ka-Spel’s lyrics articulate a sense of paranoia through the adoption of a pluralized

first-person perspective, with a sinister, observant “we” asserting a capacity for manipulation on

such songs as “Disturbance” (1991) and “We Bring the Day” (1993).

Less explicitly, Christopherson sometimes included recordings of disquietingly private

conversations in the music of Coil and especially TG. For instance, the former’s “The Anal

Staircase” (1986) and the latter’s “Persuasion” (1979) include field recordings of children and a

conversation about a child, respectively, which aim to discomfort or even implicate the listener

through their contextually derived suggestion of violence or child abuse (Daniel, 2008; Keenan,

2003/2016). The specific effectivities of these field recordings themselves depend on

representation’s sometime-articulation to a radicular assemblage. Such field recordings can

indeed literalize industrial’s paranoia—of surveillance, of ubiquitous but hidden violence—and

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thereby convey it in a relatively straightforward manner. However, the integration of these

recordings also serves deconstruction through juxtaposition, operating as an element of

disturbance in whichever song envelops them. Importantly, as Daniel (2008) suggests, these

often incomplete or borderline incomprehensible recordings derive from Christopherson’s “dark

art” of “the cropping of fragmentary information” (p. 113), whose very fragmentariness lends

itself to the intimation of disturbing, greater wholes—“hinting at the unspeakable” (p. 112),

telling stories and supplying seemingly straightforward information that itself may suggest far

worse, barely concealed things.

Elsewhere, it is in industrial’s mobilization of the representational that some of its

differences to free folk can be pinpointed. Comments made by Sir Richard Bishop of free folk

precursors and peers Sun City Girls in response to Coil’s “Glowworms/Waveforms” (1998)

illustrate some of these divergences. Over a series of ominous electronic drones, a slow,

shuffling pulse, and assorted spectral interruptions, John Balance’s deadpan voice recites a series

of apparently nonsensical questions—e.g., “Where’s my bum? Where’s my summertime?

Where’s my footstep? Where’s my chequer?” (Coil, 1998)—that, in their musical context, take

on a sense of portent. Bishop is not impressed:

[Bishop:] I don’t know much about [Coil]. I was probably exposed to some of their recordings a while back, because some of the people I was studying magick with were listening to Coil and Current 93.

[Marc Masters:] Do you relate to their use of alchemy and esoterica?

[Bishop:] I don’t know. When I listen to that type of music, it doesn’t remind me of anything magickal. It’s dark and it’s spooky, I get that. But that doesn’t do anything for me. … Well, you can make the spooky music and quote from [occultist Aleister] Crowley all you want. It’s not going to make you a better magician. It’s maybe going to get you some reputation with your fanbase – like, “Oooh, these people must know everything about this dark shit.” That’s fine. But as soon as I hear someone bragging about doing this or doing that, I think, you’re an idiot. You should know that any magick pursuit is a very private thing. “To know, to will, to dare and to be silent.” To be silent, you asshole! Shut the fuck up! [Laughs] (Masters, 2007, pp. 22–23)

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What is important here is not so much Bishop’s implied evaluation of magickal practice in the

industrial formation. Bishop is probably more invested in ideological matters of magick than

most other musicians of the free folk formation and thus not necessarily representative of free

folk in this register; also, his remarks ironically resonate with industrial’s own individualized

claims to knowledge. However, his misgivings speak to free folk’s comparative disinvestment

from representation and, generally, paranoid-signifying assemblages. Bishop seems to criticize

two interrelated modes of representation. One concerns the apparent representation of darkness

in music, for instance through the tension generated by drones as well as the unsettling

embeddedness of Balance’s deadpan vocals in the queasy void of drones. Where free folk

employs drones, they are less likely to directly point towards a hidden or secret realm, let alone a

paranoid-frightful realm, even as they maintain a dislocatory character. Instead, as articulated by

free folk’s rhizomatic-presignifying assemblage, they open more “positively” onto cosmic spaces

and times.

The other mode of representation evoked and disparaged by Bishop concerns the

representation of specific knowledges—the direct evocation of magickal lore and history, which

is associated with the overt, passionate investment of industrial “visionaries” in the knowledges,

stories, and lives of such predecessors as Aleister Crowley.38 Free folk’s relative disinvestment

from the representational puts free folk in tension with the ideological elaborations of magickal

and other knowledges that many industrialists are known for; one could say that these are too “on

the nose” for free folk and thus an example of the type of representational enunciation that free

folk, despite its desire to otherwise tackle crises of investment, cannot fully affirm. The magickal

can be part of free folk’s rich articulation of realms beyond, but its representation in interviews,

38 I will discuss industrial’s “subjectifying” obsessiveness in greater detail in the section on the visionary assemblage.

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song titles, lyrics, and so on is much more limited and almost always drawn back into a

multiplicity and heterogeneity “that prevents any power takeover by the signifier” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 130).

Paranoia and a presignifying assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) describe

as “presignifying” an assemblage that affords an expressive heterogeneity and polyvocality and

fosters a multiplicity of becomings. I have already argued that a comparable assemblage

dominates the collective-experimental sensibility of the free folk formation, which articulates

and expresses this sensibility through a vast range of methods, resulting in a certain social-

sensorial heterogeneity and richness. Industrial’s relation to the presignifying only partially

resembles that of free folk. The music of some of industrial’s most psychedelic-visionary

practitioners draws on such an assemblage in a way not far removed from free folk. It engenders

a cosmic sense of wonder through immersion in the natural and the spiritual even as it retains

menacing, “paranoid” characteristics, as in the Pan-ic woodland fantasy of Cyclobe’s “The

Woods Are Alive With the Smell of His Coming” (2010) and the—lyrical and sonic—animal

and vegetable realms of Coil’s “Broccoli” (1999/2020) and “Batwings (A Liminal Hymn)”

(2000). These pieces enact a variety of becomings that are irreducible to the signifier or to any

representation. Yet, as much as they draw on a presignifying assemblage, they also remain

haunted in a manner that is characteristic of the industrial formation: Rhizomatic sprawl is

always drawn back into a radicular assemblage, even if for a limited time. These pieces are

among the most powerful examples of the articulation of the visionary and the paranoid with

which I will close this chapter.

For now, I want to focus instead on instances where the paranoid, rather than the

visionary, dominates industrial’s engagement with the presignifying. Indeed, the formation’s

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relation to the presignifying is especially salient and controversial in a variety of projects that

bind it particularly closely to a heightened paranoid element. Hebdige (1979) writes that reggae’s

“dread … was an enviable commodity” to punk, and a “means with which to menace” (p. 63).

Over the years, many industrial projects have sought a similar, yet even more extreme sense of

“dread” and danger by drawing on various “non-Western” musics and spiritualities (also see

Reed, 2013). Sometimes, this was expressed in the integration of instruments such as Tibetan

thigh bones into the ritual musics of 23 Skidoo and Psychic TV (Keenan, 2003/2016); 23

Skidoo’s decidedly anti-fascist music (Reynolds, 2005b) drew further on non-Western musics

with connotations of “darkness” even as it turned away from the ritualism of The Culling Is

Coming (1983). This search for “dread” could also play out through a reinforcement of various

stereotypical articulations of primitivism and danger to Blackness in particular, but also to other

perceived racial identities, and “tribalism” in general. Consider, for instance, the cover of

Psychic TV’s Force the Hands of Chance (1982), which “features a rather grizzly looking skull,

which has been punctured by (what I assume are) arrows, on a sharp blue background. What’s

also noticeable is a Psychic TV cross, engraved into the forehead of the skull, like some tribal

marking” (Cock-a-Doodle, 2004, para. 1). Meanwhile, the later work of Whitehouse’s William

Bennett, such as Cut Hands’ Afro Noise I (2011), often articulates African-derived polyrhythms

to song titles suggesting violence and danger—different enunciative practices that combine into a

rich but threatening ensemble that emphatically acts on the body in its orientation towards dance

but also attempts to generate anxiety. These tendencies towards the fetishization of a threatening

“Africa” are even more obvious, and more obviously problematic, in Bennett’s Extreme Music

from Africa (1997) compilation. This album has long been assumed to at least partially consist of

recordings created by Bennett himself, rather than by the African musicians whose work it

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supposedly compiles (Dunton, 2011). Its label description on the website of Susan Lawly,

Bennett’s own label, calls Africa

the dark continent of the tyrants, the beautiful girls, the bizarre rituals, the tropical fruits, the pygmies, the guns, the mercenaries, the tribal wars, the unusual diseases, the abject poverty, the sumptuous riches, the widespread executions, the praetorian colonialists, the exotic wildlife - and the music. (Susan Lawly, n.d., para. 1)

Colonial and neo-colonial—racist—ascriptions of darkness, death, primitivity, and abjection

serve to frame the compilation’s musics as exciting to an industrialist audience that is attuned to

the dark and the unspeakable, and whose whiteness, as Reed (2013) points out, is consistently

presumed.39 Here, the presignifying is articulated to the paranoid through patterns of

stereotyping; the “irrational” decentering of the signifier is articulated as threatening, even as that

threat is desired. A set of musics simultaneously evades signifying and subjectifying tendencies

and reinforces a set of historically violent representations.

Paranoia and several a-semiotic encodings. The industrial formation’s investment in

hidden bodily potentials, as well as the materiality of various technologies, suggests an

articulation of the paranoid and other relevant assemblages to an investment in what appears to

be the material “itself”; but perhaps this investment could best be described in terms of a-

semiotic encodings, specific articulations of reality irreducible to the semiotic. Neither purely

material nor working on discursive substance (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016), the a-

semiotic shapes and contains primary realms of lived belonging, of bodily experience. Some of

the experiments of TG and other industrialists actively aim beyond the semiotic, be it through

ritual mediation or even in attempts to arrive at unmediated impact. For the purposes of this

39 Also see a blog post by Josh Hall (2014) for a critique of Bennett’s work that connects these issues to other problematic tendencies in industrial (and related) music.

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study, the latter experiments might best be understood as an investigation of “signals.” In

Grossberg and Behrenshausen’s framework,

a particular input or stimulus elicits a specific response, without assuming that such relations operate according to the strictures of direct or linear causalities (for, as Guattari notes, an entire field of materials has already been arranged to facilitate this seemingly “direct” effectivity). Signals establish the ways the states (intensities) of one body can and do impact the state of other bodies, ranging from the materialities of genetic codes to the most direct forms of controlling or managing the behaviour of a population. (p. 1015)

P-Orridge (as cited in Ford, 1999) expressed interest in the “incorporat[ion of] … subliminal

information, metabolic frequency and different control techniques used by other organisations”

(pp. 8.9–8.10). For Ford (1999), such

“control techniques” tied in with TG’s research into the harnessing of sound to provoke controlled physical and psychological reactions in the listener. In this metabolic sense the whole body, not just the eardrum, became a receiver of the musical message …. (p. 8.10)

Reed (2013) emphasizes industrial music’s “techno-ambivalence,” its dialectic between a

Futurist-derived affirmation of modern technology and a Burroughsian techno-paranoia. TG

exhibited and performed this ambivalence in relation to the bodies of the band’s members

themselves as well as those of other people. For instance, the band articulated this ambivalence

into a paranoid investigation of militarist-survivalist thought, style, and practice that

emphatically centered on TG’s exploration of the a-semiotic:

After having been burgled and losing much of its equipment, [Industrial Records] decided to transform the Beck Road “Headquarters” into a fortress. … Fantasy increasingly became reality at Beck Road as the group’s experiments with infra- and ultra-sound [extreme low and high frequency] equipment—such as Pizo horns and signal generators—began to be used in earnest.

The “bunker mentality” (Ford, 1999, p. 9.18) of these days coincided with the arrival of an

itinerant group that settled down in a wasteland area near Beck Road. P-Orridge claims that their

presence led to a rise in crime in the area. While TG’s sonic experiments were a logical outcome

of several of TG’s interests and clearly were experienced by the band as empowering, they also

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lent themselves to more problematic purposes as the band started aiming its sonic weaponry at its

neighbors. P-Orridge (as cited in Ford, 1999) recounts the gathering of “intelligence” related to

this violent experiment, including “hearsay and anecdotes overheard from tinkers in Broadway

Market complaining of sensations of a ringing in the ears, of broken sleep, nightmares,

headaches and bad feelings” (p. 9.19). P-Orridge also claims to have vandalized, together with

TG associate Monte Cazazza, the itinerant group’s cars and caravans; supposedly, the group “left

the wasteland convinced that it was haunted and cursed” (Ford, p. 9.21). Here, the supposedly

anti-authoritarian TG ended up reproducing a dominant anti-deviant paranoia and, notably, some

of the same forms of violent prejudice and discrimination that the band attempted to combat or at

least unveil as inherent to dominant “normalcy”:

Adolf Hitler also called the gypsies in Germany subhumans, along with other groups. In this nihilistic phase of our evolution we had no problem reassigning this category to the infestation just beyond our wall. It seemed clear they had no redeeming features, nor wished for any. This was a miraculously viable situation for a practical investigation of the various theories and ideas we had been conceptually considering. (P-Orridge, as cited in Ford, 1999, p. 9.21)40

Fear and violence can be inscribed on the body. Paranoia does not always refer back to

“control”; instead, it may point towards the dehumanized bodies of which P-Orridge claims on

“Subhuman,” a single inspired by these incidents: “You make me dizzy with your disease”

(Throbbing Gristle, 1980/2011b). TG’s experiments with and through the a-semiotic were

embedded in and conditioned by particularly conventional and discriminatory discourses and

power relations—and thus oddly compatible with the law-and-order tendencies mapped by the

CCCS.

40 In these remarks, P-Orridge (as cited in Ford, 1999) presents h/erself as aware of the problematic character of these actions—“the apparently rational process by which emotions can be whipped up with ease into a fury of resentment” (p. 9.21)—but nonetheless portrays the violence inflicted as a valid defense: “Sadly, for I personally despise stereotypes, all the worst fears of problems of harassment and criminal activity immediately manifested themselves” (p. 9.18) following the itinerant group’s arrival.

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This infamous, quasi-fascist episode is a particularly striking example of TG’s self-

understanding as a collective of experimenters, and the dangers of experimentation and its

application. It is also a striking example of the group’s paranoia at its peak, and of the

articulation of its paranoid assemblage to an a-semiotic assemblage. But industrial’s paranoid, a-

semiotic tendencies are not always as clearly articulated to the social (as distinct from the

aesthetic). TG regularly appears in histories of noise music, or of noise’s articulation to and

disarticulation from music. Noise, here, tends to be defined negatively, as that which disturbs,

which interrupts, which appears incommensurable with musical and other conventions. Even

beyond the sonic, TG’s manifold aesthetic and social experimentations have been described as

“cultural noise” (Goddard, 2008); for noise scholar Paul Hegarty (2007), “industrial music

aspires to live in unresolved negativity” (p. 106) and therefore relies on transgressive practices to

cross ever so many boundaries. While some of these instances of noise suggest yet another

iteration of deconstructionist practice, the music does not always operate in the manner of a cut-

up or merely as a mode of disturbance. Musically, TG’s noise often manifests in deliberately

deformed pieces (Hegarty, 2007) that rarely rely on melody and harmony in any conventional

manner, and only sometimes integrate recognizable rhythms. This can result in undifferentiated

“Walls of Sound” (a TG song title from 1978), in which electronic sounds and more traditional

instruments (such as P-Orridge’s violin and Tutti’s cornet) blend into each other and are run

through various effects. This dimension of industrial music can be described as a-signifying;

more, it was regularly mobilized for attempted interventions in the a-semiotic. Hegarty (2007)

assigns to industrial “a Foucauldian take on power”: “Power is internalized by individuals

through endless micro-processes where the body is regulated, defined, identified as the means of

controlling you” (p. 119). Thus, industrial’s sensory overload and focus on the body is part of its

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subversive project—one that does not escape “power” but attempts to re-articulate its techniques

and its carriers:

Powerful, mechanized and/or tribalistic drumming sought to reconfigure an audience’s relation to what they were hearing—this would not be entertainment, ambience, sound track. Rhythm, volume, noises, harsh interferences and frequencies—all targeted the body as listening device so that the mind-body dualism the modern western listener has been disciplined into was undone, even—perhaps especially—if only momentarily. It is a given that the musicians in question believed that this was not something that could be suggested or offered politely—the work was too extreme to function except at maximum intensity (this applies equally to recordings, even if the listener is allowed considerable scope to refuse). (p. 120)

Indeed, groups such as Whitehouse rely even more strongly on extreme frequencies at high

volume. At “maximum intensity,” industrial aims to push listeners and musicians to various

limits, including those of the body and its responses; here, the a-signifying is articulated to the a-

semiotic, and both are ultimately re-articulated to the radicular, providing industrialists with a

temporary fragmenting of control and its stranglehold. Much commentary on industrial has

tended to prioritize this “noisy,” “transgressive” dimension. The radicular assemblage, in its

encounter with the paranoid, becomes an apparatus of continuous disarticulation, deconstruction,

interference, and disturbance, directed at the discursive, the social, and the material.

Vision

Still, the focus on the paranoid as well as on industrial’s crucial “noisiness” and

negativity tells only part of the formation’s story, even when the paranoid assemblage is

analyzed in its various articulations to other assemblages. This focus points more towards the

power-obsessed realm of TG and Cabaret Voltaire than to the more consistently spiritual-

occultist work of Coil, Current 93, TOPY, and others. Perhaps it is significant that these latter

projects started only after TG had disbanded—and that TG’s own investment in magickal

practices was more pronounced towards the end of the group’s initial existence. A visionary

assemblage arguably pointed away from industrial’s more restrictive and draining paranoiac

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concerns, anxiety-inducing as they were in their embrace of “unresolved negativity.” An

affirmation of spiritual dimensions and a renewed focus on the body’s material capacities opened

new doors for industrial. Reed (2013) shows that industrial faces the question of how “to fill the

vacuum left by deprogramming” (p. 8), by the formation’s reliance on deconstruction. For Reed,

industrial often does so through investment in the irrational. One of his examples—COUM’s

pranksterism—even predates TG; industrial was never devoid of countercultural elements

irreducible to militant deconstruction and “unresolved negativity.” However, I want to suggest

that this residual countercultural-positive vector was deemphasized in industrial’s most paranoid

moments and subsequently became a key resource for industrial’s visionary re-articulation of its

esoteric-experimental sensibility. During industrial’s affirmative turn, paranoia did not

disappear; but other relations to the hidden or the secret now often took center-stage, perhaps in

an attempt to escape the most constrictive paranoiac circles towards something more positive and

open—even if that “openness” was found inside, as wondrous interiority.

I want to suggest that, as a key component and articulation of the formation’s sensibility,

industrial’s paranoid assemblage was joined by its own transformation—a visionary assemblage,

the sensibility’s second key component and articulation. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987)

describe both “a paranoid, signifying, despotic regime of signs and a passional or subjective,

postsignifying, authoritarian regime.” The signifying regime is primarily constitutive of the

paranoid articulation of industrial’s sensibility, while the postsignifying regime provides the key

to the visionary articulation. From the signifying assemblage’s circle of signs, a set of signs

departs at a point of subjectification, generating a line of flight which “receives a positive sign,

as though it were effectively occupied and followed by a people who find in it their reason for

being or destiny” (p. 134). In industrial, a sign, a symbol (a rune, a sigil, an old set of writings or

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recordings, a metaphysical or aesthetic obsession, a personal epiphany or disaster) may serve as a

point of subjectification, a jumping-off point for an opening-up to some articulation of the

sublime or cosmic. In the postsignifying assemblage, this line leads into several distinct,

successive passional sequences. One passion or obsession follows another: a sequence that may

be familiar to readers of England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s (2003/2016) biography of

Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, which spends considerable time tracing the many

specific obsessions that became formative of its subjects’ musics and self-conceptualizations and

that equip these subjects themselves with a “visionary” authority.41 All this, however, is not so

much to claim that industrial is primarily and alternatingly dominated by the signifying and

postsignifying assemblages, as if these constitute polar opposites. Instead, the passional lines of

the postsignifying assemblage mediate and re-articulate the paranoia of the signifying

assemblage into a more “positive” set of forces, the visionary assemblage. This may be most

saliently expressed in Coil and Cyclobe’s queer, esoteric, and increasingly cosmic work of the

late 1990s and early 2000s; in the strange vistas of Current 93’s hallucinatory excursions from

the 1990s onwards; or in The Legendary Pink Dots’ consistent articulation of wonder to portent.

In this mode, industrial often reconnects to and reconfigures a residual countercultural

spiritualism. Although this spiritual element can be found in the paranoid assemblage as well, the

visionary assemblage is readier to embrace it.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), the signifying assemblage’s interpreter-priests

have a privileged relationship to the (dominant) powers of past and present, while the

postsignifying assemblage’s prophets relate to the future’s potential. The industrial formation’s

41 The “authoritarian” element of the postsignifying assemblage therefore should not be understood as an overt “political” authoritarianism that explicitly affirms hierarchy, but rather as the privileging of “vision” as a superior mode of deviancy. That said, the lines between these authoritarianisms can be blurred—perhaps most obviously so in the case of P-Orridge’s leadership of TOPY (Siepmann, 2019).

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distinction is similar, yet not exactly the same. The interpreters of insidious, hidden powers—i.e.,

those industrialists who work in a more “Burroughsian” vein—certainly foreground the present

as they fear and battle the forces that beset them. However, industrial’s visionaries do not always

envision the future. Sometimes, they dive into the past to recover hidden potentials; and often

enough, their gaze is multidirectional in its temporality. As with the paranoid assemblage, I want

to distinguish between different articulations of the visionary assemblage. It especially connects

to, and formulates hybrid assemblages with, 1. a representational assemblage, 2. a radicular

assemblage, 3. industrial’s machinic assemblage and the “Body without Organs”, 4. an

arborescent assemblage, and 5. a hallucinatory somniofaciality machine; and it re-articulates to

6. a paranoid assemblage.

Vision and representation. Most straightforwardly, certain industrial artists—such as

The Legendary Pink Dots’ Edward Ka-Spel and Current 93’s David Tibet—sometimes perform

an opening to a sense of the cosmic through storytelling. Ka-Spel in particular draws on science-

fiction tropes to tell stories that speak of simultaneously awesome and awful futures, or perhaps

atemporal virtuals. These may include worlds colorful but crumbling in the wake of

environmental disaster (“Just a Lifetime,” 1990/2001a) or nuclear apocalypse (“Waiting for the

Cloud,” 1987/2018), ruminations on the human condition from a cosmic perspective

(“Evolution,” 1991/2001b; “A Velvet Resurrection,” 1995/2009), and, quite characteristically,

songs that describe vast vistas of interiority (“Andromeda Suite,” 1994/2008; “Red Flag,” 2019).

Musically, these songs often employ sequencers and synthesizer patches that recall the German

Kosmische Musik of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream with its connotations of outer space

and vast spatiality; they also sometimes draw on the psychedelic/space rock of Gong, another

decidedly countercultural/“hippie” influence.

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In a different register, the representational tendencies of industrial’s “information war”

also manifest in many of its most visionary moments. Industrial’s visionaries, too, can keep a

secret; but mostly, they are more than happy and even eager to share their obsessions, to make

accessible their specific points of subjectification. With the title England’s Hidden Reverse,

Keenan (2003/2016) evokes these groups’ investment in a specifically English realm of deviancy

and esotericism—a set of queer-esoteric lineages that these groups articulate themselves, from

which they draw sustenance, and in which they place themselves. Notably, interviews with

Coil’s John Balance and Current 93’s David Tibet often contain information on some of the

artists and mystics referenced in the lyrics and artwork of their respective groups. Such figures

may include Elizabeth I.’s astronomer and advisor John Dee and his medium Edward Kelley,

who communicated with angels, as well as poet and visual artist William Blake, cat painter Louis

Wain, horror writer Arthur Machen, occultist Aleister Crowley, painter Austin Osman Spare, and

more contemporary figures such as director (and Coil collaborator) Derek Jarman. All these

figures share a visionary investment in the hidden and secret (occulted realms accessed through

alchemy, art, sexual deviancy, and more) and serve as inspirations to industrial’s self-styled

deviant visionaries: points of subjectification in the presence of whose work Balance, Tibet, and

many of their peers recognize themselves. Simultaneously, they do perhaps speak to a struggle

over “Englishness” or “Britishness”—to a search for alternative traditions “against the

background of a crisis of national identity and culture precipitated by the unresolved psychic

trauma of the ‘end of empire’” (Hall, 1988, p. 2). If Thatcherism’s “regressive modernization”

served as an ideological technique of discipline, moralizing against deviants and aiming “to

expel symbolically one sector of society after another from the imaginary community of the

nation” (p. 8), then industrial distances itself from this re-articulation of Englishness/Britishness:

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ideologically, by assuming the mantle of deviancy, and affectively, by resituating itself in a

parallel (alternative more than oppositional) England that is incongruent with Thatcherite

moralism while failing to tackle its crucial racist dimension. The “hidden reverse” disturbs

dominant notions of Englishness and directs Englishness towards a queer realm of

experimentation but rarely pierces its own colonialist conditions.

As much as the visionary-representational articulation takes place collaboratively, it

primarily enables individual subjectivities. Industrial’s visionaries, just like and perhaps even

more so than its interpreters, are perceived as having distinctive voices, idiosyncratic personal

mythologies, and unmistakable, vast interiorities. Perhaps this also lends itself to odd forms of

atomization—where the encounter of individual(ized) obsessions in collective spaces merely

reproduces a dysfunctional reduction of collective-creative investment to individual

eccentricities. For some time in the mid-1980s, David Tibet, Douglas Pearce (Death in June), Ian

Read (Death in June, Fire + Ice), and various others eccentrics lived in a house (“Enclave X”) in

Tufnell Park, London, owned by Odinic priestess Freya Aswynn; other important members of

the formation (e.g., Annie Anxiety, Diana Rogerson, Steven Stapleton, Tony Wakeford) “moved

in and out of the house” (Webb, 2007, p. 84) or lived nearby (Keenan, 2003/2016). This suggests

a particularly creative milieu. Indeed, Webb (2007) writes:

They were all taking an interest in Crowleyite Thelema, the Northern European Mysteries, paganism, apocalyptic reference points, magic, and ritual. These themes were to be explored by all of these individuals in their own lives and within their musical projects, and in keeping with the very individualistic nature of Crowley’s “do what thou wilt” their uses and interpretations differed and had particular resonances in their artistic work. (p. 84)

Webb’s framework (discussed in the dissertation’s introduction), though correct in identifying an

interesting node in a network important to this formation, is unable to analyze or account for a

variety of problems highlighted by this specific location and moment. Anecdotes from this time

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(e.g., in Keenan, 2003/2016), while sometimes entertaining, also suggest a disjointed assemblage

of obsessions: One fellow dweller “claimed the crown of Norfolk, apparently as a descendant of

the King Of Wessex, and … also made replica Arthurian swords” (p. 205); Tibet drunkenly set

fire to “a pyramid of all his Noddy42 collection” (Rose McDowall, as cited in Keenan,

2003/2016, p. 205), almost causing a disaster, while a former girlfriend recalls an occasion

“where Tibet’s friends were all sitting around having a cosy chat about Nazi memorabilia while

some racket played in the background” (Lorraine Love, as cited in Keenan, 2003/2016, p. 207).

Tibet and collaborator Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson “were both sick to death of meeting people at

Freya’s who claimed to be the reincarnation of Crowley …. Total collapse would ensue if we

ever heard the phrase ‘sexual magick’ again” (Tibet, as cited in Current 93, n.d.). Though

anecdotal and indubitably played up for effect, these stories point towards some of the most

prevalent clichés associated with industrial music, notably obsessions with “transgressive”

figures such as Burroughs, Crowley, or Charles Manson. More importantly, they suggest some

important limitations: Articulated as esoteric “information” and circulating as cultural capital, the

knowledges, histories, and figures that elicited industrialists’ passions sometimes became points

of subjectification of the narrowest kind, creatively and ethically limited, socially and politically

bankrupt. Notably, several key figures associated with Enclave X—including Aswynn (High

Rede of the Troth, 2018) as well as Pearce and Wakeford (see below)43—have at different times

been criticized for racist statements and/or otherwise problematic political alignments.

42 Noddy is a character from Enid Blyton’s popular children’s books and one of Tibet’s many obsessions—indeed, points of subjectification—chronicled by Keenan (2003/2016) in England’s Hidden Reverse. 43 Among many possible examples of explicit critiques of racist and fascist-aligned tendencies in “neofolk” and other industrial-related musics, see the blog Who Makes the Nazis? (n.d.) and Büsser (2001).

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Vision and a radicular assemblage. Industrialists re-articulate a radicular assemblage

not only in the paranoid resistance of the cut-up, but also through other forms of collage that

center on juxtaposition more broadly. These practices are often consciously derived from avant-

gardist movements, especially surrealism. If the cut-up aims at the articulation of a

supplementary “third mind,” then industrial’s surrealists—deconstructive visionaries—turn

towards a mental interiority that is experienced as harboring hidden potentials of the imagination.

Whereas free folk’s more rhizomatic aesthetic aims ever-outward, into a material richness,

industrial in its most visionary incarnations lets voices, noises, colors, and more dance across the

mind, which is a space of weirdness and of authentic creativity. Consider, for instance, The

Legendary Pink Dots’ explorations of “madness” and its implications on 1985’s Asylum, which

is given the telling tagline “a place to escape from, a place to escape to” (Legendary Pink Dots,

1985/2014): a simultaneous line of flight and a return to a fragmented self—a fragmentary unity.

The music on Asylum is highly diverse, including bizarre yet catchy synth-pop (“Echo Police,”

“I’m the Way, the Truth, the Light”), gothic balladry (“Golden Dawn”), a jaunty cabaret spoof

(“Fifteen Flies in the Marmalade”), diffuse dirges (“Femme Mirage,” “A Message from Our

Sponsor”), and collaborator Steven Stapleton’s characteristic collage work on “So Gallantly

Screaming.” At least in the Pink Dots’ early years, and certainly around the time of Asylum, Ka-

Spel described the group’s work as expressing the “terminal kaleidoscope,” in which

we take the planet as if it was a drowning man, and as a drowning man sees his life flash past his eyes very quickly, all the emotions and all the colors that he’s ever seen, ever experienced—but we just take it on a global scale ... repeating images, getting faster and faster.” (Legendary Pink Dots, 1985, 01:09)

The visionary’s apocalyptic insight is expressed in the ever-renewed, hallucinatory juxtaposition

of signs. This is not a “purely” cosmic flow, but rather is drawn back into a fragmentary unity:

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the mind of the planetary drowning man, whose impending demise both implies a catastrophic

futurity and unleashes the past.

Even more so, Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound trades in incongruous juxtaposition with

direct reference to the (now residual) surrealist vanguard. Where Coil, as discussed below, fully

commits to sexual-material practices, Nurse With Wound traces imagery of sado-masochism into

bizarre collages alongside lounge music, direct references to avant-garde artists and cult rock

musicians, found conversations, synthetic crickets, and more. Any transformations or becomings

here are peculiarly limited by the consistent presence of signifiers of dream logic, darkness, and

paranoia—from disembodied voices to sudden cuts to electroacoustic drones: a visionary glance

into an abyss that turns out to be “the” subconscious, “the” mind. All of industrial’s visionary-

radicular musics involve some degree of collaboration, even in the case of Nurse With Wound,

which is very clearly Stapleton’s project. But aesthetically, they rarely hint at any sustained

collectivity. Even the unleashed mind’s powers seem ultimately to be those of just one person—

more often than not, indeed, a man, even when that man is characterized by (and implicitly

criticized for) his toxic patterns, as in the case of many of the characters appearing in Ka-Spel’s

songs.

Vision, the machinic assemblage, and the Body without Organs. The sheer sensory

assault of TG and related projects may lend itself to terror and violence, but it just as likely ties

in with immersive bliss. After all, industrial has often tended to preach to the converted (Reed,

2013), rather than spending most of its time épater la bourgeoisie or actively reaching out

beyond the formation’s borders. Some industrialists seek corporeal-experiential empowerment

and attempt this through a bloody-minded intervention in the formation’s material articulation,

its machinic assemblage. For Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987; also see Grossberg &

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Behrenshausen, 2016), the machinic assemblage is an arrangement of bodies, of formed

materials. It is not unformed matter (the virtual) but a contextually specific configuration,

notably as the milieu. The milieu, in turn, is the material space that is transformed into a

formation’s territory—a lived place. Human bodies (and other material arrangements) do not

simply exist as pre-given essences. Instead, any historical moment’s discursive, social, and

material forces shape and position bodies in space and potentially formalize them as locations of

affective investment. Bodies—human or otherwise—are organized in contingent, contextually

specific ways; what a body can do cannot be known in advance (Deleuze, 1968/1990). The

industrial formation consequently sees power at work in human bodily experience; and it knows

that this bodily experience, this sense of capacity, is contingent. Many of its artists therefore

strive to enhance—and seemingly set free—the body’s capacities, envisioning a less constrained

mode of body-mind existence. Indeed, industrial may well orient itself towards virtual bodies,

opening up the machinic assemblage—human and related bodies in their specific milieu—

towards its more-than to reterritorialize it as a new realm of belonging—of more “capacious”

inhabited bodies.

TG’s slogan “Entertainment Through Pain” was provocative, but it also spoke to an

investment in pleasure, pain, and their interrelations: sado-masochistic self-experiments towards,

or rather through, something like a Body without Organs (BwO). Deleuze and Guattari

(1980/1987) describe the BwO as a dis-organized plane conducive to affective flows not

afforded by the body’s conventional stratification. Articulated through rigorous experimentation,

a BwO is the continuous exploration of bodily capacities that is irreducible to its seemingly pre-

given organization. In 1978, P-Orridge (as cited in Ford, 1999) wrote that s/he employs

putting myself into unpleasant or risk situations … as a means of deconditioning myself psychologically. I believe all bodily and all erotic functions of the human being, both

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male and female, are both natural and interesting. I hate shame. Anything I found myself thinking about, and which I am not sure I could do in public or private without feelings of embarrassment or self-consciousness, I put into an action to test myself. (p. 6.33)

There is, again, the search for something “natural”—apparently extreme, perhaps, but “true”—

that has been buried by the conditioning that reinforces conventional morality. Though much of

what P-Orridge says here speaks to the discursive and/as the mental, deconditioning also requires

the liberation of the body—its material capacities, “all bodily and all erotic functions”—from the

discursive shackles that limit it. The body is a field of cultural struggle, and TG’s “libertarian

form of behavioral science” (Steirer, 2012, para. 9) aims to temporarily deterritorialize it in order

to arrive at a more capacious body.

Meanwhile, Coil’s ritualistic approach to the body is particularly noticeable in the early

EP How to Destroy Angels (1984). Its artwork declared it “ritual music for the accumulation of

male sexual energy”—an evocation and actualization of potentials of the body, notably the

discriminated, “deviant” homosexual body. Tellingly, Coil initially worked on the soundtrack to

Clive Barker’s film Hellraiser (1987), a horror movie with barely concealed themes of sado-

masochism, which the group has claimed took inspiration from Christopherson’s own collection

of extreme gay pornography (Keenan, 2003/2016). Balance (as cited in Keenan, 2003/2016)

accused Barker of “s[elling] his soul” (p. 231) by accepting his distributor’s demands for a more

commercially viable film that did not include Coil’s score. However, the finished film still

revolves around the sado-masochistic articulation of pleasure to pain that Deleuze and Guattari

invoke as a prime example of the production of a BwO. In the world of Hellraiser (Barker,

1987), a hidden dimension comparable to Christian hell exists. In this realm, daring seekers of

the extreme get to—are forced to—experience pleasure and pain; the most extreme pleasures are

administered through, and in combination with, the most extreme pain. Coil and some other

industrialists are similarly invested in the exploration of heightened states that are kept secret and

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even penalized in polite society. This is not a purely discursive exploration, but instead requires a

willingness to (apparently) “directly” work on the human body. Testing the limits of the body-

mind assemblage, industrial is willing to envision a body and, consequently, a heightened or

altered “consciousness”—a specific enunciative assemblage—beyond the given.

Elsewhere, as on Love’s Secret Domain (1991) and Time Machines (1998), Coil brings

the exploratory potentials of (outlawed) psychedelic drugs to the fore. As Balance sings on

“Windowpane,” a song evoking the experience of an acid trip: “See microscopic, see world

view/See the future leaking through” (1991). The experimental alteration of one’s consciousness

enables bold visions of the virtual; in industrial, as in many other countercultural realms,

chemical intervention in and augmentation of bodily processes serve as important conditions of

this alteration. The discursive transforms its milieu—rewires its territory. All this

experimentation beyond the given organization of the body, of the mind-body assemblage, takes

place at the risk of destruction. Despite their exuberant evocation of the BwO, Deleuze and

Guattari (1980/1987) warn of this risk—of drawing a line into death, emptying the body,

deterritorializing the body into the void. The transformational engagement with a BwO requires,

perhaps paradoxically, a certain (metaphorical) sobriety in order to remain sustainable. As one of

industrial’s most radical and deliberate seekers of heightened states (Oey, 1988; Keenan,

2003/2016), Balance struggled with mental health issues and alcoholism until his accidental

death in a fall in 2004. Keenan’s narration of Coil’s career in England’s Hidden Reverse, first

published before Balance’s untimely death, contains copious remarks by and about Balance and

his precarious attempts to stay in balance that appear ominous in light of his passing. Balance’s

extraordinary visions often evoked the radically destructive line of deterritorialization that he

ultimately drew.

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In a different yet related register, Coil’s work of the late 1980s and early 1990s also

draws on a variety of dance musics. “Windowpane” does not pair the acid visions of its lyrics

with an unmetered soundscape, but instead works with a regular dance beat. From some of TG’s

later songs (“Don’t Do as You’re Told, Do as You Think,” 1980; “Discipline,” 1981) onwards,

many industrial projects have been exploring the ability of bass to move bodies. Carter and

Tutti’s duo project, Chris & Cosey (later Carter Tutti), articulates some of the themes of TG

(esoteric symbolism, sexuality) first and foremost to a type of minimalist electronic dance music,

based primarily on regular beats. This connects to TG’s paranoid investigations of the a-

semiotic, notably through an investment in rhythm’s ability to shape a lived territory; but it is

more eager to go beyond an exploration of rhythm’s “disciplinary” powers and open up to the

considerable pleasures of various club musics that emerged simultaneously with industrial.

Indeed, Reed (2013) emphasizes that “Chris & Cosey’s dance stylings and Genesis P-Orridge’s

championing of acid house music” can be understood as reacting against fundamentally negative

and even violent articulations of industrial’s sensibility. This rhythmic focus on the body serves

“as a semineutral way of filling the void where rationality used to be,” a rationality that

industrial’s paranoid assemblage understands as corrupted and deceitful and therefore

undermines—an undermining that, in turn, risks attracting “hate-based politics” (p. 313). Chris &

Cosey and late-1980s Psychic TV shared this shift to the emphatically “danceable” with various

other groups of the industrial formation, not least Cabaret Voltaire; and it matched Tutti’s own,

highly body-centric work outside music, i.e., as a pornographic model and stripper (Ford, 1999;

Tutti, 2017)—vocations widely condemned as immoral, yet simultaneously accepted as secret

pastimes.

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When Coil released How to Destroy Angels in 1984, the EP faced criticisms for its liner

notes’ foregrounding of “male sexual energy” and apparent exclusion of women (Keenan,

2003/2016). Although these criticisms were themselves somewhat misguided and problematic,

given Coil’s aim to empower a set of identities and practices discriminated by rampant

homophobia, they do to some extent speak to industrial’s homosociality. It is, often, white male

bodies that are at its center of attention. This makes its exceptions even more striking. Tutti (n.d.)

has regularly invoked a decidedly countercultural principle of art equaling life (Clarke et al.,

1975/2006)—in her case, an individualistic logic of “honesty” and autonomy, through which

Tutti mounts a critique of bourgeois morality and explores the hidden, disavowed potentials of

(cis-female) bodies. Her solo album Time to Tell (1982/2000) envisions—and reports back

from—a realm of heightened eroticism expressed both in her dispassionate spoken word delivery

and the album’s enveloping, synthesizer-based music. More recently, P-Orridge’s “pandrogeny”

project has been praised for its radical, surgical as well as discursive intervention into gendered

corporeal materiality—not a deterritorialization towards an irrevocably dis-organized body but,

instead, the body’s reterritorialization beyond exclusionary conventions of gender.

Vision and arborescence. The visionary assemblage relies on a move of opening-up,

even if it is towards the interior. Industrial recognizes that it cannot subsist on paranoia alone; in

Reed’s words, it grapples with the problem posed by “the vacuum left by deprogramming.” The

visionary assemblage grants industrial an opportunity to expand, to affirm; it emphatically

deterritorializes—leading away from the given towards different realms. However, that does not

keep it from at times affording some of the most rigid reterritorializations. The industrial

formation harbors many hidden or secret elements that could be found beneath or beyond the

decay and anxiety of 1970s Britain. Some of these secrets point to alternative worlds, interior or

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exterior, and some of them even lend themselves to a certain oppositionality, as in TG’s

experiments. However, industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility sometimes also enables a

reactionary condemnation and rejection of a decadent “modern world” as a whole. This

melancholy amplification of the sense of decay, which I have described earlier as one of two

larger-scale structures of feeling particularly relevant to industrial, can be seen especially in the

“neofolk” or “apocalyptic folk” subgenre associated with Death in June, Sol Invictus, and

Current 93. Here, the visionary’s gaze is fixed on a pre-industrial past that is pure, or at least less

contaminated than the deceitful and sad present; the future is apocalyptic by default.

Douglas Pearce of Death in June has been criticized for the ambiguity of his lyrical,

musical, and symbolic references to fascism. The recurring question of whether he is a fascist or

merely a TG-esque deconstructive “provocateur” who aims to shake people out of complacency

through confrontation with the taboo is unanswerable and perhaps misses the point. More

important is Pearce’s foregrounding of purity and his projection of an unsullied pre-modern, pre-

industrial “Europa” (Büsser, 2001). A melancholic longing permeates Death in June’s music

(Webb, 2007)—not least in Pearce’s baritone, which evokes the authority and nobility of a weary

visionary. This melancholia suggests that Europa is unrecoverable; but it still holds the promise

of something more honest, honorable, and true—of an unalienated connection of blood to soil

that is implied as Pearce again and again traces his roots, as in the lyrics to “Runes and Men”

(1987): Immersed in “drunken thoughts of runes and men,” he envisions “other lives/And greater

times” (Death in June, 1987). Scattered interview remarks by Pearce, however knowingly dark

their humor, do suggest an actual anxiety about the presence of non-white people in a globalized,

post-World War II Europe. Asked how he “feel[s] about fans that are Eurocentric/Racialist,”

Pearce (as cited in Scapegoat, 1998) states:

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Depending upon their “version” of Eurocentric Racialism, then 9 times out of 10 I feel very comfortable with it. This is how it’s supposed to be. I would like to think that the Klu Klux Klan [sic] version isn’t included in this. Eurocentrics goes beyond reactionary Christian, political militias. I believe in seizing the end of time, not being a passive part of it. (para. 16)

Pearce’s vision here is apocalyptic as well as paranoid; and it connects, crucially, to an

arborescent assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) that takes the primacy of roots for

granted, however hidden they are by the detritus of the modern world. The connection to these

roots implies purity, against the contamination of contemporary urban-industrial decay, against

the rootless (historically an anti-Semitic trope), and against the impure non-white; this is what

Büsser (2005, 2007) contrasts with free folk’s contamination-through-multiplicity. For Anton

Shekhovtsov (2009), Death in June and Tony Wakeford’s Sol Invictus are examples of

“apoliteic” music. Shekhovtsov derives this term from Italian traditionalist, fascist-aligned writer

Julius Evola, himself an inspiration for many neofolk acts. Apoliteic artists are characterized not

so much by openly and explicitly fascist and racist propaganda but rather by an aristocratic

retreat from the decadent “interregnum” that is the modern world. These musicians articulate

“three main lyrical and artistic themes” in their work: “the death of Europe; Europe in the

interregnum; and the rebirth of Europe” (p. 444). The contemporary world is false and deceitful;

a heroic future is hinted at but, at least for neofolk’s melancholic originators, appears quite out of

reach; the past is idealized.

Neofolk artists regularly articulate this search for premodern roots to some version of

paganism, itself of great interest to less reactionary industrialists (such as Chris & Cosey and

Coil) as well. Webb (2007), discussing neofolk and especially Tony Wakeford’s Sol Invictus

project, writes:

A type of melancholia and pessimism pervades much of the work of artists in this milieu. Also a longing for something that has disappeared or a description of something that has left a void is ever apparent. The legacy of the Romantic poets of England lies heavy on

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Sol Invictus’s work: … a type of reactive art against the surety and rationality of the enlightenment where scientific reason seemed to these writers to have overtaken any understanding of emotion and any respect for nature. … The turn towards a type of esoteric spirituality where paganism comes to the fore because of its respect for nature, it [sic] openness about sexuality, and its rituals and ceremonies guided by the seasons is the most obvious place for writers and artists who have this opinion to be. (p. 100)

For O’Sullivan (2008), some instances of modern paganism may serve to bring elements of

other, perhaps prior, assemblages into the present in order to counter the present’s restrictions

and injustices. For example, the re-articulation of certain collective rituals may help counter,

disperse, or go beyond specific modes of individualism and alienation.44 As explored in the

previous chapter, the heterogeneous practices generated by free folk’s collective-experimental

sensibility can be understood in a similar way. However, as O’Sullivan points out,

a productive utilisation of myth … is explicitly collective: the production of collective enunciations, which in itself involves a calling forth of the people to whom the myth is addressed. If myth is to be utilised as strategy, as a component in the production of subjectivity, it must then be utilised in a contemporary manner, for a contemporary people, in order to get them out of the impasses of the present. (pp. 314–315)

O’Sullivan’s key examples of a dangerous utilization of such past elements are Nazi ideology

and, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger’s fetishization of a pure people. Unlike free

folk’s “impure,” collective ritualism (Büsser, 2007), the more restrictive work of Death in June

and many of Pearce’s “neofolk” peers appears more eager to call forth a people of noble

individuals. One does not have to explicitly embrace fascism to experience miserablist dreams of

such a people and its inevitable loss; but one may end up precluding most other socio-political

formations.

44 O’Sullivan productively posits examples drawn from modern paganism and contemporary art as experimental practices directed against, or rather beyond, a dominant regime of faciality. However, although O’Sullivan echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s own warnings against the fetishization of experimentation and the simplification of enunciative assemblages, he arguably fetishizes faciality itself (as a hybrid regime of signifiance and subjectivity) in a way that overly simplifies contemporary regimes of power and signs. He ascribes to the face a degree of dominance that robs it of its power as a pragmatic tool of exploration and analysis (see Morris, 1998, pp. 123–157, for a pragmatic mobilization of “faciality” as a concept in cultural analysis).

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Vision and a hallucinatory somniofaciality—and free folk’s industrial affinities. The

trajectory of David Tibet’s Current 93 project leads across various articulations of the visionary

assemblage to other assemblages. Early Current 93 worked with a ritualistic, transgressive

collage aesthetic, comparable both to Nurse With Wound and to Psychic TV’s less conventional

moments, opening to horrible vistas of war and depravity. In the second half of the 1980s,

Current 93 joined Death in June and Sol Invictus (with both of which the group shared members)

in their articulation of neofolk’s search for premodern roots. Through his turn to a heretical

Catholicism from at least the early 1990s onwards, Tibet diverges strongly from many other

prominent industrialists in ideology, while nonetheless sharing their esoteric-experimental

sensibility. This religious-ideological turn further bolsters his vision of a world whose

appearance is not real, or not the primary reality; but the search is now not so much one for

premodern, pre-Christian roots. Instead, what is real is the suffering of Christ on the cross. In

much of Current 93’s psychedelic folk musics of the 1990s and early 21st century, his lyrics

consequently open up to apocalyptic visions. Tibet evokes these vistas through his notoriously

divisive vocal style, an occasionally wide-eyed, often fervent sprechgesang that takes to a

spiritualized extreme a distinctly English tradition of visionary whimsy (from Pink Floyd’s Syd

Barrett and Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill to Balance and Ka-Spel; also see, e.g.,

Moliné, 2008). Tibet’s lyrics are bolstered, illustrated, and/or augmented by his collaborators: As

a key member on many of these albums, Steven Stapleton undermines, or perhaps enchants,

Michael Cashmore and Ben Chasny’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar with portentous, dissonant,

electroacoustic drones and collages. Alongside Tibet’s voice, these interventions and

interferences turn what would otherwise be quite conventionally pretty songs into uneasier

creations. Darkness and chaos always threaten to break through—and often do. Behind an unreal

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appearance, the end times wait—horrifying, but also pointing towards the victory of the “inmost

light,” Christ’s truth and reality.

To Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), Christianity is based in a hybrid assemblage

(signifying and subjectifying) that relies on Christ’s universalized face. This can be taken into

quite strange directions, and “the most prodigious strokes of madness appear on canvas under the

auspices of the Catholic code” (p. 198). Tibet’s heretic-Catholic search for and experience of the

face of God—always there, all-seeing, yet in agony on the cross—consequently has lent itself to

a particularly rich play of images, of appearances, of masks, while taking to an extreme

faciality’s “basic abstraction of the ‘human’ from the world/the body” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p.

312), whose materiality is at best secondary in a deceitful if enchanted dream realm.

On Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006), a large cast of instrumentalist collaborators (including

free folk key figure Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance) and guest vocalists (including

TG’s Cosey Fanni Tutti) help Tibet construct a lengthy psychedelic folk song cycle based on his

titular childhood nightmare. As on many other Current 93 albums, childhood is articulated as a

time of now-lost innocence, similar to the modern world’s lost innocence. On the album’s cover,

a simple, childlike drawing of a weeping and bleeding Christ-face is surrounded by various

deities, demons, and other creatures from ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and perhaps other

mythologies. Similarly, the album’s many songs, circular and vaguely “oriental” guitar melodies,

portentous drones, and hermetic lyrics constitute a densely populated landscape onto which Tibet

inscribes ever so many nightmares, fears, and paranoid-proliferating signs. This landscape is “a

deterritorialized world” that serves as a hallucinatory, enchanted but rotten “correlate” (Deleuze

& Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 191; also see Morris, 1998) to the true passion of the watchful Christ.

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Christ remains the world’s one truth as the demons proliferate. He judges but also liberates.

According to Tibet (in Reyes, 2019),

we can all be liberated and we can be free, without the masks that we wear, without the myriad of faces that we shove on ourselves, to lie to ourselves and to lie to our friends… but we can’t lie to God, and in the end we’re all naked before the Aleph. (18:14)

In free folk, with its elements of the presignifying assemblage, masks proliferate and contribute

to polyvocality. In the signifying assemblage (which is foundational to industrial paranoia), “the

mask does not hide the face, it is the face” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 127), as any sign

(and therefore any mask) always leads back to another sign, with the face at its center. In Current

93’s passional realm, where the paranoid has been re-articulated through and into the visionary,

masks are the deceitful faces found in an unreal dream world. Even in their deceit, they always

point back to the one reality of the true face of God, which implies all the true faces of those

potentially liberated. Faciality has turned into a contradictory and hallucinatory somniofaciality:

In a world that appears to be a dream (Latin: somnium), the play of masks and faces far exceeds

the recognizably facial yet can be prophesied to return to the one true face.

Still, this is perhaps one of the points at which free folk and the industrial formation can

converge. Earlier, I mentioned Sir Richard Bishop’s criticisms of industrial’s (in that case,

Coil’s) representational elements. Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance—who plays

alongside Bishop and Chris Corsano in Rangda—has covered Coil’s stately “Fire of the Mind” in

concert and, most saliently, was a member of Current 93 around the time of Black Ships Ate the

Sky. The free folk formation does not assemble anywhere as clearly around individualized points

of subjectification as the industrial formation does, and Chasny’s own albums are not nearly as

obviously dedicated to the elaboration of personal obsessions. However, as Sirota (2021a) writes

of Chasny:

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I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in some way dimly understood, might still partake of the magical. (para. 1)

The “seeker” Chasny’s search for a magical richness draws on free folk’s collective-

experimental sensibility but finds epistemic-spiritual nourishment in the contradictory depths of

industrial visionaries’ musics and obsessions. The disquieting articulation of acoustic,

fingerpicked guitar to drones in much of Current 93’s work (especially in the 1990s) resonates

with free folk’s immersion in the weird, in multiplicity. Encarnacao (2016) describes “the

particular feeling of claustrophobia and airlessness” (p. 227) found in Six Organs’ “Creation

Aspect Earth (Reprise)” (1999). Though articulated to free folk’s investment in immersion, this

aligns well with similar work in the industrial formation, notably the representations of, e.g.,

apocalyptic events in David Tibet’s lyrics, or even the screams of Current 93’s tape-based but

similarly “claustrophobic” early work. However, free folk remains content to dwell in

asignifying and nonrepresentational dislocation. The “murky” drone- and loop-based music of

Double Leopards, Inca Ore, and The Skaters can at times resemble TG and Nurse With Wound,

too, but it is hardly at all articulated to TG’s paranoia and transgression, or to Nurse With

Wound’s surrealist probing of the subconscious. Too much signification, too much

representation, too much reterritorialization on interiority would just disrupt this intense but

patient immersion. Still, the delirium of industrial’s visionary moments in particular—as in the

case of Current 93’s somniofaciality—offers plenty of opportunity for re-articulation into and

across free folk’s enunciative assemblages. Thus, it is no surprise that Chasny joined Current 93,

or that Hush Arbors’ Keith Wood (also a sometime-member of Six Organs and Sunburned)

succeeded Chasny in Current 93. Where industrial opens onto the cosmos, free folk happily

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draws on it; and the Current 93 albums from this phase, while concerned with Tibet’s obsessions,

were among the richest and most outward-oriented in Current 93’s career.

Vision and paranoia: a vignette. On a mild October night in 2019, The Legendary Pink

Dots perform at Chapel Hill’s Local 506 as part of their 40th Anniversary Tour. The group

mostly plays selections from its colorful recent album, Angel in the Detail (2019), but also works

updated versions of several older fan favorites into its performance. I am attending this show

with a rare, international mix of friends and family, which further intensifies the event’s

immersive character. At one point, well into the set, guitarist Erik Drost weaves tentative,

psychedelic rock-inflected notes through a sampled chant (“Call in the spirits!”) that is repeated

several times: Surely this soundscape serves as an interlude, and something is just around the

corner. Singer Edward Ka-Spel mouths along to the sample, addressing the crowd, as if to warn

and excite everyone present. The built-up tension finally gives way to an unmistakable sound.

Someone has triggered the mouth-harp sample that opens “Disturbance,” the first track on 1991’s

The Maria Dimension. The short sample is looped throughout the song, and it carries one of ever

so many circular melodies that proliferate across “Disturbance,” including Ka-Spel’s vocal line.

Ka-Spel voices an undefined and somewhat sinister “we” that pronounces itself “the invisible

invaders of your privacy, your dreams,” of which the song’s addressee can glimpse “just a

shadow” (Legendary Pink Dots, 1991/2001b)—a phrase that Ka-Spel repeats several times. Ka-

Spel never reveals what exactly this plural “disturbance” is. Enunciating his words amidst a

slow-moving, circular arrangement, he does not have to specify the source of his (or the

listener’s?) paranoia; the anonymity of the portentous “we” and the rich imagery of his lyrics

make the “invisible invaders” all the more intriguing, disturbing, and powerful. Ka-Spel

represents this “we” through his slippery description (or rather circumscription), but

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representation here is contingent on paranoia; it is a representation of an always-almost absent

presence. On stage, Ka-Spel repeats the word “shadow” a few times, highlighting again that the

song’s “we” merely grants the listener a glimpse of its nature.

On The Maria Dimension, “Disturbance” fades out after little more than five minutes. By

that point, Ka-Spel’s vocals have long disappeared, leaving space for a circular synthesizer

melody that appears to travel upwards but is consistently countered by a sometimes ascending,

sometimes descending saxophone line, whose descent serves as the expected resolution. On tour

in the 1990s and early 2000s, the group sometimes extended this interplay beyond the seven-

minute mark. But 28 years after the song’s original release, saxophonist Niels van Hoorn has

long departed the band, and the Pink Dots make no attempt to replace his characteristic,

grounding melody. Instead, Ka-Spel and The Silverman, the group’s other remaining founding

member, keep doubling down on their circular synthesizer lines, again and again adding density

and volume. Meanwhile, Drost’s guitar chords have started to blur into a distorted drone that,

through the contrast it generates, foregrounds the bright synth lines even more. My body is

shaking, my hands start tracing the synth melody’s path, perhaps as if they are drawing an

infinity symbol above my head, until the song finally winds down after approximately ten

minutes. Starting with a sinister, observing plurality’s monologue, offering merely the slightest

glimpse of some strange and perhaps threatening beyond, the song has circled ever further to

arrive at far more expansive vistas: something enveloping, something cosmic, with all the threat

and wonder that may imply. Paranoia has largely given way to, yet still underfeeds, vision.

Vision and paranoia: a sidereal assemblage? Across the musics of the industrial

formation, up to this day, portent rules. Something may be just around the corner; there is unease

and disquiet, P-Orridge’s “funny noise” heard “over the ruined factory.” In the slow, measured

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delivery of John Balance or Edward Ka-Spel, whether the lyrics are about an odd everyday

situation or about magickal powers, something seems on its way, ready to break through at any

point. Any sound or word can be invested with a vague sense of dread, made to point towards

something dreadful but as-yet unknown. Still, this dread is often articulated to vision. In fact,

rarely do the visionary and the paranoid fully part ways.

To the contrary: Many of the richest, most potent articulations of industrial’s esoteric-

experimental sensibility draw on both. Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton adds an

undercurrent of dread and disquiet (usually in the form of electronic drones) to otherwise

pastoral, guitar-based explorations of an enchanted, mystical, pre-modern England on Current

93’s Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre (1994/2007). In The Legendary Pink Dots’ “Citadel,” the

narrator and his peers embark on a paranoid journey into the titular center of power—only to find

an empty room, a window opening to unlimited vistas (“From here you’ll watch the world go

by/And doesn’t it look sad?”), and an invitation to jump (Legendary Pink Dots, 1995/2009). On

the cover of Cyclobe’s Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window (2010), a painting by Fred

Tomaselli (Cuzner, 2012), the smoke arising from a small rural cottage’s chimney grows into an

enormous, seven-headed serpent that itself appears to consist of countless squirming snakes and

extends skywards, dwarfing the cottage. Awe-inspiring in its cosmic reach and otherworldly

beauty, threatening in its cosmic multiplicity and irreducibility to anything resembling human

reason, it augments the album’s portentous and celestial musics. The articulation of the visionary

and the paranoid here borders on the enunciative plurality of the presignifying. Certainly, a sense

of hauntedness cuts into slithering and bubbling soundscapes—but this hauntedness itself

consistently undergoes a process of dispersion and multiplication, never quite able to

conclusively draw Cyclobe’s invocations back to the fractured unity of the radicular assemblage,

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even if a horrid face appears between the trees. “The Woods Are Alive With the Smell of His

Coming” (Cyclobe, 2010), but the polymorphous-perverse body of Pan engenders ever so many

animal-, plant-, and ghost-becomings. In this awful and awesome cosmic assemblage, the

articulation of the paranoid to the visionary is itself mediated by an articulation of the signifying

to the haunted-radicular to the rhizomatic.

One of Coil’s lesser-known and most assertively experimental releases, Worship the

Glitch, is billed as a collaboration with an entity called “ELpH” (ELpH & Coil, 1995/2018). This

project is particularly instructive in the multiplicity of modes of the hidden and secret it

articulates, and in its rich articulation of the paranoid and the visionary. Working on new music,

Coil became aware of random compositions emitting from their equipment and were seemingly at odds with the constant “accidents” that were perpetually plaguing the recordings. The band blamed these unintentional emissions on “ELpH”: a conceptual being that is one part physical equipment failure and one part celestial fiend… constantly playing the role of trickster by throwing a wrench into Coil’s methodology. (Dais Records, 2018, para. 2)

Coil ultimately affirmed and embraced this apparently accidental generation of unknown

outcomes, resulting in assemblages of eerie, spectral fragments of voices and other sounds

simultaneously distant and intimate, half-heard, irreducible to any clear human, individualized

contour. In ELpH’s case, technology is not merely appropriated and turned against itself in order

to unveil hidden control machines. It is explored obsessively for its metaphysical and physical

properties; it becomes a point of subjectification for Coil, for ELpH itself, for their “third mind.”

This is not the classic “ghost in the machine” perceived throughout modernity in the breakdown

of communication. Instead, it takes on a manifold and generative sense suggested by Peters

(1999), who argues that

those who build new media to eliminate the spectral element between people only create more ample breeding grounds for the ghosts. A cheerful sense of the weirdness of all attempts at communication offers a far saner way to think and live. (p. 29)

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The “ghosts,” the disturbances, mistakes, fragments, and unexpected elements of communication

technologies, are diverse and heterogeneous. They may block messages, but they may also add to

them, and they may open up unknown realms. Instead of being reducible to any one clear trope,

ELpH moves through a variety of hidden realms—metaphysical and technological—that Coil

accesses through improvisation, through the group’s connection with this strange entity. ELpH is

not merely failure and/or noise: ELpH may emerge out of mistakes but also is a positive cosmic

force that reaches out and opens up hidden realms to the group. There is paranoia in ELpH’s

haunting of Coil’s recording session; but there is a visionary opening-up to and through ELpH,

too. ELpH is accessed with the help of what Balance and Christopherson called “Sidereal

Sound”:

Sidereal Sound means appertaining to the stars but also means sideways … and that relates to the way that [Austin Osman] Spare would tilt his portraits slightly sideways as if to reveal aspects of the person that you wouldn’t normally see. … We’re trying to do the same with sound, to sort of skew it to the side so as you can see the things that you wouldn’t normally perceive. It’s the musical equivalent of catching a glimpse of something peripheral in your vision. (Balance, as cited in Keenan, 2003/2016, p. 330)

Sound generates its own hauntings, and it is haunted. Sound can suggest and induce disquiet, but

it can also open up to realms of potential in a joyous, fun, or empowering way. If disquiet and

hauntings do not sound like they lend themselves to the construction of a home in the esoteric, it

is worth considering Balance’s comments in an interview with Ian Penman (2000), who remarks

that “Coil’s recent work … seems haunted by an air of loss: dead friends and departed others?”

(p. 32):

Again it’s borderline – is it something lost or is it something being rediscovered, burrowed into? … When I was young I was really quite scared of the dark – I think my parents taught me to be – and I remember the deciding thing was, I turned around and said: I’m going to go to the woods at night and walk into the darkness and embrace it and if I die, I die. I remember doing that and…nothing happened. I suddenly thought: I now know fear of the dark is wrong. In fact, it’s comforting. So at that point in my life I embraced – literally – the darkness. I mean, not in the sense of evil. … Light –

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illumination – comes from within the darkness, not from electrical lighting. (Balance, as cited in Penman, 2000, p. 32)

What appears to be an expression of loss may at the same time be a desired connection to so

many other realms. Balance appears to enjoy being haunted, and similar things go for his friend

David Tibet (2016): “After entering into [horror writer Thomas] Ligotti’s abyssal worlds, one

will never see the shadows again as one did before, and never see the light without being aware

of the darkness about to break through” (p. xv).

With Hegarty (2007), one may reconnect such hauntings to the more explicitly

transgressive practices of COUM, early TG, early Coil, Whitehouse, TOPY, and their respective

explorations of perceived taboos related to violence, sexuality, bodily functions, and so on:

Throbbing Gristle … aim to keep the taboo hovering nearby; what is the point of transgression if we are comfortable with it (in which case it isn’t transgression, it being relative)? … What remains is something Bataille thinks of as a wound (see his Inner Experience) where you have the sense something has changed, that you were somewhere outside of everything, even if you were never really present for your not being there. This wound is the sense that something lies beyond rationalist, capitalist, murderous society, even though this something is almost nothing, and that therefore something is wrong with existing culture. (p. 111)

It seems that industrial, in its earliest and perhaps most militant years, was more content to seek

out and rest with such wounds. As the years went by, its practitioners broadened their sets of

techniques that would, perhaps, allow them to linger “somewhere outside” for longer durations,

or that would sustain and thereby emphasize their visions of realms beyond—at the expense of

their investment in the (nonetheless continuous) presence of “taboo[s] hovering nearby.” The

sensibility thus evolved into something more emphatically cosmic and visionary, less hardened.

This is not quite a return to hippie spirituality; if anything, it is a type of countercultural, or post-

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countercultural, exploration that bears the scars of disappointment and disillusionment but

attempts to wrestle its way out of its own latent nihilism.45

In its most potent articulations of a paranoid assemblage to a visionary assemblage,

industrial is consistently haunted (a radicular assemblage assures the consistent presence of some

remnant of the seemingly dispersed chain of signs) but always catches glimpses of some

articulation of the sublime or cosmic, re-articulating the past into vision after vision and the

present as a time-space in which one can “see the future leaking through.” Whether it is shaped

more by a paranoid or a visionary assemblage in any given moment, industrial’s esoteric-

experimental sensibility always additionally perceives something else, something beyond,

“sideways,” “appertaining to the stars,” never reducible to any single element, haunted by the

unknown but also ready to open onto it. Industrial always catches glimpses; in that sense,

perhaps its strongest articulations of the paranoid and the visionary express a sidereal

assemblage.

Conclusion

To attempt to periodize the industrial music formation is difficult. In addition to the

persistence of “industrial” as a genre name that remains relevant across various radically

different formations, the task is also made more difficult by, for instance, the sometime-

designation of many acts discussed in this chapter as “post-industrial.” Peter Webb (2007)

regularly calls the neofolk milieu “postindustrial”; David Keenan (2003/2016) calls 1983’s

Equinox Event in London “the most significant gathering of the post-Industrial scene” (p. 117).

In the same year’s Industrial Culture Handbook, Savage (1983) even suggests that “merely to

45 In the afterword of the updated England’s Hidden Reverse, Keenan (2016) highlights John Balance’s remarks on the milieu of the 1983 Equinox Event, which involved several key artists of the industrial formation and the “hidden reverse” in particular. Balance speaks of “a very nihilistic little group of people” (p. 428) that nonetheless transformed and attained an unlikely creative longevity.

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think in terms of ‘industrial’ is, of course, to admit that a particular phase of activity has passed

into the history books.” Industrial accordingly “was a brief and vigorous intervention” into “the

dialogue between the ‘avant-garde’ and ‘pop’” (p. 4), perhaps as if actual industrial had ended

with, or soon after, TG’s announcement that “the mission is terminated” in 1981 (Tutti, 2017;

also see Ford, 1999). It is indeed the case that the likes of Current 93, Nurse With Wound, and

the various projects of TG’s former members often responded to the questions TG had posed.

They grappled with the legacy of TG’s particularly diverse multi-modal experimentation across

different registers; and Industrial Records, the label that inspired and defined so much early

industrial, had ceased operations for the time being. But the industrial formation is neither just

the historical “event” of TG’s impactful emergence, nor can it be mapped onto the ever-

proliferating genre of industrial music (or the various sub-genres prefixed with “industrial,” e.g.,

“industrial techno” or “industrial rock”). As a formation defined by a specific, esoteric-

experimental sensibility, industrial has persisted and evolved over the years, not least due to the

breadth of its experimental practices; it has proven to be consistently influential on and adaptable

to other formations.

The legacy of the industrial formation is too broad and heterogeneous to adequately

describe in this chapter’s conclusion; Reed (2013) has already covered much of this ground. The

tendencies towards the individualist-obsessive that I have described—the bloody-minded

trajectories of the interpreter, the serial passions of the visionary—can make it difficult to

describe a still-existing coherent “scene” or “milieu” in social terms (industrial musicians do not

share the same squats these days). On the other hand, the notoriously obsessive fandoms of its

key practitioners remain active; simultaneously, industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility has

not disappeared, and the diverse trajectories of those musicians most closely related to the

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formation’s key projects have enabled this sensibility to be re-articulated and replenished in a

variety of different contexts. Perhaps ironically, COUM and TG have amassed considerable art-

institutional acclaim; their work, and the trajectories of their members, have received copious

documentation. Cosey Fanni Tutti and, posthumously, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge have published

autobiographies—Tutti’s is the basis for an upcoming film (Waite, 2020). Drew Daniel’s 20 Jazz

Funk Greats (2008) analyzes the TG album of the same name in considerable detail. Keenan’s

England Hidden Reverse already detailed Coil’s story years ago. Not only has P-Orridge’s view

of TOPY been documented in Thee Psychick Bible (1994/2010), a collection of h/er and various

affiliates’ writings spanning several decades, but a documentary on TOPY is in the works (Bulut,

2016). When Hull became the UK City of Culture 2017, it “embrace[d] its frenzied sexual past”

by hosting a COUM exhibition (Searle, 2017). Though always hard to pinpoint in any traditional

disciplinary manner, COUM and TG’s multi-modal, radical experimentalism continues to enable

new articulations to various (musical and other) artistic discourses.

The Legendary Pink Dots have drawn a line across the decades that resembles free folk’s

desire for consistent (perceived) uniqueness as reliable “sub-underground” experimenters.

Similar things could be said of Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, though the former project in

particular has also gathered considerable cultural capital “overground,” with David Tibet having

become a prolific editor of books and an invited curator of weekends and evenings at sizeable

European festivals (e.g., at Austria’s Donaufestival in 2007 and the Netherlands’ Roadburn

Festival in 2008). Tibet’s trajectory has certainly benefited from an ability to consistently find

new collaborators from quite different fields to co-articulate his passional grand statements; and

he has managed to largely disaffiliate himself from his former “neofolk” peers. After all, their

continued infamy could interfere with the acclaim some industrialists have gathered in artistic

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fields that are less amenable to the (at best) “ambiguity” of neofolk projects’ engagement with

fascist histories. At this point, there have been scattered public criticisms of and even in-person

protests against Death in June for several decades; but rarely have they been as high-profile as

when the Southern Poverty Law Center (2017; also see Hatewatch, 2017, and Iadarola, 2017) put

Soleilmoon Records (Death in June’s American distributor) in the “Hate Music” category of its

list of “active hate groups” of 2016. That a group as obscure—and, perhaps more importantly

and precisely, obscurantist—as Death in June could find itself listed among more overtly racist

acts was made possible by a combination of different factors.

One primary factor involves large-scale shifts in affective landscapes, where the

“hyperinflation” discussed in the prior chapter makes it difficult to successfully maintain (for

whichever reason one would do so) the political ambiguity favored by the likes of Death in June

who claim disaffiliation from all political movements while articulating a supposedly

transgressive aesthetic. This should not be understood as a defense of the apparent “ambiguity”

of Death in June in the face of a supposed “cancel culture”—as the second primary factor

emphasizes: An increasingly common articulation of artistic practice to political activism and

intellectualism, notably in the analysis of power relations and modes of discrimination that they

afford, has furthered feminist, anti-racist, and other calls for political and ethical accountability

in music scenes and similar formations. While certainly not always successful, these have helped

shed light on exclusionary and exploitative practices that at other times were more easily

explained away through reference to personal eccentricities and daring, transgressive artistry. A

“poetics of transgression” (Thompson, 2017a) never operates in a vacuum and cannot be

assumed to “speak truth to power” by default; and an obsession with the long-lost purity of an

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idealized premodern era, even when shrouded in aloof ambiguity, cannot always be given the

benefit of the doubt.

Simultaneously, some of these shifts in contemporary structures of feeling have enabled

the formation “to catalyse new becomings at [its border]” (Gilbert, 2014, p. 198). Coil’s

relationship to the political has always been difficult. The group generally seemed unwilling to

align itself with any explicitly political movements;46 but throughout their career, Balance and

Christopherson showed an acute awareness of the violence inflicted on queer bodies. As made

obvious by Christopherson’s video, the group’s 1985 cover of “Tainted Love” (then a recent hit

by Coil friends Soft Cell) turned the song into grim commentary on the AIDS crisis (Bravo,

2020; Keenan, 2003/2016); Balance (as cited in Live Coil Archive, n.d.) would still dedicate

“Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” a song about the director’s murder from 1986’s Horse

Rotorvator, “to all the poets and the queers” (Ostia section, para. 1) in concert sixteen years later.

In his afterword to an updated edition of England’s Hidden Reverse, Keenan (2016) suggests:

“In many ways Balance’s death … marked the end of The Reverse or more properly its switch

into forward gear as it hurtled towards some kind of backwards resolution” (p. 429). This

“switch into forward gear” also involved Current 93 becoming more emphatically collaborative

well beyond the borders of the formation and the rather hermetic Nurse With Wound’s shift to

regular live performances; and TG’s 2003 reunion, which Keenan considers a capitulation to

46 For instance, Stephen Thrower (as cited in Whitney, 2011) recalls of his initial suggestion to Balance and Christopherson that they collaborate with This Heat’s Charles Hayward on “Things Happen” (1991): “I think Geff and Sleazy were a bit wary of him because he was regarded as a bit of a ‘lefty’ but I pushed for him because I thought This Heat were so incredible” (“Things Happen” section, para. 1). Christopherson (as cited in Barnes, 2009) says of American noise/industrial musician Boyd Rice: “A long time after Coil and Boyd worked together, we fell out because of Boyd’s increasingly racist public image. It wasn’t because of political or social correctness. For us it was just common sense. Anyone who singles out a particular portion of any population for criticism just because they fit into a certain category, whether it be gay or black or Jewish or even female, to us was, and is, simply moronic” (p. 25).

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nostalgia, “seemed to mark the ultimate reorientation of The Reverse towards the future” (p.

432).

However, this speaks at least as much to Keenan’s own artist-isolationist tendencies

(Keenan, 2015) as it does to any qualitative shift in industrial musicians’ sensibility. The very

queerness of “The Reverse” has continued and made even the work of some of industrial’s most

idiosyncratic practitioners articulable to newer formations. Current 93 and Cyclobe have

collaborated with ANOHNI, whose considerable success in indie/art-pop realms has also made

her a transgender icon. Coil’s articulation of a marginalized sexuality into a rich experimentalist

framework has provided politically potent inspiration to more recent formations. These

formations (including the next chapter’s case study) articulate the artistic to the political and the

intellectual; they engage explicitly with matters of identity—both as an affirmed mode of

experience (Grossberg, 2005, 2018) and as a field of power relations. Similarly, Tutti’s work in

COUM has become legible in a feminist context, despite her hesitation to identify in such terms

(Wilson, 2015); and the pandrogeny project guaranteed P-Orridge’s continued (if controversial)

relevance at the intersection of vanguardist-countercultural art-as-life ideology, postmodern

experimentation with gender and sexuality, and contemporary complications and proliferations

of notions of “identity.” It is worth noting that P-Orridge lived in New York near the end of h/er

life; Coil’s Drew McDowall (a key member during the ELpH and Time Machines years), too, has

been living in New York in recent years. Both have collaborated with noise, psychedelic rock,

and electronic musicians whose work aligns more with the free folk formation in some cases and

with the next chapter’s epistemic formation in others.

Indeed, this latter formation is not only particularly invested in identity as a realm of

knowledge, across which the industrial formation can resonate strongly. At times, the epistemic

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formation’s experience of the world in terms of ubiquitous power relations—to be analyzed and

to be changed—also allows it to articulate industrial’s paranoid assemblage to its own more

sober, yet still suspicious, orientation. Simultaneously, industrial’s visionary assemblage,

regardless of Keenan’s misgivings about its relationship to the future, becomes translatable into

vistas of the future, or at least of alternative temporalities, when taken up in the epistemic

formation’s much more affirmative experimentation with futurity and contingency. Some of

these connections to industrial are implicit; others are explicit. For instance, the solo work of

Hiro Kone (Nicky Mao) explores capitalist exploitation (Hiro Kone, 2017, 2018) and “the power

of absence … in this time of looming and unrelenting techno-fascism” (Hiro Kone, 2019, para.

1); mostly devoid of lyrics, her electronic music draws these critical-reflexive ideas of political

agency and constraint into soundscapes both tense and spacious. Mao’s respective collaborations

with Coil affiliates Drew McDowall (The Ghost of Georges Bataille, 2018) and Annie Anxiety

(Repossessed, 2020) articulate a sense of dread and drama; simultaneously, their sound’s

propulsion and the settings of Mao’s performances embrace club culture much more fully than

Coil did, whose work remained characterized by an ambivalent relationship to the popular and to

“surrounding musical trends” (Stephen Thrower, as cited in Whitney, 2011, “Chaostrophy”

section, para. 3; also see Keenan, 2003/2016). Elsewhere, Chino Amobi’s Paradiso (2017)

resembles the horrorscapes of early Current 93, the hallucinatory expansiveness of the same

group’s Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006), and (as pointed out by Power, 2017) other industrialists

and their affiliates such as Coil and Laibach. However, Amobi re-articulates these elements

through an anti-racist, Afrofuturist impetus that these projects never shared. A sense of portent

and wonder becomes a resource in the epistemic formation’s engagement with histories of

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violence and exploitation and its evocation of alternative worlds and temporalities. It is this

recent formation to which I want to turn next.

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CHAPTER 3: THE EPISTEMIC FORMATION—A REFLEXIVE-EXPERIMENTAL SENSIBILITY

The first few decades of the 21st century have seen a proliferation of uncountable pockets

of artistic, political, and social micro-experimentation, including by those invested in

experimental musics. Contemporary technocultural apparatuses (in particular, but not limited to,

people’s everyday engagement with the internet) have afforded a remarkable spread and

diversification of creative practices, simultaneously resulting in the breakdown of generic and

subcultural boundaries (Rojek, 2011)47 and in the multiplication of micro-niches (Büsser, 2010).

Many pockets of experimentation are fragmentary and short-lived; and they are quite easily

marginalized, contained, or articulated to modes of value extraction by formations of

contemporary capitalism, “the great nomad par excellence” (Braidotti, 2011b, p. 17).

Additionally, they often are insufficiently strategic in their quest for sustainability and impact

(Gilbert, 2014; Grossberg, 2015).

However, in this chapter, I want to explore one emergent formation that is particularly

eager to make such experimentation stable and sustainable. This constitutively transnational

formation is characterized by a critical-reflexive and multi-modal approach to musical and other

artistic practices. I will call it the “epistemic formation” due to its affective and ideological

investment in a variety of knowledges (and knowledge modalities). The formation involves

heterogeneous alliances of often explicitly political collectives alongside emphatically

collaborative artist-activists. The formation’s experiments are often quite openly inspired by

47 Chris Rojek (2011) calls these processes “cultural de-differentiation.”

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artistic predecessors, political activism, and recent (post-structuralist, feminist, post-colonial…)

theory. Like free folk, this formation responds to a disarticulation of popular imagination and

experimentation (and to the transformations in temporality this disarticulation connects to, as

well as to longer-term modes of temporal alienation). However, unlike free folk, it also responds

to crises of knowledge by emphatically investing in new, experimental knowledges and modes of

knowledge production. These appear to provide tools for an articulation of experimentation to an

imaginative politics (which does not always translate into a broader popular imaginary, but at

least serves its exploration).

In this chapter, I will first provide a brief overview of this stylistically, geographically,

and socially heterogeneous formation. I will then outline several contemporary crises and

competing forces that constitute the formation’s conditions of possibility. I will describe the

formation’s reflexive-experimental sensibility, which privileges critical-creative work that

experiments with, through, and on various sets and modalities of knowledge while assigning a

heightened political charge to imagination. I will then go on to map the formation’s engagement

with several interrelated realms of knowledge and investment: collectivity, power, identity (and,

beyond it, being-in-the-world), and temporality. Finally, I will outline the enunciative

assemblages across which the formation articulates its sensibility.

The epistemic formation

Aesthetically, the epistemic formation is highly diverse, although its sound is dominated

by a mixture of electronic music styles. These draw on diverse dance music lineages (e.g., house,

techno, drum and bass) as much as on more academic lineages of experimental electronic music.

However, strong elements of punk, industrial, hip-hop, free jazz, and other musics tend to be

articulated to these “electronic” elements or even foregrounded to a degree where the formation

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cannot conclusively be described as essentially “electronic” in generic terms.48 The formation is

highly eclectic and conscious of vast archives of past musics, as well as of the connections

between these musics; but it is also less explicitly invested in the construction of a musical canon

of predecessors than industrial and free folk. It is, arguably, too diverse to agree on a common

musical canon; its investments in scholarship and/or activism preclude the generation of an

exclusively “musical” canon; and these scholarly and activist investments themselves are just as

diverse as the formation’s musical investments, precluding even the generation of a multi-modal,

transdisciplinary canon with clear boundaries.

Despite the formation’s stylistic heterogeneity, many artists of the formation tend to be

discussed as partaking in “deconstructed club music”—a set of styles drawing on electronic

dance musics but reassembling their textures and structures, fracturing their meters, and so on.

This genre name is not entirely inappropriate, as I will show later in this chapter, because it

offers some insight into the aesthetics of some of the formation’s musics. However, it does not

capture the formation’s diversity. Similarly, Simon Reynolds (2019) has grouped many artists of

this formation under the neologism “conceptronica,” which “isn’t a genre as such, but more like

a mode of artistic operation—and audience reception—that cuts across the landscape of hip

music” (para. 3) and is characterized by a “conceptual bent” (para. 2). While Reynolds’s remarks

are insightful and instructive, they also risk centering the “conceptual” at the expense of other

modes of critical reflexivity, not least those that are less reliant on explicit theorization.

Socially, the epistemic formation is highly diverse. Its artists often reflexively thematize

matters of identity, especially race, gender, and sexuality. This thematization is both an

48 Of course, the formation is unthinkable without various modes of “electronic” mediation that are of constitutive importance to the production, distribution, and consumption of its musics, and more generally to its social genesis. However, to affirm this fact is not the same as to assign the historically specific genre name “electronic music.”

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expression of and a contributing factor to this heterogeneity. Additionally, the formation is more

internationalized than those of the prior case studies. While it still centers on countries of the

North Atlantic, and especially the United States, it is not fully reducible to these and has actively

drawn connections across all continents. The formation’s artists tend to be committed to the

breaking-down of various boundaries and the crossing of borders, literally or figuratively. In fact,

Whitney Wei (2019) argues that musicians of this formation have paved the way for a genuine

decentering of Western/North-Atlantic dance music:

So, when [transnational label and collective] NON introduced the concept of decolonising the dancefloor, and [Mexican label and collective] Naafi spoke about the self-flagellation of Mexico’s DJ community towards its own indigenous sounds, the discourse moved from the diversity of the music itself to the DJs playing it. The critique shifted from representing the likes of tribal, Afrobeats, and baile funk to a diasporic audience towards finally allowing DJs who came directly from the original cultures to be on stage. (para. 11)

In the words of Rosi Braidotti (2011b), many of the formation’s artists thus “aim at instilling

processes of qualitative change at the very heart of the system.” In a certain set of cultural fields,

they “deterritorialize dogmatic and hegemonic exclusionary power structures at the heart of the

scattered hegemonic centers of the contemporary global world” (p. 19). It is also worth noting—

and perhaps crucial—that Reynolds (2019) is right to point out that many musicians of this

formation49 “have been through art school or postgraduate academia” (para. 3) and are “fluent in

the critical lingua franca used in art institutions and academia worldwide” (para. 5). Still, the

epistemic formation is probably less socially cohesive than the formations of the preceding case

studies. There are dense assemblages of collaboration scattered across the formation, but the

formation is sizeable and heterogeneous enough that one may find many artists in it who are not

friends and/or collaborators with one another. Its audience is hard to pinpoint: less obsessive than

49 More specifically, Reynolds (2019) makes this claim about “most of the leading conceptronica artists” (para. 3).

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industrial’s fans, less invested in traditional record collecting than free folk’s (unsurprisingly,

given the increased shift towards online distribution).

While the formation is quite vast, I will foreground certain key examples throughout this

chapter. NON Worldwide, a label and transnational artist collective, builds on Afrofuturist tropes

to “decolonize the dancefloor” (Lozano, 2016, para. 9) and re-articulate Black diasporic

collectivity. The “Severo” style of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, an Aymara-American electronic

musician-activist and NON associate, thrives on historically-minded collaboration that explores

the complexities of race, sexuality, and human-world relationships (Amin, 2016). Similarly,

Holly Herndon, a composer strongly inspired by Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism (Herndon,

2010), has been collaborating across a variety of (disciplinary, artist-activist, human-machine)

boundaries and explored body-technology relations in a popular music setting (McDermott,

2015). Musician and poet Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) is known for her many collaborative,

transdisciplinary boundary-crossings that engage with Afrofuturist pasts and futures and the

history of racist violence in the United States. Speaker Music’s DeForrest Brown, Jr., inspired by

Henri Lefebvre, self-identifies as a rhythmanalyst (Sagström, 2019) who explores the

relationship between Black bodies and the cultural industries. The Ascetic House label and

collective (with its hybrids of post-industrial noise, dance, and other styles) emerges from the

lineage of Throbbing Gristle and its peers as well as the noise formation of the United States but

frames its work in unusually explicit political terms while connecting to various other, more

clearly dance-oriented circles (such as, for instance, the NON-affiliated Halcyon Veil label).

Sound artist Klein assembles surreal but intimate collages that reflect, and reflect on, Black

sociality.

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The social and aesthetic connections between these artists vary in strength from case to

case. However, they all engage with their historical contexts in a strongly reflexive way. This

engagement can be characterized as critical (in that it reflects, investigates, puts into question,

and foregrounds the contingency of present conditions); and it is heterogeneously political (in

that it centers on, explores, raises awareness of, and challenges numerous sets of contemporary

power relations), or at least invested in the ethical (in that it explores potentially beneficial

modes of acting and living together). In many cases, artists draw on and make explicit their

investment in scholarly knowledge, but this connection is not required. Instead, other aesthetic

and activist modes of critique, reflection, and reflexivity can play a role too. The formation

thereby problematizes and augments existing, dominant articulations of—and articulated

distinctions between—knowledge and imagination.

Drawing on involvement in and knowledge of decades of community-building in popular

music formations and political activism, the epistemic formation is heavily invested in various

(material, ideological, affective) articulations of community and collectivity, as well as, more

broadly, sociality. It explores and fosters various modes of collectivity—socially and

aesthetically, ideologically and affectively. However, this investment is contradictory and may

initially appear counter-intuitive, given that most projects of the epistemic formation are

notionally “solo” projects. Before continuing to outline the formation’s specific collectivities, I

want to highlight this contradiction and its specific place in the epistemic formation. In this

formation, a tendency towards one-person acts is shaped by the same economic, cultural, and

technological forces that have resulted in the decreased activity of free folk’s improvising

collectives and in free folk artists’ increased reliance on solo set-ups (Brown, 2013; Spiegel,

2019a). This apparent dominance of solo projects is partially enabled by the greater accessibility

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and affordability of hardware (from loop pedals to laptops) and software (from applications such

as Apple’s GarageBand to software synthesizers) that enable individuals’ “unprofessional,”

“unschooled,” and “Do-It-Yourself” production of complex, rich musics at home.

Simultaneously, the economics of touring make traveling as a band, within which any earnings

must be shared, less profitable; and artists’ self-representation as creative individuals resonates

with competitive and romantic individualisms that are, to some extent, residual to this formation.

In other words, under current conditions, most key acts of the epistemic formation primarily

consist of, or are primarily represented as consisting of, one individual artist. They either carry

that artist’s personal name (Chino Amobi, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Holly Herndon) and/or a

stage name primarily associated with that individual person (Moor Mother, Rabit, Speaker

Music). As I will show in later sections, many artists explicitly interrogate and even contest

dominant notions of individuality, but these problematizations must consistently struggle for

sustenance in a culture-industrial assemblage that privileges and purports to reward creative

individuality.

The epistemic formation has nonetheless articulated different modes or expressions of

collectivity, which remain in tension with and often circumvent the various modes of

individuality circulating across the formation. These modes or expressions of collectivity often

respond to a perceived dearth of, or existing constraints on, creative collectivity; and they arise

from an existing awareness or at least sense of the political potentials and urgency of collectivity

and collective experimentation. For analytical purposes, the formation’s articulations of

collectivity can be divided into 1. actual collaborative practices (the first layer of music’s social

mediation described in Born, 2017), 2. reflexive thematizations of collectivity (across all of

Born’s layers: microsocialities, imagined communities, the refraction of social relations,

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questions of institutionality), and 3. semiotics of collectivity (imagined communities in the

broadest sense). More often than not, at least two of these go hand in hand and condition each

other in any given performance or recording. I will primarily describe collaborative practices in

general in this section, while the formation’s reflexive thematizations of collectivity and its

semiotics of collectivity will be explored in greater detail in dedicated sections later in this

chapter.

To first state the obvious: Although contemporary market logics and associated

ideologies of individualism (Gilbert, 2014) may call for the singling-out of individual performer

personalities as primary creative agents, most performances, and most steps in the production

and distribution of any recording, are bound to involve some degree of active, actual

collaboration, however much dominant discourses of creativity may mask the social character of

artistic labor. Even if one leaves out the more abstract relationalities of musicians’ engagement

with instruments, distribution platforms, and other elements stemming from other people’s labor,

even DIY performances in the smallest venues tend to involve sound technicians; and even

releases on artists’ own micro-labels often are mastered or supplied with artwork by someone

other than the musician under whose name any given recording is released. Most obviously, of

course, bands still exist, and individual artists’ albums often include guest appearances by fellow

performers. For instance, Chino Amobi’s Paradiso (2017) is not just an exercise in world-

building; it also populates its dystopian and fractured world with a wide range of collaborators,

including Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Nkisi, and Rabit. This is not exactly a harmonious

collectivity. Nina Power (2017) writes that

Paradiso is relentless …, never letting you get too comfortable with any sound or voice for too long. The sheer number of collaborators means that this record is incredibly dense, packed with multiple layers and clashing relentlessly, like ships against the shore. (p. 63)

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Most of Crampton Chuquimia’s own albums, while released under her own name, tend to

involve copious guests—including, again, Amobi and Rabit. Similarly, the collaborative

practices feeding into Holly Herndon’s releases and performances have consistently expanded

over the years. In addition to her partner and audio-visual on-stage collaborator Mat Dryhurst,

himself a media theorist, Herndon has assembled a shifting ensemble of one-time and regular

collaborators, some of them primarily activists and theorists involved in one or two songs or

videos, some of them members of Herndon’s on-stage choir. As Herndon (2019a; Venker, 2019)

points out in remarks on 2019’s Proto, this is not necessarily a “democratic” ensemble:

We tried some experiments with decentralized, non-hierarchical systems in ensemble meetings. … Those are really fun exercises, but at the end of the day someone has to compose and make decisions and find a way that everybody involved feels valued and their voices are heard and you try to bring the best of their performances in – but still make those hard decisions by yourself. It was not written by a community. At the end of the day it was myself and [Mat Dryhurst] hammering away [at] this music and spending hours and hours editing the recording sessions. (Herndon, as cited in Venker, 2019, para. 36)

In other words, this is not a horizontalist project devoid of hierarchy. However, it does involve

significant and explicit creative input from all participants and therefore cannot be reduced to a

clear-cut form of verticalism either. As I will show below, Herndon’s “leadership” role—the

result both of market forces and artistic intentionality conditioned by long histories of

individualized music-making—does allow for experimentation with unconventional modes of

collectivity and care.

The dynamic character of the above collaborations and the mutuality of many of these—

with artists whose albums feature “guest” performers often returning the favor by appearing on

their peers’ recordings—ensure that the epistemic formation’s collectivities rarely can be

reduced to the “Leviathan logic” Gilbert (2014) describes as (ideologically) dominant throughout

much of Euromodernity. It is certainly the case that musicians’ contributions to a notionally

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“solo” act’s performances and recordings are often subsumed under, and suggest an investment

in, said solo act’s name and status. However, the apparently vertical relations characterizing this

subsumption and investment themselves are actively embedded in and productive of various

horizontal and transversal modes of relation and collaboration, with individual artists’ names

serving as temporary points of (individual and collective) subjectification that ultimately are

secondary to the larger assemblages of collective creativity across which they move. It is true

that musicians undergo considerable “incorporeal transformations” (Deleuze & Guattari,

1980/1987)—that is, their practices are re-articulated in a discursive register: Media coverage

bolsters and confirms their creative individuality. However, the culture-industrial apparatus of

capture—its individualizing machine—is never completely successful, let alone inescapable.

Instead, artists of the epistemic formation know how to extract some of the powers of these

individualizations, increasing their capacities for collaboration as they encounter new audiences.

As Chino Amobi (as cited in Vorisek, 2020) says:

I have built many relationships with collaborators who I have end up [sic] meeting at some festival or another and have been able to connect with them on a deeper level and learn more details about their story and unique experience.

Amobi considers such a “multiplicity of voices” (p. 2) central to his work; he thus articulates

these opportunities for “connection” through social and culture-industrial networks to a semiotics

of collectivity.

Meanwhile, the collaborative practice of Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) resembles those

of free folk’s artists. Moor Mother is notionally a “solo” project, although one that regularly

features guests on recordings and that operates, as I will show below, across a decidedly

collective-polyvocal semiotic assemblage. However, in addition to this best-known project,

Ayewa is also a member of several duo projects (700 Bliss, Moor Jewelry, and especially Black

Quantum Futurism) that differ quite significantly in style. Additionally, she is a member of the

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free jazz group Irreversible Entanglements, to whose improvisations she contributes lyrics, and

has guested in live performances and on recordings by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Harrga,

Zonal, and others. As in free folk, although much journalistic (and, for that matter, scholarly)

discourse may strive to single out the individual performer, the sheer diversity of projects, of

collaborations and modes of collaboration, puts into question any discursive reterritorialization

on and foregrounding of one particular project.

Further key cooperative practices involve the running of labels: NON Worldwide,

founded by Chino Amobi, Angel-Ho, and Nkisi, long served as a platform for other (often Afro-

diasporic) artists and released an influential series of compilations showcasing the breadth of its

network while also presenting the work of (and NON’s affinities with) related collectivities.

Notably, two of NON’s releases were explicitly billed as collaborations with Mexican electronic

music label and collective NAAFI;50 and SAFA! New York City (2018), one of NON’s (thus-far)

last releases, was “a benefit compilation of music made by the children of the Brooklyn based

organization Sonic Arts For All to raise awareness of their additional program in Puerto Rico”

(NON Worldwide, 2018, para. 1). Elsewhere, Ascetic House is likely better-known as a label

(and, again, as a collective) than its individual key artists are; and while Rabit contributed to

Icelandic art-pop star Björk’s song “Losss” (2017), his Halcyon Veil label otherwise certainly

rivals his own musical project in terms of exposure. Generally, the epistemic formation continues

the DIY tradition of small, artist-run labels already encountered in the industrial and free folk

formations.

50 These are a compilation from 2015 and a release by vocalist Embaci from 2016, both titled NON vs. NAAFI.

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Crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, oscillations of the political

Following this introduction to the epistemic formation and overview of its social

dimension, I want to take a step back from the formation itself in order to highlight three

interrelated assemblages of forces that are particularly relevant to the formation and its

constitutive sensibility: crises of knowledge (themselves conditioned by contemporary crises of

commensuration), enclosures of popular imagination (constitutively aligned with crises of

affective investment), and oscillations of the political (traversing a multitude of political

discourses, crises, and transformations). I will go on to outline these assemblages while

summarizing their specific relations to the formation.

Lawrence Grossberg (2018a) argues that the current conjuncture is characterized by a

complex set of crises of knowledge, among other elements. These are socially experienced as

such: It appears “that knowledge (and the forms of authority that accompany it) has become less

determined and determining, less identifiable, less effective, more troubled” (p. 149). In other

words, there appear to be countless instances of competing discourses over ever so many events

that fail to be consensually resolved; traditional “experts” appear to have lost much of their

authority or credibility; various media appear unable to evaluate competing knowledge claims.

These crises may be most visible in public accusations and anxieties surrounding “fake news”

and highly visible conspiracy theories, but they are also popularly experienced in the apparent

impossibility of political decision-making in the face of the contemporary climate crisis. The

conditions of these crises involve forms of political polarization with truth-effects of their own,

various historically specific anti-intellectualisms, and the proliferation of not just uncountable

facts but diverse modalities of knowledge that exceed traditionally dominant practices of the

production and dissemination of scholarship.

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However, most importantly, Grossberg (2018a) sees crises of commensuration as key to

contemporary crises of knowledge. Here, shared standards of evaluation are dissipating, or

appear impossible. Such crises of commensuration are overdetermined: shaped by diverse

political attacks (across the political spectrum) on institutions of knowledge, vast changes in

media landscapes, and scholarly “self”-criticisms that rightly questioned powerful institutions

and received modes of knowledge but were unable to establish sufficient alternatives, or

sufficient investment in alternatives. If it seems broadly impossible to arrive at any larger-scale

consensus over shared values, “truths,” and investments, then it is not surprising that conflicting

claims to and modalities of knowledge appear to struggle ceaselessly (and sometimes simply

evade each other) across academia, news media, popular ideology, and more. While such

struggles can be constructive (and certain modes of struggle have long played a generative role

in the production of knowledge), the current conjuncture heightens a sense of irreconcilability,

mutual denial, and even relativism.

The recently emergent epistemic formation, then, thrives in and responds to this

environment, even as it suffers in it. It is itself a reflection of the crises of knowledge and

commensuration, in that it is fragmented in its diverse theoretical frameworks and knowledge

claims. It inadvertently contributes to these crises of knowledge and commensuration, in that it

proliferates various modalities of knowledge without arriving—or even attempting to arrive,

some exceptions aside—at shared standards of evaluation. It also works against these crises (both

intentionally and unintentionally), in that its engagement with various knowledge claims and

modalities of knowledge contributes to the (experimental) exploration of such knowledges’

potentials while arguably increasing their accessibility. Whether successful or not, whether

sustainable or not, the epistemic formation’s numerous practices are ever so many attempts at

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“articulating concepts with the empirical, material and non-conceptual worlds, to see where new

concepts are needed” (Grossberg, 2018a, p. 181). They are attempts at finding a discursive-

material footing in a seemingly unhinged world. This should not be understood as merely a

response to a certain “lack” (of consensus, coherence, or standards of evaluation). Instead, it is

important to map the formation’s reliance on and amplification of the easily forgotten, and

sometimes disingenuously denied, affective charge of intellectual engagement—its passion, its

fun, its experienced necessity. For the epistemic formation, the negotiation of knowledge claims

and the cultivation of (aesthetic, activist, scholarly) reflexive engagements with contemporary

larger-scale conditions provides a sense of belonging. It is what feels right and necessary—how

could it not be?

Like free folk, the epistemic formation responds to contemporary enclosures of popular

imagination, which go hand in hand with what Grossberg (2010b) calls crises of investment or of

the popular. They involve a disarticulation of imagination from experimentation: As the

popular—a realm of affective investment—spreads across everyday life, with post-war

formations of (formerly) “youth culture” embedded in and woven into ever so many practices,

ideologies, and structures of feeling, it also increasingly appears aligned with habit. It is what

simply exists (the given) and what simply is done; it does not necessarily provide a sense of the

possibility for transformation. The normalization of affective investment in the popular

complicates imagination’s potential. This normalization makes it harder to imagine beyond that

which appears given, thereby separating imagination from an experimental embrace of the

unknown. Imagination appears stuck in what is already there; popular imaginaries are often

captured by, for instance, larger franchises of the cultural industries. These can of course be

mobilized in potentially empowering ways, but they also remain fairly limited in their

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composition and effectivity on the basis of various cultural-economic calculations. When

experimental imaginaries do find widespread investment, they often are already in the process of

being actualized into their most limited material and discursive forms (e.g., the market-

individualist cult of Elon Musk), or their strategic deficits allow them to be easily contained

(e.g., Occupy; see Grossberg, 2015). At the very least—and here the enclosures of popular

imagination are most clearly articulated to crises of commensuration—it appears harder to arrive

at any shared, rigorously experimental but popular imaginary of future worlds. As is well-

established, there is a paradoxical proliferation of experimental imaginaries (Grossberg, 2015).

However, these regularly fail to be articulated to each other in a sustainable manner. It is

important to note that this situation is thus not exactly the grim, pervasive “capitalist realism”

Mark Fisher (2009) has diagnosed. It may appear that there are no, in the words of John Clarke

(2010), “articulated and articulating alternative framings of the world and our place in it.”

However, this predicament “is somewhat narrower and less all-embracing than Fisher’s

concept.” This is the case not least due to “the contradictory, paradoxical and tension-ridden

character of the dominant/would-be hegemonic sets of meanings” (p. 351) in the contemporary

context. Fisher’s matrix is also too monolithic to account for the very contradictions of affect’s

articulation—that is, the complexities of people’s investment—and the simultaneous

proliferation and diffusion of imagination.

This disarticulation of imagination from experimentation thus inhibits the search for the

virtual in the actual and undermines the articulation and actualization of real potentials. It fosters

the proliferation of acontextual fantasies and makes the fulfilment of potential appear

impossible. It is itself the result of complex struggles over people’s affective investment,

including but not limited to right-wing alliances’ attacks on and appropriations of popular culture

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that weakened its potentials for lived resistance (Grossberg, 1992; 2010b). At the same time,

crises of investment elicit a continuous search for—an inflation of—affective intensity in the

face of a seeming inconsequentiality and dullness of popular investments and imaginaries. The

free folk formation re-articulates imagination and experimentation through an often-

improvisational proliferation of enunciative practices that rarely centers on representation. The

epistemic formation, on the other hand, more strongly connects to emphatically experimentalist

formations in activism and theory (Grossberg, 2015) whose attempts at this re-articulation tend

to be more self-reflective and explicit in their intentionality. As such, the epistemic formation’s

response to enclosures of popular imagination is constitutively articulated to its response to

crises of knowledge. It is not surprising that Mark Fisher, for instance, is an important

interlocutor for musicians of the epistemic formation such as Holly Herndon. His work combined

a framework drawing on high theory with an investment in the potentials of experimental

imagination, which he understood as strongly inhibited by contemporary cultural, economic,

political, and social forces. Fisher saw (experimentalist) culture as a potential force for change—

and thus as crucial for an investment in the future.

Indeed, enclosures of imagination also need to be understood as mediated by and

affording certain shifts in dominant temporalities. Grossberg (2015, 2018b) has mapped these

developments (summarized as a structure of feeling of “temporal alienation”) across the last few

decades. They are characterized by an experienced “weirdness” of time, a disarticulation of the

present from past and future, a dissipation of the present’s presence. Consequently, the future

appears difficult to imagine in any manner that is simultaneously robust and bold, rigorous and

experimental. Free folk attempts to re-articulate, ground, and diversify time in its drones and

collective improvisation, in its patient yet intense “being in the moment.” In comparison, the

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epistemic formation, while certainly able to employ similar techniques, is much more explicit in

its negotiation of temporality. As Grossberg (2010b) points out, crises of investment inhibit a

leap into the unknown. If the future appears unimaginable in any robust way amidst such crises,

the epistemic formation attempts to reinvest it.

The formation expresses this reinvestment and reimagination in different ways,

sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit. Performers such as Moor Mother and Elysia Crampton

Chuquimia center their work on alternative conceptualizations of time—in Moor Mother’s case,

the notion of time as circular, which lends itself to a juxtaposition and articulation of narratives

and stylistic elements across different historical periods (Love, 2018; Pothast, 2019) and thus a

renewed understanding of the emergence and contingency of power relations. This mode of

reinvestment and re-articulation is not exclusively a response to a contemporary sense of

temporal alienation but also draws on and counters a long duration of temporal alienation(s)

among the exploited and devalued Black diaspora in particular. The epistemic formation also

proliferates other, often implicit, evocations and invocations of new (or alternative) futures, or of

different worlds that are implied to be of the future, or at least of different worlds that can be

imagined as potential future worlds. These articulations of different or future worlds resonate

with and expand on the reminder that “another world is possible.” To Grossberg (2015), drawing

on Benjamin, this ubiquitous call is indicative of an “organization of pessimism” that must

remind itself (in a time of experienced disappointment) that another world can be possible, when

it is in fact experienced as extremely hard to attain. Between its various modes of time’s

reinvestment and reimagination, the epistemic formation reflects on, re-articulates, and attempts

to go beyond existing bodies of (artistic, activist, and scholarly) work, be it those with a direct

import on matters of time, or those experienced as implicitly relevant to articulations of

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temporality. It invests in notions of time and in potential presents and futures that critique, lead

away from, or even appear to solve the perceived impasses of the present.

The third assemblage of forces drawing the epistemic formation’s response is strongly

implicit to the first two; though this very implicitness is crucial for an understanding of the

epistemic formation’s constitution. This third element is not so much a crisis of politics, as the

formation is not exactly responding to a contextually specific, revelatory destabilization of

“politics” itself, however defined, that differs appreciably and necessarily from past instabilities

of varying duration. It is also not a specific political crisis, even though (as I will show below)

protagonists of the epistemic formation engage with a diverse set of specific political challenges.

Instead, this third element could be described as a set of oscillations of the political that runs

through, is conditioned by, and itself conditions diverse political crises, conflicts, and challenges.

The formation responds to different proliferations, generalizations, and minimizations—in other

words, various different articulations and disarticulations—of the political. These articulations

and disarticulations do not necessarily take place simultaneously; their speeds, durations, and

specific histories may differ.

For instance, the idea that “the personal is political” is tied particularly to its historical

mobilization by various countercultural/social movements of the 1960s, while Grossberg (2018b)

argues that an inverted articulation—“the political is personal”—expresses contemporary

individualized-narcissistic structures of feeling. This, however, is merely one example out of

many. The personalization of the political and the politicization of the personal tie in with and

stand in contrast to such diverse tendencies as contextually specific modes of depoliticization

and “anti-politics” (Clarke, 2010), an investment in “micropolitics” as a dimension

complementary to “macropolitics” (Gilbert, 2008), openings (and new forms of closure) of the

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political realm to disenfranchised populations, the conflation of the political and the ethical, the

inventive articulation but also overreaching fetishization of a molecular politics (as opposed to

the perceived shortcomings of a more traditional “molar” politics) and the related positioning of

an affective-creative potentia against a dire, crushing potestas, and so on. The formation’s

experience of these oscillations of the political has to be understood in terms of the broad

accessibility and perceived ubiquity of (modes or notions of) the political: The musicians of the

epistemic formation have been socialized intellectually and affectively with an awareness, drawn

from scholarship as much as activisms of various social movements of recent decades, that

everything can be understood in terms of power relations, of struggles over power. They have

encountered ever so many knowledges and imaginaries that theorize or otherwise articulate

notions of power, of ethics, of the political; and they have, simultaneously, encountered

widespread depoliticizations, a sense of political inconsequence, an “organization of pessimism”

(Grossberg, 2015).

It is instructive to invoke the popular notion that “everything is political” here, which

applies in telling ways within the epistemic formation. On social media and beyond, it is

commonly mobilized as an affirmation of the supposed ubiquity of power relations, precisely in

the face of perceived depoliticizations. That the phrase’s tactical application skips the actual

work of articulating the specific political relations of any given event or object is beside the

point: For the epistemic formation, of course everything is political; the political is a relational

presence, a power-relational presence. One might say that the epistemic formation lives in

Michel Foucault’s world:

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault, 1983/2010, p. 343)

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For the industrial formation, too, “everything is dangerous”; but this generalized danger, whether

articulated ideologically or affectively, is shaped to a large extent by a paranoid enunciative

assemblage that generalizes a sense of unease (but also of empowerment—what if one holds the

key to dangerous secrets?). Conversely, the epistemic formation understands and experiences this

danger as broadly relational, instead of necessarily implying the hidden or the secret. Power can

be hidden, without a doubt, and the epistemic formation does not shy away from uncovering it

through its artistic and social experiments; but power also operates on the surface, requiring even

the obvious and quotidian to be analyzed, taken apart, made contingent (and not just as deceitful

tools of seemingly hidden control powers). Simultaneously, the epistemic formation is more

sober; it does not necessarily follow danger down a rabbit hole but attempts to map its relations.

This does not keep it from encoding its investment in the probing of power relations in

portentous, dramatic, even apocalyptic ways, at times resembling a particularly heterogeneous

take on industrial’s sidereal assemblage.

To posit crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, and oscillations of the

political as central to the epistemic formation’s constitution is not to suggest that these are the

most politically and ethically, personally and collectively urgent and threatening challenges that

confront the formation’s protagonists themselves. It is, however, to say that this specific cultural

formation can only be understood as being unified in difference (as emerging) by these three

assemblages of forces. They condition musicians’ experience of the everyday as artists who are

also invested in activism and/or research. Musicians’ engagement with other forces cannot be

separated from their responses to the crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination,

and oscillations of the political. As many of this chapter’s examples will show, the artists of the

epistemic formation explicitly do engage with and intervene in a broad set of experienced crises

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or challenges of considerable impact. In Foucault’s words, these musicians “always have

something to do.” These crises and challenges include the persistence and re-articulation of

racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, and other forms of discrimination and

exploitation; the continuously growing environmental crisis; the persistence and/or resurgence of

authoritarian politics, and other crises of democracy and collectivity; humanitarian crises of

displacement (e.g., the “refugee crisis”); the instability of various formations of capitalism; the

challenges to notions of the “human” posed by various cultural-technological apparatuses; and,

most recently, the public health crisis of 2020 and 2021 and the affective, ideological, and

economic uncertainty it elicits and heightens. Whatever one’s contextualization and

conceptualization of these crises and challenges, they often have more immediate, perceptible,

and perhaps fatal consequences for various populations (including members of this formation)

than the crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, and oscillations of the political

do. For instance, racist discrimination and violence—in contemporary instances and in their

sheer historical weight—are likely to have a greater and more immediate impact on an artist’s

life than the proliferation of irreconcilable knowledge claims. However, the epistemic

formation’s engagement with these other crises and challenges is always connected to and

mediated by its responses to mutually articulated crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular

imagination, and oscillations of the political.

This chapter therefore does not suggest that the three assemblages of forces by default

carry the greatest weight in musicians’ lives and work, or are experienced as such. Instead, it

argues that the assemblages of forces, and musicians’ responses to them, condition the

formation’s emergence as a formation, a unity in difference that cuts across and connects to

other formations. The chapter also does not suggest that musicians’ responses to other challenges

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are epiphenomenal aspects of their lived experience. It also does not suggest, for instance, that

the epistemic formation’s various creative-imaginative expressions are necessarily most effective

in those parts of an affective-semiotic landscape that have primarily been shaped by the crises of

knowledge—that the formation’s effectivities and the formation’s conditions of possibility by

default concern the same realm. Although the formation’s specific articulations of imagination to

matters of knowledge are quite unique to it, a formation’s effectivities are never guaranteed in

advance. It is entirely possible that artistic responses to broad crises of knowledge are more

impactful in narrower, more localized contexts (as aesthetic inspiration in local “scenes,” as

interventions in specific discourses, as contributions to activist practice, as fun) than, for

instance, in institutions explicitly dedicated to the production of knowledge. The crises of

knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, and oscillations of the political are themselves

inflected and re-articulated by these other (political, economic, environmental) challenges; but in

all the diversity of their articulations, the three assemblages of forces are central to the epistemic

formation’s constitutive logic of lived experience—its sensibility, as outlined below.

Finally, none of this is to say that the articulation of experimental musics to humanities

scholarship, critical/political theory, and so on is new per se (the articulation of experimental

musics to “the political,” meanwhile, is comparatively well-established). Most obviously,

“academic” experimental musics have always at least been in institutional proximity to such

work; and critical scholars of music have often themselves been active musicians. Theodor W.

Adorno’s forays into composition are fairly well-known, if somewhat overdetermined by his

outsized scholarly stature. The career trajectory of composer and improviser Cornelius Cardew,

once Karlheinz Stockhausen’s student, was strongly shaped by a Maoist framework, which

inspired his attempts at democratizing his own musical practice. Moving more emphatically into

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popular-experimental musics, one could list Afrofuturist musics’ claims to scientific and

scholarly status, blurring the lines between speculative cultural theory and science-fiction; the

lifelong inspiration synthesist Richard Pinhas has derived from his academic mentor Gilles

Deleuze, who read an adapted excerpt from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human on an early

track by Pinhas’s bands Heldon (1974/1993) and Schizo;51 or even the industrial formation with

its investment in diverse secret knowledges. By the 1990s, the increased relevance of “theory” as

a transdisciplinary formation also found expression in the Mille Plateaux label’s Deleuze-

referencing experimental electronics and in the work of Detroit techno duo Drexciya (a key

inspiration for parts of the epistemic formation), which articulated Afrofuturist art and Paul

Gilroy’s Black Atlantic into the rich mythology of an underwater civilization of the Middle

Passage. Meanwhile, the writings of “improvised sound worker” Bruce Russell (2009) of The

Dead C and A Handful of Dust draw on situationism, Walter Benjamin, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Although the free folk formation tends strongly towards the nonrepresentational, Russell’s

writings, circulating across international experimental music networks, have inspired free folk

musicians and are highly instructive for any analysis of free folk and related formations.

However, what distinguishes the epistemic formation from these earlier symbioses of

critical-theoretical discourses and popular-experimental music is the sheer density and volume of

musics performing such articulations—the particularly widespread emergence of a sensibility

that fosters such articulations. Just as countless works of (post-structuralist, post-modern,

feminist, post-colonial…) “theory,” often with very broad claims to relevance, have been

proliferating across academia, the number of popular-experimental musics inspired by theory or

staking “theoretical” claims has been growing exponentially. While I aim to show in this chapter

51 Pinhas, in turn, impacted Deleuze and Guattari’s own understanding of music and, in particular, musical synthesis (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, pp. 612, n. 53, 628, n. 94).

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that this proliferation can only be understood in relation to contextually specific crises of

knowledge, this claim in itself only goes so far in illuminating the formation’s emergence. The

crises of knowledge are not simply an abstract, determining set of forces, a structural framework

shaping certain musical expressions. These crises are always articulated and experienced

socially, and they are not always experienced as crises. The proliferation of theory does not just

take place in the academy, and across the limited “market” of academic publications. Instead, for

many of the formation’s protagonists, theory has become a crucial part of everyday life, an

ideological and affective assemblage deeply embedded in and co-constitutive of lived

experience, as well as a set of resources that helps bridge the gap between imagination and

experimentation. Regardless of anti-intellectual and ahistorical “ivory tower” clichés, “theory,”

but also other modes of critical reflection, can contribute to a sense of belonging; to active-

creative ways of being-in-the-world.

The epistemic formation’s sensibility

The sensibility that governs the epistemic formation is a reflexive-experimental sensibility

that privileges a critical-reflexive mode of experimentation. It serves as a logic of social

mediation according to which musicians experience their lifeworld—that is, some articulation of

their historical context(s)—as an always-already ethically and/or politically charged realm that

calls for exploration. It privileges affective investment in and aesthetic articulations of critical

bodies of knowledge, old and often new; but it is not simply reducible to a representational

semiotic and concurrent modes of reflection. Instead, power relations and their exploration and

transformation are felt to be important. They are sensed as primary to the world as it exists,

whether these relations appear to be hidden (as sensed by large parts of the industrial formation)

or out in the open. If “the peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that

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must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived” (Williams,

1979/2015, p. 168), then the formation’s sensibility enables and guides practices that conduct

this “endless comparison” in a particularly reflexive way that actively “studies,” questions, and

often aims to intervene in the articulated, the lived, and the gap between them. Indeed, this

reflexivity should not be understood as necessarily implying passivity. The formation’s attempts

at aesthetic and social intervention are crucial to an understanding of its sensibility (also see

Lubner, 2019).

Artists of the epistemic formation actively engage with and even embrace a deluge of

artistic, political, and scholarly discourses; but this deluge is substance for critical-creative work

that attempts to articulate a different world, or at least to lay the groundwork for such

articulations. This reflexive component to the formation’s sensibility has lent itself to such

ascriptions as Reynolds’s (2019) “conceptronica” neologism. However, the formation’s

invocations of theory and politics are only a part (if a particularly unifying one) of a larger set of

semiotic and a-semiotic encodings. Additionally, the term “reflexive” should not be understood

as the activity of a disembodied mind (Braidotti, 2011b). As this chapter will show, the epistemic

formation’s reflections and negotiations of diverse knowledges, theories, and politics are

pronouncedly corporeal, embodied. It is therefore advisable to be skeptical of Reynolds’s (2019)

view that “conceptual electronic music … doesn’t primarily aim to elicit a physical response. It’s

music to contemplate with your ears, to think about and think with” (para. 9). As important as

scholarly modes of contemplation are to the musics of the epistemic formation, claims such as

Reynolds’s mainly serve to reiterate a mind-body dualism most clearly expressed in his article’s

strapline, which claims that “so much electronic music this decade felt like it belonged in a

museum instead of a club.” In its semiotic heterogeneity—its various mutual articulations of

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representational, radicular, and rhizomatic assemblages—the formation traverses and, in diverse

ways, negotiates and integrates “museums,” “clubs,” and many other spaces. This does not

guarantee its “popularity” in a quantitative sense, but it is irreducible to the cerebral or academic,

let alone to “high culture.”52

I now want to outline several areas of knowledge, or related to the production of

knowledge, that the formation’s reflexive-experimental sensibility privileges and encodes into

musical (and related) expressions. As I will clarify over the course of this chapter, these areas

can only be separated for purposes of analysis and accessibility, but they never appear “on their

own,” whatever that would entail, in any artist’s work. The first, and perhaps most crucial, of

these areas is that of collectivity, and of sociality. The second area concerns (economic and

political) power; the third involves the exploration of multiple interrelated categories and notions

of identity, subjectivity, and being-in-the-world; the fourth interrogates temporality and,

alongside it, notions of history, ancestry, and futurity. Musicians of the epistemic formation tend

to traverse and negotiate most or all four of these, thereby articulating a variety of responses to

the crises of knowledge, enclosures of popular imagination, and oscillations of the political.

Following on from this detailed outline of the formation’s engagement with these areas of

knowledge, I will map the enunciative assemblages across which the formation’s encodings are

articulated.

52 Taking Reynolds’s distinction further, experimental musician Rami Abadir (2020) aligns the conceptual and (supposed) representational bent of “conceptronica” with an “emerging elitism that keeps imposing itself on more spontaneous trends and on the implicit social movements organically created within the music scene” (para. 11). For Abadir, artists who already are able to access rarefied institutional knowledge benefit from journalism that latches on to such language and festivals that incentivize its use. Abadir’s warnings of an exclusionary intellectual elitism are particularly strong when targeting Eurocentric programming at well-funded multimedia festivals that do indeed regularly host some of the epistemic formation’s better-known artists; but his critique pits the conceptual and (supposedly) overly intellectual against the spontaneous and organic, thereby missing the epistemic formation’s considerable affective investment in modes of expression that cannot simply be reduced to cynically or naively deployed cultural capital or to vectors of institutional encroachment.

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Thematizing collectivity

The epistemic formation engages in a reflexive thematization of collectivity. This

reflexive thematization both emerges from and in turn conditions the foundational, social-

material co-operations discussed above. It sometimes resembles and heightens the industrial

formation’s own such thematization, as found in Industrial Records and Thee Temple ov

Psychick Youth (Muggs, 2016). Many of the formation’s artists establish explicitly collaborative

working processes and/or set up particular releases as spaces for a plurality of collaborations.

For instance, Holly Herndon’s Platform (2015) serves not just as an exploration of

platform capitalism (see the section on “power”) but also as a platform for a variety of

collaborations (Brown, 2015; Claymore, 2019; Džuverović, 2016)—with media theorist Mat

Dryhurst, activist group Metahaven, and fellow musicians such as Colin Self and Amnesia

Scanner. On Proto, Herndon (2019b) and Dryhurst envision their collaboration with a large

number of artists as a way of rearing an artificial intelligence called Spawn, resulting in a

controversial experiment in kinship beyond the human. Spawn’s elaborate conceptualization in

press materials and interviews may have inadvertently distracted from Herndon’s focus on the

community that created Proto. Still, the album can be understood as an attempt (however

problematic) to explore human-technology relationships beyond, on the one hand, a

technophobic horror at AI’s potential dangers (and its wholesale dismissal as a ploy for corporate

domination) and, on the other, Silicon Valley-style techno-utopianism. For Herndon, AI, while

both scary and exciting, is very much a part of contemporary human lifeworlds, unimaginable

without human labor. Machine learning is messy; consequently, Spawn’s contributions to

Herndon’s ensemble are not those of a perfected intelligence in full control, but those of an

improvising (Hahn, 2019), still-learning assemblage whose expressions can be quite rough and

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noisy. This messiness is foregrounded in particular on “Godmother,” a collaboration with

experimental dance musician Jlin. Emily Bick’s (2019) otherwise dismissive review of Proto

considers this track more interesting than the album’s others, which Bick perceives as

insufficiently critical of AI:

“Godmother” is Proto’s closest attempt to embrace the algorithmic unintelligible: it’s jumpy, rattling, resolutely undanceable, lacking the context to anticipate the response of a dancer, a listener, an embodied other. … AI ugliness is its own aesthetic and worth considering on its own terms, an emergent fucked-upness from rules-based processes, running at scale, that do not care for humans (or anything!) at all. (p. 53)

“Godmother” is thus a particularly instructive example of Herndon’s engagement with machine-

learning in its cultural-technological embeddedness; and it speaks to an expanded notion of what

a community can do, reaching beyond the human.

Elsewhere, Herndon’s collaborator Colin Self facilitates Xoir (formerly known as Xhoir),

“a non-utilitarian vocal workshop … focused on alternative modalities of group singing” (Self,

n.d., para. 1) that doubles as a communal space:

It was about getting people together in a room, sheltering from the winter, and finding a form of group creativity that wasn’t competitive or valued for its productivity. ... A lot of people who came to Xhoir had either some kind of divorced relationship to singing or their bodies, some had transitioned or had bodily shame associated with expressing a queer voice or body. Xhoir became a place to negotiate and explore the voice and its capacity to change. (Self, as cited in Harper, 2018, p. 17)

According to Adam Harper (2018), Self’s music generates “a network of solidarity whose nodes

comprise what he refers to as ‘Research Sisters’” (p. 17)—contributors to mutual sustenance, to

survival. These may involve friends as well as inspirations at a distance. One of Self’s songs,

“Stay With the Trouble (for Donna)” (2018), is dedicated to feminist theorist Donna Haraway.

Here, community is conceptualized as collective research and care. In fact, Xhoir’s renaming to

Xoir served to “have this workshop become expansive beyond being considered just a choral

practice” while granting it “a mythic name for a platform that can continue to generate and

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evolve based on it’s [sic] myriad participants and activities” (Self, n.d., XHOIR -> XOIR

section, para. 1):

The X signifies both ancient and future languages and can be tied to complex mapping of linguistics between Euskara, Mexico, India, China, Slavic land– and points toward a kind of bootleg global language, a complex conversation amongst a myriad of histories. (Self, n.d., XHOIR -> XOIR section, para. 2)

Beyond just being a “utilitarian” choir workshop, Xoir, while primarily led by one person, also

actively works towards spatial and temporal multiplication, pushing to embed a relatively

localized collaborative practice in as heterogeneous a context as possible in order to arrive at a

particularly egalitarian mode of collective care. Both Herndon and Self explore explicitly

positive, wholesome, alternative collectivities that explicitly respond to contemporary challenges

in a way that requires active investigation—“research,” the production and contextually

appropriate dissemination and harnessing of knowledge.

Elsewhere, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia has formulated a style called “Severo,”

described as follows in her artist statement for the emphatically collaborative album Elysia

Crampton Presents: Demon City (2016), which also features Amobi and Rabit:

Written as an epic poem, Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City is an official document of the Severo style.

What is Severo?

The Severo style is an ongoing process of becoming-with, made possible by the family-networks and communities that have inspired and sustained our survival and collective search for transformative justice. (Crampton Chuquimia, as cited in Break World Records, 2016, Artist Statement section, paras. 1–3)

Crampton Chuquimia draws on her Aymara heritage and contemporary theory to arrive at

alternative relationships to the world and the many complex beings—or, more to the point:

becomings—it generates, against Euromodern subjugations of indigenous knowledges and

minoritarian communities, and against individualized separation and alienation. Crampton

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Chuquimia (as cited in Wharton, 2016) does affirm the importance of the personal. Certainly,

collaboration and collectivity are crucial, and even the individual body is constituted by “a

beautiful camaraderie of entities.” Still:

The more we learn, not only do we find how connected we’ve always been, but we come to understand our own discreteness as well, through this process of symbiosis. It’s not that these collaborations obscure what we are, they help us better utilise our potentiality and power by uncovering what is actually involved in the maintenance of identity over time. (para. 22)

Elsewhere, Crampton Chuquimia (as cited in Barbara, 2018) explicitly defines her work in terms

of “an impulse to resist appeals to individualism (marked by colonial law, in relation to bodies

and land ownership, as a project of genocidal regulation against Native American people in the

Americas)” (para. 1). Of course, contemporary conditions would not lend themselves to a

discursive dissolution of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, the individual artist, in favor of a

foregrounding of heterogeneous collectivities in continuous becoming; but Crampton Chuquimia

uses the benefits of being represented as an individual artist (e.g., by being invited to perform

and speak at festivals, to release albums, to be interviewed, to be affectively and economically

invested-in) for the propagation and public negotiation of more emphatically collective,

empathetic, and diverse modes of being-in-the-world (hence the album title’s telling phrase

“Elysia Crampton presents”). Crampton Chuquimia’s is not the subjectivity on which all related

collaborations must ultimately reterritorialize. Instead, her practice is set up to function as an

entry point for the articulation of highly heterogeneous collectivities.

As another key mode of the reflexive thematization of collectivity, parts of the formation

explicitly conceive of labels and other musical-social institutions as collectives, simultaneously

building material collectivities and harnessing signifiers of collectivity. The Ascetic House label

draws on a lineage of noise and industrial music that emphasizes the secret or obscured,

including in its approach to collectivity. Ascetic House calls its headquarters the “Sonoran

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Lodge”; its communications at times play with an anonymous-bureaucratic aesthetic similar to

that of Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records, for instance by calling a batch of new releases the

“January Program,” or by engaging in a “Prison Outreach Program” that provided cassette tapes

free of charge to inmates (Pelly, 2013; Pattison, 2014). Label co-founder and Marshstepper

member JS Aurelius (as cited in McDermott, 2018) claims:

I think there is only hope in the collective …. There is power in solidarity, power that we’re only using a small percentage of. The foundations of these international networks already exist, and I think there is this hugely overlooked potential in strengthening and expanding upon them. … Since day one, the mission of Ascetic House has been to uplift and strengthen these networks. To create new connections and solidify them. There is a reason why state powers take so much care to disrupt and dismantle DIY communities and the spaces in which they exist. … It’s because of the potential we hold to support and uplift each other, to learn from each other’s communities, to share resources and dialogue. It’s quite revolutionary and we hardly even recognize it. (para. 36)

Collectivity is thus thematized with ethical and perhaps implicitly political aims. Creative,

radical collectivity is understood as carrying potentials that are thus far only glimpsed—

Raymond Williams’s (1979/2015) “pre-emergent,” that which is not-yet articulated but real.

Aurelius and his peers slowly work towards the actualization of this potential, “creat[ing] new

connections and solidify[ing] them.” Simultaneously, they understand radical collectivity as

consistently under siege because of its potentiality, which could engender real and lasting

transformations undesired by dominant forces. For Ascetic House, the almost mythical power of

the collective must be protected and fostered; this protection and fostering is an almost

conspiratorial project that requires boldness, adventure, and transgression.

Elsewhere, NON Worldwide—largely inactive at the time of writing—is perhaps the

formation’s most visible “collective.” It was founded by Chino Amobi (a Nigerian-American

artist based in Richmond, Virginia), Angel-Ho (Cape Town, South Africa), and Nkisi (born in

the DR Congo, raised in Belgium, based in London) as a transnational collective (Muggs, 2016).

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Adam Harper learns from “a representative for NON Records” (as cited in Harper, 2015) that

NON is

a sovereign nation state divided into three united territories. NON citizens reside in villages, towns, and cities across the globe. Each citizen has distinct social as well as geopolitical agency with our nation’s infrastructure. … In no uncertain terms, the Intent [sic] of NON is to run counter to current Western hyper-capitalist modes of representation and function, exorcising the language of domination through the United Resistance of policed and exotified colored bodies …. At a time when national (market) state financial and political systems are tested as never before, NON shall remain committed to the militant realities and potentials of “The NON State.” NON came into existence through the Pan-African desire for representation on our own terms. (para. 5)

NON simultaneously embraces the idea of a “nation” in the sense of an “imagined community”

(Anderson, 1983/2006) and counters Euromodern notions of a clearly bounded, homogeneous

nation-state. According to Amobi (as cited in Stabler, 2016),

the [NON] state itself is without boundaries. However, we do locate ourselves within specific spaces. For example, at the show at the New Museum, citizens are being issued passports to get into the space. So, in essence, for that night, NON is a space with borders and boundaries. There’s an ebb and a flow. There’s temporary boundaries that are fluid, so it’ll be that for a second, and then at the afterparty it’ll switch, and then there will be definite borders. There are certain areas you need passports to travel between, but there still remains that malleability. No border is fixed. It’s a paradox: To say “we don’t have borders,” then have borders within a borderless state. It’s part of what we do, and that translates from online to offline and back. (para. 5)

As an “imagined community,” NON relies on shared aesthetic and political values, or perhaps on

a resistant-reflexive structure of feeling that shapes these values. Muggs (2016) highlights the

role of a shared habitus, and particularly of language, in the collective’s sustenance:

[NON] also has its own rhetoric and code of conduct, related to but separate from both academia and mainstream activism. … But what’s most striking is how naturally these phrases come; hearing Nkisi in person, and watching the interactions of various NON affiliates online, there’s little of the defensive archness and wilful obfuscation that comes with art projects, and more of a sense of belonging through a shared subcultural vocabulary, like that of a gang. (p. 26)

I want to use Muggs’s remarks to set up certain distinctions. As Muggs points out, NON’s

language draws on academic and activist language, even though it is not singularly defined by

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these. Consequently, one frequently encounters terms such as “decolonization,”

“deterritorialization,” and “reterritorialization” (Harper, 2015; Lozano, 2016; Muggs, 2016),

especially in Amobi’s communications. Similarly, interviewer Colin Joyce (2016) likens Elysia

Crampton Chuquimia’s language to “the best academic writing” in that “her every sentence feels

like something to be savored, its spiderweb of ideas and meanings worthy of untangling” (para.

4); indeed, references to academic writing recur throughout interviews with Crampton

Chuquimia. In his piece on “conceptronica,” Simon Reynolds (2019) observes:

Most of the leading conceptronica artists have been through art school or postgraduate academia, and they’re comfortable speckling both their work and their conversation with references to critical theory and philosophy. During our interview, Chino Amobi brings up everyone from the black studies and performance scholar Fred Moten to the ’90s cyber theory collective CCRU. (para. 3)

While Reynolds’s observation is not wrong, the phrase “speckling … with references” arguably

infers a certain utilitarianism (as if these “references” were inserted inorganically) and perhaps

expresses a mild cynicism or bemusement, a suspicion of something resembling “the defensive

archness and wilful obfuscation” that Muggs mostly does not see in NON’s conduct. Reynolds

therefore risks masking a key dimension of the epistemic formation’s collective experiments and

experimental collectivities. “Critical theory and philosophy,” and notably post-structuralist/post-

modern/anti-enlightenment “theory” as an academic lingua franca (Grossberg, 2018a), are not

limited to the academic sphere. They also are not merely a set of tools to be invoked, or a means

of granting and attaining distinction (although they are, or can relate to, all of these things; also

see Abadir, 2020). Certainly, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia (as cited in Boucherat, 2016) has self-

deprecatingly claimed that, among other things, “resorting to the language of the university was a

way of trying to get intelligent people to engage with my work” (para. 8); but even this speaks

more to her desire for collaborative engagement that mutually infuses imagination and

knowledge.

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More to the point, for the epistemic formation, theory has also become a lived semiotic

substance that is just as important for the attainment of what Muggs calls “a sense of belonging

through a shared subcultural vocabulary” as it is for the strategic codification of scholarly

knowledge claims. Just like its other characteristics, the epistemic formation’s investment in and

expression of the collective is not reducible to the theorization and representation of collectivity.

At the same time, though, this theorization and representation are part of these artists’ lived

experience. Indeed, academic and activist theorizations of collectivity can help shape and take

part in the semiotics of collectivity active in the epistemic formation. Theorizations and

thematizations can themselves be turned into semiotic substance; or they can help spur

enunciative assemblages that center the collective in various ways. However, this does not mean

that the formation’s enunciative assemblages always reterritorialize on reflexive thematization.

The collective circulates through the epistemic formation’s musics. It is both evoked and invoked

in a variety of ways. I will outline the formation’s semiotics of collectivity later in this chapter.

Power

The epistemic formation is strongly conscious of and regularly explores existing power

relations. This does not mean that the formation’s artists share a consistent theory of power, or

that they necessarily explore the same spaces, modes, and particular relations of power. It also

does not guarantee that the formation is able to actually transform existing power relations.

However, it does mean that the formation’s reflexive-experimental sensibility privileges the

existence of power relations and differentials as a key presence in lived experience. With a

background in higher education and/or political activism against various injustices, the musicians

of the epistemic formation are attuned to an understanding of their lifeworlds as shaped

throughout by different formations and technologies of power. Indeed, the formation experiences

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the world as “politicized” and articulates this politicization in various ways. For this formation,

nothing is ever “not political.” The formation’s articulation of what it encounters as political in

turn also implies the mutability of power relations. To work towards such transformation, the

formation articulates imagination—articulates imaginaries—to various modes of knowledge.

This articulation takes place through artistic and social experimentation that embraces the

unknown or unknowable character of its outcomes. The formation’s staging of power relations

(directed towards critique, directed towards transformation) is a primary aspect of its re-

articulation of imagination to experimentation.

In “The Last Question,” a poem included in the first volume of the NON Quarterly

Publication, NON Worldwide co-founder Nkisi (2016) expresses a “dream of bliss in

experimental situations with neither/obligations or prohibitions.” Against bureaucratic state

apparatuses and capitalist exploitation, Nkisi positions an imaginary that is radically open in its

experimental embrace of the unknowable. Experimentation and imagination are articulated

against habit; habit serves various dominant forces. Consequently, NON Worldwide’s

engagement with power relations is multi-modal. Throughout the first NON Quarterly

Publication, NON’s “citizens” are concerned with imposed borders, boundaries, and

categorizations to be questioned and transgressed. As a self-defined “nation,” a reflexively

“imagined community” (Anderson, 1983/2006), NON problematizes borders as geopolitical

markers of power that divide and distribute people and spaces according to imperial, colonial,

and other authoritarian interests and logics. As a collectivity centered on unconventional musics

and related art forms, NON engages major languages as colonial technologies of power—

“exorcising the language of domination through the United Resistance of policed and exotified

colored bodies” (“a representative for NON Records,” as cited in Harper, 2015, para. 5), thereby

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actively engaging in something resembling industrial’s investment in deconditioning. Habit,

which protects and reproduces existing power relations, must be challenged. NON foregrounds

its Afrodiasporic background, and consequently is particularly invested in the exploration and

dismantling of racist and colonially derived structures.

One example of this is Chino Amobi’s Airport Music for Black Folk (2016), which

evokes the racial profiling experienced by Black bodies in airport security. For Marie Thompson

(2017b), the album’s fractured and intrusive sounds challenge the obscured, unmarked “white

aurality” of albums such as Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony (2007) that flatten the airport

experience into an undifferentiated, neutralized soundscape.53 A Ruse of Power (2016), a

confrontational noise-pop album by VIOLENCE (Olin Caprison), articulates power to identity as

well: “According to [NON Worldwide], Power is intended to explore ‘race, gender, ethics and

religion’ while ‘unraveling’ the usual norms and social constructs” (Ryce, 2016, para. 3):

There’s an established narrative and narratives that live on the outskirts, inhabiting the shadows of monuments all over the world …. I try to move through these various narratives, various truths and bring some syncretism, and light, to the hidden places whilst simultaneously working my own personal narrative into the mix. (Olin Caprison, as cited in Ryce, 2016, para. 4)

Here, an interest in power, or rather what power hides, resembles industrial’s search for the

hidden; VIOLENCE’s own music at times resembles the heightened brutality of some early

industrial as well as industrial rock of the 1990s. Elsewhere, Mya Gomez describes Inmate

(2016) as her “personal exploration of carceral oppression in English detention centres” (Gomez,

2016b, para. 2), having been held, surveilled, and deported. Inmate’s slow, staggering beats and

descending minor-key synthesizer melodies convey portent, but the release contains no clearly

discernible lyrics. Its subject matter is not particularly obvious throughout (with repeated

53 Both albums should be understood in the tradition of, or as referencing, Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978).

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screams on “Spanto” and sampled waves on “Ex-Narcissist” perhaps the closest the music comes

to straightforward representation), but Gomez’s accompanying remarks nonetheless are likely to

impact a listener’s experience (provided the listener also is a reader). For instance, a listener who

reads Gomez’s statement may be more likely to experience Inmate’s closer “Released,” which is

less driving and driven than prior tracks, as offering the titular sense of release, even though a

high-pitched tone maintains a sense of unease (Gomez, 2016a). NON, ultimately, is a hub of

activity for a critical and creative engagement with existing power relations. The sheer

multiplicity of these engagements does not coalesce into any clear set of theories or political

demands, but it suggests that NON is (or was, given its recent inactivity) a vibrant space for

undogmatic experimentation with the expression of such theorizations or demands.

Holly Herndon’s music engages with the power relations shaping contemporary cultural-

technological apparatuses. Platform (2015) thematizes digital surveillance as a technology of

power, not least through the experimental use of an actual surveillance application. For instance,

Herndon (as cited in Gordon, 2014) has described “Home” as a “a love song for prying eyes (an

agent / a critic), and also a break up song with the devices with which I shared a naive

relationship” (para. 6) in light of “the ongoing NSA revelations” (para. 5). For Proto (2019),

Herndon, Dryhurst, and artist Jules LaPlace raised an “artificial intelligence baby” (Herndon, as

cited in Friedlander, 2019, para. 32) called Spawn. Spawn was created as a playful figuration, a

performer embedded in a specific community of artists, activists, and theorists, in order to raise

questions about control over the development of machine learning. Reflecting on Proto’s album

title, Herndon (as cited in Friedlander, 2019) states that

we were also thinking about protocols as a baseline set of rules that a community agrees upon. People use the word in technology while talking about the baseline infrastructural decisions you make at the protocol layer, [which] have dramatic repercussions as you start to build the platform layers on top of it. With Platform, we were dealing with some

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of the problems with the way the Internet has gone and the issues around platform capitalism. [With Proto, we’re] thinking about that in terms of artificial intelligence — what kind of values we want to instill at the protocol layer before things get out of hand. The last several years [have given rise to] a dramatic shift in protocol. What do we value? What are we going to take as a shared truth? It’s not just a technology question — it’s political and social. (para. 21)

Note, here, the desire for “a shared truth”—an unusually explicit expression of an interest in the

experienced “political and social” consequences of contemporary crises of commensuration and

knowledge. Herndon’s work thus explores contemporary cultural-technological apparatuses in

order not just to critique them and show their contingency. It also aims at the articulation of

shared alternatives to contemporary power relations, at the overcoming of existing hierarchies in

favor of something “new” and different—for instance, in the words of one of Platform’s song

titles, “New Ways to Love.”

Speaker Music’s DeForrest Brown, Jr. is particularly invested in the exploration of

larger-scale assemblages of anti-Black racism and their interrelations with contemporary

economies, especially as encountered in the cultural industries. Brown also regularly writes for

music websites such as Tiny Mix Tapes;54 his articles tend to be notably theory-informed. Brown

and Ting Ding have published the QTRLY Report (Ding & Brown, 2019) and its follow-up

publication, Manufacturing Normalcy (Ding & Brown, 2020). Consisting of vignettes of and

ruminations on the state of the cultural industries, they are presented as “multitextural data and

rhythm analys[es]” (Ding & Brown, 2019), providing pithy and sometimes mercurial insights

through the presentation and juxtaposition of various data. Brown has also engaged multiple

times with the role of the “club”: As an apparently or potentially egalitarian space, it is one of the

epistemic formation’s most commonly invoked tropes harnessed towards the generation of

54 Tiny Mix Tapes is now defunct but served as a key node for artistic-scholarly criticism that explored the epistemic formation while expressing its sensibility.

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radical collectivities. However, this does not necessarily imply an uncritical acceptance of clubs

as utopian spaces. Brown (as cited in Sagström, 2019) says:

Club culture … is a commons of free expression outside of Western progress, acting as an ungirdled blank space and open zone latent with excess energy, bubbling on the outside of politics while forever reimagining political boundaries. … If you’re a producer of the club night, you’re still working and circulating currency; but if you’re a clubber you’re consuming at an hour that is intended for rest for another hard day at work. We can split this hierarchy again into racial terms but, given the clear and ideologically necessary economic disparity between Blacks and Whites in America, the notion of both fitting into slots of worker and clubber completely bypasses the structural reasons why either group would be in either position. (para. 6)

Of course, the club’s positive capacities are not always already actualized; they require hard

work. Consequently, artists of, and articles about, the epistemic formation sometimes use phrases

such as “decolonizing the dancefloor” (e.g., Brown, 2019; Mertens, 2017; Wei, 2019) to describe

the formation’s work of undoing economically and racially charged modes of exclusion and

exploitation. Similarly, much of the formation’s music directly emerges from or draws on

various so-called “dance music” traditions (from disco to—especially—techno), resulting in the

frequent media use of the phrase “deconstructed club music” to describe this music’s

rearrangement of characteristic textures and beats of electronic dance musics into more

fragmented, fractured, unpredictable works. Recently, Brown has been working on a publication

titled Assembling a Black Counter Culture, which tells

a general history of techno and adjacent electronic music with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems … and attempts to evade and subvert the race and class-essentialist status quo established by American technocratic distribution of labor and capital. (Primary Information, 2020, paras. 1–3)

Brown’s explicitly theory-informed writings, articulated to his sometime-nonrepresentational

musics, thus aim at the dismantling of economic-racial apparatuses of discrimination and

exploitation, with music serving as a medium of this attempted dismantlement and, at least as

much, as a field of study in which interrelated capitalist and anti-Black modes of expropriation

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and destruction operate. Meanwhile, according to Ryan Meehan (2020), Brown’s immersive

installation/event drape over another places visitors both “in a simulacrum of the New York art-

industrial economy, and in a space in which they might imagine a world beyond it” (p. 79). This

tendency towards a contradictory, challenging immersion can be understood in relation to the

formation’s investment in modes of being-in-the-world, as discussed in the following section.

Identity, subjectivity, being-in-the world

Much of the epistemic formation draws on and invests in highly diverse notions of social

identity, individual and collective modes of subjectivity, and, more broadly, ways of being in

(and relating to) the world (Heidegger, 1927/1962).55 While the formation is not devoid of

romantic individualisms, it generally understands people’s identity, or sense of identity, as part

of larger, ethically and politically charged contexts—embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2011b)

in power relations, relations of care, modes of creative and economic interdependence, entire

worlds (including those yet to be constructed), and more. Instead of merely turning inwards to

explore a perceived realm of individual creativity, musicians of the epistemic formation always

place themselves, their peers, even the entire species in relation to other entities: other humans

(in different relations of power), animals, nature, specific technologies, and more. The

experimental exploration of these relations takes place through a wide variety of expressive

practices that translate (mostly in a non-homological manner) the experience of contextual

relationality into highly complex, heterogeneous soundscapes. The reflexive thematization of

identity and subjectivity itself suggests that these urgent interventions are partially determined by

55 The invocation of Heidegger’s term here is not meant to suggest a larger, rigorously Heideggerian framework, but rather to open up space for the diversity of ways in which musicians of the epistemic formation articulate (conceptualize, theorize, otherwise encode…) relations to their various contexts, environments, worlds. That said, Heideggerian terminology certainly does resonate with the terminology and ideas encountered in interviews with some musicians (e.g., Elysia Crampton Chuquimia).

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the crises of knowledge and perceived enclosures of imagination. Musicians of the epistemic

formation do not merely (and immediately, unproblematically) experience their lives as

constitutively embedded in these manifold relations; they experience and understand this

embeddedness as neglected or insufficiently articulated in dominant ideologies and structures of

feeling. As Rafael Lubner (2019) writes of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia and her collaborators,

musicians of this formation actively “engage with the various fabrics of which they are part”

(Laughter, Stutter, Break, and Blur section, para. 3).

Chino Amobi, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Moor Mother, and many other protagonists of the

epistemic formation explore Blackness and its place(s) in the world—notably also historical and

contemporary patterns of anti-Blackness. The now-inactive free jazz/noise duo Black Spirituals

did not integrate lyrics into its music but signified and enacted Blackness in such album titles as

Black Tape (2016) and Black Access/Black Axes (2018). According to writer Zoé Samudzi’s

(2018) release notes for Black Access/Black Axes,

the Black Spirituals evoke and produce a Black spirituality in the sonorous tradition of Black flight calling us to follow the North Star and any and all other pathways to freedom. It’s the choreographed and synergistic spontaneity and improvisation with clear inspirations drawn from jazz traditions, indigenous African drumming, and anti/de-colonial musico-theological and ritualistic traditions across the Afro diaspora; and it’s an expression that constitutes the kind of musical fugitivity most organically and innately produced by Black Americans in our “post-emancipation” captive state. … The Black Spirituals, like their musical forebearers, are fugitive planners enacting, per Harney & Moten, “ruptural and enraptured” soundscapes and offering a space of refuge within which enlightenment can be understood and, thus, enacted. (paras. 2–3)

Here, and in their own statements (Chuter, 2015), Black Spirituals connect their collective-

improvisational practice to politically charged theorizations of Blackness that understand it as

characterized by an irreducible sociality and as generative of various oppositional and/or

alternative expressions. Blackness here is articulated as lines of flight leading away from, or as

war machines directed against, a majoritarian settler-colonialist state with its coercive and

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definitional power. As free improvisers, Black Spirituals work with an articulation of the social

and the sensorial (Moten, 2003) comparable to that of free folk; but this articulation is more

reflexive in its constitution than free folk’s tends to be, with an aim towards understanding and

experiencing Blackness (its conditions, its potentials) differently. Black Spirituals member

Marshall Trammell (as cited in Chuter, 2015) says of a tape of Aboriginal music from Australia

heard in an ethnomusicology course:

The vernacular in that duo is masterful and super heavy. The pronouncement of their sense of Being in/for the World and a resounding connectivity of their sense of place in the Universe remains undeniable to my ears. These are elements that are key to why I remain an Improvisor and I have keen interest in preserving relationships with Improvisors in dynamic and strategic formations. (para. 12)

Improvisation here serves a rich connection to the surrounding world, understood beyond

conventional human interactions. Black Spirituals explicitly and reflexively articulate

experimental-musical practice to a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging can be

understood in terms of identity, but identity itself must not be separated from the surrounding

world in its multiplicity and vastness.

Elysia Crampton Chuquimia’s work similarly explores the relationship between identity

and the world, or different ways of being-in-the-world. Crampton Chuquimia (as cited in

Wharton, 2016) shares with many of her peers a distrust of categorizations, binaries, and violent

boundaries: “There is always something that resists, that eludes; this is queerness’s domain”

(para. 13). Her work explores such ontologically grounded resistance—the space-times between

that favor transformation, as in the case of the Aymaran taypi:

I’ve come to understand taypi as a sort of juncture where the space-times of the here and now and the unknown or de-known co-mingle – where, for example, the world of outside and the world of inside are woven together …. It seems to be about those contrasts remaining, failing to disappear at such an intense level of intimacy, and generating energy from their contradiction, their resistance to fully merge, with fields of possibility radiating from their being together. (Crampton Chuquimia, as cited in Gooder, 2018, para. 2)

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Crampton Chuquimia (as cited in Barbara, 2018) understands her work “as a project of Aymara

survival and resistance” (para. 1). Despite this appeal to her heritage, this resistance itself is not

defined by any singular identity, as this heritage itself already is manifold and must be

understood well beyond any traditionally defined space and linear time. Speaking of Severo, her

explicitly collaborative style, Crampton Chuquimia (as cited in Boucherat, 2016) says:

The “we” is our existence as non-sovereign, non-individuated things, for example our family, friends and ancestors, but also the non-human family that sustain us on this earth, such as fungi, biota and other organisms that live within and around what we define as “I.” One should remember here that, historically speaking, the non-human encompasses human life as well, concerning those ancestors and family members that weren’t and still aren’t counted as human within our colonial society, per sovereignty’s horizon line. (para. 10)

There is an explicitly political—anti-colonial—bent to Crampton Chuquimia’s appeal to

embeddedness and kinship beyond the human, playing out in her exploration of the actualization

of her own (Aymara, trans) identity, but not reducible to it. Like many of her peers, and many of

the theorists they engage with, Crampton Chuquimia aims to explore worlds of difference against

and beyond the power relations that violently stratify this difference through the imposition of

clearly defined, hierarchically differentiated identities. Crampton Chuquimia’s work in that sense

parallels (and actively engages with) similar tendencies affiliated with “new materialism” and the

“ontological turn”—especially those that foreground recent theory’s similarities to and erasure of

indigenous knowledges.

Throughout the epistemic formation, identity is indeed often articulated to (questions of)

ontology. Asked about the apparent death of Amobi’s own alter-ego at the start of his novel

Eroica (2019), Amobi (as cited in Vorisek, 2020) states that the book’s introduction “reveals a

self-death of a certain way of being, hence the title ‘Onticide’” (p. 4):

[Jan Vorisek:] Onticide is a term derived from the afro-pessimist discussion on the ontological death of black subjectivity.

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[Chino Amobi:] With regards to Onticide, via Calvin Warren, it is a mode of understanding I translate that is not of this world. Beyond time and space. A state of being that is in this world but cannot exist in this world and is not of it, a state with no home in this world. (Vorisek, 2020, pp. 4–5)

The question of being-in-the-world thus becomes a dynamic tool for an exploration of power

relations, of modes of oppression and exclusion. Amobi and his peers identify the persistence of

racist violence and colonial structures as a primary, perhaps the primary, political and cultural

issue shaping their lives; the specificity of the epistemic formation’s response to these lies in the

artists’ articulation of their aesthetic work to a series of tools derived from specific formations of

knowledge. This response to racism and other modes of violence thus simultaneously—crucially

but less obviously—also serves as a negotiation of crises of knowledge, with imagination and

experimentation being re-articulated through and to an affective investment in knowledge.

Although it might be tempting to theorize the epistemic formation’s strong investment in

matters of identity as a straightforward expression of a generalization of identity as culture

(Grossberg, 2018b), it is important to note that the epistemic formation consistently challenges,

problematizes, even subverts its own articulations of identity. Musicians of the epistemic

formation understand identity in its relations to other, even non-human modes of being-in-the-

world; and they subvert stable notions of identity through the sheer playfulness with which they

explore identity. Another example is Meemo Comma’s Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter² (2021),

on which Lara Rix-Martin “takes Kabbalistic text and Jewish prayer and guides them through

twinkling ambient synths, breakbeats and cranking industrial noise, full of strange wonder and

drama” (Meemo Comma, 2021, para. 1)—engaging with her Jewish identity by articulating some

of its components to the audiovisual splendor of 1990s anime. Meanwhile, electronic musician

Fatima Al Qadiri’s EP Shaneera (2017) “combines Khaleeji (Arab Gulf), Western drum kits and

Arabesque melodies” (Al Qadiri, 2017, para. 2) into “a love letter to evil and benevolent queens

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around the world” (para. 3): The titular word “refers to a gender-defying persona (or temporary

state or action), of being an evil queen” (para. 1). Her latest release at the time of writing,

Medieval Femme (2021), is “inspired by the classical poems of Arab women” and “invokes a

simulated daydream through the metaphor of an Islamic garden, at the border between

depression and desire, where the present temporarily dissolves, leaving only past and future” (Al

Qadiri, 2021, para. 1). Through the title’s anachronism and scattered vocals, Medieval Femme’s

re-articulation of time becomes a negotiation and complication of identity. In these examples, as

in Crampton’s re-articulation of Aymara cosmology and Amobi’s engagement with Black

Studies, identity is not fixed but becomes a realm of invention and exploration, in turn generating

unexpected becomings.

Finally, I briefly want to point towards an investigation of human being-in-the-world that

is comparatively disinvested from matters of identity, yet connects with the epistemological and

ontological concerns of the above examples. Most of Holly Herndon’s work explores human-

technology relations; rather than prioritizing identity, she primarily interrogates what defines

“the human” in its world—especially in relation to sets of technologies often portrayed as

separate from, and even in binary opposition to, notions of humanity. Throughout, Donna

Haraway’s cyborg feminism and work on kinship are among Herndon’s key inspirations for a

materialist investigation of human embeddedness and embodiedness in larger sets of relations

(Braidotti, 2011b). Platform (2015), as mentioned above, investigates a specific mode of

contemporary capitalism and, crucially, people’s relationship to and dependence on social media.

On “Chorus,” the sounds of Herndon’s daily browsing are themselves highlighted as a genuine

part of Herndon’s everyday lifeworld and as a problematic artifact of surveillance technologies

from which many people’s everyday cannot be separated. In the song’s video, Akihiko

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Taniguchi’s 3D renderings of people’s work desks make laptops and other devices and objects

curiously fleshy, thereby emphasizing their materiality and messiness in contrast to more sterile

articulations of technology as immaterial (Minsker, 2014). Technology, then, is shown in its

embeddedness in a human world, just as humans are embedded in a rich world that also involves

technological infrastructures. Humans always exist (and are defined) in relation to the

environments that they co-constitute and that co-constitute them.

Temporality, history, ancestry, futurity

The epistemic formation is characterized by different articulations of temporality. While

the formation’s stylistic diversity means that free folk’s temporalities (the drone’s cosmic

temporality, the improvisational investment in intensity and possibility) can be encountered here

too, I primarily want to focus on one heterogeneous set of articulations—connected especially to

Afrofuturist art and theory—that is more specific to the epistemic formation. It connects past,

present, and future in a nonlinear manner, experimentally mapping historical and apocalyptic

horrors to provide insight into existing power relations while prying them open to envision

alternatives, or at least ways out. I also want to emphasize some musicians’ investment in (not

necessarily musical) ancestry as part of ethically and/or politically inflected artistic expressions,

a tendency that matches the formation’s overall approach to history—an approach that is quite

unlikely to construct clear-cut musical canons. Even where it does not draw on Afrofuturist and

related work, the epistemic formation often aims at alternate, perhaps more just, inclusive, or

interesting futures and/or new, experimental engagements with the present.

Black Quantum Futurism, Camae Ayewa’s multi-modal duo with Rasheedah Phillips,

works with an alternative conceptualization of time that also shapes Ayewa’s work as Moor

Mother as well as her various collaborations with other artists:

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Western history is predicated on the idea of linear time – strung beads of causality and an arrow that always points forward. According to Black Quantum Futurism, this view of time is oppressive and limiting. Instead, the collective offers a perspective that allows for different times and places to be experienced as interrelated, in a manner that points beyond linear storytelling, thus revealing new and unheard histories. (Pothast, 2019, p. 37)

Ayewa herself conducts research in different places she visits on tour, at times integrating

knowledge of any given place’s history and resultant power structures into her performances

there, alongside more personal experiences (Pothast, 2019). Her explorations are multi-

directional—temporally as well as spatially, articulating events in different times and spaces and

at different scales (from personal to geopolitical) to each other. Any given song may reference

recent instances of police brutality, biblical stories, African origins, the history of slavery, post-

civil war legislation, and more. John Morrison (2019) writes that “time happens in a circle and

Moor Mother is everywhere to bear witness and speak on all that she sees” (p. 49).

In John Akomfrah’s documentary/science-fiction film hybrid The Last Angel of History

(1996), a time-traveler known only as the “Data Thief” explores the history of Afrofuturism, and

Afrofuturist music in particular. With writer Kodwo Eshun and other key interviewees, the film

argues that, in Black people’s lives, social reality and science fiction cannot be neatly

distinguished. Notable science-fiction tropes such as mass displacement, genetic transformation,

alienation and oppression all play constitutive roles in the history of the African diaspora; and

Afrofuturist musicians (George Clinton, Sun Ra, Lee Perry, Derrick May, Goldie…) all explore

cutting-edge technology as they draw lines of flight towards the future, and into outer space. In

noted time-traveler Ayewa’s words: “We’ve always been doing these things that some people

may deem future …. It’s just like, no, this is reality” (as cited in Pothast, 2019, p. 41).

In his portrait of “the voices disrupting white supremacy through sound,” notably

including NON Worldwide, Adam Harper (2015) applies the lessons of Akomfrah’s film to

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Chino Amobi’s work in particular: “With its robotic voices, lasers, mechanized noises and

general tumult, the music of Chino Amobi, formerly known as Diamond Black Hearted Boy, can

be heard as a kind of auditory science fiction” (para. 8). Indeed, on Amobi’s Paradiso, many of

these elements appear to be of the future. Simultaneously, elements from uncountable musical

styles of the 20th and early 21st century collide, not least due to the sheer multiplicity of

collaborators joining Amobi; a recurring jingle—“Welcome to Paradiso! You’re now listening to

NON Worldwide Radio with Chino Amobi!” (Amobi, 2017)—frames the lengthy album in terms

of a key medium of the 20th century; and on several tracks, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia reads

from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea” (1845). Paradiso is not just of the future;

what Harper calls its “general tumult” stretches across different times.

In light of this “general tumult” in particular, it is worth taking the title of Akomfrah’s

(1996) film into consideration. The film’s “last angel of history” is the Data Thief, who travels

through time but can never quite settle in any given historical moment. Walter Benjamin

(1955/1968) famously writes of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus:

[The angel of history’s] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (pp. 257–258)

Amobi and Ayewa, too, are dealing with “wreckage upon wreckage.” They too want to engage

with this suffering—through music, but also through other art forms, and through political

engagement. In their music, they end up embracing the wreckage, facing not just the past, but

instead diverting it into different temporal directions while letting it serve as a guide. Past,

present, and future in all their horror, but also in all their contingency, are re-articulated and

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directed against neat, linear history in order to unveil and intervene in the destruction wrought by

Euromodern progress.

Jon Davies (2019), himself a frequent collaborator of DeForrest Brown, Jr. under the

name Kepla, draws on Eshun’s ideas when he claims that the dark Afrofuturism of Prison

Religion (a Richmond, Virginia-based noise/rap hybrid duo affiliated with Chino Amobi) “also

functions as a form of protection against a world gone dangerously insane.” According to

Davies, Prison Religion’s album Beachhead (2019)

launches them back into space. It’s as though they looked at their hometown and decided that being swallowed up by the void might be a safer bet. … With Beachhead Prison Religion communicate a nightmarish vision of broad scope, which in turn puts their voices at the mercy of each unfolding environment. The two protagonists might not have liked Earth, but space doesn’t even afford them a compass. (p. 49)

Davies likens Prison Religion to such contemporaries as Amobi, Rabit, Swan Meat,

SCRAAATCH, Black Quantum Futurism, and Dreamcrusher:

In spite of their differing approaches to production and performance, these artists share similar aims, using music as a narrative platform to navigate their politics while forging unspoken bonds between Afrofuturism and a more pessimistic form of psychedelia. Amid the alienating social atmosphere it has become necessary to ask, “What is reality, and who is it really for?” (p. 49)

Accordingly, an Afrofuturist negotiation of (broken) time is of key relevance in large parts of the

epistemic formation, supporting its critical investigation of its lifeworld. Many artists of this

formation thus respond both to a contemporary structure of feeling of temporal alienation and to

longer-term disinvestments of Afro-diasporic temporalities—exclusions from or expropriations

of the present (Sharma, 2014), erasures of pasts, denials of futures.

The dark Afrofuturism of the epistemic formation does not necessarily resolve these

modes of temporal alienation. Indeed, for Eshun (2003), “Afrofuturism’s specificity lies in

assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access

triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations” (p. 298).

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However, it does deconstruct dominant temporalities, sometimes even collapsing diverse

temporalities into hallucinatory planes of contingency. In Eshun’s words:

By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates. (p. 297)

These various techniques thus leave openings for the re-articulation of different futures:

imaginaries fed by distinct contemporary knowledges, always oriented towards political or

ethical change.

As Davies’s list already implies, Afrofuturist lineages often inspire the work of non-

Black artists of the epistemic formation as well. In 2016, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia presented

a multi-media performance titled Dissolution of the Sovereign, inspired by the life of indigenous

revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, dismembered by her captors:

After [Crampton Chuquimia] nods to the Sisa story, horrifying images of bruised and battered brown bodies flash on the screen, as do portraits of colonial figures (such as our own founding fathers), and fires, burning brightly. … At one point in the set, she imagines a future in which the heat death of the earth brings about the end of the prison system, and parts of Sisa’s body are found and reanimated by a sentient AI. A world of possibility reopens. The story she tells is one of horror, then more horror, then ecological catastrophe, then something small and precious, something that always made Crampton’s work so powerful: the soft light of optimism, rising out of ash and chaos. (Joyce, 2016, paras. 15–16)

In Dissolution of the Sovereign, Crampton Chuquimia piles up disturbing, violent imagery and

articulates different historical moments and musical styles to each other. The piece

simultaneously denies linear history—“coming from an Aymara perspective, the language

doesn’t even embody that linear perspective of time” (Crampton Chuquimia, as cited in Joyce,

2016, para. 9)—and opens up to one imaginary future that contains violence and destruction, but

also glimpses of hope: the hope generated, perhaps, by an embrace of contingency (also see

Lubner, 2019). Like Moor Mother, Crampton Chuquimia collapses different temporalities into

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each other while connecting to certain ancestors, or ancestries. Thereby, she parallels a move

encountered in, or in response to, certain “new materialisms” or the “ontological turn”: the

foregrounding and/or re-articulation of specific, historically marginalized, exploited, or

subjugated non-Western ontologies and epistemologies. Through this reconnection to and re-

articulation of specific knowledges, these artists are able to imagine possible and potential

futures that move away from perceived current impasses and power relations without arriving at

a naive utopia, simultaneously challenging temporal alienation in admittedly risky (indeed,

experimental) ways. As in Moor Mother’s work, and as in Amobi’s ominously futuristic

Paradiso, the future’s contingency is conditioned by past and present horrors; the recognition of

and engagement with this contingency does not guarantee the abolition of horrors in their

entirety. Tellingly, paralleling the Afrofuturist moves of her peers, Crampton Chuquimia (as

cited in Wharton, 2016) considers Dissolution of the Sovereign her “contribution to the

Aymara/Andina Futurist legacy” (para. 29).

Elsewhere in the formation, articulations of futurity are sometimes more clearly defined

in their directionality, as contingent futures are re-articulated to a contingent present. Through

engagement with a variety of theorists, Holly Herndon’s work attempts to intervene in present

power relations. With Reza Negarestani, Herndon understands AI as part of a larger-scale,

transhistorical, “great collective project” (Herndon, as cited in Blanning, 2019, para. 11) of

human intelligence. With N. Katherine Hayles, Herndon understands machine-learning as part of

a larger environment of cognitive systems—a spectrum from cognitions to consciousnesses

(Friedlander, 2019). Finally, with Haraway, Herndon invests in a sense of kinship beyond the

human (Claymore, 2019). Lina Džuverović (2016) correctly points out Herndon’s affinity with

accelerationist ideas of technologies’ mobilization for the creation of different (non-capitalist)

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futures. Still, Herndon considers her work an explicit response to present conditions, despite its

discursive alignment with notions of futurity (Bulut, 2019). In interviews promoting the release

of Proto (e.g., Claymore, 2019), Herndon invokes Simon Reynolds’s notion of “retromania” to

criticize a perceived trend towards the endless rehashing of past tropes. Her position appears

modernist (Herndon, n.d.), as she wants music to be appropriate to the affordances and

problematics of its time. Herndon emphasizes that machine-learning in musical contexts often

serves the replication of a given composer’s style, resulting in the potential creation of “new”

music from long-gone musicians, from Bach to Tupac (Cills, 2019; Claymore, 2019). Not only

does this, as Herndon points out, open up issues of appropriation and attribution that reveal the

highly problematic power relations shaping the cultural industries; it also privileges an endless

rehashing of the old at the expense of the new. Spawn, on the other hand, was therefore raised as

an ensemble member, instead of a stylistically predictable composer. Herndon is not dismissive

of past artistry, and her interests lie not just in newness for the sake of newness. Instead, she

regularly points out the relevance of contingency—of intervening to change course (e.g., in the

aforementioned negotiation of protocols) while it is still possible.

The future, then, is re-articulated to the present through an awareness of contingency:

The present is not simply given but has been constructed by specific forces out of a specific past.

This contingent transformation of the past into the present offers hope and opportunities for

active work towards a different future. I want to suggest that Herndon’s sober-rigorous

experimentation is aligned with Rosi Braidotti’s (2011a, 2011b) experimental mapping of

embedded-embodied subjectivities that are adequate to the demands of their specific contexts,

which, like Herndon’s work, draws inspiration from Donna Haraway. This is a critical-creative

project that affirms the world yet attempts to access its realm of potential for the purpose of

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transformation. As an experimental project, this search for appropriate figurations—for instance

in the case of Herndon and Dryhurst’s Spawn—bears a potential for failure(s), but it also

foregrounds the affective charge of creative work that articulates specific knowledges,

experimental imaginaries, and political interventions. Herndon critically-creatively (Braidotti,

2011b) invests in the present for the sake of alternative, and perhaps better, futures. The “New

Ways to Love” Herndon seeks require an adequate understanding of present conditions. Herndon

perhaps appears more optimistic than many other protagonists of the epistemic formation,

notably those who engage explicitly with the persistence of racist violence. DeForrest Brown, Jr.

(2015) writes of the techno-pragmatic collective experimentation of Herndon’s Platform:

I have many reservations about Herndon’s hopeful approach, which could be ungenerously characterized as “teamwork as panacea for the total wreckage of humanity inflicted upon itself and its environment.” This kind of platform is simply not available to everyone; Herndon and her cohort have enough capital to perform these collaborative acts and to create the space for an imagined future. All the same, I suppose that that is neither here nor there given that the effort is incredible and legitimate, and not completely founded on starry-eyed visions. Herndon and her record are practical and functional. Platform is automatic, investigative and hypertextual: boundless. (para. 10)

The epistemic formation does not have a unified approach to matters of temporality, and to its

politics—what Eshun (2003) calls the “chronopolitical”—but shares an investment in

experimental practices that embrace futurity (and future’s contingent relation to past and present)

as a realm of potential and intervention that is best approached boldly—critically and creatively.

Enunciative assemblages of the epistemic formation

The epistemic formation primarily articulates its sensibility across three larger

enunciative assemblages. One is rhizomatic—ever-shifting, dynamic, highly complex, a genuine

multiplicity perhaps aligned with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) “presignifying”

assemblage. Another one is radicular—fractured and fracturing, fragmented and fragmenting,

always deconstructing (and haunted by) unities and binaries. The third is itself a hybrid

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formation with a predominantly, but not exclusively, representational character—often leaving

intact the relationship between signifier and signified, regularly reterritorializing the formation’s

most alien sprawl and most rigorous deconstruction in an authoritative, definitional way, but also

circulating various other modes of conceptualization, translation, signification, and more. These

assemblages are articulated in a multitude of ways, resulting in diverse hybrid assemblages, any

of which may apply more to some artists and styles than others. The formation’s very reflexivity

prohibits the activation of any “pure” assemblages, whatever these would entail. An artist’s

statement reterritorializes a sprawling, rhizomatic piece on the representational; or an album’s

representationally defined “concept” is carried away into ever so many hybrid sonic events in

which dancers do not even recognize a trace of the “concept.” A highly dynamic apparatus of

polyrhythms may appear haunted by histories of violence, when certain words are uttered or

certain sounds appear to cut its fluidity. Despite this irreducible plurality, certain assemblages

may be easier to map when listening to one artist than another; different assemblages emerge

more assertively in some parts of the formation than in others.

Semiotics of collectivity

Questions of sociality and collectivity have reappeared throughout this chapter, notably in

the actual collaborations and social-material collectivities of the epistemic formation, and in the

reflexive thematization of sociality and collectivity in the work of many of the formation’s

artists. Following on from (but always in relation to) these articulations of collectivity, I want to

suggest that certain semiotics of collectivity are active throughout much (though not necessarily

dominant in all) of the formation’s affective-social landscape; and I want to suggest that these

offer a productive entry point for mapping this landscape, as long as these semiotics of

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collectivity are understood in their hybridity and multiplicity, irreducible to any single

assemblage of enunciation.

Experimental-electronic musician Klein integrates a multitude of voices (everyday or

otherwise) into her miniature-like sound pieces, a practice that has been interpreted as evoking

ever so many shades of (Black) collective experience and sociality:

Most of the tracks [on Klein’s cc, 2018] play with the idea of large groups of people, full of choruses and slicing and stepping collective horror (as in the roars of “Stop”) or witness (the babble of hysterical, pitch-sped samples on “Explay” could be a gossiping, shit-talking crowd, as she sings about a dickhead ex and says, “I don’t give a damn, I just want my mum”). (Bick, 2018, 62)

Here, it is not a singular voice that is centered, even though Klein primarily works as a “solo”

artist on her releases under this name. Instead, this music runs on a polyvocality and

heterogeneity resembling that of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) presignifying assemblage,

where signification is merely one mode of sign behavior among many others, and a multiplicity

of voices does not reterritorialize on a set of distinct individual subjects. Even beyond the voice,

Klein’s music involves a wide variety of everyday, often non-musical sounds—and everyday

mediations of sound, as in undefined street sounds.

Klein’s work with its loops, collages and cut-ups, strange voices, and sense of eeriness

can be instructively compared to and contrasted with industrial project Nurse With Wound. This

comparison is far from arbitrary; note, for instance, Jennifer Lucy Allan’s (2020) review of

Klein’s Frozen (2020): “It’s as if Dean Blunt [an artist-trickster of the epistemic formation] made

a Nurse With Wound album” (para. 16). However, the comparison is also instructive in that it

can illustrate certain distinctions between respective enunciative assemblages crucial to the

epistemic and industrial formations. Take, for instance, Nurse With Wound’s “Fashioned to a

Device Behind a Tree” (1982) and Klein’s “apologise” (2018).

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Both tracks prominently feature loops that involve or evoke people crying. On

“Fashioned,” once a high-pitched electronic tone has subsided, one can hear the tearful-sounding

voice of a man, treated with reverb, desperately exclaiming variations on a set of German

phrases (Nurse With Wound, 1982/2001): “Komm zu mir, mein Täubchen. Ich hab dich doch

lieb.” (“Come to me, my little darling. I do love you.”) A small child’s voice responds clearly:

“Nein, Papa. Ich will nicht, Papa.” (No, dad. I don’t want to, dad.”) Simultaneously, one can

hear the sound of a child crying (again, treated with reverb). Although the crying child may be

presumed to be the same as the speaking child, these two loops operate at different intervals,

overlap with each other, and overlap with the father’s voice—which itself is doubled, cut-up, and

made to overlap with itself. Throughout the song, another set of uncanny electronic drones

slowly builds in intensity and finally overtakes the voices. The voices themselves are strangely

stilted and sound distant from each other. Although one responds to the other, it is hard to

imagine them in the same room. “Fashioned” can have a decidedly disturbing impact on the

listener, comparable perhaps to a film or, crucially, to a nightmare. Nurse With Wound’s

collages juxtapose and unleash a rich variety of sounds, but the dark edges and uncanny

distancing mechanisms of Steven Stapleton’s productions always suggest a reterritorialization on

an individual subconscious—a nightmare, trauma, madness.

Whereas “Fashioned” starts out with a disturbing, electronic drone and keeps its voices

spatially distant or oddly isolated in their emotional intensity, Klein’s “apologise” plunges the

listener right into messy emotionality. Throughout the piece, what sounds like the breath of a

crying person is looped constantly, joined by various other loops of cut-up crying or, for

instance, of a voice saying “sorry” (Klein, 2018). As in Nurse With Wound’s piece, electronics

ultimately appear to take over (here also involving beats, whereas “Fashioned” remained

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beatless), but only after the crying sounds have been given their due, having taken up most of the

song’s imagined space for its first few minutes. The song heightens the materiality of crying:

snot, tears, and air. It thereby articulates a space that feels more intimate, even oddly “realistic”

than the surreal void in which the disturbing father-daughter conversation of “Fashioned”

circulates. Klein’s key source on “apologise” is a popular film:

The harrowing “apologise” samples Heather Donahue’s snot-flecked apology monologue from The Blair Witch Project, her jerky, tear-laden breath forming a scratchy rhythmic loop that sits under torturous repetitions of Donahue’s mea culpa and builds to a howling climax of gasps and machine rhythms. Like the iconic scene from which the sample is taken, the effect is devastating, an overspill of unadulterated emotion that transcends its origins as a piece of consumable culture. (Cardew, 2018, para. 2)

Nurse With Wound’s surrealist fetishization of interiority makes “Fashioned” a striking

horrorscape, the paranoid visions of a dreamer. “apologise,” on the other hand, articulates

material immersion and emotional intimacy. Nurse With Wound’s father and daughter talk past

each other, whatever their exact relationship; Klein’s cut-up Heather Donahue performance

sounds like it takes place in a room with people, even in close proximity to other people. Klein’s

music has an irreducibly and irreplaceably social dimension, which is denied by Nurse With

Wound’s psychological realm—its visionary-radicular assemblage always pointing towards the

dispersed-distorted individual. Klein articulates her collages across an assemblage of enunciation

that affirms its own collectivity.

Similarly, on releases by Speaker Music and Moor Mother, there is a richness of

references, stylistic elements, and non-musical sounds that suggests an uncontainable sociality; a

rhizomatic, sprawling set of shifting relations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Speaker Music’s

DeForrest Brown, Jr. sends scattered-scattering beats, partially indiscernible vocals, and other

elements to roam across each other. None of these elements fully dominate the other, be it on

such long-form pieces as Of Desire, Longing (2019) and Processing Intimacy (2020c) or on the

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more club-oriented, song-length assemblages of Percussive Therapy (2020b). Here, Brown

articulates what Kodwo Eshun (1999) calls a “PolyRhythmengine,” distributing multiple

interrelated rhythms at different scales across nonlinear pieces long and short, drawing melodic

and linguistic elements into highly dynamic plateaus. Absent Personae (2017) and The Wages of

Being Black Is Death (2018), Brown’s collaborations with British producer Kepla (Jon Davies),

give more space to Brown’s voice, yet still don’t quite let his highly deliberate formulations on

Black bodies’ contemporary exploitation attain full clarity of transmission. Instead, they barely

stand out from a soundscape of everyday sounds, beats, other synthetic noises, and more,

suggesting a larger world of which Brown’s voice is merely one part, even as it utters lyrics

shining a light on that world’s unbearable conditions.

On Moor Mother albums such as Fetish Bones (2016) and Analog Fluids of Sonic Black

Holes (2019), Camae Ayewa’s voice, declaiming her incendiary poetry, certainly takes center-

stage. However, although Ayewa’s delivery is authoritative, and although the mix grants her

voice more clarity than one often finds in this formation’s musics, her lyrics themselves are

hallucinatory or visionary, making transversal connections across space and (as elaborated in the

section on temporality) time, invoking many different characters, including historical figures,

who crowd Ayewa’s often-short songs. Her voice stands out from yet adds to a soundscape that

suggests a hybrid of many different styles, from hip-hop to industrial and noise. If Ayewa is

recognizable as one person throughout these songs, then she is a shape-shifting person—a

dispersed, radicular presence moving across and through a rhizomatic, diffusely collective

sprawl, connecting to and disconnecting from it at different moments on any given recording.

A centering of sociality and multiplicity is far from new in the history of Black musics

and their theorization (Gilroy, 1993; Moten, 2003). The epistemic formation’s articulation of

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sociality in its musics tends to be particularly reflexive, building both on the sociality of Black

musics themselves and on their scholarly theorization in recent decades. However, it would be

simplistic to suggest that the rhizomatic assemblage active in the epistemic formation is fully

spawned by this reflexivity—a model that would arguably deny that very rhizomatic character.

The formation does not merely re-theorize collectivity in the face of crises of knowledge;

regardless of the degree of reflexivity apparent in any artist’s work, the formation as a larger-

scale collective assemblage of enunciation draws on and re-articulates richly experimental modes

of collective imagination and expression that have historically been marginalized. These modes

are experienced as carrying a resistant charge. They are not merely conceptualized as critiques of

contemporary conditions, but they are invested in as powerful antidotes to affect’s

“quotidienization” (Grossberg, 2010b, p. 225) and to the apparent draining of imagination

through habit.

Articulating rhizomes and radicles

The epistemic formation’s rhizomatic dimension at times does resemble free folk in its

rich articulation of the social and the sensorial and in its opening to cosmic time-spaces. There

are multiple realms of overlap and exchange, as well as certain shared investments in

experimental-musical traditions (notably various lineages of experimental jazz). Even where

there are particularly significant musical differences, one may detect similarities between the

respective sensibilities of the two formations. For instance, NON Worldwide co-founder Nkisi’s

7 Directions (2019) operates yet another PolyRhythmengine, articulating techno to Congolese

percussion lineages, drawing on Bantu cosmology (Lynch, 2019; UIQ, n.d.). It certainly does not

sound like most free folk, but it spirals outwards into “cosmic” virtual realms in ways that

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resemble free folk’s most ecstatic moments—or, for that matter, industrial’s most psychedelic

visionaries, such as Cyclobe.

However, quite often, the epistemic formation is much happier than free folk to cut into,

dismantle, disturb, or break up any given discursive (especially, but not only, musical)

assemblage. Much of the music of Chino Amobi, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Rabit, and others

does not just employ sounds that signify such violent irruptions (e.g., breaking glass, explosions,

etc.), but also actively cuts up song structures, at times arriving at a collage-like effect. That said,

Amobi and Crampton Chuquimia’s earlier work (as Diamond Black Hearted Boy and E+E,

respectively) was perhaps more constitutively collage-like, leading to Adam Harper’s (2014)

introduction of the term “epic collage,” a style defined by its “divine surrealism.” Still, Amobi

and Crampton Chuquimia’s newer compositions themselves often appear like a rich but fractured

patchwork. Holly Herndon samples sounds (voices, web browsing artefacts…), takes them apart,

and reassembles them into odd not-quite-song structures, while also explicitly directing them

against problematic human-technology dichotomies. Her collaborators in Amnesia Scanner take

apart and reassemble particularly brutal modes of dance music. Meanwhile, “Lee Gamble’s 2012

debut for PAN, Diversions 1994-96, consisted of memory mirages of jungle raves in the English

Midlands—not a period-precise retro recreation, but more like a ritual conjuring of the intensities

he experienced during his misspent teenage years” (Reynolds, 2019, para. 8), suggesting a

“deconstructed club music” haunted by its stylistic predecessors. In all of these musics of the

epistemic formation, one can see a radicular assemblage at play. Its cuts, deconstructions, and

fragmentations support a consistent denial of various stylistic, generic, and ideological unities

and binaries, but also invite their ghosts back in.

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Still, it is rare to encounter “pure” rhizomes and radicles in the epistemic formation.

These assemblages tend to be intertwined, at different moments shaping each other’s

potentialities and effectivities in different ways. They articulate different shades of sociality—

some more sprawling, some more ruptured, some more rapturous: In the words of Harney and

Moten (2013), as applied by Samudzi to the music of Black Spirituals, they often are both

“ruptural and enraptured.” Elysia Crampton Chuquimia and Chino Amobi like to cut, distort, and

fragment sounds, song structures, and other elements; but unlike, for instance, Nurse With

Wound’s surrealist-industrial reterritorialization on the fragmented and contradictory individual

mind, their music more easily enables fragments to spiral outwards, to reconnect elsewhere, to

sprawl into sonic-material-social becomings. Many of these musics—all these different

articulations of the rhizomatic and the radicular—share a certain tendency towards the

disorienting, towards sensory and discursive overload, towards hard-to-grasp yet very material

interminglings, interweavings, and contradictions. Lubner (2019) writes of Crampton

Chuquimia, Amobi, and Why Be’s collaboration “Dummy Track” (2016) and the “vexed relation

to the individual” it expresses: “This sonic confusion — between laughter and music, music and

laughter — creates an arena within which the singular is made untenable and unsound”

(Laughter, Stutter, Break, and Blur section, para. 4). Meanwhile, Nick James Scavo (2017)

claims that

there is an expansive, loose association of international producers who know full well the allure of Machinic Eros, as Felix [sic] Guattari calls it, “the desire to be in the thick of things,”56 be it culture, technology, symbols — the whole range of messy systems humans attempt to wrangle. These artists often use a cinematic symbology and all of its tropic tendencies to arrive at a statement of personal vision, interpolating trending audio into prodigious wills to power, wills to become, or … the will to un-become in an audible act that reflexively acknowledges a fragile humanity at the center of this discourse’s high-fidelity. (para. 4)

56 This definition appears in Guattari’s essays on Japan (Guattari, 2015, p. 14).

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Something like this “desire to be in the thick of things” is articulated in a variety of ways by

artists of the epistemic formation—pulled in different directions by rhizomatic and radicular

assemblages. Speaker Music’s PolyRhythmengines draw on and rearrange the techno-cultural

thick of things; Klein’s loop collages traverse a social-material thick of things while extracting

and re-proliferating eerie and intimate clusters of voices. If these musics are “cosmic,” they are

so on account of their radically open and dynamic immersion in the thick of things, in the

“ecstasy of complexity” (Gilbert, 2004, p. 135), not in the sense of a cosmos of flat and

undifferentiated relationality.

On the other hand, Holly Herndon, Lee Gamble, and other artists’ deconstructions of

aesthetic and social unities and binaries direct apparently human and inhuman elements against

each other and against unities that are dissolved again and again, while simultaneously

celebrating flesh, the artificial, and their indivisibility. In Herndon’s case, the “fragile humanity

at the center of this discourse’s high-fidelity” regularly opens up not necessarily to the teeming

cosmos of Speaker Music or even free folk but instead cuts holes, temporary voids, into actual

reality—“using the attractive and fashionable to publicize deeply personal, spectacular visions”

(Scavo, 2015, para. 4), toying with sublime voids into which the thick of things can attempt to

crawl. The musics of Chino Amobi and Moor Mother, meanwhile, never quite allow for a full

dominance of either the rhizomatic or the radicular. Certainly, they perform over and over again

the radicular hermeneutic that Fred Moten (2003) identifies in Black experimentalism,

articulating “wholes” that are as rich as they appear to be always already cut, wounded, haunted

by histories of racist violence, while in turn cutting into any Euromodern unity and stability.

Still, in their very richness, their musics regularly connect to sprawling cosmoi irreducible to an

ever-present dissolved unity or haunting. They suggest perhaps that no cosmic sprawl is ever

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alone in actual and virtual reality; and that no haunting, no wound is ever finite and definite.

From cuts, new sprawl or new vistas may emerge:

When you listen to [composer Arvo Pärt’s] music, you hear two distinct voices, one voice that is anxious and in despair/bondage. Tortured, poor, blind, violent, abject, and impoverished. Then you will hear another voice, a voice that is hopeful, filled with grace, mercy, and at peace with everything that has and will ever be, dancing in this light, and dancing in this darkness. People have told me that they consider my music dark, but for me the music is always celebrating a light of hope and redemption within the darkness. The catharsis is in the creative act and the refusal to stop creating. (Chino Amobi, as cited in Vorisek, 2020, p. 3)

The phrase “the thick of things” carries connotations of the material. No musics of the epistemic

formation ever deny that materiality and corporeality, regardless of claims that they are directed

at the “head” or “mind.” The formation’s hybrid rhizomatic and radicular assemblages all

process and re-articulate certain a-semiotic encodings that act on the formation’s machinic

assemblage, from bass’s contingent but historically grown impact on dancers to the shrillness of

alarming, shattering, splintering sounds that resemble the (only apparently unmediated) impact

of actual alarm signals on human bodies—a dramatic directness also fetishized by industrial and

accounting to some degree for the epistemic formation’s fascination with industrial. The

epistemic formation therefore does not reduce music’s corporeal dimension to a mere resource

for or side effect of the discursive negotiation of identity, of the human and non-human, of

being-in-the-world. Instead, it toys with music’s expected and unexpected impacts on listeners’

bodies. This involvement in and of the corporeal is just as perceptible in a dance club as it is in

Hyberdub label owner and experimental musician Steve “Kode9” Goodman’s affect-theoretical

book Sonic Warfare (2010), which explores the considerable power of frequency in the

generation of “sonic collectivities.” Hyperdub is a key label of the epistemic formation; it

appears significant that its owner’s influential book is just as reliant on a broad selection of high

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theory as it is on the corporeality of the dance floor experience—two dimensions of the

formation’s “thick of things.”

Indeed, it is crucial to emphasize that modes of knowledge themselves are part of a lived

experience that is encoded into the formation’s musics in so many different ways. Musicians of

the epistemic formation are facing ever so many political, economic, environmental, and other

crises; and they have grown up in a world in which different knowledges and modalities of

knowledge proliferate—a world in which the supposed authorities of knowledge themselves

critically dismantle dominant truth-effects and joyfully spread uncountable (genuinely or

seemingly) new knowledges that bear, or appear to bear, political and/or ethical import. It is

therefore not surprising that these musicians would encode assemblages of theory, research, and

activism into their response to enclosures of popular imagination. “Knowledge” here fires up the

imagination, in intended and unintended ways. It is not simply a representational-institutional

master-apparatus that calls for the artistic encoding of its concepts. “Knowledge” elicits affective

investment and can serve to augment one’s creative-imaginational and bodily capacities. It can

serve as semiotic substance; it can be embedded, translated, articulated into various a-semiotic

assemblages.

Representations, concepts, titles

That said, the key presence of (activist but especially academic) knowledges and

modalities of knowledge, the sense of belonging that they offer, does condition the epistemic

formation’s strange and perhaps ironic relationship to representation. Many of the formation’s

preferred theorists—including Deleuze and Guattari—are suspicious of representation, or at least

eager to decenter it; and yet, so many of these musics themselves rely on representational

enunciation, mobilizing clearly defined (if sometimes difficult) language in order to convey

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certain ideas and concepts, however complex these may be. Additionally, as asignifying and

nonrepresentational as many musics of the epistemic formation are, many of its musicians are

more than happy to offer commentary on them in decidedly representational modes—as

exemplified by many of this chapter’s quotations. This is not to say that the formation is

necessarily haunted by representation, or that it suffers of a kind of anti-representational false

consciousness. It is to say that the formation articulates a representational-signifying assemblage

to rhizomatic, radicular and perhaps other assemblages.

This is the case not least because such an articulation affords productive engagements

with a “thick of things” perceived in terms of power (and other) relations that call for critique

and for imaginative intervention. Representation certainly has limitations: It can set borders and

impose violent (definitional) sentences; it can “translate” other modes of enunciation into

particularly static, rote expressions. Historically, many musicians and, for that matter, fans have

been suspicious of attempts to “explain” the music they make or love, preferring to foreground

(or simply accept) its affective charge and/or interpretive openness. But explanatory-interpretive

representation is not exclusively reductive. It can also draw vectors across borders; it can serve

connection and community. Musicians “explaining” their own work by drawing on existing or

newly formulated knowledges may thereby open up their work to new relationships outside a

primarily musical realm; and their “explanations” may well serve as a form of consciousness-

raising. Representation can attempt to constrain the formation’s sensory overload; but it may just

as likely be sucked into this sensory overload to become a particularly inspirational or

disconcerting part of it. In the epistemic formation, representation rarely has a totalizing function

that would trace a static “concept” or another set of ideas onto a specific set of musical practices

or specific recordings in their entirety. Instead, representational practices augment other practices

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of the formation in nonlinear ways, resulting in these practices’ mutual diversification and

transformation. Representation plays a dominant role in a hybrid assemblage in which explicit

interpretations, theorizations, concepts, significant track titles, and other related elements

operate; a hybrid assemblage that is itself articulated to the formation’s rhizomatic and radicular

assemblages in various ways.

Those instances in which an actual concept appears at the core of a specific project, and

is even represented as such—notably in the case of Holly Herndon’s albums, but also those of

Chino Amobi, Fatima Al Qadiri, and others—do not inevitably suggest semiotic closure, let

alone unification. In what remains a popular-experimental context, one cannot assume that such

projects necessarily assert a logocentric “dominance of narratives and written concepts over the

aesthetics manifested in the material and texture of sound, how sound is employed, and its

impact on listeners” (Abadir, 2020, para. 12). All of Herndon’s albums operate with a central

“concept,” setting a partially representational basis for often asignifying musics through

explanation while attempting “to embed the concept (that underlies each of my albums) into the

music-making process itself. I hope that one can audibly hear the underlying concept through the

aesthetic choices and the actual aural qualities” (Herndon, as cited in Bulut, 2019, para. 8).

Herndon explores these concepts (human-technology relations, machine-learning’s contextual

embeddedness, and more), which are not necessarily representational themselves, through

various, different expressive practices whose heterogeneity does not allow for a homological

relation to the concepts in question. Instead, a set of ideas, which itself may have partially

emerged out of musical practice, is pried open and re-articulated into different enunciative

practices. Concepts can be mobile, nomadic even (Braidotti, 2011b). Sometimes, a concept will

be expressed in fairly representational terms (and this may include press releases and

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interviews); sometimes, it may inspire a highly experimental, noisy track irreducible to

signification. At other times, it may support the composition of an unconventional piece of dance

music; often, it is worked into Herndon’s artistic process and not made explicit. Still, any such

concept can serve as an anchor for a listener’s experience, or as a translation of Herndon’s work

for specific purposes (a grant application, a short promotional blurb), or as a guide through a

complex assemblage of sounds and sights.

“A representative for NON Records” (as cited in Harper, 2015) tells Adam Harper:

“NON uses sound as a weapon to destabilize and deterritorialize our audience, and through this

process of sonic reclamation and reterritorialization, we redirect the listeners’ attention to our

message” (para. 5). Here, an experimental—perhaps radicular-deconstructionist—disarticulation

and re-articulation of perception is tied to a particularly contentious and seemingly

straightforward mode of enunciation, the “message.” The term “message” often suggests both a

traditional model of communication (a message is relayed from a sender to a receiver) and

presupposes—or desires—a relatively clear meaning. This makes the term appear antithetical to

certain experimentalist sensibilities—notably those that favor nonrepresentational and/or

asignifying aesthetics and refuse to be “reduced” to a clear meaning, an obvious takeaway or

“lesson.” A “message” is not necessarily representational. Still, it does tend towards the unifying;

the notion of a singular and, ideally, clear message stands in tension with an orientation towards

heterogeneity, or an affirmation of noise (understood as distorting or inhibiting a message’s

clarity and thus as potentially subversive—see Hegarty, 2007). The NON representative does

reproduce the binary of sender (artists/label) and receiver (listeners), but the clarity,

definitiveness, and representational character of the message is far from guaranteed. Indeed, the

relatively open character of NON and its citizenship would suggest that a straightforward sender-

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receiver relation is quite impossible even if one ignores the traditional model’s shortcomings:

NON citizens are numerous, manifold, and not exclusively musicians. They may be engaged in a

multitude of different (musical, literary, visual-artistic, conversational…) practices related to

NON.

However, the NON representative’s statement does perhaps speak to a certain self-

understanding—a certain reflexive artistic subjectivity—of artists (or, generally, NON citizens)

as active interveners. These interveners have something to contribute: To return to Foucault’s

phrase, they “always have something to do.” They must be critical-creative and highly deliberate

in doing what they have to do. Activist and scholarly knowledges thus may serve as points of

subjectification for musicians of the epistemic formation, whose comportment is shaped by their

investment in such knowledges. In turn, the dissemination of “messages,” and of such

knowledges in general, to peers and listeners further proliferates such points, potentially

generating ever so many musician-scholars and musician-activists. Far from reinscribing the

sender/receiver binary, these new instances of experimentation with, around, or beyond

“messages” are empowered by and simultaneously contribute to heterogeneous assemblages of

collective creativity. Messages—and the knowledges they relate to—can carry an affective

charge and afford empowerment that is irreducible to a simple increase in knowledge through

successful communication.

Selwa Abd (as cited in Beery, 2020) creates music under the name Bergsonist. She takes

her project’s name from Deleuze’s book Bergsonism, harnessing its ideas in a way that

complicates an analysis of the epistemic formation’s investment in knowledge:

The idea Deleuze is defending is … just that intuition is the best method to legitimate any creative act …. The way I approach creativity is similar. It’s always naive. I reject knowledge and technicalities to find my own systems, which are not conventional, but they work for me. (para. 11)

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Abd here denies “knowledge” in the sense of pre-given, stratified, perhaps “major” knowledges

that could dictate her approach to creative practice. However, she simultaneously affirms

“knowledge” by actively drawing on and mobilizing a specific interpretation of Deleuze’s

theoretical framework. While Abd’s techno- and ambient-based music rarely employs lyrics, it

also expresses the epistemic formation’s contradictory investment in and encoding of realms of

knowledge through her choice of track titles. Some of Bergsonist’s tracks bear evocative titles

that may color the music (“Busy City,” “Heat,” “Mutation,” “Planetary Systems”); others are

titled in an apparently aspirational or even imperative mode (“Abolish Camps,” “Cultivate

Empathy,” “Only Trusting Music Publications With Musicians as Writers,” “Vote Bernie!”); and

some tracks carry matter-of-fact titles that reference general types of crisis (“BioTerrorism,”

“Colonial Revolution,” “Human Rights, Loss,” “Shootings Everywhere”) or particular crises or

incidents (“12 Years to Fix the Planet,” “Conflict in Yemen,” “Covid-19,” “Gaza Border

Violence”) (Bergsonist, n.d.). But what’s in a title? In More Brilliant Than the Sun, Kodwo

Eshun (1999) explores a variety of (primarily, but not exclusively, Afrofuturist) musics as “sonic

fiction” beyond the literary. They operate not just through lyrics (which are rare in Eshun’s

examples anyway) and sound, but also through the specifics of the record and its packaging, or

through the choice of titles: “There’s different interfaces between different Sonic Fictions,

between the title and the music” (p. A[179]). Bergsonist and other musicians, such as Speaker

Music, attempt to mobilize these potential, heterogeneous relationships between pieces of music

and their titles.

Is this signification? Partially, yes: These titles point towards specific events, processes or

ideas—to specific signifieds. In this sense, they serve as a type of consciousness-raising,

especially when pertaining to controversial current events. In addition to higher-profile releases

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on established labels, Bergsonist has been releasing recordings fairly spontaneously on her

Bandcamp page. As Matthew Blackwell (2020) points out, “an added incentive for working

outside of the label system is timeliness—the titles of ‘RESISTANCE’ and ‘PANDEMIC

HOPE’ obviously refer to current events, and the tracks take on a weightier significance in that

context” (para. 3). This is the case even though Abd often articulates her titles to musics that

exhibit no clear (aesthetic or other) connection to the titles’ supposed signifieds. There is,

consequently, more going on here than signification and consciousness-raising.

Blackwell (2020) writes that “much of [Abd’s] best work is self-released at a rapid clip,

resisting hierarchical modes of ranking and comparison in favor of a rhizomatic (and very

Deleuzian) organization that encourages self-directed discovery” (para. 2). This rhizomatic

character applies not merely to the relation of Abd’s work to the cultural industries and to

listeners. There is another, related rhizomatics at play in the articulation of Bergsonist’s track

titles to their respective tracks, to each other, and beyond. Taken together, they suggest a

kaleidoscope of highly charged yet unspecific pointers towards and through specific events,

processes, and struggles; a world in which “everything is dangerous,” at least potentially, and in

which everything must be understood in terms of explicit or implicit power relations. In context,

none of these titles are neutral. A bit like Moor Mother’s lyrics, they pile up dangers and

catastrophes while setting them into circulation and at play, thereby offering at least a series of

hints at the contingency of actual power relations and the potential for (critical-creative)

intervention. The rhizomatic assemblage that engenders Bergsonist’s track titles always already

asserts and reflects that power relations are at work within, through, and beyond it. In their

implied outreach and sprawl, these titles differ from The Legendary Pink Dots’ “terminal

kaleidoscope,” whose increasingly sped-up images ultimately are drawn inwards to the mind of

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the planetary drowning man. In contrast, Abd’s title choices suggest boundless (if unspecific)

circulation.

Similarly, DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s track titles on recent Speaker Music releases can be

assumed to already be political or politicized, whether they are the more abstract “Adaptive

Preference” and “Emergent Trauma Response” of Percussive Therapy (2020) or the quotations

of writings by Black political activist Joe Boggs (2011) found in some of the titles of Black

Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (2020a)—e.g., “African American Disillusionment with Northern

Democracy Continues to Smolder in Every Negro Who Has Settled Up North After Knowing

Life in the South” and “It Is the Negro Who Represents the Revolutionary Struggles for a

Classless Society.” Here, the political—specifically a revolutionary articulation of race to

class—is made to circulate across and through a busy PolyRhythmengine, making explicit the

historically resistant potential of the musics Brown draws on: “Techno Is a Liberation

Technology,” to quote yet another title from Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry. Perhaps the

epistemic formation’s drawing on signification and representation allows it to stabilize the

political—to intervene in oscillations of the political—just for a moment, only to then feed this

stability into a contingency machine meant to open up new paths towards resistance and change.

Conclusion

In social terms, the epistemic formation is perhaps the least clearly defined of this

dissertation’s three examples. Its bonds of friendship and collaboration are more diffuse; social

connections between, say, Moor Mother, Holly Herndon, and Marshstepper are not quite as

easily traced as those between Throbbing Gristle, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Current 93, or

those between Sunburned Hand of the Man, Charalambides, and even Animal Collective. This

difference (in scale, or perhaps in density) does not make the epistemic formation any less of a

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cultural formation. In fact, its breadth—the breadth covered by and articulated to its critical-

reflexive sensibility—can also be seen as a source of power, a greater potential for the

articulation of alliances, a genuine heterogeneity and diversity that enables and expresses a more

legible relationship to various modes of the “popular” than that of the other two formations. Even

though it is easy to align the epistemic formation with “high art,” “the museum,” and the “ivory

tower,” one of the formation’s key characteristics is its ability to engage with what qualifies as

“mainstream” pop music with far less hesitation than free folk (with its residual “rockist”

element) and industrial (with its elitist suspicion of supposed “mass” culture).

In the meantime, for the purposes of this chapter conclusion, it is important to

acknowledge that the formation’s breadth and lower social density—its fragmentation, even—is

likely to make it less recognizable as a formation in the future. As this formation is very much of

the present moment—perhaps still emergent—it does not lend itself to “where are they now?”-

type surveys in the same manner as free folk and industrial. Given this formation’s relative

youth, this “now” appears shortened to a smaller-scale present: In relation to these formations’

overall history, industrial and free folk’s “now” might involve the last few years; their “now”

parallels the epistemic formation’s entire history. The “now” of the epistemic formation is most

easily, if superficially, periodized as the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic has made

the already existing weirdness of time more perceptible,57 and although the members of the

formation have structured this liminal time-space in different, often quite characteristic ways,

this “now” does not yet feel like a necessarily defining moment of the formation’s trajectory.

Certainly, Moor Mother has been releasing a remarkable amount of new music; Holly Herndon

and Mat Dryhurst (n.d.) now host a podcast called Interdependence that features “conversations

57 I am grateful to my peers in the Off-Centre collective for emergent Cultural Studies scholars for fruitful discussions and analyses of this topic, which will eventually emerge in written form.

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with figures shaping 21st century culture”; DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s critique of the music industry

has found new foci amidst the havoc wreaked by the pandemic in an already unstable, unjust

music business (Kim, 2020). But these are just specific intensifications of already existing

tendencies. Before the pandemic already, Chino Amobi released his novel Eroica (2019); under

the name Chuquimamani-Condori (n.d.), Elysia Crampton Chuquimia has been recording less

emphatically electronic, often piano-based music that her Bandcamp page describes as

“classical,” “folklorico,” and “prayer song,” suggesting another expansion of an already very

heterogeneous and emphatically Aymaran (and “Aymara/Andina Futurist”) œuvre. The

epistemic formation keeps experimenting.

Several potential scenarios for the formation’s evolution pose exactly that challenge of its

recognizability or legibility. The first, which is likely too glib, suggests that this articulation of

imagination to knowledge is a type of “new normal” for the foreseeable future, making the

epistemic formation’s orientation increasingly indistinct and perhaps dissolving it in larger-scale

cultural currents. This constellation either presupposes the longevity of crises of knowledge, or

posits the generalization of the epistemic formation (and similar formations) as a solution to this

very crisis. Both options are too vague and appear oddly apolitical, suggesting something like a

globalized, aesthetic-intellectual end of history. A different, perhaps more sober scenario grows

out of the formation’s existing fragmentation and its proliferation of different modes of

expression. Here, the formation’s different cells re-articulate and mediate their critical-reflexive

sensibility through further engagement in their own respective multi-modal projects, resulting in

alliances that draw them further away from the epistemic formation as it currently exists while

transforming different formations and communities along the lines (of flight) of the formation’s

critical-reflexive sensibility. Perhaps they establish themselves increasingly in—academic, but

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not just academic—areas from which they have already been drawing, thereby furthering some

of their existing techniques.

Most importantly though, the crises of knowledge are far from resolved, enclosures of

imagination may well have been fortified during the pandemic, and no clear political settlement

appears to be in sight on either side of the Atlantic. This is the world, or these are the worlds, of

the epistemic formation. The formation keeps multiplying and refining its tools for the

exploration of these confusing realms; the only thing guaranteed is its continuing

experimentation, even as some of its key modes of sociality are challenged at a time when

proximity stands in uncommon tension with care. Without slipping into the glibness of the above

idea of a “new normal” of generalized experimentalism, I want to suggest that the case of the

epistemic formation also points towards potential avenues for future research into similar

formations, into similar orientations—similar sensibilities that proliferate notions and practices

of experimentation in the wake of the “post-structuralist” and related “turns” in humanities

scholarship. Even more so than the “case study” that I am closing with these remarks, such a

project would investigate the very formations and trajectories that condition its own

emergence—that make critical-reflexive practices of collective experimentation and the study of

such practices desirable.

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“ONLY THE SUN KNOWS”: CONCLUSION

Two thirds into her book The Posthuman, discussing the life-death continuum in terms of

her philosophy of difference, multiplicity, and transformation, Rosi Braidotti (2013) claims:

“What we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into this generative flow of

becoming, the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomized,

individual self” (p. 136). Though not exclusive to Braidotti’s thought, this is an interesting

expression of her emphasis on becoming. Coming from an otherwise rigorously anti-essentialist

scholar, this problematic suggestion of an original desire for transformation, for dissolution into

the cosmos, is surprising. Human desires for transformation and for access to the virtual certainly

exist; human investment in radical (and, at least by implication, radically collective)

experimentation as proposed by Braidotti’s “nomadic” and, more recently, “posthuman” ethics is

real and carries considerable power. However, this investment is not an essential aspect of

human nature that merely needs to be uncovered. Such a claim would neglect the necessity of

winning people to invest and engage in transformation and collective experimentation in the first

place (Grossberg, 2005, 2010b; Spiegel, 2019b)—a necessity that Braidotti is well aware of.

From Braidotti’s claim thus arises a question that can be applied just as well to other

collective modes of accessing the virtual—one of the main questions that I have been grappling

with throughout this dissertation: What are the conditions for people’s investment in collective

experimentation? My project is inspired and energized by the critical-creative embrace of

collectivity and experimentation in Braidotti’s Nomadic Theory, Jeremy Gilbert’s Common

Ground, and similar work. I am curious about actually existing, sustained, passionate, “popular”

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attempts at collective experimentation, about their potentials and limitations—notably because I

share Braidotti and Gilbert’s passion for potential transformations of the world towards

something more just and joyous. I analyze the aesthetic and social practices of this dissertation’s

three cultural formations because I see them—in different ways—as particularly potent and

interesting in their sustained (if always problematic) “experimentalism.” I am also, of course,

approaching these formations as a fan: If I discuss an artist or band at any length in this

dissertation (and do not consider them fascist), I have most likely danced to their music quite a

few times. Part of my enjoyment of such dancing is indeed a desire for and affirmation of

becoming, of transformation, of accessing a more-than; and it is reflexively so, as a preferred

way of listening to and thinking through and with the music. It is not ahistorical and acontextual

though. Instead, this articulation of an ethically or politically charged philosophy of difference

and multiplicity to experimental music and its exploration through dance is itself very closely

aligned with the practices of the prior chapter’s epistemic formation; perhaps it can even be

understood as arising from the outskirts of this formation. Even as “crises of knowledge”

condition and are conditioned by political and cultural impasses, they also co-constitute critical-

reflexive sensibilities that privilege multi-modal experimentation and exploration. This

dissertation’s investments and inquiries are no less contextually specific than the collective

experiments it studies.

The historical contingency and contextual determination of affective and ideological

investment in collectivity and experimentation underlines the importance of the critical

evaluation of such investments, the practices they enable and constrain, and their complex

relations to—their responses to and reconstructions of—their conjunctural moments. The

primary question of this conclusion is therefore: What are the potentials and limitations of these

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formations, their sensibilities, and their collective-experimental practices? There are several

dangers to an evaluation of this kind. With Willis (1978/2014), it is worth noting:

We cannot enter a cultural supermarket, choose this and that, pass other things by, take what is good, leave the rest and pay the variable bill at a check-out to the future. … The metal cannot be simply smelted out from the ore of experience in human affairs. (p. 236)

This should not be understood as, or extended into, a type of facile relativism; critique cannot

simply be waved away based on the recognition that formations are complex and heterogeneous.

However, it also cannot take the shape of a top-down intervention. Eshun (1999) writes:

In CultStud, TechnoTheory and CyberCulture, those painfully archaic regimes, theory always comes to Music’s rescue. The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially. Like a headmaster, theory teaches today’s music a thing or 2 about life. It subdues music’s ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate. (p. 00[-004]58)

This dubious rescue is not this dissertation’s job. Building on Eshun’s polemic, Steve Goodman

(2010) wants to “place theory under the dominion of sonic affect, encouraging a conceptual

mutation. Sound comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate,

loosening up its organized or petrified body” (p. 82). Ultimately, this, too, is at best part of this

dissertation’s story for two primary reasons: First, I understand music in terms of its articulation

of the aesthetic and the social—and in terms of its own articulation across different contextual

levels. Although this may evoke the subsumption of music or sound criticized by Eshun, it also

means that “music” is an extremely broad assemblage from which one may learn. Second, just as

this project does not assume that “theory” or scholarly work can simply “rescue” music or even

“teach” music about itself, it also does not simply receive (affective, conceptual, ideological…)

input from music or sound. Instead, it offers a negotiated, grounded evaluation that moves back

and forth between and hopefully beyond the different dimensions of the theory-music

58 Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun uses an idiosyncratic pagination system; the chapter number “00” and the bracketed negative numbers, counting up to zero, indicate that this quotation is taken from the book’s preface.

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relationship that Eshun problematizes. Indeed, this is not a binary; in one register, this project

may well seek to “becom[e] but a single component in a thought synthesizer which moves along

several planes at once, which tracks Machine Music’s lines of force” (Eshun, 1999, pp.

00[-004]–00[-003]);59 but in another register, it simultaneously aims to conceptualize these lines

themselves within, across, and against larger social-discursive-material assemblages—thereby

hopefully giving them their due instead of suppressing or simply lionizing them. An analysis of

the potentials and limitations of these formations consequently serves as a contribution to a

conversation or, rather, a multi-dimensional engagement (especially in light of the increasingly

critical-reflexive character of many such cultural formations—even beyond the epistemic

formation). Perhaps it can help generate productive “vector[s] of transformation” (Gilbert, 2006,

p. 184) in some of its encounters; in humble meetings in which “theory” specifies its potential

import without assuming dominance or, for that matter, undervaluing its own capacities.

Free folk

What are the potentials and limitations of free folk’s experimental articulations of

collectivity and collective articulations of experimentation—and what can free folk teach in the

current context? Free folk’s legacy appears hard to pinpoint. The realm of potential that free folk

accesses, the as-yet unknown that it experiences and constantly re-articulates, is a realm of

generous, experimental collectivity—indeed, of collective experimentation that must to some

degree affirm sociality to be able to access the unknown or even unknowable. Free folk clearly

draws on the 1960s counterculture, but it can never—and never wants to—simply mimic it, not

after punk and not after Reaganite (and, for that matter, Clintonite) “neoliberalism.” If free folk’s

affective composition does involve a residual punk-derived anger or aggression, or nihilism and

59 That said: Can it ever be one “single” component?

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cynicism, even disillusionment, then free folk’s constitutive mobilization of free jazz in

particular enables it to articulate an enunciative assemblage that neutralizes these feelings and

moods by weaving them into multiple modes of expression. Where a void could open up, free

folk works hard (yet also in a relaxed manner) to invite multiplicity in, or to invite multiplicity to

assert itself. Multiplicity is, after all, in free folk’s space already, making it habitable in the first

place.

Free folk’s sprawl, its investment in community, multiplicity, and transformation,

responds to crises of investment—what can truly matter in an apparently flattened world?—and a

sense of temporal alienation as described by Grossberg; and as Diederichsen suggests, it

responds to the considerable constraints imposed on so many modes of collectivity in the cultural

industries and beyond. However, this does not mean that there is a constitutive lack to free folk,

an absence that enables its collective experimentation in the first place. If anything, these

contextually specific (experiential and socio-political) absences heighten free folk musicians’

awareness of the virtual and actual existence of ever so many collectivities and multiplicities. For

a long time already, free folk musicians have been sensing these uncontainable multiplicities in

the recordings and performances that inspire them: in the marching band tunes drawn into a

vortex of elation on Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village (1967); in the whispers that expand space

beyond the mortal realm on Pearls Before Swine’s anti-war call “Translucent Carriages”

(1968/2005); in the syncretic-communal spiritualisms of Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry; in

Nurse With Wound’s delirious mind-space, Nico’s meandering inner desert-space, and Sun Ra’s

beckoning outer space; in Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s mystical Americana; in the eardrum-

rupturing drones of La Monte Young and Tony Conrad and the percussive invocations of Angus

MacLise and the Master Musicians of Jajouka; in Yoko Ono’s irrepressible animal-becomings;

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in the wildly and widely roaming guitar explorations of John Fahey and Sandy Bull; in the

damaged drone-rock cosmicism of The Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3; in the walls of

noise spliced into rock songs by Sonic Youth, The Red Crayola, and The Stooges; in Can and

Miles Davis’s rhizomatic improv-studio assemblages (Gilbert, 2004); in dilated group

improvisations from Ornette Coleman to the Grateful Dead to the Taj Mahal Travelers. Free folk

draws transversal lines across and through these musics, not simply juxtaposing or imitating

them but learning from their powerful multiplicities. All these musics are crucial resources of

collectivity and experimentation and thus also, for free folk musicians at least, “resources of

hope” (Williams, 1989) and passion. They are not the only resources at hand, but they are

particularly powerful and serve as dowsing rods for the search for the virtual in the actual,

thereby helping to re-enchant and re-multiply so many other dimensions of free folk musicians’

lived experience.

To say that this is not simply a response to a lack is not to say that free folk is

“channeling” or “tapping into” an unchanging, always existing multiplicity.60 The cosmic roar

invoked both by Keenan and Braidotti is not eternal, essential, or disconnected from the

discursive. Instead, free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility consistently re-articulates the

potential—virtual—that free folk accesses; and free folk’s actualization of collective-

experimental potentials itself depends on larger affective landscapes and economic-technological

shifts (such as those that have been inhibiting the sustainability of free folk’s most affirmatively

collective projects, its large improvising groups). Either way, what is striking about free folk’s

articulation of collectivity and experimentation is not so much the fact of its existence (other

60 Ideologically, it appears quite safe to assume that free folk musicians would have a variety of divergent opinions on this matter: After all, even their idols and predecessors La Monte Young and Tony Conrad have articulated radically opposed approaches to the relationship between culture and cosmos, with Conrad accusing Young of the authoritarian fallacy of affirming a Pythagorean, pre-given “harmony of the spheres” (Joseph, 2008).

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related articulations preceded it, obviously) but its historical specificity: Under the auspices of

managerial individualism, disciplined mobilizations, and authoritarian-interventionist brutality,

free folk negotiates between an articulated “neoliberal”-patriotic myth and lived crises of

investment and temporal alienation by generating expressive forms that (in music, in ways of

living, in collectivity) actualize a social and aesthetic more-than that free folk senses in its

seemingly flat world.

As a response to crises of investment, enclosures of imagination, and a sense of temporal

alienation, free folk’s articulation of the social to the sensorial remains powerful. More recently,

in a time of heightened activist and scholarly quests for new modes of being-in-the-world that

provide collective sustenance and relate more sustainably and caringly to the planet and its non-

human inhabitants, free folk presents an orientation that, despite certain expressions of its

ideology, decenters the individual human and presents as desirable various collective and

aesthetic modes of immersion and relation that relinquish anthropocentric ideals of mastery. The

formation’s animal-becomings point towards “a creative transformation that stresses the

productivity of biopower in terms of zoe, or generative, non-logocentric life” (Braidotti, 2011b,

p. 120): an immersion in the rich forces of life that—however messily—suggests more

sustainable, caring ways of being-in-the-world. That said, free folk neglects to translate these

ethical potentials into a politics. While individual protagonists of the free folk formation are

engaged in important political projects, free folk as a formation has never quite built those

alliances that could help sustain (also see Willis, 1978/2014) and simultaneously learn from its

unique methods of connecting to the virtual.

Affinities arising from the weirdness and richness of the social and the sensorial are more

important to free folk than a clearly defined identity. Despite sometime-ascriptions of the rural

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and local, free folk’s sensibility offers a cosmopolitanism of the weird, a privileging of hybridity

and multiplicity across aesthetic and social borders. However, its disregard for borders can

simultaneously mask the existence and effectivity of borders that remain determinant, however

contingently, in free folk’s historical context. As open as free folk may be towards the world,

towards the Other, towards multiplicity, it can also reproduce—and certainly did so especially in

its earlier years—stereotypes of Otherness. Its relationship to those on whose work it draws is

not as harmful as that of so many other affective alliances across rock’s history, but it is also not

particularly resistant to many contemporary racisms. Perhaps it is useful at this point to return to

Moten’s articulation of the ensemble of the senses and the ensemble of the social, an articulation

that is crucial to free jazz and that free folk, too, attempts. According to Moten (2003),

improvisation is “ensemble’s condition of possibility”61 (p. 94); by “ensemble,” he means “the

generative—divided, dividing, and abundant—totality out of which and against which …

subjectivity appears” (p. 112). For Moten, this plural assemblage of Blackness and its

expressions, this “whole,” is by default incomplete; and it is directed against completion while

always tending towards the more-than.

Moten’s Derridean approach risks always reinscribing cuts, wounds, breaks, and

hauntings, thereby articulating series of radicular assemblages. However, Moten’s

characterization of “the Black radical tradition” should not be dismissed as a critical tracing of a

pre-established theory onto any assemblage. Instead, it speaks to the persistence of struggle—and

it speaks to the persistence of modes of racist violence and alienation, a persistence that must be

taken into account in any analysis of the “changing same” (Amiri Baraka: Jones, 1968/2010; cf.

Gilroy, 1993) of Black popular-experimental music. It speaks to the persistence of (modes of)

61 Moten intentionally omits definite and indefinite articles for “ensemble” as a standalone term, assigning conceptual weight to the term while still evoking its musical meaning.

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Blackness as an incommensurable deconstruction of Euromodernity. Free folk’s sprawl appears

far less characterized by irreducible, constitutive ruptures. Like many countercultural and post-

countercultural formations (Willis, 1978/2014), it marginalizes itself instead of being at the

receiving end of violence. It does draw on Blackness and other modes of Otherness (as

articulated by Euromodernity against itself) in a way that is mostly irreducible to more

straightforward appropriations such as white rock musicians’ adaptation of the blues and

rock’n’roll, but despite its articulation of imagined (and sometimes material) communities that

attempt to bridge racism’s gap, it has—as a formation—not quite figured out the relationship of

its comparatively free-wheeling sprawl to the histories of struggle of so many of the social and

aesthetic practices on which it draws—and to those practices’ own resistance to and subversion

of Euromodern categories and practices. Free folk learns from, carries on, and re-articulates so

many of free jazz’s innovations, but perhaps it does—we do?—not always know what to do with

these—how to engage with particularly deep cuts and wounds, with the negativity of exclusion.

In its own way, free folk embraces difference, but some profound conditions of difference appear

out of its reach.

Relatedly, free folk’s embrace of sometimes (seemingly) leaderless or otherwise

unconventional collectivity—the horizontal, to some degree, but, more importantly, the

transversal—does not by itself make it a prefigurative “model” for democratic practice. After all,

this is first and foremost a cultural formation producing strange music, not a body of

emphatically political decision-making. Still, perhaps it can give some humble hints towards the

joys to be had in weird, dislocatory immersion—in the exploration of the molecular, which

should not be fetishized but can perhaps be harnessed in its powers of contingency. If affective

investment appears impossible, if imagination appears rote, why not embrace the richness of the

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world? In this, free folk has at times been inhibited by its own reproductions of certain forms of

exclusion; and a radical openness is not the same as actual outreach and alliance-building

(Spiegel, 2013). Crucially, there is also no inherent reason that free folk’s aesthetics—which,

despite their heterogeneity, are not all-encompassing—should appeal to others similarly invested

in the world’s multiplicity. But free folk’s most potent lesson for a study of collectivity,

experimentation, and the relations between them is perhaps what Diederichsen considers the

hordes’ “ethics of relaxation.” Even though free folk can get intense and disturbing, its practices

benefit from a certain patience or unhurriedness that enables its openness and grounds its

experiments.

The point is not that a sustainable, collective embrace of one’s lifeworld has to feel or

operate, let alone sound, like Sunburned and NNCK. The point is not to replicate free folk’s

forms or to fetishize the substance free folk formalizes. The point may instead be that, in the face

of a contemporary affective hyperinflation (Grossberg, 2015) that has perhaps only grown in the

years since free folk’s perceived peak, the spatial and temporal opening provided by an ethics of

relaxation broadens the opportunities for the enactment of collective experimentation and

experimental collectivity. This is also not a call for a rational, deliberative forum; it may well be

a seemingly chaotic, at times disturbing, irrational territory, but it is one that does not preclude

and prefigure the outcome of experiments. It remains open to the new, to challenges, to

difference, even as things get really weird. Of course, not everyone is allowed unhurriedness, let

alone relaxation in contemporary actual reality; the articulation of an ethics of relaxation requires

embedding in a politics of difference that itself seeks to provide the conditions for unhurriedness

instead of treating it as an unstratified resource already available to all. On this rocky path,

challenge, care, and patience condition and enable an open, thorough and playful engagement

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with the weirdness of time, with the instability of space and place, with the plurality of the

sensorial and the social. An unhurried sociality evades, as far as it can, cruelty and negligence

(Harney & Moten, 2013)—hopefully not to dwell in the molecular, but to learn from, maintain,

and share the particular social-sensorial articulations that emerge.

Industrial

The industrial formation’s legacy appears particularly overdetermined by so many, often

conflicting, narratives: the myths surrounding its best-known interpreters and visionaries, often

mischievously fed by these artists themselves; the academic reception of TG and the group’s

members as key figures in histories of “noise” and transgressive arts; the formation’s

translatability into institutionalized-artistic and popular-musical discourses; its successful

sloganeering and inescapable obsessions; and various controversies regarding its ambiguous

politics. This dissertation has touched on all of these narratives in different ways, attempting to

map the formation’s contextual specificity without reducing it to any such existing discourse.

That said, these discourses (and many more) are all crucial to an understanding of the formation

and its potentials and limitations, regardless of their historical “accuracy.” Their very plurality

can itself speak to the remarkable diversity of industrial’s experiments—industrial’s foundational

curiosity; and the limitations of so many of these discourses are not merely the constraints of

flawed, unduly imposed narratives. Instead, these discourses themselves often express some of

the formation’s own blockages. To some degree, the formation has allowed its own myths to be

re-inscribed onto itself over and over again. Simultaneously, the sheer proliferation of industrial

stories has enabled alternative evaluations of the formation’s effectivities. From its myths, which

are articulated by and to the formation’s interpreters and visionaries in problematic, telling, and

even productive ways, emerge more complex and transformative maps.

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For instance: When Genesis Breyer P-Orridge passed away in 2020, public responses

were complex. Though grieving an artist who was an inspiration to uncountable artists and

praising a half-century body of genuinely experimental work, many commentators (e.g.,

Diederichsen, 2020; Turner, 2020) also acknowledged less admirable aspects of h/er biography,

particularly the allegations of abuse raised by Cosey Fanni Tutti (2017) in her autobiography Art

Sex Music. Regardless of one’s evaluation of P-Orridge’s individual trajectory, reactions to h/er

passing and reflections on h/er life can—intentionally and inadvertently—shed additional light

on some key potentials and limitations of the industrial formation. P-Orridge stands for an

experimental orientation that is radical, inquisitive, and remarkably flexible. As a co-instigator of

COUM, TG, Industrial Records, TOPY, Psychic TV, Thee Majesty, and the Pandrogeny project,

P-Orridge was involved in countless modes and instances of experimentation that posed artistic,

social, personal, and corporeal challenges not only to audiences but also to P-Orridge and h/er

collaborators themselves. TG was eager to change and rarely confined its experiments to any one

register, resulting in a body of work more diverse than those of many other, longer-lived

industrial groups. P-Orridge’s post-TG career, while not without its own orthodoxies (e.g.,

Psychic TV’s tendency to fall back on an emulation of late-1960s psychedelic rock), suggests an

investment in the continuous questioning of (seemingly) anything accepted. In this, s/he was

inspired not least by the 1960s counterculture that shaped h/er trajectory and various avant-garde

formations s/he engaged with; but all these impulses played into and were themselves mediated

by industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility. This structure of feeling consistently searches

for, aims to unveil, and/or immerses itself in hidden realms that it senses beneath a misleading,

treacherous, banal, and/or perhaps spoiled surface. Industrial created and still creates numerous

tools for the probing of such hidden, secret realms.

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P-Orridge’s association with a particularly large number of such tools characterizes h/er

status as a particularly important paranoid interpreter and visionary of the industrial formation:

an acute detector of cultural fault lines that have been mobilized in the service of oppression but

are ripe for intervention; a charismatic narrator of potential other worlds and other experiences.

Still, the very fact of experimentation’s existence and presence does not guarantee that

industrial’s story is one of vanguardist successes. Experimentation always implies the potential

of failure, of a certain risk—and sometimes experiments themselves are potentially harmful by

design. A powerful interpreter’s paranoia may not be justified, or may be misapplied; indeed, a

paranoid interpreter can mis-interpret. Similarly, a visionary’s visions may fall flat, may simply

reproduce existing (power) relations in new guises, or may not make themselves accessible to

others. They may even engender a type of untethered “absolute deterritorialization” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1980/1987) into death. Industrial was and is eager to probe power relations, but its

analysis of power can be blind to its own exclusions—and can be too “conventionally” paranoid

in a way that simply reproduces those existing power relations it fails to map. P-Orridge’s status

itself is one of the most salient expressions of industrial’s partial reliance on a subjectifying

regime that foregrounds and exalts individual passion and creativity, thereby masking existing

collectivity and simplifying complex histories.

Industrial is not essentially individualist; it has generated too many instances of intensely

creative collectivity to be reduced to a cult of the individual. Nonetheless, industrial has in so

many instances—and across so many of its dimensions—returned to and reterritorialized on a

creative individuality perceived as the source of true agency, distinct from or even in opposition

to most modes of group formation. Thus, even some of industrial’s most audacious articulations

of collectivity paradoxically engender highly individualized practice—as in the endless (re-)

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production of knowledges Steirer (2012) sees in industrial’s “information war” and the intensely

personalized sigil magick of TOPY. Siepmann (2019) points out that, contrary to TOPY’s

rhetoric, its innovations have often been attributed to P-Orridge’s genius as opposed to John

Balance, David Tibet, and other TOPY members (also see Keenan, 2003/2016). TOPY

weakened its potential for radically collective experimentation by exalting a magickal-libertarian

individuality but also, in contradiction to this, by falling back on a toxic, hierarchic organization.

As outlined by Siepmann (2019), this instance of Gilbert’s “Leviathan logic” subordinated

difference (and thereby also what Siepmann calls “individuality”) to a leader figure defining the

collective. Industrial’s affective and ideological investment in interpreters and visionaries

enabled the formation of personality cults and, worst of all, could result in a willingness to

overlook interpreters’ and visionaries’ abuses of power—as appears to have happened in P-

Orridge’s case.

Aesthetically, some of industrials’ greatest purveyors of heterogeneity have often

struggled to imagine this heterogeneity as articulated by and to creative collectivities, rather than

the fragmented and/or alienated human mind and its unacknowledged nether realms. Politically,

industrial has at times articulated an individualist libertarianism first and foremost—or perhaps

even something resembling, as Marie Thompson (2017a) argues with regards to the “poetics of

transgression” of Whitehouse, “the liberal prioritization of the individual subject and individual

rights, liberties and freedom of expression over and above questions of structural inequality,

collective identity and sociopolitical privilege and power” (p. 142). This has, in turn, fostered an

inability to identify harmful practices (TG’s sonic warfare against an itinerant group, some of the

excesses of Whitehouse’s anything-goes transgression) as anything other than bold exploration.

In its search for the hidden and the secret, industrial’s individualized passions—those points of

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subjectification—can also engender a solipsism that is unable to sustain collective

experimentation at a smaller scale (think of the tragicomic stories surrounding the hopeless

Enclave X house) and uneager to form alliances that could enable and sustain industrial’s

probing, unconventional orientation at a larger scale. Indeed, in some of its most disturbing

moments, industrial has tended to give in to an aristocratic pessimism that condemns the

supposed degeneracy of the modern world and fetishizes particularly narrow, rote, and (at least

by implication) racist “secrets” of a long-lost, perhaps unrecoverable past. Here, industrial

wallows in reactionary sadness and vanity, incapable of dealing with difference and

transformations—exploratory potential lost to misanthropy and resentment whose capacity for

violence is dampened somewhat by a solipsistic retreat from the present.

Industrial’s complex and contradictory reproduction of a paranoid structure of feeling

dominant in the historical moment of the formation’s emergence undermines its

conceptualization of power. Industrial routinely found and finds itself drawn back to and against

a central enemy. In spite of industrial’s often-radical experimentation towards unknown

outcomes, this enemy is easily taken for granted. For industrial, “control” is guaranteed not so

much in the specificity of its carriers or manifestations (it is by default diffuse and hard to grasp)

but in its very presence and dominance. As industrial wrestled a Burroughsian control machine

(Reed, 2013), it failed to notice or acknowledge other machines characterizing the conjuncture of

the formation’s emergence—notably, perhaps, the very existence of the paranoid structure of

feeling as a paranoiac machine that captured the industrial formation and inscribed the chase

from sign to sign into its practices. Instead of refusing the pre-given, of practicing an analysis of

power “without guarantees” (Hall, 1986), industrial often undermined and sometimes still

undermines its genuine curiosity by fetishizing control in its sinister ubiquity. Even worse, this

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paranoid orientation can feed into and reproduce racist, sexist, and other reactionary modes of

paranoia. This reproduction of the paranoid structure of feeling, this partial integration of

industrial into a paranoiac machine that paved the way for Thatcherite authoritarianism, goes

hand in hand with the other dominant structure of feeling relevant to industrial’s emergence, a

widespread sense of decay. For there to be decay, something must have been in its prime at an

earlier time; re-articulated into an arborescent-visionary turn to the past, generalized paranoia

and a sense of decay can lead to the elitist affirmation of an idealized past. This also goes to

show that the visionary assemblage, though able to crack the paranoiac machine open and enable

glimpses less tethered to the felt presence of danger, is not necessarily a successful solution to

industrial’s problems. Visionary lines of flight can reterritorialize on elitist interiority or dissolve

in solipsistic reverie. Industrial is stronger when it allows vision to complicate danger and

darkness—reaching outward while nonetheless keeping its visions in check, refusing a

deterritorialization into the void. This is the power of the sidereal assemblage: an investment in

and invitation to affective complexity.

Indeed, in the current moment, the most instructive elements of the industrial formation

might be those that pair an emphatically multi-dimensional experimentation with a certain

humility, draw back from the fetishization of the (human) individual, and articulate the paranoid

to the visionary while tempering both with a playful sense of openness (as well as a little bit of

mischief). I want to spend the rest of my concluding remarks about industrial by highlighting one

particularly potent example. ELpH is a useful guide to the industrial formation—not so much

representative of all its practices, of all the articulations of its sensibility and ideology, but

remarkable in its multi-directionality and multi-modality. ELpH is irreducible to any one practice

or theory but nonetheless able to precisely probe elements of industrial’s lifeworld. This makes

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ELpH a potent figuration, a “more materialistic mappin[g] of situated, embedded, and embodied

positions” (Braidotti, 2011b, p. 13)62 of the industrial formation.

ELpH is not simply prefigurative and cannot easily be disembedded from the contexts

shaping the industrial formation. This “conceptual being that is one part physical equipment

failure and one part celestial fiend” (Dais Records, 2018, para. 2) is too clearly an articulation of

industrial’s specific investments (control/power, body/mind/self potentialities, the esoteric or

occult) to unproblematically serve as a guide to other formations. However, ELpH can still

provide useful practices, movements, sounds, hints, ideas, glimpses (“Glimpse” is the title of an

ELpH song), or at least tools to catch such glimpses: ELpH generates “vectors of

transformation.” ELpH is a mistake in the machinery, a glitch—but also one to be revered:

Worship the Glitch, as the album title suggests. ELpH is interference in production processes, a

negative force to be feared; but ELpH is also emission and accumulation, a positive and

productive force. ELpH is a spirit being, reaching out from hidden realms, offering glimpses of

the beyond; but ELpH is also a material being, living in musical equipment, reliant on electricity.

ELpH is audible first and foremost, a ghostly presence in disturbed recordings; but ELpH is also

spoken by Coil, with whom ELpH is in contact; and ELpH has even been drawn, however

crudely, as record artwork and logo.

Most importantly, ELpH is the construction—the articulation—of all these in their

mutual dependence and contradiction. Any ELpH recording offers specific sidereal insights,

productively skewed glimpses of the potentialities of material, discursive, spiritual,

technological, and other beyonds. ELpH undogmatically evaluates, balances, and attempts to

62 It is unclear whether Braidotti would consider a (partial) spirit-being to be compatible with the Deleuze-Guattarian materialism that characterizes her call for contextually appropriate, mobile concepts. However, I think it is this very ability to traverse material, spiritual, cultural, scientific, imaginary, and other realms that makes ELpH so powerful.

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commensurate these complexities and contradictions; ELpH may generate shivers but also

engenders the joy and excitement of curiosity—perhaps even the sense of belonging and warmth

of communion with the non-human. In the words of William Blake, slightly altered by John

Balance on Coil’s “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep”: “May the Goddess keep us from single

vision/And Newton’s sleep” (Coil, 1999/2020). More than those moments in which industrial

attempts to explicitly reinscribe its ideology of power, more than a mere “poetics of

transgression” that is so often understood as industrial’s key characteristic, ELpH offers an

experimental orientation that invites experimenters to weigh apparently incommensurable claims

to knowledge, to truth, to being-in-the-world—a sober mapping that should be taken seriously

even as it does not take itself too seriously. Worship the glimpse!

The epistemic formation

The epistemic formation, finally, avoids many of the problems of the free folk and

(especially) industrial formations through its critical-reflexive sensibility. Many of its

practitioners—often out of personal (yet always collective) experience—are keenly aware of

histories of appropriation, exploitation, and exclusion; and they avoid political quietism and the

pitfalls of a paranoid fetishization of presumed power relations. However, the formation appears

to fit almost too well into the contemporary proliferation of somewhat isolated or uncoordinated

artistic, intellectual, social, political, and other movements invested in social justice, progressive

or radical politics, imagination, and more (Grossberg, 2015). It is not a mass movement or even a

widely-known subculture based on, for instance, strong working-class engagement (as punk and

rave were). It is not particularly cohesive (or, for that matter, homogeneous) in its analyses, even

as its musicians tend to share a radical or progressive ideology. Of the three formations discussed

in this dissertation, it is perhaps that which is least defined by strong social ties among its

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protagonists across the entire formation. Despite its considerable investment in the generation of

new collectivities (and new modes of collectivity), the epistemic formation can hardly be called a

“movement”; even when its novel collectivities become inspirational beyond the formation’s

own shifting borders, they are difficult to sustain: NON Worldwide’s promise was greeted

enthusiastically, but the label has been seemingly dormant for several years at the time of

writing, with its key figures drawn in different directions that, while productive, do not

necessarily speak to an expansion of NON’s potentials as a collective as opposed to a (former)

hub of creative individuals.

This does not mean that the epistemic formation and its diverse artists and groups are

doomed to forever play out a conventional “subcultural” cycle, appearing vital for one brief

moment and powerless once this moment has been defused or co-opted; and it does not mean

that artists of the epistemic formation are bound to remain obscure in the long run. Despite the

considerable stylistic and ideological influence that famous acts such as Nine Inch Nails have

drawn from the industrial formation, and despite free folk’s proximity to successful indie-folk

acts and, in particular, Animal Collective’s ascent into (however limited) indie stardom and chart

success, the epistemic formation is perhaps most actively involved in “popular” music in any

conventional sense. The glossy textures of some of the formation’s musics—the “high-fidelity”

aesthetics mentioned by Scavo (2017)—clash with the willful “ugliness” and sickliness of much

industrial; the same textures and the more affirmatively dance-oriented electronic beats of some

parts of the epistemic formation stand in tension with free folk’s rugged impurity and the

residual rockism that free folk derives from some of its indie-rock predecessors. However, the

epistemic formation’s deconstructions and reconstructions of techno and pop musics have not

invited, or at least not incited, mass involvement. That said, beyond the immediately musical, the

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emphatic engagement of artists of the epistemic formation with cultural-technological elements

more associated with dominant forces—notably Holly Herndon’s critical, if controversial,

probing of AI and surveillance technologies—suggests a willingness to spark or influence larger-

scale debates. Elsewhere, artist-scholar-activists such as Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Moor

Mother, and DeForrest Brown, Jr., and collectives such as NON Worldwide explicitly tackle

large-scale political discourses and popular struggles around various power differentials heads-

on.

This affirmative, collective activism of the epistemic formation differs notably from

industrial’s isolationism, which reveals secrets of apparently global importance to the initiated

while distrusting more expansive and inclusive modes of collectivity; and it differs from free

folk’s disinvestment from representation, which has provided free folk’s enunciative multiplicity

with additional space for unconventional practices but has also precluded certain popular modes

of articulation that are, for better or worse, more characteristic of political engagement in

contemporary actual reality. Unlike these other formations, the epistemic formation largely

affirms explicit and public engagement with widely-discussed issues, even if it does so from a

minoritarian perspective and mediates these issues through specialized (but perhaps increasingly

accessible) knowledges. Much more—and much more actively—than the other two formations,

the epistemic formation aims to do justice to the existing world—“to engage with the present and

be worthy of it” (Braidotti, 2011b, p. 16); and it aims to highlight the contingency and

transformability of this world. Still, like this dissertation’s other two examples, it is limited in its

articulation of alliances with other formations; it certainly contributes to networks of critical-

political activism and scholarship, but it currently does not strengthen them in a decisive manner.

Its experiments, enunciations, and becomings are powerful and inspiring and, at their best,

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contribute to crucial “cultures of survival” (Hall, 2016, p. 188), as in the case of Colin Self’s

generous Xoir workshops or NON Worldwide’s active exploration of diasporic life and/as

resistant expression; but that the formation opens countless opportunities for experimentation

does not guarantee that its collective experiments enable large-scale transformation. Knowledges

and collective-experimental practices proliferate and highlight the “infinite relationality”

(Gilbert, 2014, p. 111) of creativity, but often remain too insular (and hampered by the power

asymmetries and apparatuses of capture characterizing the cultural industries and related realms)

to engender the emergence of sustainable, larger-scale creativities that fuse diverse, radically

different communities without submitting them to a hierarchic principle.

Indeed, the epistemic formation also does not resolve the crises of knowledge that it both

counters and reproduces. Nonetheless, many of its considerable powers are located in a related

register that may seem somewhat unpromising from some perspectives invested in the “popular”:

the register of theory, of scholarly critique; or at least of similar enunciative assemblages that are

characterized by reflexivity and an investment in the relationship between power and knowledge.

The epistemic formation’s focus on matters of identity is, perhaps, particularly noteworthy in its

willingness to open identity up to other modes of being-in-the-world; Elysia Crampton

Chuquimia’s “Aymara/Andina Futurism” is as potent and rich as the worlds conjured by

industrial’s most “visionary” artists but manages to be more inviting and genuinely collective

than the works of many of these predecessors. The formation’s critical-creative interrogation of

identity highlights the instability of any such categories, even where they are affirmed;

unsurprisingly, given the formation’s emergence from crises of knowledge and commensuration,

the mutual relationship of the various ontologies and modes of being-in-the-world articulated by

its artists remains unclear. Of course, the formation does not necessarily strive for

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commensurability—and it is important not to call for a flattening of difference between the

various approaches, ontologies, identities, and modes of being-in-the-world articulated by the

epistemic formation. As shown in the example of DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s generous critique of

Holly Herndon, artists of the epistemic formation differ in their situatedness, in the cultural and

economic capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986) they have accumulated, and so on. The epistemic

formation’s amplification and proliferation of difference is perhaps most obvious in the register

of temporality, where its virtuosic, constant dis- and re-articulation of histories of struggle—in

Chino Amobi’s dystopian city by the sea, in Moor Mother’s historical spiraling and

zigzagging—reveal modes of traveling through time, of being in time, of knowing time in

different ways: time as contingency, contingency as an opening for struggle, as the possibility of

a different world. This appears particularly relevant during a pandemic that has made temporal

difference and heterogeneity more perceptible. Who can live in whose times, in whose time-

spaces, who is invited by whose pre-emergents? As much as the epistemic formation’s sprawl

speaks to crises of commensuration, its reflexivity also makes it comprehensible as an attempt at

heightening the negotiability of difference.

In all this, the epistemic formation is not reducible to a false binary between the academic

and the popular, or between theory and practice. Its reflexive-experimental sensibility counters a

range of powerful binaries as well as their actual discursive effectivities. Above, I have

questioned Simon Reynolds’s (at least implied) dichotomy of club and museum. This is not to

flatten their differences. Clearly these spaces differ considerably in terms of their histories as

well as their cultural and economic capital; and they are, to state the obvious, immensely

heterogeneous themselves. However, when these two types of space are invoked in order to

distinguish between musics that work on the body and musics that work on the mind, the

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epistemic formation is misunderstood. That the epistemic formation challenges the—historically

gendered and racialized—dualisms of body/mind and emotion/reason, or that it reveals their

unsustainability, is not particularly unique; many formations actively do so. The practices of the

epistemic formation are directed not least against elitist and populist distinctions that pit, e.g., fun

against the “academic”; but it is also not enough to claim that the formation’s practices simply

combine aesthetic and scholarly elements. Instead, the formation’s reflexive-experimental

sensibility is articulated across such too-easily binarized sets of practices. It dwells in these

practices, in these orientations, in a way that highlights their irreducibly complex, even

rhizomatic, relations. It experiences the world as profoundly shaped by power relations that are

most commonly described in “academic” terms. It experiences “theory,” matters of power,

aesthetics, and experimentation as crucial parts of the lived territory in which it invests; theory,

politics, and music in their complexity all are important parts of the discursive environment the

epistemic formation inhabits and contributes to. Academic knowledges and practices that are

often relegated to a supposed “ivory tower” are just as much part of the formation’s semiotic

substance as the sounds that it engages and produces.

Of course, that the formation encodes scholarly practice musically may seem relatively

straightforward, even predictable, given the educational backgrounds of many of its

practitioners; simultaneously, it would be problematic to place shared scholarly experience as the

undifferentiated precondition of the formation’s existence.63 The complexities of the crises of

knowledge and the many other forces that shape and are shaped by them deny this facile

presumption; instead, amidst these complexities, it is remarkable to see the formation affirm the

63 Lubner (2019) accuses Michael Waugh of similarly positing the emergence of the internet as a ruptural moment that generates or conditions a “post-internet” landscape whose aesthetics first and foremost reflect and negotiate the ubiquity of digital relations; this prioritization of the internet’s emergence flattens historical and political complexities.

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affective charge of intellectual work. If the contemporary conjuncture is characterized not least

by a disarticulation of experimentation from imagination, by enclosures of imagination, the

epistemic formation is eager to re-articulate these while constructing an affectively charged place

for “knowledge” and “theory” that highlights their presence and potency in contemporary

lifeworlds beyond (yet encompassing) the academy. Simultaneously, this articulation does not

succumb to the managerial reiteration64 of the need for “the university” to engage with “the

community,” lest it remain (in) the supposed “ivory tower.” This imperative merely further

alienates modes of knowledge-production from lived experience by reproducing a foundational

binary of scholarship and the lived.

In their widely-discussed The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013)

present the titular dimension as a realm on which “the university”—portrayed in perhaps too

unified a form—depends, a realm which it exploits but simultaneously can never fully capture.

Against a co-opted, institutionalized, seemingly resistant “critique,” Harney and Moten pit a

fugitive, industrious, radical “study” that always escapes and steals from the institution with

which it stands in such constitutive tension. The book’s chapter on “The University and the

Undercommons” is itself both an engagement with and an expression of the crises of knowledge:

an attack on the alienating, oppressive role of educational institutions; a non-strategic but

glowing affirmation of the creative and political potential of the collective work, the collective

experimentation of the many. I do not want to mobilize Moten and Harney’s work as an accurate

analysis of or a political blueprint for realms of knowledge production but as an ethically-

64 This is not to deny the frequent problem of scholarly institutions’, and practitioners’, sometime-elevation above their definitional “outside.” However, the managerial imperative translates this problematic into a rote, anti-intellectual tracing of a relationship that ought to be mapped in its complexity (on the distinction between a dynamic map and a static tracing, see Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, and Grossberg, 2014). By demanding that a supposedly homogeneous “ivory tower” be responsive or responsible to a similarly homogenized “community” of stakeholders, this imperative merely reproduces a detached institutionality that supports dominant economic-political structures.

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charged description of and parallel to what the epistemic formation is doing, what it can do and

what some of its strengths (and perhaps limitations) are. Musicians of the epistemic formation

draw on institutional and industrial apparatuses of knowledge: on their own experiences in

academia, on proliferating publications, on theory at its most imaginative or radical. Only

sometimes do they feed it back directly into established apparatuses, even as such apparatuses

benefit from their work; instead, they spin webs and circulate ideas, sometimes expressed

representationally, sometimes propelled into markedly different modes of enunciation. The

formation’s non-strategic orientation is largely unable to transform institutions—to re-articulate

institutionality, even; although some of its practitioners may be aiming for this, most experiment

with and on knowledge while abandoning struggles for its institutionalized forms. In this way,

they perhaps merely reproduce the crises of knowledge. Simultaneously, however, they

experiment with new modes of critical-political intellectualism that are not constrained by those

apparatuses that provide dedicated spaces for the production of knowledge and frustrate that

same production. They imagine new ways of mobilizing a passion for knowledge, for critical-

creative work that is irreducible to the historical and contemporary apparatuses of exclusion and

exploitation operating across academic institutions.

This dissertation’s three formations differ in many ways; notably, their sensibilities are

distinct, despite copious opportunities for mutual articulation. They all give reasons for hope and

draw lines of inspiration: Free folk’s collective-experimental sensibility embraces support, care,

and patience as conditions for a genuine opening to the discursive, social, and material richness

of the world(s); industrial’s esoteric-experimental sensibility faces fears, generates wonders, and

articulates genuine curiosity and affective complexity in ever so many realms of inquiry; the

epistemic formation’s reflexive-experimental sensibility re-articulates imagination to

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experimentation by investing in politicized knowledges and modalities of knowledge so as to lay

open and amplify the affective charge of engaged, intellectual work. What they all share in their

virtuosic navigation of the molecular is a lack of institutional durability or expandability. In all

three formations, a certain craftiness in (DIY) production and distribution has allowed artists and

listeners to carve out marginal yet widely-connected realms of creativity. Micro-labels and their

various (cassette-tape, CD-R, online) networks challenge or at least evade culture-industrial

apparatuses of capture; but their durability and/or their potential to actively generate strong,

collective alternatives to these culture-industrial apparatuses (from which they steal, and which

feed on and sometimes integrate them) are very limited. For free folk, these networks have been

a precondition and expression of an investment in multiplicity; for industrial, they served the

creation of clandestine (though often individualized) relationships in an open-ended “information

war”; and the epistemic formation often engages such networks reflexively in order to build and

bolster collaborative projects that attempt to present alternatives to, or lines of flight through and

away from, culture-industrial structures. If the epistemic formation highlights, even teaches, the

passion and joy of critical-creative work, of becomings in the direction of something like a

political intellectualism, then the question of institutionality is perhaps one particularly deserving

of the mobilization of such an affective charge in a critical-reflexive way. What is

institutionality’s realm of potential, and how can it be accessed?

A few concluding remarks

The focus of this dissertation has indeed been on the contextually specific realm of

potential that Williams calls the “pre-emergent” and that Deleuze and Guattari call the “virtual”;

it has been on cultural formations whose defining features include an investment in the search for

the virtual in the actual. In other words, these formations—sometimes more, sometimes less

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successfully—explore potential lines of flight and vectors of transformation that exist in their

historical moment. As cultural formations, they are characterized by specific configurations of

practices; these practices are enabled and distributed (while others are made impossible) by

specific sensibilities. Sensibilities are structures of feeling, logics of lived experience that relate

in complex and contradictory ways to larger affective landscapes while governing and defining

the cultural formations to and by which they are articulated. A sensibility is articulated across

hybrid enunciative assemblages—that is, specific affective-semiotic configurations. To study the

contextual conditions of the modes of collectivity and experimentation characteristic of this

dissertation’s three cultural formations, I have mapped their sensibilities across interrelated

discursive, social, and material registers. Though music and the affective investments it affords

are at the center of all of these formations, I have also attempted to do justice to enunciative

practices that are not directly musical, including, for instance, musicians’ self-representations in

interviews; after all, modes of collectivity and experimentation can be articulated in many

different registers. That said, this framework has thus far been somewhat limited in its

engagement with the institutional and the economic. Although I do not think that the framework

is “idealist”—after all, it always understands the discursive, the social, and the material as

ultimately indivisible and mutually constitutive—I do think that a sustained study of one specific

cultural formation’s conditions and effectivities at the length of this dissertation would be able to

more clearly outline the relationship between collective-experimental sensibilities and, e.g., the

political economy of music, cultural policy, and so on, even as it might lose some opportunities

for comparison between different formations.

Given its constitutive focus on the experimental and transformational, this dissertation’s

framework may also show its limitations when dealing with less explicitly “experimental”

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formations. This is not at all to say that those formations do not encounter discrepancies between

the articulated and the lived; but their investment lies less in this gap. This is also not to say that

other formations contemporaneous with this dissertation’s case studies would discover the

“same” pre-emergent or virtual in their shared actual reality (to the degree that they even share

actual realities—contemporaneity does not guarantee conjunctural identity). They may relate

differently to the forces shaping and traversing the actual; for that reason, the realms of potential

immediately accessible to them may also differ considerably. They may be less marginal, less

self-marginalizing, than the formations discussed here; or they may, in fact, be excluded,

violated, and exploited in ways that make the precarity of many of the artists discussed in this

dissertation appear comparatively negligible. Indeed, the desires of these less affirmatively

“experimental” formations may differ radically from the desires of this project’s three cultural

formations.

After all, the three formations’ investments cannot simply be generalized; and their very

real potentials and strengths cannot simply be combined into an ideal notion of collective

experimentation applicable and accessible to other formations. Nonetheless, this dissertation’s

framework constitutively embraces the idea that different virtuals can, to some extent, be

articulated to each other, or perhaps translated—provided that, to start with, the work of

conjunctural analysis is done. For instance, free folk’s ethics of relaxation appears powerful not

only because of its artistic expressions, interesting though they are to many; perhaps more

importantly from the perspective of a conjunctural analysis, this ethics of relaxation could be re-

articulated as—or simply inspire—a set of tools and orientations that draw a line of flight away

from affective hyperinflation towards more sober and patient (but dynamic and pragmatic)

engagement with the potentials of collective decision-making. Far from necessarily reproducing

320

a depoliticized, seemingly “flat” reality, such sobriety and patience may then inform careful,

active rather than reactive, work towards different futures. Such work is not experimental for the

sake of experimentation itself; instead, it takes great care to attune itself (whether affectively or

ideologically) to the potentials and limitations of different modes of embracing the unknown.

These tools and orientations drawn from experimentalist sensibilities thus may help to negotiate

larger alliances, more powerful unities in difference that draw transversal relations across the

field of the popular in order to invite people to imagine together—and to actualize their

imaginations collectively.

I have argued elsewhere (Spiegel, 2019b) that conjunctural analysis itself calls for

experimentation—must be experimental to some degree. Taking Stuart Hall’s denial of analytical

guarantees seriously implies an embrace of unknown (yet knowable!) outcomes. The work of

conjunctural analysis requires interdisciplinary collaboration that draws on transdisciplinary

resources. It picks up tools that are appropriate to a specific set of contexts without allowing the

outcome of the analysis to be pre-determined by these tools’ disciplinary emergence and

constraints. I cannot claim that free folk, industrial, and the epistemic formation are homologous

to Cultural Studies as a scholarly formation at all, or that their practices and orientations can (let

alone should) be easily translated into Cultural Studies’ own work; but I hope Cultural Studies’

own interest in experimentation and, thus, in popular-experimental formations has been well-

served by a framework attuned to manifold embraces of the unknown. As a set of contributions

to conjunctural analyses of different historical moments, this dissertation has attempted to serve

not so much a critique of ideology, but a critical-creative engagement with an affective register

as it relates to the ideological. It is a project that attempts to take affect, moods, feelings seriously

without essentializing or, hopefully, fetishizing them; and it does so across many different but

321

interrelated realms of being and becoming. It is attuned to becoming, to investments, to a

collective type of agency beyond the intentional. This attunement is not self-sufficient, however;

it must be part of a conjunctural analysis. To be attuned to transformation and potential is,

however, crucial in the long term for the political import of any conjunctural analysis.

The dissertation has thus attempted to explore some instances of what is, or was, or

appeared possible in specific conjunctural moments. Its question of potentiality is not about

vanguardism or about prophecy. The late musician, filmmaker, and theorist Tony Conrad (1997),

himself an influence on and collaborator of various artists mentioned in this dissertation, used to

suggest that “history is like music—completely in the present.” The same goes for a formation’s

realms of potential. This invocation of the “present” should not be understood as a denial of past

and future, as a reproduction of temporal alienation; instead, against the universalization of

music’s effectivities and the essentialization of dominant histories, the present stands in for

historical contingency, for temporality as defined by shifting power relations and struggles.

Similarly, the realms of potential accessed by this dissertation’s three formations—and, in a

different register, by this dissertation—are not genuinely prophetic; their actualization and their

specific ways of being actualized are not guaranteed in advance. This project invites those who

are invested in transformation, in creative lines of flight, to explore rather than fetishize the

realms of potential they encounter as they embrace the unknown (but perhaps knowable)

together.

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