antagonist

I’m not a big Luke Vibert listener. Even his critically acclaimed work as Wagon Christ or Plug never did get me going so to speak. The only album that created enough discomfort to keep me listening is his collaboration with Jeremy Simmonds ‘Weirs‘. Weirs was the final accumulation of a particular sound and ambience which to me started with Dick Raaijmakers’ ‘Electronic Music’ (1981), made almost mainstream by Richard D. James, epitomized by Mike Paradinas, especially on his debut album, and finally laid to rest by Vibert & Simmonds (Wisp is just an anomaly). This is the sound of machine melancholy, the austere aestheticism contained in the weird wiring together of machines and human emotion through frequency modulation and scruffy beats.

Vibert & Simmonds Path T’Zoar (Weirs)

The track listed here is not the best track on the album but it’s certainly the one that captures the particular sound I’ve referred to best. The track builds around a simple sine-wave in an almost pure form representing the steady pulse of a heartbeat sounding through an EKG machine. In aural culture we’ve come accustomed to this particular sound escalating into the flatline, the electrocardiogram that signals death. It has become something to be expected. As the anticipation of death, the pulse is a mnemo-perceptive effect as philosopher Jean François Augoyard classified it. Entranced by the precision of its military timing, we pre-hear death itself.

The flatline is a test tone. What it tests, is the existence, or rather the presence, of vital signs. The lack thereof creates the monotonous, electronic, disaffected tonality of death. In other words, the test tone is a sonological rendering of being onto death, it is a Klang-zum-tode.

Here it slows down, opening a dysphoric contemplative sphere of claustrophobic intensity. Locked inside, circled by a high pitched, almost eerie, wavelike sound of solidified serenity, backed by a testosteron fuelled beat, the listener finds something like solace. There’s comfort in the realization that machines and emotions can be grafted onto each other, that there is beauty in and beyond the ‘machinic’.