Figure with Meat
Introduction by
Marco Torres
The buzzing resonance is so familiar, so… electro-acoustic. Every generation: A drone from the incoming cohort of scruffy contact mic aficionados who all sound the same as their ponytailed elders. Without a doubt, with absolute certainty, I had already decided in my mind what kind of thing this piece of music was going to be and what kind of experience it was that I would be having as I sat down to listen. To predict the future accurately one need only close oneself off to new experiences.
I listened with the unreceptive attitude of someone who just woke up groggy, until a couple of minutes in, when I was gently jarred to attentive wakefulness by the familiar becoming less familiar. Without changing too much, the high-pitched noise had turned itself into a kind of dulcet strobing glimmer. By gradual variations in timbre, the music changed from nails-on-chalkboard to honey-glazed ululation, but before I could register how exactly the sound had changed, the harshness returned. For the next twenty minutes the thing oscillated between these two poles of sweetness and harshness, all the while passing through a series of gradual permutations apparently at random.
It was the deliberate arbitrariness of what the sound was doing that got me to pay attention — this Brownian motion of buzzings, whirs, and glissandos. What this unfolding “it” was, I was not certain. It did not offer many clues as to the logic of its path: its origin and destination, its instrumentation, its feelings, or its themes. Despite the sense of sensory intimacy it produced, the thing remained inscrutably alien. As a creature it would certainly be small, high-frequency, like a hummingbird with its thousand wing beats per minute and its sweetness-seeking proboscis. There was something venomous about it as well, but there is no such thing in this world as a venomous bird. Maybe a bee, then, or some kind of sweet-toothed anthropoid.
The listener must give in to the music’s internal temporal development. This is how I listened to the first part, letting the thing grow and change on its own. But since I knew I had to have something to say about it, I kept searching for something to hold on to: a melody, a beat, a character, a scene, an episode, a theme, etc. So I went on and treated the second part with the patience with which one approaches pornography.
In his 2020 review of Georges Bataille’s 1928 foray into porn, The Story of Eye, the composer of the piece, Grant Tyler, wrote that “it reads like a porn film... With each short chapter, one sifts through the narrative in order to find the juicy treat, and one is never disappointed.”
Indeed, I was scrubbing through the timeline in search of knowledge.
Tyler goes on: “Besides potentially serving as an appendicular illustration for Freudian ideas about desire and regression, it does little to jar the reader out of the dream of reality, instead opting to immerse him or her in new ideas for sexual experimentation.”
As a composer, Tyler is not interested in using his music to teach the reader Freud or “new ideas for sexual experimentation.” He rightly seeks to make the kind of work that will “jar the reader out of the dream of reality.” Nevertheless, the sadomasochism of making or listening to this kind of noisy electro-acoustic music could be commented on. But I will respect the artist’s refusal to impoverish his work by making it useful as an educational device.
Another thing to comment on could be the music’s historical precedents. Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Carl Stone, Eliane Radigue, Yasunao Tone, Maryanne Amacher, and many, many more.
The word “historical” gives one pause. Does this music, at this point in history, have a history? Does it have historical predecessors, or does it merely have evolutionary ancestors? Has this kind of droning abstraction gone through purposeful, self-conscious, self-transformations since its emergence in the third quarter of the 20th century, or has it adapted aimlessly — stochastically — to the Brownian motions of its changing cultural environment? Certainly, the audiophile listeners, record collectors, and Wikipedia editors of this kind of thing are less like historians than taxonomists. Like entomologists or marine biologists, they collect, inspect, and categorize specimens, cataloguing them by subspecies such as “minimal synth,” “ambient,” “glitch,” “power electronics,” “drone metal,” “field recording,” “spectralism,” “amateur,” “interracial,” etc.
The best possible description for the piece is one line from the poem by Billie Chernicoff that comes with the download: “The nothing inside of a bell, unfurling…”
The words paint a picture: Freed from its resonant chamber, the sound unfolds, alien and delicate like a crustacean freed from its shell.
Euaugaptilus filigerus the copepod family of crustaceans. Illustration by Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1924).
written while listening to Figure with Meat, music by Grant Edward Tyler
by Billie Chernicoff
Featured in Blazing Stadium, Issue 7.
You can’t help a woman
humming —
or whistling the stripped down
melody. Nor can I
not hear her, a surge
in the foreground, a bell
close up, foreplay,
infinite,
infinitesimal.
What meat do you
mean —
the tongue?
A heart
beside itself,
twisting around itself,
breaking — a dance,
falling, a dance.
It becomes
even less —
origin,
first thing —
a swell I can’t help
calling feeling —
and can’t help feeling,
or calling.
Sound of no thing,
the nothing inside of
a bell, unfurling
a rushing train,
twilight —
tinnitus,
tintinnabulation.
O haunted Poe,
walking the old streets
of Baltimore —
Amity, Mulberry, down
to the harbor, hectic
meat in love.
Horror, the hair of
the back of the neck
erect, to tremble
or shake —
with (religious) awe.
You can’t help
his nerves
or the birds, or a river,
can’t help our brief span
of attention, a quiver,
a tell-tale heart,
or our fatal lack of
imagination,
our not being able
to get across —
Berryman
tilting,
Celan leaping,
Virginia
drowning herself
in the Ouse, stones
in her pockets,
and April,
who can help April?
Entends-tu by Yves Tanguy. 1937
I can’t help hearing
a siren,
a heartbeat,
the hero’s
heart tied to a mast.
The screen goes dark
and I can’t help
feeling alarm,
as if I’d been watching
the music, and not
merely staring
and hearing a heart
on its own —
minimal, animal, alien,
criminal.
The sound of what happens
between the stations,
Christ or Orpheus
tuning in —
because anything
might instruct a person,
anyone befall her.
The heart is a figure
8, meat —
from the root
meaning wet —
unlimited streaming,
the muse, a bowed bell.
Still from La Jetée, by Chris Marker, 1962.