A few weeks ago I spent most of a day wandering around Zone 2 with industrial extremists Whitehouse being piped straight into my calmly interested ear canals the whole time by way of an iPod and those earphones that serve as the equivalent of a ten foot concrete fence. That evening, perhaps feeling that all that industrialised angst hadn’t been quite enough, I curled up in front of David Cronenberg’s very early feature Crimes of the Future. Here I was introduced to a substance called ‘Rouge’s foam’. The narrator Adrian Tripod, floating under the brutalist ceilings of his dermatological clinic ‘The House of Skin’ (a name coined a decade and a half before Hellraiser, in those innocent times), ruminates:
Later Adrian Tripod, unable to begin repopulating the world through procreation with a 6-year-old because she has succumbed to the skin disease of which Rouge’s foam is a symptom, smears said foam onto his lips and sheds a single cobalt blue tear. I know what I’m watching next Valentine's Day.
I then thought it would make a good name for a Whitehouse-like industrial band who while at art school in 1979 had gotten hold of Crimes of the Future. I quickly realised that the name wasn’t entirely fitting as it wasn’t radically taboo, just an obscure Cronenberg reference and without that... just a bit weird really. But the foam and its name could have been an interesting metaphor for the music itself, and its effect on listeners: a messy, primal, biological matter secreted involuntarily by stricken listeners from the very organ that was supposed to facilitate genteel appreciation, while an onslaught of white noise and claustrophobic cyborg commentary engulfed them. Very Cronenberg, very Tetsuo.
Eww, gross. This image is one or two fairly significant leaps of association from an aesthetics blog that will generally aim to be neutral and liberal, but I was looking for a good name and I grabbed it quickly as I was hoping to post my review of ‘Fear of Music’ as soon as possible. In the short term, ‘Rouge’s Foam’ seemed a fitting mask to wear for an anonymous polemical review, with its connotations of ‘seeing red’ and ‘oozing a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence from the mouth’. It also suits an aesthetic I hope to talk about here, one of psychological ‘over-stimulation’.
This blog is a place where I’ll try to explore various aesthetic responses and ideas too whimsical, wild or plain indulgent to be entertained in the usual course of funded research. I say aesthetics because I’ll generally try to avoid objective interpretation, or hermeneutics – the goal won’t be to discover, understand and classify, but to suggest insights into appreciation. Neither will value-judgment figure strongly in my approach. Of course, aesthetics and interpretation are certainly not separate activities: you can’t experience a work without interpreting it, and mindfulness of a certain relative ‘validity’ of readings, once in place, can play a crucial role in appreciation. For example, now that I know that Beethoven was elderly and dying when he wrote this music, I won’t attribute its characteristics to youthfulness, and my appreciation could be richer for that. Not only this, but one's awareness of a ‘validity’ in reading a work can become (an) aesthetic in itself. I only mean to say that I will not be implying any objective accuracy for my readings, or that I have discovered some ‘truth’ inherent in the works involved.
As it was at least six years before either Throbbing Gristle or Whitehouse could have been available to provide the soundtrack for Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg made do by noisily repeating low-quality sound effects alongside the chillingly calm observations of a mentally disturbed narrator.
To this end I’ll also hope to avoid excessive theorising. I may comment on theories, but I won’t really be inventing them myself, believing in them for ever more, and hoping that this humble blog will be added to the knowledge banks of the human race. That would be formal research work. I won't be positing, for example, a full-blown theory of over-stimulation so much as an ‘aesthetics’ of over-stimulation. I just hope to explore ways of looking, listening, reading and creating. As research can enrich this however, I’ll write as well as possible against a backdrop of academic thought, particularly as a student of musicology. This is also as an insurance and a reaction against a lot of recent critical writing about music that has sometimes been painfully ignorant of current thinking in mainstream musicology.
If this all sounds ambivalent, contradictory and muddled, that’s because it may well turn out to be. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in a year’s time I’ll be posting weekly soup recipes for under £1 a day.
Before the disappearance of Antoine Rouge, there were many strange creatures here, but for some time now there has only been one, and he... I believe... I have noted a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence oozing from his ears. I am not quite certain. My interns have also noted the deadly emergence of this secretion, which we call “Rouge's foam”.
I then thought it would make a good name for a Whitehouse-like industrial band who while at art school in 1979 had gotten hold of Crimes of the Future. I quickly realised that the name wasn’t entirely fitting as it wasn’t radically taboo, just an obscure Cronenberg reference and without that... just a bit weird really. But the foam and its name could have been an interesting metaphor for the music itself, and its effect on listeners: a messy, primal, biological matter secreted involuntarily by stricken listeners from the very organ that was supposed to facilitate genteel appreciation, while an onslaught of white noise and claustrophobic cyborg commentary engulfed them. Very Cronenberg, very Tetsuo.
Eww, gross. This image is one or two fairly significant leaps of association from an aesthetics blog that will generally aim to be neutral and liberal, but I was looking for a good name and I grabbed it quickly as I was hoping to post my review of ‘Fear of Music’ as soon as possible. In the short term, ‘Rouge’s Foam’ seemed a fitting mask to wear for an anonymous polemical review, with its connotations of ‘seeing red’ and ‘oozing a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence from the mouth’. It also suits an aesthetic I hope to talk about here, one of psychological ‘over-stimulation’.
This blog is a place where I’ll try to explore various aesthetic responses and ideas too whimsical, wild or plain indulgent to be entertained in the usual course of funded research. I say aesthetics because I’ll generally try to avoid objective interpretation, or hermeneutics – the goal won’t be to discover, understand and classify, but to suggest insights into appreciation. Neither will value-judgment figure strongly in my approach. Of course, aesthetics and interpretation are certainly not separate activities: you can’t experience a work without interpreting it, and mindfulness of a certain relative ‘validity’ of readings, once in place, can play a crucial role in appreciation. For example, now that I know that Beethoven was elderly and dying when he wrote this music, I won’t attribute its characteristics to youthfulness, and my appreciation could be richer for that. Not only this, but one's awareness of a ‘validity’ in reading a work can become (an) aesthetic in itself. I only mean to say that I will not be implying any objective accuracy for my readings, or that I have discovered some ‘truth’ inherent in the works involved.
To this end I’ll also hope to avoid excessive theorising. I may comment on theories, but I won’t really be inventing them myself, believing in them for ever more, and hoping that this humble blog will be added to the knowledge banks of the human race. That would be formal research work. I won't be positing, for example, a full-blown theory of over-stimulation so much as an ‘aesthetics’ of over-stimulation. I just hope to explore ways of looking, listening, reading and creating. As research can enrich this however, I’ll write as well as possible against a backdrop of academic thought, particularly as a student of musicology. This is also as an insurance and a reaction against a lot of recent critical writing about music that has sometimes been painfully ignorant of current thinking in mainstream musicology.
If this all sounds ambivalent, contradictory and muddled, that’s because it may well turn out to be. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in a year’s time I’ll be posting weekly soup recipes for under £1 a day.
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