sigur rós
When we talk of worlding, we mean that we can make music from things surrounding us, from our ambient environs, and this means as well that things surrounding us equally suggest the music. And in the tension between these two forces—perhaps we can figure these forces as centripetal and centrifugal—the music comes into being, on the one hand a product of these tensions, on the other reflective of them. We particularly see this in musical production and experimentation. Our discussion of the Flaming Lips highlights this dual tension. Their parking lot and boom-box experiments, for instance, highlight how audience, band, and technology can be interlinked for distributed forms of production, but it is equally the case that in hearing such music, we hear the production forms that are involved.
Our example of the band Yes demonstrated how high conceptualization and artistic vision, technical mastery, otherworldly musical landscapes with one foot in the tradition (classical) and the other in the future possible (wherever their muse took them), technology and technicians, fellow artistic travelers like Roger Dean, and a burgeoning Green movement ideology all combined to evoke a sound-world. But such a world is not limited to sound alone; sound stands as the key organizational motif and central artistic goal, but at the same time, it both reflects and is reflective of a world.
These kinds of practices redistribute, remediate, music's place in the culture. Music works with the world of production: it is distributed, participatory, and contextualized, and in hearing it, reading about it, and viewing the multimedia forms it connects up with, it communicates that world to us. Consider as a different example from Yes or The Flaming Lips the 2002 album from the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The album is entitled—if one can call this a title—( ). There is no information included with the CD. There is a plastic slipcover with the band's name on it and a big cutout of parentheses, which lets music store staffers know where to file it and customers know who created it, but once one tears off the shrink wrap, removes the slipcover, and looks inside, there are nothing but strange, abstract photos of plants at water's edge, reproduced in highly stylized shades of white, grey, and black.
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There are no song titles, no identifying marks, no list of personnel. The only information besides that given on the slipcover is on the back cover of the enclosed CD booklet (so that it cannot be seen until one purchases and opens up the album), where they include a website: "Sigur-Ros.com." With that, the album's title, an empty set of parentheses, takes on far greater significance. First, it is certainly a reference to the music. Ambient, sweeping, long, abstract songs. Indecipherable lyrics, comprised a mixture of made-up words they call Hopelandic (although on other albums they frequently sing in Icelandic). The vocals are high-pitched, angelic, unearthly; the guitars, frequently bowed instead of picked or strummed, are less chords or notes than blankets of chilly beautiful distortion. The parentheses indicate that both nothing and everything is evoked in this music; we can fill in the meaning; we can fill in the parentheses. And yet, the album seems to suggest, this connects to who we are, to our world today; it reflects and is reflective of existential comportments to self, other, and world. Less abstractly, it connects to technology.
In actuality, the songs all have names; for instance, track four is called "Njósnavélin," which translates (unlike the untranslatable Hopelandic vocals) as "The Spy Machine." Such information is readily available on band and fan websites, where we can find personnel, producers, song titles, and more. This suggests that we could look at the album and the music it contains as one half of the parentheses, and the technologically-enabled websites and fan discourse as being the other half. The parentheses mark out a world. The album itself, the production of a band and its network of human and non-human agents, is one half of that parentheses; the other half is the audience and its network of human and non-human agents. The in-between is the always-in-creation set of meanings and relations between the two—and it too has its network of human and non-human agents.
