Unfaithfulness to sound,
language, & both plunged
into a kind
of chatroom where
one tries to iterate
the meaning of the other &
fails. Hence the
jitteriness of this panorama,
Arigato.
On the outside,
In the windows where
the sewers
become visible in the
presence of another
body — the computer’s.
In the inside, uncovering
different forces between
objects & their relationships.
The same for sampled sound,
i.e., painting in an infinite
neighborhood of spacetime.
Fragrant vegetation,
bustling metro stations, busy
internet searches from which
we cannot escape; these
excesses, the excess fat, the
usable trim, the extra pooches of
oozing noise; this pop made just
to get more pop out there, these
YouTube videos made just to get
more data out there, coupled
with all this schizophrenic social
media sharing, wherein we upload
our lives, sharing our face in
real-time, on FaceBook, on FaceTime,
on SnapChat. Where does all this data
go? In the trash, I guess, hence
Arigato’s pop garbology.
In this world, recycling & composting are
allowed, despite copyright
laws explicitly saying that sampling,
which DJWWWW elevates to its own
bustling art form, is still punishable.
Arigato begins macrosmatic,
& doesn’t cease smelling
out all forms of media, draining
the flood & drinking the flood-water,
utilizing the chump change, constellating
the disparates, vibrating the vibes. If
hip-hop’s samples are the aesthetic
par excellence of Sampling
— yes, with a capital S — then
Arigato performs
its anti-thesis: an anti-aesthetic
metanarrative, a digital watercolor
drained of a foreground, background,
middle ground, & lyrics. We do hear
voices, or rather, voicings: a metalanguage
vacuum-packed for zero-gravity
conditions, sculpturally, balletically.
Names come out of this vibrating
nothingness: Chief Keef, Carly Rae
Jepsen, Chewbacca. Then others touch
down, arriving in the middle of the
battlefield energized, but unsure, like
Gang Gang Dance & Animal Collective.
The sounds of Arigato
move in every direction, on
all sides, with the ponderous
frenzy of a ancient city or colosseum,
bursting, merging, or avoiding one
another, taking up sonic mass,
drowning in the vaporization of their
own phenomena. If you want to don
your trench coat & tommy gun,
take up thy magnifying glass &
investigate this album’s microcosms;
it beckons you forth, like the ring in
Lord of the Rings. But,
you don’t have to, of course.
Because, like a fresh crime scene,
with footprints & fingerprints,
there’s a narrative to all the commotion,
juice-pressing you into its Japanese-style
noir-collage. This album
investigates, as much as
it can, the complexity of a future
with no future. Sampling becomes not
a nostalgic weapon but a surgical
one: placing a sound here, or there,
with tweezers so small
that the sounds get lost in the digital
stream’s incision, the digital beams of
light lighting our faces on our smart
phones. In these kinds of blizzards,
there are escalators, escape routes,
& emergency exits: ways for us to
cling onto the sample, using it
topographically, or, vice-versa,
passing it by, & getting
entangled in the mania.
Psychic & cognitive rhythms gush
out: postfuturism cybertime.
The perception of temporal
progression, of non-drum sounds
repeated, stimulates our short-term
memory. Neurological telepathy,
synthetic emotion.
Zaum, Zaum; a postsymbolic
communication, summoning
etymologies & origins of
utterances unclear to us. From
the hallucinatory, to
the real-world, & back.
The cause of the illusion, but not
the illusion itself, a.k.a. sampling.
Chains of musical automatisms
perish underneath the sampler’s
gaze. Sound as garbage collection,
as ocean-purification; sound as
untethering the sea turtle’s neck from the
plastic 6-pack ring. In this medium,
every sound eventually vanishes &
that vanishing really stays with
us. We remember how they disappear.
Arigato challenges us to
rethink the symbolism of how
we remember, & how we think,
during times of information overload or
hyperproductivity. Welcome to this
pinball machine, welcome to this
anti-virus software, welcome to this
monstrosity, now part of daily life,
this proliferation of URLs & the self,
split into multiples, but, unlike Whitman,
not containing multitudes, only just a kernel,
divided into post-kernels: a turtle put
into a gigantic food processor, shell &
all. Arigato severed from
affectivity, searches for the infinite
syntax that can tell its story.
Arigato a.k.a.,
thank you.
More about: djwwww
