Aestheticizing the Between: Ambient Grindcore as Practice-Based Inquiry into a Poetics of Resonance and More-than-Human Feeling
Jamie Stephenson
Abstract
This paper explores themes of liminality and interstices, consonant with Lola Olufemi’s idea of “activat[ing] the bond of the otherwise” (2021). Operating between the practical and the theoretical, I employ two compositions by my “ambient grindcore” project, Hermetic Abyss, to aestheticize themes of “between”-ness on several levels. Where extreme metal bands have employed elements from “non-metal” idioms in their work(s)—e.g., (dark) ambient, industrial, free improvisation, noise, drone—such engagements have tended towards the liminal. Works such as Bolt Thrower’s War Master (1991); Morbid Angel’s Blessed are the Sick (1991); Sepultura’s Arise (1991); and Napalm Death’s “Discordance” (1992) use this aesthetic via intros, segues, or outros. While these practitioners use non-idiomatic aesthetics sparingly, the vernacular/art music of Hermetic Abyss inverts this, synecdochically, turning such practice into a compositional total. The experimental-metal intersection becomes the whole. Utilising a musicological analysis of these extreme metal texts and my own artistic practice, I also explore cultural “between”-ness. Both pieces were composed via file-sharing and mutual reconstruction on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, between me in York and experimental guitarist, Miguel Peréz in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. My practice emerges from my philosophical research into nonbinary articulations of reality through a poetics of resonance, an experimental affect theory that reaches for the more-than-human, through a broad (and speculative) conceptualisation of “feeling” (Olufemi, 2021), adjacent to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas around “touch” (2008).
Link to practice: "Hermetic Abyss" Bandcamp link
Themes: aesthetics, musicology, grindcore, ambience, liminality, poetics, resonance, globalisation, subculture, vernacular music, art music.
'One of the most important decisions made by philosophers concerns the production or destruction of gaps in the cosmos. That is to say, the philosopher can either declare that what appears to be one is actually two, or that what seems to be two is actually one.'
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) [i]
Introduction: “Auditioning” and “Ambience” in Theory and Practice
Driven by discontent with a certain reductive tone in Anthropocene discourses, my research investigates post-Enlightenment philosophy’s engagement with the nature of reality, employing sound as an ontological starting point. I seek to provide a critical perspective on Western thought’s tendency to impose and privilege reductive binaries (e.g., presence-absence, human-nonhuman, subject-object), on the grounds that philosophy’s primarily visualist grammar perpetuates a problematic anthropological bias. I do so through a hermeneutic methodology I call auditioning, broadly defined as a questioning of the nature of being via aesthetic tropes associated with sound (reverberation, tactility, reciprocity). Following this, my associated idea of ambient metaphysics offers a means of de-binarising ontology, by rethinking connective distances, and aestheticising them through sonority.
In terms of artistic practice, Hermetic Abyss, a collaborative project with me as its one constant, operates in a theoretically consonant musical idiom I have termed “ambient grindcore”. For the specific pieces of practice under discussion here—the two compositions which comprise my release, Plague Ambience (2024)—Miguel Peréz and I worked in tandem. Peréz is an experimental guitarist, based in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, who records and performs as the Skull Mask, among other aliases. After becoming social media acquaintances, we were drawn to collaboration over a shared interest in extreme metal and experimental music. Both Plague Ambience pieces—“Vulpine Chasms” and “Apathy Carrier”—are influenced by the interstitial experiments of several extreme metal bands which employ “non-metal” idioms—e.g., (dark) ambient, industrial, free improvisation, noise, drone—in their work at a liminal level. These elements often manifest as introductory and conclusory passages, standalone interstitial pieces, or segues.
While practitioners such as Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, and Sepultura employ non-idiomatic aesthetics liminally—that is, such moments of experimentation are just that: atypical of their usual artistic practice—the vernacular/art music of Hermetic Abyss inverts this, synecdochically, such that the practice is turned into a compositional total. The intersection of experimental music and extreme metal becomes the whole. Herein, “ambience” again becomes the principal compositional element of the project. As well as the intersection of two seemingly polarised musical genres, Hermetic Abyss allows me to explore a cultural register of “between”-ness in relation to the affordances and disempowerment inherent to late capitalism. Rather than a pejorative critique of Anthropocene globalisation, I sound out the productive tonalities of “mondialisation [“world-forming”]”, as postulated by French metaphysician, Jean-Luc Nancy.[ii] With this idea of mondialisation, Nancy proposes an intermediary zone of contiguous existence wherein differentiation occurs, transferring philosophical attentions away from “world” as thing or object, and towards worldly processes of becoming, of being-in-action. This is in harmony with Lola Olufemi’s “experiments in feeling”.[iii]
“[W]hy does one have to determine ‘access to’ a priori as the only way of making-up-a-world and of being-toward-the-world?”, asks Nancy, “[w]hy could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being-between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without ‘access’?”[iv] Here, Nancy offers a neat summary of some of the main principles of his ontological system. Being-among and being-between convey the import of community, a derivation of Martin Heidegger's Mitsein (being-with) that bears Nancy’s singular-plural being—existence articulated as both collective and interstitial. Being-against, meanwhile, expresses the duality of remoteness and contact through the dichotomy of touch—a major Nancean theme—and its associated tenets of weight and mass.
“Ambience” and the More-than-Human
Momentum has gathered concerning the question of the nature of being in those postmillennial bodies of philosophical theory associated with metaphysical realism.[v] In their attempts to articulate the nature of existence, some contemporary thinkers have—through either condonement or retaliation—inherited the theme of a lacuna between subjects and objects from Immanuel Kant.[vi] Moreover, this gap is substantiated primarily as a rift separating human consciousness and the world. Consequently, twenty-first century continental realism has attempted to redress the impasse between epistemology (the study of knowledge) and ontology (the study of existence), by re-examining what constitutes the “in-itself” of reality, as it persists independent to thought.
The current rehabilitation of the question of the nature of being is due, in part, to French theorist Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of “correlationism” (itself a recapitulated critique of Kant).[vii] Correlationism has been conflated with an associated “speculative” turn in ontological realism.[viii] Meillassoux’s definition of correlationism—offered in his pioneering essay, After Finitude (2006)—proposes that humans “only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other”.[ix] Correlationist thought positions humans and world in an indivisible union, with each term impossible to be thought exclusively.
The human-world relation has become metonymic of all relations, as far as how the real has been written about and thought, such that the unification of the terms “human” and “nonhuman” somehow completes the composition of being in its totality. This conviction, that all the vast and innumerable remainder of being—i.e., all things in existence that are not human—can be adequately abridged to, and contained by, the term “nonhuman”, is reductive. The belief, implicit or otherwise, that humans carry more ethical and ontological weight than all other entities, perpetuates a top-down hierarchical system of exceptionalism. Even now, in the Anthropocene era of humanity’s awareness of its injurious global impact, a rhetoric of exceptionalism is perpetuated. It is precisely at this impasse that ambient metaphysics emerges, as a potential exit from such ontological neglect.
I propose that any firm distinction between oppositional binaries such as those heard in philosophical discourse (e.g., substance and process) is not only reductive but ethically questionable. By contrast, I argue that being is neither solely one nor the other but is just as much composed from the ambience between such terms. I define “ambience” as an affectual (rather than epistemological) mode of being. It is born from, and subsequently perpetuates, the shared communality inherent to sound’s relationality and radical reciprocity. These sonic registers of “ambience” are also intended to imply a balancing out of philosophy’s aesthetic vocabulary, an equilibrium between poetic and affectual allegories. This is partly what I hope is articulated by the two pieces on Plague Ambience. I’m really interested in the idea of trying to hold onto the negative as a site of possibility in its own right, rather than as some pejoratively-framed zone to be passed through on the way to some “better” thing or place. Might this be called something like a “para-teleology” or “meta-teleology”, whereby ontological import is placed more on the process rather than the end result?
In this manner, rethinking the “between” of Kant’s human-world relation, through the aesthetic tropes of sound—as resonance, as ambience—allows for a distinguishing and separating of boundaries; a transversality which productively unites and differentiates, delineating contexts, while also enabling their contact, their bordering of one another. As such, ambience at once divides and connects, offering a participatory site, or sites, of co-relation, where seemingly contiguous entities, events, and thresholds, intersect. In constituting this transitional inter-zone, ambience performs a paradoxical function, lending a type of finitude that is punctuative, the quasi-partitioning of continuity into a discontinuity, a rhythm, conjoining individuality and totality. This “rhythmizing” of being (to borrow Nancy’s own repurposing of Nicolas Abraham’s “rythmisante” concept) is the amplification of particular beings out of a general ontological milieu, what Nancy calls the “imposing [of] form on the continuous”.[x] Nancy’s ideas emerge from Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the ‘between’ [Zwischen]”.[xi] That is, a special harmony—the “apartness of an expanse that is, at the same time, held together”—similar to Heidegger’s concept of the “‘nearing nearness’” or “‘nearhood’ [Nahheit]” discussed in “Time and Being” (1969), stressing a close proximity that need not result in direct contact.[xii]
The term “ambience” (borrowed from the French noun “ambiance”, meaning “surroundings”) allows for an aestheticization of being which the ascendant tropes of ocularcentric rhetoric do not. The adjective “ambient” is rooted in the Latin “ambientem”, the present participle of “ambire” meaning “go about” and is associated with “surrounding”.[xiii] Ambience lends itself to theories of the more-than-human, facilitating an aestheticization of being beyond Western post-Cartesian philosophical tenets which privilege “our” perceptual and epistemological forms. Ambience also works at resisting human exceptionalism by acknowledging other animals/senses. Indeed, “ambience”—broadly defined—has ecological associations with Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the “Umwelt” (“surrounding world”, “environment”), defined as an organism’s “outer boundary”, a subjective spatio-temporal frame of reference.[xiv] Susanne K. Langer follows Uexküll, with her idea of organisms having species-specific sign-systems she terms “ambient” or “open ambient”.[xv] In this manner, ambient metaphysics is the objective which my proposed methodology of “auditioning” strives to convey. Together, auditioning and ambient metaphysics offer productive new ways for contemporary realism to apprehend the nature of being, ways which do not compartmentalise reality into either substance or process, nor reify the symbiosis of consciousness and the ocular as the principal ground of a subject-centric being.
All beings give themselves and receive each other via the reciprocal tactility of touch achieved through a trembling. Each compositional body is its own whole—its own world, even—within a mêlée of differential wholes (worlds), which only exist as this networked field of frequential intensities, through the perpetual pressures and forces of touch. Bodies become compositional themselves, assemblages of registers of other bodies which facilitate their subsistence, in the transimmanent process of mondialisation, of world-forming. Amplifying Nancy’s sentiment that touch is the “transcendental” of sense (e.g., that touch subtends all existential modes, including sound)—Being as “sounding” is analogous to Being as a touching, a communal register of Being between beings as touch.[xvi] This “touch” is productively expressed via the tropes of sound.
Ambient Grindcore and Aesthetic Methodologies
As absurdist musical taxonomies go, “ambient grindcore” is named so only in quasi-jest. It is a conflation of art music (“ambient”) and vernacular music (“grindcore”), a term I originally coined as a placeholder. Only retrospectively have I realised that here, too, “ambient grindcore” performs the very holding together apart that Heidegger alludes to above. Closely associated with the early solo work of Brian Eno, precursors of ambient music can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “furniture music” (“Musique d'ameublement”) of French composer, Erik Satie.[xvii] Satie’s pieces such as “Trois Gymnopédies” (1888) and “Trois Gnossiennes” (1890), characterised by their minimalism (and what David Toop refers to as “concise melodic charm”), anticipate Eno’s longer instrumental compositions, including “The Heavenly Music Corporation” (1973) with guitarist Robert Fripp, and “Discreet Music” (1975). Almost diametrically opposed to ambient, grindcore (as an extreme metal sub-genre) is rooted in a rhizomatic network of adjacent musical styles, including (but not limited to) punk, hardcore, d-beat, crust, and death metal.[xviii] Its aesthetic tropes include “short, fast songs, characterised by punk riffs, extremely fast drumming (‘blastbeats’) and screamed vocals.”[xix] Grindcore’s lyrical content is typically political and usually left-wing in orientation (being particularly critical of late capitalism). Perhaps the quintessential grindcore band is Birmingham’s Napalm Death, who formed in 1981, and released the seminal debut album, Scum, in 1987, featuring twenty-eight songs performed in thirty-three minutes.
Napalm Death’s importance in the context of this paper is manifold as several of their past and present members intersect with many other experimental genres. These include former vocalist Nic Bullen who formed the initially beat-driven, and later ambient, Scorn project (with ex-Napalm drummer, Mick Harris) before pursuing more experimental voice compositions. Alongside Scorn, Harris would go on to perform in Painkiller, a free jazz-extreme metal trio with saxophonist/composer, John Zorn and bassist Bill Laswell, as well as creating extreme minimalist drone music as Lull. Former guitarist Justin Broadrick pioneered industrial metal with Godflesh and has worked in genres as varied as dub (Techno Animal, with Kevin Martin) and power electronics (Final). Napalm Death’s longstanding bassist, Shane Embury has also worked in industrial metal (with Meathook Seed) and presently creates ambient electronica as Dark Sky Burial.
Napalm Death were one of the key influences on Plague Ambience by Hermetic Abyss, specifically the introductory noise-industrial piece “Discordance” which opens their fourth album, Utopia Banished (1992). The instrumental is one minute and twenty-six seconds of distorted guitar noise, monitor hum, and feedback, mixed with audio samples from John Carpenter’s science fiction horror film, They Live (1988). Similar compositions which warrant particular mention as influences on Peréz and I (in the production of ‘Vulpine Chasms’ and ‘Apathy Carrier’) include the dark ambient intro and outro to Bolt Thrower’s War Master (1991), “Intro” from Blessed are the Sick (1991) by Morbid Angel, the enjoining industrial-tribal musical passages from Sepultura’s Arise (1991), the noise-drone assemblage “Crawlspace” which closes Brutal Truth’s Need to Control (1994), and “Torching Koroviev” by Khanate from their self-titled debut album (2001).[xx] Both these Hermetic Abyss pieces were constructed via filesharing and mutual reconstruction by Peréz in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and me in York, England. Peréz provided original recordings (guitar and bass riffs, plus noise and feedback) which I then processed and transformed through various digital signal processing methods. I would then email the works-in-progress back to Peréz for him to provide his own production embellishments and additional source material. These exchanges continued over several months until we were both satisfied with the results.
In several respects the music of Hermetic Abyss represents a sono-aesthetic accompaniment to my ontological notions of “auditioning” and “ambience”. Elsewhere, I have written about my theoretical practice as a “poetics of resonance” or “sontology”. [xxi] All these terms are in some sense tautologous, prescribing a thinking through sound, by proposing ambience and the aesthetic tropes of sonority as an alternative means of interpretation and an agent of methodological reorientation. The objective of this is to displace the anthropic province associated with the subjective conundrum of interpreting reality. In its accommodating and structuring, ambience is at once positive and negative; indeed, it is the “/” in the equation “+/–”, such that the modes of its intelligibility waver between presence and absence. In a grammatical context, “/” (or virgule) is a polysemous marker used to denote a myriad of structural functions including opposition, ratio, and choice. In such dialectic relations as these, the virgule (“/”) gains discursive authority from its interstitial colonisation and regulation of narrative space and time, between poles and paradigms. Such a correlation is amplified when one considers that a more vernacular name for the virgule is “slash”, connoting a temporal, spatial, or conceptual rift. Nevertheless, given that it is also figurative of elision, it seems more fitting to think the virgule not in terms of a slash, but instead as a healing ligature indicative of the slash. Neither the divider nor the division, the virgule is, to employ a more sonorous metaphor, the lingering echo of dissection. It is a newly constituted threshold, marking the fresh connecting points of two formerly disparate tectonics (be they conceptual, temporal, or narrative), the interpolation of a disjunctive break between divides. As such, Plague Ambience performs an adjacent rejection of binary thinking, a refutation of Graham Harman’s reductive postulate that "the philosopher can either declare that what appears to be one is actually two, or that what seems to be two is actually one."
In sum: the amplification of the “between” in my musical practice is consonant with (and emerges from) my philosophical research into nonbinary articulations of reality, tangentially enjoining the practical with the theoretical. My proposed poetics of resonance, as an experimental affect theory, reaches for the more-than-human, through a broad (and speculative) conceptualisation of, and experiments in, “feeling” in harmony with Lola Olufemi’s thought, and adjacent to Nancean’s ideas around “touch”.[xxii] Ambience (in its ontological register) and the aesthetic/compositional methodologies involved in ambient grindcore each abide by Olufemi’s “bond of the otherwise”, which she elaborates as having “a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity I want us to fall down together.”[xxiii]
References
Abraham, Nicolas, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation and Psychoanalysis, trans. by Benjamin Thigpen and Nicholas T. Rand (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995)
Barnhart, Robert K., (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (London: Chambers, 2011)
Bolt Thrower, 1991, War Master, Earache MOSH 29CD, compact disc.
Brassier, Ray, Hamilton Grant, Iain, Harman, Graham, and Meillassoux, Quentin, “Speculative Realism”, in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Volume III: Unknown Deleuze and Speculative Realism, ed. by Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012, orig. 2007), pp. 307-449.
Brutal Truth, 1994, “Crawlspace”, Need to Control, Earache MOSH 110CD, compact disc.
Eno, Brian, 1975, “Discreet Music”, Discreet Music, Editions EG EEGCD 23, compact disc.
Fripp, Robert, and, Eno, Brian, 1973, “The Heavenly Music Corporation”, (No Pussyfooting), Editions EG EEGCD2, compact disc.
Gaikis, Lona, “Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human”, in, Open Philosophy, Vol. 4, Iss. 1 (2021), pp. 149–161.
Granholm, Kennet, “Popular Music and the Occult”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, ed. by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2017), pp. 198-209.
Harman, Graham, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, UK, and Washington, USA: Zer0 Books, 2012)
Heidegger, Martin, “Time and Being”, in On Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972, orig. 1969), pp. 1-24.
---., Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking; and, Logic: Heraclitus's Doctrine of the Logos, trans. by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018, orig. 1979)
Hermetic Abyss, 2024, Plague Ambience, Bandcamp, https://hermeticabyss.bandcamp.com/album/plague-ambience
Innis, Robert E., “Peirce’s Categories and Langer’s Aesthetics: On Dividing the Semiotic Continuum”, in, Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan./Jun. 2013)
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Marcus Weigelt, (London: Penguin, 2007, orig. 1781)
Khanate, 2001, “Torching Koroviev”, Khanate, Southern Lord SUNN14, compact disc.
Langer, Susanne K., Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling Vol. II (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972)
Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (London and New York: 2008, orig. 2006)
Morbid Angel, 1991, Blessed are the Sick, Earache MOSH 31CD, compact disc.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Sense of the World, trans. by Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, orig. 1993)
---., Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandell, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, orig. 2002),
---., The Creation of the World, or Globalization, trans. by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007)
---., Corpus, trans. by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)
Napalm Death, 1987, Scum, Earache MOSH3CD, compact disc.
---., 1992, Utopia Banished, Earache MOSH 53CD, compact disc.
Olufemi, Lola, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (London: Hajar Press, 2021)
Overell, Rosemary, Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes: Cases from Australia and Japan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Satie, Erik, 2001, “Trois Gymnopédies”, Gymnopédies - A Selection of Piano Pieces, Naxos 8.550205, compact disc.
---., 2001, “Trois Gnossiennes”, Gymnopédies - A Selection of Piano Pieces, Naxos 8.550205, compact disc.
Sepultura, 1991, Arise, Roadracer RO 9328-2, compact disc.
Stephenson, Jamie, “Hermeneutics of ‘Auditioning’: Contemporising Tensions between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ through a Poetics of Resonance”. In Caiete Echinox, 47, December 2024, pp. 17-31.
Toop, David, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001)
Venomous Echoes, 2024, “Abhoth Multiplied to Thy Millennium”, Split Formations and Infinite Mania, I, Voidhanger, IVR234CD, compact disc.
von Uexküll, Jakob, “The Theory of Meaning”, trans. by Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner, in Semiotica, Vol. 42., No. 1 (1982)
Endnotes:
[i] Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, UK, and Washington, USA: Zer0 Books, 2012), p. 2, original emphasis.
[ii] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or Globalization, trans. by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007)
[iii] Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (London: Hajar Press, 2021), p. 8.
[iv] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. by Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, orig. 1993), p. 59.
[v] By “realism” I mean the opinion that a “world” (material or otherwise) exists autonomous to any consciousness of it. Defined thus, theories of “reality” (plus allied terms including “the real”, “being”, and “existence”), have been developed in several directions, including dualism, rationalism, materialism, idealism, and empiricism.
[vi] Kant distinguishes between “noumenon”, the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) outside thought, and “phenomenon”, the thing as it appears to consciousness. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Marcus Weigelt, (London: Penguin, 2007, orig. 1781), p. 258, B306. This conceptual staple of the continental tradition—the phenomenal-noumenal dyad—has routinely been conveyed through aesthetic metaphors which represent the sensual reception of the thing-in-itself via inherently specular terms.
[vii] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (London and New York: 2008, orig. 2006), p. 5.
[viii] Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism”, in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Volume III: Unknown Deleuze and Speculative Realism, ed. by Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012, orig. 2007), pp. 307-449.
[ix] Meillassoux, After Finitude, 2008, p. 7.
[x] Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandell, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, orig. 2002), p. 39. I am indebted to Nancy’s reference in Listening—n.34, p. 74.—to the work of Abraham for the concept of “rhythmizing” (rythmisante). Nicolas Abraham’s Rhythms: On the Work, Translation and Psychoanalysis, trans. by Benjamin Thigpen and Nicholas T. Rand (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 21.
[xi] Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking; and, Logic: Heraclitus's Doctrine of the Logos, trans. by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018, orig. 1979), p. 116. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) trans. by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 269.
[xii] Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being”, in On Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972, orig. 1969), p. 15.
[xiii] Robert K. Barnhart, (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (London: Chambers, 2011), p. 29; 28.
[xiv] Jakob von Uexküll, “The Theory of Meaning” trans. by Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner, in Semiotica, Vol. 42., No. 1 (1982), p. 47, ff.
[xv] Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling Vol. II (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 14-15, ff. Robert E. Innis has linked Langer’s wider ideas concerning “feeling” as an emergent property of natural processes to Charles Sanders Peirce’s “infinite semiosis”. Robert E. Innis, “Peirce’s Categories and Langer’s Aesthetics: On Dividing the Semiotic Continuum”, in, Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan./Jun. 2013), p. 5. Langer’s thought has been applied explicitly to the sonic by Lona Gaikis “Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human”, in, Open Philosophy, Vol. 4, Iss. 1 (2021), pp. 149–161.
[xvi] Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Elliptical Sense’, trans. by Jonathan Derbyshire, in A Finite Thinking, ed. by Simon Sparks (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 110.
[xvii] David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001), p. 197.
[xviii] An approximate lineage of genre influences leading to grindcore would be heavy metal→ punk→ hardcore→ d-beat→ crust→ grindcore. For the uninitiated, “d-beat” is a particular brand of hardcore punk named in part as homage to the UK band, Discharge, and their brutally minimalist style of drumming. “Crust” is similar in style to d-beat, while the former’s lyrical content tends towards the radically environmental, anti-capitalist, feminist, anarchist, and animal rightist. Crust and grindcore were initially used interchangeably as descriptors.
[xix] Rosemary Overell, Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes: Cases from Australia and Japan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 2.
[xx] Dark ambient can be classed as one of the “post-industrial styles” of music that “Throbbing Gristle influenced and [which] was fused with other musical styles”. Kennet Granholm, “Popular Music and the Occult”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, ed. by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg (London, Oxford, New York, Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic 2018), p. 206. The nomenclature of contemporary underground extreme metal is notoriously cryptic and contractive (terms like “blackgaze” or “grindgaze” abound, whereby the “-gaze” of “shoegaze” is appended to the “black” of “black metal”, or “grind” of “grindcore”, respectively, as a means of describing hybrid music which pertains to genre tropes of either field). I am thinking here of something like “Abhoth Multiplied to Thy Millennium” by Venomous Echoes from their album, Split Formations and Infinite Mania (2024).
[xxi] Jamie Stephenson, “Hermeneutics of ‘Auditioning’: Contemporising Tensions between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ through a Poetics of Resonance”, in Caiete Echinox, 47, December 2024, p. 18.
[xxii] Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, 2021, p. 8.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 8; 7, original emphasis.
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