“Rochers à Fontainebleau,” Cézanne, c. 1893
He brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love.
I sat down under his shadow and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
Thou art all fair my love, there is no spot in thee.
The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.
Until the day break and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountains of myrrh and the hill of frankincense.
I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. I am my beloved’s and his desire is towards me.
—The Song of Songs
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry.
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (123)
…the grain of the voice [is] an erotic mixture of timbre and language…it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.
—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (66-67)
Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.
—Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West (95)
There is a remarkable sequence in the third movement of Barry Truax’s Song of Songs where one of the piece’s two main characters articulates the word “love,” which immediately explodes into a stuttering, timestretched tapestry, upon which they form with their musical partner a cascading, jagged terrain of vocal tics and guttural envelope-fuckery, Beckett on Cézanne’s “coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God” (222-223). The entire piece is driven by this shifting between linguistic legibility and abstraction, facilitated by the timestretch technique achieved through granulation of the vocal. In his essay “Homoeroticism and Electroacoustic Music,” Truax highlights the particularly erotic nature of the timestretch technique:
Granular stretching of a voice, by adding a great deal of aural volume to the sound with the multiple layers of grain streams, often seems to create a sensuousness, if not an erotic quality in the vocal sound. A word becomes a prolonged gesture, often with smooth contours and enriched timbre. Its emotional impact is intensified and the listener has more time to savour its levels of meaning.
Truax’s exploitation of the timestretch does not merely engage with eroticism “as such”—rather, he explicitly positions two main characters, coded to the socially-conditioned ear as male and female, and uses the timestretch to blur the boundaries between them, generating an utterly thrilling sensual flux in the sonic realm that plays with the fluidity of gender and sexuality in real-time. Danielle Sofer, in their essay “The Macropolitics of Microsound: Gender and Sexual Identities in Barry Truax’s Song of Songs,” notes that:
…few aside from Truax explore erotic significance outside the confines of normative heterosexuality…As Truax sees it, electroacoustic composition is an ideal setting for a sexually explicit engagement with sound precisely because of the ambiguity of attempting to recognise sound sources. This ambiguity allows for flexible relations to form among and between elements, people, and things. (2-4)
Here, counterintuitively, it is music’s power of abstraction, and the particular perceptual faculties it calls upon in the listener, that allows it to unfold with such force the concrete problematic of gender and sexuality via an erotic sensory experience. The concept of time is built into the mechanics of this materialized eroticism via the granular timestretch technique: time is literally fucked, screwed, recalling Woolf’s temporal screwing in Orlando wherein the narrator suddenly changes genders midway through the book and leaps and corkscrews through centuries of sedimented history as a fluid being in every sense of the word. This almost utopian feeling of existing beyond or above time, or of time itself taking on an erotic quality, recalls, finally, the timestretched vocals in mid-90s club music, particularly drum’n’bass as it was emerging from jungle, wherein the sudden freezing, warping and pitching of a sampled vocal combines with and heightens the already potent mixture of bodies, sweat, narcotics and psychedelics on the dancefloor, ramming Truax’s timestretched “sensuousness” into the skull with the impact of a Funktion-One tweeter.
Truax’s literal blurring of boundaries between his two characters was, in his words, “a metaphor for love itself.” Here, on one level, he materializes Freud on love, in Civilization and its Discontents: “At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away” (13). But, further, as Truax plays with the pitch and timbre of the voices, “heterosexual and homosexual portrayals of the text [reach] an emotional peak,” are intermingled, constantly shifting between these coded and seemingly contradictory registers depending on the timbral and temporal character of the voices. Truax:
The most explicitly homoerotic moment occurs at the climactic point where the male voice brings out the final phrase “his desire is towards me” (3:25), leading to the most heavily stretched and expanded version of the word “desire,” accompanied by the prolonged singing voice of a monk, the crackling fire, and a florid elaboration of the cantillation melody played by the English horn.
Accordingly, Sofer argues that Truax, through this timestretched flux, operates on several registers that exceed the hermetic art object: “text, music, meaning, social and historical context—moving beyond such binary categories as the male and female genders or homo- and heterosexual orientations to a more fluid and dynamic understanding of gender and sexuality” (2). Further, they argue that the power of Truax’s piece comes specifically from its constant negotiation of “the territory between voice recognition and denial of its referential significance” (3) through a destabilizing of “the typical musical oppositions between melody and harmony, and between timbral profiles and harmonic spectra” (10). Only music is capable of mediating and materializing this canonic or fugal shuttling between the abstract and the concrete, between the infinitely plastic and reproducible Schaefferian sound-as-sound and the sound of a particular body in a particular world.
But it is precisely this alluring quality of music’s abstractive powers that often renders it a falsely and impossibly neuter or explicitly depoliticized zone, both in its materiality and in the social and cultural apparatuses that swarm around it. As music, hand in hand with the development of painterly technologies like granular synthesis, moved further into realms of seemingly total abstraction, the illusion was created in which, in Truax’s words, it appears that “instrumental music aspires to a level of abstraction where issues such as gender or sexual orientation play no role.” In response to this, Truax positions the opera, and its use of the voice, as a music that explicitly and unavoidably renders it “highly gender specific.” According to this logic, the voice is necessarily of a body, with the necessary triggering of a network of associations and interconnections with the concrete world, and the necessary exit from the involuted realm of pure music.
However, the history of vocal sampling in club music has shown that the voice, seemingly an unshakeable link between shadowy abstraction and the fleshy world, can and has been cleanly separated from the latter, trapped in music, rendered the plastic material of misogynistic fantasy through the use of abstractive technologies. As Sofer, following Barbara Bradby, argues: “the female voice [in electronic dance music] can be used to represent a distorted female perspective compromised by the auspices of ‘male fantasy’—by the gaze of the (male) producer or composer” (2). In many strains of dance music, the sonically abstracted female voice, at the fingertips of the male producer or composer, often conjures fantastical flashes or images of the associated body from an essentially pornographic perspective.
The problem is not the presence of sex, eroticism, desire, perversion, pornography, etcetera, in the music as such—what good would music be if it couldn’t access, unfold and materialize these dimensions of the human experience? Rather, the problem is the nature of that presence and the social and technological relations it materializes—relations often severed and buried by the abstracted form of the music in question. Here we find reproduced in the percussive gunshot realm of club music those two identical poles that Truax so skillfully navigates in Song of Songs: recognition of the voice, and denial of its referential significance. An examination of three club tracks—Dillinja’s “You Don’t Know (The Remix),” Black Electric’s “Come To Me,” and Jana Rush’s “Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)”—and their unfolding of this problematic through the timestretch, will illuminate the power of Truax’s erotics of sound to restore the link—the friction—between artwork and the world.
Goldie, speaking of his much-contested invention of timestretching via the Eventide H3000 Harmonizer, described his visceral reaction upon the discovery: “It was like every hair on every follicle on my entire body just stood up.” Here, at the timestretch’s entry into the world of club music, it is undeniably stamped with an erotic, sensual character, one of a pleasurable, overwhelming, even uncontrollable stimulation to the body. Remarkably, he was merely applying the effect to a breakbeat. In “You Don’t Know (The Remix),” Dillinja counterposes the timestretched voice with its non-processed counterpart, eroding, like Truax, their gendered perceptual and social codings.
Dillinja’s track does not open promisingly, beginning with a looped text-less female-coded utterance reminiscent of what Truax via Hannah Bosma notes in the realm of electroacoustic music as the predominance of the male composer/technician “wielding considerable audio power, with a female performer on stage as a visual display.” But Dillinja promptly introduces a partner to the initial voice, lower in pitch, repeating “you don’t know…” in fractured and stuttering bursts. At the pivotal moment in the track (1:20), everything drops but the initial voice, which vanishes, spiraling into a total auditory void. In return, in an act of Orlando-esque rebirth, the void spits out a glorious pitch-fucked and timestretched version of the initial “you don’t know” refrain as the drums roll. Dillinja allows the tails of the timestretched refrain to curl and unwind, dissipate like clouds, over the roiling percussion, giving it, like with Truax, a genuinely sensuous if not erotic quality in which the listener can fully “savour its levels of meaning.”
Critically, the timestretching effect destabilizes the seemingly rigid social and perceptual coding established at the start of the track. The timestretch acts as a rupturing force that renders a formerly banal and overcoded auditory experience terrifying and ecstatic. Now it seems wholly plausible that both vocal “partners” stemmed from the same sample, and therefore the same voice and body—but this remains forever ambiguous, establishing that same tension between “voice recognition and denial of its referential significance” that is so generative in Song of Songs. Here, too, the two voices become one; there is no longer counterpoint between partners, but a single timestretched synthesis of the prior pair floating above the twisted percussive wreckage below. When the initial female-coded voice returns, it suddenly feels totally garish and out of place, a remnant of a mode of perception—socially overcoded—that has been shed during the direct experience of the work itself and its processes of sonic transformation. “You don’t know…” now takes on the character of a tease or taunt, an acknowledgment of our generative disorientation.
In “Come To Me” by Black Electric, the timestretch explodes beyond the realm of the mere physical manipulation of a digital waveform, instead surfacing layered contradictions in the access to and application of abstractive music technologies themselves. The track opens with a male-coded timestretched and vocoded sample that repeats “love…sex…” while a non-processed female vocal duo—co-producer of the track—sings “love” in staggered harmony before moving into a more traditional verse-chorus structure. Critically, the way the latter “love” descends in a stretched-out, nested waterfall is reminiscent of the molecular auditory dilation made by the timestretch effect; it is an apparently non-technological, therefore more profoundly technological, stretching of time, harmonic and timbral data. This is a sonified rebellion against the “distorted female perspective” (Sofer 2) of the male composer/technician, a materialized rupturing of the latter’s long-exclusive control of music technology going back at least, as Truax notes, to the emergence of electroacoustic music after World War II. The voices are unequivocally “of bodies,” but not the “conjured” or mediated bodies of the male composer; the voices are fully capable, through their own technology, of approximating the temporal-perceptual effects seemingly only accessible through the occult wizard-like manipulations of the male technician.
Further, the timestretched, male-coded voice occupies a structurally submissive role in the track, quietly gluing its elements together, not drawing attention to itself. This is further proven by the female vocals in the verse, which consistently deliver a series of commands: “I wanna see you kissing my body / And I’ll tell you what’s next / You fall to your knees / And praise me like your queen / You are my servant / And I’ll make you scream”—upon which the male voice returns, as if obeying the command. The male voice remains completely silent and compliant during the verses, waiting to receive its orders. Its overtly robotic timbre, due of course to the timestretch effect, lends it the character of a tool or sex toy for the female protagonists of the song, to be used and discarded at will: the abstractive timestretch technology is pushed to the background, made subservient, a facilitator of the enhanced pleasure of the protagonists rather than a tool of masculine technological domination. The female voice, through an erotics of sound, dominates technology, rather than the other way around. The track falls into a text-less ebb in its concluding third, the desires of all parties sated—nothing more needs to be said tonight.
Finally, Jana Rush’s “Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)” demonstrates, in deploying the timestretch to a debased and erotic end through the throbbing brain-fuck pulsation of footwork, the power of a direct utilization of contemporary abstractive music technologies to render—in a clean reversal of the “distorted female perspective”—the potentially threatening male voice mere plastic, an element of a thrilling sexual fantasy. The track opens with an ambiguously-coded timestretched moaning interspersed with non-processed breathy exhalations; Rush’s hi-hats burst like Truax’s timestretched “crackling fires” which, per Sofer, “create a perfect setting for amorous activities” (4). A third voice suddenly warps in, male-coded, gutturalizing “motherfuck…” with the “fuck” syllable timestretched to a trembling, sensuous oblivion. As the flanged and gouged-out drums collide and burst in flailing, gorily enervating patterns, Rush introduces a deep horror-movie cackle, which, in deranged fashion, modulates its pitch in conjunction with the oppressive drums, vibrating between coded registers of gender and sexuality as Rush zooms in on a suddenly androgynous, orgasmic inhalation in the first half-second of the laugh: abject terror becomes expansive, eye-rolling pleasure.
The ubiquity of timestretching across the entire terrain of the musical materials not only melts away the coded registers of the voices—it also renders the non-vocal music erotic in its own right. Rush plays with our perceptual preconceptions of the footwork rhythm, blasting holes in the typically rigid rhythmic grid and allowing the timestretched tails to cascade, exhale, over voids of total silence; the drums themselves dissolve into fractalized chemtrails; the track and all of its intertwined elements zip through Proust’s “dark filter” of the timestretch, inhaling, sighing, moaning in an obsessive and undeniably sexual register. Here we are reminded of Swann, Odette, and Vinteuil’s sonata:
What great repose, what mysterious renewal for Swann—for him whose eyes, though refined lovers of painting, whose mind, though a shrewd observer of manners, bore forever the indelible trace of the aridity of his life—to feel himself transformed into a creature strange to humanity, blind, without logical faculties, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimerical creature perceiving the world only through his hearing. And since he still searched the little phrase for a meaning to which his intellect could not descend, what strange drunkenness he felt, as he divested his innermost soul of all the help of reason and forced it to pass alone through the sieve, through the dark filter of sound! He began to become aware of all that was painful, perhaps even secretly unappeased in the depths of the sweetness of that phrase, but it could not hurt him. What did it matter if it told him love was fragile, his own love was so strong! He toyed with the sadness it diffused, he felt it pass over him, but in a caress that only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He made Odette play it ten times, twenty times, demanding that while she did so she should not stop kissing him. Each kiss summons another. (246)
Rush introduces another male-coded voice in the final third of the track bearing the command: “You better bow down on both knees.” She pitch-fucks and fractures this potentially violent command, rendering it mere plastic musical material, separated from its really-threatening body. This male voice, just like the horror-movie cackle, is utterly sapped of its potentially domineering power, instead taking on a perverted and hypersexual affect as a stimulating, even comical element of a delirious, transgressive sexual roleplay. The threat of the male voice is rendered neuter through its internal sonic transformations as well as the terrifying depth and intensity of the enveloping music itself, stemming from Rush’s utilization of contemporary abstractive music technologies, primarily the timestretch. Versus Black Electric, who illuminate alternative modes and definitions of technology that destabilize the superiority of what Truax terms the long-“homosocial” environment of audio and computer engineering, Rush weaponizes the latter’s technology against itself, demonstrating that technology is never eternally fixed but rather materializes a social relation, a metabolism, that is constantly in motion.
Truax links the aforementioned image of the male electroacoustic composer/technician controlling or wielding the female voice to “the male painter at his easel depicting the nude female model, traditionally as an object of desire.” An examination of what I consider three “painting films”—Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, and Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel—against the above analysis will expand the question of timestretching beyond its immediate auditory manifestation, demonstrating its potential power to dissolve the reification of the artwork and restore its connection to the world, its social realities, across mediums. The key is that, following Tag Gallagher on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, “cinema is an art of time, not of space”—its material is time and its passage, duration. Here, in contradistinction to the musical examples, the timestretch operates not so much as an overt manipulation and distortion of the filmic material itself, but rather in the temporal-perceptive faculties of the viewer, forced to become fluid, pliable, in the face of an unusual and demanding visual stasis.
Accordingly, Akerman applies the timestretch to reveal the coarseness of a brute everyday misogynistic reality. Her film demands the heightened focus and perception required to sustain attention on a static rather than mobile or fluid artwork. The “slowness” of the film and its durational frames render scenes as paintings, forcing the listener into an intense perceptual zone in which time is dilated. There is a somewhat narcotic quality to this timestretching and its effect on the viewer; Dielman’s physical stasis is intertwined with her social and cultural stasis stemming from her existence as a middle-class woman, and timestretching brings us closer to that reality, rather than allowing us to take flight from it or distort it in fantastical ways.
Dielman’s sudden murder of her sexual client at the end of the film with a pair of scissors, then, is the perceptual bursting of this endless drudgery of the timestretch. Time is literally shattered, along with our perceptual faculties that had been so patiently trained throughout the extreme duration of the work: we are brought even closer to the world, its literal blood and guts. Here, Akerman shows the terrifying and atavistic potential in shifting through the genuinely different modes of perception internal to the experience of an artwork, a terror established through time and its manipulation. The abject horror of endless domesticity and subjection, rendered banal through duration and repetition, is suddenly inverted and projected in a singular, murderous act of literal rupture, velocity, into the flesh, the arteries. It is no coincidence that this singular rupturing of time centers on an erotic act that, for both Dielman and the viewer, vibrates ambiguously between the realms of pleasure and pain.
Rivette, in depicting the stereotypical gendered process of painting, Truax’s “male painter at his easel depicting the nude female model,” applies the timestretch to gradually dissolve the boundary between art and the world. Over the course of four hours, we see that boundary become more and more porous, with the painter Frenhofer’s model Marianne beginning as a reluctant and unwilling participant in the creative process—pushed into it without consent by her boyfriend—and ending as the co-conspirator of Frenhofer with arguably even more power than the painter himself; he ultimately leaves it to her to decide whether the painting was a success.
Here we observe the unfreezing of the seemingly static, vacuum-sealed time and space of the fixed painting-object in real-time; the image becomes unstuck, a contradictory historical process in motion involving intersecting social, sexual and intellectual struggles rather than a mere static snapshot. The hushed, almost documentarian scenes depicting the sketching and painting process from the ground up constantly shuttle between banality and ecstasy, modulating our own social and sensory preconceptions of this structurally Platonic model of the virility of the male artist. While Frenhofer’s rough physical manipulation of the nude Marianne is often alarming, somehow their entire dynamic, against all odds, retains the quality of that between equals. Each assumes and sheds the role of dominator in an almost dance-like or canonic fashion that never falls into the neat or stereotypical heterosexual dynamics of attraction. Each literally needs the other, derives meaning from the other, is changed by the other.
In unfolding the painting process over such an extended duration, Rivette stretches perceptual time so as to draw out the sensuality and eroticism—necessarily intertwined with questions of power and domination and their attendant struggles—in the act of creation itself. The brittle scratching of Frenhofer’s pen activates our body in chaotic and uncontrollable, arguably erotic ways, like Goldie’s Eventide, while we are utterly transfixed by the complexities of the process of artistic production as they are dilated to a perceptual extreme. The film’s peculiar temporality constantly collides with and rewires our expectations of what is to come, surfacing those expectations and forcing the viewer to confront them as stemming from a gendered conditioning rooted in contingent, historical social relations that are constantly subject to transformation. The opacity of the creative process is disintegrated; the latter becomes a sieve; the world leaks in.
Here, a key element of the timestretch emerges: perversion. There is a somewhat debased pleasure that stems from the filmic stretching of perceptual time. Immediate pleasure is incessantly deferred, its arrival never certain. Pleasure must then be made by the activated viewer against the conditions provided by the artwork; the pen, the window, the stone take on an erotic and desire-charged character in the absence of pleasure. And the moments where that pleasure is granted are quite literally orgasmic, the ejaculation of blood from Dielman’s scissors after over three hours of domestic purgatory. Frenhofer’s semi-secret entombment of the real painting of Marianne—with its traces of aesthetic violence committed against Liz, his wife and former model who he ejects from the studio the more he falls in love with her—is that pleasure infinitely deferred, the ultimate dissolving of art into the world, the literal grafting of the artwork into the physical structure of the home. It is simultaneously an act of total banality—we observe Frenhofer, with the aid of the housekeeper’s daughter, Magali, mixing the mortar, obscuring the painting brick by brick as if engaged in mindless labor or child’s play—and an act of grave ecstasy, the murder and burial of an artwork we have witnessed in torturous gestation for almost four hours. We are never allowed to climax, to see the finished artwork in its totality; we must find that pleasure in the world itself.
Ferrara, finally, materializes the three-dimensional erotic and sensory space of the timestretch by painting with digital artifacts and incessant montage—the last of which potently screws time to the point of total stasis—to first narcotize the viewer and promptly shatter that narcosis. New Rose Hotel is essentially a painting in motion, an ever-shifting screen within a screen within a screen, spiraling through endless layers of abstraction and perceptual-cognitive disintegration. The montage technique, twisting and folding different points on a linear timeline back upon themselves, both highlights and reflects the vicissitudes of our perception in relation to time, the way that hours can literally be made to feel like seconds and vice versa in our daily sensual experience of the world, the way that recurring memories or dreams make time appear to be a knot of writhing ouroboros rather than an array of notches on a ruler. Woolf, Orlando: “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second” (69). The sensuality of the film, then, stems not from its explicit sex scenes but rather from its interminable existence in this space of painterly perception. Only shadow and light exist in this blasted cloud; the film is one long timestretch in which, following Truax, we genuinely “savour” its contours, its “grain streams,” the rough, husky sensuousness of X’s voice.
As it becomes clear at the end of the film that Sandii—the seemingly naïve, pliant tool, a literal sex object, a weapon of corporate espionage—has been plotting five steps ahead of the film’s supposed masterminds, the erotic, painterly pleasure drawn from the preceding experience of the film becomes clouded with doubt and confusion, a kind of epistemological terror. Ferrara’s entrancing filmic timestretch takes on the quality of an opiate that has actually distorted our ability to see clearly, to be in the world. As Sandii, in her final maneuver, turns proprietary technology against the shadowy male technicians by leading them into a lab-based mass viral murder, making away with the spoils and promptly disappearing from the filmic space entirely, she is restored to the screen as a kind of perceptual pornography on X’s tiny video-display as he, hunted by corporate assassins, masturbates to her memory and inches closer to suicide. In this act of rupture that literally rewrites the perceptual past, X, just like the viewer, has been torn from a gendered narcosis—a belief in his total social, sexual, intellectual and financial mastery over Sandii—and is ultimately rendered in search of that lost and impossible high, whose natural endpoint is death, Dielman’s gash.
The following excerpts from Sofer are key to both their and our overall analysis—particularly in regards to the potentially eyebrow-raising association of the pitches of voices with genders in the preceding arguments:
On the one hand, we do not wish to reduce the complex relationships, both musical and erotic, emerging in Song of Songs by identifying its sounds with either a female or a male speaker. But, on the other hand, we threaten losing some aspect of the experience by omitting a discussion of gender and its implications for musical listening. (10)
…a position that does not account for such identifying factors as gender, however optimistic, potentially relies on a myth of music’s absolutism, therefore perpetuating the long-standing resistance by some to acknowledge that context might not arise entirely from ‘music’s inner relationships.’ (3)
This “myth of music’s absolutism,” or an uncritical belief in its totally abstractive and abstracted character, is inextricably linked with a similar myth of time’s absolutism. It is through the overt manipulation of time—its stretching and rupture, its contradictory and sensual imbrication of the banal and ecstatic—and our attendant perceptual faculties that the artwork is disturbed, de-sedimented, made a living, historical, erotic, sensual rather than a dead or static artifact of the marketplace. Truax’s application of the timestretch, in creating zones of gendered and sexual ambiguity, activates the listener, forcing them to draw connections and thereby interrogate the clashing social relations that criss-cross the artwork:
Hearing each speaker recite the text in its entirety with the original gendered pronouns, and then layered with several more voices, may cause listeners to question the number of perceived characters in the work, their respective genders, and also, given the erotic tone of the text, the characters’ various orientations towards each other.
Timestretching in the club context operates on multiple levels: the dancefloor itself is a site of extreme compression and dilation of time—yes, amplified by drugs, but with a totally sound basis in the sober musical, social and physiological facts—so the perceptual operation of the timestretching effect in this context is intensified. Hours of collective attention paid to the most minute shifts in the blaring, swarming mass of sound—an addition of a hi-hat here, the notching of a bass frequency there—tune and sharpen the perceptive faculties to a point of near-total debasement and perversion exactly like that forced upon the spectator by films like Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman—in which we respond to the pressure of time by projecting desire and sensuality into and onto the artwork and the world in search of a constantly deferred and therefore seemingly forbidden, thrilling and orgasmic perceptual release. In this deliriously intensified context, the guttural sigh of Dillinja’s “you don’t know…” warping and zigzagging from a smoked-out void of sound in the prismatic recesses of the bass bin, literally activates and stimulates the body, rendering it erect, alert, just as the clatter of filter-fucked percussion comes slithering and thumping against the lungs, the breasts, the sternum, the guts. Here, one recalls Woolf on time in Orlando:
For what more terrifying revelation can there be than the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. (211)
The manipulation of time in and through the artwork delivers this “terrifying revelation” of the present that destabilizes the artwork and its reification, its hardening into mere surface, an interchangeable commodity. The key, however, is that this “present” is not made eternal, unmoored or unshackled from history and its materiality. The stretching of time as such bears no inherent radical or clarifying properties: Dielman’s eternal present is the claustrophobia of domestic purgatory; Frenhofer and Marianne’s eternal present is the conclusion of the creative act infinitely deferred; X’s eternal present is a narcotic shroud of interminable unreality; the eternal present of the club constantly threatens to hurtle into total social and psychic involution, a world of abject pleasure-fucked illusion where one floats, Orlando-like, above the world and its histories while the nightclub and drug economy and its labors grind away below like the teeth on MDMA. Rather, it is the contradictory dialectic between the eternal present and its violent rupture—wherein the timestretch can operate in both capacities, as demonstrated by our array of musical and filmic examples—that bears the potential to restore the connection between artwork and the world. Through this cataclysmic act—the gash of Dielman’s scissors, the hiss of Sandii’s lethal DNA synthesizer, the entombment of Frenhofer’s original painting of Marianne—time is unstuck, made visible, and the artwork accordingly dissolved into the world itself, into its vast catacomb of social relations, its histories. Woolf’s timestretched love letter to Vita Sackville-West—“Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word” (95)—blooms deliriously, sensuously, into Orlando, with whose conclusion we will conclude:
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not say. Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There was her husband’s brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
‘Ecstasy!’ she cried, ‘ecstasy!’ And then the wind sank, the waters grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.
‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!’ she cried, standing by the oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave ripped and the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and nothing moved between sky and sea. Then he came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon the earth. There stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more stepped from her chariot.
‘The house is at your service, Ma’am,’ she cried, curtseying deeply. ‘Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in.’
As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.
‘Here! Shel, here!’ she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.
‘It is the goose!’ Orlando cried. ‘The wild goose….’
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Eight. (230-232)
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