AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: E-Zine Vector [www.virose.pt] DATE: May 1998
I don't know if the numbers 4 and 6 identify my body temperature according to some unfamiliar criterion of
measurement or if it is just another communication process among the great number of symbols which first
invaded commerce and now accompany all currently consumed objects and pieces of equipment. This complex
signal is expressed in various numerical formulas, names, and codifications, the famous (and indispensable)
barcode being the prominent one. They are manifest as true metaphors of the daily imagery, as they function as
advice and indications, often premonitory of the unrelenting advancement of this brave new world progress “for
all” tastes.
Long ago I started feeling the somatic effects, which were incipient because of the great quantity of numerations
amassed during all these years. The desire to destroy, greatly exceeding its true dimensions, which meanwhile
had spread into various systems and structures where I had been introduced was, in a sense, cancelled by various
types of bureaucratic reasons, social conveniences and political justifications. The same thing had already
happened with the record of my nominal classification, which was given to me practically since my birth
(creators and their intentions are irrelevant). These facts were kindly made known to me as an obligation to be an
integral part of the organization to which I belong, a citizen-custody mechanism, which is indispensable for to
me exist and later to became an active and participative subject in the so-called national territory. I still don't
know nor imagine if I will ever know where this constantly perfected net of personal information might reach,
nor do I know what the possibilities are for it to relate to various classifications, numerations, and codes already
existing about me, nor do I know the origin of the individuals who one day will decide to order the execution of
these prosecutorial manoeuvres.
However, to alleviate this strange sensation that hinders me from developing a richer thought in the direction of
positive forces, I started to imagine that those strange and complicated number patterns and their complex
codifications were nothing more than the equivalent of a name of a “Virus”. The microscopic “bug” (pardon the
primitivism of this language) which, like all invisible beings, immediately acquires an aura of mystery which is
evident in the lack of a feeling of belonging to someone (“belonging somewhere”). I understand perfectly the kind
of perception of the world, which goes building across successive generations and that the past left intact as what
is the inapprehensible, the phantasmatic. It appears to me now, associated with an admirable mechanism of
constant renovation, and we sense it in the most elaborate feelings of terror, in the many fears, in the arduously
assembled profound doubts, in the rapid and fleeting hesitations, in the confusions of what seems to be similar,
in the threatening signs that no longer serve any purpose, because they stopped provoking even the slightest
tension and influence in the attitudes of alertness and vigilance long ago. They appear ready to act (who knows
where from) malevolent and destructive on the emptiness of each organism, which will become more and more
defenceless in the presence of constant and ever changing attacks. Because of the “intelligence” of the mutations
and the change of the presented figures, they will shamelessly enjoy the advances of the science, in which the only
thing left to do is to assume responsibility of its errors and, next, to affirm itself as comically secure, necessary,
and sufficient. In this case, any combination of numbers, letters or other symbols could only be a simple piece of
antimatter. Its discovery will focus all attention on its uncontrollable exploitation which has been so long awaited
by the media. We understand that forms of acting star to be very fashionable a little everywhere in the
innumerable current scientific investigations, which are perfectly, explained the objectives and strategies of
fashion and the science of war. After the failure to rapidly find a confirmation of extraterrestrial life in its most
popular manifestation, it was crucial to find some justifications to use up and eliminate (I don't know if this is
possible) the energy long ago accumulated by a collective in a state of profound anxiety, and thereby to gain some
time as the truly extraordinary situation haven't happened yet, although we would have to admit that the
performing and circus-like space voyages are spectacularly visible. The manipulation of the image in this
environment of hyper reality subtly manifests a total incapacity to go beyond a given number of small trips
around the planet, with the already inevitable live transmission “for the city and for the world”, in which there
are several kinds of pirouettes and interesting tricks take the satellite off and on, fix the cable, turn the screw,
change the part, experiment without the force of gravity. This moment of evident uncertainly, more and more
visible, has attracted to other parts of the planet innumerable explorers, competent representatives of the
inestimable predatory sense of our race also known as treasure hunters, who now amuse themselves by combing
the ocean floor, relying on the highest technologies, which only the insolvency of a crumbling empire sells at the
lowest price. The desecrated empire, or its desecration, turns into the main collaborator and accomplice in one of
many miserable dilapidation campaigns, organized under the auspices of several countries which call themselves
civilized and protective of the oceans, forests, and so on. In them, there clearly exists an obsessive and paranoid
idea of a superior and lifesaving civilization, which, as in many occasions, limits itself to verifying the death of the
enormous shamelessness within speeches full of morality and other hallucinatory, corrupt, and deceptive home-
remedies. As moral author of yet another catastrophe, what do their “democratically elected” representatives
think? Will the negative be indeterminate, will be the qualification be random, or will the need to destroy (as an
intrinsic part of the construction process) be a project of life? Whatever the choice, it's always yet another
response among many which daily contaminate, banalise, and saturate the language completely. All the beings
that the nature prepared over millions of years the providence of which we don't know the master always facing
the possibility of its imminent annihilation, nothing but the existence of this game filled with the mixture of fate
and much destiny helped me learn.
But let us proceed with the facts. One day, I found in the work “The Book of Heads” by John Zorn, the essential
motifs to understand that space and time are no longer the sole products that make up an alchemical material,
which spread an immense dispersion in musical writing. Rhythm appears to be the minimal limit from which to
reach its last peak. Only one “beat”, as to say, one beat “forever”. A kind of approximation to its ultimate unit
happens then the zero-point of a beat and its unique and universal pulse. These first approaches to the
problematic of rhythmic limitations in the context of jazz as improvised music is registered in the work of 1978,
“The Book of Heads”, an experiment concerning the multiple aesthetic possibilities on the musical plane, hastily,
together with 35 exceedingly shorts studies for guitar (in this case Marc Ribot's), the length of which totally
rejects any attempt at existential referendum, about which we should consider altitude, surface and depth. The
change of the meaning of these coordinates helped to abolish the minute as the minimum unit of time, giving to
space all the possibilities of cultivating a new sense of freedom, which, proceeding from other values, will
continue to be redimensioned in the velocity of the second and in its smallest parts.
I have to go back to rummage through some old funny ridiculous stories to be able to explain something about
the enormous dispersion phenomenon that this music expresses. There exists an obsessive atmosphere of sonic
abuse to incite the most creative behaviours of approach over the body and on the body (of the guitar) which have
innumerable similarities with the technique of surgical incisions. The scalpel shines upon making the first cut in
the skin of someone who gave himself or herself up to the objectives of a supreme art; it runs in direction of sound
over an instrument which is discovered to be totally flawed and which yearns to be amputated in various parts, to
obtain the necessary corrections and to rebuilt it in the smallest detail. I don't know if it was music that brought
about is destruction/construction resulting in the enormous monstrous apparatus or if it was the contrary. After
this urgent intervention, the sonic and delirious crimes seem to arise from a guitar turned inside out, the interior
of which now appears totally exposed and visible. The bridge, the scale, the top, the body, the neck, the tuning
key and the back are perfectly observed from the inside with a series of frets glued to the neck and to the top, in
number and disposition variable according to the maker.
“The Book of Heads” is one of the first works of Zorn which already anticipates his frenetic journey among
subcultures, marginalities, genres, no man's land, and other experimentalisms which always can be cultivates
until the end. I have, you see, immense difficulties in giving good explanations of these journeys, as etiquette and
good manners never were my or his specialty.
Organic and visceral “Zapping”, sometimes highly contaminated with associations of healthily dubious origins; it
is the result of no time to lose in opportunities that survive in a space crowed with sonorous, visual, and now
virtual individualities, where to late walk out of whatever order-number could be an exceedingly painful chore,
and, in some cases, a fatal one. As it happens in all flights, in the midst of the chaotic escape, many remain en
route because they run out of the strength which allows them to endure an irritating march that advances slowly.
But whoever the walk is hard, the chore of just going on walking slowly must appear as an act driven by a
maniacal and anxious desire for the excess of speed. The reserved domain (insistent claim of the private sphere or
a box that contains the remains of its last banquet, a musical “Pantagruel” in underwear harassing over the
telephone) has enormous representation in its elaborations, occasionally featuring a high incidence of the
psychosocial, the political (I recall the work “Kristallnacht”), the sex-sado-masochistic, the “pornographic”, the
kitsch, the cinephile, and finally, the religious, when in these last years he decides to return to the discovery of his
roots, and proceeding from there, to start another incendiary manoeuvre full of militant spirit in the context of
his (according to some, dubious) Jewish origins. And it is beneath the inspiration of a Hebrew culture that is
most recent movements have been lately developed as far as we can see.
Jazz appears to be a form of agglutinating cement/glue which acts with greater or lesser intensity through the
interstices of a musical fabric, developed through the extended manipulation of sonic sediments of unknown
origin and which part to an uncertain destination. The conglomerate constructed through the pressing of a
brutality of surplus, shavings (by products of a mass- production line, which the machine is ungrateful or in some
cases vain) will cause the acceleration of the engine which pulverizes all the limits of space and time. When living
in space and time is a hindrance, structural disorganizations and evolutionary disharmonies that dispatch to the
emptiness of an entity are revealed, inside of which it is no longer possible to distinguish act and action. And
what remains is a consequence of the responsibility of the random. The antimatter seems to made flesh in the
virus. I have to recognize the eminently narcissistic feeling of these observations. But there is an impressive
relation among the various instruments of sensory calculus which let me think with real precision and they help
to know how to act in the presence of the passing of.
Everyone will have his or her moment in reverse, kind of revelation subtracted from it.
...in spite of some times having the notion that I am turned inside out. My skin folded inwards and the rest
hangs outside without the slightest pain. I don't even want to imagine the appearance of this quartered figure,
newly returned to light in its coloured parts insides. To look myself in the eye(s), to hear myself in my ear…
TRANSLATION: INGVAR LÖFSTEDT
