e-flux presents You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM)—a digital exhibition and research project curated by Xenia Benivolski.
In their influential essay, “Experiments in Civility,” Bill Dietz and Gavin Steingo start by saying: “It would seem that in many circles, music has a bad reputation. You can’t trust music. One minute a piece of music is proclaiming the heights of Western civilization, the next minute the same piece is the sound track to genocide. Music is unfaithful, a slippery character. Or is it the other way around? Is it we who are slippery? Is it who or what we are in music—who or what music lets us become?” [1]
Unlike literature or art, music appears to be nonrepresentational, at least at first. “But music also is a place of sorts,” says musicologist Holly Watkins, “replete with its own metaphorical locations, types of motion, departures, arrivals, and returns.”[2] Songs articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes and social structures; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others. The quality, cadence, and rhythm of sounds can document changes in topology through their evolution. By listening to sounds—and the way they have been transcribed, adapted, and memorialized—we can trace otherwise invisible political interventions into landscapes and soundscapes and, in return, understand these interventions as documents, instructions, or scores.
Music is a powerful mnemonic device. When it comes to language as well as place, the human brain uses phonology—how languages organize sound in the brain—to aid in memorization. It is the song’s structure that helps us remember other information about it. In other words, the melody helps us recall the lyrics. But every collective experience is made up of structurally subjective impressions. Working from an assumption that internal and external soundscapes resonate in collective execution, You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM) is a research project connecting sound-based artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers who explore the way that landscape, acoustics and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures. This project was developed by Xenia Benivolski, with significant support from Julieta Aranda, throughout 2020 and 2021, a time when people were confined to their homes and one of the only ways to be transported was through the body’s association of the sonic with the spatial. YCTM is a digital exhibition whose primary medium is sound and music, accompanied by texts that complement, rather than explain.
With works and texts by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, Victor Wang, Sachiko Namba,Matt Smith (Prince Nifty), Kurt Newman, G. Douglas Barrett, Stefana Fratila, Abhijan Toto, Pujita Guha, Sung Tieu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ayesha Hameed, Felicia Atkinson, Michael Nardone,Ryan Clarke, Bitsy Knox, Jessika Khazrik, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, Tessa Laird, Elin Már Øyen Vister, Rachael Rakes, Reem Shadid, Bill Dietz, Gavin Steingo, Xenia Benivolski, Julieta Aranda, and Shock Forest Group (Katya Abazajian, Sheryn Akiki, Daria Kiseleva, Jelger Kroese, Susanna Gonzo, Nicolás Jaar, Paula Dooren, Pantxo Bertin, Pamela Jordan, Erica Moukarzel, Simon Skatka, Sjoerd Smit, Bert Spaan, and Axel Coumans)
The introduction to the project, IS YOUR TIME, is an hour-long sound work and accompanying text by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound hearing time was an exhibition co-produced by M WOODS and ICC and co-curated by Sachiko Namba, Victor Wang, and Zhang Youdai in 2021. In marginalia, Wang and Namba comment on and contextualize Sakamoto’s project by developing a textual framework for the circumstances that led to this exhibition and the artist’s long history of working with sound and music. IS YOUR TIME encapsulates the violence of natural and unnatural disaster. The composition incorporates a piano that was washed up on the shore after the tsunami from the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. For Sakamoto, this piano represents forces of nature that have shaped and molded our environment, including the forces responsible for its journey to sea and back. Simultaneously he believes that these forces, to a degree, are also contained within the vessel of the instrument and can therefore express new sounds and tones as a result of its exposure to the natural elements and this global event, which resulted in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster. Parts of the composition are reliant on the seismic movements of the earth, as Sakamoto is driven to reflect on an event that, according to NASA, may have sped up the earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond.
The echoes of past and possible nuclear events that reverberate in the body of the instrument challenge time and rhythm. By tapping into the rhythms of the earth, and enlisting the soaked piano, the artist understands the traumatic event through the external and internal tones that have been documented in its material mechanics. Music tracks changes in the world by making noise palatable. Dialectics between order and violence mirror those between music and pure noise: each reveal hidden physical and social architectures. Sakamoto’s project introduces chapters that work through outer and inner spaces and through the social sphere, framing material rhythms and returning to the earth itself.
YCTM is presented on a platform designed by Knoth&Renner and developed by Knoth&Renner with Jonas Holfeld; it will unfold through four chapters, framed by an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter is organized thematically with four or five artworks, and released every two-to-three months. Visitors to the site are encouraged to listen to the works in their entirety and can navigate through as the project develops.
YCTM on e-flux.com is made possible with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. It is produced by e-flux and developed in partnership with M WOODS, NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), Liquid Architecture, Kunsthall Trondheim, and Infrasonica.
[1] Bill Dietz and Gavin Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (2016): 43.
[2] Holly Watkins, “Musical Ecologies of Place and Placelessness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 405.
