Sigur Ros 33 1/3 excerpt by Ethan Hayden Lyrics
Phono-eroticismIn her essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag warns against seeing works of art as a binary between form and content. For her, the idea that a work of art can even have a “content”—that it can be “about” something or have a “meaning”—not only misses the point, but is destructive to art itself. Instead, one should simply appreciate the “sensuous surface” of an artwork, without translating it into a symbol or allegory or milking from it some sort of deeper meaning. She ends the essay with the now famous phrase: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”23
Nonsense can also be purely sensual, not a union between form and content but rather the absence of content in favor of the simple music of phonetic sound. Here we jump from echolalia, the most referential form of nonsense, to the most abstract: purely phonetic constructions. This is an approach we can perhaps refer to as phono-sensuality or the phono-erotic: nonsense texts that are not imitations of machines or birdsong but are simply meant to be appreciated as sonic arrangements. The phono-erotic is entirely superficial, simply concerning itself with the surface-level sounds of the human voice and how its sounds can be organized into patterns, like tiles in a mosaic or themes in a symphony. The phono-erotic is that which attempts to bypass understanding, and return to the voice as play, the voice as empty, unsignifying sound.
As a writer on architecture, Paul Scheerbart is known for the influential 1914 work Glasarchitektur, though he is perhaps even more well known as a fantasy novelist. Included in his Ich liebe dich!: Ein Eisenbahnroman (I Love You!: A Railway Novel) was a nonsensical phonetic poem, opening with the lines:Kikakoku!
Ekoralaps!
Wîso kollipánda opolôsa.
Ipasatta îh fûo.
Kikakokú proklínthe petêh.
Nikifilí mopa Léxio intipáschi benakáffro — própsa pî! própsa pî! [. . .]24Despite Scheerbart’s renown as a writer of fantastical fiction, perhaps the easiest way to understand “Kikakoku!” is through the lens of architecture: it is a construction, built from phonetic material. It can be explored, looked at from various angles, and appreciated for its craft. Like most architectural structures, it’s not about anything, but simply exists, a work of art meant to appeal to the senses.
Scheerbart is often cited as a precedent for the phonetic experiments of Hugo Ball and the Dada poets. In 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball presented six poems that he described as “Verse ohne Worte” (poems without words) or “Lautgedichte” (sound poems), which consisted of phonemes not unlike those found in European languages, but which were playfully recombined into new, nonsensical arrangements:gadji beri bimba
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama bim beri glassala
glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim
blassa galassasa tuffm i zimbrabim [. . .]25For Ball, however, the lautgedichte were not simply playful attempts at creating abstract vocal constructions, but were active negations of language. Reacting against what he considered journalism’s complicity in the violence of World War I, Ball’s program notes for the initial performance explained:In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word, too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge.26Ball’s lautgedichte were part of an abandonment of the language that led to the barbarity of the war, an approach diametrically opposed to that of the Futurists’ proto-fascism. In reducing language to a rubble of phonemes and then building anew, Ball creates expressions that, being purely abstract, could not be co-opted into any larger narrative (nationalist, racist, religious, journalistic, etc.) that could lead to bloodshed. Before leaving Germany for the neutrality of Switzerland, Ball wrote in his diary: “If language really makes us kings of our nation, then without doubt it is we, the poets and thinkers, who are to blame for this blood bath and who have to atone for it.”27 Taken a step further, Ball’s lautgedichte are acts of penance, reparations for language’s violent excesses.28
Just a month after the premiere of his lautgedichte, Ball composed a Dada manifesto, a text that, only midway through its proclamations, seems to disintegrate into phonetic vocal play:Dada is a new tendency in art. [. . .] Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. [. . .] Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.29One can see a sort of progressive semantic degradation taking place, the word “Dada” slowly changing from proper noun to mere sound effect. It is as if the text itself gets distracted, forgetting its polemical purpose and instead becoming a phono-erotic game, a relishing of the sensuous character of the simple sound “dada.”30
The German artist Kurt Schwitters practiced his own idiosyncratic form of Dada, which he called Merz. Schwitters was primarily a collage artist before he composed one of the more substantial works of phonetic poetry, the Sonate in Urlauten (Sonata in Primitive and Original Sounds) or the Ursonate. Written over the course of ten years (1922–32), the Ursonate is a massive four-movement work, which borrows its form and techniques from the realm of absolute music.
“Absolute music,” such as the symphonies of Brahms or the string quartets of Beethoven, is non-representational music that has no external narrative or reference. The term was coined in the nineteenth century, in opposition to the idea of “program music,” or music that explicitly expresses a non-musical idea (e.g., music meant to tell a story, express an emotion, or evoke imagery). Absolute music is entirely self-contained, using musical material itself as its subject matter. Thus, the Ursonate’s four-movement structure is adopted from standard classical sonata forms: an opening rondo with four main themes, a slow second movement, a light-hearted dance, and a quick-paced finale with an improvised cadenza. Schwitters’ score includes musical directions, including tempo, dynamics, meter, even pitch contours. In addition, the piece has “themes,” which are “developed,” approximating the techniques of the classical sonata by continuously varying material through a variety of procedures, including additive/subtractive processes, permutation, and substitution [Fig. 1].31Figure 1 Excerpt from Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate , from: Das literarische Werk , ed. by Friedhelm Lach, vol. 1 Lyrik © 1973 DuMont Buchverlag, Köln and Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stift ung, Hannover.
With the Ursonate, we get a work that is perhaps as close as one can get to the purely phono-erotic: using nothing more than phonetic material, it refers to nothing but its own internally consistent structure, that is, nothing but itself.
Schwitters recorded a reading of the Ursonate, the full performance of the piece requiring nearly forty minutes.32 An evocative sonic artifact itself, the recording was sampled by Brian Eno for “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from 1977’s Before and After Science. It was perhaps Eno who introduced Talking Heads to Hugo Ball’s work while producing Fear of Music, an album whose opening track, “I Zimbra,” features a jubilantly rhythmic adaptation of “Gadji Beri Bimba.” David Byrne and company undoubtedly seized on both the poem’s implicit rhythm, as well as its asemanticity. Lacking any extra-musical reference, the text becomes one-dimensional, disappearing into the texture, the percussive voices just another thread in the dense rhythmic fabric.
There is something else at work in “I Zimbra,” however: an evocation of otherness. The words could just as easily be a text in a foreign tongue, and, with the multi-layered percussive texture deliberately referencing West African drumming, it is likely many listeners interpret the text as just that.33 This effect is at the center of our next nonsense strategy.
...Notes23. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octagon Books, 1982), 14.
24. Paul Scheerbart, “Kikakoku!” in Rasula and McCaffery, 104.
25. Hugo Ball, “Gadji Beri Bimba,” in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 70.
26. Hugo Ball quoted in Steve McCaffery, The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 16.
27. Ball quoted in Ibid., 21. The sentiment that language is complicit in the atrocities of war is shared by many in the early twentieth century, and some of the more utopian linguistic solutions to this problem will be addressed in the fourth chapter.
28. Ibid.
29. Ball, 220–1.
30. Admittedly, there is a mantric quality to this recitation as well, and, indeed, Ball had a mystical or thaumaturgical side to his intentions for the lautgedichte. For more on this aspect, see McCaffery, 2012.
31. Nancy Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” in
The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108–10. The literality of these processes in the Ursonate actually anticipates the processes of minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich more than they resemble those of earlier classical composers.
32. There is some debate as to whether this famous recording was actually made by Schwitters’ son Ernst.
33. Eno and Byrne would later collaborate on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album that presented itself as a fake ethnographic artifact, a field recording of a fictional tribe which also relied heavily on a manufactured sense of “otherness.”
Nonsense can also be purely sensual, not a union between form and content but rather the absence of content in favor of the simple music of phonetic sound. Here we jump from echolalia, the most referential form of nonsense, to the most abstract: purely phonetic constructions. This is an approach we can perhaps refer to as phono-sensuality or the phono-erotic: nonsense texts that are not imitations of machines or birdsong but are simply meant to be appreciated as sonic arrangements. The phono-erotic is entirely superficial, simply concerning itself with the surface-level sounds of the human voice and how its sounds can be organized into patterns, like tiles in a mosaic or themes in a symphony. The phono-erotic is that which attempts to bypass understanding, and return to the voice as play, the voice as empty, unsignifying sound.
As a writer on architecture, Paul Scheerbart is known for the influential 1914 work Glasarchitektur, though he is perhaps even more well known as a fantasy novelist. Included in his Ich liebe dich!: Ein Eisenbahnroman (I Love You!: A Railway Novel) was a nonsensical phonetic poem, opening with the lines:Kikakoku!
Ekoralaps!
Wîso kollipánda opolôsa.
Ipasatta îh fûo.
Kikakokú proklínthe petêh.
Nikifilí mopa Léxio intipáschi benakáffro — própsa pî! própsa pî! [. . .]24Despite Scheerbart’s renown as a writer of fantastical fiction, perhaps the easiest way to understand “Kikakoku!” is through the lens of architecture: it is a construction, built from phonetic material. It can be explored, looked at from various angles, and appreciated for its craft. Like most architectural structures, it’s not about anything, but simply exists, a work of art meant to appeal to the senses.
Scheerbart is often cited as a precedent for the phonetic experiments of Hugo Ball and the Dada poets. In 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball presented six poems that he described as “Verse ohne Worte” (poems without words) or “Lautgedichte” (sound poems), which consisted of phonemes not unlike those found in European languages, but which were playfully recombined into new, nonsensical arrangements:gadji beri bimba
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama bim beri glassala
glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim
blassa galassasa tuffm i zimbrabim [. . .]25For Ball, however, the lautgedichte were not simply playful attempts at creating abstract vocal constructions, but were active negations of language. Reacting against what he considered journalism’s complicity in the violence of World War I, Ball’s program notes for the initial performance explained:In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word, too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge.26Ball’s lautgedichte were part of an abandonment of the language that led to the barbarity of the war, an approach diametrically opposed to that of the Futurists’ proto-fascism. In reducing language to a rubble of phonemes and then building anew, Ball creates expressions that, being purely abstract, could not be co-opted into any larger narrative (nationalist, racist, religious, journalistic, etc.) that could lead to bloodshed. Before leaving Germany for the neutrality of Switzerland, Ball wrote in his diary: “If language really makes us kings of our nation, then without doubt it is we, the poets and thinkers, who are to blame for this blood bath and who have to atone for it.”27 Taken a step further, Ball’s lautgedichte are acts of penance, reparations for language’s violent excesses.28
Just a month after the premiere of his lautgedichte, Ball composed a Dada manifesto, a text that, only midway through its proclamations, seems to disintegrate into phonetic vocal play:Dada is a new tendency in art. [. . .] Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. [. . .] Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.29One can see a sort of progressive semantic degradation taking place, the word “Dada” slowly changing from proper noun to mere sound effect. It is as if the text itself gets distracted, forgetting its polemical purpose and instead becoming a phono-erotic game, a relishing of the sensuous character of the simple sound “dada.”30
The German artist Kurt Schwitters practiced his own idiosyncratic form of Dada, which he called Merz. Schwitters was primarily a collage artist before he composed one of the more substantial works of phonetic poetry, the Sonate in Urlauten (Sonata in Primitive and Original Sounds) or the Ursonate. Written over the course of ten years (1922–32), the Ursonate is a massive four-movement work, which borrows its form and techniques from the realm of absolute music.
“Absolute music,” such as the symphonies of Brahms or the string quartets of Beethoven, is non-representational music that has no external narrative or reference. The term was coined in the nineteenth century, in opposition to the idea of “program music,” or music that explicitly expresses a non-musical idea (e.g., music meant to tell a story, express an emotion, or evoke imagery). Absolute music is entirely self-contained, using musical material itself as its subject matter. Thus, the Ursonate’s four-movement structure is adopted from standard classical sonata forms: an opening rondo with four main themes, a slow second movement, a light-hearted dance, and a quick-paced finale with an improvised cadenza. Schwitters’ score includes musical directions, including tempo, dynamics, meter, even pitch contours. In addition, the piece has “themes,” which are “developed,” approximating the techniques of the classical sonata by continuously varying material through a variety of procedures, including additive/subtractive processes, permutation, and substitution [Fig. 1].31Figure 1 Excerpt from Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate , from: Das literarische Werk , ed. by Friedhelm Lach, vol. 1 Lyrik © 1973 DuMont Buchverlag, Köln and Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stift ung, Hannover.
With the Ursonate, we get a work that is perhaps as close as one can get to the purely phono-erotic: using nothing more than phonetic material, it refers to nothing but its own internally consistent structure, that is, nothing but itself.
Schwitters recorded a reading of the Ursonate, the full performance of the piece requiring nearly forty minutes.32 An evocative sonic artifact itself, the recording was sampled by Brian Eno for “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from 1977’s Before and After Science. It was perhaps Eno who introduced Talking Heads to Hugo Ball’s work while producing Fear of Music, an album whose opening track, “I Zimbra,” features a jubilantly rhythmic adaptation of “Gadji Beri Bimba.” David Byrne and company undoubtedly seized on both the poem’s implicit rhythm, as well as its asemanticity. Lacking any extra-musical reference, the text becomes one-dimensional, disappearing into the texture, the percussive voices just another thread in the dense rhythmic fabric.
There is something else at work in “I Zimbra,” however: an evocation of otherness. The words could just as easily be a text in a foreign tongue, and, with the multi-layered percussive texture deliberately referencing West African drumming, it is likely many listeners interpret the text as just that.33 This effect is at the center of our next nonsense strategy.
...Notes23. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octagon Books, 1982), 14.
24. Paul Scheerbart, “Kikakoku!” in Rasula and McCaffery, 104.
25. Hugo Ball, “Gadji Beri Bimba,” in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 70.
26. Hugo Ball quoted in Steve McCaffery, The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 16.
27. Ball quoted in Ibid., 21. The sentiment that language is complicit in the atrocities of war is shared by many in the early twentieth century, and some of the more utopian linguistic solutions to this problem will be addressed in the fourth chapter.
28. Ibid.
29. Ball, 220–1.
30. Admittedly, there is a mantric quality to this recitation as well, and, indeed, Ball had a mystical or thaumaturgical side to his intentions for the lautgedichte. For more on this aspect, see McCaffery, 2012.
31. Nancy Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” in
The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108–10. The literality of these processes in the Ursonate actually anticipates the processes of minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich more than they resemble those of earlier classical composers.
32. There is some debate as to whether this famous recording was actually made by Schwitters’ son Ernst.
33. Eno and Byrne would later collaborate on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album that presented itself as a fake ethnographic artifact, a field recording of a fictional tribe which also relied heavily on a manufactured sense of “otherness.”