“Its meaning is the function of its occurrence.”
—Leslie Scalapino, “Robert Grenier’s Scrawl,” Objects in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place, p. 42
Rehearsal (0:03) (0:25) (0:26) (0:45) (0:06)
The cassetta matematica (mathematical box) of Athanasius Kircher (17th century)— reminiscent of Jon Abbey’s press release for the album (‘puzzle box of sound’), and of which Friedrich Zelinski writes: ‘On opening the box, the first thing to attract notice is a horizontal strip inscribed in black on a white ground with a menu of nine different branches and applications of mathematics…’ which Kircher built for himself as a formal means of/for ‘…the elaborate and artistic linking of the linguistic elements.’” (Deep Time of the Media, p. 141, 143)
Afterimaging (1:35) (0:33)
Re-routes epistemological or aesthetic agglutinations— insertions at once ontologically flat and endlessly repetitive (moreso by necessity of its objecthood played as CD/mp3 than the aesthetic construction and distancing of its content), yet not without a certain quality of casual, domestic ambience and circumstantial styl/e/us—
“The effort is the the ‘hopeless waiting to touch being.’ Touching actual being entails mutilation of the constructed self (‘to undo itself in the amputation of the words’), the writing actually being dead moments; it is causing a ‘fixity of dead moments.’ It is ‘active’ negatively in that sense, so the dead moments are also lost, extinguished while being present. The enactments of the body are repeated as ‘waste products’ which are sloughed off.
The ‘wordless body,’ absence of voice, speech, hearing, which are forms of discursive distinction, is delineated as a state of empty ‘bliss.’ It ‘seeks its night’ in ‘waves of red, without order, without distinction.’
In Zen practice ‘appearances’ which are the world are the same as mind. The mind is freed from itself and those appearances by delusion itself. It can only be in delusion.”
—Leslie Scalapino, “Extinction of Images,” Objects in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place, p. 8
(1:35) (2:09) (1:45) (0:57) (4:56) (0:08) (1:38) (0:23) (2:31) An object which repeats a reading of space with slightly fluctuating temporal variations throughout the year— restricted, in a sense, by cultural formations of time, as opposed to acknowledgment (even) of the object’s shape (e.g. a slab of rock with a flat surface). Processes attached to an exterior or an orbit— Time as withstanding empiricism. JMF 044/046 on sundials.
The namesake, Motubachii, culled from Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries— Lem, who in materialistic equanimity does not distinguish "garbage" and "art," ("Lem in a Nutshell," A Stanislaw Lem Reader) would yet seem to counter any too-heavyhanded speculative realist reading/listening thereof, especially as regards Meillassoux. For instance, while one could make a compelling parallel between Motubachii and the Turing test (e.g. which of these sounds are 'artificial' and which 'real'), Lem argues that the Turing test must inevitably fail: an algolrithm can never be complete. To put the CD on repeat does not guarantee the sort of constancy Meillassoux demands of a mathematical bias. Motubachii is looser, and to some extent about hapticity.
Thoreau, quoted at the close of Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Form and Discontent”: “Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.”
Motubachii improvises a milieu, but refutes a palimpsest via polycarbonate data impressions. Incorrect: remix Motubachii by burning it onto a CD-RW.
“Although different performances of the same piece may project somewhat different patterns, each performance is a process in which there is change, but the change is ordered, and the principle of the order is fixed and unchanging. If the music leads to a perspective from which one recognizes unchanging order and if the contrast of present, past, and future necessarily presupposes change, then this perspective stands outside the temporal process. The experience of listening to a Bach movement is the experience of moving through a temporal process to that which endures non-temporally.”
—David B. Greene, Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music, p. 10
Construction (9:29) (6:00) (4:25)
“Or shall we say that one event M merges itself into another event N, while preserving a certain identity by means of an unchanged element, so that we can say, not merely that M has ceased and N begun, but that it is M which has become N? Still the same difficulty recurs. M and N may have a common element, but they are not the same event, or there would be no change. If therefore M changes into N at a certain moment, then, at that moment, M has ceased to be M, and N has begun to be N. But we have seen that no event can cease to be, or begin to be, itself, since it never ceases to have a place as itself in the B series. Thus one event cannot change into another.”
—John McTaggart, from “The Unreality of Time”
Repetitive architecture— ebbs of propreoception over an object— perception as assemblage and re-assemblage (more Deleuze). Reading as overcoming or withstanding a distancing. As Tan Lin writes: “The best way to read a book like a building is to read it over and over again. The mechanical is a system of gradual connections between dependent terms. D&G said that” (Seven Controlled Vocabularies, p. 109). Also, on the same page— “Like an index of meaningful moments (constraints = affects)” and “[desire is about waiting for nothing].” Motubachii as sustaining affect imbued through the listener’s immediate environment— temporally/spatially, though the latter of these remains more susceptible to fluctuation. Headphones Motubachii, public park Motubachii. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes regarding the first lunar landing and its elimination of an abstracted distance between Earth and moon— “One of the innumerable points stochastically placed everywhere where there is some somewhere” (On Kawara: Paintings of 40 Years, p. 28).
“The effectuation of the vision-in-One does not cancel its state as negative condition or render it ‘sufficient’, it is thus neither the actualization of a virtual nor the realization of a possible.”
— François Laruelle, “A Summary of Non-Philosophy,” p. 143