I hate to write about something so many other people have already chosen to blog about, but when I came back to listen to Kontradictionaries again, it sounded very different to me. Already I can feel my ears adjusting to the harsh sounds we’ve been listening to in class, and every so often when there is a soft, high overtone, I almost feel like I’m listening to classical music while all I am really hearing is a bunch of roaring drones. While I completely agree that this isn’t dance music, I could actually imagine myself walking to class in the winter, bundled up in every winter garment I could find, with this piece warming my ears. Only at about ten minutes in did my head start to buzz unpleasantly. I’m also finding myself beginning to disagree with my former assessment that this piece was no more than a technical exercise with no emotional content. When the overtones appear, it is almost like light spilling from behind a cloud. I could see this piece as some sort of meditation on the monotony of life, with a couple of bright, shining moments sprinkled throughout, though I would really not like to be the one to defend that thesis. I do find myself enjoying it more as I force myself to continue to listen to it. Perhaps one day I will consider it dance music?
“Hey, I’m not done with you y–”
I take off my headphones ten minutes into the piece. The droning is draining.
I quickly put them back on as I can still slightly hear the array of oscillators still buzzing through my headphones hanging around my neck, as if the oscillators were dissatisfied with my eagerness to leave them. But I put them back on because I want to find something in this mess of sound waves coursing through my ear canals.
There seems to be so much to be said to me by these drones, yet it is completely up to me whether or not I put my guard down and accept these messages…or, on the kontrary, continue to make them up; after all, it’s just a bunch of humming, right? Right?
I think arguing with myself is exactly what this piece wants me to do: a way of truly submitting to its incessant, persistant power. What I think the piece might also want me to do is analyze and decipher it into oblivion, until I can grasp some kind of meaning from it, however artificial that meaning might be.
I don’t know how possible that is for me, but I’d like to try and delve into it as I did for Atmospheres; however, a 25 minute play-by-play assessment is a bit out of line for this one, I think. I will say that it appears that the piece is in a circular, repetitive motion, with the volume and slight tuning changes of individual oscillators keeping things…exciting. Overall, it’s what you make it, because I’m pretty sure there aren’t many original changes in the piece besides a select few that are repeated throughout. That being said, I’m pretty sure I heard someone spitting at 11:13.
I can’t say if I liked this piece or not. I think it’s more or less a blank slate, with slight distinguishable parts, which makes Kontradictionaries somewhat avant-garde, postmodern, or one of those fancy terms I can’t really use with much confidence; basically, I think Kontradictionaries is more like modern art than any of the other pieces, due to its monochromatic characteristics and seemingly uninspired (albeit sparse) dynamics. The only thing I’m sure about in this song (besides uncertainty) is that I won’t ever be dancing to this.
As much as it pained me to listen to Phill Niblock’s “Kontradictionaries,” I came out of the experience an entirely new outlook on the power of music/sound. For roughly the first five minutes of the piece, I was able to concentrate fully on internalizing the sounds and achieving a fairly in depth understanding of how they were affecting me. The unwavering persistence and aggression of the music was what eventually made my mind wander. Since the sound was nearly uniform throughout, each time it there was a variation it was easily spotted and appreciated. Even with the variation, the entire piece instilled me with one unchanging emotion: anxiety. For the first five minutes the anxiety was interesting and bearable. After that the consistency of the music allowed me to lose interest somewhat. I was able to force myself to concentrate some and regain my footing in the drone, but I was quick to lose myself again. When the piece became background music to my daydreaming, the anxiousness grew exponentially. Since I wasn’t focusing on what was happening with the music and noticing all of the intricacies, it felt like it was nagging at me over and over. This made it even harder to try to get back into the flow of the music. Eventually the anxiety grew to the point that my whole body was sweating. Even now I’m actually feeling uncomfortable just recalling the memory. So although I may not sit down and listen through the piece again for pleasure, I have the utmost respect for how heavily it affected me.
In my blog I wanted to clarify my feelings about Niblock’s Kontradictionaries and the statement I made about it in class on Monday. In class I said something along the lines of, “I could only appreciate Kontradictionaries on an intellectual level, and not on an emotional level.” I take Kontradictionaries as something of an essay on overtones. I was inexperienced in overtones coming into class on Monday, so listening to Kontradictionaries opened my ears to things I had never heard before. Compared to Stimmung, the Niblock Piece demonstrated overtones in a much more explicit fashion. As I said before, it was a musical essay, an experiment, on overtones. When I listened to Kontradictionaries, it provoked an intellectual response in me, an enlightenment, one might say. Stimmung produced a more emotional response in me because it put the overtones Kontradictionaries had experimented with to a more emotionally artistic purpose. In that way, I could, as I said in class, listen to Stimmung simply for the joy and pleasure of listening to it, because emotion never gets old; it never exhausts itself. You can’t get tired of feeling an emotion like you can get tired of having an intellectual idea stated. I couldn’t listen to Kontradictionaries again, simply for the joy of listening to it, because its potential to enlighten is spent. You can’t be enlightened about something twice. So, to summarize and further clarify my thoughts, Kontradictionaries was intellectual art, which, for me at least, has limited appeal, and Stimmung was emotional art, which is timeless.
So this blog is about Phill Niblock’s “Kontradictionaries”, also known as the piece that made an entire class (and some random guy who walked by) uncomfortable. Hearing everyone’s reaction to this song(?) was really interesting for me, as it helped me kind of piece together my own experience. During the piece, I just kind of tuned out and used it as a platform to concentrate and focus my mind so I didn’t get too bored. But as a consequence, I wasn’t really aware of all the little nuances going on. I’m actually listening to it right now, and it’s amazing how much less intimidating and gut-wrenching it feels on small speakers, as opposed to the room-filling pervasiveness of the big speakers, which make this song sound kind of like some kind of troll orchestra tuning instruments made from the bones of fallen enemies… All in all, this piece was interesting from a somewhat experimental point of view, yet I don’t know about it being music.-Chris
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