Pendoulous

Meditations on my obsession with a 1999 dub-techno track and the (im)possibility of writing about what one is closest to

0.

My favorite way of listening to music has always been searching for the “perfect” track for the current moment — taking into account mood, environment, season and probably a million other factors I’m not even conscious of — and then just endlessly looping that one track for hours on end.

About a month ago, I found myself doing just that with one of my favorite tracks ever, Greek producer Fluxion, aka Konstantinos Soublis’, 1999 track “Pendoulous” (a misspelling of “Pendulous”, I think. At first I thought it might’ve been a Greek word, but no such word exists. If you Google “Pendoulous”, the only thing that comes up is this track), released on the legendary Basic Channel successor label Chain Reaction and appearing on the Vibrant Forms compilation-album.

While listening, it struck me that I’ve never really written about a lot of my favorite tracks, music like this which also doesn’t really have anyone else extensively writing about in its full specificity. Because what is there to even write about? Just a chord, a bassline, noise and a barely-there kick drum. No lyrics, no narrative, no arrangement, no references … but somehow, I felt the urge to write, to write about this track, even if all I would be able to write about is how I couldn’t write.

That is how this piece came about. It is somewhat experimental in its form, perhaps closer to fiction in parts. I do not know if, or how much of, this really works. I had already convinced myself that there was no way it ever could work, had already mentally abandoned the draft for another month, another summer, another lifetime … but then, a few days ago, I was overcome with a desire to see things through, to assemble together an attempt, the only attempt I could make at getting at whatever it is that has made me love and obsess over this strange, strange music.

1.

pen·​d[o]u·​lous,ˈpen-jə-ləs, adjective

(1) archaic: poised without visible support

(2a) suspended so as to swing freely, branches hung with pendulous vines

(2b) inclined or hanging downward

(3) marked by vacillation, indecision, or uncertainty

The task ahead is simple. Everything has been prepared, there is nothing else left to do. Hands on the keyboard, words appear. I seize the moment, convinced that these words are the right ones. As long as I keep going, I should be good, getting closer and closer to this object that I am writing about, an object that couldn’t be more present because it has been playing on repeat for the last two hours, this six minute dub-techno track from 1999 that should be easiest thing in the world for me to write about. I know it, intimately, probably as intimately as one can know anything.

Hubris! Of course, tragedy strikes. Suddenly, I know nothing, I run out of words, no longer in flow, everything is called into question. Are any of these words even close to being adequate to their object? What just a mere moment ago seemed so close and graspable now seems withdrawn, impossibly distant — even though it is still right in front of me, I am still listening to it right now, but it now appears to me as an unknown language, unintelligible and untranslatable.

But hadn't I understood, just earlier? Just earlier, when I was, as I often do on summer nights, aimlessly cycling my bike through the mostly empty streets, into the warm, hazy night, in search of everything and nothing. I stopped at an intersection, browsing through tracks on my phone, looking for something that could guide me. I saw a familiar cover art … yes, of course, that one — and then it was like a switch had been flipped, everything was different, I was no longer moving aimlessly, but with full intent, endowed with a secret knowledge of the night, small, light and mobile.

But that was earlier, when everything seemed so light and easy and effortless. Now, nothing is effortless. I am no longer the naive listener I was earlier. I am a hunter and an assassin, quiet and lethal, continuously circling around my object, plotting every way it could be approached, mapping out all of its possible escape routes and lines of light. I am a failure and a fraud, my prey has escaped me. If only it would speak to me in a way that I can understand. But it can only speak in the riddles that are its sound, and so all I can do is listen and interpret, hoping that I will somehow come in possession of the rosetta stone that will let me decipher what it really is that I am hearing right now, to hear more than I am hearing.

2.

To achieve that melting of sounds into one, I used effects extremely in many cases, as long as it served this goal, of molding the sounds into one. More like a painter who in the process of creating his own colors, ends up having a palette that everything is borrowing something from the other color. [....] This led me to work on repetitive forms with heavy use of effects processed live to create a spontaneous story. In addition to sound palette and form, there were the frequencies that, when interacting with other frequencies, gives you the perception of tones and counter melodies that don’t exist as written context but rather happen as a result of all the elements interacting with each other. [Fluxion, "An Interview with Fluxion", Primediv Blog 2019]

Perhaps a track like Pendoulous is difficult to write about not because, like some people believe, all music is inherently difficult to write about, but because this is the kind of music that is itself ambiguous. What can be heard is itself perceptually undetermined and open to interpretation, veiling itself behind a field of shadows — noise, distortion and auditory masking. These are the phenomena of the liminal zones in which one sound doesn't quite end and the other doesn't quite yet begin, the outer edges of our perceptual field, not accessible to immediacy, but nonetheless present. The substrate of perception.

3.

flux·​ion,ˈflək-shən, noun

(1): the action of flowing or changing; something subjected to such action

Like almost everyone that released on Chain Reaction, Fluxion mysteriously appeared on the label with no prior discography, perfectly embodying the ethos of the project from the get-go: skeletal dub-scapes, reduced and obscured to the point of almost disappearing. In direct contradiction to the common-sense principles of music production and engineering, Pendoulous conceals rather than reveals; its dry, dark, noisy and hazy patina shields it from immediacy, melting together sounds into something that appears as being without an origin, since it is no longer clear what the source of all this is even supposed to be. All that remains are its effects, filters and delays in motion, sweeping, almost tripping over themselves, creating new textures and harmonics that are neither noise nor tone; the substrate of what remains after the “chain reaction” of effects endlessly feeding into more effects has taken place, leaving behind nothing but a desert of pulse and texture.

What, you might wonder, is left after such ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that is molded and extruded through dub-space. [Simon Reynolds on Chain Reaction, “Heroin House”, Spin Magazine 1998]

What remains left is blurry and barely there, but it is present. But what about the before, the source material that was there before the dub-apocalypse set in? … unheard and inaudible, we can only logically extrapolate its existence, in that there would have to have been some kind of primal source material, but it remains unknowable, only being felt as a present absence from the virtual past that forever keeps haunting the substrate.

4.

vi·​brant,ˈvī-brənt, adjective

(1a): pulsating with life, vigor, or activity; oscillating or pulsating rapidly

(1b): readily set in vibration

(2): sounding as a result of vibration

This is a track of pairs; pairs inside of pairs inside of pairs. Take the chord(s): there’s a chord that itself consists of a pair of two hits, fused together by trailing, weaving delay feedback. It is then joined by a second pair of chords, faintly and passively pulsing in the background. The bassline is a pair of two hits in quick succession, leading into the perception of a virtual second pair that never actually arrives and is only suggested by the presence of that pulsing chord that appears where the bass would have. The hi-hat is paired with a resonant sweeping flanger, which is paired with brushes of noise and crackle, which are paired with noise, paired with even more noise, all the way down to the very bottom of auditory perception: the noise floor.

Many of the chord sounds on Vibrant Forms I and II are easily identifiable as synth stabs. I can reconstruct how they were made — saw wave, filter envelope, resonance … But this, this phased, vocoded, wah-wah-ing formant-thing? It doesn't sound like it's coming from any combination of synths and effects I've ever played with, but rather like some kind of living being, one that is saying something to me, the meaning of which is immediately graspable as sound, but cannot be decoded into any kind of human language; a wah that stands by itself, vowels without words, expressing nothing except the spectra in movement that they are, speech that is not speech, expression without content. If there is a voice here, it is not the voice of a human, but of an animal, imbued with a sacred facticity, like the moo of the cow or the meow of the cat, exterior to all analysis because it expresses a pure fact whose existence is independent of any possible content, is already in itself perfectly, tautologically, true. The real auto-fiction.

5.

Pendoulous ends with a classic techno fade-out, suggesting that this end was just an arbitrary cut to something that could have just gone on forever and ever … do you remember your adolescence? That feeling towards the end of the summer break — let’s hold onto this forever, there is no reason to ever let this go — hoping that fall and the next school year and growing up would never come, an endless summer. I am back on my bike. The dark air is hot and damp, the wind cool and soft. It is the end of summer.

6.

Everything is aerated. Jets of silver water spray your sensorium, wash your brain. All struggle, obstruction and blockage have been sluiced away in a colonic irrigation that leaves you as buoyant as light itself. [Kodwo Eshun on Chain Reaction, “The Tone Zone”, The Wire Issue 169, March 1998]

I am submerged in a warm, glowing, gently moving body of water, sinking slowly, heeding a call to submerge into the depths, to submit to the abyss: bliss. I am small, light and mobile.