This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound – A Conversation
Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill
May 9, 2024
USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab/Art Share LA
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Edwin Hill: Thank you. That was beautiful, powerful. I’m not sure beautiful is too simple of a word—unless we think about also the expansiveness of beauty that Maya [Kronfeld] brought up with respect to avant-garde experimental music practice, which is definitely something you’re engaged in. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to start with and then open it up for discussion. And the questions are really built from the discussion that we’ve already been having—really all semester—as we engaged with all of your work, but also, today, with different topics that came up. And in a lot of this, I’m borrowing the language [from the] the words that have been coming up.
I wanted to start asking you to talk more about what it means to perform in an academic space, which, on one level is a surface question: Why is it meaningful to you? What sorts of things does it allow for? And why do you think it’s typically so difficult to do? But beyond the surface level, of course, as we got a chance to think about reading your work and the work of others—it relates to a “deep refrain”—and your thought that has to do with the interrogation of the paradoxes—or impasses or seeming irreconcilable relations—between musical praxis, the limits of language, ineffability, and the production of knowledge. And that’s what we’ve been talking about a lot. As Erin [Graff Zivin] was summarizing our discussions from this morning, she talked about the question of what’s legible or audible, or what is otherwise able to be registered—maybe not always in expressible and satisfying ways. But what do we do with the break, between what’s registered in hearing and playing and what’s registered in discourse? I see this performance as engaging with this, so I want to note, also for all of you—that at one point Michael said—I don’t want to talk. I was like, oh, he’s really struggling with this thing right now, you know what I mean? At one point you wanted to make a point not to speak, as maybe a continuation of this interrogation that you’re doing in written words, [as a] kind of performance strategy, with what you shared and how we experienced. So, what does it mean to perform in an academic space and what can you say about it?
Michael Gallope: Thanks so much, Edwin. I think it’s a really tricky question. From the most sociological level, music departments are not places where there’s a lot of creative work, right? It is mostly a kind of cultural industry for music education and classical music—training musicians in a professional context. There are some institutions that do jazz extremely well in different kinds of ways. It’s interesting—Why is that the case? Why could you get an MFA in poetry and do avant-garde poetry in an academic context in the 60s and 70s, but in music, the institutions were based in an academic style of composition, and this was racialized in a very particular way in the United States to exclude figures like Ornette Coleman who probably could have worked as professors—or Alice Coltrane—but would not have been hired [at the time]. So, when we think about music and the production of knowledge, there are very specific historical questions about the way these institutions have been built that have made certain kinds of legitimacy—and again, in a way that is deeply racialized—that made that [legitimacy] complicated and difficult and unequal. It’s an ideological question, in an institutional sense.
And me being the dialectician I am, I think, okay—so what about me personally? How do I feel about that? Michael [Love] and Maya and I were talking about this outside. I had become very used to doing my music in another context and doing my creative work in another context at Zebulon over here [in Los Angeles], or at cultural institutions, or clubs, or whatever, in places where the whole semiosis of the scene and the situation makes sense. And the kind of music I play is not going to support me, so I never looked at it as something that I could commit myself to, but it always existed in a separate space for me and in a separate social space for me. One of the things I couldn’t help reflect on, seeing the incredibly powerful performances [over the past two days], is first of all, all the work and the artistry that Maya and Michael did to synthesize that duet, and to have their work speak to each other. But just the techne and the existential intensity of presenting work in a context where—maybe this is just me being the grizzled academic that I’ve become—but it is very easy to sit here and give a paper and talk about ideas, and it is very challenging to present work in a context that doesn’t historically seem to square with what that object is.
That’s been an instructive lesson for me in terms of just thinking about music. Because the fear and anxiety and intensity of just doing it, that is, to me, the ontology of the medium. If you take that out, if you take the risk that one puts in—the risk of humiliation, the sense that you’re going to totally fuck your life up by committing to music—if you’re going to go down that road, you’re being honest with what music is—which is this thing that reveals Being, right? It reveals the deepest pain, and it’s trauma and it’s inequity, and it’s utopia, and it’s ecstasy, and it’s these things layered together in all kinds of uncomfortable ways that we don’t even—we’re not very good at even interpreting it most of the time. And I think maybe there is something about the way academic spaces have been set up that are just—it’s easier to domesticate the art form than it is to live with some of the political, social, [and] erotic intensity of [music’s ineffability] that is just part of the production of the art. And so, I think, in all my work, I’m trying to recall that. And in this most recent book [The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–78] I’m trying to think like that when I go through the archive. I try to listen for those traces of people feeling like their life is at stake in order to get their thing out there.
Hill: I think that’s really powerful. Sometimes I wonder if, on the one hand, we’re thinking about, bringing the academic and this other space together, and then sometimes there’s part of me that’s thinking—but maybe it’s nice if they’re not [together]. Maybe this other place is this safer place or allows me room to do things I couldn’t do and I kind of like that. And maybe I don’t want to introduce myself as a professor, you know, because that will mess the vibe up, you know what I mean? And I don’t want people to think I know things, for example. Do you struggle or think about that aspect also? That’s part of the risk of bringing these together is that maybe that other world is now your world, and therefore it doesn’t serve as a refuge in the same way as before.
Gallope: This is interesting; it has changed for me over the last ten years. When I first started, I had this very paranoid [impulse]—okay, I’m not going to tell anybody if I go on tour or do something. And at the time I was playing with this Sierra Leonean musician, Janka Nabay, and I was managing. And it was an intense kind of West African, Afro-beat style of electronic dance music, and I was playing keyboards in it. And it was just as far away from the academic world as you could imagine in terms of the situations that we were in, and so I had become very used to separating them. And then, maybe it is something about being in a state university, the University of Minnesota, and also being in a department community who all have different perspectives on what means to be, a lefty, right? And there are a lot of students that actually don’t see a distinction [between the academic and non-academic world]. They do creative work. They live praxis in all these different ways. And so, when they meet you and they’re in a teaching space and then they see you in a show, they’re like—this is great. So, part of it was the community wore down some of those boundaries in Minneapolis, where the public institution—my attitude became that it’s less of a distinctive realm. It’s more like a public good. And in order for it to remain a public good, it should be available in many ways as possible, and I don’t want to draw boundaries around it. And but it took me a while to come to that.
Hill: I’m glad you are talking about your other experiences too, and just like the programming of this event has been kind of interesting—the musical playlists that’ve gotten put together and I feel like there is a logic or coherence that maybe is coming after the fact. I want to talk about groove. Can we talk about groove? And grooves? I was thinking about the talks this morning about fragments and shattered pieces, and I started wondering about grooves as sites of a kind of cut, but that are also where and how things might fit together. And Maya was talking a little bit about groove also in that presentation. We can think of course, along with Alex Weheliye about the imbrication of rhythm and grooves of history and sound technologies and we can ask how rhythmic feeling good can serve in the suturing of historic trauma, the suturing of the body as was mentioned this morning, and some of the comments are of an aesthetic, but also maybe suturing the human and the machine. So that’s a general question I wanted to ask. Since we’ve been discussing repair, how do grooves do reparative work, how they afford possibilities of reconciliation or perhaps open possibilities for reincarnation after death? And more specifically, I would love to hear you talk about how groove, rhythmic feeling, a certain kind of way, how grooves manifest and work within the aesthetic, temporal, and spatial contexts of drone music, experience, and performing. I am also curious about the performance of the music. How does your music put you in a groove, a groove of Being, a groove of feeling, and also speculation? But take it wherever you want.
Gallope: What I played today didn’t have much groove obviously. It is sort of anti-groove. There is a lot of emptiness, and something happens, and you don’t really know what it is. And there’s language-like stuff, maybe. I don’t know if it is a conversation. I want to create something that I don’t understand. So that’s what I’m searching for, and it’s very much about reincarnation. I’m searching for—Michael [Love] and I were talking about creating metaphysics. Sometimes it’s not going to happen, you know? Otherwise, it wouldn’t… that’s what music is—trying to find that. I think there is a parallel to groove. I find groove very hard. I have played a lot of dance music. And I am the kind of person—after I’ve recorded, I’m doing little edits, and pushing stuff behind the beat just because I can’t [play it the way I’d like]—[so] I [edit it in the way I] want it to be—[and, when I listen, I think] oh my gosh, I wish I could do that live. [I want to] just have that kind of—whatever it is. Maybe if I had a bigger body and I had more [of a sense of] relaxation or something, I could find that side of the groove that was a little behind the beat, and I just can’t do it. But when it works—it’s like, you know, consciousness is open or something. There is this disclosure when it’s happening and when it’s dancing. I was feeling that a lot, you know, during various moments like of this collaboration [with Janka Nabay]. And it’s about volume and there’s a fragility to it. And then when it’s locked in, it’s like—I don’t know—there’s the historicity in terms of forms, in terms of the break, in terms of Blackness and the way we were talking about Michael Sawyer’s talk earlier, with respect to [Fred] Moten and all of these metaphors of formal displacement and thinking. When that groove is truly alive, that thinking is suddenly three-dimensional to me and there’s a whole lot happening. But it’s very tricky to put it into shape. I guess I’m very respectful of people that specialize in it because it’s an incredible thing to find that attunement, and to be able to be with it. There’s a certain, almost passivity to it—like letting it happen.
Hill: After you performed, I almost wanted to say that it was glorious, but then I was remembering… Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman… it could make you hear a musical history, when you listen to electronic music and its experimental dimensions and you think about the play of tone that’s happening with artists that you’re citing, and it was really interesting to think about these kind of genealogies. But I also know that you push back against a utopian notion of music, or an essentializing of music. One way I read your work is that it’s kind of a critique of the audio-visual litany that Jonathan Sterne talks about and the way the music is kind of figured in a certain way with respect to Judeo-Christian philosophies and histories. Before we turn it over, I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the notion of paradox within this.
Gallope: I’ve been accused of being a sonic or a musical exceptionalist—maybe I am sort of—but I don’t even know what that means. I think, in my work, I am trying to [respond to my past experience] going to school and learning about semiotics and being a part of this “linguistic turn” and using language as a metaphor and model for everything. I think part of me was trying to push against that and understand the specificity of sound in its inconsistency—how it operates. Because it’s obviously filled with all kinds of language-like things, but there’s also a difficulty that one has—I always say it’s like an embarrassment. Okay, you could talk about music for a while, but when you press play, or Maya goes and sits at the piano, or Michael turns on the [iPad], there’s just pppshhhhh—just this surplus. It’s impossible to remember, you know? It’s just like, oh, I forgot how complicated that groove is when we were breaking down. Just looping this single thing [as Alex Chávez asked us to do yesterday] and finding the multidimensionality in it. I think in my work I am trying to sustain attention—not like I’m some sort of theologian for music that believes it exists in some totally separate space—but [I am] just trying to call attention to the character of the depth of it, and the oddity of it, and the multidimensional inexhaustibility of it. You sit down and you find that magnetic groove or a loop of something, and you could sit there and listen to it for—Alex [Chávez] was talking about what, 16 hours? Until 5 a.m.? How does that happen, right? That’s a kind of fascination.
Hill: Let’s open it up for questions.
Q1: Thank you so much. That performance for me really expanded a lot of categories. I wanted to ask you, Michael, what is it like to play music where overtones are—it’s hard to call it overtones—are the primary thing? I was really struck with the care with which you set up what then became a drone. There were so many choices you made in the beginning to support what was to come in terms of how you were honing those opening tones that then became the basis for more playing. To me, that’s where the groove really resided, is in that whirring—what would erroneously be taken as a single tone. And all the movement in the groove, it seemed like you had so much patience in really not proceeding to the next phase until you had kind of laid that kind of groundwork. And so, I was just wondering what it’s like to hear and prepare in that way.
Gallope: That’s helpful. This keyboard is the drone keyboard. And it’s a Casiotone from the 80s, but—this is one of the things where 90% of the sounds [on the keyboard] I don’t like, but there’s a few things that are just magic. You know, there’s metaphysics on a couple of these buttons for some reason. And these only cost $100, and they’re made like toys; you can just throw them around and they don’t break. But it’s an 80s keyboard, and then you put it on top of the Yamaha organ drone, and then suddenly you just see this instability, right? And then you can kind of just take a few variables and play with that. There’s a lot of drone music that—in the scene in the Twin Cities you have laptop-based stuff, you have modular synthesis—which is a whole other can of worms in terms of indeterminacy—you have live performance, you have homemade instruments. I was interested in the idea of—a keyboard like an organ is going to make one sound and then, you can layer drones and do things. And people kind of hear your decisions, and maybe they’re listening with you, or you want them to listen with you. And that became an interesting thing for me, to find a way to move through it and build it and make it—I think of it as a kind of sculpture.
Q2: The Brazilian scholar and musician José Miguel Wisnik’s book O som e o sentido (1989) [Sound and sense] has this wonderful moment at the beginning where he derives pitch, and then harmony, from rhythm, right? An oscillation. And this also goes to what Maya was mentioning in terms of beats. But I also noticed that just before the sort of ending if you wanted to call it when the car alarm took over, your piece entered into what we might call a rhythm section, right? Pitch sort of fell away, and you’re really asking us to focus on that more oscillatory part that’s no longer pitched. So, I was wondering, not necessarily just that moment—How does this allow you to think through rhythm, given that that’s one of the focuses today? This is also ostensibly arrhythmic—I mean, it isn’t but, right?
Gallope: At the end, I am doing what are referred to as “difference tones.” When you [have] low frequencies where the frequency is not that fast, when you have two dissonant frequencies, they phase with each other, and you start hearing this prrrrrrrrr. You never know how it’s going to sound; it is all dependent on the system. If there are sub[woofers], it could make the whole floor [vibrate], and also the resonance of the room. So, there’s a lot of indeterminacy there. But it’s a little bit like—I know, in the 80s, you know those old TVs, where you’d turn the channel, and it would be static? I’m very into those kinds of things where you just turn it and there’s some weird thing on the television. So, they’re kind of cuts, in a way.
Hill: There’s shapes, right? There’s contours in the sound.
Gallope: Yeah. Just to make sure, in case you were confused that I was trying to express something, this makes it clear I wasn’t, you know, it’s crrrrrr—the TV’s off.
Q3: This was super interesting in terms of how there seemed to be a narrative without this stable temporal architecture. And especially this last part that I perceived it as a narrative through some kind of mimicry, let’s say the sound of shotguns or helicopters or something like that, so how there was a sense of suspense building up, but how that is usually these specific affects of uneasiness and anxiety are usually attached through Hollywood representations, these kind of tones that follow, let’s say, police chasing or something like that, or shot guns. So, how that sense of in a way that it was—you said empty space, but how much that empty space creates affect and what it does to our bodies. I just felt my hormonal oscillations kind of attuning to what you were trying to say or express but also shaped by these other cultural notions that we had attached to these particular notions of suspense or sound. What do you think that your music does, for you, or for your audience?
Gallope: It is a kind of terrifying way to end it. It’s like being caught between two big fans or something like that. But what I’m interested in a sequencing, you use the word narrative, and I think, there’s no causality, right? If we take Aristotle’s definition of narrative that has causality—right, a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you change the TV, there’s no causality, other than you switching it so there is a cut. I’m interested in the way that affects your memory of what you heard before you know. So, it’s like: Oh, what was that? That was excessive and weird and then, after this happens, what was that thing? That’s where maybe the language-like stuff comes into the fore, because these things are obviously not related to each other, but they also are related to each other—and you don’t want to solve that, you know?
Q4: From a different angle, one thing that strikes me about understanding drone and various types of ambient music in general is that it works around temporal dilation and makes us sit with maybe that discomfort right? There’s usually a kind of acclamation period like in the first minute or two—are we really doing this? Two or three minutes after that, yeah we are. And I think about something like the temporal dilation in the moment. And then I think about your other main profession on the page, on the various types of temporal compression and dilation that are required in either narrative or argumentative discourse. On one side you can have the story of [Gabriel García Márquez’s] 100 Years of Solitude compressed into 400 pages—a whole century. Or you could have the Joycean Ulysses story of a single day sprawling over hundreds of pages. I’m just curious, to boil down the question for you, given [where] your musical and aesthetic sensibilities are taking you: Do you feel like you write slower? Are your sentences doing different things with time because of the way you’re playing?
Gallope: That’s a great question. I don’t think so. Now I’m thinking about Aristotle for some reason—thinking about narrative—but my teaching is really Aristotelian. It’s organized. And my writing—when I write it’s just like—shhhhhhhh—I am just editing. I don’t know if other musicians feel this way—the music/writing difference—which is that for my writing I can sit there and keep working on it and I can trust that it’ll always be getting better the more hours I put in on it. I’m finding more things and fixing little sentences. But music—you can go down a hole and make it a lot worse. And all the best music that you write is the stuff that happens by accident. It’s like: oh yeah that was the throwaway tune and then we took the beat out and it was actually great. [When writing a] lot of music, I choose not to play for a while in order not to listen. I can’t listen to a lot of music especially in the age of streaming. I actually have listened to less just because—I just can’t do it. It kind of crowds me out. So [music and writing] have two different economies for me in a weird way but that doesn’t mean they don’t affect one another. What [music] really has affected are the things I pay attention to as a writer. It’s like—what is the that surreal unconscious depth of why someone would come out to hear music? The strangeness of that and the metaphysics that people are trying to incarnate. If I am going to write about music, I need to make sure that particularity is alive in some way, that I’m listening to the archive in a way that’s attentive to and affected by what I pay attention to. I am not spending as much time like labeling chords like a music theorist would. There are lots of biographies in my book, and there is lots of history and backdrop, but when I talk about the object, I’m trying to recover those [musical] decisions and those moments that my practice is helping me think about.