(:)(:):::

Section B began in earnest with a scalar uprising, as if to allay the drone point’s mesmeric clout by quasi-reversing what had brought it on. But reversals weren’t erasers. The B-flat fixation had decisively surfaced repressed tendencies that would doubtless continue skewing affordances willy-nilly, if subliminally.

X regained contact with the notation. Time finally appeared to be moving again, and with redoubled élan, snapping his mind back to a taut awareness of continuity after the crisis that had temporarily sent it spinning into uncontrolled speculation. He had heedlessly plunged into a sinkhole of his own making, which only happenstance could extricate him from.

It had been a singularly fraught idea to preemptively engage the ring modulator, overwhelming the melody with a shimmering set of frequencies, which lent a curiously static, invariant patina to his deviational initiative. What started as an embarrassment promptly coagulated into a pathological condition, increasingly difficult to extinguish. Luckily, the protracted pedal and the abundant proliferation of difference it encouraged—in momentarily dispensing with the need to both read and render—had dissolved the necessity of committing to that particular idiosyncrasy. It shouldn’t have been incumbent to overplay this early in the game, with 19 pages to go out of 21, but X at times succumbed to an anxious urge to jump ahead, as a method of hyperstitionally sidestepping the natural decline of attention integral to durational enterprises, altogether forgetting the redoubtably chaotic effects of excessive caution.

The feeling of interminability was expected, even comforting. It was still too early in the proceedings. After all, a certain amount of time is always necessary to clarify an emergent field before categories are formed and crystallized. For now, it was all too open. Each note received inordinate attention, suffering the weight of its bloated capacities to rewrite the logic that had heretofore been operating. Revision without end. Things were moving forward, but teleology remained ever murky, recalling the swift transition of consistently halved steps into never getting started in the first place.

(((:))::)

As X walked away, the words of Empedocles stuck in their craw: “those who change their bodily condition deem to change their thought.”

X recollected being caught time and again in the throes of physically challenging engagements during which hexis, a somatic disposition acquired through training, had its way with phronesis, or practical wisdom. Moreover, the annals of torture were replete with zealous accounts of mental compliance systematically obtained via stress positions. But the chain of influence could be productively reversed, affording a given abstract configuration—such as a set of shrewdly massaged melodic contours—the capacity to reorganize corporeal inclinations. It was easy to see how the melancholia of The Brown Study could be upgraded into a chronic syndrome, lingering unbidden, seeping into everyday infrastructures, eventually rendering the body pliable to other trajectories.

Bergson and Bachelard, at loggerheads once again, returned to refine this open-ended digression. X thought about capitalism’s delusional fantasy of defeating time, irremediably tethered to the erasure of history and the arrest and containment of messy processes of decay. To them now, Bergson’s vitalist temporality perpetually taking care of itself without the encumbrances of negativities and affective concavities seemed pathetically and inescapably shackled to this world system and its thoroughgoing vampirizing of exuberance in the “affirmation” of cyclical creative destruction. How might such a predicament be resisted, short of engineering psychosomatic constructs that differentially compact and dilate temporal flow between gaseous, viscous, and solid states so as to pressure memory retentions, dislocate bodily time from rationalized clock time, seeking out any available opportunity to reinstate contingency according to the rhythms of chronal collapse?

Perhaps The Brown Study had been designed to operationalize select Kublerian circuit relays in order to thwart the deleterious eternal presentism aiding and abetting capitalist designs, mangling their logics through the illapsi of anomalies, repatterning susceptibilities. The thought persistently loitered on the way home.

A business card protruded from X’s mailbox.

THE BROWN STUDY.

March 29, 2008. 6 PM.

387 Park Avenue South. New York.

neither/nor.

(::)((:)):

Section P punctually aligned asounders, suddenly reversing behavior in light of a peculiar recognition, that of the signal, or sigil before us: a parting handshake, fully harmonized and spread out across two staves. Its hieratic austerity compelled total submission, as was usually the case with immutable protocolar formulas parachuted in to abort delinquent processes, not that most asounders weren’t already deeply desirous of any reason to intone in rhythmic unison after such determined divagation.

It was also in the nature of last-page wrap-ups to temporarily condense attention into ritual deliberation. Perhaps a chance to make amends. Such grandiosity, of anthemic ilk, fostered defiantly distasteful overtones for X, though they knew that an assertion of centripetal, collective intent was necessary to properly seal off what had transpired that evening on Ossington Avenue, Toronto, March 30, 2007. Six bombastic, accented minor tenths attacked with pyretic violence spurred the conclave’s resolve to terminate the rite ecstatically, with a wide-voiced progression expanding outwards in contrary motion capped by an ultimate, quizzical chord held for ten counts.

Cut-out.

As Section Q began—a mere four bars of melodic restraint, a stuttering alternation—the eldritch priest languidly departed from the scene, electric guitar in tow, not to be seen again.

It took some time before each asounder, contending with the cumulative weirdness of the experience, enveloped by the kaleidophonic melodicity remaindered by dramatic closure, managed to pull it together, pack and quietly exit the room. Words were not exchanged until on the street, and then only polite formalities. After all, most of us barely knew each other, at least exoterically.

X contemplated whether another asounder had experienced the séance both linearly and vertically, as a melody disparately wafting across the tracks of an immeasurably deep, everlasting recording session, unpredictably entertaining conduits to alternate times. X knew they were unusually sensitive to the paranormal psychic effects induced by certain types of musical performance, especially those requiring tenacious absorption, having many a time tripped multiple Kubler circuits to warp causal influence.

((:)(:))(:)

With the penultimate page of the score before us, anticipatory fantasies of the end began exerting palpable pressure, catalyzing the wayward predilections of Section N into full-blown turbulent multiplicity, instead of corralling its stepwise ambulation into a terminal rallying point, an occasion for collective homorhythmy. X again felt the looming presence of strategic and somewhat disingenuous engineering at work. Section O went one better, ditching N’s durational flexibility by restricting itself to straight quarter notes. This only emboldened the metastasizing delay lines that began deferring the melody into a cloud whose unfolding, sumptuous expanse goaded certain asounders to further distend.

Maybe this part was intended to concretize and ratify what The Brown Study had been—isomorphic with the sundry fortuities it had provoked—into a form that would sustain its collaborators beyond the almost expired séance. If even a radically simplified notation failed to forestall a precipitate slide into chaos, perhaps this meant that we had located, after many hours of collective effort, the crux of the matter. The eldritch priest’s battery of tests in their crafty pre-structuring of performative propensities had been patiently brewing a consistent concoction, the sum of our divergent machinations amounting to an entity that had become its own thing.

Most importantly, the contaminative enmeshments of notational inflexibilities, wildly disparate individual attempts at developing idiosyncratic valences and their complex inflection by audial feedback had engendered an exceptionally strange substance none of us could claim ownership of. It was a properly cybernetic state of affairs.

X suspected that the powerful massed effect of this newly constituted egregoric entity would exert no uncertain influence on all subsequent melodic listening, internalizing and transmission. The psychic intensities unlocked through such dogged collective focus, underwritten by individual struggles to come to terms with personal proclivities, glaringly exposed, had sparked a course that could only be called transmutational.

X had a flash, rapidly subsumed by the charismatic onrush of the final approach: this séance had been the inceptive move of a broader program, facture unknown.

((::))::

And yet, despite this accumulating ground, apareidolia fiercely prevailed. Opposed to the compulsive drive to detect patterns in the undifferentiated, apareidolia describes an inability to generalize relations, sensations into stable percepts that would allow for secure enough transit between micro- and macro-perceptual scales, such that more or less robust prediction could be ventured (equipped with fallback subterfuges in case primary targets had been missed). After all, even a sketchy knowledge of The Brown Study’s overall structure would invest each asounder with coordinates defined enough to fashion an approach that could evolve autonomously. A contrario, a steadfastly prosecuted molecular immanence kept architectonic yearnings in check. Such an obsessional presentness jibed with the theory that the priest was conducting an intricate analysis of melodic propensities through setups that enjoined asounders to tarry in the dark, struggling to be inventive without ever transgressing the threshold of necessary confidence as to the validity of this or that contrivance over time.

It’s likely (though not axiomatically) true that the vagaries of time would eventually end up concretizing the general constitution of the experiment, if it lasted long enough. But with the end in sight, such conjecture could not be conclusively tested. Nevertheless, X wondered whether the regress at work was less than infinite.

The fourth, longest and most abstruse interregnum yet interceded, assuredly priming in its recondite bearing for the monomania to come. Section N consisted almost exclusively of ascending and descending scalar lines, at differing speeds (once again, deploying a notated rubato meant to discharge affective effects). It was a more streamlined proposal amenable to swift adumbration. A conspicuous hostility began to erupt within the more conventionally trained division of the emergent egregor enduring its intuitive brethren’s irrepressible vagrancies in what turned out to be the most intensely exposed moment of the entire evening. Tension was also being brokered through both speed and directionality: something was being built up to, paradoxically through discontinuities, interruptions and resumptions.

A trumpeter asounder—invisible—flaked out into stratospheric range, keening obliviously.

((:::))

Even in its wondrously immoderate extensiveness, the specific melody unfurling in The Brown Study was beginning to seem like a conceit, a placeholder masking ulterior processes.

The séance had lasted long enough that slower transactions could finally be detected, such as an insidious crossfade patiently dialing back one’s will to scrupulously attend to progressive details as an abstracted, generic melodicity gained ground, however unstable. In retrospect, the eldritch priest’s vague pronouncement that “contour trumps” had nothing to do with accurately rending the actual melody but rather pulling it back into genericity by simply attending to the general outline. Danger lurked. It was only a matter of extended time before this ongoing commitment to a lack of precision would perforce end up generating false positives, escalating the risk of structural collapse. Indeed, the numbingly diffuse melodic scheme asserting itself opened the floodgates to future unwitting coincidences and categorical confusions to haplessly plague already strenuous efforts at time binding.

This möbiusoidal slide into generality also inexorably shifted emphasis towards the individual asounder’s melodic penchants: the absence of any injunction to accurately render (an already arduous assignment for the more instinctual player) hastened the resuscitation of well-rehearsed phraseologies, the festering of which might well eventually dissolve any impetus to continue the ritual.

But even given this awkward clause, an overall sense of structure (or at least the part of it so far traversed) strayed increasingly from conceptual containment. The structural listening privileged by Adorno as a fundamental technics of musical perception—allowing for the inside and outside-time tracking of a musical object through the perpetual interchanges between parts and wholes—struggled to take hold in these far from ideal circumstances. Indeed, the evolving compression of melodic activity into a kind of ratcheting phase space containing all melodic possibilities resulted in the retrospective confounding and exchanging of sections rather than a meticulously ordered set of memorable, local melodic instantiations. An affectively valenced melodic method took mnemonic precedence over any of the actual melodies it happened to spawn.

(((:)))(:):

An abstract intrusion suspended our pursuits for the third time, reinforcing a tangible sensation of discontinuity that had been gradually sinking in as discrete states congealed, self-reified in the abruption of alternation. Was the séance now probing the modes by which a modicum of collective control could be reasserted, albeit tacitly, by sporadically declaring full stops, while the inscrutable synthesis that inhabited them slyly modulated what was to come?

These breaks and the voluntary dropouts both oscillated dialectically with the surfeit of expression that every asounder by this point had weathered by virtue of attending to The Brown Study’s imperatives. Plenitude had been overheated via overstimulation into its opposite, forcing disconnection, withdrawal, hallmarks of dwindling, catagenic time.

Indeed, Gaston Bachelard argued that Bergson’s emphatically void-suppressing, boundless profusion of possibility—overflowing even in spans of relative repose—didn’t accurately track with one’s habitual experience of time, littered with multifarious varieties of sinkholes, inertias, stoppages. To boot, intuitively inclined asounders especially favored a type of melodic articulation that required boring holes before every run (and in extremis, before every note), experimentally pitching retreat against incipience in a manner more resonant with Bachelard’s flickering vitality beset by blackouts than Bergson’s inexhaustible fulsomeness.

The asounder’s increasing and ultimately fatal incapacity to render these melodies continuously purposeful invariably intensified the oscillation between states of timeless ecstasy and patches of somatically amplified, torpid frustration, with nary a teleology in sight. An enigmatic logic of separation was at work in the tactical deployment of melody. Though the micro-tunes that assembled into the grand melody remained adamantly unmemorable, their curvatures nonetheless impelled expression, even in the absence of explicit textual prescriptions. What’s more, dynamic surges and attenuations unfolded in their collective emergence without recourse to germane notational specifications, which were not to be found. Sustained notes almost unfailingly accrued in bell-curve-like swells that lured you away from the orbit of chronic self-obsession, while freeing listening to roam peripherally. Truly, an occult correlation between dynamic and contour had yet to be deciphered.

((:):)((:))

Another, lengthier “inhuman” intermission broke in without fanfare, passing itself off as the most natural rejoinder to the preceding melee. This time it was populated by buzzing tones that intermittently eschewed audibility, resulting in the first moments of extended silence (so to speak) of the entire session, though short-lived, as transitory harmonies, eerie in their hyper-clean articulation, promptly saturated the void.

Section J lumbered inceptively, deprived of the necessary élan to ensure immediate continuance. Fatigue and embarrassment had begun to wear down the collective sounding, increasingly plagued by dropouts, even walkouts. At least the overall sluggishness of the pacing in principle afforded time to ponder what was happening, opening up spaces between action and re-action, especially so for the crack readers present able to more readily clear their attentional slate.

This silver lining notwithstanding, X hypothesized that dropouts might function pragmatically as control mechanisms tasked with routing careless improvisational impulses before they metastasized into a concerted play that couldn’t be undone. (This tactic foundered in the Montréal instantiation, as far as they could tell; the turgid extensities and dramatic overkills that singularized it irresistibly and repeatedly compounded themselves.) More cynically, the sanctioning of self-extraction might have been cunningly countenanced in order to impart an illusion of agency that would ineluctably lure each asounder into more reliable compliance. When abutting against the sense that nothing more can be meaningfully added, to stave off expression burnout and a diminishing ability to sincerely engineer difference, you could simply drop out, with the proviso that your idiosyncratic, but inescapably productive work would shortly resume, reentry appreciably buoyed by what X called an incipience effect, a regenerative device whose only catch was that you had to leave to come back.

For no apparent reason, though certainly instigated by renewed, post-dropout commitments, another cloud began forming in the wake of an irrepressible swell on a sustained note. This altogether prodigious concentration of psychic energy converted the physical location—as the music concomitantly swapped out tracks—back to 2007 Toronto.

::::::

It didn’t matter anyway, for X had evidently been dropped from the séance, at least audibly. She continued depressing the keys for a short time out of amusement before attending to perplexing asymmetries between space and sound. X discerned how with each time-shift the character of The Brown Study mutated, differentially informed by local conventions, its ever erratic boundaries further deferring any prospect of totalizing comprehension. The operative injunction to deviate could force any notated program to abdicate from causally guaranteeing a specific musical consistency.

This version…she couldn’t think of a more suitable word. It was like navigating a continuous, transtemporal substance on a mixer with infinite channels, switching periods via subtle, ably dissimulated crossfades. Though musical logics didn’t reorganize with the same starkness as affected locational transformations, each “version” valenced things in a particular way. For instance, the occasional chordal change covering a precisely delineated area was routinely being extended far beyond its purview in a more overtly willful manner rather than lagging due to productive incompetence of one kind or another. (To boot, the changes as such arrived unwarranted and in misalignment with the underlying melody, deforming and reforming it—another eldritch design bent on coaxing reorientational effects.)

Moreover, harmonic stopping points now tended to just happen, even without specified changes. And once harmonic motion transiently slowed, jazzy extemporization axiomatically entailed. At least it did here. Quick digressions into unreconstructed lick territory mobilized as soon as a lick-like figure appeared on the near horizon, nervously impelling anticipatory fibrillations. The newly reconstituted—chronoportationally remixed—assembly of musical lineages had led proceedings afield. In effect, the swingier orientation currently being seduced out of the budding egregor that was and is The Brown Study flagrantly underlined the latter’s unswinging use of so-called irrational subdivisions of the beat, however rhythmically alluring in themselves. In this gathering, even straight successions of quarter notes incurred studied divergence, evoking a palpable tension in the more straight-laced readers who had to slacken hopelessly chimerical notions of fidelity to accommodate.

(::)(:)(:)

Intoning restarted after the hermetic minute-long interlude, utterly remote from the melodic keening we had heretofore been copiously exposed to. Composed of brute, dryly articulated sine tones droning and glissing across the audible spectrum, it would be the first of many inhuman ingressions, perhaps destined to reset the collective affordance machine, or (more likely) operating on an integrally occluded xenological level.

We had crossed the median, though resolve had plummeted to its lowest point yet, a minority of asounders tentatively grappling to resume connection after the weird alienation effect. The eldritch priest maintained an aloof facade throughout as if attuned to an underground continuity inaccessible to us. (Indeed, the still ongoing, massive Section H cavalierly sheltered these antithetical approaches).

An entrainment effect began to creep up, further skewing any prospect of temporal solidity. Each asounder would eventually undergo a radical untethering from the activity that required another’s availability to convincingly reset—such unshackling often occurred when a melodic element incited an experimental extemporization that momentarily distracted from notational imperatives. Whomever pulled things back together had the opportunity to set a new pace that others would gladly follow, most having by now attained a somewhat addled state.

Meanwhile, the first texturally fulsome event of this segment began agglomerating, despite itself. A misread duration sent the melody careening off in so many delayed directions that it compounded into an emergent sinkhole, all but obliterating the generative tune, directionality temporarily suspended. It was then that X noticed the asounder to his left vigorously bowing his violin, without any acoustic evidence of his travails. The room darkened accompanied by a musty odor, foregrounded as if it had been there all along, just heeded. X felt the urge to drop out to scout the location, but was doubly stalled by an uncanny impression of centrifugal retreat—effects unlatched from causes—and a glimpse of an address scrawled on a post-it note stuck to the now empty chair on his right: 387 Park Avenue South. New York. Date unknown.