This evening a concert will take place

Gilles Deleuze

 The floppy disc is ready. No expectations, awaiting nothing that has not
already been heard or thought, a linear time progression marked by beats
from rhythm instruments, a system of points, a score - it's transformation
realizes the system's elements audibly through established references or in
a series that defines every tone by it's place in the sequence. One already
suspects that the first sequence is followed by this second one and each
future part is dependant upon the last in the row. But not only is that
which is heard to be brought back into the memory, but, to the memory, all
that is audible also seems to be only in regard to what can be remembered.
The music even claims independence from any specific perception that would
recognize it for itself, that could also cause it to sink into oblivion.
Even so this forgetting is only a part of the power of the memory itself,
the audible however, is the naked updating of particular dispositives that
belong to habit.

 Everything points to: the music follows an organized plan that remains
hidden, and as such cannot be heard. It sets the length and timing, the
form of the sound material, the definition of the musical subjects, which
for their part assign rampant interpretations to the musical forms, and
their genesis and structure are taken from the memory. The quicker identity
or concrete form and memory approach a black hole the stronger the
passionate, musical subjectivity constitutes itself. A circulating
relationship of resonance and continuities builds itself between this
subjectivity and the musical systems that draw co-ordination systems and
patterns in the surface.

 Even so, we switch on. Escape into a virtual sound space. Suddenly, as if
struck by lightning, waves and streams of sounds penetrate the ear, tear up
the forms that the memory has stored as music, in a whirl of absolute
speeds that are like a swelling and receding of sound streams, but also a
flowing into one another of micro-streams, small whirls create microscopic
jumps and strange concentrations, as if the jagged line of lightning will
break apart the point system and its subordinate lines. The lightning lines
break open point shaped space relations, the written notation scale into
which a tone is put and where its intervals are organized, syntax and axiom
of the machines that regulate the sound. The tone is held as a point in a
point system. A distinctive and arbitrary unit that fixes the game of
melody on horizontal lines and in relation to other units. The combined
sound of tones is marked on the vertical line, the chord fixes the melody
and the harmony. The music needs a surface, the compositional body, upon
which the tones become music, and its resonance machines - mouth flute
machines, finger violin machines. At the same time there are prolific
discourses about compositions and tone machines, about the possibilities
and necessities of building filters to block the sound streams.

 The creation of musical codes occurs through stratifying a chaos that is
surrounded by the rauschen of the world and its objects, and through the
endless speed of all the forms, that molecules can take on, dissolving
again. One is permanently surrounded by molecules' collision sounds that
are not within the range of our senses. With more sensitive ears one would
sink in a sea of rauschen. Rauschen is not made up of discrete tonal
movements, no clear frequency conditions, but wide frequency spectra that
run aleatorically. Chaos is the world of rauschen that contains all
frequencies at the same time and so is completely virtual, storing all
chains of signals and tones.

 Again we are struck by a lightning that reaches an absolute
deterritorialisation speed when it breaks up the codes and forms, but at
the same time it is part of a dark, imperceptible pre-stream that secures
the course of the lightning lines. This dark pre-stream is definitely not
the chaos itself. 'Chaos is a pure MANY, pure disjunctive difference,
whilst the something is a ONE, not yet a unity, but much more the
indefinite article, which is defined by an arbitrary singularity. How does
the MANY become a ONE? A large sieve must intervene, like an elastic and
formless membrane, like an electric-magnetic field.' The dark pre-stream is
something like a sieve, that releases the endless rows of sound from the
inter-objective rauschen of the material objects, signals, sounds, noises,
possibilities of endless rows of sounds. The sieve functions like an
abstract machine that does not try to block the speed in which everything
is produced and dissolved again, as the music has done until now, but
instead creates a virtual time space in which dynamic and speed differences
and a teeming mass of sound singularities can develop. No measure regulates
the order of the sequences, the sequences themselves build heterogeneous
series that are made up of differences between the elements of these rows,
whereby the communication between the rows themselves is made by something
that also differentiates the differences between the rows. Endless sound
series in which differences differentiate. The musical forerunner, or the
sieve, indicates the term refrain, 'a prism, a space time crystal.' Or more
exactly the 'endless machine like machine' that opens the territorial
refrain, that is a song, a refrain with a tremendous deterritorialisation
speed and that creates a cosmic refrain in that the abstract machine
becomes a sound machine. Sound machines are inhabited by heterogeneous
sound materials, disjunctive varieties, perhaps tones, sounds, noises, less
by linking, which assumes that the tone series are homogeneous and
discrete, than by shifts and the production of an in-between that becomes a
composition. If there is a sound then another but particular sound must be
chosen that produces an in-between space or an in-between time between them
'... to a given potential one must choose another, but not any, the kind
that produces a potential difference between the two, that is a producer of
a third or something new.' The rhythm is constituted in this in-between;
the synchronization and the cohesion of heterogeneous sound blocks is an
operation of differentiation that refers to the different blocks and
differentiates them. When the rhythm dominates every impulse or timing in
the sound sequences then the measure stops chaining the sound blocks
together in a homogeneous musical environment, and is dissolved by a non
pulsating tempo or an unbelievable beating, making a fixation of time units
impossible in the lack of perceptible differences between the individual
sound periods. The musical movement is only perceptible when it is preceded
by an organization plan that fits in with the subject in the shifting
conditions of fast and slow, in a co-ordination system in which intervals,
thresholds and borders are registered.

 The music has a tendency to imperceptible continuous variation, to 'pure
becoming', an untraceable condition of speed, it climbs out of the black
darkness, the possible world of rauschen, to stream into an immanency or
consistency level. The emission of sounds breaks through every serial
sequence, tears sound molecules out of the layers and becomes a throng of
singularities that are immanent to their own level. Tonal diversity
occupies a level when the music is nothing more than the many conditions
that go through it: differentiation, rhythm, fluctuation, dissonance and
polyphony. In chaos, the world of endless creation and passing away, the
nomadic diversity does divide the methods of virtuallithe world of rauschen
that contains all frequencies at the same time and so is completely
virtual, storing all chains of signals and tones.

 Again we are struck by a lightning that reaches an absolute
deterritorialisation speed when it breaks up the codes and forms, but at
the same time it is part of a dark, imperceptible pre-stream that secures
the course of the lightning lines. This dark pre-stream is definitely not
the chaos itself. 'Chaos is a pure MANY, pure disjunctive difference,
whilst the somethiferent rhythms and sound landscapes. It is not about
pressing the material into a form but about developing an ever more rich
and consistent material, that can catch more and more intense forces. 'What
makes a meterial increasingly rich is the same as what holds
heterogeneities together without decreasing to the heterogeneous. What
holds them together in this way are intercalary oscillators, synthesizers
with at least two heads. These are inter analyzers, rhythm synchronizers.'
And so even the tone itself is just a differentiated singularity that is
not bound to any other singularity, and it is just this lack of binding
that allows it to make many connections. If these connections find
themselves in permanent variations, they still have to be repeatedly newly
constructed, everything culminates in the construction that is the internal
of the constructed.

 Nomadic sound machines are not only linked to chaos through snatching
something from it, arbitrary singularities and tone molecules, but they are
also threatened by blockades and bonding processes that block up the
machines and their productions. The tone molecules' vibration can be shut
down, the tone becomes a discrete unit again, its interval and pitch can be
fixed to another unit on an arranged score of the sonorous space;
particular kinds of notes (C major) and chords (triads) become privileged,
tonality becomes a decisive criteria, etc. The being of such music is that
of actuality and its form and layers block the absolute speed, in actuality
the tonal blocks, with their lines, are segmented and territorialised. Then
the music pulls itself together in song, tumbling in the condition of a
formula.

 One finds oneself in the first type of refrain, an 'ensemble of expressive
material that covers a territory and that develops itself in territorial
motives and landscapes.' Fix a center in a chaos, organize a place to stay
around a center or escape this staying place, the territorial refrain
allows all aspects to coexist and contains the possibility of
deterritorialisation within it, because disappearing lines can open up the
place to stay. While the possibilities must realize themselves on the
disappearing lines, whereby relative deterritorialisation repeatedly leads
to terrible reterritorialisation, the deterritorialisation can become
absolute in that the disappearing lines increase themselves and create
connections, produce constructions. The different types of
deterritorialisation are always related to one another through cuts. To
achieve the method of virtuallity the music catches the structures, the
forms and layer particles, and designs sound streams and allows them to
flow on a consistency level. So there is the possibility of leaving the
territory to open a tonal structure for another structure. The second type
of refrain, the 'cosmic refrain of a sound machine', is actually a bursting
structure, becoming effective there inside the structure of the sound
machines, torpedoing the point system and releasing the musical lines from
their subordination to the points (tone, contra-point). 'And that is
exactly the difference that we want to make between 'That in fact is the
distinction we would like to propose between MACHINE and ASSEMBLAGE : that
machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the
assemblage under going deteritorialization, and draw variations and
mutations of it.'

 The machine does not refer to conditions, to an ensemble of units, but to
the virtual event and it works as a deterritorialisation vector that gives
the event a musical body that is carrier of its own instability.

 A 'successful' musical body would be something of unique singularity that
does not erase the trail of heterogeneity but follows and multiplies it. On
the other hand when the multiplication is an effect of the machine then it
becomes clear that the musical body can be only fleeting, it is not simply
being there, unity or links of elements, but a becoming by which every
change is a change in the dimension of the composition of the whole body.
The machine produces variety 'that is not only that which has many parts,
but is folded in many ways,' and the musical body is full of folds and none
is like the other. One could call the machine an operator that folds the
world around it, a fold throwing and other fold making folding machine. The
operation of folding is that of a differentiating, and if one hears a music
by its folds, as is in the case of repetitive music, then they build
themselves by the repetition of infinitesimal differences, by divergences
coiling in and around one another, even when these are only composed of
minimal inaudible deviations. Or the folds cover the musical instruments.
One often finds instruments that are unusable, that have a not quite
controllable variety of functions. Decoration, switches, illustrations,
ornamentation of the surface can superimpose the surface of the rational
functions. The machines themselves are endlessly folded, one cannot
separate the sound machines from economical, political, social, physical,
psychological and biological . Consequently the machine problem exceeds the
technical problem, that is, the technological object. Although the material
construction of technologies today is not thought of as presenting them,
but rather the sum of their inputs and outputs and internal ability to
transmit, it must be mentioned that psychological, cultural and political
functions, the capital as economical condition, the discursive systems of
knowledge are counted as their inputs and outputs. The technologies are
filled with deterritorialiation vectors that open them up to the outside,
the machine production of machines. Machines are fabricated by an outside
(chaos, capital) and at the same time they produce and open themselves to
the outside.

 Sound machines are covered in sound streams, receive sound material and
have openings and interfaces that make it possible to dock onto other sound
machines, or flow into them through sounds. They can fold their own
components endlessly (dissonance) and develop themselves till they pass
away. Machines produce their own expression, a world of singularities, and
in this respect they have the characteristics of a machine without inputs
and outputs, as only living biological machines have. But the relationship
of the two machine methods (self realizing living machines and machines
that get their components from outside) must go beyond pure existence.It
would be an inner seat of infection to describe, a 'proto-subjectivity',
that which brings the machines to life and continuously reproduces them, at
the same time relating to the outside that the machine is confronted with
in every way. This outer field contains exceptional complexities by which
the proto-subjectivities can be registered without having to be able to
consciously take them on. There are far more influences, impulses,
potentials coming from the outside that can meet things and subjects,
independent of every space time definition, independent of the subjects and
their elements.

 The effects are not available to a discursive matrix, the systems of
signification or the musical dispositives. But even so there is something
that expresses them, constructions and elements of expression that show
that the outer machine is an inner of the outside. Rhythm and sound are the
most intense expressions of music that come to expression in affective
music. Potentials are stored in it, pure possibilities of impulses and
ideas that exceed the perception of those that they meet, that on the other
hand are never considered by significant discursive systems and their
coding complexes.

 The elements 0 and 1 have only the function to relate points for other
signs and their codes. The binary code is pure information that can serve
any content, and even create an immaterial context, a social relation of
the general exchangeability. Whereby it must be assumed that a homogeneous
unit, a universal code, has the implied prerequisite that allows all the
materials, insignificant and significant signs, to be translated into the
communal language of 0 and 1. 'One can constitute signifying chain
operations with deterritorialized, digitalized, discreat elements only if
there is a semiological screen available, a wall to protect them.' But
machines are producing decomposition on the edges of the interfaces, of the
information machinery, decomposition of forms of expression and expression
substances ('white wall - central computer hole'). They are abstracter than
the information machinery and their binary codes, and for this reason allow
no translation of insignificant expression characteristics. How do the
abstract machines function? A material content that only has degrees of
intensity, resistance, heating, expansion, speed or delay has an expression
of function that only has tensors, like a mathematical or musical writing
system. Thousands of abstract machines produce their own levels in here and
now, with out a registration surface that came along as a universal
dimension with its own dimension.

 Electronic sound machines: it depends on the problem and the question that
one asks. What does it mean - making electronic music? That Mathematics is
the basis of the music, a mathematics solution rule, the algorithm? That
music happens in the universe of synthesizers, monitors, midis, computer
science, computer etc.? Or ask a second question. How does electronic music
function? This question shows that the electronic music can not be sent
back to the first question, it follows rather more a paradox model: making
inaudible audible. It is made up of a teeming throng of sound materials
that represent different intensities (slowness, speed, layering, delay,
condensation) and functions, (synthesis of the sound components, synthesis
of sound an rhythm, etc.). The expression material makes space for caught
or collected material. The caught forces are now no more forces of the
earth, that constitute a large expressive form, but today they are forces
of a formless, immaterial energy cosmos. The cosmic forces, jumps, silence,
duration, ensembles that go from and include very small to very large, for
their part fold the material again and again. The sound machines make music
and its being is the being of the event, something that escapes a current
position and that is drawn together to a moment, a moment in which nothing
happens, because every present is endlessly divided in a too late (past)
and a too early (future). The event is pure becoming. The sound vibrates or
'Today there will be a concert'.