1993: Vorticist Rhythmachines 22

Water carried the sound of the drums and sound carried the distance between the old and the new world.
—Black Audio Film Collective, The Last Angel of History (1997)

The rhythmic vorticism that runs through Serres to Deleuze and Guattari takes as its model the rhythmicity of hydrodynamics, particularly the interruption of predictable flow by the emergence of pockets of turbulence. Another strand of this orientation can be found in Cinema 1, where Deleuze writes, “Water is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility from the movement itself. This is the origin of the visual and auditory importance of water in research on rhythm.”1 Hints of this rhythmic hydrodynamics also crop up elsewhere. For example, the parallel between early acoustics and fluid mechanics can be found in Hermann Helmholtz, whose late-nineteenth-century text, On the Sensation of Tone, became canonical in the science of acoustics. Helmholtz began his research treating acoustics as a branch of hydrodynamics.

The generation of a vibrational nexus is paralleled by the decompression of rhythm from noise. The question of turbulence, the volatile tension between order and chaos, is shunted into a question of vibration as microrhythm. According to the branch of engineering concerned with sonic vortices, all sonic phenomena, as particle and wave kinetics, can, at least in their physical dimension, be conceived of as problems of fluid or aerodynamic turbulence. In physics, vortex sound is sound generated as a by-product of unsteady fluid motions. As Howe has pointed out, “It is now widely recognized that any mechanism that produces sound can actually be formulated as a problem of aerodynamic sound”:²

Thus apart from the high speed turbulent jet—which may be regarded as a distribution of intense velocity fluctuations that generate sound by converting a tiny fraction of the jet rotational kinetic energy into the longitudinal waves that constitute sound—colliding solid bodies, aero engine rotor blades, vibrating surfaces, complex fluid-structure interactions in the larynx (responsible for speech), musical instruments, conventional loudspeakers, crackling paper, explosions, combustion and combustion instabilities in rockets, and so forth all fall within the theory of aerodynamic sound in its broadest sense.. .. Any fluid that possesses intrinsic kinetic energy, that is, energy not directly attributable to a moving boundary ... must possess vorticity.... In a certain sense and for a vast number of flows, vorticity may be regarded as the ultimate source of the sound generated by the flow³

This idea of vortex sound has key resonances in different registers, from the vibrational patternings of cymatics through to the hyperrhythmic dynamics of electronic music. In his key late 1990s essays reframing the concept of “acoustic cyberspace,” Erik Davis described how contemporary conceptions of virtual reality were trapped in a visual model of space inherited in particular from Descartes’ split between the mind and the body, whereby the self transcends space, is detached from it, surveys it panoptically, as a disembodied vision machine (where “I” is synonymous with “eye”). For Davis, the legacy of this model (traces of which can be found in Gibson’s 1980s descriptions of cyberspace) had dominated the proliferating discourses on the digital since then. Instead, Davis, in parallel to Kodwo Eshun’s analysis in More Brilliant Than the Sun, drew from the polyrhythmic nexus and bass viscosity of Black Atlantian musics, alongside McLuhan’s conception of acoustic space, in order to develop an alternative version of virtual space, one that is sonic but, more than that, is essentially invasive, resonant, vibratory, and immersive. In this vibrational ecology, the sensual mathematics of a rhythmachine possesses the affective sensorium, inserting itself amodally (between the senses), generating a polyrhythmic nexus.⁴

There is an interesting contrast between futurism’s celebration of the art of war in the noise and Afrofuturism’s art of war in the art of rhythm. In The Art of Noises, Russolo bemoans rhythm, complaining that “the first beat brings to your ear the weariness of something heard before and makes you anticipate the boredom of the beat that follows. So let us drink in, from beat to beat, these few qualities of obvious tedium, always waiting for that extraordinary sensation that never comes.”⁵

While the concept of noise forges, for futurism, in its nexus of war machines and sound machines a sonic militancy, Afrofuturist musics such as jungle, Davis argued, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, congealed around rhythmic turbulence. It should be remembered, however, that the philosophers draw from a European avant-classical tradition of music and sonic experimentation that was in fact antagonistic toward and sacrificed rhythmic speed for a “nonpulsed time,” a cerebral listening, or mental dance that they would refer to as “voyaging in place.” In their discussion of the refrain, Deleuze and Guattari set out to salvage the concept of “rhythm” from being merely understood as synonymous with “form,” a form that measures and regularizes the pace of movement, as opposed to a topological form that arises from immanent material processes. They admit that there “is indeed such a thing as measure, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a rhythm without measure, which relates to the up swell of a flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.”⁶

In this distinction between meter and rhythm, they draw explicitly from Messiaen’s controversial comments regarding the history of African American music, eliding a set of problems and thereby limiting the potential of their wider rhythmanalytic innovations. Discussing, on the one hand, jazz, and, on the other, military music as the generation of rhythm, Messaien argues:

Jazz is established against a background of equal note-values. By the play of syncopation it also contains rhythms, but these syncopations only exist because they’re placed on equal note-values, which they contradict. Despite the rhythm produced by this contradiction, the listener once again settles down to equal note-values which give him great comfort. ... Here’s another very striking example of non-rhythmic music which is thought rhythmic: the military march. The march, with its cadential gait and uninterrupted succession of absolutely equal note values, is anti-natural. True marching is accompanied by an extremely irregular swaying; it’s a series of falls, more or less avoided, placed at different intervals.⁷

But perhaps Messaien is a little too quick to step over syncopation in his discussions on rhythm. In not uncommon fashion among the European musicological elite that includes Adorno, Messaien treats syncopation, the emphasis on the offbeat, as merely the negative of meter, its shadow, one that is purely derivative. Moreover, and directly concurring with Messaien, Deleuze and Guattari repeat, “There is nothing less rhythmic than the military march.”⁸

Such an approach, Chernoff argues in his book African Rhythm, African Sensibility, is typical of the profound European misunderstanding of Afro-diasporic rhythmic pragmatics. Chernoff, on the other hand, emphasizes the very in-betweeness of syncopation, which in the rhythmic culture of the African diaspora must be given a more positive spin.⁹ As Erik Davis has noted, drawing from Chernoff, in Black Atlantian polyrhythm, “The game is to push the beats to the edge of bifurcation without allowing them to settle into a singular basin of attraction.”¹⁰ When the rhythmic movement of the body is taken into account, the military march is time and again thrown up as the epitome of the tempo of war, a disciplined, repetitive, mechanical collective body. For Deleuze and Guattari, in their rhythmanalysis of capture, a state military organization is conceived as a metric crowd, while a nomad war machine is a rhythmic pack. Yet the musical sources they draw from make it deeply problematic to conceive the shape of such a collective mobilization. It is as if the vorticist rhythma-chines suggested in A Thousand Plateaus, for Eshun and Davis, actually had their stronger analog in Black Atlantian currents of polyrhythmic, electronic music. Both of these interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari’s sonic concepts were taken up within the thoughtware of electronic music culture. We also find in much of the modernist avant-garde, right through to contemporary “glitch”-based music and its celebration of “noise” via “accidents” and “chaos,” a suppression of rhythm, and therefore of the dancing body, its affective mobilization and rhythmic contagion.¹¹ This suppression contrasts sharply with the rhythmic “conceptechnics” that emerge from the various dance cultures, which, as Erik Davis puts it, “drum up acoustic cyberspace” through what Kodwo Eshun describes as Black Atlantian rhythmic futurism,¹² what Simon Reynolds has tagged the “hardcore continuum”¹³ and what others have referred to more recently as “global ghettotech.”¹⁴

From futurism to Afrofuturism, the avant-gardist sonic war machine that takes the violence of noise as its object transforms into a rhythmachine concerned with beat frequencies “far from equilibrium.” If a noise tactics is common to both, then it is only in mutated form. For a rhythmachine, noise shifts from end in itself to a field of pulsive potential. Afrofuturism forces a new set of questions on the futurist legacy of the concept of noise. What potential rhyth-machines lurk virtually within its vibrational field? What difference does digitalization force onto this rhythmic potential, where molecular vibration becomes numerical rhythmic quanta?