Emile Frankel - Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine the Future?

For a period during the writing of this book, I was sat working in a one-room Berlin flat with my partner Alice. At night wed play the 90s SNES game Earthbound in which a group of kids fight an alien force brainwashing the citizens of Earth into salarymen tainted by corporate greed. The protagonist of the game is visited by a heroic figure who hands him a small device for recording the sound of these defeated alien invaders. At the moment of vanquishing one of these bosses, youd step out into a beautiful sparkling vista and hear a melody on the wind. These tiny snippets of music somehow evoked that feeling of saving the world. Youd hold out your little recording device, or ear, and stand there enveloped in the sound. Just four note melodies. I began to think of this book as a similar recording device, and that I was searching for some kind of saviour in the music I laboured over and for some kind of way to express how it touched me. Id like to thank and acknowledge Alice for her support, inspiration and a kindness which wrapped me up and protected me. In the same way, to all my friends who read my drafts and advised me and just talked with me, you were a frequent warmth and mesh of support at the back of my mind. Thank you Eli for your friendship and meticulous help. To John Romans for your copy-edit, to Tom Kemp for your wonderful cover images which I shall cherish, to Benjamin Noys for your moving dedication, and to the Royal Conservatoire, Samuel, and the teachers who guided and allowed me the space to formulate a prototype of these ideas into a Masters Thesis, thank you. Finally, to my parents and family who were a constant source of guidance, care and love, to Doug and Zero Books for taking a chance on a new author, and to all the artists who both made this music and took the time to talk to me about it, I thank you.

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All over the earth when its dawn, flying creatures chirp sweetly in the branches. This sound of day-dwellers awaking is defined in many cultures as a distinctly sweet beauty. Bird vocalisations, and the sounds and products of the sky are joyous and hopeful. When it should be light but it is not in an eclipse of the sun, or in the smog of a newly industrialised city a lack of chirps informs an associated fear. This silent malaise of the biome above us, and its inverse, a healthy sky full of sounds, emphasises the psychopathological importance of sweetness. In certain musical histories, the human voice sounding like a bird, sounding sweet, has been the preeminent compliment. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. Beloved one; pleasing to the mind and senses; one in a sound or wholesome state; and, of water, fresh, not salt.

Yet sweetness is also a hollow adjective. Sweet substances provide short-term satisfactions. During the forward assemblage of 70s capitalist mass-production, the chemically-processed food revolution claimed sweetness as the eras greatest product. The ability to turn the starched remains of a corn harvest into something disguised as edible, redefined the Western diet and narrowed it incredibly. Addictive, short burst energy content was a consumerist revelation the affect and taste of molecular built-in-obsolescence. However, in recent years, and in part due to the new and expanding health-food market, sweetness has become characterised as a false seduction: a fattener and an ugly desire. The now common pairing with the adverb sickly speaks to this. In what can be seen as a conflicting carrier of mood and neoliberal politics, I introduce sweetness to comment on the basic relationship between ideology and the equally conflicting forces of emotion and taste within abstract music. In concrete terms, I want to discuss the way the affect of a sound can be distorted by changing technologies, and instrumentalised by new economics of listening. And in more abstract terms, I write to describe the potential for music to affect us, and through this, the way it might help support or resist hegemony. In the space of a now thoroughly neoliberal internet, that link between mood and ideology becomes essential for understanding descriptions of the future.