Sonicwarfare
April 5, 2016
On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction
Posted by sonicwarfare under Uncategorized
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I recently was interviewed about J G Ballard by Tim Noakes for Rough Trade’s new magazine, and the
result got heavily edited. Here is the full unedited transcript.
What is your favourite novel of Ballard’s and why does it resonate with you?
– Hard question, but its probably The Drowned World. It was the first Ballard book I read. It was around
1995. I was coming down to London during the summer to go to Jungle raves. I didn’t really know
London very well. It was a hot summer. It was very easy for me to fold the book i was reading into this
humid city and alien, tropical sounding music I was listening to. Both the book and the music I was
listening to seemed rivetted to some kind of Conradian trip into the heart of darkness.
In March, a film of his novel High Rise is being released. In it, social warfare breaks out with the upper
classes in the penthouses waging war against the middle and lower classes for control of the building. To
me it seems very prescient, with gentrification spreading through UK’s inner cities and poor
communities being forced out due to rising living costs. Steel canyons dominate every capital in the
world. If left unchecked, does living on top of people breed more violence and class division, or a greater
sense of community?
– Im looking forward to High Rise a lot. In a way, the pre-run for it as a film was Snowpiercer, but
instead of a tower block with a built in social hierarchy, its a train, and the rear of the train makes an
attempt at revolution by storming forward, passing through the different levels of the social hierarchy. I
found it interesting that just before they reach the front of the train, where the master/engineer resides,
they find a decadent night club.
Anyway, I’m not really persuaded by the idea that high rise development has to be opposed to
community life. All my favourite cities are in East Asia and are all super dense and high rise. I don’t
think the logic of high rise development has to be seen as to the detriment of street life, community etc.
Sometimes it can amplify it, the street becomes multiplied so its not just on the ground floor anymore,
but on elevated walkways etc. Anna Greenspan, in her recent book Shanghai Future, is great at
describing that tension between street life and high tech, high rise urbanism. Really, I don’t think there is
enough high rises in London. There is a massive shortage of affordable housing, and relatively its a very
low rise city. Very little of the new high rise developments seem to be social housing, but rather seem to
be exactly the kind Ballard describes are liable to be populated by feral, bored middle classes in
meltdown. The problem, of course, is who gets to live in the current wave of over priced luxury blocks
that are going up, but I’m very much in favour of increasing urban density, especially if it doesn’t make
property prices crazy and drive out residents who have been there for decades i.e. the current model for
developing London.
Ballard loved the sound of machine guns, and your book Sonic Warfare explored the notion of sound as
a weapon. Do you foresee a future where sonic weaponry is widely used by local police teams to keep
situations like the citizen revolt in High Rise under control?
– Ballard’s short story The Sound Sweep was a big influence on my book, particularly 2 of his
speculative conceits: the persistence of vibration, and the neuro-affects of inaudible sound (what I call
unsound) The sonic world depicted in the story is one in which sounds do not dissipate as usual. Instead
sonic artefacts take on a new physicality and permanence, persisting, cluttering up the city like actual
refuse. There is even a sonic refuse truck with a device called a ‘sonovac’ (essentially a glorified sampler
which removes instead of copying every sound it records) which hoovers up all the noise and detritus.
So in a sense, its an environment in which past (or virtual) sounds (which usually fade to silence as they
pass, unless they are recorded or remembered) are as real as actual sounds. Towards the end of the
story, there is an ultrasound concert which is inaudible but the audience are receiving waves of aesthetic
pleasure as if it was a standard audible concert. In the story, its almost as if, audible sound and music
itself is treated as toxic waste, rubbish, a pollutant to the air and so an inaudible ultrasound concert is
somehow was more refined, purer, sensation without audible stimulus. So these ideas of cleansing the
concert hall/city of unwanted noises led me to speculate about acoustic techniques like phase
cancellation that are used in noise cancellation headphones – what if they, or a similar device were used
on a mass scale to silence areas of cities, or at least to mask certain sounds. Then I also came across an
actual commercially available device called the Mosquito, which replicated the elitist sonophobia of
Ballard’s ultrasound concert, but which was supposed to be inaudible to all except teenagers, who
would find its high pitch whine irritating and would force them to move on from congregating outside
commercial properties. I could certainly imagine these devices used to ‘cleanse’ the area around High
Rise or being used in his more recent novels like Kingdom Come to acoustically harass ‘undesirables’ as
a spectator sport.
Burial’s debut album was described as the soundtrack to The Drowned World. How have both of your
views of London changed in the intervening years? Metaphorically is the city drowning?
– Yeah, that idea came from the press release I wrote for Burial’s first album. Not sure how much it had
anything to do with Burial’s intentions to be honest. it just what the album sounded like to me with its
infinite rain. It wasn’t really supposed to be a metaphor, but rather about real climate change. I think I’d
just read something about how little the river Thames would have to rise to submerge most of central
London, and this conjured up images of tube trains as submarines.
Why do you think your generation of producers latched onto Ballard’s outlook?
– In an year when optimistic utopianism is en vogue as a refuge from capitalism, his style of dystopian
pessimism (realism) seems somewhat out of fashion, which probably makes it even more appealing.
There are several Ballards, often separate, often at work at the same time. There is at least a brutalist one,
a suburban one, an ecological one, a videodrome one, and probably more. A common thread is his
depiction of the torque of abstract geometrical urbanism on the human psyche. I think many electronic
musicians are inspired by the alienation of living with/in/around angular and geometric monoliths,
whether they are grey concrete or glass and steel because its an architectural instantiation of the same
processes of abstraction going on in their music.
Do you feel the most creatively inspired amongst industrial landscapes – if so, why?
– I find most alienating, artificial landscapes in which your insignificance as a human is reinforced,
inspiring. These days, these are mostly post-industrial. By this point in the game, the idea of the
industrial landscape as a muse for electronic music has become somewhat over saturated. Sure, it was
the dereliction of the dying industrial age that inspired many musicians in the late 70s, 80s and 90s so on.
But we are now living through the emergence of a whole new strata of technological civilisation and I
think musicians and artist spend their time much more productively by engaging with the new
situations that digital capitalism throws up in front of us everyday.
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