Another entry into our Nihil Sonic Tractatum certainly belongs to Death Grips, not only because of the group’s indifference towards the concept of genre as a whole – implying a kind of distrust for the meaning of the concept in general – but also because of many lyrical themes scattered throughout their discography. Now, the fragmented and often purposefully disjointed nature of Stefan Burnett’s lyricism makes it difficult to form a fully-fledged taxonomy of what philosophical concepts are being tackled in the songs – to which, I’m sure, the group would say that they are not tackling any concepts at all, thus further reinforcing the nihilist’s point of view – but a good entry point into the burrow of Death Grips could be the following passage from the maxisingle “Stereoids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber)”: “I’d rather not get involved / I’m not that much, never been that much / But I saw too much to pay shit off”. Our sonic nihilist here is one of deference, Artaudian objection towards any kind of grouping, thus further cementing the group’s aforementioned dislike for genres and inaptitude at being confined by them. Our nihilist is one of avoidance, of social and thus physical distance, presence through absence. They then turn the nihilism inward, declaring that they themselves – and thus also their constitutional nihilism with it – are “not much”, hinting at a moment of ego-death-through-meaninglessness. They have “seen too much”, been to the other side of non-return-nihilism in order to just venture back into a kind of drastic ignorance of the meaninglessness of “it” all, which is perhaps the same reason why they’d rather not get involved: the nihilist often spares their presence to those not yet nihilistic enough not because they believe they are “better” than them, but simply because they don’t want to ruin their dinner party, or whatever else normal people do to socialize (the nihilist does not believe in social traditions and thus cannot even be compelled to think up a scenario outside of the realm of hopeless nihilism for the arrival of hopefulness). The nihilist stays away because they cannot confront the absurdity of life through comforting illusions; thus, retreat is the only viable option.
A further inquisition into the undercurrent of nihilism featured in the work of Death Grips arise from the track “World of Dogs”: “You live in hiding / You’re climbing the wall, no privacy / I’m trying to survive but I’m dying; die with me / Blow out the lights, take your life / Ride the falling sky with me / Falling inside of me / It’s all suicide to me”. This is another very loaded and certainly decidedly cryptic portion of writing from Burnett, but what is most striking is not the underlying pessimism but the way in which this pessimism is used as a metaphor for a kind of egalitarianism of life itself. In fact, it could be arguable that the suicidal ideation implied goes further than merely the actual act of self-erasure; it can also be read as a shrug of the shoulders the already nihilistic (and depressed) person, for whom anything in life is comparable to erasure; anything life simply amounts to nothing. Our narrator is “trying to survive” but he is essentially nihil-pilled, in a state where, since nothing can have meaning, nothing will ever have meaning again. He invites you to “die with him”, either metaphorically or literally, in an attempt to circumvent nihilism: if nothing has meaning, I will eradicate the principle of reason within me in order to become a manifestation of this nothingness. The conundrum of suicide for the nihilist is a debatable one, for why would the nihilist, convinced that their actions have no meaning, turn to suicide, null-point, in the first place? Would they not unmask it as, according to them, a frivolous attempt at meaning-making through negation? Suicide here is not deferred to a metaphor in order to deride it of any intrinsic seriousness the topic might require and for which professionals are surely more idoneous for but simply because it is difficult to consider the nihilist a suicidee. Either our protagonist is not a nihilist at all in this case, or suicide is used as a linguistic equivalent to complete alienation.
Yet, it seems that, usually, whenever Death Grips’ lyrics are as specific and intelligible as they are in this case, it signals a more literal approach; still, even the literal and offer us ways in a sonic kind of nihilism. Consider the following excerpt from the song “Up My Sleeves”: “Some things only I have seen / some people only I have been / Used to know who I was / Fuck if I knew who that was / Pay no mind illogical / Just don’t die in a hospital”. Here, the nihilist becomes the Alzheimer’s patient, not even privy to giving meaning to the ontology of the self, only privileged to glance at its constitution in so far as to discard it entirely. Even then, their attempts seem fruitless, “illogical”, with a wink of the eye in so far as even the illogical nature of the self is bound to be meaningless. In comparison to the previous portion of lyrics offered, this one is entirely unsympathetic to death; more precisely, death in a hospital, death as that which dishonors you from life in the most unglorified and pathetic way, succumbing to demise between bad lunch food, sterile bedsheets and doors that do not close from the inside. It is not that death itself isn’t meaningless, it is that the conditions for an honorable death, Mishima-style, are not given, which makes the resulting circumstances of death disdainful. Yet, the “Used to know who I was” invers a time in which the image of the self was not yet ruptured – presumably by extreme nihilism – and thus creating a before-nihil and after-nihil; two states that cannot be reconciled by the now nihil-expert. No, the now nihilist, aptly shown by the following passage, “Fuck if I knew who that was” doesn’t even care to endeavor into any possible kind of rectification of the phenomenal self, preferring to leave things ambiguous. He is already past the point of no return, seeing things that other don’t see, being people that that nobody else has ever been, inhabiting spatio-temporal realities that are as close to extinction as to Genesis, with no external relationality. The nihil-expert as the last possible human standing, not caring about its condition whatsoever.
To those that assume the ultimate nihilist to be a farse, a trickery of the mind the translates self-righteousness into idealism, I’d like to present Japanese composer Keiji Haino, the ultimate “man in black” (him who makes others forget, deleting any memory of hope in favor of complete neutralization, but, in this case, by darkness). Here, too, it could as well be posited that Haino is actually more of a philosophical pessimist, with album titles such as “So, Black Is Myself” (1997) referring more to a kind of desolation that is in-human rather than a strictly anthropomorphic depression who morphs into a kind of emotional apathy (for, in this case and many others, black clearly has an all-consuming connotation that cannot be equated to the nihilist’s “nothing matter”, for otherwise there would be no point in stating what one is made out of, which color one transmogrifies into or which kind of beast is perhaps closer to the essence of the self, or whatever else the nihlist’s mind can come up with to entertain itself). On the other hand, Haino literally has an album called “I Said, This Is The Son Of Nihilism” (1995), which would further corroborate our working theory of him actually being more of a nihilist than a straight up pessimist. In sonic terms, there seem to be two sides of Haino’s work: the strictly instrumental one and the one more focused on vocal patterns and inflictions, which is not to say that the two don’t intertwine at various point throughout his discography. The purely instrumental Haino is ruthless in his aggression, but it could be argued that, a lot of times, the nihilism is inherently more so a technical one rather than a philosophical one, asking the question: what is the point of adhering to style, ways of playing or, yes, even genres for that matter, when one could simply do something that has not parallels? In a more simplified sense: why produce something that sound like something that already exists? If one were to picture a person that has never heard music, doesn’t even know about the concept of music, and one then were to subject the test-patient to any album by Haino, I would not be surprised if they were to dismiss the entire concept of music right from the outstart (a similar experiment could be valid for the work of Merzbow, with whom Haino has collaborated on varying occasions). Perhaps it is exactly for this reason that Haino has, through his long-standing career, preferred the tactics of improvisation to the rigidness of rehearsal, with the former acting as a vehicle towards the unknown that, even when contextualized, can really never actually be known fully. This is not the result of an amateur plucking away at a guitar hoping for anything to happen, but instead the product of a master of his craft, so attuned to the sonic forces that the instrument, whether the more traditional electric guitar or the more eclectic hurdy-gurdy, suddenly becomes only valid when pushed to its limits. This might result in minimalism as well as completely razor-sharp maximalism, but the end trajectory is almost always the same: a sonic “it is what it is”, entirely unpreoccupied with tonal expectations because one has already done away with music entirely. Haino plays from beyond sonic extinction, from the place where, upon the fall of all the pessimists, who by now have killed themselves, there shines but one black star in the otherwise desolate landscape, playing for absolutely no one but themselves. In a sonically extinct environment, musical traditions, systems and infrastructure reliant on soothing any kind of musical preconceptions suddenly transform into an entirely invalid premonition; the sonic son-of-nihilism, thus, having declared that to play music in the same manner one relied upon before this sonic extinction, decides that it is not important what you play and perhaps not even how you play it, but that you play, that, despite reason being impaired by nihilism’s claims, they who have reached sonic extinction on the experiential level, on that which can rest on their own empirical basis that sets their own being apart from extinction, witnessing it despite not as a human but as a fantasmogram of the self, the beauty of the sonic, which does not defy the possibly inherent nihilism of the musician, lies in how it is compelled to be even in the unexpected, one merely has to listen. As we know, listening itself is a deeply nihilistic practice, particularly attuned to the volatility of the human perceptual system and its being equipped with the power of being able to drown out certain “unwanted” sounds at moments in which the mind need but to concentrate on more pressing matters; the auditory system as the primary architect of nihilism, of “this particular sound has no meaning to me in this very moment” out of an auxiliary necessity instead of an actualized decision. Haino’s work flips the switch: since there are sounds the human, in certain instances, is tricked into not caring about, let us turn those sounds all the way up to eleven, with the ferocity of a thousand rhinoceroses heading towards the ear’s canal.
Perhaps Haino’s most rigorous externalization of nihilism is how little he seemingly has always cared about recognition, which might actually be part of his widespread appeal in underground circles in the first place, almost as if personifying the following passage of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”: “…live in obscurity so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of that which is most important to your age! Put at least the skin of three centuries between yourself and today!”. Haino’s sensibility is of ancient kind, entirely incompatible with modernity; many of the covers of his albums are black-on-black, with the lettering on differentiating itself from the background in its slightly lighter shade of black, almost as if to defy both marketability in a world of induced representational vomit and exegesis entirely. Haino has no wish to “be understood”, entirely aware that he is on a solitary mission to the ends of the sonic spectrum, and relishing in his nihilism because of it; able to get past conventions, to get past that which we have deemed to reasonable, musically speaking, a whole universe of possibilities can be discovered. This particular vein of sonic nihilism can, at times, be quite overwhelming, not only because of the actual sonic component and its distorted nature, but also because now you have peaked behind the curtain of all that traditional, pop-euro-centric music leaves out; you wander behind the drawn curtain and you discover a landmine of possible sonic palates. Each attempt is akin to a game between sonic life and sonic death, but the widened acknowledgment of the possibilities of the sonic is invaluable and thus you take your next step with full conviction. In the words of Haino’s 1993 album, an “Execration That Accepts To Acknowledge”; a curse that keeps on giving.
Another radical position in our domicile of nihilism is that of Marco Fusinato’s approach to performance-based art in the sonic realm. Fusinato, with deep-roots in the punk and hardcore scene of Australia, is known for his performances for mass-amplification that are not only completely improvised but also actively antagonistic in their essence. In the ongoing series “Spectral Arrows”, Fusinato arrives at the venue hosting him upon opening hours, setting up facing a wall and then proceeding to play for the entire duration of a given work day, unceremoniously “clocking out” when the workday is over. The improvisation itself is characterized by the intertwining of shrieking walls of feedback and distortion and the occasional burst of white noise entering the mix, unrelentless in its ferocity and conceptual rigor. In proceeding as he does, Fusinato actively defies the cult of the performer as well as standardized performance durations, leaving most audience members with only a fraction of the whole of the played material. Even the most arduous of sonic bliss-seekers will return to their abode with only a heterogenous recollection of the hallucinatory feedback-shrieking the artist has become known for, with the material itself being, essentially, lost to time. Even the eventual few physical releases of each performance only feature a small chunk of the entire duration of the project, with no liner notes on the record, no printing on the center label, black, heavy vinyl, sometimes not even a name to adhere to. In classic nihilist fashion, if nothing has meaning, why give anything meaning in inscribing it with any informational modes, even those merely belonging to reason, that might incriminate it in the court of the Nihil Supreme? The performance’s antagonism is not a result of disdain for the audience, quite the contrary: it is a disdain for the ego of the self, thus using an alleged antagonism only in order to make space for the sonic. And what a sonic feast it is; Fusinato’s brand of free-noise improvisation is amongst the most radical the genre has to offer, certainly the most radical the art world has to offer, with the perceptual result being one of such intensity that one cannot merely, after having witnessed one of Fusinato’s performances or after having listened to one of the resulting records, return home and put on some Phil Collins, or whatever one puts on to feel good about the rest of the day. No, the rest of the day is ruined, but in the most magnificent fashion: Fusinato’s work often acts like the sharks way out of the coast, a stand-in for the reminder to not venture out too much for you might get bitten (or be subjected to auditory loss). Yet, as many surfers and other lovers of the oceanic surely can attest to, the most potent waves are not found along the shore but out where predators might creep up on you, and yet one still ventures out precisely in order to feel the grip of the uncertain territory, the sonic waves clashing into cascading and static rhythms of piercing frequencies. After emerging victorious from one of these encounters with such a sonic wave, one will not dwell in the tepid assurance of a low-tide, no; one will get out of the water completely in order to recalibrate, to reassess things, to consider maybe, just maybe jumping back into the unknowable. Fusinato’s brand of sonic nihilism is uncompromising in its musicality, yet it remains, dare I say, “hopeful”, but hopeful in the same sense the sonic nihilism of the unchangeable of someone like Phil Niblock remains hopeful; hopeful that the perceptual and cognitive might, even if only momentarily, impair reason as to make the body susceptible for a heightened awareness of loss, a kind of presence through absence of a sonic realm that, where it only to be described through reason alone, would crumble. When physically subjected to the sonic material, both Fusinato’s cacophony as well as Niblock’s apparent stasis actually end up becoming catalysts for psychoacoustic phenomena such as combination tones, octave illusions, the augmented perception of partials and overtones and the overall change in sound pressure due to the very high volume both Fusinato and Niblock play at. Fusinato’s nihilism inherent in an improvisational approach to sound-making is comparable with that of Haino, in the sense that any kind of musical expectation is subverted by the radical intensity of the playing style itself no adhering to dodecaphony, but also in the decidedly in-human format of the performance series “Spectral Arrows”: Fusinato knows fully well that (almost) no audience member will be able to sustain physical presence throughout the entirety of the performance, their temporary experience thus negated by the sheer magnitude of the comparative length of the actual entire duration. By the end, it is entirely possible that Fusinato is to be placed on a conjoining planet to that where Haino has found residence, it too demarcated by utter extinction of the empty gallery space, as if one can never be sure if one has even played for anybody or if the room has been devoid of the human presence the entire time. Even in complete and utter absence of presence, Fusinato’s guitar would still thuds its harsh walls of feedback into every crevice of the venue like the sonic axe of obliteration it might be deemed to be (in fact, Fusinato sports a predilection for aluminum-guitars; pieces of electronic bewilderment that might as well be used as weapons if need ever be, as if the sound material itself didn’t already do enough damage).
