Subwoofer as Cruel Catharsis
by Danny Baird
Standing under a tent whose name might be What (but also could be Who) I found Artaud in Tove Lo.
I've been playing with EDM in theatre for a while now. Love for the New York club scene and the revelation that was "Here Lies Love" led me to matriculate in an electronic music program after scooping up my BFA. Something about my experience at Bonaroo clarified my passion for the form. Uniting music & technology to overthrow the senses felt like the theatre Artaud had theorized - a theatre as impractical as it was enchanting.
I've a bastardized reading of Artaud. I ignore whatever I believe to be "fredian nonsense;" all talk of the unconscious being the wellspring of art & truth & other bullshit. Admittedly, one could argue (comfortably) that such whimsy is the centerpiece of the Theatre of Cruelty. I choose to focus on the end game of Artaud: an overwhelming of the senses that leaves one more open to [insert the goal of your theatre piece here.]
Why EDM then? There's a lot of ways to overwhelm an audience: fill the theatre with live rats, pump in the smell of brimstone, put Liza Minelli onstage. The profoundest differences, in my opinion, between electronic music and traditional are the Limiter & the Subwoofer. The limiter allows for instruments to be their absolute loudest by hard-compressing the nuance out of the audio, creating a wall of sound. One can apply limiters to natural instruments, but as you compress the audio to extremes the organic faults that make acoustic music sound so beautiful oft become unlistenable. With electronic music using synthetic, digital instruments, everything feels LOUDER without necessarily being literally LOUDER than amplified acoustica.
The subwoofer grants access to a world of sounds unknown to music. The booming bases they allow are the sounds of cataclysm made musical. Tectonic plates warring with one another, the grinding of warring glaciers: these sounds are accessible to the producer of electronic music. A drum core of hundreds could hardly could hardly compete with one 808 obsessed DJ and the Bonaroo speaker system. The unnaturalness of these low tones, more akin to war than music, chief that overwhelming of the senses Artuad desires. Music becomes physicalized, brutalized; no longer listened to but experienced.
In Here Lies Love, the roaring of a chopper turns to music, turns to silence, turns to tears. At bonaroo, the dropping of the bass evokes ecstasy - unearned decadence. I'm not saying that all EDM is inherently Cruelty. But, when their methods and interests happen to align, Artaud's impractical dreamings come closer to reality: a forceful cleansing of all but the present moment.
Danny Baird is a writer and theatremaker from Baltimore, Maryland.
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