Glitch: An Endangered Credo JEEVAN C. RAI,* MAY 2011 ** Glitch, a music of radical aesthetic intent, stands on the brink of con- ceptual implosion. Its Cagean emphases on noise and relinquish of control have come under threat from both external cultural shifts and an internal conflict arising form its own stipulations. The communica- tion of its credo has been diluted by humanity’s deepening immersion within digital environments and our consequently increased aware- ness of their means of construction. In this text I shall discuss, first, why this is the case, with reference to both Glitch’s assimilation into popular music genres and to technological evolution; secondly, the re- action of Glitch practitioners to the challenge of maintaining their un- derlying aesthetic identity on an (ever-encroached-on, and thus) ever- shrinking artistic territory. It is necessary to preface this with a brief review of Glitch’s aesthetic origins. Glitch’ is an umbrella term for musics based on the manipulation of small audio artefacts traditionally considered as defects.” Its begin- ning unites ‘high art’ twentieth-century experimental music with the later rise in ‘home-studio’ computer music. In the 1990s, by which time electronics was faster, cheaper, and more accessible, musicians born into a generation of technological deftness ended up ‘in their own bedrooms [...] repeating [independently] the electronic experi- ments and discoveries of early electronic music’, through which they eventually came to learn of, and then from, its early practitioners’ * Dept of Music & Media, Univ. of Surrey. ** Originally printed as an internal paper; this edition reproduced for open access in 2020. _* Needless to say, Glitch capitalized means the idiom; lowercase glitch, the technical phenomenon. _* Sansom, 2009. * Cox & Warner, 20086, p. 366. Examples of precendents include Schaeffer, Cage, Oliveros and Lucier, the last of whose I’m Sitting in a Room (1969) clearly had a particular influence on the Glitch aesthetic.2 GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO J.C. RAL while simultaneously being influenced by electronica artists of their own time’. Consequently, explorations of sound in this trend outside academia lay between popular popular electronica and experimental music. Within the latter is coiled Cage’s liberation of noise’ — the result of sound and uncertainty.° Reynolds (1990, p. 5s) defines it as ‘something which blocks transmission, jams the code, prevents sense being made’ — that which happens when some form of language breaks down. As new technology provided easier means of produ- cing ‘alien’ sounds, it became more challenging to extend the sonic boundaries of Cage’s aesthetic.” Once digital technology grew all too ubiquitous, the medium of digitally processed sound losing its nov- elty both in the ear of the listener and the mind of the creator, Glitch extended electronic music aesthetics not just to communicate sound, but to reflect on the tools with which is is produced and reproduced.* This has roots in the extended techniques of free improvisation’ and in the experiments of David Tudor, who built his own electronics, in his own words, to find out what’s there — not to make it do what I want, but to release what’s there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear.”° As Tudor emphasized tool via the quirks of circuitry, Glitch fur- ther uses sonic material from artefacts of digital processing — by- products of technological malfunction — and presents it as music.”* Listeners and composers were accustomed enough to recorded sound that attention was no longer only towards the music beyond the acous- matic ‘surface’ of the recording, but also the ‘surface noise’ itself.’* Turntablism, for instance, incorporates reproduction artefacts by tak- ing the vinyl recording itself as a performance, including scratches, and thus ‘interven[ing] in consumerism’s cult of the object’.”? Ana- logously, phenomena such as software bugs, data drop-outs, quant- * Such as Juan Atkins and Kraftwerk. * Cage, 1937/961b. * Cage’s Imaginary Landscape 4 notably prefigures Glitch.” Weil, 2002, p.s23. ' Cascone, 2000, p.12..” Tudor, n.d/2004, p-207,® cited in Collins, 2003, p.2.? Cox & Warner, 2008a, p.392. Freire, 2003, p. 70. * ‘Shapiro, 1999, p. 43J.C. RAI GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO 3 ization noise and clipping are considered the ‘dialect’ of digital tech- nology, and as such form the basis of Glitch, which similarly seeks to deflect the commercialism of digitally ‘perfect’ production.” Glitch’s ‘aesthetic of failure””’ exploits the fact that certain interac- tions with technology, often in a manner which Cascone calls ‘mis- use and abuse’,’® yield unpredictable results, constituting further en- actment of Cage’s indeterminacy.’” An experimental process is one which is not ‘to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown’.* Thus the per- ception of noise, and the unpredictability of Glitch’s sound-making process is able to obstruct the respective converses of what Chion calls causal and semantic listening,” its results being of unknown mech- anical origin not only to the listener, but often also to the composer (due to the ‘accidental’ nature of sound production). What is left is a reflective inversion of Schaeffer’s ‘profound listening’:” the sound object” is both poietically and subtextually”* understood to represent a failure, error, or glitch of some type — but being created by such a failure, its process of creation relies on a lack of intent (i.e. premedit- ation of outcome) on reception: Pan Sonic’s Slovakian Ruata (2006) involves misuse/abuse of studio technology, the tools of production, whereas skipping cD players in Oval’s 94 Diskont (1995) emphasize tools of reproduction.” Glitch is influenced by a wide range of genres,” including most predominantly techno, electro, and ambient music.”* For instance, Kangding Ray uses glitch artefacts to mediate music which is largely informed by ambient techno, and when he does incorporate non- glitch sounds, such as pianos in Status+Light (2006), they are em- * Besser, 2010, p.3._* Cascone,2000. “That is, ofa type which was unintended in the techno- logy’sinvention. *” Cage,1937/961a. “* Cage, cited Nyman, 1999, p.1. *? Chion, 1994, pp. 25-31. 2 The converse of the causal mode of listening is a causal understanding in creating sound, and that of semantic listening is the intent in communicating it. Thus the Glitch process obstructs respectively the knowledge of sonic outcome based on cause, and the ability to premeditate a codified message, the latter of which is of course partially dependent on the former. ™ Schaeffer, 19664977. As described by Schaeffer (objet sonore, sometimes translated into English as ‘sonorous object’), ibid. * ive. re- spectively with regard to causal and semantic listening. * Stuart, 2003. * Large sub-genres of electronic music, and electronica in particular. * Sansom, 2009.4 GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO J.C. RAI bedded in such a way which sits beneath the glitch or the ‘surface noise’. Alva Noto’s laptop performances in collaboration with Ry- uichi Sakamoto are improvised, which allows the synergy of their individual interpretations of sound to take on a life beyond the con- trol of either performer, Noto’s control of the technology to process the piano’s sound source counteracted by the ‘relative indeterminacy’ of the latter to Noto.” However, one thing which has posed a major threat to Glitch’s maintenance of its aesthetic is its assimilation into a number of pop- ular musics, in particular other electronic music sub-genres (some- times creating offshoots such as ‘glitch-hop”*) and experimental rock. Though artists within its domain take influence from other idioms without contradicting Glitch’s credo, impact in the other dir- ection does similarly, but on the terms of the ‘parent’ genre — and indirectly affects the comprehension of ‘glitches’ used. How Glitch is assimilated into and by other genres is linked with how glitch samples are made available commercially,”, and therefore used. Many paw”? sound-banks and sample libraries include ‘glitch’ subsets” categor- ized in a language familiar to mainstream computer music produc- tion, such as ‘pads’, ‘bass’, patches, etc. This recontextualization of Glitch’s vocabulary into an archive designed for substituting or dec- orating more conventional timbres within mainstream music consti- tutes a determinate instrument from which users knows exactly what they are getting. Samples are often provided in the form of a (virtual) drum-machine patch, glitch elements approximating the standard sound set.” While this type of assimilation happens all the time between musical genres,”’ it poses a problem to Glitch’s aesthetics when the ¥ Noto & Sakamoto, 2006. It is ambiguous from the repertoire to which this label is applied whether it originated from glitch fused within hip-hop, or trip-hop.” In the pro-audio, or music: technology, industry. *° Digital audio workstation ** To name but a few of countless examples: EastWest’s Quantum Leap series, Propellerhead’s Reason 4 sound bank, Apple Logic Studio 9 (whole categories of sound bank called ‘warped’, which treats standard samples with Glitch-like processing). Also, even software marketed at amateur or hobbyist musicians, such as Garageband Jampack Remix Tools. ‘The ‘standard set’ comprising the usual ‘kick’, ‘snare’, hi-har’, etc. ** Neill, 2002.J.C. RAI GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO 5 samples become part of a music in which they no longer represent malfunction, their source of creation becoming irrelevant. This is not problematic to the assimilation itself, neither are the resulting or assimilating genres necessarily diluted by it — importing glitches is just an expansion of their palette. However, it presents a challenge to ‘pure’ Glitch practitioners: glitch timbres used heavily in mainstream musics become accepted by the listener as part of the music beyond the acousmatic surface, no longer (re-enacting a failure of techno- logy, but rather the opposite, its success. Causing this is the use of glitch samples uninformed by the Glitch credo. For instance, the ‘glitch-hop’ act Grasscut, like many such artists, does not use glitch artefacts as a material basis for their work (as do Glitch practitioners) but instead as ‘effect’, superimposed over material which is idiomatic to their established genre. Old Machines (2010) is an example of this type of usage: rhythmic loops comprising glitch ‘kits’ supplement a standard drum machine rhythm rather than replace it. This ‘cos- metic’ use of glitch sounds is neither problematic nor ineffective in itself, but its separation from the context of Glitch’s aesthetic means that listeners come to associate glitch sounds with the parent genre’s idiomatic conventions, of which they eventually accept it as being a component. A genre seeking to exist otside popular music” loses its concep- tual weight when its practices eventually cross over into mainstream acceptance.” Therefore Glitch’s aesthetic is reliant on maintaining unfamiliarity and unexpectedness. However, cases of assimilation whose ‘parent’ idiom shares some of, or is in line with, Glitch aes- thetics, reinforce the latter’s emphases on malfunction rather than simply utilizing its sound palette. Examples of this are found in Radi- ohead’s* music from their ‘Kid’ sessions.” The songs Kid A (2000) ™ Which glitch does (Sansom, 2009). ** de Ledesma, 2010. Radiohead is an example of an act whose incorporation of Cagean aesthetics dovetail with those of Glitch, hence the apparent ‘compatibility’ of the two [Tate 2005: 03]. °” ‘The bulk of this material can be found on the albums Kid A and Amnesiac (the latter of which is sometimes referred to as ‘Kid B’, being recorded at the same time as the former)6 GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO J.C. RAI and Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors (2001) use sample bit-crushing”* com- plemented (respectively per song, completely and virtually) by in- comprehensible lyrics. (Vocalist) Yorke achieves this by ‘misusing’ an auto-tuner (a notably apt icon of digital perfectionism) by speak- ing without tune causing ‘[it] to desperately search for the music in your speech, and produce notes at random’.*? Both songs thus form a breakdown in communication between creator, machine and listener. But generally, assimilation of Glitch occurs in electronic mu- sic and hip-hop” as typified by the above description of Grasscut’s work, without mediation of its aesthetics. Glitch is consequently in danger of getting stuck in a rut: the more that mainstream music organizes and incorporates — and thus validates — artefacts which are currently ‘usually’ understood to be noises of malfunction, each eventually becomes culturally transformed into a non-failure in the ear of the listener: we expect to hear this voltage spike, we expect to hear that digital clipping pop. The sounds of Glitch are in danger of losing their original novelty due to submergence into more estab- lished popular music styles.** This is compounded by an increasingly digitally-embedded population, each generation more adept with technology’s inner mechanisms than the last, party due to rapid In- ternet growth.” Glitch’s ontological problems do not just come from outside, but also from within. Alongside assimilation into other genres, it appears to have its own internal conflicts between credo and practice. Initially, because of the increasing speed and stability of computer hardware and software (the latter of which, but the mid-2000s had particu- larly become tool of choice by Glitch artists, studio hardware being exhausted of malfunction by the likes of Pan Sonic), the seemingly paradoxical ‘reliance on failure’ of the 1990s had more or less come > -Bit-crushing is the act of distorting digital sound matter by reducing the resolution (and therefore precision) ofitsdata. ” Hansen, 2005,p.127. “Besser, 2010,p. 4.“ Much in the same way that a foreign word’s usage in English may qualify it as (what linguists call) a ‘borrowed word’, and then even- tually be accepted simply as part of English (with its foreignness downgraded to ‘etymology’). A computer problem in the 1990s called for a technician, but today, DIY solutions are readily available on the Internet (Kelly, 2007]J.C. RAI GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO 7 to a dead end.** Instead, it became customary to ‘force’ crashes by processor overload, to force voltage spikes, and to modify the code of software itself to create failure.’ The last of these particularly begs the question, Js this really a glitch? After all, it does not demonstrate the failure of technology, but instead sabotages it to manufacture a mutated technology which is designed to fail. So the aforementioned form, the seemingly paradoxical, ‘reliance on failure’ is replace with the actual paradox of ‘successful failure’. Following a desire to tweak code came a demand to have more open access to the basic, (low-level) technology of digital audio. Thus software such as CSound, Super- collider, PureData, and (the commercial) Max/Ms? etc. became the standard means of simulating failure — but by facilitating through a precise understanding of the inner workings of psp (digital signal processing)*’ rather than low-fidelity, serendipity, unexpected tweak- ing and the ‘ghost in the machine’, which is (we must remember) part of Glitch’s identity. this shift appears to devalue its supposed defiance of consumerist design.** The demand for access to more basic-level digital processing — and consequently open-source software’” — was born on and of the Internet," whose partin the growth of a semi-institutionalized Glitch technique must be considered as crucial in leading Glitch practice to where it is now. In the first instance, it played a large part in the devel- opment of glitch’s methods, we forums allowing artists to discuss and share methods of tweaking software, as well as sharing their own sonic creations for reuse by others (e.g. under Creative Commmons”).”° But in doing this, it also created an established set of methods of ‘malfunction manufacture’, which became increasingly ubiquitous as a common denominator of the vast majority of Glitch. This need * Besser, 2010, p.1. “* Lyon, 2002, p.16. ** Besser, 2010, p.6. “* Marclay & Tone, 1997/2008, pp-343-345. “” Open source software is free in both senses: itis free to download, and its source code is made available openly so that anyone may alter and redistribute a modified version.“ Hunter, 2003, p-s17.“” Creative Commons isa free-service copyrighting body which was developed parallel to, and incorporating many of the ethics of the GNU General Public Licence. It allows artists to copyright work with specifications which allow others to redistribute, reuse or alter the work under defined restrictions. °° Sansom, 2009.8 GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO J.C. RAL to develop, establish and propagate glitch-making technique (admit- tedly a pursuit which eventually materialized some way or another in any creative practice) has pushed Glitch to the limits of its domain in terms of accident and unpredictability: the practice in its purest form already rests on a knife edge between phenomenological noise and composed sound, but the compositional process has come to include the development of an increasingly comprehensive (and web- centralized) knowledge-base of the creation of certain types of noise, artefact and glitch. The single greatest threat to Glitch’s aesthetic of failure’ is the technical empowerment of the artist and/or listener to control and predict. This brings us back full cycle to the challenge which prompted Glitch’s beginning: as more noises become validated as (intentional, and thus communicative) sounds, it became harder to find something which would be perceived as ‘noise’ which, recall, is non-communicative. Thus in its validation of noises, Glitch is run- ning out of ‘failed’ poietic territory to inhabit. In seeking to remain outside of the popular music sphere, it is required to perpetually find new boundaries to penetrate, which lie outside of the realm of noises which it has already annexed, colonized and transformed into musical matter. As a consequence, it has to keep moving outside of itself to occupy space which cannot be conceptually devalued by external or internal assimilation into ‘intended’ music.”* ‘The Internet and Web, as well as partly creating this conundrum, also yield some (at least short-term) answers, in being a new medium of communication yet to be fully explored.” It provides a new plane of technology in which artists can rework old methods. Liddell’s video I'm Sitting in a Video Room (2010) is based directly on Lucier’s sem- inal work of similar name (1969). Instead of reverb and tape providing artefacts, an analogous deterioration of audio-visual signal is created by a thousand iterations of upload/download to YouTube. In this, the video comes to embody the codec with which it was compressed, * Yhave been using the word ‘intent’ for lack of a better one. Glitch of course has contextual intent, but one which requires a hindrance of any textual intent, or message being transmitted. Lyon, 2002, p. 30.J.C. RAI GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO 9 and the very act of online video sharing and downloading — which is arguably a major emblem of this early-21st-century era of the Internet. If Glitch seeks to emphasize technology’s presence, then em- phasizing its artificiality could prove another channel of pursuit — particularly in an age when much digital technology is built with a view to emulate or reproduce acoustic reality as faithfully as possible. Ikeda has used this approach in a number of ways. Headphonics”’ a binaural piece in three parts, involves a sine wave bouncing between the left and right channels. The acoustically impossible purity of a sine tone™ combined with the phenomena of isolated monaural hearing (which is never experienced in acoustic space, only achieved through headphones) accents the artificialities of both digital production and headphone listening. He has further explored the artistic potential of ‘acoustic impossibility’ by creating the sound installation Matrix for an anechoic chamber.’ These approaches make similar points about digital perfectionism as those which emphasize failures. The other line of pursuit is that of a reversal of the roles of ‘sound’ and ‘noise’. Alva Noto has used generative methods such as the inter- pretation of plain text files by audio decoders in Unitxt (2008), and the results are used as the musical materiel. But in this piece, the same text is spoken over the music and ‘takes on the role of [unwanted sound)’ and the roles of message and noise are exchanged, as ‘the noise is now the [musical] message and the text is its obstruction’.”” Artists pursuing these new poietic and aesthetic orbits around the same conceptual axis appear to have found a way out of the afore- mentioned noise-to-sound vicious cycle. But however much these may continue to push conceptual envelopes, will Glitch always be able to continue being ‘Glitch’? As a genre it will of course continue to exist, as no doubt will the sound world that has been built within and around it over the last two decades. But unless artists continue to find new ways to subvert technology’s use in industry — new ways * Ikeda, 2006.“ Cowell,1929._** Anechoic meaning devoid of reverb, ic. having absolute zero acoustic reflection. ** Toop, 2004, pp-u-14. 7 Collis, 2008, p. 33.10 GLITCH: AN ENDANGERED CREDO J.C. RAL to outrun technology, new ways to misuse and abuse their own estab- lished set of techniques for ‘manufacturing malfunction’, and new ways to fail’ — there is a danger that their idiom will lose its credo. 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