A bright Summer's morning a few months ago. Strong espresso coffee and reflections on a fruitless night spent in front of the Amiga. Searching for new angles....but how? but how? Burroughs has been dead a few days and I'm reminded of something I read in one of his obituaries; his life-long obsession with what he called the 'word-lock' - The limitations imposed on any individual by the very nature, the very act, of using words. It seems to make perfect sense on this morning - I feel the same. I'm caught in a sound-lock.

I've been reading 'Film as a Subversive Art' by Amos Vogel. I've taken to reading it with my morning coffee when my brain still feels fluid and in semi-dream state. Anything but a fucking newspaper these days. I open it at a chapter on Eisenstein's editing techniques and without really realising, obsessively begin to replace the word 'film' with 'sound'. Amazingly it seemed to make sense......

".....A technical process (the ordering of strips of sound into logical, narrative sequence) is thus transformed into an aesthetic act. Events, heard in real-time as a continuous, integrated flux of objects in motion, should be 'cut' by the producer into discrete segments (mere snatches of reality), then dynamically joined in combinations designed to create a new reality.

In a not entirely tenable analogy with Japanese character writing, creative editing is seen as a multiplication rather than addition of separate effects. Just as the Japanese character for 'dog' and another for 'mouth' form, when juxtaposed, the character for 'bark', so the juxtaposition of two sounds creates an entity greater than the sum of its components (as in Gestalt psychology). Each sound is an object; but in their combination, sounds create concepts - metaphors, symbols, a new grasp of under-lying intellectual constructs.

Montage works by the COLLISION of two pieces of sound, not by their mere 'joining'.

-Insist on the presence of montage, conflict and contradiction in all the arts -

-SURPRISES, DISPROPORTION, DISTORTION, UNEXPECTED

COMBINATIONS, and most importantly, IRREGULARITY.

As the brain is confronted by the unexpected, it moves back and forth in confusion and excited agitation in an immediate, inevitable search for relationships and does not come to rest until a new 'understanding' is reached. Thus arranging is not peaceful (sic)seamless, logical or polished, but rather like a 'series of of explosions of the internal combustion engine to drive a car (track) forward...'.

The conflicts between the sounds or even within a single sound might be those of scales, volumes, masses, graphic direction, clean as against dirty-timbre, darkness against light, image against sound. Each of these tensions is 'resolved into a meaning configuration. These configurations in turn serve as a basis for further tensions: consequently for further configurations. Contradiction is the basis of dynamic organisation of the associative qualities of the track.'

Arranging, then, is not merely combining what is audible in individual sounds, but making conscious inaudible concepts arising from their combination -
the chains and clashes of psychological associations diabolically contrived by the producer for maximum shock.....".