Book Review - Untitled Tracks. On Alternative Music in Beirut.

CC + 46 Adeena Mey BOOK REVIEW - Untitled Tracks: On Alternative Music in Beirut. Photographs by Tanya Traboulsi, Ziad Nafwal and Ghalya Saadawi (Eds.), Beirut: Amers Editions, 2009, 159 pages. Often, when a work (of art) is left untitled or is given the title “Untitled”, the lack of an explicit name replaced by a sign marking this absence suggests a refusal to objectivise the work, or to reduce it to strict interpretations and categorisations. In short, such work might be endowed with more openness. In the case of Untitled Tracks, however, the title is nevertheless followed by the all-encompassing “alternative”. In fact, there could not be a more adequate title for a book that strives to map an emerging, ever-changing, fragmented sonic landscape in a no less fractured social-political context; that of Beirut. Edited by DJ, music producer and critic, Ziad Nawfal and writer, academic and Nowiswere contributor Ghalya Saadawi, Untitled Tracks is organised in two parts: the irst is composed of essays, the second of Tanya Traboulsi’s ongoing photographic documentation, both charting speciic aspects of this seemingly rich and heterogeneous terrain. In her introduction, Saadawi carefully attempts to formulate and ‘thematise’ the relationship between these sonic, musical practices and a certain politics, all the while warning of the shortcomings of reducing the former to the latter, or to other geographic and regional concerns. Saadawi circumscribes what the book is (not) about in the section titled “whatnot”, as well as the things the book is intended to do. Although one could be tempted to present this musical scene in a sweeping gesture akin to a comprehensive history – an ‘ideal’ the editors explicitly avoid – they opt instead to refer to these practices and the eclectic musicians as, what Saadawi calls, an “imagined community”. The aim here also being the creation of a representational space, or a sort of visual and textual equivalent to the recorded aural manifestations. Hence, if this community is an imagined one (and one of possibly “emancipatory moments” as well), the photographic work which captures it does not simply represent or recomposes throughout the pages of Untitled Tracks since it is only incarnated in the latter. Rather, the photos act as a kind of visual archaeology in the present, fashioning these subjects in the encounter with the lens. As contributor Serge Abiaad puts it, “taking pictures, like documentary ilmmaking, is not about externally observing and monitoring through the camera’s lens, but about being present with that which we are witnessing.” Of Traboulsi’s photos, one can mention those of electro-acoustic/noise musician Tarek Atoui, where the physicality of his performances is rendered quasi-palpable; or rapper RGB’s dark and almost knightly poses; or The New Government’s NME cover-like attitudes. What these have or do not have in common or where they stand within the stream of alternative music in Beirut does not seem to be the driving force behind this collection of photos. If they necessarily document actors, events, gestures, objects and scenes that make up Beirut’s alternative sonorous topography, Traboulsi’s images are in fact more reminiscent of Walker Evans’s idea that “art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style”. They do not fall under the acknowledged genre of “documentary style” either, as neither do they produce a series as such, nor do they adopt the aesthetics of the archive. It seems, rather, that they attempt to de-encapsulate the poetics of a series of situations. In both the photographs and texts, experimental music is given a notable part. Some of the most visible igures such as Tarek Atoui, Charbel Haber, Sharif Sehnaoui, Mazen Kerbaj and Raed Yassin can be seen performing or iddling with their instruments and other live performance apparatuses – human-technical-sonorous assemblages exploring the silence-noise spectrum. Alongside Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s close reading of Atoui’s Un-Drum performance (based on his partial hearing loss resulting from his arrest during the 2006 war) and Seth Ayyaz’s essay (part contextualisation of the emergence of the improvisation/experimental scene in Beirut, part written iction as sound and an effort to recreate the sonic event of the Irtijal festival and give the reader a sense of being-there), Walid Sadek introduces the work of Lebanese music theorist Nizar Mroueh for the irst CC + 47 Installation view and display at Ulises booksop, branch Lastarria, Santiago. Courtesy of the artist. Tarek Atoui performing live. Foto: Tanya Traboulsi time to an English-speaking audience through his translation of and commentary on The Legitimacy of Noise: A Personal Opinion, published in 1968. Obviously inluenced by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises, Mroueh sketches a music history that signals a move from dominant regimes of musicality towards “the ruin of a pre-musical landscape.” Discussing some of the major musical innovations of the 20th Century – Schönberg’s dodecaphonic composing system, Cage’s indeterminacy principle and Musique Concrète pioneers Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henry for instance – Mroueh circumscribes what he sees as a sonic territory that radically shifts away from traditional conceptions of composition, understood here as a spectrum delineated by “mathematical ordering” on the one hand, and “nihilistic chaos” on the other. Beyond the aesthetic and scholarly value of each dimension, one of the interests in reading Mroueh is that he brings them close together – by deeming them pre-linguistic antecedents to the functionality of sound as a vector for corporeal motion (dance) – through what he deems a fundamental, human “aural sense”. Not only does this idea echoe with Adorno’s dislike for jazz or popular music as mere dance or background musical forms, it can also constitute a fertile ground to discuss ideas of aesthetic modernism. The latter, as developed by the German philosopher, re-enacts one of the tensions of modern society, namely the universal vs. the particular. Thus, broadly speaking, modernist art’s negativity lies within its internal logic of individuation, which, as Adorno writes “distances art from the universal. [Thus] the sole path of success that remains open to artworks is also that of their progressive impossibility.”i. Through an Adornian lens, Mroueh’s modernism thus comes out as one CC + 48 under which the singular is not whisked off in the name of a pre-established aesthetic universalism, but whose local eventualities might favour the path of the “progressive impossibility” stated by Adorno. Today in Lebanon, such eventualities are often correlated to social and political events. For instance, Mazen Kerbaj reminds us in one of his interviewsii that if the context of war produces extreme situations, they are also very fertile ones that feed creativity. From this point of view, all artists presented in Untitled Tracks bear, to a certain extent, the “aural sense”, which, according to Mroueh, “roars with anger and thunder, hums and rustles with the sounds of tenderness, and has often recorded humanity’s efforts to defend itself and survive.” i Theodor W. Adorno (2002), Aesthetic Theory, London, New York, Continuum, 202. ii Mazen Kerbaj, Music during wartime, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=9lcgou7kkdk CC + 49