Mystic Turn, Sonic Alliance
Talyn Sandhu
Time of Publication: 18/9/23 ; 14:27
Introduction.
This essay will survey the genesis of a Mystic Turn (MT) that derives from consideration of the recent flourishing reticulation of occult signatures in contemporary art and sound works. The MT is a symbiotic parasite within The Speculative Turn. It is a dialect that permeates the bounds of numerous neologisms, models and forms of life within the sprawling “epistemic long tail” 1 of speculative theory.
It is important to note that this essay is written amidst the emergence of the MT, consequently its precise definition and intent remains partially elusive. Instead, this essay aims not to explicitly categorise this turn into its individual ideologies and outcomes but to speculate about its ghostly silhouette, that is leaking into the cracks of contemporary art, enmeshing with present speculative epistemologies (Xenofeminists, Left-Accelerationists, Neo-Animists, Afrofuturists to name a few) and amplifying their conjoined presence in the form of a contemporary mystic work (CMW).
The MT can be understood as a growing re-emergence of pre-Enlightenment mystics, wyrd modes of existence and residual practices (a fundamental term for the MT and this essay which will be further explored in a later chapter) within contemporary art and sound works. Inherently, it is an objection to modernity and its tendency to rationalise, calculate and measure everything. It represents all that was deemed irrational by the Enlightenment, a tentative sludge that seeps out from the vapid ruins of the modern, amalgamating to form “a procession of data that Science has excluded.” 2 This essay assesses this resurgence of our past and how it may be utilised against the impasses of the present (and various subjectivities afforded by capitalism). “This is not from any nostalgic desire to return to an idealised moment, nor to dream of escape from the complexities and pressing concerns of today. Neither is it, strictly speaking, to do history; rather, it is to view the past and present as entangled.” 3 Once this vast entanglement becomes recognisable, it facilitates the acknowledgment of the MT as an innate response to contemporary condition.
The MT realises itself in the works of some well-known interdisciplinary artists such as Mark Leckey, Tai Shani, New Mystics (a platform that explores interconnections of magic and technology organised by Alice Bucknell) but proliferates in the esoteric with projects like Most Dismal Swamp’s curated mixed reality biomes, Odious Rot an independent magazine for the birth of a new craftsfolk, Iglooghost’s techno-pagan sonic fictions, Heith’s ritualistic rave for neomedieval audiences and manifold others.
It must be noted that the MT and its close association with the reawakening of pre-Enlightenment modes of existence shares a fractional resemblance with the alt-right Neoreactionary movement (NRx) that has coalesced around the discourse of a Dark Enlightenment and more specifically with Neoreactionary philosopher Nick Land (A key figure also recognised for his contributions to the CCRU, that will be returned to multiple times throughout this essay) and his politics that explores a “time-twisted vector that spirals forwards into the past, and backwards into the future” 4. However, NRx in its haste to accelerate through capitalism has shed its affiliation with egalitarian and democratic ideals, calling for a full reversal of all values generated by Enlightenment progress, presenting a fascist ‘patchwork’ model (small states organised around ethnic, business or ideological interests). Since the MT is a concept that derives from an emerging pattern in contemporary art, it naturally associates with contemporary leftist speculative ideologies that recognise the polyvocality of the contemporary, operating within the spaces between rather than attempting to divide them. Therefore, rejecting abusive uses of Enlightenment such as the one fabricated by NRx. Recognition of the MT and its increased uptake by speculative, leftist anti-capitalist epistemologies, acts as an intensifier for inciting concept manufacture of hybrid models that aid visualisation or sonification of futures that could exist beyond capitalism.
It is apparent that the MT shares a strong resonance with the sonic, throughout, this essay will employ the perspective of the tympanic membrane, a sonic probe into the resurgence of the past into the present. As stated by sonic theorist Eleni Ikoniadou, “I take for granted that, firstly, perceptible sound is only a subset of the broader vibrational continuum, and, secondly, that an engagement with the sonic encourages the conceptualization of a third dimension between theory and fiction.” 5 Particularly, engagement with the practice of sonic fiction has a distinctive affinity with the MT which will be explored in the following passages.
The Nature of the Mystic Turn.
The Swampscape :
In order to understand the relevance of a MT in contemporary art, it is important to first recognise the vast entanglement of our present. This entanglement comes in response to the speculative opportunity presented by science’s disenchantment of the world and the self, it births a long tail of new Enlightenments/speculative theories that attempt to form new meaning from the ruinous modern, in turn the present is riddled with neologisms, revised concepts, heresies, memetic battles, alien theories and other speculations.
One model in particular that has facilitated the conceptualisation and recognition of the MT and is especially proficient in elucidating the vast polyvocality of the present is Dane Sutherlands text ‘The Dank Enlightenment’. Sutherland advocates for the ‘swampscape’ as a suitable analogy for the contemporary.
An essential characteristic, key to swampscapes, is their anomalous constitution ‘in a classificatory order predicated on a hard and fast distinction between land and water, time and space’. Simultaneously solid land and fluid water yet also neither, swampscapes embody a topology of muddy indistinction, and a taxonomic heresy that disallows the easy separation and parsing of solid forms. This is relevant for understanding a contemporary condition that has supplanted the teleology of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity with the entangled simultaneity of multiple, nested logics: a quantum ecology that blurs, combines and superposes fact and fiction, nature and culture, technology and the occult, past and future, authentic and synthetic, work and play, science and mysticism, self and other, dry silicon and wet biology, online and offline, human and nonhuman. 6
It becomes apparent that the present is suspended in a limbo of manifold logics, an overwhelming unknowability of in-between space pervades. To interpret this unknowability, it becomes clear that current human cognition is no longer viable. A new language, to account for a “plurality of ontologies” 7 must be established. In order to seek this new language, we must scour the gaps in knowledge, explore the alien theories, amateur heresies and new terms that interpret the unknown. The MT is the exploration of human practice from the past that previously worked alongside the unknown and wyrd, reimagined alongside contemporary speculative epistemologies on the unknown expressed through the medium of contemporary art. CMWs are directly working with formulating a new “teratological language” 8 to form new reason by altering our habitual laws and countering utilitarian principles instilled in us by modernity.
Residual Culture.
In his book Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams discusses how the contemporary is constructed of an array of cultures, dominant, residual and emergent. He defines the dominant, or hegemony (effective culture) in our case being modernity, western rationality and contemporary capitalism, as consistently incomplete as there are always vestiges of previous hegemonies. These “still seem to have significance because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize.” 9 these vestiges form the residual. “The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.” 10 The residual can be distinguished from the ‘archaic’, an element of our past that is effectively integrated into the dominant culture, recognised wholly as an element from the past. Williams also speaks on future-oriented ‘emergent’ cultures, that he describes as an area of new human activity that is yet to be recognised by the dominant culture.
The MT is specifically attentive to the residual, the areas of our past that are not fully accounted for by the dominant culture. The unrecognizability or undetectability of the residual is crucial, its ability to remain an effective element of the present despite the all-consuming surveillance of modernity, deems them powerful. As the grip of this surveillance begins to slip and the swampscape divulges in the present, the residual is superposed, its relics and rituals have quickly become suitable instruments for study. Through their re-emergence we can begin to assess their reintegration with technological and scientific development, specifically the way it invokes their ‘mis-use’. The inworking of the occult and mystic, grants the ability to perceive new uses for devices considered redundant by science. Therefore, this resurgence is a planned destabilisation, an intentional glitch, a forced contention between what was contained and the uncontainable. An attempt to deviate from the impasse of the current hegemonic path. Through these hybrid works, new meanings appear.
Embracing Apophenia.
Early Foucault defined Epistemes as “implicit ‘rules of formation’ which govern what constitutes legitimate forms of knowledge for a particular cultural period. They are the underlying codes of a culture that govern its language, its logic, its schemas of perception, its values and its techniques,” 11
Foucault drew a strong distinction between a Renaissance episteme based on resemblance, analogy, and occult signatures and a subsequent Enlightenment regime, which rejected that resonating mirror show of images for taxonomy, strict filiation, and rationalized, abstractly defined relationships. This Enlightenment episteme transformed the organization of knowledge—the order of things—but it also transformed the world, entering into the very folds of perception and experience. It did so by driving a wedge between things and meanings, establishing what Bruno Latour characterized as the fundamental logic of modernity. Within the paradigm shift Latour described, a radical distinction is drawn between natural objects and human culture, two domains that had formerly been braided into one resonating reality composed of hybrid objects that were at once natural and cultural. This was the old “anthropological matrix” of fates and fetishes that modernity claimed to set itself resolutely against.
However, the older episteme did not disappear—it was just pushed to the margins, where it persisted and mutated inside the worlds of literature, popular entertainment, fringe science (and tech), “madness,” and the esoteric underground.” 12
The old ‘anthropological matrix’ is integral to the MT, earlier in the text Davis discusses the alleged apophenia of pre-Enlightenment categorisation in cabinets of curiosities (Wunderkammer) that presented narwhal tusks as unicorn artefacts, alongside dagydes, talismans and other objects that modernism strived to define as unrelated. “As Barbara Stafford puts it, these cabinets did not present a static tableau but rather “a drama of possible relationships to be explored.”” 13 As the Enlightenment regime took hold, the drama of these relationships was slowly deteriorated into much less imaginative forms. Consequently, rekindling these allegorical and dramatic connections is an essential tool for artists that operate within the MT, actively interweaving the residual rather than showcasing it as separate. When distinctive objects, locations or acoustic environments of the contemporary (especially those entwined with previous individual experiences) are fluently explored with residual elements of our past, ludic relationships and narratives are naturally formed between them. These connections bypass our habitual logics, as things begin to exert their own meanings and influences between the observer and other things, independent of what created them and time they inhabited, the disparity between the past and present, human and nonhuman is diminished. Once this fissure is driven through the ivory tower that upholds the Enlightenment era above the Dark Ages, it facilitates the use of the materials from the past as alternative points of subjectification in the contemporary. Particularly when mobilised by new art and sound works.
Sonic Alliance.
Sonic Turn :
“The past decade has seen a proliferation in sound-based scholarship and the increasing significance of audio culture – as simultaneously a site for analysis, a medium for aesthetic engagement, and a model for theorization – which has been identified as ‘the sonic turn’.” 14 This turn, focuses on utilising sound studies to explore psychological, social, aesthetic, philosophical and economic elements of the subject. However, in her essay ‘A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption’ Eleni Ikoniadou poses the fundamental question:
“If, in sound studies, the sonic is consistently taken as that which we can hear, feel, or somehow perceive, as a result of something doing or something being (be it biological, artificial or other), then how can we account for the sonic’s immanent relationship to the uncertain, the unearthly and ultimately to the unknowable?” 15
Crucially, Ikoniadou poses a question that reaches beyond the anthropocentric angle of sound studies, delineating the recognition of the sonic as not a mere tool concerned with human affairs “but rather as this other planet, which, like Solaris, resists scientific inquiry, precise measurement and deviates from our habitual laws.” 16 Perception of the sonic medium as equally concerned with the nonhuman, allows the rephrasing of Ikoniadou’s previous words: “audio culture – as simultaneously a site for uncertain analysis, a medium for unearthly aesthetic engagement, and a model for unknowable theorization”. 17 Naturally, it is evident that the sonic is a medium with vast potential in the contemporary, riddled with gaps in knowledge and unexplored implementations it establishes itself as a subject uncontainable to our current human cognition, it incites change, even catalysing it when entangled with various speculative theories and experimental works. It is clear the sonic shares a likeness with the residual and its unrecognisable capabilities however, it is through the practice of sonic fiction that their combined relationship is able to flourish.
Sonic Fiction :
Sonic fiction is a term coined by Kodwo Eshun, whose groundbreaking book More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) that was critical to inciting the sonic turn, brought afrofuturism - artists such as Sun Ra, Rammellzee, Drexciya - to the attention of critical art theory, sound studies and philosophy. Vitally, Eshun deploys sonic fiction as its methodology throughout. “sonic fiction can be understood as the convergence of the organization of sound with a fictional system whose fragments gesture towards but fall short of the satisfactions of narrative”. 18 Sonic fiction is a practice that inherently invokes speculation, fanfiction and audience confusion. Eshun explains “a sonic fiction is assembled from track subtitles, the instructions in runout grooves, the statements on labels, the graphic images embedded within the support system of the record or the CD or the file, all of which feed into and reinforce each other to form a plane of consistency”. 19 Sonic fictions invite concept manufacture, new worlds, languages and perspectives, generating self-expanding projects that navigate a space between speculative theory and science fiction, collectively displaying “an extreme indifference towards the human”.20 This allows sonic fiction the ability to facilitate vast possibility spaces, in which time perception is entirely altered, ancient past and the far future assemble themselves as the audiences are dismembered by rhythms of psychoacoustic electricity. Seemingly, sonic fictions have the capability to work at the intersections of all entanglements saturating the present. “Having had only recently to come to terms with the unknowability of the world – as well as its existence without us and its complete indifference to us – sonic fictional methods become a form of disorientation proper to the study of the present.” 21 Sonic fiction is a medium that allows apophenia and synaesthesia to unfurl through experimental music, a platform especially proficient at accommodating the re-emergence of pre-Enlightenment modes of existence, seamlessly fusing them within our contemporary.
Case Studies.
1: Under Under In :
In his recent show ‘O’ Magic Power of Bleakness’ Mark Leckey previewed a new work, ‘Under Under In’, an audio-play accompanied by visuals displayed across five screens, presented beneath a to-scale replica of an M53 flyover that passes close to his childhood home. Through this piece, Leckey re-envisages an encounter he had when he was nine, with a fairy that appeared to him while hanging around under the bridge with his friends. The play follows five teenagers being haunted beneath the bridge, one of them with a desire to leave his home town, is abducted and transported to a fairy world, far below the bridge and replaced with a changeling, a clone of himself entwined with the knowledge of fairies. The changeling begins to speak in riddle and repeated words, warning them of trespassing on an old fairy path. Pervaded by hysteria, the others huff inhalants and begin to see visions, glimpses of fairies until they are all collectively plummeted into the supernatural that exists beneath them. They are pulled out for a brief moment until the play reaches its climax, in which the four teenagers all fold over into pose resembling that of the bridge, plastered with rapturous expression.
Despite being accompanied by distinctly clever visuals, in which the viewpoint of each teenager in the film is portrayed by snapchat videos laced with digital 3D models and ghostly renders of ancient bridges and fairy paths, the most remarkable feat of the play is unquestionably the audio. Leckey effortlessly interweaves a soundscape that fuses, 808 drums, folkloristic humming, descending bass drones, rich layered synthetic pads, bird calls, cars and sirens. The voices of the scouse protagonists and the whispering fairies lie within this soundscape. Their vocals are fractured and contorted, slang phrases littered throughout, twisted, recycled, repeated over and over, creating loops that disorientate the audience and their concept of time. As Leckey puts it, “You enter into a loop that has the potential to take you out of your body – into this state of ecstasy – but then you yourself are on repeat, you’re stuck.” 22 Leckey goes on to discuss how this coincides with fairy folklore tales in which they would entrance people into never-ending dances, a wild delirium impossible to escape until their body crumbled. The audio is successful in ensnaring the audience but must also be noted for its excellence at interlacing the contemporary and the past. Leckey uses language, timbre and recognisable samples to portray an environment that undoubtedly considers the in-between. The protagonists discuss, Greggs steak bakes, Galaxy Mcflurry’s, Audi driverless cars and Stone Island atop a bed of fairy chants, metallic chimes, iPhone Alerts and Roblox ‘Oof!’ sounds. Leckey utilises the apophenia of pre-Enlightenment assemblage via the sonic, he summons objects so vastly different in their physical forms and carefully crafts them into a soundscape that is CMW that displays the sonic’s fluency in composing the past into present, fiction into fact.
“The bridge is this state of in-between, like a sense of limbo: I have recently heard this state called ‘cusping’. For me there’s an energy, a power in that. It is a manifestation of being suspended between contradictory positions – becoming and belonging, belief and disbelief – states within myself that I cannot resolve. The bridge is this entity that both summons and repulses me.” 23 Leckey, points to his work being an expression of an in-between space, an unknown that he is unable to comprehend or resolve, but nonetheless attempts to harness its power, or elevate the gaps. Once again, he alludes to the necessity of a new language or mode of cognition that can host the multiple and the unknown, but by expressing an artwork amidst a state of limbo he is also contributing its formation “And with this re-figured and ‘teratological language’ a new form of reason is emerging, for such a language is a system for thinking with the world; parsing it and acting upon it.” 24
2: Heith (Live 08.12.22) :
In his recent performance at Iklectik, Milan-based artist Heith showcased a new live performance cohesive with but separate to his newly released debut album ‘X, Wheel’. The artist performed with friend and collaborator, VISIO (Nicola Tirabasso) before a monochromatic visual that displayed the view from a caged window of a medieval carriage, that lurched and rattled along a cobbled track, where lightning frequently illuminated the silhouettes of church spires and gravestones on the horizon. Tirabasso donned beast claws and lit incense before initiating the performance, digital rhythms emerged from an amassing of processed vocals, Heith muttered enchanting lyrics atop thumping drums and gongs, both artists fluctuating between acoustic and electronic instruments, interweaving fragile wind instruments with strident noise. Throughout, there is a consistent arrangement of devouring climaxes and delicate sounds borne of their dispersal. In an interview Heith stated “For me, it’s more about the alchemy of the process than the sound itself…to see the death of a sound and what comes after it”. 25 Midway through the performance, Tirabasso transitioned to playing the hurdy-gurdy, a medieval string instrument renowned for its ability to form multi-tonal dissonant evolving drones. As this engulfing drone fused with rampaging digital artefacts and swelled, an unease built as the sounds became raucous, Heith began aggressively huffing through a flute, Tirabasso violently wound the wheel of the hurdy-gurdy, the two bedevilled by the rapturous cacophony, hunting for a collective clairvoyance. As the performance reached its zenith, the audience imbued with the discomfort of a forceful come up, gained a glimpse into the artists delusion, granted the ability to embrace an altered perspective.
Heith’s wyrd practices assuredly employ the power of sonic fiction, from his neomedieval visuals, arcane instruments and mystic chants that pervade his performances to the asemic alphabet that features on his album cover, Heith fictions a hypnagogic world “untethered to linear notions of time and space.” 26 Heith uses the possibility space, facilitated by sonic fiction to create a parallel world in which technology and the occult are irreversibly infused, he conceptualises a new human that uses an impossible language and inhabits a Middle Age teeming with electricity. “From Marconi to Tesla to Moog to Ra, electrification opens up a discontinuum between technology and magic. Why a discontinuum instead of a continuum? Because alternating current transmits across gaps and intervals, and not by lineage or inheritance. From now on, Electronic Music becomes a technology-myth discontinuum. Traditional Culture works hard to polarize this discontinuum. Music wilfully collapses it, flagrantly confusing machines with mysticism, systematizing this critical delirium into information mysteries.” 27 This quote from Eshun shares similarity with Heith’s practice, particularly his interest for his performance to be recognised as a ritualistic rave. These ritualistic raves act as a laboratory for a synaesthesia that uses pagan mysticism as a method for interpreting computer algorithm, occult spells for scientific research and local folklore as state law. Within the tentative ritualistic rave, he incites new thought patterns, “It’s part of the process of development of technology and rituals, like how symbols change their meaning and new symbols come up in every age.” 28 Heith uses his rituals to tease out a new language from within himself and the audience by interpolating the swamp, he summons a teratological language that is able to interpret the in-between and altered states, wilfully invoking others to join him.
Analogy: Primitive Magical Unity.
Both Leckey and Heith’s works are reminiscent of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of a “primitive magical unity”. 29 In his text, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon suggests that the mode of existence for primitive humans, before any subject-object (nature-culture) split was one of magical unity. He employs the idea of a phase-shift that occurred, splitting the primitive magical mode of existence in two, to form the separate modes technicity and religion.
In Simondon’s diagram, he further splits the two phase-shifts into their relative practice and theory elements, with aesthetics on a horizontal plane to the original magic unity. He states that, “Aesthetic thinking emerges at the neutral point between technics and religion, at the moment of the division of primitive magical unity: this is not a phase but, rather, a permanent reminder of the rupture of the unity of the magical mode of being and a search for a future unity.” 30 Simondon’s idea of aesthetic thinking is kindred with the works of Heith and Leckey, their aesthetic works indicating and elevating this in-between space or the ‘rupture of unity’ in search for a future unity, a concept that is itself questionable but what is interesting is “the idea that a notion of unity is not just found in residual cultures but drives practices towards a future state in which alienation is overcome.” 31.
Furthermore, Simondon suggests that the magical mode as the “fundamental structuring of the milieu of a living being” 32, involves “the birth of a network of privileged points of exchange between the being and the milieu.” 33
A privileged place, a place that has a power, is one which draws into itself all the force and efficacy of the domain it delimits; it summarises and contains the force of a compact mass of reality; it summarises and governs it, as a highland governs and dominates a lowland; the elevated peak is the lord of the mountain, just as the most impenetrable part of the wood is where all its reality resides. The magical world is in this way made of a network of places and things that have a power and are bound to other things and other places that also have a power. Such a path, such an enclosure, such a temenos contains all the force of the land, and is the key-point of the reality and of the spontaneity of things, as well as of their accessibility. 34
Simondon also suggests that alongside privileged places, sit privileged moments, times, dates in which it is favourable to act, through rituals held at specific times, the participants are able to link privileged points and gain access to the vast temporal matrix, “They are special kinds of space-time foregrounded out of the more ordinary and mundane.” Using Simondon’s privileged points of exchange as an analogy, could this imply that, Leckey’s bridge is a privileged place and Heith’s ritualistic rave is the ceremony for accessing an external multi-dimensional temporal matrix of the unknown.
Though Simondon’s ‘primitive magical unity’ is somewhat questionable in its authority, it is interesting to consider its evidence and appliances in the contemporary, could it “in Williams’ terms, offer up an alternative to a more dominant technical-religious mode of existence. Put bluntly: could magical thinking, in our own time, be residual?” 35
Conclusion.
By now, it is apparent that the MT is impending, it crawls into our peripheral through the CMWs that are becoming ever more frequent, beseeching a “tantalising and threatening re-enchantment of the world”. 36 CMWs have established that they are not merely an endeavour into past modes of existence, out of feeble desire for escapism, they are works that embrace the vast unknowability of the present, encapsulating the polyvocality in their work, they wilfully incorporate the antitheses and the spaces in-between, recognising the residual and fictional as suitable methods for parsing the world around us, forming a new reasoning, new feeling and scheming new futures.
Amidst the speculative opportunity presented by the disenchantment of the world and the self by the sciences, we are faced with an ‘epistemic long tail’ that attempts to renew our “image of thought”. 37 CMWs are the practical implementations – the experimental infantry – working directly with the formulation of a new language, new symbols, new modes of cognition that account for the multiplicity and the uncontainable, in a post-truth world. “nothing is true because there is no single, authorized version of reality – instead, there is a superfluity, an excess, of realities.” 38
The growth of the MT can be attributed to CMWs hyperstitional nature. The term ‘hyperstition’ was coined by the Ccru a hyperstitional object, is itself a fictional object that uses fictional quantities to render itself real in an effective culture.
there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production. Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. Ccru uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually re-invent itself. 39
Hyperstitional objects are the driving force for contemporary capitalism, it is responsible for fictioned cravings for products, especially through brands. By supplanting an image of the future in the present, it organises the consumptive desire of the present in order to make itself successful, therefore achieving the future that is presented in this image. This same tactic is employed by CMWs, they present an alternative mode of existence, that entangles technology and the occult, science and mysticism etc. germinating their audience with visions and sonification, which instils a desire for a new mode of existence beyond capitalism, spawning new work in the pursuit to realise this mode of existence.
Antivoid Solutions, in their essay The Hyperstitional Object: Reflexivity and the recovery of lost possible futures, experiment with hyperstition as a tool for reflexivity, by forcing the hand-axe from the present into the mind of the primitive human, instilling their consumptive desire with an alien artefact they are able to recognise it as a self-prophetic symbol of capitalism, “We create the very condition of our present—in recognising this fact, we (society) are able to imagine or recover “lost futures”; a post-capitalist world.” 40
Through the re-emergence of residual culture and past modes of existence in contemporary work, forcing them to inhabit a different time, CMWs inherently utilise a form of time-folding, “Templexing—time folding—is central to hyperstition, as it exposes the control structures dependent on linear accumulation (language being a particularly insidious perpetrator)” 41 Therefore, the MT is a burgeoning collection of art and sound practice that are empathetic of our multi-dimensional reality, recognising the dependency capitalism has on linear time structure. If enough works engrain an untethering from linear notions of time – a concept particularly familiar to the sonic – perceptions of a future without capitalism are attainable.
Bibliography:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7fzbjj3sdzg6sm9k1aewo/Mystic-Turn-Sonic-Alliance-Endnotes-Talyn-Sandhu.pdf?rlkey=m852g9aam1ove4y6mu6c4qqr7&dl=0