Worm illustration (photo: Dictionnaire Universel D’Histoire Naturelle).

Welcomed Earworms

Short Essay

What if an earworm is not an irritation, but a pleasant repetition? In their essay, our contributor reflects on the potential of a song as a safe haven to come back to.

It goes like this:
First, mangled guitar strings. Then. Percussion, two hard hits on the drum.
Years, days, makes no difference to me
The bridge, my favourite part –
This place smells like piss and beer –
Then –
In a tone of defeat –
Can you get me out?

This is difficult to admit. But the terrible person that I am, the bitterest of slobs, the most narcissistic of outfit repeaters; I am also privy to occasionally passing secret judgement on my friends’ questionable little quirks and thinking to myself, thank God for my mental stability. Me. The Sane One.

But let me divulge a moment of terrifying truth. One that has me questioning my title as The Sane One. The best of my worst quirks:

You know it, Ohrwurm – Earworm –?

– usually used to describe the horribly captive feeling of having the same part of a song stuck in your head. The bridge of a pop song, in a way both unpleasant and against your will. But what of the voluntary feeling? I am often too busy to expand on my musical palette, as I am stuck listening to the same song over and over again for weeks on end. Gleefully disassociated. To me, earworms are a safe haven.

What clicks in my brain that yearns for that repetition?

Skittish Honesty

Two weeks ago it was that song by MIA, you know the one that starts I fly like paper get high like planes etc. etc. Not interested in narrating the rest because it’s not The One, not anymore. This week,

The mangled guitar strings

Percussion

Two hard hits on the drum

Years, days, makes no difference to me –

Not even in this safe angelic space called Sonic Worlding could I possibly divulge how often I’ve listened to it. Over and over again

This place smells like –

My title as The Sane One, taken from me –

– piss and beer.

But, of course, you! You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, even if we can’t admit to each other, you might be able to agree, in the safety of your own subconscious? This phenomenon: that music isn’t for listening, music is more a yearning for disassociation.1 Just check your friend’s Spotify Wrapped.2 Or your lover’s. Or your own.

Repetitive Stimulation

I itch for it when I’m trying to focus or when I’ve had a shit day, or when I try to stop myself from texting abominable ex-lovers. I want a sound’s familiar arms wrapped around me to get unfamiliar with myself; gently nudging me out of my own head, allowing me to separate from the worst of myself. To divorce from the most tangled garbage of my thoughts – I need the comfort of sound I already know. Zone in now. First, mangled guitar strings. Feel the feelings that have already been named. Then. Percussion, two hard hits on a drum. Lyrics that have been heard before.

Notes that I can memorize. Words, imprinted.

Can you get me out?

Music can stimulate a pleasure that centers in our brain. And when I find that song that clicks

Piss

I want to press that tender spot again and again

Beer

I want to engage that part that activates the dopamine. For me, earworms aren’t a nuisance. Earworms are my musical g-spot.

Can you get me out?

The first sound of percussion, the guitar that twirls again and again.

Years, days –

The drums.

Makes no difference to me –

And then my phone shuffles to the next song, and my sweet escape ends, the thoughts get frazzled again, the flood of anxiety pushes through. Angrily. << rewind.

– Piss and beer

(Relief.)

Can you get me out?

1. The feeling of dissociation can be described as disconnecting from yourself and the world around you, possibly detaching from your body while feeling that the reality around you is not real.
2. Spotify Wrapped is a viral marketing campaign by Spotify that allows its users to view a compilation of data about their activity on the platform over the past year.

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Alicia Goveas is a writer born in Anishinaabe Algonquin territory. They mostly write sad and terrible fiction. Goveas came to Norient for an educational visit in June 2023.

Published on October 23, 2023

Last updated on June 19, 2024

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Perception

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Four ears for listening (photo: Stefano della Bella/Wikimedia).

Listening with Four Ears

Essay

by Marie Thompson

One day, when pregnant, our author listened to a song and began to cry unintentionally. In what ways, she asks herself in a new episode of the Sonic Worlding column, are the romanticization of music and pregnancy connected?

Content note: this piece discusses pregnancy and mentions pregnancy loss.

In April 2022, I found myself crying while walking into the city. I was in the second trimester of a pregnancy: an experience that was fraught with anxiety, difficult bodily transformations, gender policing, and hope. Listening to a song I had heard hundreds of times before – Aretha Franklin’s rendition of «I Say a Little Prayer» – triggered an unexpected outpouring of affect. I’m mindful that the figuration of a pregnant person crying for no reason is an unpleasant stereotype, underpinned by the devaluation of feminized displays of feeling. Nonetheless, during this time, music sounded – and felt – different. «I Say a Little Prayer» came closer and landed more intimately than before, causing tension in my chest and my eyes to prickle. Where I had previously been resistant to emoting through music, the ebb and swell of Franklin’s voice, intensified by the instrumentalists and backing singer, allowed me to let go of an ambiguous something.

It isn’t surprising that Franklin’s song sounded different to me, given that pregnancy can literally change your senses. Some experience a heightened sense of smell or taste, while others may develop hearing loss or tinnitus. It is not an overstatement, then, to say that pregnancy changes how the world feels and sounds, transforming our preferences and perceptions.

Although music writing has frequently referenced sounds’ purportedly womb-like qualities,1 there has been limited attention paid to pregnant listeners themselves. Yet, music has often been promoted as a tool of affective modulation during pregnancy. Drawing on common tropes about music’s soothing capacity and its status as a cheap cultural resource, pregnant people are told that music can relieve stress, or help them bond with their (future) child. It has even been suggested as a means of pain relief during labor. As a result, a significant subsection of the pregnancy consumer market consists of curated playlists, CDs, and music players.

Contradictory Sentiments

Both music and pregnancy have been subject to intense romanticization, sometimes concealing their proximity to negative feelings and ambivalent affects. In the case of the former, the oft-celebrated joy and pleasure of music is frequently found in articulations of heartbreak. As a technology of emotion, music draws out catharsis from suffering. Take «I Say a Little Prayer» written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and recorded by Dionne Warwick as well as Franklin during the time of the Vietnam War, it is a song of love and devotion. And yet, the euphoric chorus ends on a contrasting note of vulnerability: «to live without you / will only mean heartbreak for me». As popular music has so often made clear to the point of cliché, love carries with it the threat of loss.

Pregnancy, too, can involve complex and contradictory sentiments. Scans and check-ups are a reminder that the making of new life comes with the risk of loss. This might be the loss of a fetus or embryo, or it may involve the loss of the pregnant person: be it the loss of life that can occur due to infections, blood clots, or high blood pressure, or the loss of self that can occur when you are treated as secondary to the contents of your abdomen.

While I am resistant to trying to «explain away» this listening encounter, it’s likely my own feelings of vulnerability meant that I experienced Franklin’s song more intensely than before. Rather than simply soothing away stress or exerting a calming influence, «I Say a Little Prayer» amplified. In so doing, it transformed my anxiety and ambivalence, illuminating how the messy relations between musical listening, sensation, and bodily and biochemical states can result in an undoing of the familiar: a hearing anew.

1. Examples of this include Simon Reynold’s Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (2008), David Toop’s Sinister Resonance (2011), and R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World and Our Sonic Environment (1994).

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Marie Thompson is a writer and researcher, based in Nottingham, U.K. She is primarily interested in the affective and materialist dimensions of sound and music.

Published on November 21, 2023

Last updated on May 14, 2024

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Listening

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«Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling» ‒ Walter Benjamin (photo: pxfuel 2022).

Like Super Mario Bumping His Head on Obstacles

Essay

by Philipp Rhensius

A body walks through the city while listening to a DJ mix. The switching between sites is like switching between tracks is like switching between worlds. An essay poem inspired by a mix of the New York-based artist Zarina.

00:00:00
Exiting the house door. Walking westwards in parallel to the S-Bahn rails.
Birds like surf and car traffic like synthesizers.
I hope that you are the one / If not, you are the prototype / We’ll tiptoe to the sun / And do things I know you like.1
Feeling like being thrown into an opening sequence in a film. Hiding under the patterns of the public. The last rays of sun shine on the body like searchlights of the thief in the backyard at night. Bad metaphors are either a matter of taste or a lazy perception of reality.

00:06:27
Walking past two people sitting on the curbside preparing their daily dose before tiptoeing to the sun. Coming across a café. The guests are sitting on the pedestrian street watching the passers-by like their private reality TV.
Feeling silly. Broken into fragments. A thought follows a thought. Just like that. Isn’t it impossible to perceive the whole? Life like in the films of Robert Altman: short subjective presences, dialogues, and images arise randomly and overlap.

00:07:33
Passing by an improvised homeless shelter.
The street turns into hypertext. Feel turns into belief, belief turns into incidentals. Every manhole cover, leaf, branch, dewdrop, bird, bush, or piece of gum sticking to the asphalt refers to something else. Like rock or classical music, whose majority of creative patterns have become symbols and caricatures of their own: the copy of the copy of the…

00:10:48
Passing by a taxi stand where seven cars are lined up behind one another. A few drivers stand in a circle gesturing with their arms thrown over their heads, the smoke of their cigarettes like extensions of their fleeting thoughts. A breakbeat transforms the scene into a memory glitch.
Being in a club. A bassline sends out circling vibrations in all directions like a water runner on a puddle. A snare splits the air like thunder. Hi-hats circle the head like wasps around a glass of lemonade. A sound like an approaching train. A tabla, in triplet 16^thnotes, spirals its way out of the mixer.
Being torn between the now and the past. The body memory of a rave. Intensified frequencies let bodies talk by means of the movement that occurs between them. No space where people throw gun fingers in the air is ever empty.

00:31:04
Bump. Collision with a man. «Idiot!», he says, loud enough to hear but too quiet to cross the threshold of verbal violence.
Some bodies fancy themselves to be an island, an independent entity loosely floating around in a universal ocean. Preferring Glissant’s idea of archipelagos, a constellation of islands, aware of the fact that they are interdependent. Like dancing, being in public is a matter of space politics, and how they are driven by certain habits. They are often gender-specific. Thinking of a passage in McKenzie Wark’s new book Raving. «Straight cis men can’t dance without this self-consciousness. Can’t let the beat take them. Can’t dissociate out of their masculinity» (Wark 2023, 28).

00:32:28
Mumbling back: «You’re the idiot!», loud enough to hint a sense of mutual resonance, but too quiet to inflame a conflict. Two police officers who are checking someone’s passport, turn their heads. Smiling dumbly as to signalize they were not meant.
Being approached like that on the street is an «interpellation». An everyday instrument for reminding the individual of being a subject, i.e. «subjected». In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical, the poet Fred Moten describes this as the moment when a police officer on the street calls out to a person, «Hey you!». As soon as one turns around, one becomes a subject. It suddenly encounters a larger social order and is confronted with an outside.

00:40:31
Changing the street side to avoid eye contact with an ex-lover.
The nervous system streams reality without ad interruptions.

00:42:34
Heading towards the canal. A street sign floats around in the blackish fluid, which mirrors a broken image of the city as blurry lights reaching into the sky. Laughing people sit on the curbside.
Heartbeat in sync with the snare drum. Typing «Lidl» into the Maps search. The nearest one is 3.9 kilometers away. Neighborhoods like that. The breathing of people in cafés, the exhalation of restaurant ventilation systems, the neon light of the agencies, and if you want, some other urban contrasts. All the while listening to a drone or so. This is the shit. Complete dissolution when people are doing something mundane.

00:44:00
The reggaeton-like rhythms slow down the heartbeat, as the walking tempo has become slower. Stopping at the traffic lights as the engine of a sports car begins to howl like a nervous bull eager to hunt the red tissue.
Wait, or is the sound coming from the music? The merging of «real» and musical sound creates a tension like an impending thunderstorm. The clouds over Berlin are moving fast, as if they didn’t give a fuck. Outside and inside, fantasy and reality: blurred. A sonic worlding happens when everyday sound turns into music, and when music feeds back into everyday sounds. The ear, freed from the usual jump-cuts, is not interested in difference. It waits until composition occurs.

00:48:21
Standing in line for a double espresso, slightly overhearing an ongoing conversation about some TV show.
There is a kind of automated dramatization when music collides with dialogue. The evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres. The alienation effect of randomly juxtaposed sensations, LOL.

00:49:07
Constantly dodging people on the crowded sidewalk.
Being like Super Mario bumping its head on obstacles to raise the score, forced to act as the situations are produced on an assembly line. No time to overthink. Bad metaphors are the result of a lazy perception of reality.

01:04:34
Passing by islands of people sitting on the grass as the sun starts to hide behind a cloudy horizon. Letting go of the tension of the contested traffic zone.
Urban life like sonic hypertext. Every manhole cover, leaf, branch, bird, spit spot, bush, and chewing gum stamped into the street refers to something else. All interwoven yet immediately flattened by the three rhetorical sweeping attacks developed in liberal democracy in order to keep real difference at bay: metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy, there to bring the supposedly escaped unknown back home. Wanting to be something instead of just like something. A bass drum or a drone in a club music tune that is not related to a pre-existing musical or «natural» source.

01:32:59
Watch the moving feet to avoid stepping on broken glass.
Feeling like copied and pasted by an anonymous pointing finger. One second we are happily strolling around and the next, the moment is gone and one has always been the abyss in a universe of arcane patterns.

01:38:14
Approaching the park exit, sensing the change of temperature as the houses radiate the heat stored from the day.
Three oncoming men. At 21:19, the poorly lit path turns into a paranoid contact zone. A shootout between looks and affect. Automated matching of class characteristics, walking styles, and voice intonation. Wondering what this would be like as a woman or PoC. Between real threat and imagined danger lies only a thin membrane. Tension and release. Like jazz, foreplay, or a good dubstep.

01:43:41
Stepping on asphalt.
The streets appear swept empty. Becoming invisible, enjoying it. As a white male, you can flow through the world without hurdles like through the Gruen transfer2 of a shopping mall. This game changes completely for Black, trans, female, or PoC people, often disguised in microaggression. Claudia Rankine in Citizen: «In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised. Oh my God, I didn’t see you. You must be in a hurry, you offer. No, no, no, I really didn’t see you».

01:47:01
The mix is over, but still not back at home. Like in John Coltrane’s «Interstellar Space» or Jlin’s «Carbon 7». Music that refuses to return to the key tone. Alienated and loving it.

Tracklist of the mix of the New York-based artist Zarina (photo: @coloringlessons/Instagram).

1. Lyric excerpt of the song «Prototype» by Outkast.
2. The Gruen transfer is an effect named after the builder of the first shopping mall, Victor Gruen. It consists of a confusion of the senses among visitors to large shopping malls. Gruen transfer can be recognized by the following behaviors: absent gaze, slower walking speed, lowered resistance to manipulation.

References aka things thought with

Altman, Robert. Filmography.

CCRU. 2017. Writings 1997–2003. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Glissant, Édouard. 2006. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.

Jlin. 2017. «Carbon 7 (161)». Black Origami. Planet Mu.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf.

Wark, McKenzie. 2023. Raving. Durham: Duke University Press.

Coltrane, John. 1972. Interstellar Space. Impulse Records.

Zarina. 2023. Coloring Lessons Mix Series 053: Zarina. SoundCloud. (Link).

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Philipp Rhensius is an editor for Norient, writer, musician, sound artist, sociologist & musicologist, and curator from Berlin. His work investigates the connections between the micro- and macro-political and is driven by the idea that «feeling the chains» is the moment when emancipation begins. His music and sound art projects (Kl.ne, aphtc, Alienationst) merge sonic fiction with sardonic poetry and visceral sound. His texts are published in i.e. Taz, Spex, FAZ, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, WOZ and several book volumes. He runs the music label Arcane Patterns and hosts a monthly podcast on Noods Radio. Follow him on Instagram, his Website, or LinkedIn.

Published on August 08, 2023

Last updated on February 20, 2024

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Alienation

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