Portrait of Guy Baron (Photo: Robert Bartholot, Berlin 2021).

Post-Euphoria – A Practice-Based Music Research: Part 1

Short Essay

In a four-part series, Guy Baron reflects upon the making of his album Post-Euphoria. Utilizing practice-based research, he examines notions of nostalgia in relation to lost experiences and club music.

DAW-based strategies of electronic music production used to connote aspects of recollection and missing are at the heart of my practice-based research. Engaging in a range of electronic music-making practices, my research creatively responds to the concept of «post-euphoria» – conceived here to describe a subjectivity with which lost, yearned-for experiences relating to electronic dance music are recollected and reimagined. It presents an original body of musical work that expressively interprets post-euphoria as a musical aesthetic, using Ableton Live and incorporating electronic dance music-inspired motifs alongside elements of songwriting. The study thus explores ways in which nuanced and complex meanings relating to retrospection and reminiscing can be articulated musically, establishing a musical vocabulary that is concerned with the residual and the faded and with what remains once perceived blissful experiences subside.

Conducting the creative work, I developed music production strategies informed by discussions of production mediations (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016) and sonic metaphors (Demers 2010), whilst symbolically foregrounding DAW-induced production traits. This includes creating what I define as «production embodiments» to figuratively suggest aspects of recollection and transformation: from slowing-down and time-warping electronic dance music samples («22–122») and utilizing a sustained freeze-mode reverb («Epilogue») to connote an attempted prolonging of fleeting euphoric moments, to incorporating fragmented quoted vocals («Forget U»), grain delay («Reprise») and audio-to-MIDI conversions («Too Late», «Residue») to metaphorically suggest a fragmented and transformed memory of perceived euphoric experiences. Musical repetition, shortened compositional structures, elaborated outro sections, and volume fade-outs are further utilized to figuratively embody haunting and decaying euphoric experiences, in such a way that sheds light on the relationship between musical form and meaning.

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Unfulfilled Euphoria

In addition to using such production embodiments, I further employ characteristic elements of electronic dance music to examine how euphoric feelings associated with this type of music can be presented as mutated and missing. These elements, to which I refer as electronic dance music tropes, include intensifying build-up sections (Solberg 2014), which are presented throughout the body of work as stripped down and never-resolving – establishing a sense of unfulfilled euphoria by foregrounding the absence of key electronic dance music elements, such as a kick drum. In addition, I create reworks of my own musical recordings as an act of «self-remixing», reflecting intertextuality between different recordings and a revisiting of my own productions to musically portray the idea of transformed recollections.

Undertaking this research and developing the recorded body of work enabled me to examine how retrospective subjectivities relating to electronic dance music can be articulated through employing music production technology, to further the relatively sparse practice-based research in this field. In addition, and as a global pandemic made dancefloor euphoria seem like a distant memory, my concept of post-euphoria received a whole new layer of meaning to include reminiscing to a time and place in one’s life – and in our collective memory – that may never quite be what it once was. Enchanted by lost nights out and lingering on remnants of a faded euphoria, this is where my musical journey into the realm of post-euphoria begins.

List of References

Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Anne Danielsen. 2016. Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound. Cambridge: MIT.

Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Solberg, Ragnhild Torvanger. 2014. «Waiting for the Bass to Drop: Correlations Between Intense Emotional Experiences and Production Techniques in Build-up and Drop Sections of Electronic Dance Music». Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 6 (1): 61–82.

This article is the first of a four-part series on the practice-based music research project «Post-Euphoria» by Guy Baron aka Semi Precious.

Biography

Guy Baron holds a PhD in music production practice and serves as an associate lecturer at London South Bank University, conducting practice-based research in music production. He works as a music practitioner under the name Semi Precious, with his releases being endorsed by Electronic Sound Magazine, The Sunday Times and The Guardian for their conceptual songwriting approach. Baron’s previous works focused on sampling of easy listening music and included a Channel-4 audio-visual commission exploring aspects of queer club utopia. He currently co-runs the electronic music record label and artist collective, squareglass.

Published on October 14, 2021

Last updated on April 11, 2024

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René Magritte «On the Threshold of Liberty» (Yvette Wohn/Flickr, 2009) .

Listening at the Threshold

Column

by Carla J. Maier

What is real and what is imagined? In her text inspired by a Laurie Anderson lecture, our writer thinks of listening as a possibility to become a stranger to oneself.

I put on my headphones and press play. Laurie Anderson’s «Norton Lectures» are about to start, at 23:00 Berlin time. It’s dark outside, and only a tiny table lamp illuminates the room where I am sitting, on a couch, with a cup of tea which I will forget to drink, because I am getting lost in a state of listening and watching that lets me forget where I am.

«Where am I? What time is it?»

This is a recurring question that Laurie Anderson asks in her performance lecture. She sits in front of a green screen, on which the listener observes a variety of moving images: a car driving through the night with snowflakes constantly hitting the front screen, driving into nothingness, getting lost. This is a recurring theme in the worlds she creates in VR such as Chalkroom (2017), which was created in collaboration with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang.

Floating Consciousness

The noises, music, and above all, Anderson’s voice, are leading me in and out of stories, like a stream of consciousness. Real and speculative worlds overlap and are weaved into each other at a slow pace, moving forward without linearity, dissolving in so many open threads and in dead ends, and capturing me on a deep-felt level.

Listening with Laurie Anderson is listening at the threshold – between dreaming and being awake, between the spoken and the unspeakable, between remembering and forgetting. It is about a state of listening in which the imagined and the real blur.

Anderson’s Chalkroom, as well as her «Norton Lectures», create a world of simultaneous noises and visuals that never synchronize, and thus, what I experience as a listener never synchronizes with what is actually heard, or seen. Instead, I find myself lost, flying through space (or falling?), at the threshold of the known and the unknown. Her practice is to create (often eerie) wonder and surprise, about the things we remember, or the things in life that we tend to forget. Listening at the threshold means becoming a stranger to oneself, or of recognizing oneself as an other.

Listening with Laurie Anderson is entering a space where one does not usually allow oneself to go, moving off-track, moving at an awkward speed, thinking things that are not speakable.

«When someone asked me: who are you talking to in your songs? I replied: I am talking to the part of you that never speaks».

Words Come and Go

Fast forward: the next day, I am sitting alone in the car at the end of an impasse I haven’t encountered before, unsure of how I landed here. I stare out of the window, realizing that I was caught in a kind of daydream, which had already started the night before while listening to Anderson’s storytelling. I am still wrapped up in the sonorous feel of her voice and in my head I am still listening to chains of words, this time though not as words, but as rhythmic noise, merging with my own imagination. And the realization that «my» voice may be someone else’s voice – that voice is never simply owned.

Listening at the threshold means humble listening: memories, dreams, other people's words and stories are always treated by Anderson as fluid, affective assemblages. As part of her storytelling, they just pass through, and although they are framed – through sounds, video, effects, filters – they are never simply captured; she does not own them, she only temporarily becomes-with them, and lets them go. It resembles the way in which Anderson uses technology: to constantly shift modalities of sensation, and to challenge how we know through sound and vision.

When she modulates her voice in the famous song «Oh Superman!» (1981) to become robotic, or when, in her recent «Norton Lectures», her mouth becomes part of a moving cut-up collage featuring the head of John Cage, speaking his words. Using technology becomes yet another form of storytelling, and her shifting of technological parameters becomes an aesthetic practice of blurring the boundaries of human and non-human, reality and dream: «Daydreams are on the same plane as facts, as with the Edison phonograph», she says. In this in-between state new stories are created, and new perceptions become possible.

«Sonic Vignettes» is a Norient Special discussing sound: one fragment, one experience, recording, one viral video, stream, one monograph or encounter at a time – in all its depth, its historical and affective ramifications, with the finest expertise in Sound Studies. Initiated by Holger Schulze, Rolf Großmann, Carla J. Maier, and Malte Pelleter, published as a monthly column.