On-Stage Banter, Granular Sense, Sounding Limits
This first week in June, we are pleased to recommend a consideration of off-hand side commentary, dust, and the work and ideas of Pascale Criton.
Recommendation: Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Elvis’ album Having Fun with Elvis On Stage consists entirely of on-stage banter. This intrigued me so I listened for 30 seconds and got the gist. When I was a kid I liked to say “Thank you, thank you very much” in Elvis voice to make my mom laugh. This was a meme to me as a child, for whatever reason. I also liked to do the Rock’s eyebrow thing. Different eras of media artifacts engender different performative forms of memetic circulation.
Seeing Terminator 2 at IFC this past weekend, I sat next to a dad who was excited to share the film with his teenage son. You could tell he had good memories of watching it when he was younger. He pointed out details and explained things, using the film to say things that are hard to say about who he was and the kinds of things he felt.
An explosion occurred onscreen – the film has amazing sound design, reminding me of how “deconstructed club” (not a real genre, never was one, one day I’ll write a post about this) repurposed foley and synthesis idioms from action movies and combat video games. After the bomb exploded, the dad said to the screen, and to his son, and I guess to me too, because I was sitting right there, “I love that sound.” In another scene, someone was eating what looked like a hamburger and he said, “Hamburger.” Later, in sync with Arnold, he said “Hasta la vista, baby.”
In the scene where the Terminator first learns the phrase, protagonist John Connor teaches it several SoCal expressions, encouraging it to combine them in order to speak more naturally. The T-800 proceeds to generate speech mirroring the prompt, combining newly learned patterns, picking up style, grammar, and tone. We are impressed by his ability to string terms together convincingly and quickly. (Neural networks are mentioned by name in the script, an interesting historical periodization.) For both the dad in the theater and the Terminator, “Hasta la vista, baby” is an enunciation of someone else’s speech, using language that is not one’s own, the function of an immanent structure always at a distance. Quite challenging to edit unless a particular vantage point is reached.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Dust, Iannis Xenakis – “Concret PH”
I am writing about dust this week: its qualities and granularity. The street cleaner truck drives along a different axis around my house each day of the week and (as far as I understand) rotates the composite small particles of pollen, dirt, and broken bits of dried trash into the air. I believe it settles in a slightly less concentrated form on the same street, gradually compressed back into its guttural form with each passing car, awaiting the excitations of the following Thursday.
There is a certain consistency of the grain’s collection in this system. New pollen fall from the flowers of trees, dirt from tire tracks from far corners of the neighborhood and scattered fulfillment centers.
The pollen is generative, the broken composite of many dirts from many places is, and appears, as a dirty crust on the ground. Dirt enters the house, too. And many of us take off our shoes in recognition of this possibility. The effort is in vain. We can only manage the grain with respect and submission. I have started to leave my shoes on in the house, and in particular, accept dirt from my own back yard to rest on the floor. I sweep, but not obsessively.
This week, I recommend an early electronic piece by Iannis Xenakis, “Concret PH.” Broken, stretched, processed recordings of burning charcoal. The composite breaking down into dust.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Pascale Criton - Circle Process, Chaoscaccia, Bothways
This week, I’m feeling a bit shocked by the cadence of writing weekly since the beginning of October, 2025. We’ve skipped one week at Christmas. Otherwise, this weekly pace has come into focus as fundamental to this project—to feel the weather of the week, to temporalize a storm of musical experience into moments of reflection in writing. Still, I’ve been having experiences recently where language is failing me. I need new words to brace the complex gestalt and texture of music’s situation. Best I can do is reach toward hyphenating or twisting words together to evoke intellectual, emotional, theoretical characters of sound: blue crystal fire, angel-agony, nightride ravedeath, american-oxygen.
Thinking along these lines brought me back to meeting, hosting, and conversing with French microtonal composer Pascale Criton between 2019 and 2023. I saw her work presented at an experimental music festival in Stavanger, Norway in 2019; and, we struck up a dialogue. We later premiered her work for the first time in the U.S. in 2023, at the Brooklyn Public Library. Since the 1980s, Criton has explored microtunings as a tactical opening for shifting players’ interaction with standard instruments. Plenty of composers have done this, but I appreciate the simultaneous pragmatism and theoretical intensity that she commits to this process. Specifically, she employs a scordatura technique of tuning all strings within 1/16 of a tone of each other—exaggerating both a similarity, repetition, and difference in their sounding. She calls this a “corporal script,” a boundary and opening for how a musician might interact with their instrument—the tones sounding both a bit similar and a bit off. This simple tuning process forces an opening into the perception of form and the role of interpretation, emphasizing gestures and novel creativity, to her a “continuous sound.” In her compositions, specifically Circle Process, Chaoscaccia, and Bothways (performed by Italian violist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker), time and motion are no longer defined by pitches and metrical systems but are “embodied as diagrams and moods.”
Criton also served as the music advisor of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, consulting with him regularly to discuss sound and music. That was also clearly a draw for me into her work. Criton’s work focuses on the sound continuum, informed by these experiences as well as studies with microtonal pioneer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, spectralist Gérard Grisey, contemporary music composer Jean-Etienne Marie, and training in electroacoustic and musical computing. She also published the text la pensée-musique (thought-music) in 2015, focusing on musical extensions of Deleuze-Guattarian concepts—refrain, rhizome, assemblages, machines—to name but a few. The text which remains untranslated in English.
Throughout listening to Criton’s music, I was struck by how her work and tuning method basically restructured my experiences with American improvisational practices, reconstituting the act of improvising (in an extremely French, theoretical way) from the ground up. It was like rehearing and reframing the countless improvised music performances I had seen up until that point: a totally different view of that language, those idioms, which I had come to understand.
Her work, and so much of the thought of Deleuze, always brings up the boundaries of language, and the pull to develop new concepts. From Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, or the Wasp & Orchid, concepts aren’t just general ideas, categories, or representations of something that already exists. A concept is something created. Like music. Or, like language too—Anemoia, derived from the Ancient Greek words ánemos (wind) and nóos (mind), a neologism describing the feeling of nostalgia for a time or a place that you have never actually experienced or known.
—Nick James Scavo