'On Manifestation FM' / Matthew Foreman
Mix series Manifestation FM finds reprieve in sounds of elsewhere by asking DJ’s and producers to consider the symbiotic relationship between sound and image.
Mix by Giulia (@_goodjuju______)
In the beginning of quarantine, I lived in a house with an assortment of rooms with no walls. My bedroom looked down over a railing onto the dining table, which itself looked down onto the ground floor where my housemates slept. It was an acoustic tunnel. It was all one room, wherethrough sound bounced and carried even the most clandestine of whispers. It is no surprise that, after months of being stuck in quarantine, these open yet intimate conditions were intensified.
While I have since moved to a new house, the sensory awareness that I developed in my former lodgings stays with me. I have become conscious of sound with a crackling background radiation of anxiety more than I would like. I was aware of the spot on the stairs into my room which creaked because I knew it could be heard as though one were right underneath it anywhere in the house. I am sensitive to the half-life that the sound of my voice possesses as it travels; how effectively it decays over distance and how I ought to control it in an environment of little to no privacy. It is in this sensitivity to sound and this restlessness, and indeed in subsequent lockdowns, that I found myself listening to more music. And it was not long before I was listening to Manifestation.
Manifestation is a mix series which provides a platform for emerging artists, including left field electronic music from some of the sharpest DJs, to ‘explore sight and sound’. Evocative images are placed alongside the music for the listener to consider, images through which the curation of the music itself was informed. Each DJ in question must view the art and move on whatever whim it inspires in them. I feel as though I have heard this kind of thing before, but I genuinely feel as though in the past, where I have seen it, it has been a gimmick. A tantalising, simple premise that allows friends and practitioners to work together in proximity, but like children distracting each other at the same table in class, I have felt it has detracted from the work in a way that leaves it without consistency or intention. A menagerie of individually inspired art, sure, but work that I feel betrays the valuing more of collaboration than what collaboration might yield for the work.
I have participated in art projects myself in which this was the truth, where the project ends up being a collaboration attempt between artists with more noise than signal. Despite these pre-existing misgivings, Manifestation was scratching an itch. And I found myself asking why?
What was Manifestation doing that those other attempts at multi-sensory art did not?
Mix by Kitty Whip (@waterporrfin.jacet)
To answer this question is to answer how the art engages the senses, which implies looking at what sight and sound actually mean.
This is an old philosophical problem. A problem of the indeterminacy of the senses through which we experience the world, where we must grapple with the ways in which we procedurally re-construct this place. I believe that this is an exercise in imagination. Where for all intents and purposes, after conceding this indeterminacy, it is no logical leap to conclude that perception and imagination, if not indistinguishable from one another – are cousins. The uncanniness, in the act of imagining, where I can see without seeing. I can taste without tasting, and indeed, hear without hearing. This may read as obvious, but I believe it is important.
There is, after all, a kind of numinous quality to the act of imagining other places; a sort of praxis and set of poetic postures which can yield incredible art. It strikes me that this is a kind Widely held belief. It certainly is not a new idea, the notion that inherent in imagination is a kind of sensing without sense. It is why the existence of science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and alt-history exist in the first place in media other than music. Why they have captured audiences since their inceptions and stubbornly defied high-art value judgements and even moral panic. Flourished in their relegation to the pulps or later fought against the satanic panic of the 80s. Even why increasingly they have moved away from subversive and countercultural, and into commercial ubiquity.
The postmodern high-tech-low-life depictions of Cyberpunk now in the hands of multi-billion-dollar production companies. The alien landscapes of Afro-Futurist techno which rebelliously exited the factory and entered watery exoplanets and alien worlds now commonly a pastime of the wealthy middle-class on a lucrative festival circuit. The discourse around the merits of capitol-W-‘World Building’ in art and why one might do such a thing continue all the time.
But what sticks out to me as a wonderful turn of phrase, is something once said by Fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss. Rothfuss decries the notion that fantasy genre fiction, for example, is ‘escapist’ - this is because such a term, to him, denotes a permanence – an exile of sorts, born out of fleeing from the world for greener pastures. To Rothfuss, Fantasy is more equivalent to reprieve. An act of mental rest in a hostile and often dark world. Not only this, but that to do such a thing is not an indictment of a genre that is weak and afraid to deal with difficult knowledge itself. The act of rest and reprieve in storytelling (and story consumption) is instead actually a return to the transgressive posture of World Building, where the cruelties of the organisation of everyday life can be understood in a data package that is, through a transformation of abjection, not our own.
Perhaps triumphed over. Perhaps not. Perhaps even, it could be construed as an art of a kind of wildcat strike. Art that says no, we will not go on - we will rest, and imagining an elsewhere is the same as imagining what we could dare to change here.
But I like this notion of world building as rest, and I like too, the notion of rest as rebellion. So long as it coincides with a participation in the world and community of and for others - that which might tire one in the first place. It is here that I believe the answer to what Manifestation is doing can be found. What itch it is exactly, that is being scratched.
Manifestation attacks the space of the ‘mix-series’ with this posture of World Building and they do it with the senses. This might sound like an arbitrary statement, as listening to music assumes the sense of hearing. But in Manifestation, DJs freely respond to the artworks created by their visual artists – all to cultivate a cumulative effect which I had found myself gravitating to.
In the mix I first heard by Feline Fine, the opening track is a cinematic pulsatile synth drone that would be right at home in a Cerebral 70s Tarkovsky film. It goes on and on, modulating into foreboding eldritch portents, all the while I find myself compelled to listen to it while staring into the accompanying art: mustard inky swirls.
What are these images of?
Sulphurous pits maybe, telling of a primordial world?
An ellipsis translucent against deep blues and blacks, streaked with flashes, veins of brighter blue. To me, by association, some bioluminescent Jelly. Clusters of stubby eggshell cylinders like a colony of bleached Organ Pipe Coral. You get the point. The longer I sit with the work, the more a world is established. It all deploys a kind of aesthetic through-line, positioning one in what could be a Strugatsky Brothers or Stanislaw Lem adaptation. And I do not think that this is a gimmick. I think that it is an inevitability, and one that should be seen for what it is. I think what Manifestation is doing differently is that its formula is simple. The visual art knows what it is and has no apprehensions or fears around value judgements around genre. It embraces them and looks instead to how going to other places, imagined places - can be virtuous and useful. The DJs see them, and they apply their craft of sound. Together they create a space that is worth going to.
Mix by Feline Fine (@felinefine_)
Why shouldn’t we go there - to those places imagined?
Spaces spurred into creation in our minds that offer that opportunity to rebel in the way that I think Rothfuss’ statement implies.
Why couldn’t something like the Mix Series be a payload for genre-fiction-adjacent art and World Building, standing alongside other medium that adopts the same tradition?
The entire Manifestation project clearly has a consistent Sci-fi bent. And I think that, when I found myself so conscious of the commons that was the soundscape of that house, it was the act of putting on my headphones and disappearing that felt right.
Mix by Tangerine (@clementine.____)
In that ennui of the world that Rothfuss describes, I find myself investing in the things which made me happy as a child, which instilled me with a wonder for the world. Those things that now serve, repurposed, as a kind of antidote that allays and staves off the morbidities of the quarantine experience, or whatever else. Reading and writing magical places or glittering nebulae of outer space, or visual art in the service of creating such genre fiction. A kind of resting in the make-believe of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The act of world building and the imaginative capacities of conceiving of other places. I think this is what Manifestation is doing with their mix series, their briefs to artists, and their strange, alien visual accompaniments.
I think I quite like going through undersea caves and looking at weird jellies. Strolling past sulphur pools. Amidst Basalt Collumni the mind can wander, and through canyons and ravines of alien Palagonite we can amble, should we only care to listen.
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Article by Matthew Foreman
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