One of the most essential practitioners and theorists from this movement, who influenced me then and continues to influence me now though I don’t create anything one would call ‘dance music’, is in fact Robert Hood.
The principle of ‘movable parts’ – in fact I remember an entire mailing list devoted to this topic – comes from Hood, from his interviews, writings and how it is clearly manifested/performed in the music, in the sense that the music itself is a no less rigorous form of thought which develops and clarifies the principle.
Everything begins with the movability of these little boxes and how they plug into one another (i.e. triggering a synth from various 909 outs). Composition ceases to be merely additive and unfolds rather in this interaction, which itself has a movable, interchangeable form.
But the movable interaction is also something that moves. What transpires from the combinatorics of simple interacting subsystems is a polyvalence (not simply polytonality or polymeter) which ‘moves’ also in many other senses – in a technical sense, the shifting of loops and various interactions with respect to one another, but more broadly and simply the sense of being moved – physically, emotionally, and in every other sense of the world. Being moved by the movement moving within movability. Dance music is first and most fundamentally a music that moves.
Here’s one example of this technique at its best. again – not so much polymeter, more a general polyvalency of ever-shifting parts and textures:
What’s more, Hood’s ‘movable parts’ and the communities and discussions that formed around it had a key influence, or perhaps was the key influence on modern ‘dawless’ setups and thus in a very direct way – on much of what has brought this community together.
I would like to, and may at some point begin a more general topic on ‘M’-design, the ‘M’ standing for movable/modular/metabolic, and many other m-terms besides [also as a nod to M-plant: Hood’s label]
‘Metabolic’ suggests a particularly interesting connection, the 1960’s Japanese architectural and urban planning movement known as ‘Metabolism’. Especially work of Arata Isozaki “Invisible City”, and its relation to traditional Japanese ‘movable parts’ techniques for the transformation of living space: tatami, screens, and so on.
[survey article: https://placesjournal.org/article/liquid-cities/]
[Isozaki’s 'Invisible City’: https://www.scribd.com/doc/228856414/Invisible-City-by-Arata-Isozaki]
Why? First some broader social reasons and then a personal reason, both of which circulate back to Hood’s pioneering work and the world-transformational potential of dance music as a whole.
First: the immediate issues of the pandemic, the broader (and essentially framing) issue of climate collapse and the inability of cities to quickly reconfigure because they do not acknowledge their own fragility and impermanence is now a very pressing one (for instance, it should not take a month to put up a few plastic barriers and pieces of social distancing tape in a place of business — imagine making a more drastic kind of adjustment). The ‘new normal’ exposes, and continues to expose, a lack of agility, and a preference for a certainty we no longer own.
In the midst of this lack of agility, or perhaps because of it, is a more threatening alternative: total virtualization. Such an alternative has long been underway and has only been accelerated by this pandemic. But virtualization as it’s understood today is not at all the same thing as movable design, despite Isozaki’s use of the term (the “virtual city ruled by codes”), and despite the central role of cybernetics in each discourse.
Virtualization in its operable sense is that articulated by Kevin Kelly in the form of the “mirrorworld”. Which means not the bringing-forth of new, movable realities ‘ruled by codes’, but rather the endless replication, simulation, and extractive platformization of existing realities, ‘coded’ by these platforms as immediate (i.e. fixed, absolutely certain, universally accessible). Metabolism is not the death-mask of the universal reproducibility of the fixed. Metabolism functions so the city can live.
In fact the looming presence of ‘smart’ cities, surveillance capitalism and the VR/AR mirrorworld, are in fact constantly undermined by the metabolic city, for the latter can subvert these constant attempts to represent, simulate, and control a fixed reality and sell it back to us. Likewise, the zombified constancy of endless flows of disposable consumption can be disrupted by acknowledging the sense of movability in what we retain as fixed.
Instead of buying new things and discarding them the moment they no longer spark the joy of being that final, perfect thing — we simply repurpose what we own, as it moves and flows with us through all phases of our life and down the generations as well.
The invisible, virtual, codable city should not be a mirrorworld, but an unmirrorable one, inscrutable to the gaze of platformized total surveillance.
Now it’s true — the dimension of inscrutability of inaccessibility to commodification is often associated with the earth: fixed, tireless, and immovable. Everything from site-specificity to ‘the organic’ to appreciation for the grain of wood or the luster of metal, all are at some level unrepresentable and resistant to mirroring’s reflection.
Far less acknowledged is the movable, metabolic and therefore equally ‘organic’ dimension of sky – the ever-modulating appearance due to time of day and season, the fickle and shifting moods we find ourselves in and within which we become deeply moved as we encounter anything at all as meaningful.
The stone which has stood for thousands of years, impervious to the rise and fall of civilizations is at once different when it stands naked before the noontide sun in the height of summer, than when it appears moss-covered under mists of cloud and the soft grey light of early spring. Yet different as well when it is the only way one can orient oneself in the blindness of a snowstorm, perhaps saving one from certain death.
The very permanence of the stone is its impermanence; its refusal of attachment and thus our ability to encounter it constantly as if seeing it for the first time. The beauty of successive encounters is underpinned by the sadness that each will soon pass, the sadness of night that makes way for the next dawn, so that the morning of the world may come for us again.
So too our moods, which are but echoes of the sky. The sunny disposition, the dark cloud of depression, the raging torrent of anger, all move inside us and seem as if they will never leave us. But just as suddenly they pass, giving way to the next. But the things we use and enjoy appear to us only within a mood and its definite sense.
The movability of the sky is also in these things, provided that we let it in, that is allow for it in design. It inheres not only in our shifting moods and times of day/seasons in which we encounter these things, but in the different phases of our lives and histories, the different needs of one generation to the next.
Movable design, facilitated foremost by modular construction or ‘movable parts’, is the design strategy which. It designs impermanence into the thing, as its permanence – thus refusing the disposability of commodification.
Now personally – while I long ago abandoned dance music as a tradition that I couldn’t really make my own, and began the process of finding a form in which I could express something, a skyborn and yet also skyclad form in and through which I could be at home, I am still very indebted to it, for both are founded upon movement: dance music is in its essence music that moves – in all senses of that word.
For me this movement is indeed the movement of the sky, invoked by the non-additive interactions of movable parts and movable design, which explode centuries of Western ‘additive’ composition. It’s no accident that the shifting senses of rhythm which unfold from polyvalent structures are like so many interlocking cycles: days, months, years – the cycles of all that recurs, all that rises up, fades and returns. It is no accident that music and astrology are so deeply linked. And that the movability of the sky is experienced only authentically and originally from within the sky in such expressions as “the pouring-away world of no attachment” [J.A. Baker.]
In my own personal connection, ‘movable parts’ are not separate devices but sections of a modular system: sequencing, sound design, and ‘dub techniques’ (dynamic effect routing), but in its essence the approach is the same as ‘movable parts’ in dance music.
Movement unfolds in their interaction but also in the interchange between sessions: similar layered sounds will be interfaced with a sequencing idea that has an important part exchanged or reversed, although in the final result everything is discovered anew. The exchanges are as the flow of life: the joys in experiencing something for the first time; the disappointment that such joy cannot endure. In all this and more I continue to learn as well from the filmmaking techniques of Yasujirō Ozu, which would take an equally long post to discuss.
Anyway the point is I can only make such a connection with Ozu because I learned this all first from Robert Hood, and the techniques and examples of dance music in general. I think a lot of us with movable setups also did, even if we can’t say where we first got the idea.
And if there develops an openness to all forms of movable design in response to climate collapse, technological singularity [in the sense of total platformization or the rule of the 0%] and other crises that currently threaten us, such as the loss of any future horizon, then it will really be that dance music has transformed the world.
