The aim of this essay is to look deeper into the relationship between architecture and music, especially the techno music, and understand why the first one who physically builds impressive and magic spaces allowing to escape mentally is overstep by the other taking us mentally to fabulous and extraordinary universe almost physically palpable. Architecture is always tension "toward", exclusively ordered for the future. It is at this point that opposes techno music, using the technique, not for the future but for the moment, which is the time of the existence, as it is ‘ek-sistence', that is to say, out of oneself, in ecstasy.

 

          Without saying that techno music would be able by itself to bring forth new forms of singular or collective existence, but it establishes a sort of "laboratory of the present", reflecting what is happening to our world, and the profound changes and relations between the body and the machine, the fusion between the flesh and the metal, in a complex combination of mediate and immediate. This process of duality between the understandable and the incomprehensible in the perception of the body is an essential task of contemporary architecture, and it aims to highlight the complex relation of these two “landscape” professions, on the premises of examples like Iannis Xenakis, Kraftwerk or Jeff Mills, by interrogating new topographies, from the body to the environment surrounded, in order to explore a new technological otherness.

 

          There is a will, even more a need to be directly related to contemporary technology, with machines, to distort it and make it as an instrument of free artistic expression, to create “a soundtrack” in and out of the world, in a hybrid space, midway of the intimate and the collective. It is reinterpreted as an immersive experience, a process of escape the exterior world and the city into a spatial, auditive and sensorial experience, constantly redefining and compromising amongst the usual and the unusual, the functional and the irrational, the old and the new, the distinct and the unpredictable, the interior and the exterior. The musical envelope stems from a multi-sensory experience, where the user can model or question his close environment, in the form of reverie, evasion or concentration. It defines a new language of expression, an "in-between", blurring the boundaries between what exists on our doorstep and what we perceive to be otherworldly and uncertain, embracing the proliferation of the mist of fear, but also provides the opportunity to embody an unlimited territory where variations, turbulences, fantasies and fascinations can be expressed.

 

 

1. A performance by not performing: the status of the DJ

 

“The notion of present and future is the main reason why I started producing music, a sudden hyperconsciousness of the present and the ephemeral.” Kangding Ray

 

       Currently, the relations between the body and the machine are more and more explored, that the human will be subjected in a near future to a deep dislocation regarding his own redefinition. The artistic appropriation of contemporary technology is based at least not primarily on a better occasion to represent the world, but on an amazing opportunity to increase and extend it. We are no longer dealing with a copy of the real world or its representation, but to its extension, its increase, which would create new sensibilities and a new way of “being in the world” and “being in the body” and share it. Nowadays, we are in an urgent need to bare the skin, to open up the flesh, to travel through the deliria of the brain, exploring the potential of a postorganic body, which is the phenomenon of the hybridization of the body and technology. 

 

          On one hand, new technologies are a well-adapted medium for the work of artists, a tool helping for deciphering the grammar of world and as such a factor to freedom to decrypt codes, replay them and interlock them differently. And on the other hand, because this interpenetration of man and technology, it engages the existence in what is called "virtual reality" in this world that is not based anymore only on "being" but on the "possible". Therefore, as new technologies are able to give reality, effectivity to a new environment for our lives, we understand why so many artists are looking to take over it.

 

         There is talk of fetching his inner monster and to define a new topography of the body to explore a technological otherness. This other form provides the opportunity to embody an unlimited territory where fantasies and wildest performances have the right to exist. Music unites man and machine in a clever and quirky flow by tensioning strong human emotions. The more we learn about humans, the more we realize that they are like machines, at least in terms of genetics and biology; and conversely over the more our machines and computers become more complex, the more they become similar to humans or animals. Thus the image of techno, the artistic and existential practices that are presented in this changing world don’t remove the body, but simply move it and engage it to a new environment. This cultural, economical and geographical dynamism can be interpreted as a try, mixed of Idealism and reason, to appropriate a globalized space. Sometimes lost in the “Limbes”, rocked by a synthetic music, this generation of djs shapes its own image of the world, establishing his territory and his places of predilection. 

 

 

2. Repetition is a form of change: A structural music component

 

"The dynamism of machines, the "soul" of the machines, has always been part of our music. Trance is always due to repetition and everyone is looking for trance in life, through sex, emotion, fun, parties, etc. Therefore, the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance." Kraftwerk

 

         Techno music is nowadays a heterogeneous music, like a cannibalistic practice. It feeds itself with all types, which are pre-existent or contemporary, recycling them with a vertiginous speed. Its aesthetic is not nostalgic but is more in the idea to impose a kind of global and deterritorialized heritage. The principle of existence and creation of techno, kind of hybridization of identities and different musical sounds, is finding and is strengthening its position and condition of opportunities in the current development of new technologies, specifically in the process of deterritorialization. Techno music is like a trance music, or at least creates the favorable conditions for his input. It generates the sensation that rationalization and functionalization of human activity in modern societies have been gradually eliminated, and makes them disappear. Techno revives its natural and intimate connection with the trance and the depths of the human soul. Behind the sound and robotic, mechanical and repetitive image, Kraftwerk has brilliantly revised the canons of pop music. Their songs evoke an extraordinary economy of means of the universal emotions, but through the prism of post-industrial and computer civilization. The trip, the intimate relationship between man and domestic technology, modern means of communication, the fascination with the figure of the cyborg and the controller. A kind of technological romanticism, a pure "techno-soul" as the musicians of Detroit call it.

 

          Techno molds the shape as if in a sense, it was a desecrated figure. And in that sense, the sacred for the man would be the trance itself, the fainting shared of consciousness in the moment. This would make the transcendence an excuse for a limited return to pure immanescence which dissolves in the present this world of consciousness. There is no access to the moment, only in the suspension or fainting limited itself by the continuity of time based on and structured by the social and rational order. Techno music expands the time and space. There is this requirement of the shared present, as if beyond it and in it, it was all time, ours, which expressed this need no longer rely on the future, but rather, to leave somehow caught up in the lived or experienced moment. 

 

         One of the essential characteristic of techno music is based on the freedom it offers to its performers, its DJs. Indeed, they no longer only have to interpret the work, but also have the opportunity to fundamentally change the structure. The musical activity of the dj challenges the notion of artist as well as his productions or mixes, questionning the work of art in its nature of completed perfection and durability. Iannis Xenakis illustrated his way to compose Metastasis in 1954. He wrote the piece with complex mathematical calculations, linked to architecture. The piece was presented in the form of a graphic, the different instruments following the traced lines which indicated the sliding between the tone heights. He wished to obtain a complex sonor reality, closed to the chaotic natural phenomenons, and illustrating his rigorous architectural construction. 

 

 

3. A measure of possibilities of going beyond: The environment of new discoveries 

 

“This is a journey into sound. A journey, which along the way will bring you new colours, new dimensions, new values and a new experience.”

 

          We live at the age of the sound immersion. Immaterial by essence, music has the capacity to mold the places and inhabit the forms. It also has the ability to invade as the same time our intimacy as well as our public spaces. Sensual and evasive, it haunts all the nooks of the space, physical and virtual, in which we’re living as a transgressive parasite. Transgression is actually a crucial position for our time. Society is created by restriction and boundaries, but as our culture is progressively subject to uncertainty and fluidity we find it more and more problematic to determine where those boundaries are situated. It provides the opportunity to embody an unlimited territory where variations, turbulences, fantasies and fascinations can be expressed. It emphasizes the interrogation of boundaries in a measure of excess, a measure of possibilities of going beyond. 

 

        Going through spaces and environments that actively evade comfort, it removes from normalcy the habits, ennui and convenience. It first intrigues, then simultaneously repulses and attracts. The curtain of routine and normality around us is pulled away to confront us with a very different world than we imagined, out of our comfort zone. It is not pretending to be safe, nor comfortable nor pleasing. When the limits are transgressed, it offers abstract spaces which have to do with the essence of existence hidden from us in normal situations. It creates new meanings, melding people and their environment, society and nature, humans and non-humans. The body is not settled as a stagnant element, but as a maturing process going beyond the norm. This alternative world shows in-between possibilities, where music can suggest, subtly or brutally, slowly or quickly, a state of liminality, an attitude of interferences with an infinity of variations, layering, dissolution, blurring, and ambiguity. The space between spaces reveals a distinctive force, a "thirdspace" in-between, marking the first awareness of a new sensation or occurrence. 

 

         Architecture is a confusion between interior and exterior, the construction of an outer space (external to the body) using the forms and principles of inner space (within the body). The intricacy and flexibility transported by technology opens the way to overcoming the concept of the ground as a tray, to discover the multiple layers, folds and density of the soil, a morphological richness that conveys new lymph to the life of the architectural forms. In the same way, surrounding in an immersive zone, techno music enables the subject to escape from the alienation of any context, and can concentrate on his new condition, and also break the barriers with the political or social control. In a society guided by the determination for erasing everything perceived as undesirable, we are guided to cross heterotopic spaces.