Silence, Music and Politics

"Run away my friend, into your solitude! I saw you being deaf by the noise of big people and being stung by small people. Forests and corals know very well how to be silent with you. Be thou like a tree again, calmly wholeheartedly stretching out into the sea. Where solitude stops, the market starts, and the big actors start to boast and the crowds of poisonous flies scream."

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

John Cage, in 1952, carried out a project related to his penchant for silence. Starting from his skepticism about what is called 'silence', he conducted his observations visiting places he hoped to find 'the absence of sound', and the results were truly unexpected; Cage did not find what he called 'total silence'. Wherever it is "the absence of sound is impossible" he said when he was in an anechoic room at Harvard University, a room that could make someone hear any sound produced in the room even his own blood circulation and heart rate.

Then the observation boils down to the composition and performance that he gave the title 4 '33? the controversial one, where he just sat quietly in front of a piano and did nothing but raise and lower the piano lid, producing unintentional noises present. No more. For exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the performance was over and that's it. In front of the hundreds who came at the time of his appearance, of course Cage was not joking, looking for sensations, or just looking for insanity. On the contrary, Cage was sane in continuing his avantguard project in questioning the dichotomy between sound and silence. He argued that the dichotomy had never existed, according to him, "silence" as the absence of sound was never present in our midst. What is there is the desire of someone to hear something, including in it also means trying to pay attention to something he wants to listen to. He then defines 'silence' as merely the absence of voices that will intentionally be done or expected to exist, distractions in such a way that it can be interpreted that "silence is only an attempt to end attention" so that "Silence is merely a change of thought", and sound still there. Sounds in silence are voices that do not want or are not meant for us to be heard.

The source of Cage's idea of ​​making 4 '33 "actually came from his colleague Robert Rauschenberg who made an exhibition of a series of paintings that at first glance seemed empty, only mere white canvas. But the Rauschenberg paintings are not empty, only he painted the canvas with white paint. He is talking about the perception of emptiness that actually never existed. Blank, silent, silent, zero point, neutral, impartial, all are just perceptions. "If there is someone who positions himself in a vacuum and neutrality, it is only his mental perception that tries to put himself outside the binary points which he perceives to exist too."

An attempt to question this neutrality reminds us of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (hereafter I call Godspeed only). Scary and beautiful, Godspeed, who we know, writes instrumental music that depicts the post-apocalyptic world, which is sometimes too quiet and too noisy to be played on radio with a duration of more than 20 minutes. They indeed intentionally include silence in their epic compositions, sometimes for 2-3 minutes, sometimes consuming a third of the composition. The founder and motorist behind Godspeed and guitarist Efrim Menuck in one of his interviews (which they rarely do) spoke of silence, as nihilism, but not as a position of impartiality and lack of will to position themselves in the world.

"The silence in our composition is a pause of reflection. To feel and appreciate sound. The voices we built from zero, after we made silence, brought down the world in a few minutes. "With answers to arguments more like Proudhon than Cage, it's no wonder Godspeed avoided literal texts and made their music without lyrics. "Language does not adequately represent our ideas, language imprisons them." Of course for us, who are accustomed to 'messaging' music and trapped in political / non-political binary music, music groups like Godspeed will look so paradoxical. They call for calls for world change that lose hope, but on the other hand they don't talk to us like most other music groups - political '

Whatever it is, what is certain is that with all their efforts to begin to demystify music (it also means silence and noise), musicians (artists and audiences), the music industry to their product details such as song titles showing the date Ariel Sharon provoked the invasion of Palestine and the cover that was more like the conspiracy map of the music industry with the military industry, Efrim and Godspeed did not at all represent a neutral position. The absence of text for them does not mean being in a vacuum, the vacuum of objectivity.

On the contrary, from Cage and Godspeed we can reflect on a subjective position in the midst of the objective upheaval of the masses. Be reminded of the forms of attendance, engagement efforts, joining other presence in the world without having to wear uniforms and shouting in the middle of the market and campaigning for the political elite. Godspeed made a difference in the meaning of 'avoiding audience' and 'doing / creating something'. They are more akin to the story of Zarathusta on Nietzsche's sheet that invites us to solitude, not silence. Inviting out of herd mentality and gang conformity in various forms, from massification in the name of the market to uniformity in the name of politics, to then find solitude in matters of creation. Loneliness is not an attempt to isolate oneself from the world of contact with 'not us'. But just the opposite, in the Nietzsche metaphor, becomes the intimate mute part of the 'forest and coral', like a tree branch that quietly wholeheartedly reaches itself into the sea. Here we see Godspeed trying to approach the world not to master, like the power and politics of candidates

Apart from all the post-rock hype and the avant-garde nature of being exploited by the media entertainment industry today, we can represent Godspeed as the representative of the end-time voices, as their music. Just as a sound that cannot be absent in silence, we are invited to look back at other alternatives beyond binary positions, perhaps one of them, composing a composition of our version of songs in the midst of mass and frenzied apathy in front of the ballot box. Building a new generation that is too tired of apathy, but also too fed up with voice box democracy, because neutrality never exists and empty silence is only a shift in perception.