As soon as I put the disc in and pressed play, as soon as I heard Delueze's thinly recorded voice intoning, as soon as the music washed over me and through, as soon as I immersed myself in these memorial goings-on, I was transported both forward and back. It is an intriguing space, and not only so in the sense of the Janus-like, retro-futuristic chic-fest currently on-going. Rather than attempt a sort of pomo-powwow, the musicians and groups assembled here on this "thin raft" are constructing imaginary pyramids in honor of Deleuze's escape into the elsewhere. I would like to think that some of the imaginary spaces and places conjured here spark contact with Deleuze's own reveries. I would like to think that he, too, would have found something here intriguing in this collection of various electronic musics, many (most?) of which fall under the rubric of the world's newest music, ambient. Just as when, in his interview with Claire Parnet, Delueze admitted that he greatly admired Edith Piaf's ability to sing off-key in a way that made it right, so too he might have appreciated the imbalance of these often odd compositions. Musical and non-musical systems and elements are variously assembled to produce a constant threat of collapse--into noise, into background, into something not-music--that nevertheless ultimately collapse the category of music itself, extending its reach to include these new limit-pieces.

Back in the heady days of the early eighties, rock/pop music and theory were just then coming together as a single blip on the collective consciousness of what has now become known, rather disgruntedly, as Generation X. During the mid-seventies Brian Eno (One Brain!) had taken previously existing concepts and distilled them into a new kind of music he called "discreet" at first, then later "ambient." This name has stuck, and the music he and other like-minded pioneers created has now long since evolved and hybridized. But the theory connection remained as well. Eno wrote several short little essays explaining his ambient pieces (the one included with On Land is the best) and their connection to systems, psychoacoustics, landscapes, and whatever else was currently clouding his cosmic Cognitiveness. Concurrently with the growing influence of Eno, poststructuralist and postmodern theory began filtering down into the minds of various musicians. Green Gartside of Scritti Politi name-dropped Jacques Derrida and employed deconstructive wordplay as lyrics, Gang of Four set their Birmingham-School-flavored university Marxism to propulsive funkpunk, punk's connections to the Situationist International became common knowledge, and industrial music began to rear its ugly machinic head. Additionally, theorists like Fredric Jameson began to apply the postmodern label to punk and new wave bands like Gang of Four, Talking Heads (who were working with Eno), and The Clash. Jean Baudrillard was picked up in the late eighties to provide the theoryscape for the delicious-downer rush of cyberpunk, and after that even the Kroker's felt obligated to try to produce an industrial CD (Spasm) with a heavy theory inflection (and that it is so anemic says much about which component of this collaboration brings more to the studio).

The death of Gilles Deleuze in 1995 has sparked several compilations of music: Folds and Rhizomes, Double Articulation, and the one I am writing about here, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze. The music on this double-CD set is heavily indebted to ambient, trip-hop, industrial, and no-wave, but all the bands and all the tracks make attempts to be elsewhere--that is, to exist within a different and differing continuum that would be extended to encompass each listener as well, conjugating messily over styles, spaces, and categories. In his essay from On Land, Eno wrote that music created in studio (as opposed to something that would be performed) can create its own "psychoacoustic space." From there Eno then moved to creating new musical landscapes that declined to recreate recognizeable places. Instead, by means of incorporating actual landscapes (mikes recording the sounds at a certain place) and adding other instrumentation and distortion, Eno dissolved the distance between real and imaginary, actual and virtual, even foreground and background. In place of these established frameworks for pre-hearing, pre-situating the music, Eno moved the aural scope outwards, layering dynamics to create a non-hierarchical, de-realizing soundscape. Traditional melody, of course, was completely absent, and for which Eno was much criticized at first. But these new sounds demanded new ways of listening; they constituted a line of flight from established music protocols. And so too does the music on In Memoriam.

Included with the CD is a booklet containing several short essays, one from a musician, one by Deleuze, and one in German by Catherine Clement and Bob Wilson. The tight relation between music and theory is made explicit in these texts, and serves to further dissolve the boundaries sundering music and the written word. Poetry, of course, has always functioned as an example of such blurring, but Deleuze has always made, to an unusual degree, that blurring functional: "there is no desire but assembling" as Deleuze and Guattari say in "Nomadology." Or, to paraphrase a passage from A Thousand Plateaus, "the theory does not define the work; just the opposite . . . the theory pressupposes the work" (397). But, as they say, this presentation is still too simplified. Achim Wollscheid's essay, which bears the same title as the musical piece he contributes--"Happy Deterritorializations"--seeks to transform a category for periodizing (the musical "aura" of an age, determined in part by that age's technology) into music itself. That is, "the auratic sound, now storable and calculable, can be handled as a matter to musical transformation" (Wollscheid). The theory creates the music, and the music creates the theory: both exist doubly in a state of mutual becoming-............becoming-bzzzquzzththththtwwwwwccksstttllllmmpp. Becoming-other, becoming uncategorizable. The goal here, and throughout the CD, is to create a kind of music for which the very criteria to evaluate, judge, even hear it as music have been left behind at the border.

They used to call this head music. Such was Robert Christgau's evaluation of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell's otherworldly Fourth World Vol.1: Possible Musics. The music was possible in a twofold sense: that it might not, ultimately, be music in the same sense we are accustomed to thinking of music; and that it was a music of possibility, carrying one into an uncertain open, equally full of joy, pleasure, and dread. Of course, now this music readily available at Best Buy, so the former sense exists pretty much only as a formal category. In Memoriam can be considered not only a music of mourning that works for Deleuze, but for all those possible musics that are recuperated as musical capital. It extends through its works the possiblity again of not having heard, of a music that is fresh. In his interview with Claire Parnet, Deleuze states that the question he asks of popular music (and philosophy, painting, art, and sports) is what does it bring him that is fresh? In Memoriam understands "fresh" as an aesthetic, seeking not only new musics, but new ways for music to be heard as music.

There are no songs here. And, if a songlike passage appears, it is as a sampled or layered component of a larger assemblage. If it is recognizeable, it is only so as part of a becoming-other-than-itself.

There are no melodies here. And, if you do hear one, it is both more and less than itself, coupled to its own other-space, already on the move.

But there are beats here! Some are funky, some just click; some tap and thump haphazardly, others chime. Several annoy. A few groove. But even the beats are scattered about, often coming and going in the same track.

And sometimes there are no beats. Just rich swathes of sound combined with other elements, sounds of the earth, technology, or something distorted and baffling.

Yet each track on the CD seeks to offer evidence that composition is the sole definition of art (see What is Philosophy). If traditional music is the sketching out of dynamics across tonal scales, composing their arrangement across established practice, then these musics are about composing the arrangement of traditional music with unrecognizeable, even non-musical sounds. The codes and forms by means of which we intuit sound as music are stretched, challenged, shattered. Welcome to the Deterritorial-dome; nothing is real, but it's nothing to get hung about . . .

The CD opens with Deleuze speaking, but soon his voice is intermeshed with sound effects such that the voice stops signifying linguistically and becomes simply another component of the unfolding music-scape. The voice becomes the mechanism that draws one into the ambience of sound itself, dissolving foregrounds and backgrounds so that all elements, the louder and the softer, unite. These terraced dynamics do not seek dominance in the mix. The third track on disc one, "On the Edge of a Grain of Sand," utilizes louder yet still gentle, s(m)oothing chord drones to set off the faintest chimes and bells that seem to call imaginary ships in the dark of a far harbor. But it is the loudness of one dynamic that generates the power of the fainter.

"What I see is thinking; what I hear is thinking, too," a synthesized voice intones at the beginning of Atom Heart's "Abstract Miniatures in Memoriam Gilles Deleuze." We hear tinkling keyboard, crackling sound and (s)wooshes, seemingly at random, ending suddenly on the phrase "obsession of thoughts" that leads into a rich ambient chillscape. It is the attempt to defy the expectations, both of the listener and the (seeming) internal logic of the music itself. "Heller" uses a gentle, spiralling, unwinding set of sounds to move us into former Throbbing Gristle members Chris and Cosey's "Intro-Spektiv" as a means to set the inward journey in motion. Several beat-oriented tracks follow, using syncopation and deep bass grooves to recreate ambience in noise. Blue Byte refines that aesthetic on "Can't be Still." Heavily distorted, quick and brash, this slightly frantic piece uses oversaturation to transform familiar jazz lines into a thick soup; even to listen to it requires a reorientation of the ear. One has to surrender to the overstimulation and dissonance, to let it wash over the demands of ear, to find its center of peace amid the maelstrom.

Mouse on Mars' "1001" abandons instruments in favor of the found-object approach utilized so effectively by early industrial bands. In a very quiet track, we hear small objects dropped, gentle taps, fills and keyboard sprinkles. Similarly, Oval's "You are Here 0.0B" and Trans Am's "Starjammer" assemble traditional music elements, such as bass, with background noise, synthesizer doodles, rustling sounds, and other touches. Each element requires the other to complete it, even presupposes their existence; the delicate spareness courts dissolution. But dissolution can also be noisy. Drawing on a similar aesthetic to Blue Byte, Bleed's "Patent" utilizes accelerating and decelerating sheets of chiming/tinkling dissonance to combine the sense of a soothing wind with the unease of pins underfoot. Beequeen uses complex terraced dynamics to create "Layered Layers," where folds of music move as one and many into and out of the weave.

As the final track on disc two, "Layered Layers" provides an appropriate metaphor for encapsulating In Memoriam. Stylistically, all the artists draw on different backgrounds, influences, and interests in creating their music, despite the particularly heavy influences of electronica and ambient. Perhaps we can see and hear the allusions to and influences of these other music systems less as categories providing footholds than as folds in a larger music that remains yet unheard. This is no mysticism; rather, it is an attempt at understanding what is thinking in the "infinite of sound" that would be, if nothing else, composting--the turning of waste into nourishment. Is not the exploding light bulb on the cover of In Memoriam redolent of dada, of the avant garde, of Bataille's black sun? Found art and Bataille's solar anus draw on a similar aesthetic of finding energy in waste, waste in energy. The solar anus, black hole sun, won't you come . . . in these fertile gardens of sound the libidinal is folded with/in cyclical, seasonal oppositions.