Danger Music as a psychological phenomenon

When Moncaleano described a changed experience of time in connection with flow, he was pointing out that “things might happen faster or slower”. If I compare this with my own experiences during concerts, I recall from Rockefeller how the experience of the moment was taken out of the boundaries of “time” – my daily temporal understanding. The moments were not defined by their length (as would, for example, a second in normal circumstances), but in terms of the depth of everything a moment could contain by way of sensory impressions – an extra and bodily dimension to the experience of time. 

Moncaleano showed how the reptilian brain flares up with unprocessed sensory information in a state of flow – an unfiltered sensory state during which one takes in extraordinary quantities of information, which suppresses an overriding reasoning, a direction of action, or association. Flow is described as a hypersensitive condition. Can the hypersensitive (sublime) state such as with fear and danger and flow produce a particular alert preparedness and explain the unique experiences that Danger Music can provide? When fear and danger can be transformed into flow, is the hypersensitivity which results a distinctive - and amplified - way to encounter art? And does Danger Music then become a field for art perception which can be developed with the help of a dedicated terminology and suggestions as to what “live” music can be?

“You have to be completely focused, immersed in the situation”, says Moncaleano, “letting things unfold without judging the situation”. After the concert at Rockefeller, I wrote the following:

After posting on Facebook that I was looking for people with professional knowledge about the body’s reactions to danger, I received a reply from a Swedish Honningbarna fan who had a boyfriend in Colombia who was willing to help. In this way, I made the acquaintance of the psychologist Camilo Sáenz-Moncaleano, who suggested focusing on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis flow theory in this context. Flow theory struck me as being potentially relevant in relation to my experience of “zen”. This is a kind of sense and action-oriented extraordinary state which emerges from being present in the moment (Moncaleano 2016). In interview, Moncaleano describes flow through the following six points: 

Danger Music as a psychological phenomenon 

I have always had a feeling that my own experiences of what I call “Danger Music” have a psychological dimension. Originally, I followed a lead which was an extension of Sigmund Freud’s term Das Unheimliche (Freud 1998; Hagerup 2012). Freud thought that, in encountering a work of art, one could suddenly recognise repressed feelings and deep conflicts. Art could, then, be perceived of as dangerous and sinister (Unheimlich) but, simultaneously, that same unpleasantness could be put to use in psychotherapy. This threw up certain associations that I have with Danger Music.  

After some time, I had a feeling that, though this was interesting, it did not feel relevant in relation to my own experiences, the feeling of zen, presence, focus, and what I described in my own concert notes as “close, but not dear”. In other words, it was a nice or hopeful feeling. I had had no experience of danger and fear as a gateway to a repressed past, but quite the opposite, as a way to achieving a feeling of “here and now” – that the things that were closest revealed themselves. As a result, I decided not to follow the psychoanalytic line further. Nonetheless, it is clear that the feeling I had when encountering fear and danger during concerts was, in one way or another, of a psychological character. 

When I first read Burke, I saw how he could be read like a recipe to how we have designed our concerts to be with the band. Burke describes six different qualities in the object which bring out the sublime – terror (for us: The violent mosh pits, the jumps, the chaos, the overstepping of boundaries connected to danger and risk), light and obscurity (the contrasts between a dark auditorium as a starting point ripped up by unpredictable and blinding strobe lighting use), sound and loudness (high volume, sound which hits tightly and with low frequency in the bodies present, group singing, a wall of disorganised sound between the songs and the end of the concert), and suddenness (The unexpected elements that we see at the very core of our concerts: The break with what can be expected. From us showing up on the stage from the audience area, the audience storming the stage, stage diving, we ask the stewards not to stop audience members who want to come up onto the stage, and we let them play our instruments). 

Eye (HANATARASH) says: “It is a kind of trance. In other words, I make sound and I walk out in a trance.” My experience, which I characterise in relation to Danger Music as a psychological phenomenon as flow, can indeed also be described as a trance – another kind of consciousness.  

I have a feeling that Eye’s experience is related to mine, and is perhaps like mine, but I prefer to describe it as “flow” to avoid the connotations of a “kick” and “strong personal experiences”. Flow suggests something that is “a de-personalisation”. A presence which shows itself to be something other than a personal experience. It is shared. 

BACK

1. A changed experience of time

Moncaleano explains first about a different perception of time as something that characterises flow. He describes it as a “a transformation of time - things might happen faster or slower”. 

This allows the subject access to a moment that can accommodate a richer sensory spectrum than what we can otherwise perceive during an equivalent period of time – “things are perceived in a completely different way[...], you’re so aware of everything happening around you it creates another idea of what’s going on”.

2. Sensory consciousness

Moncaleano explains the capacity and interaction between different parts of the brain. “Our senses pick up so much more information than we are conscious of” because we cannot receive, interpret, select amongst and organise all sensory information equally at any given moment. In the state of flow, however, the activity is drastically reduced in the analytical, upper part of the brain, and the reptilian brain flares up with unprocessed information. This opens up the possibility of what Moncaleano calls “new layers of experience”.

3. Focus

Referring to focus, Moncaleano says that “you have to be completely focused, immersed in the situation", and refers further to interviews he has carried out earlier with performers, both athletes and artists, who explain how they feel a kind of mental tunnel vision when they are in flow.

4. The experience/abdication of control

Moncaleano points out that having control in a flow context is not about the drive to “pursue control”, but “being completely involved in the present[...] letting things unfold without judging the situation”.

5. The experience of being “outside yourself” 

Moncaleano describes this as “A de-personalisation, in a sense that you are away from your body[...]. The experience is felt to be bigger than you”. Descriptions of being “outside yourself” are not exactly rare in art and music history – everything from raves to Sunday Mass has led people in to what they perceive to be another dimension. One of the questions I asked Moncaleano concerned what separates my experience jumping alone from a ten-metre diving board at the swimming pool from my experience of jumping from the gallery during a concert. When I am standing on the diving board, something is lacking that is present during the concert. Moncaleano replies that in order to achieve the state of flow, “the challenge and abilities [must]be equal”. Jumping from the ten-metre board requires only a jump, whilst several things are required during the concert, and these must be synchronised: Singing, making sure to jump in the right place, contact with those in the concert hall, maintaining contact with the band, jumping on the crest of a musical wave, not hitting the floor – and a number of other things too that also demand greater competence (abilities).

6. The situation is rewarding in itself

In situations such as when I stand on the railing of the gallery, Moncaleano explains that the brain produces large quantities of dopamine and adrenalin which give the person in flow pleasure.

Danger Music as a cultural phenomenon

The point of departure for my study of Danger Music was the feeling of zen (for want of a better word) which I could experience at my own concerts, particularly in situations of danger and fear. Danger Music has shown itself to involve several different practices. My attention has been directed towards Danger Music when it is unimparted fear and danger there and then, not an intellectual experiment as it was, for example, in the case of the Fluxus practices to which I have referred. “Often danger music is not sound; it is philosophy”, as David H. Cope puts it (1981). Consequently, it was natural to look at Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s (2004) Production of Presence – What Meaning Cannot Convey , even though this is a general criticism of modern, Western ways of existing in the world more than it is a book about art.

I have interpreted presence to mean a phenomenon’s immediate effect on the body. Gumbrecht suggests a presence that can stand in contrast to meaning and interpretation in order to shed light on how the culture of the West has, to a great extent, toned down the significance of presence. Gumbrecht writes that the book “will challenge a broadly institutional tradition according to which interpretation, that is, the identification and/or attribution of meaning, is the core practice, the exclusive core practice indeed, of the humanities.”. There is in and of itself nothing wrong with the production of meaning, he writes; what an academic rebellion against meaning is about is how social institutions give meaning-oriented questions absolute dominance. Perhaps one can also draw parallels to differing practices within artistic development work? In order to be able to relate to the world in a more nuanced manner than meaning and interpretation alone allow, Gumbrecht establishes one position for meaning (meaning culture) and another for presence (presence culture) (Ibid, p. 52). “The things of the world”, he writes, “could oscillate between presence effects and meaning effects” (Ibid, p. 2). Equating these two positions represents a longing for “some resistance to the intellectual relativism that (some say almost inevitably) comes with the culture of interpretation.”

To be present (being), then, challenges the position interpretation and argumentation (truth) has. Truth is turned towards the direction of something that happens in bodily meetings with things, senses in states of presence, including if this involves an unstable point of access to what can be true, and deviates from our expectations of logic and causality. However, this counteracts what Gumbrecht describes as a “loss of worlds”: “our feeling that we are no longer in touch with the things of the world” (Ibid, p. 49). In other words, the sensation of losing the “world of things”, which I touched upon earlier by way of introduction. Our search for truth moves away from “meaning” to the “meaningful”, and focuses on what is connected to the body, and how the things and face-to-face relationships of the world affect us. 

Gumbrecht points out that, ever since Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”, the opposition between body and thought has impressed upon our self-understanding. Before Descartes, the belief was that meaning or truth was something one actively created or produced. It was something which came to you. To the extent that one could hope that insight could manifest itself (appear), it was like a mystical and unexpected gift which was served out without the the thought that one had to give anything back (Ibid, p. 26). It was a question of appearances, which manifested themselves to the senses there and then. Such events required presence. Art, writes Gumbrecht, can, by its presence, provoke things which are invisible to appear and obscure what is already visible (Ibid, p. 82).  

SUBLIME, TRUE ZEN

It seems as though the ideas of Burke, Csikszentmihalyis and Gumbrecht touch upon something essential in how one can understand Danger Music. Nonetheless; I feel a need to connect these ideas to actual bodily experiences at concerts. What make senses, zen and truth into sublime, true zen?

Danger Music as an aesthetic phenomenon 

As we remember, the troubling connection of wonder and fear in encounters with danger has been described as the sublime since antiquity. Longinos, Burke and Kester (to mention three figures from different historical eras) seem to be in agreement about the significance of this astonishment of “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (Burke in Bale and Bø-Rygg 2008, p. 35).

What I notice in particular here is the emphasis that both Burke and Kester place on things empirical, sensory and bodily. Burke describes how the qualities of the sublime rest within the sensory objects which, through our experience of them, “hurries us on by an irresistible force” (Ibid, p. 35), whilst Kester describes the sublime as a “somatic epiphany that catapults the viewer outside of the familiar boundaries of a common language, existing modes of representation, and even their own sense of self” (Kester, 2013, p. 12).

In the first excerpt from my log (p. 1) I describe how I perceived the moment when I was about to jump from the gallery, as my body reached its maximum potential for sensory impressions. I became removed from myself, and instead of exploding, imploded into an empty, but by no means incomplete, feeling of the reality around me. "Near but not dear. Distanced, but not absent”. It is striking how this appears consistent with both Burke’s and Kester’s descriptions. 

Honningbarna seek out and try to create unpredictable and chaotic situations, perhaps also some which are dangerous and disturbing. This has led to situations during which I certainly have not perceived of the chaos as flow or presence, but simply unpleasantly chaotic, perhaps what Burke would call danger without wonder or astonishment. I have had feelings which are more like fear, frustration and powerlessness. But what I am writing about here is something else, presumably close to what Moncaleano describes as “A de-personalisation, in a sense that you are away from your body[...]. The experience is perceived as bigger than you”. This is more reminiscent of what I have experienced: I become removed from myself. This feeling can perhaps also be connected to how flow arises as a result of a considerable challenge in a state of balance with considerable ability. To be the focal point at a venue with 1400 agitated people is a complex and considerable challenge. Nonetheless, after eight years of touring, I have established a level of expertise such that I feel secure in the knowledge that I can deal with the situation, even though fear and danger still pump around my body, and perhaps in others too. I let go of myself and let the action unfold because the great challenge and what I can achieve are diffuse and flow over into each other in the self-confidence, will and action-seeking nature of the heat of battle.

Danger Music as a cultural phenomenon ("production of presence")

We have seen that Gumbrecht established two different positions for the production of truth, one for meaning, meaning culture, and another for presence, presence culture. Gumbrecht’s point is that both of these positions are useful when one is carrying out research in order to grasp a phenomenon. However, considering the fact that presence culture has been without standing under modern conditions in Europe, insisting on a presence culture represents a cultural critique of the European position which hegemonically enforces interpretation and meaning as the access points to truth. Were we to look at my log, we would find examples of this kind of presence culture, which I call “moments of zen”. I write: “a moment or an atmosphere which is so absolute that I stop remembering the noise of information from everyday life  [...]”. These are not moments during which I stop reasoning reasoning, or when stop interpreting, but where I bodily and with my senses perceive that I have access to a truth that is different to “meaning” and “interpretation”, but is nonetheless no less real or true. This is an access point to “truth” which perhaps lies at the core of what music and art are about – is it, then, familiar territory for what can be considered art’s mandate? Perhaps it is the protest against hegemonic “reason” that Gumbrecht’s theories contribute, a cultural critique which those fascinated by Danger Music feel speaks to them. Are they drawing an artistic and emotional parallel to Gumbrecht’s theory?

Gumbrecht’s theory also involves a notion of appearance, which is something that reveals itself to be a sensory experience that is not a result of reasoning. Here too, I find parallels exist with my own experiences during concerts when I have never attempted to create those “zen experiences” that have actually come to me. This has been akin to receiving unexpected gifts that I did not even know existed. 

My other point as regards Danger Music as an aesthetic phenomenon comes from the analysis of the historical overview earlier in this study: I see that Danger Music (or at least the part of the field that is significant in my study) is characterised by its refusal to serve as a representation for something other than that which is “here and now”. Neither the situationists, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or the mosh pit are symbols, or representations of something other than what they actually are. The Futurists were not the only ones to write music which envisioned war or violence in he twentieth century. But whereas Penderecki’s heart-rending, fear-inducing and violent work, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima references the heart-rending, fear-inducing and violent reality of war, it nonetheless remains a representation of reality – a symbol – when it is performed in a concert hall with a passive, safe audience. There is no war in the auditorium. The Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera puts it in the following way: “I don’t want an art that points at a thing, I want an art that is the thing.” (Bruguera cited in an interview with Sam Dolnick in 2011). The Futurists wrote the work born of the war, but they also brought the serata, where violence and danger appeared in that very place and moment. Danger Music as an aesthetic phenomenon is therefore connected to two key terms: 1) Burke’s understanding of “the sublime” and 2) The non-represented.

A moment or atmosphere so absolute that I couldn’t remember everyday life’s deafening noise of information, bad conscience, confusion and commitments, or imagine that there can be anything else than clinging to the railing, waiting for the chorus and leaping of the ledge onto the hands beneath me. 

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