New Article & Sound Intervention: Special Low Frequency Version
11 February 2009
Special Low Frequency Version:
A Text to Accompany a Sound
Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors
Commissioned by Ultra-red for the “Sound of the War on the Poor” intervention; this track and others from the collection are available on their website (project will go live in March).
A Text to Accompany a Sound: Liner Notes
What is the sound of the war on the poor?: Is it a scream? Or rather, the sounds of gunshots or hungry bellies? Is it silence? Is silence, as many would suggest, the moment before the scream? This question, as with all of our interventions and inquiries, must begin with our experiences and struggles in our everyday lives. Special Low Frequency Version is simply the documentation of a particular experience and moment. It is a field recording of a unoccupied and “unproductive” factory in the Pacific Northwest where “work,” at least in this moment, has stopped. Herein Team Colors suggests that the “sound of the war on the poor,” at certain temporal and spatial intersections, with an “economic crisis” raging the planet, is a low droning hum: the sound of unoccupied machines. Does this hum point to our fear that unproductivity for capital is unproductive for our lives? We join our comrades in the Midnight Notes Collective in asking: “Must the Molecules Fear as the Engine Dies?”[i]. This speak to the crisis in capital that we in fact produced through our refusals and struggles, to the dying engine that we have torn and are tearing apart. Hence Team Colors, and together like our comrades in Midnight Notes, Ultra-red and others are mapping out a line of escape from these fears, from exploitation, from the imposition of work and periodic crises, and the productivity/unproductivity nexus of capital; we are mapping out a line of escape from these sounds, the sounds of the war on the poor.
Special Low Frequency Version [ii] was recorded during the “work week” of 25/30 January 2009 in the Pacific Northwest.
Author Note
As a member of the militant research collective Team Colors I served as the co-editor and coordinator for Ultra-reds’ contribution to our one-off online journal In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement and Movements (Whirlwinds). Initially introduced to the work of Ultra-red by Marc Herbst of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (publisher of Whirlwinds), I was quite impressed with the richness and engaging nature of their text “Some theses on militant sound investigation, or, listening for a change”[iii]. The ability to use “sound” to connect to the many realities and struggles that take place in everyday life, and then link these realities and struggles to one another is percisely what Team Colors and the Whirlwinds collection seeks to do with “text” and “voice”. Team Colors, and myself personally, are touched that Ultra-red has included us in this intervention.
Team Colors Collective
Team Colors is a collective engaged in ‘militant research’ to provide ’strategic analysis for the intervention in everyday life’. Our purpose is to explore questions of everyday resistance, mutual aid, the imposition of work, social reproduction, class composition, community participation and the commons – by creating engaging workshops and producing provocative written documents and articles. Currently Team Colors operates in the United States with members based in the New York area, Midwest, Northwest and Southwest. Our approach has come from our involvement in community organizing projects, community dialogs, and resistance activities over the past decade.
[i] George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (of the Midnight Notes Collective). “Must the Molecules Fear as the Engine Dies?”: Notes on the Wall Street ‘Meltdown’”, (October 2008; circulated via email and on the web); www.midnightnotes.org.
[ii] Special Low Frequency Version refers to the first full-length studio album from minimalist doom-drone musicians Earth, a rotating Seattle-based outfit with one seemingly core member. Recorded in August of 1992 and released by Sub Pop Records in February of 1993, the album plays for 73:00 minutes through three tracks. Earths’ song and album titles have found their ways onto countless other projects, an impressive list of former members, and a genealogy that flows into many neighboring genres of heavy and minimalist music.
[iii] Ultra-red . “Some theses on militant sound investigation, or, listening for a change”, Team Colors Collective (eds.), In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement and Movements (Los Angles: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008); www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info.
