Interview: PRXLUDES

A conversation with Zygmund de Somogyi on themes of fragmentation and memory, postmodernism, accelerationism, pop music idioms, longevity, architecture, and the ‘human 2.0’.

Read the full interview here: https://prxludes.net/2022/06/27/ben-nobuto/

Excerpt

Zygmund de Somogyi: Is postmodernism something that’s important to you in your compositional process, in a more general sense?

Ben Nobuto: It’s how I think about everything. Mark Fisher — the writer — talks about “broken time”, how the future we anticipated in the 90s failed to come about in the way people had hoped. So there’s this ‘frustrated temporality’ in the 21st century, this mix of nostalgia for lost decades and this sense of constantly moving but never really moving forward, like something frozen mid-motion. Also, a lot of our experience of day-to-day life is fragmented, broken up into tiny chunks, and it’s rare that we’re actually doing one thing for a sustained time. I’m always wondering what effect this has on our subjectivity. I feel like that’s the default mode of expression now, in a way. It’s funny — I don’t know why this kind of thing isn’t seen more in art…

ZS: Is it that people aren’t exploring this idea, or that people don’t want to explore this idea…?

BN: Kind of. It seems like a lot of contemporary classical music is still working with this older mode of expression, which involves long, drawn-out ideas; things that fade in, things that fade out, things that develop, things that breathe — like the human breath. But we don’t breathe, or think, like that anymore. At least, I don’t. Everything’s chopped up. So this kind of glitchy broken-ness… To me, that feels like the most authentic way of understanding myself.

. . .

BN: [Fredric Jameson] talks about this hotel in downtown LA called the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. It’s this crazy huge hotel — very florid, with escalators coming from one side all the way down… sprawling design. The way he talks about this is so interesting: he’s saying [that] this space represents a mutation, or an evolution, in our sense of space, and he calls this the postmodern hyperspace. The architecture has finally succeeded in transcending the human body’s ability to locate itself in space. It’s intentionally designed to make you feel disoriented, and dislocated. And he says: it’s like the architecture is directing us, compelling us, to grow new limbs, or expand our sensory capabilities — “sensorium” — to be able to compute this much information going on in this crazy hotel. We have to literally advance to a new species of human to be able to understand where we are, or what this thing is.

ZS: That’s utterly fascinating. I’m already making parallels…

BN: I remember reading that and being mind-blown. I think a lot about how that would translate into a musical language: what if you could create a music that sounds like it’s asking you to upgrade yourself? The senses you’re equipped with at the moment are literally not advanced enough to compute the amount of information being sent towards you. So there’s this feeling of disorientation; but also this reaching towards some kind of “human 2.0” — that’s why my [Manchester Collective] piece is called ‘SERENITY 2.0’ — because it’s like a software update. That had a massive impact on my thinking, when I read that book.

PRXLUDES is an online magazine dedicated to the promotion of young composers and practitioners of contemporary music styles, founded by Zygmund de Somogyi: https://prxludes.net/