Consider the guitar’s body. What is its shape? And material? How dense is it? What is the length of the instrument’s neck? Is its bridge made of wood, metal, or ceramic? And what is the gauge of its strings? In a physical model these constructive attributes are represented mathematically as parameters within a digital synthesizer – the hope: that the synthesizer will emulate the real-world characteristics of said instrument. Put simply, the computer dresses up like a guitar.

For Tom Mudd, these synthesized representations have frequently been untethered from the acoustic instruments in question, undermining our expectations for the relationship between instrument and output. In his earlier works, the strangeness of the synthesis sought to uncover an uncanniness within each instrument, one that is often obscured by musical convention and the performer’s technique.¹ We might hear this aspect of Mudd’s output in relation to the work of various virtuoso instrumentamentalists who extend their instruments in order to emulate electronic circuitry. These acoustic works and Mudd’s synthetic representations direct our attention to the uncanniness of the performer’s body, their technique, and the instrument in question as a kind of prosthesis.

In Cord Collisions, Mudd has extended beyond uncanniness as an end in itself. Instead, we encounter our own listening. We listen to ourselves listening to the guitar, to our associations and expectations for what it means to hear the instrument. Mudd’s compositional coup on Cord Collisions is that he uses this listening-to-listening to shift our attention away from the guitar and towards the generic codes within which the instrument participates. By way of the guitar, we listen to ourselves listening to a power ballad, to free improvisation, to slap bass, to noise rock, to folk-like finger picking, to heavy metal hammer ons, and glittering prog-like harmonics. Mudd works with the various inheritances of musical convention – formal and affective – so as to reconceive our relationship to said conventions.² Consider Pillar of Earth, in which Mudd makes like Slint and calls up a computational fantasy of noise rock ballads. Here a bent string embellishes the stirring melodic figure that opens the piece. This figure is then approached microscopically: like a series of lens changes, each repetition brings us closer to the form of the embellishment. In doing so however, the embellishment is abstracted – the closer we get, the more obscure it becomes.

I am reminded of Frits Thaulow’s paintings of water, in particular his attempts to represent water’s movement. As his work matured, the canvas gradually tightened its frame around the body in motion, increasing its proximity to the water itself. This rendered the painting’s contextual and topographical clues (think: river bed, sandy dune, vegetation, or distant mill), so sparse as to turn the paintings abstract – the water became a blur of color and light. This abstraction could only be arrived at by way of the painting’s representative function and through the generic conventions of landscape painting itself.

This development is akin to Mudd’s proposal on Cord Collisions. Like Thaulow’s extended conception of landscape painting, here, rather than relating to genre as a set of limits or bounds against which the artist knocks, agitates, is hostile towards, he suggests that genre is a tool on the composer’s utility belt – an accomplice. Genre, in Mudd’s hands, is the accretion of history; while limits are to be agitated, history is to be worked with. This shift is particularly refreshing at a moment when “experimental music” is so completely inhibited by its relationship to genre, wherein the quality of the music is assessed according to its adherence to the genre’s stylistic codes with seemingly no attempt at situating them. The result is frequently a kind of perverse aesthetic moralism in which questions of style are construed as structure itself. What do we hope to achieve with this line of inquiry? We must urgently reconsider our relation to these generic categories, what they mean to us, and what we use them for.

Cord Collisions offers us one way into this thinking. Following Mudd: work with the instrument’s history. Work with the connection between the instrument’s technological form and its emergent musical techniques. How do these connections coalesce into convention? Take seriously the various affective inheritances of these generic codes – as in: weren’t you also moved by Pillar of Earth and Dew Collector? After all, isn’t feeling also just the sedimentation of history? In doing so, we might find something other than agitation and the reperformance of modernist angst. Here convention functions as a Trojan Horse. What else might we hear in a power ballad? How else might we use it?

- Dominic Coles

¹ Think: the high frequency smear caused by a finger sliding across a string or the clunk of an arm against the acoustic guitar’s resonant body.

² Conventions which, for Mudd, are always mediated through the form of a particular instrument.