Vibes of 9/11

I think the Vaporwave genre is quite interesting as a form of twice-removed ambient music--where music played in places (or could be played in places) becomes a way to "score" places and memories of places--such as shopping malls where Muzak is understood to exist. Personally, I've never heard music in an elevator, but everyone understands the term and associates it with that label.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, everyone had some kind of a soundtrack to the event because the music would naturally become encoded (or coupled) to memory. They are very much like photographs: Photos are "confection" for memory and you can't avoid being seduced by them. Even if you don't look at them, the fact that they exist gives them power in the shadows. They become the elephant you can't think of.

There was an interesting podcast I listened to this morning about the World Trade Center Muzak Community who "soundtrack" the event, even though they weren't even born yet or have fuzzy memories as a child. The soundtracks are the traces in found video footage of the liminal spaces around the towers in which music was playing in the background. It's the residual "background radiation" from a traumatic event that younger generations want to experience vicariously. Obviously, the internet (especially YouTube) allows us to excavate memories, even those we didn't have. Doing this kind of thing is not unlike scoring a film in which audio elements can be treated as diegetic (in the world of the film) or non-diegetic (as a soundtrack). But I wonder if this has moral implications: Do we want to be exhuming the memories of people who lost loved ones on 9/11 or even people with video cameras who happened to be there and don't want a new trigger to those events?

In this clip, the music is purported to be diegetic but I suspect it was faked and is non-diegetic. To those with a direct memory, this is traumatic even with no sound. And why would they care if music was playing there?

The WTC now has the same secondary meaning for everyone, even if they weren't living then. The brain stores memories randomly but is replayed linearly, and we apply the film metaphor and reality then becomes like a film. Even the remembering of a dream can sometimes be like rewinding a tape. The comment after disasters "It was like something I saw in a movie" is a part of the universal dream of consciousness.

Back in July I was watching a video of the flooded streets of Montpelier Vermont as someone kayaked through, and the sound of the alarms all sounding at once had a surreal sinister quality. Muzak playing there would make it even more sinister, and I think that is what people are doing with Muzak as an audio relic. What makes it compelling is the juxtaposition of moods.

But what's even more interesting to me is that young people are using this Muzak as an access point to an interest in music more generally, not unlike how people in the 60s discovered American music playing at saloons on air bases in England which inspired them to pick up a guitar. It sounds bizarre yet intriguing at deeper levels, especially if they are inspired to make ambient music. 

***

The above (manipulated) photograph was taken by me on 9/11. Initially it was over-exposed but I thought that inverting it gave it a more spooky vibe for the feeling at the time.