Memory and the Aesthetics of Overload
We live in an age marked by the limitless proliferation of information and its immediacy. The internet and AI espouse the boundless storage of data as if for all eternity and for purposes of resynthesis; the world’s memories are available at our fingertips in permanently accessible archives (Baudrillard 1990, Han 2015, Kornbluh 2024). This climate of memory overload has evoked responses in a wide range of music in the twenty-first century, music in which expressions of overabundance, hypertrophy and exponentiality abound. In this paper, I draw on three examples to argue how music in different ways expresses the contemporary human experience of feeling both at home in and overwhelmingly disoriented by incessant exposure to an immeasurable wealth of archival memories.
In The Great Bailout (2024), Moor Mother (aka. Camae Ayewa) recalls the colonialist sins of the past by combining haunting poetry with a sensorial overload of musical influences that range from noise to jazz. Olivia Block’s The Mountains Pass (2024) memorialises the natural and animal world in a repetitive overabundance, infused with warmth and clarity of vision in the woven textures of field recordings, acoustic instruments and drones. In Garden of Delete (2015), Daniel Lopatin’s alter ego Oneohtrix Point Never navigates what he describes as the need to make sense of the illogical flow of autonomous media sources of cybernetic reality in his transfixing collage-like polystylistics.
I situate these examples in a long tradition of composers who have made use of multimedial references, archival sources and notions of saturated memory to express an aesthetics of overload. Already in the 1960s, the overbearing weight of the past and a despairing relinquishment to its confusion characterised Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter (1969), while the dense clusters and gestures of György Ligeti’s Volumina (1961–2/1966) captured what he described as the echo of all past music. However, more recent forms of excess engage in new ways the consequences of the technologies that have become a part of our real-world experiences. These creative responses to the lived experience of overload invoke critical awareness of what new technologies and AI do not do: they convey the emotional, expressive and aesthetic influences of the proliferation of information and its increasingly overwhelming, electrifying and suffocating effects. This music both embraces and rejects the exponential accumulation of information: although memory is experienced as all-encompassing, it is inevitably flawed and incapable of capturing or remembering everything. The music considered in this paper engages this paradox, invoking the cumulative logic of knowledge exchange while simultaneously expressing its Other – the temporality of human experience that evades conceptual logic. This paper claims that in this music, we find both expressive recourse to the external, totalizing system of tangled threads as well as their reconciliation in a remembering vision with the agency to express human values and narratives. I argue that this music offers a path beyond the alienating limits of systematic thinking and into new modes of sonically negotiating the proliferation of memory.
Keywords: overload, aesthetics, composition practices, memory, late-stage capitalism
Biography
Peter Edwards is a professor at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. He has published in Music Analysis, Music & Letters and in edited collections on topics that intersect aesthetics, music analysis, cultural studies and critical musicology. His monograph György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque examines Ligeti’s creative process, the sketches for the opera, and the significance of the opera in the wider context of modern and postmodern aesthetics. Peter is also a composer and guitarist.
University of Oslo, Norway – peter.edwards@imv.uio.no