When art is flattened and wrought for strict functionality, humans often try to reattach the lost ties to sensuality by connecting said functionality to experiences with an emotional pull. This way, even the most mundane and innocuous contents of every day life can be imbued with a sense of mystery and/or foreboding, providing space for paradoxical experiences within an unassuming environment. This is why the Twitter account @SpaceLiminalBot has amassed almost half a million followers simply by posting pictures of empty rooms and hallways. It is also why one can spend around one fourth of a show dedicated to dancefloor hedonism on bird noises, audio feedback and disjointed movie samples, all on taxpayer-financed radio. How do humans manage to intuitively burrow beneath such completely unassuming art surfaces? What is it that we think we'll find by doing so?
In 2014, Peter Long at the University of Western Sydney published a paper called The sound of in-between: Exploring liminality in popular music composition. The term “liminality” here builds on an application of the term that was first employed by folklorist Arnold van Gennep. This was later expanded upon by anthropologist Victor Turner. Where Gennep recognized a feeling of ambiguity or disorientation in the different stages of rites of passage for smaller tribal societies, said feeling was extrapolated by Turner to apply much more broadly:
Liminality is a complex series of episodes in sacred space-time […] The factors of culture are isolated [...]. Then they may be recombined in numerous, often grotesque ways, grotesque because they are arrayed in terms of possible rather than experienced combinations-thus a monster disguise may combine human, animal, and vegetable features in an "unnatural" way, while the same features may be differently, but equally "unnaturally" combined in a painting or described in a tale. In other words, in liminality people "play" with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them.
While Gennep and Turner were mostly concerned with how said feeling of liminality can subvert notions of “work”, “play” and “leisure” to upend established societal structures, Long has focused more on the etymological content of the term in its application to music, which comes from the Latin word limen (“threshold”). By observing a number of characteristics in music from a wide array of composers from the 20th century, he has attributed this threshold-like feeling to factors that manifest in five different categories:
harmonically (harmony situated in-between or outside the harmony that is typical for the applicable cultural context)
rhythmically (rhythm devices situated between a defined meter (polyrhythms) or lacking a distinct sense of pulse (arrhythmic))
timbrally (accentuated timbre by the use of time manipulation or studio effects)
execution and method (deviating from the use of predetermined structures)
phenomenologically (removing or obscuring a sound's original source, and therefore the meaning normally attributed to it)
The first concrete example that Long uses as an example of said categorization is 70s psychedelia (yay, boomer time!). More specifically, he cites a number of songs by The Beatles that manipulate timbre to the point that a parallel can be drawn between a traditional, drug-induced psychedelic experience and a feeling of liminality, such as recording lead guitar and vocals at different speeds (“Rain”) and recording entire solos backwards (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). The question is what utility such a specific idea of liminality has. While it certainly can aid people already inclined to go on psychedelic journeys towards a common liminal environment, it can also be hampered by the high degree of subjectivity any psychedelic experience is beholden to. Coincidentally, this also partly explains why psychedelic experiences in and of themselves have limited utility beyond a particular subject: it requires the translation of said experience from an altered state of mind within a highly individual brain chemistry makeup. This necessarily leads to compromise and dilution of the descriptive arguments that would follow from it, as the subject in question no longer can rely on the previously mentioned conditions (state of mind and brain chemistry) to maintain its utility among other humans. Liminality must maintain ease of access as far as possible to avoid such problems. Therefore, tinkering with timbre and musical time to achieve liminality must be carried out in a way that doesn't immediately map on to specific subcultural expressions, especially when these are dependent upon a too high degree of individuality.
Things get more interesting when Long picks up Pierre Scheffer's idea of “reduced listening” in the context of liminality:
In listening to sonorous objects whose instrumental causes are hidden, we are led to forget the latter and to take an interest in these objects for themselves. The dissociation of seeing and hearing here encourages another way of listening: we listen to the sonorous forms, without any aim other than that of hearing them better, in order to be able to describe them through an analysis of the content of our perceptions.
[...] the repetition of the physical signal, which recording makes possible, assists us here in two ways: by exhausting this curiosity, it gradually brings the sound object to the fore as a perception worthy of being observed for itself; on the other hand, as a result of ever richer and more refined listenings, it progressively reveals to us the richness of this perception.
By hiding the instrumental source of a sound and repeating it throughout a composition, said sound can actually be placed in the foreground instead of the background. From here, it can then be assigned a specific function that aids the artist in harnessing a composition's liminal potential. Numerous examples of this method in ambient music have cropped up after Brian Eno's pioneering efforts, such as “Spectral” by Hypnopedia from 1992:
At 1:21, a simple sequence of string chords can be recognized as a leitmotif for the track. In between the recurrences of the leitmotif, the space is filled with sounds that are almost alien to the overall synth framework: bird noises, classical Spanish guitar, faint accapella vocals and croaking frogs. When blended together, the leitmotif takes on the function of a kind of marker or checkpoint, denoting the end of one sonorous area and the introduction of another. This method would later be expanded to apply to entire DJ mixes by the UK rave/prog rock hippies in Future Sound Of London, as shown on their Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1 from 1993:
The contrast between “organic” noises divorced from their material origin and tracks featuring heavily processed timbre have an even greater impact here. By regularly returning to “Environments” by Amorphous Androgynous (a now lost album relying on processed field recordings) over the course of two hours, and also by consistently selecting ambient tracks that drench spaces between the markers in reverb, The Future Sound Of London draw on a wide array of rhythmic, timbral and phenomenological factors to adjust the listener's attention. Instead of just perceiving a sequence of tracks, the markers actually denote a number of track sequences within the overall mix framework, and the listener is encouraged to take note of what happens in between them.
Chapter three in Long's paper provides a breakdown of all the techniques and processing employed in practice for all the music that was part of his research for this paper. It gets VERY granular, including a long segment on quartal harmony and harmonic differences between Indian and western tradition which, sadly, is a bit above Dream City Turmoil's pay grade. However, not everything here is quite so theory-heavy, and we can trace it to modern-day examples that don't rely on boomer nostalgia. First up is the elongation of time within the frame of a single composition, which ultimately subverts listeners' expectations of song structure. Combine this with subtle shifts in timbre and a fairly fixed set of chords, and voila: the travel path is set.
Next, we return to the previously mentioned divorcing of a sound object from its source. We've already discussed some of the utility of doing this, but how would it actually look in practice? One path to take is the use of specific techniques for timbral alteration, such as reverb and echo, to create different perceptions of space and distance. The recent Quark Expresso album on &Options is very successful in this regard:
The reverbed low frequencies and contrasting, short high frequencies on tracks 1 to 4 hark back to the exploration of low frequency room resonance in Alvin Lucier's “I Am Sitting In A Room”, which Long refers to later on in this section of the paper.
Finally, there's the changing of speed at which samples or instruments are played. While this is a technique that vaporwave has made almost too familiar at this point, there are examples in dreampunk and other ambient offshoots that prove it isn't drained of utility just yet. The newly formed collective glass remnant displays such utility on their latest self-titled album:
The change in speed and pitch for the amen break utilized around half way through the track “Future Landscapes”, and the way the resulting “grain” of the sound of the break fuses with the oscillations of the bassline go a long way to create a similar sense of liminality. This is in large part due to the heavy contrasting of the track's initial synth backing.
Clearly, it is possible to establish a kind of recipe for the creation of liminal spaces in audio form. The question is: why do we still need them? What utility do these spaces have for artists and the humans touched by their art in 2021 and beyond? If dreampunk (or any kind of electronic music) is meant to provide relief from the urban stressors that affect its current audience, a key factor is heightened awareness of the environment said stressors occur in. If artists can instil the feeling of liminality in urban environments by linking their music to the audiovisual impact felt by the people living in them, they will also create potential for global connections that transcend regional urban idiosyncrasies. The reason why letters in kanji were so prevalent in dreampunk and vaporwave during the 2010s isn't just orientalism, or because kanji has an inherent aesthetic value derived from the work required to master writing it. They were prevalent because they suspend the listener’s immediate urban regional boundaries, setting up a brand new environment for a common experience of global urban melancholy. Said potential can not be made full use of, however, if it is not accompanied by audio stimuli providing an adequate counterpart to the visual impact. A “recipe” for musical liminality, as sketched out here, is what will complete the picture.
In conclusion, it is worth underlining the following: Victor Turner viewed the passage between spaces as necessarily being a transition from negative to positive. It's time to re-evaluate if such a passage necessarily has to involve the complete rejection of the present. Can we, by using older ideas of being in transition, instead present an opportunity to synthesize a common human experience from all the stages of the passage in question?