“Requiem for a sound at the end of the digital vortex where the coded mind drifts,” (“Interview”) reads the epigraph to an online interview of the Japanese music group, Chouchou. The sentence is grammatically incomplete, and even in the original Japanese - a language that does not always translate well to English because it relies less on the linguistic subject - the sentence is succeeded by three short dashes, indicating that it is perhaps a “fragment” of a longer statement. Yet a quick search on the Internet swiftly reveals that the statement exists only as part of this specific interview: in fact, to search the Japanese version of the quote is to also encounter one of those rare moments in our digitally infused lives where the omnipotent search bots of Google are only able to return a grand total of a single search result. Clearly, then, the quote was deliberately constructed and selected to color both the interview and the image of Chouchou as something embodying not just the sense of virtuality and ambiguity that the sentence’s individual words suggest, but also fragmentation.
In an interview with the late poet, artist and literary scholar Nicholas Zurbrugg, the postmodern pioneer Jean Baudrillard argues that “the form of [his] language is almost more important than what [he has] to say within it. Language has to be synchronous with the fragmentary nature of reality” (Zurbrugg 171). In many ways, Chouchou’s choice of epigraph functions along the same principles. By virtue of being a mere fragment, the epigraph invites us to dwell less on the semantic meaning of the sentence, but more on the affect that its form and construction produces. This is of course not to say that the content is irrelevant. Rather, it is a method of analysis that promises to be particularly interesting given the complex, multimedia nature of Chouchou’s music. Indeed, as a music group that was conceived in the metaverse of Second Life, performs live within self-constructed virtual concert spaces and sets their music to kaleidoscopic remediations of urban landscapes, Chouchou – as not just musicians but also as creators – continually challenge the limits of being characterized by a single media form.
That Chouchou’s work lends itself to being analyzed through a postmodern lens is perhaps unsurprising, given the simulated construction of their own identity. As a group composed of two musicians who style themselves as vocalist juliet Heberle and composer-pianist arabesque Choche (the first names are stylistically in lower case), it is clear that their identity resonates heavily with Iwai Shunji’s magnum opus, All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). A film about a group of troubled youths and their relationship with the metafictional idol Lily Chou-Chou, All About Lily Chou-Chou shares not just name but also relationship of aesthetic inspiration with the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy. The word “Chou-Chou” is in fact the sobriquet of Debussy’s daughter Claude-Emma, and the first of his two-part composition Arabesque has clearly left an impression on both Iwai – who features the track heavily in the film, and titles a Lily Chou-Chou song after it – and arabesque Choche - who incorporates it into his pseudonym. By building on both Debussy and All About Lily Chou-Chou which itself draws on Debussy for its construction, Chouchou’s identity is a complex derivation of multiple orders, and is therefore an identity constructed in multiple levels of simulated reference.
Interestingly, the manner in which this simulation is executed makes the postmodern framework all the more relevant for understanding a highly complex multimedia property like Chouchou. Indeed, the resonance that Chouchou has with Iwai is curious considering the absence of any direct reference to the film itself in Chouchou’s oeuvre. Yet it cannot be denied that the relationship exists: just last year, a question on the influence of All About Lily Chou-Chou was tweeted directly to juliet Heberle, who, in response, stressed that while she considers Iwai’s piece to be a “wonderful work of cinema,” the name “Chouchou” was directly derived from the “love name of Debussy’s daughter, Emma” (Heberle). At the same time, however, the name given to Chouchou’s YouTube channel, chouchouholic, is all but a direct reference to lilyholic, the name of the official All About Lily Chou-Chou website and the URL for the messaging board (BBS) where the film’s story had in part unfolded. It is therefore perhaps more accurate to posit that Chouchou’s identity is part of a “network” of references – what Baudrillard might call a “term in the terminal” (Kellner, “Media Culture” 233) – a model which privileges the autonomy of the connections over any authorial or auteurial agency. Chouchou loses the ability to “[self-project] themselves into their objects” and instead lose their identity to “a functional network of communications” (Kellner, “Jean Baudrillard” 13). In other words, what Chouchou consciously references becomes less important than what their own identity appears to subconsciously reflect. The form therefore once again takes precedence over the “intended” message.
The projection of this simulated identity through the image of a network is particularly productive given how important the construct of the network has become for understanding a diffuse media property like Chouchou. The depowering of the authorial-auteurial agency, for example, is reminiscent of the deanthropocentrization of relationships between human actors and non-human actants in the actor-network theory, a conceptual framework developed by critical theorist Bruno Latour for the examination of networks (Ritzer 2). As Ritzer writes, both human actors and non-actants are “foundationally indeterminate” and have “no a priori substance or essence” (1): it is not the individual nodes themselves that have agency and subjectivity. Rather, it is through entering into “networked associations” that both “derive their nature” and are “[provided with] substance, action, intention and subjectivity” (1). Clearly, the need to explicitly demarcate the source of substance in the actor-network theory suggests both that there is a default and assumed power structure that is projected outwards from the human agent, and that this power structure is subverted by the networked condition. In other words, there is a shift of importance from the individual to the network that is perhaps unsurprisingly similar to how Chouchou’s identity has been constructed, given its nature as a media property that was born digital.
It is undoubtedly the case that Chouchou themselves are aware of the simulation of their own identity, as the media that they produce aesthetically echo its fragmentation. While Chouchou makes no secret of having clear references for their work – as seen in juliet Heberle’s response to the tweet – they consciously shape the form of their work in order to encourage the disintegration of such metanarratives. This is most clearly reflected in their approach to medium: though this paper has reflected both the popular perception of Chouchou - and at times the perception of Chouchou by Chouchou themselves - by referring to them as a “music group,” the label betrays the multimedia foundations that their work is grounded in. Indeed, while they emphasize the sonic elements of their work both in discussion and in practice, it is perhaps more accurate to describe Chouchou in multimedia terms. This is something which is most evident in their early work - the source of much of their recognition - which combined not just audio and visual but also the virtual in their music-making. As exhibited in the instructional video “How to play The Babel,” Chouchou’s music is played from a tower of virtual boxes, each of which corresponds to a particular sound that Chouchou conceived in analog. Not only do these “once-autonomous realms” of media “radically [implode]” (Kellner “Jean Baudrillard” 8) into each other in the multimedia space and thereby emulate the conditions of postmodern simulacra, but the musical tower of Babel that Chouchou constructs is also a rather literal manifestation of a fractal aesthetic. This is something which plays out in both appearance and function, as interacting with each box essentially “simulates” the instrumentation. In addition, the fact that each level of the tower is arranged in terms of logical, chordal progressions suggests also that the transition from analog to digital may have been done by consciously fragmenting a more wholly conceived composition. Finally, the modularity of the boxes in Chouchou’s tower is also representative of a “non-linear” (Roquet 109) approach to mediamaking - something which media scholar Paul Roquet argues as being representative of the new and digitized creative process (109) – that is fragmented simply in its inherent resistance towards a linear, “metanarrative-type” process. There is therefore a clear pursuit of a fractal aesthetic that is expressed not only in medium – visually, et cetera – but also in the methodology and artistic direction.
Chouchou’s elevation of form to a level that is equal to, if not greater than content also raises an interesting question of musical genre. It is clear that Chouchou’s music is partly informed by the “shift from the noise music of the 1980s and 90s… to the more reductionist and lowercase sounds of the new century” (70), a shift which Roquet argues is the basis of what he calls Japan’s “ambient music.” As he posits, ambient music in Japan is heavily inspired by the music of Erik Satie (23), one of the most prominent composers of the impressionist tradition. It is in impressionism where we find an interesting link between the genre of ambient music and the postmodern desire for form over substance that Chouchou exhibits. After all, impressionism is known for its subordination of detail in favor of an overall atmosphere and effect: as Debussy himself puts it, the goal of the impressionists is to “render not a landscape but the sensation produced by a landscape” (Roberts 120). This elevation of atmosphere is undoubtedly what defines the “ambient” in ambient music, and is something which is central not only to Chouchou’s musicality but also to their aesthetic. In the video to the song Cloud 9, for example, images of urban spaces are not only duplicated and mirrored to create a visual simulacrum – simulacra in itself being unconcerned about the detail and more about the representation – but the camera moves into space with such speed that the viewer is unable to discern individual images with any sort of precision. Instead, what the viewer perceives is the impression of traveling at high speed through an urban environment. In doing so, what the viewer ultimately takes away is not whether or not a certain district or a certain symbol has been represented in the video, but the affect that the form of the video generates.
Of course, while it is certainly productive to dwell on form and structure in analyzing Chouchou, it is also important to remember that Chouchou makes music with the primary goal of being consumed by the general population. As arabesque Choche himself states, their goal is to create music “for a very personal world,” the kind that is listened to “in front of a PC or with an iPod” (arabesque “Interview”). Unlike sonic art installations or other forms of audial media (which are consumed but do not necessarily have consumption as their ultimate aim), the focus on consumption necessitates that we pay particular attention to the relationship between performer and audience. In the case of a fully digital media property like Chouchou, perhaps the most interesting negotiation of this relationship happens at the point of performative liveness. As both Auslander and Sanden have argued, it is the notion of liveness which has been and continues to be threatened by the emergence of new technologies, as the effectiveness of the non-live will always question the purpose and effectiveness of existing conceptions of the live (Sanden 45). This is essentially a negotiation between medium – the technology through which liveness is conveyed – and message – in Chouchou’s case, an intimate experience and affect that is generated through form. In choosing to construct entire virtual spaces within the metaverse of Second Life as stages for performance, Chouchou themselves exhibit an awareness of the potential and volatility of liveness as part of their multimedial approach.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the condition of liveness that is experienced in Chouchou’s virtual concert spaces mirror the fragmented aesthetic exhibited in the form of their identity and music. Earlier in this paper, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory provided an interesting framework to analyze the shift in power relations from the individual actor to the connections between actants in the networked construct. In the case of Chouchou, a similar shift of power occurs between performer and audience in the virtual: while the performer can exert a greater level of control onto the environment itself, he or she loses a significant degree of control over the specific nature of the actual experience. This is because the experience is no longer mediated through the built environment but the terminal through which the audience accesses the performance. To create virtual liveness is therefore in many ways to kill the author, in the Barthesian sense of the term: the agency of imbuing meaning shifts from the author-performer to the reader-audience and thereby engineers the “death of the author” (Barthes 148). As the author is one and the reader is necessarily many, this by definition engineers the fragmentation of meaning in and experience of virtual liveness. In the case of Chouchou, this fragmentation is pushed even further by the availability of virtual spaces that can be downloaded, thereby allowing users to execute their own personal instance of these spaces within their own personal Second Life terminals.
From the perspective of the audience, an engagement with virtual liveness is therefore also an engagement with a highly intimate and personal experience, at least in the case of Chouchou. The relinquishing of degrees of control and agency to the audience arguably collapse both the space and the invisible boundary between performer and audience that is traditionally enforced by the stage, allowing an experience mediated by one’s own control and in one’s own terms. This is something which Paul Sanden has tried to understand through the concept of the “performing personae,” or, the ability of virtual liveness to communicate the performing personality and therefore engineer an experience of true “liveness” (Sanden 49). As he writes, because virtuality takes on “real meaning” for the participants, a machine can produce a feeling of liveness because it allows for a “subjective encounter with a persona” (Sanden 51-52). The collapsing of this physical and symbolic space between performer and audience that we see in virtual environments like Chouchou and the shift in agency from performer to audience is a heightening of this encounter both in spatial intimacy and in subjectivity (as the subject is empowered through the shift in agency). Additionally, for media entities that are born digital both in identity and in product as Chouchou is, the virtual encounter adds an additional layer of intimacy by virtue of being a simultaneous encounter with both the real and the hyperreal. These are all levels of intimacy which inform the experience that Chouchou has attempted to engineer – their message - and they are derived directly from the fractal nature of virtuality – the medium.
In 1964, then-literary scholar Marshall McLuhan coined the iconic phrase “the medium is the message” in anticipation of the sweeping change that electronic media would bring to modern society. Since then, we have moved past the electronic into the digitally virtual, with new machines and technologies threatening to once further fragment our relationship to the medium. Indeed, as this paper has hoped to posit, the possibilities for analyzing a media construct like Chouchou - born completely digital and exists purely in the virtual - challenges us to once again refocus our attention away from what is being said to how it is being said. Perhaps this means that in the world of the virtual, the message is the medium.
Works Cited
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» Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1990. Print.
» Choche, arabesque, and juliet Heberle. “Interview: Chouchou.” Interview by Brown Noise Unit. Brown Noise Unit. 25 Apr. 2016. Web. 9 May 2016.
» Gane, Mike, ed. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
» Kellner, Douglas. “Introduction: Jean Baudrillard in the Fin-de-Millennium.” Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 1-23. Print.
» Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
» Ritzer, George. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005. Print.
» Roberts, Paul. Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy. Portland: Amadeus, 1996. Print.
» Roquet, Paul. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Print.
» Sanden, Paul. “Virtual Liveness and Sounding Cyborgs: John Oswald’s ‘Vane’.” Popular Music 31.01 (2012): 45-68. Cambridge. Web.