QUANTIZED CULTURE

BY STEPHEN JANIS

The Winter Music Conference, an annual gathering of skinny,

house DJs, chain-smoking record producers, and tight-skinned publicists is the Dance Music
equivalent of a Shriners convention: a chance to escape the outer-boroughs of Manhattan or the
boreal straits of London for four days and bask in the hot Miami sun. In the early 1990s when the
conference was relatively small in scale, the center of activity was The Fontainebleau a retro-styled
luxury hotel situated just above Thirty-Eighth Street in South Miami. As a young record label owner
possessing a few techno discs to promote, I convinced my partner to buy me an airplane ticket—
provided I find and pay for a cheap hotel room on my own. The Fontainebleau was too expensive,
so I called a friend working for a local record distributor in Miami, who recommended the Beacon,
a fading, art deco hotel located in the nexus of the strip on Seventh Street.
More than a decade ago, South Beach was in the latter phase of its remarkable transition from
Bohemian enclave to international hot spot. Many of the old art deco hotels had been refurbished,
and the cosmopolitan flavor and refugee artiste shtick had turned bodegas into erstwhile fashion
boutiques. The “strip” (the heavy commercial zone roughly between First and Twenty-third streets)
was a tendril fork off of U.S. Route 1, split from the main land, cosseting the Atlantic Ocean like an
accusatory finger. The Beacon Hotel stood in the nexus of the strip, a non-descript white washed
building with a stark blue neon sign, offering a double bed, a translucent television set with bad
reception, and bird’s-eye-view of the maid’s closet across a portico. All for $80 a night.

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 The music conference was low key then, a gathering of pale techno heads from the UK—
cologne soaked Latin house DJs—and few oddball rappers. The congregants would linger in packs
comprised of tag-along familiars, rarely venturing outside an insular group for a chance encounter.
Having very few industry contacts, experience, or credibility, I spent most of my time sitting by the
pool, hoping to bump into a powerful DJ or overseas record distributor. After two days of little
success, I abandoned the Fontainebleau pool for the porch of the Beacon to soak in the scenery,
energy, and culture of South Beach.
Sitting by myself with a glass of Appleton’s rum on the rocks, the strip offered better visual
stimuli than one could find on a hyperactive African savanna. Beside the overwhelmingly lush
parade of tan, almost abstractly well-formed bodies, odd scraps of other subcultures peeked out
beneath the mangrove thickness of ripe plastic breasts and swollen pectorals. From house heads
to hard core punks, the strip was open cultural real estate, a sliver of sand on the tip of the conti-
nent, too malleable to own and too transitory to dominate. It was during my hours on the porch
that I discovered the varieties and modalities of rhythm in close proximity.
As the sun worshipers swarmed the sidewalk wearing inline skates, moving to the incessant
thump of 128 house beats per minute, the perfectly formed intervals for slaloming between over-
endowed starlets and pale N.Y.C. refugees, was accurately enunciated by the steady downbeat of
alternately insistent house music booming from an almost contiguous storefront of clothing

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 boutiques and daiquiri stands. As a group of hardcore, straight-edge (non-drinking) punks strutted
towards the beach, every spare moment was filled by a beat box spewing thrashing toms and gut-
tural, primal vocals, the ubiquitous presence of the thundering kick drum underlying both their
aggression and separateness. As a phalanx of blunted hip-hop heads drove by in a late model
hooptie, the large omniscient hit of a bass drum on syncopated down beats immersed them in a
cloud of suspended animation; parsing every second into a billion images of self-idealized percep-
tion and insight.
Thus it seemed that the elements of style not signified by a type of clothing, hairstyle, or
colorful accessories, found form and function in the machinations of rhythm. What a blue streak
of hair or a designer wristwatch failed to convey, the broadcast and assent to a beat or rhythm
accomplished seamlessly. Certainly it was easy to identify a like-minded person in the interval of
the right beat. Those who embrace the house “credo” subject themselves to its rhythm; those who
don’t, move through the space it inhabits awkwardly, with a semblance of anger and discomfort.
Rhythm, as it is expressed in popular forms of music, simply organizes time by crafting
agreeable intervals, a sync code for the public domain, coordinating movement, gestures, and the
sensibilities of surface appearances. In South Beach, those attuned to house rhythms darted like
automatons—the deeply tanned waiter with a silicon smile, the sultry Columbian expatriate walk-
ing a perfect line between the sway of her thunderous hips. Like partitions between office cubicles,
rhythm defines the boundaries of personal space and individual prejudice. Whether a sub bass,
hand-clap, cymbals, high falsetto maracas, or low-resolution
bass kicks and repetitive tribal toms, beats encode the tex-
ture of a perceptual environment with trappings of assent
On the strip, movement and disagreement, force and carelessness.
On the strip, movement was synced to a beat; the
was synced to a beat;
cigarette from lips to mouth, from ashtray to sidewalk,
the cigarette from lips beneath the heel, and finally to the steaming bituminous.
It is difficult to smoke, drink, or eat slowly to house music;
to mouth, from ashtray the motor imperative of the driving base drum unnaturally
to sidewalk, beneath the mechanizes the impulses of your body. Similarly, it is
impossible to be frenetic in the wake of a subterranean
heel, and finally to the hip-hop beat—its slow moving sonic swathe cuts time into
long, drawn out moments of withdrawal. Perhaps this is
steaming bituminous.
what I witnessed, without fully understanding the free-form
dysphasia of time.

A mechanical clock seems like a strange, off-color oddity, a vocal anachronism that can be
silenced, but not silent at work. With grinding gears and hive-like corpuscles of talon springs,
mechanical clocks correlate time sense with the machinations of seconds: a consistent ticking
with a metronome regularity that inculcates a sense of order—inherently logical, rhetorical and
inescapable. A digital watch however, liberates time from the rigid mechanics of a gear spring. In
place of prosthetic hands lumbering around the circumference of circle, digital time progresses in

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the effervescence of LED readouts and disembodied numbers. It is phantom time, spectral digits,
digital matchsticks that shuffle and realign with perfect alacrity as minutes evaporate, hours pass.
It is a divergence from the tick, from the precise machinations of a corporeal machine, from the
outward and orderly marking of time’s passage. It is a physiological break with tactile conveyance,
an embrace of the invisible time keeper, the innards of a circuit, the pure flow of electrons.
Free from the limitations of earthbound
mechanics then, digital time is more mal-
leable than its mechanical predecessor, and
so we are free to define it. As Lewis Mumford
stated in his controversial and compelling
treatise, Technics and Civilization, “no two cul-
tures live in conceptually the same time and
space” (18). Thus in Miami, as sub-cultures
collided, space was marked by the patterns
of rhythm, a mutual sense of timing that
embraced the like-minded and warded off
the outsider. What is house culture without
the dominant kick drum, enunciating on
every downbeat? Syncopate the same
beat, in other words, move it off the precise track of interlocking progression and you have hip-
hop elementally. In wide open spaces, in the vast human expanse of a city park, how else can we
negotiate the boundaries of the culture we inhabit other than through rhythm? Our internal clocks,
the intervals of time in which we act, are woven in a sonic tapestry into the aural environment,
tethered to human consciousness in the exteriorized climate of satellite radios, iPods, and
camouflaged loudspeakers. In place of the mechanical surety we are liberated to seek a custom
acknowledgment of it’s passing, though a hip-hop song, or hardcore rant, a rattling bass drum or
a thundering tom. We tailor time and it adopts; we signify though rhythmic idioms, and seek com-
panions in the wellspring of the interval. Time is free form, customized, ubiquitous and arguable,
or as Michel Foucault might have characterized it, the semiotics of unnatural sounds.

According to Mumford, the tenth-century Benedictine monks invented mechanical clocks to

synchronize the hours for prayer and penitence. Regulated Time then, has always been, in a sense
subject to the coloration of necessity. Besides mimicking with some precision the progression of
the sun from the primordial shadows of the morning to the coloring of imminent dusk, in a sense
the makers of clocks defined time according to the prejudices of culture.
Or as Mumford wrote:

It is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries—at one time
there were 40,000 under Benedictine rule—helped to give human enterprise the
regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for a clock is not merely a means
of keeping track of hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men (14).

QUANTIZED CULTURE JANIS 27

 What then, is the fashion that marks today’s cultural boundaries of time? If digital technology
has made it a free form dilemma, what is our source of style that defines it? Perhaps it is still the
language of the machine, expressed in the mechanics of popular culture. As Sanford Winter noted
in the Architecture of Time, “The advent of the computer in our laboratories and studio has cer-
tainly made the shape and form of time amenable to human manipulation and intuition”(9). Who,
then, organizes these intervals for us? What clock dictates how we will divide the cultural land-
scape into manageable plots of cohabitation? If hip-hop is my creed, how will my internal clock of
signification be measured against the more agile and affirmative ringing of the house head’s bass
drum? Who dictates my sense of time?
For some sub-cultures expressly identified with particular types of music, the answer lies in
the über clock, the drum machine—the tool of producers and musical stylists, the rhythmic sinew
of hip-hop, house, and other forms of programmable music. The innards of the drum machine
are comprised of a simple programmable digital clock, a clock that imprecates a customized time
sense through the idioms of popular music. It’s the source of the indefatigable house beat, the
stylized hip-hop swing, the piquant sensibility of highly syncopated R&B. All find structure and
schema in the sinew of machines with robotic names such as SP1200 and MPC2000.
Decorated with oblong pads and LED screens, cubist buttons and modular keypad’s both
ergonomic and sleek, a drum machine is an artist’s palette of binary samples, offering all the
colors of rhythm, cymbals, bass drums, snares, maracas, brushes, tambourines, and shakers.
Housed in the hard shell plastic casing, the dissembled sounds of beats are stripped of form, and
marshaled by a a technological process that creates ready-made patterning of rhythm and time.
The first affordable and fully programmable drum machine, Roland’s TR-808, was released
in 1980, a second cousin of earlier Roland machines such as the CR78. By virtue of an internal
synchronization clock, the TR-808’s 768 bars of compositional space laid out in a unique step
programming system made it a favorite of pioneering hip-hop and house producers. Step pro-
gramming allowed the composer to lay out a song structure based solely on the rhythms of the
machine. Thus a four-on-the-floor, the staple house rhythm of regulating kick drum on every
quarter note, was now possible almost ad infinitum. Similarly, within each step, a new instrument
or accent could be added, synthetic claps at eight bars, and high hat hit after sixteen, and the
staccato snare after thirty-two measures.
The TR-808 had enough credible sounds; a resonant, low frequency kick drum, an efferves-
cent shaker, a well-defined and translucent high hat. Sounds that were used sporadically by early
pioneers of hip-hop and house music and are found in popular recordings as eclectic as Afrika
Bambaataa’s electro funk hit Planet Rock, to Marvin Gaye’s chart topper Sexual Healing. Eventually,
as new models were introduced with increasingly sophisticated technology, the drum machine
became the dominant studio tool, and producer’s staple instrument. From Michael Jackson to
Sting, from LL Cool J to N.W.A., the drum machine has structured the timing of a majority of the
dominant genres of popular music.
Now, the idea of a stand-alone “drum machine” has become at least technologically passé, and
the conceptual framework of these earlier machines has been passed to the innards of personal
computers. Samples downloaded onto hard drive accessed by a sequencer matrix add a precision

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 aerodynamic lift to the wry confectionary vocals of Britney Spears and Nelly. Still, the concept of
the drum machine, the rhythm box, the circuit separation of the sounds into screen icons to be
played by proxy and recorded as sequences in the hard drive of a computer belongs to schema of
a drum machine. And nothing the human hand has achieved in tactile perfection can be matched
by the fluidity of the synchronized samples stitched together into a flawless and repetitive beat.
Even the most precise session drummer cannot offer the flexibility, consistency, and overwhelming
accuracy of the drum machine, and by extension, a coherent pathology of timing.

All drum machines, and the computer programs that simulate beats, have a loop function—
an option that allows the composer to select a time frame, from one bar to one thousand, to
recur continually at the designated tempo. All the recorded patterns from this “loop” are eternally
repeated. Thus a four-bar loop with a heavy kick drum, spare high hat, and a resonant snare
becomes machine cognition of the sediment for musical composition.
Composing, of course, is synchronized to the mechanics of the machine. Starting with a
blank screen, a beats per minute (tempo) is selected, the click track turned on (generally a Moog
like bleep or shrill maraca metronome), and the creating begins.
Press the pad that accesses a kick drum four times, and the
Nothing the human kick drum will sound exactly at that moment in time continually.
Precision is the most striking quality of a drum machine. A four-bar
hand has achieved beat repeated continually, driven by the digital clock demands preci-
sion, a bifurcation of parts that are precisely placed and interlocked
in tactile perfection
on an even, unbending plane. As a loop mutates with different
can be matched by sounds, the imprecise high hat or lagging kick drum becomes intol-
erable. An unnatural symmetry pervades the texture of the groove;
the fluidity of the it communicates the cohesion that the drum machine demands.
synchronized samples The human hand is not so naturally mechanistic. Our sense
of rhythm is somewhat imprecise, in contrast to the precision of a
stitched together machine. To perfect our beats, to make them whole and aligned
with the machine, necessitates quantization, a function and schema
into a flawless and
for correcting human flaws, a filter option that aligns our imprecise
repetitive beat. creative markings with the uncompromising precision of the
machine. Selected, it simply moves the played parts to the most
proximate interstice. Choosing “eighth note” places the note played
to the closest eighth interval of the measure. Choosing “sixteenth note” moves it to the nearest
sixteenth spot in the measure. Quantization adds precision to the wavering hand; it synchronizes
all human imprecations to the symmetry of precise repetition. It is digital form, arrayed to assuage
the wholly analog impulses of human reflexes.
It is then, through quantization, that the magnificent certainty of a house beat is achieved.
Likewise for syncopated hip-hop beat, or even the skittish triplets of Timbaland all shuffled in fluid

QUANTIZED CULTURE JANIS 29

 sequencers courtesy of a machine and its corrective mechanism. If what I observed in Miami was
in fact true, that each of us somehow imports our sense of timing from the music that is accept-
able to our sensibilities, and somehow, like the Benedictine monks we synchronize our rituals of
interaction in way that we find mutually agreeable, then our culture is, in a sense quantized. That
is, our course of interaction is slightly corrected to rhythm of the machine. If we bump and grind
our pelvises to a Nelly song or an Ultra Nate house anthem, we are, at least casually, synchroniz-
ing our mating dance to the frequency of a binary membrane that governs the cultural order of our
milieu. This means, that despite the fact that digital technology has liberated us from the synchro-
nized rigors of the mechanical clock, we have in a sense ceded our timing to the new forms of
precision embedded in the variant idioms of popular musical culture.

Sexually, we respond to rhythm, which is why the intoxicating and predatory movement of
the kick drum in a house song is so appealing. It is machine semiotics in the simplest form; the
onward progression of a beat that is as relentlessly precise as it is communicating precision. Can
we grind our pelvises together, could we mechanize our parts on the dance floor with the pulsat-
ing precision of the machines that coordinate our movements?
This is what the digital clock inculcates in us, a time sense coordinate to the machine, an
adaptation to a digital pulse that is not natural but necessary. If we can be sexualized by a rhythm
that is not organized by the human hand, then we are perhaps better prepared for the future with-
out the use of it. What of consciousness without a heartbeat? If it can exist without a body, then
perhaps we are synchronizing ourselves to the heartbeat of the future. Perhaps that is why house
music seems so heartless. What is organic about a perfectly symmetrical succession of low
frequency notes, a pattern that seems to preclude imperfections, mistakes, sloppiness, or perver-
sions? To adapt to its sense of timing requires a similar refinement, a physical perfection, and an
adroit sense of style. Maybe that’s why as I sat on the porch, those tuned to the frequency of
house were neat, shaven and oiled men, as close to physical perfection as seems possible.
Scattered among the heartless, in a wave of undulating sound, I could almost imagine put-
ting on a pair of inline skates, shaving my calves, quickly launching my body up the circuitous
concrete pathways that weave around the spit of land between beach and strip. Sandwiched
between the ocean and the hotels, water and automobiles, these serpentine paths envelope all the
migratory activity not fully committed to the beach or the cafes, the sand or the strand. Leaving
the porch of the Beacon hotel, bit seemed almost heroic, like taking up a cause, the next wave of
human evolution, attuned in the muscles and concentration of the semi-flat concourse and the
slated air of the Atlantic Ocean. R

Sources
Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter, 2002, MIT Presss
Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford, 1963, Harcout Brace & Compnay

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