Arpanet - Inertial Frame

Arpanet's third album, 'Inertial Frame', came out in 2006 on the French label Record Makers. Following on from Arpanet' s 'Quantum Transposition' in 2005 this makes it one of Heinrich Muellers most rapid project follow ups to date. At the time he certainly appeared to be in a flurry of releases with the 12", 'Reference Frame', to promote this album having come out in June, the album itself in November and also by now he was connected with Black Replica. I decided to cover this project first because the 12" predates the date given as the start up of Black Replica on their MySpace page.
-
There is no credit or photographs of personnel on the album or 12" as to who is responsible but by now people would be aware. I guess after three albums even one of Mueller's projects becomes its own thing and stating or presenting who's involved isn't strictly speaking necessary, it just becomes Arpanet. Nevertheless in very small print an email address for dataphysics at t-online.de is given for those in the know. Obviously by returning to Record Makers for another release as Arpanet shows that the label were happy to again do business with Mr. Mueller. They also took this as an opportunity to reissue 'Wireless Internet' on LP which for any label to do in this day and age is a major vote of confidence in an artist. On the surface the subjects here are most definitely that of black holes and time-travel, the former and to an extent the latter have been consistently lurking in the background of both Drexciya and Heinrich Mueller projects up to this point. On the back of 'Linear Accelerator' in 2003, which is not itself concerned with black-holes, we find a computer generation of one for instance. He himself simply stated in the sole interview undertaken for this album that “it’s an ode about science, a celebration of its own power.” In this 2006 interview for the French magazine Chronic’ he also said on his approach to making the music that, “We are technology integrated. We analyse technology and then, we organize the sound. Producing electronic music is a scientific process, we take hypothesis forth and we test it." Also if you look at part one of the video for the sole concert they did for this album in Paris in 2006, by coincidence the intro visuals for the club they played in brings you on a journey into a what looks very like a black-hole or wormhole. See link at base of article.
-
In addition to online sources I will be using the book, 'A Brief History of Time (From the Big Bang to Black Holes)' by Stephen Hawking to help with all track title meanings etc. This is because I believe there is a very good chance that this best seller from 1988 could well have been read by Heinrich Mueller, not to mention James Stinson. It's been read by just about everyone else of that generation so why not them! Going further, I would hazard a guess that it might well still be on Muellers reading list as so many of the titles can be found in the glossary or within the book itself. And why not, you might as well go to the master in this field, just because he's popularly known shouldn't come into it. Also Hawking's groundbreaking ‘No Boundary Proposal’ gets a name check. Although I have no doubt Mueller has used many reference points in his research. It's not a bad book to read as accompaniment when listening to the album as well, as I have been doing at times for the sake of this article myself. But first I will look at the most obvious thing, the music.
-
The most obvious difference on this album to his music since 2003 is that it is very accessible. Before this I felt he was trying to get us to listen to music objectively and question everything we had previously thought about it while also introducing us to equally new and challenging subjects such as high energy physics and quantum mechanics. On this album he really has lightened up on the experimentation for some reason, maybe he doesn't want us to have any expectations of what to expect from him or he just wanted to flex his muscles in the old way to teach the other producers who's still the boss! Whatever reason he had for it I'm grateful, it wouldn't last beyond this album anyway, not that that matters but 'Inertial Frame' is a slight return.
-
‘Universe Oscillation’ is a very accessible and slight (in a good way) opener. It has a disembodied voice type sample which gives it a gothic feel, it would not be out of place as a Black Replica track. The tempo is slow and meditative but still richly textured and engaging. As I was saying, the synergy between subject matter and music which I have been examining in his music since ‘Linear Accelerator’ evolves on this album or is simply not present depending on how you look at it. He will certainly be returning to this experimental template a year later with ‘Calabi Yau Spaces’, so he has some parallel thinking going on but on this album the music is pretty much accessible throughout. Is this a return to ‘94-‘97 era Dopplereffekt, no, not to that extent, but a step on from it maybe, a middle ground between his old and new approaches.
-
'Großvater Paradoxon' is so lush, Its beautifully drawn out slow melody is soon joined by the most alien sounding male vocodered voice speaking the title of the track, which is German. This is just gorgeous, totally mysterious, and definitely that word again, alien. It just floats along, with the voice slowing down to almost comic speed, it could play forever in this way, timeless. After such an incredible run do far, Mueller surprisingly, in my opinion, drops the ball on the next one, ‘Axis of Rotation’. It just kind of begins out of step with what has gone previous, it’s a choppy track anyway, the drums are kind of clumsy but I guess that is what he wanted. I guess if you listen to it in isolation from the album it is perfectly fine but in this sequence it kind of doesn’t work well. It has some nice touches at the middle point and towards the end though where the beats drop out and some nice atmospherics appear.
-
Talking about sequencing, if he had had the next track, ’Infinite Density’, third then I would be telling you about the three near perfect tracks which open this album. This is outstanding, another timeless piece of music for the ages from Mueller. It’s no wonder it was picked to be on the 12” to promote the album. It’s really something and probably quite simple in construction but impossible to replicate by anyone else. The synth lines are of the ether, the bass line a never ending puzzle, the beat is solid and manages to ground the whole thing into cohesion. But as I said, try to replicate it and see how far you get. ’Zero Volume’ has a huge wobbly bass-line, high frequency showers and plenty of what sound like vocal samples for atmosphere. A male vocal simply sings “Singularity“ till the end when it adds, “Time, space, infinity”. With already two standouts this album is quality, but can he keep up the pace? Well, on “Twin Paradox” I would say so but this is so slight it is almost ephemeral. More atmospherics than melody here which works well. There are interference and dropout sounds which make the male voice intoning of “Twin paradox, elements of time and space” sound like some lost spaceman from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the voice and message is intriguing enough to suck us along throughout though. It’s another nice but I would say, unexpected track at this stage.
-
In the same way that ‘Axis of Rotation’ kind of bumps you out of the flow, after the dreamy ‘Twin Paradox’, so does ’No Boundry Condition‘. It is hard to sequence this stuff when an album is pulling in two so distinct musical directions but this is not necessarily a mistake. It’s obviously how he wanted it to be, if it jars us then that is what it might be meant to do. I remember Radiohead talking about how hard it was for them to sequence the famously experimental and varied tracks on ‘Kid A‘. The track itself literally gallops along, totally unlike any tempo we’ve heard so far. Hard to imagine people dancing to this one but it is featured on the 12”, it definitely does have an accessible appeal and showcases the other side of an album that as I mentioned has very much two sides. No vocals on this one but it does give you a full, if somewhat angular, workout. ‘Schwarzchild Radius’ sounds a bit like an after thought, it is a bit short at just under 3 minutes alright. I’m not saying it’s incomplete, it does its atmospheric job very nicely but it's not one you’d remember. 'Event Horizon’ on the other hand is easy to remember. Another epic, great vocals, bass-line and snappy snare. This is also on the 12” an instrumental version entitled, ‘Event Horizon (Beneath The Photonsphere)’. There is a comic dread in the vocal here, not sure if it’s intentional, but it goes, “Below the autosphere, you are very near, event horizon, event horizon, articles come near and disappear.” That is it sounds like he saying 'autosphere' but I can't find a meaning for that word. Regardless, there are some lovely sounds on this one, it's the longest track as well at over 6 minutes. In fact all the tracks are of reasonable length on the album. ‘Chandrasekhars Limit’ is where he does his ‘this could be a genre from another dimension’ bit. I say that because it does have an element that might be techno but not quite, something is off, it's got too many distracting atmospherics floating through it maybe. Not to contradict myself completely but it does also kind of remind me of something either of his own or Drexciya that has gone before. It also does sound to me maybe not fully realised, I don’t know. Its fine but not one your memory will retain for very long. ‘Ergosphere’ fits in well but similarly doesn’t really sound fully realised. I hate to be harsh but it is kind of more filler, but at just under 3 minutes it doesn’t really distract from the album. Someone else might disagree but I think it is well judged enough for it to be included. You might well think the end of this album is really turning into a dumping ground of sorts, but it is tasteful trash, but Mueller better come through for us! He doesn’t quite just yet, at just over the 2 minute mark ‘Lorentz Contraction’ is a quick diversion of weird spacey sounds with not much of a melody but as Muller has told us previously, “...everyone has a different perspective of what rhythm is. Percussion is not the only source of rhythm, waveforms are also rhythms. Patterns that repeat themselves is rhythm. No certain sound or percussive element is exclusively a rhythm, every element produces its own rhythm." But yes, he does redeem himself! ’Gravitational Lense’ starts off great, very clean and clinical up to the 1 minute 30 sec mark where it morphs, in a very Black Replica way, into something else entirely. The vocal goes, “Gravitational lens, visible light begins to bend." The spelling is again wrong, it should be spelt Lens. The second part is pretty different from what has gone before and I have to compare it to 'Spider Theory' by Black Replica in style. It has some weird percussion and other sounds which move about till it suddenly fades out at just over 3 minutes. This final track of the album started off so promisingly but really takes an unexpected turn. It's almost too obvious with hindsight to say that its there to signify his turn towards Black Replica but maybe he wanted to make it that obvious or else it is just a coincidence, who knows. Musically I love this album, it would be a real shame if fans of his more accessible style didn't check it out for fear it was more like 'Linear Accelerator', I think it fits well between both of those extremes. It's also an album that has inspired probably the most fans to make video's for its tracks, so that tells you something as well.
-
So what is it all about? Well, before I go into my own version of what it means, Mueller himself went out of his way to go deeper for our sakes when not long after the release of the album he produced two radio style programmes for the internet based Cybernetic Broadcasting System. There were two of them, entitled 'Time-Shifting' and 'Relativity'. They took the form of a series of questions and answers plus snippets of unreleased music in-between. I won't transcribe the entire text for you, they can still be listened to anyway, links at base of article, but I will list the questions for you in the hope you will be intrigued enough to listen to the answers for yourselves. A digitally treated female voice asks the questions and a male, not Mueller, answers. There were also German and French versions made, I heard the German and it is the same people/voices speaking. In the ‘Time Shifting’ programme the questions are as follows, "What are characteristics of time in a rapidly moving system? In a gravitational field does time move more slowly? Could you explain time travel? Explain the Grandfather and Twins Paradox? Do wormholes actually exist? Can time travel be realised based on current knowledge of technology? If we were able to move from the past to the future, what consequences would there be for mankind?”
-
The questions for the programme entitled ‘Relativity’ are, “There are three dimensions for objects in physical space and one dimension composed of time, how does the time dimension effect the other three spatial dimensions? Why do we say time is running but never space is running? What are the basic concepts of the general and special theory of relativity? According to the big bang theory, the cosmos originated as a singularity and has continuously expanded. Will the cosmos continue to expand or will the universe eventually collapse due to gravitational forces? When life terminates for a star, it collapses inward and forms a black hole. Is the surrounding region of space effected? What is the definition of space-time curvature in terms of gravity? What is the true nature of gravitational waveforms, are they longitudinal or transversal in behaviour, can they be detected, can single pulsations effect the fabric of the space time continuum? Do we exist in a single universe or do we exist in multiple universes? How close are we to the synthesis of all the fundamental forces into a single grand unification theory? Can all the laws of physics from observable phenomenon be summarised into one elegant theory, the ultimate equation?” That is a pretty broad and all inclusive amount of information which after reading this article you might benefit further from reading. I won't break the music down to review each of the unreleased pieces but they are mostly short and kind of rough, atmospheres in the main, best to hear them yourselves. Some nice bits can be found and there is one complete unreleased track which has already been isolated and posted on You Tube, link below. Surprisingly there is nothing from the album, go figure, more new stuff for us though, a nice gesture and glimpse into what else was happening in his studio around this time. I would love to know where the voices come from or if it is an entirely new creation. As I said, the answers themselves are authoritative and informative, proof that he does expect people, if they desire, to think about these subjects which he presents. He has of course been giving 'data-links' to companies or organisations like Cern, Desy, NTT DoCoMo etc before so that we could do just that ourselves but in this case he has really gone out of his way, taking it to the next level to give those who want it an extra with extras. Maybe at some point in the future he will release a whole album as a CD ROM with additional information, graphs, movies etc, it would certainly suit the subjects he is covering but maybe it would be going too far, the important thing is that we do our own research. People like to find their own ways into a subject and take what they want from it. You are free to stop reading anytime!
-
Best to start with the meaning of the album and 12” titles. The word inertial comes from inert, which means passive, not moving, I hope this still makes sense to you when joined with frame. The two titles of the 12” and album can actually be run together as well. In physics, an ‘inertial frame of reference’ is a frame of reference in which physical laws hold in their simplest form. For example, an inertial frame of reference is one in which the motion of a particle not subject to forces moves in a straight line at constant speed or that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers regardless of the state of motion of the source. This is classical physics, the basics which you need to go further, which this album most definitely does. In a way you can look at the actual physical record and CD as a framework which contains other information as the titles themselves have no direct connection with the main subjects which you find here, black-holes, time-travel and a bit of string theory. The titles are literally like the covers of a book, the necessary frame for what they contain between them. That’s how I’m interpreting them anyway!
-
The first track, ‘Universe Oscillation’, as you can guess does not have a specific scientific meaning, it‘s like saying radiant sunshine or something. But it could also be written as vibration of the universe which gives it a much more human or life/nature ring. In this context I suppose it’s some sort of acknowledgement of the enormity of the spectacle of the workings of the universe and its inherent natural mystery. A kind of glance at the problem before going into some of the detail. I’m not going to go into each title in order as I think they are better understood if broken into the two main subjects.
-
That first and most obvious subject is that of black holes, although Mueller may see it as being the wider subject of relativity. In space, any object smaller than its ‘Schwarzschild Radius’ is called a black hole. Schwarzschild himself is pictured. The surface at the Schwarzschild radius acts as an ‘Event Horizon’ in a non-rotating body. An event horizon is a boundary in space-time, an area surrounding a black hole or in fact a wormhole, more on this later, inside which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach this outside observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side disappears. Basically a black hole is a hole in space-time. It is a theoretical region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The ‘Chandrasekhar Limit’ is the maximum possible mass of a stable cold star, above which it must collapse to a black hole. ‘Axis of Rotation’ refers to a discovery that the size and shape of a black hole is determined by its mass and rate of rotation. Before this people wondered if a black hole pulsated or rotated. ‘Zero Volume’ is the state of ‘Infinite Density’ which it is theorised you would discover at the bottom of a black hole. The ‘Ergosphere’ is a region located outside a black hole. Its name is derived from the Greek word ergon, which means “work”. It received this name because it is theoretically possible to extract energy and mass from the black hole in this region.
-
In my opinion, ‘Gravitational Lense’ is the title which links this subject most obviously with the theme of time-travel or ‘Time-Shifting’ as Mueller may prefer to call it. A Gravitational Lens is formed when the light from a very distant, bright source (such as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a black hole) between the source object and the observer. The process is known as gravitational lensing. It was discovered by Orest Chwolson in 1924. He speculated that the gravity from a massive object such as a black hole can warp space-time, bending everything in it - including the paths followed by light rays from a bright background source. This subject of time-travel continues in the remainder of the titles. There is an amazing remix of Gravitational Lense' entitled 'Chwolson Xallarap Remix' supposedly by Arpanet. It just appeared online mysteriously but something tells me it is legit, or else whoever did it really knows their stuff as the title refers to the already mentioned Orest Danilovich Chwolson (1852-1934), the Russian physicist who is most noted for being one of the first people to study the gravitational lens effect and the fact that the Xallarap effect (an analogy of parallax) is a variation in a gravitational lensing observation caused by the orbital motion of the source. I have included a link to it for you anyway, so make up your own mind. For certain this album has the most additional material so far. The internet is such a great place to put that type of stuff, like the radio programmes and any extra remixes etc so maybe because he moved so directly into embracing MySpace during this period with Black Replica, Zwischenwelt and latterly Zerkalo, he was here testing those hyperspace waters a bit? Seeing what type of response he got and would people pick up on it. Right at the start of Arpanet don't forget there was text on an official Arpanet website for 'Wireless Internet' which promised that everything to do with communicating with the band etc would be done electronically. I said in the article for that album that he was just a few years ahead of his time with this idea and it should then have come as no wonder when he so readily embraced MySpace when it came along.
-
In physics, the ‘Twin Paradox’ is a thought experiment of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, in which a person who makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket will return home to find he or she has aged less than an identical twin who stayed on Earth. This result appears puzzling, since the situation seems symmetrical, as the latter twin can be considered to have done the travelling with respect to the former. On the other hand, ‘Großvater Paradoxon’ is German for Grandfather Paradox which is this: suppose a man travelled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveller's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveller's parents (and by extension, the traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived, allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox. The grandfather paradox has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible. However, a number of possible ways of avoiding the paradox have been proposed, such as the idea that the timeline is fixed and unchangeable, or the idea that the time traveller will end up in a parallel timeline, while the timeline in which the traveller was born remains independent. As mentioned, these two paradoxes are explained in the radio show.
-
Some evidence of this line of thought emerging can be detected in the titling of his remixes as Heinrich Mueller for Duplex in 2005 as ‘Time Dilation 1 & 2‘. Time dilation is the phenomenon whereby an observer finds that another's clock, which is physically identical to their own, is ticking at a slower rate as measured by their own clock. This is often interpreted as time "slowing down" for the other clock, but that is only true in the context of the observer's frame of reference. In Einstein's theory of relativity, time dilation is manifested in two circumstances. In special relativity, clocks that are moving with respect to an inertial system of observation are measured to be running slower. This effect is described precisely by the Lorentz Transformation. In general relativity, clocks at lower potentials in a gravitational field - such as in proximity to a planet - are found to be running slower. This of course brings in the possibility of other dimensions which Drexciya’s Storm Series was partly concerned with. This ties in with the picture of a wormhole which we find in the artwork. I found an exact but labelled copy of the diagram online, as shown. A wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of space-time that is basically a 'shortcut' through space and time. Space-time can be viewed as a 2D surface, and when 'folded' over, a wormhole bridge can be formed. A wormhole has at least two mouths which are connected to a single throat or tube. If the wormhole is traversable, matter can 'travel' from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat. This appears to be the link with Dopplereffekt's 'Calabi Yau Spaces' album of 2007 which is largely concerned with string theory, but more on that album when I get there.
-
‘Lorentz Contraction’, according to Hendrik Lorenz, is in physics, contraction or foreshortening of a moving body in the direction of its motion. This contraction only becomes noticeable, however, at a substantial fraction of the speed of light and the contraction is only in the direction parallel to the direction in which the observed body is travelling. It also more importantly served as the basis for the mathematics of Einstein's theory of relativity.
-
‘No Boundry Condition’, which is also spelt wrong by the way, is the theory that the universe is finite but has no boundary in imaginary time. Which sounds like a paradox but it's an idea that comes from the quantum theory of gravity, which as we learned when examining 'Quantum Transposition', is not a field which behaves as we would normally expect it to. This is one of Stephen Hawking’s theories and he says this about it if it is so, "There would be no singularity at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time." I suppose I need to explain what makes this idea significant in the first place. Hawking believes there are two types of time, real and imaginary. In real time the universe has a beginning and end, points at which the laws of science break down, it is said to have singularity. But using imaginary time then we can imagine having infinity with no boundaries of beginning and end. Hawking again says, “Which is real, ‘real’ or ’imaginary’ time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.” It is just a model, they have yet to prove it.
-
The covers of both the 12" and album are light cones. Which are said to be a surface in space-time that marks out the possible directions for light rays passing through a given event. I first found a matching diagram of them in Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time', in it he tells us that they are to do with Einstein's special theory of relativity and that we may construct a light cone for every event in space time. But in general relativity, the future light cone is the boundary of the casual future of a point and the past light cone is the boundary of its casual past. This all happens in something called Minkowski Space-time by the way. Regarding the upcoming 'Calabi Yau Spaces' album it's also worth keeping in mind Minkowski space-time is the mathematical setting in which the theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated. In this setting the three ordinary dimensions of space are combined with a single dimension of time to form a four-dimensional manifold for representing space-time. I have included here a labelled diagram and hope it is informative. It is a neat image and works well to sum up the subject matter of the album.
-
But how to sum all this up? Well if we simply go back to what Mueller himself said about the album being “an ode about science, a celebration of its own power,” and then look at the fact that he has posed and gone to the trouble of answering certain questions on this subject. I suppose the most obvious thing on one level is that he is trying to give us a taste and encourage us to experience the power of science which he feels. He is trying to coax us along and I'm sure there are people, like myself, who are yielding to this call and learning new things, seeing things differently and ultimately mentally evolving. With Drexciya and his own projects there was always a mysterious and intriguing aspect built in anyway, but this time he is using that factor plus the subject matter to pull us in a very specific direction. If Muller was a visual artist I would ask the question is he was an object or process based artist. In Mueller's case I would say he is an object artist, meaning he works on the process privately then presents the finished product. An artist who puts an emphasis on process usually works in collaboration or with a community group for example and the nature of their finished product could never have been arrived at by the artist alone. The process is equally important, if not more so, than to the finished object. The object artists work is usually internal, private, even secret. This does suit Mueller, the twist with him though is, since at least 2003, he has been inviting us in to view the process. He is not inviting us to help him in the classic workshop scenario but on the most basic level I believe he is at least trying to inspire in us a measure of the power of science of which he himself feels. Mind you, one of the reasons he has given us his email address in the artwork may not be simply for live promoters to get in touch, not long after this album he began appearing live, but he might be hoping to make connections with people with similar interests to discuss the subject. He is giving us an insight into his thought process anyway if not his working method. He might not realise he is doing this. Not every artist does this, many prefer to keep it secret, to increase the mystery or illusion of mystery. I know this is the exact opposite of what most people associate Drexciya and Mueller with, you would be surprised how much is actually on display if you look a little deeper. It is only the obvious surface level stuff they keep from us and sadly that surface stuff is what most musical artists give us, which is what we have come now to expect so when it is not there we label them as mysterious and secretive. Maybe I am reading too much into all of this but this time around there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is what he is trying to do. Of course if you can extrapolate out huge amounts of data from the smallest scrap of printed paper (paper making, chemistry of inks, history of printing, concept of writing etc etc) when your working from a whole album you will find things in that forever (don't worry, I will be stopping soon!) and since 2003 he's introduced his fans to high energy physics, quantum theory, relativity and coming up soon, string theory. This is a micro journey of subatomic discovery which has macro impact on a universal level. After all that it is truly as Mueller stated, “an ode about science, a celebration of its own power.” but a power we can also begin to feel, a journey of discovery we can take together.
-
Which makes his next move a puzzle but one I'm sure I will bring more light to when I examine Black Replica.
-
Full length Unreleased Arpanet Track from Radio Programme
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhPrVoJUExk
Arpanet - Time Shifting Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOeoFQl_QvA
Arpanet - Relativity Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilYkC3_0LY
Arpanet live at Le Geode, Paris 22nd June 2006 (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFLRFxJ-I-E
Arpanet - Gravitational Lense (Chwolson Xallarap Remix)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB0_ZxbK0WQ
Universe Oscillation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySE2D2i5r3g
Infinite Density
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_UQagTuah4
Axis of Rotation (Audio)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olon9Dp9hY8
No Boundary Condition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzf9TuhaGv0
Useful links
http://everythingforever.com/hawking.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b7xer66ifQ
http://www.cbs.nu/