transversal audio

Transverse Reverse the Universe

Marcelo Expósito

Transverse Reverse the Universe is an experimental version of the Transverse song, itself a detournement of another song from 1970. This track was constructed by transforming certain of Gerald Raunig's concepts — like the temporary overlappings of theory and practice, or of revolutionary and artistic machines — into techniques of production; and specially by digging deep down into the procedures of his transversion. The first part of the track is a dividual reading of the Transverse lyrics, following a very basic Brechtian mechanism of dialectically articulating naturalistic identification and the edition of the voice reinforcing the simple technological, three-dimensional mode of its recording in the reverberating library space of Casa Azul, Málaga. The second part is a machinic reconstruction of Transverse’ theoretical background: Chapter 9 of Gerald Raunig’s book Making Multiplicity, titled "Of Technologies and Transverses". The vocoder used here in a non-conformist, sometimes unfriendly manner, is in itself a conceptual distortion of how this technical effect was originally used in electronic and pop music (from Kraftwerk to Giorgio Moroder) during the 1970s as an — ambivalent — utopian assemblage of human beings and machines. The drone in the background was generated by overlapping layers of Transverse's actual melodic line played on a Rhodes piano, isolated from the original singer's voice and extremely slowed down until it becomes a substrate or the underground roar of the ritornello-like way of (vocoder) theoretical reading. The third part is a secondary expropriation of the detourned 1970 song from Spotify, recorded in the air over and over — until an accident happened when the detourned and the retourned song overlapped by chance in the process. The whole of it was reversed, inversed, and finally speeded up and cut-up edited in order to produce a sonic multiplicity through the construction of this beyond-the-discursive, a-signifying multitude of human-and-non-human singing voices.

Headphones recommended.

For more info about the project see https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity

Voces subsistenciales

Sara Jiménez Fernández

During one of the seminars of the Programa de Estudios Radicales (PER) organized by Suburbia, dedicated to Gerald Raunig’s book Dissemblage and its translation into Spanish, a group of activist researchers drifted through the Lagunillas neighbourhood —the territory discussed in the song—asking neighbours what a “subsistential territory” meant to them. Rather than attempting to represent their answers musically, the residents’ minor voices are assembled in a fragmentary manner, alluding to the multiplicities, the stammerings and the wisdom already present there—which cannot be the object of representation, nor captured, but which resists and persists, generating echoes of a murmuring fabric.

The accompanying rhythm, with its displaced beats, ghost notes, syncopations and broken beats, reflects the incompleteness of the rhythms of a neighbourhood that nevertheless insists and subsists in the present. Broken beats are a fundamental part of Andalusian culture (crystallised as breakbeat), and of Málaga in particular, ranging from flamenco to verdiales, via rave culture, which was particularly significant as a form of cultural, bodily, affective and popular resistance during the 1990s, influenced by the rise of British rave culture and jungle music, and which shattered all the cultural identity frameworks of the region’s folklore.

For more info about the project see https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity

Out of Joint

Polio Brezina

Starting with a certain clean digital quality, it gradually becomes rougher, more pixelated, degraded, and distorted—as an analogy to the digital environment, which, aside from the political, ideological, and social transformations in machinic capitalism, is quite simply spiraling and spinning out of control because everything is becoming increasingly complex. As digital predation and attempts to curb it are devouring more and more resources and clogging up the internet, the sonic aesthetic of the piece gets more and more out of joint. All of this is interrupted by invocating the Lucies, not only as reminders of John Lennon’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Syd Barrett’s Lucy Leave, but also as lucid dreamers, looking for alternative schemes: “Delirious disjointures, desiring machines.”

For more info visit: https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity06-outofjoint.

ΠΝΥΞ - PNYX - Listening to minor voices

Angela Melitopoulos / Kerstin Schrödinger

The Pnyx is a rocky hill in the heart of Athens, surrounded by parkland. On its slope lies a vast platform of eroded rock, as well as the orator's stone.

From 507 BC onwards, the Athenians gathered on the Pnyx to hold their political assemblies. In order to reduce the influence of oligarchic aristocracy on the politics of the polis, they established an assembly for a direct democracy that granted equal rights to ‘free citizens’ –

but excluding women, slaves and foreigners.

This ‘parliament of the world’ ensured the equal application of the laws, whilst at the same time it was a popular assembly capable of neutralising citizens if they posed a threat to the state or were potential tyrants.

For the video and more info see: https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity05-minorvoices.

These Versos Transversos reverberate the verses of Gerald Raunig´s song Far-Near and emerge from the pedagogical and political praxis of an organization of migrant women in Linz, Austria: das-kollektiv.at.

They are verses that reverberate the profound distances and visceral proximities between educator and student along the path of reciprocal and transversal learning to read and write—words, the world—in literacy and German-language courses. Courses where the relationship itself becomes the space of knowledge production. Courses marked by the latent tension between the colonial capitalist normative imperative and the joy arising with the desire to reinvent the world. Becoming-poetry.

The student, here transformed into almost-fiction and embodying many at once, learns to read and write for the first time in her life. In addition to the difficulties common to adult literacy in a foreign language, she experiences difficulties typical of dyslexia, making the process more difficult and protracted and increasing her vulnerability before a state that demands her rapid transformation into a productive workforce. She is a refugee, suffers from heart problems, and divorced her violent husband here in Austria, very near to, very far from Afghanistan, very near to, very far from the Rio de Janeiro of Clarice Lispector’s character in Near to the Wild Heart, resistant to the dominant norms of behavior of her time.

And flowing, these verses reverberate concomitances and distances between struggles, processes, sufferings, joys, violence, achievements, voices, and silences, and cause present, past, and future times to flood into one another, nourishing tomorrows and becomings. Pulsing with the joyful certainty that there is no plan for human life beneath the starry sky of this our planet.

| Ian Salgado: arrangements and guitar

| Rubia Salgado: lyric and vocals

| For more info see: https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity04-versos

Five saxophones haunt the vocals of "This Middle". Within a dense tapestry of sound, each one seeks to duplicate the vocals with its own voice. Between the lines, they swarm like insects and immediately regroup for the next verse, only to follow the voice at the center once more with renewed energy. The deliberate failure to achieve unison is intentional. Imperfectly synchronized, spreading out in a fan-like pattern, pulling toward one another, jostling each other—all the voices join in dynamic resonance and amplify the shared flow. | More info at: https://transversal.at/audio/multiplicity03-middle

This version is an electronic rendition, both vocally and instrumentally, of "Dividual Lines". It is an attempt at a trans(in)dividual expression of the dividual content of the lyrics. | Vocals and vocals effects, Guitar and Korg Kaoss Pad guitar effects and Drum programming on Kaossilator Ko-1 and Kaossilator Pro: Raúl Sánchez Cedillo

Beomora, Viennese funkrock band from the late 1980s, plays a disco version of the opener of „making multiplicity – conceptual songs“, Machinic Capitalism. Bring in an ultra clean Telecaster rhythm guitar, a funky-plucking slap bass, the unavoidable disco strings, and add them to the magical Rhodes and the voice on vinyl. And then just take all the resonant heads off the drums, stretch dish towels over them and add a few old microphones and 32C microphone amplifiers, and off we go pulling on the leash that is a means to unleash ...

C. Kobold: drums, production and mix

A. Koch: drum recording

M. Scheer: mastering

D. Baumgartner: guitar

A. Rührer: bass

A. Frei: basic mix vocals/Rhodes

G. Raunig: Rhodes piano and vocals

Vortrag von Stefan Nowotny auf der Konferenz TOSQUELLES transversal

4. Oktober 2025, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

https://transversal.at/blog/tosquelles-transversal |

Ausgangspunkt des Vortrages ist eine Passage aus der 1948 verteidigten Doktorarbeit von François Tosquelles, in der von einem „Gesichtspunkt des Sozius“ die Rede ist. In ihr verdichten sich nicht nur zentrale Motive von Tosquelles’ Arbeit im Feld psychiatrischer Institutionen, sie wirft auch die Frage nach der relationalen Praxis auf, die einen wichtigen Teil der Genese theoretischer Begrifflichkeiten (wie „Sozius“) im Werk von Deleuze/Guattari bildet. In einer zweiten Bewegung wird Guattaris Begriff der „Transversalität“ in den Zusammenhang der psychoanalytischen Diskussion von Übertragungsphänomenen wiedereingerückt, die in der institutionellen Psychotherapie Namen wie „multireferenzielle Übertragung“ oder „dissoziierte Übertragung“ erhielten. – In beiden Fällen geht es nicht allein um die Feststellung von Verschiebungen und Differenzen. Mehr noch geht es um die Geschmacksveränderungen, zu denen es kommen mag, wenn die durch Tosquelles’ Wirken in der Klinik von Saint-Alban angerührte „mayonnaise albanaise“ (Guattari) in theoriesprachliche Routinen aufs Neue eingerührt wird.

Vortrag von Chritoph Hubatschke auf der Konferenz TOSQUELLES transversal

4. Oktober 2025, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

https://transversal.at/blog/tosquelles-transversal

Der Vortrag fragt nach der Rolle von Technologien und technischen Objekten in der institutionellen Analyse. Zwar finden sich in den Texten der institutionellen Analyse zahlreiche Erwähnungen von technischen Apparaturen und Objekten, doch wird deren Status kaum theoretisiert. Eine gewisse Ausnahme bilden die Arbeiten von Félix Guattari. Im Vortrag wird zunächst die Frage der politischen Organisation am Begriff der Gruppe in Guattaris Frühwerk diskutiert und danach auf drei konkrete Begegnungen Guattaris mit technischen Objekten eingegangen (der Druckerpresse in der Formierung einer Gruppe, dem Tonbandgerät und der Schreibmaschine in der psychoanalytischen Gesprächssituation und dem mobilen Radio-Equipment in den freien Radiobewegungen). Auf je unterschiedliche Weise zeigen sich an diesen Begegnungen Elemente einer Technikphilosophie Guattaris, die nach den transversalen „Technologien der sozialen Beziehungen“ fragt.