I noticed the plateau effect first in Black Up, the Shabbaz Palaces record. Many of the tracks find Lazaro rapping over hodgepodge–buzzes, clicks, off-kilter beats, chopped loops, sounds that belong more to post-dubstep than to mainstream hip hop. It is Lazaro’s flow that gives the tracks coherence. The pieces depend on his rhymes to make sense of otherwise unsteady alliance of sounds. [See especially A Treatise Dedicated . . . and Yeah You].

However, my thoughts on the plateau effect didn’t fully coalesce until I heard Radiohead’s NPR interview on The King of Limbs. When they started making KOL, the band spent five weeks experimenting with loop-creation using a new software. According to Yorke, they ended up producing tracks that were more “sounds and layers flying at each other, like a collage,” than structured songs. Yet Yorke says that the moment he recorded his vocals, the tracks made sense; that he unleashed latent melodies with his singing. You can hear this phenomenon so well on Bloom, the first track of the album. Yorke doesn’t come in for a whole minute. But when he does, you move from listening to a collection of sounds, to hearing a song.

For me, a song produces the plateau effect with these three elements: 1. an unstable alliance of sounds–you are not even sure if they “go” together 2. an element that lends coherence to the track, but which comes in after the song has begun (Lazaro’s flow, Yorke’s singing) 3. a continuing sense of the precariousness of this assemblage. So for the third point, we still hear the hodgepodge of sounds underneath Yorke’s vocals, and thus remain aware that the song is built of elements that sound like they might at any point just go their own separate ways.

The name “plateau effect” is loosely inspired by philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of a plateau, “an intensive continuity” composed of “very heterogeneous elements” (cf Two Regimes of Madness, pp. 176 – 179). The plateau effect draws attention to the fact that the elements (sounds) that make up a specific intensive continuity (song) are “very heterogeneous” (don’t obviously belong together). At the same time, the plateau effect also highlights (via the vocals) the unity of the “plateau,” and the fact that we have a tendency to see things as units versus assemblages.

The plateau effect is unsettling. Its reliance on an unsteady combination of sounds reminds me that objects–in this case, songs–are composite, and that the composition is unsteady, temporary. Alliances can be dissolved; objects can pass away. Recognizing the plateau effect in a piece of music is like recognizing that I have trillions of microorganisms in my gut that help me digest my food. My body is an assemblage and my consciousness is an element that represents my body to me as coherent, unified. This is not to say that I do not possess a unified body apart from consciousness! The analogy just helps to highlight that uncanny moment where we come into contact with the fragile interpenetrations that make up objects. It is also the uncanny moment where we sense what is alien within the familiar, that which is in some way “in but not of” (like the microorganism in my intestines, or the blip that helps make the song what it is, but still does not quite fit).

But the plateau effect does more than highlight an object’s fragility and strangeness. It also exposes the power of those elements that obfuscate the fragile (and composite) nature of objects, elements like a sung melody, an author, or a logo. We often mistake these elements for the essences or foundations of an object or assemblage, when in fact they are either emergent properties, single elements among many, or fictions posited after an object’s composition. After you listen to Bloom once, you cannot help but hear the melody even before it comes in, as if it was always already there. Subconsciously you might even begin to smooth over the uncanniness in the music, to consider the song itself as smooth, homogeneous, a nice scoop of vanilla ice-cream.

Stay tuned for my Best Albums of 2011 List, which will present shining examples of the plateau effect in a neatly unified list. “Some you play, then move on, couldn’t find the notes/Some friends they groove on you and haunt you like a ghost/You can’t sleep/Always hear that beat/It flow back to mind, every time you breath” (Shabazz Palaces, The King’s New Clothes . . .).

More music and philosophy mash-ups:

• Animal Collective and The New Future
• Rapitalism Part 1, Part 2
• The Age of Adz and Dexter: Or Madness as the New Hermeneutic Part 1, Part 2
• Juana Molina, Sign, and Ecstatic Utterance

It seems like most of the worthwhile music mashups that have hit my ears in the past year have involved Radiohead (e.g. Minty Fresh’s mashup of Jay-Z and Radiohead, Jadiohead).  Touché.  Why mashup with mortals when you can mashup with gods?

But recently a friend introduced me to DJ Tor’s mashup of Sufjan Stevens and various hip hop artists (Aesop Rock, Outcast, Grand Puba, etc).  It’s called Illinoize.  Touché.  If you don’t mashup with gods, you might as well mashup with an angel.  You can download both the instrumentals and the regular tracks in either MP3 or CD quality files here.  Take a listen and tell me what you think.

Me?  After couple of cursory listens I can say that this new mash is bangin.  For another more extensive but equally glowing review check out what The Wounded Messenger.

With all this co-mingling, I have to ask:  What are the best and worst music mashups that you can imagine?