embrace
accept (a belief, theory, or change) willingly and enthusiastically.

clang
1. when a DJ has an especially bad mix, making the bassline go out of sync and “clang.”
2. a slang term used for robot sex or porn, coming from the sound of machines banging.

In 2019, aya and xin used the expression embrace the clang as a kind of motto for the third instalment of our podcast series. It would be absurd and naive to read the sentence as a call for the implementation of an aesthetic-poietic precept per se, for it seems obvious that a poor technical performance is usually counterproductive. Instead, far from exhausting its reading in the DJ context’s technical import, the expression opens a string of understandings through each word’s network or chain of different —and sometimes unofficial or slang— meanings and its joined connotations.

From the artistic viewpoint, clang could metaphorically refer to the adoption of a sonic (musical, klang) militant defiance to that self-styled chaotic, heterogeneous culture industry that seeks to conceal a widespread uncritically accepted homogeneity, with its generic abstractions, standard formulae, spectacular and image-centered forms, serially manufactured and distributed products, and hollowing out of meaning through the pluralistic equalisation of all trends and scenes. Nevertheless, it could also be understood epistemologically, in such a way that, by means of one of those procedures that we could call dialectical, previously incommensurable systems or structures are brought into connection. This analogy is particularly meaningful in those systems known as Identity Politics —class, race, gender, sexuality and so on—, now represented not as reified structures of essentialist, natural and ahistorical determination, but as real areas of conflict carried out by real people where the Identity gives way to identifications that, constantly subject to mainly historical, political and economical mutations, have to be transcended through an against-the-grain-lecture to reach agency (embrace) on a higher level. For instance, think about queerness as one of the devices for the “psychedelic dismantling of existing reality”, something “cool [clang] and sexy [robots banging]”, closer to Ian Penman’s now-classic review of Tricky’s Maxinquaye than to commodified, normative queer visions.