Horizon Collapse: experimental music and 21st-century temporality

This paper investigates the ways that contemporary experimental music reifies contemporary capitalist temporal logic. The thesis argues that time-consciousness is embedded within musical form, manifesting as a state of ‘horizon collapse’ where temporal meaning is foreclosed, and the past and future are flattened into the present.The theoretical framework integrates Anna Kornbluh’s theories of immediacy, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s concept of semiocapitalism, and a ‘margins-without-centre’ spatial-temporal model adapted from John Sheppard. To mediate between political economy and musicology, the research utilises Georgina Born’s quadripartite model of musical time, which identifies societal, generic, retentional/protentional, and internal formal structures as discrete sites of analysis. By applying Born’s model, the results demonstrate that musical time is a site where capitalist logic is encoded. The analysis of the author’s compositions reveals that while certain modes of reification may be unavoidable, a time-conscious approach to composition generates a dialectical tension between this reification and a search for alternative temporalities. This facilitates a self-critical modality of composition that considers the ethics of aesthetics often rendered invisible by capitalist production. There is no utopian work at the conclusion of this research — only the establishment of a trajectory that seeks to reclaim temporal continuity.The paper comprises two concurrent texts: the first analyses the political economy of time and the encoding of capitalist logics across Born’s model. The second is a creative-reflective text featuring offshoots and deep dives into the author’s compositions, including Immutable Transience (2024–25), Spéculation (2025), and an in-depth quadripartite analysis of SLACK (2025). keywords: time, Political economy, Experimental music