shiels
_
This is flirtation, the goading and concealing and resisting. This is the erotic game you all seem to play on here a lot. It's not all about the content, sometimes you just want to see each other at your most passionate.
shiels
_
Self as sphincter is a good line, and has all the psychosexual connotation of shame and discipline and hygiene in how it relates to taste
Of course the rare and exquisite pleasure is in the transgression of your self imposed parameters, when someone can hit the right angle or contextualises something, things line up... and all that you've been denying yourself flows in unrestrained and you know nothing again
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
i don't think i understand this thread.
luke, if someone played you a jaco pastorious song what's the process of you not liking it? is it that you secretly could like it and that you're choosing not to so as to assert a perceived psychological dominance over the person playing it to you? is it to protect a notion of yourself as somebody who doesn't like jaco pastorious?
luke, if someone played you a jaco pastorious song what's the process of you not liking it? is it that you secretly could like it and that you're choosing not to so as to assert a perceived psychological dominance over the person playing it to you? is it to protect a notion of yourself as somebody who doesn't like jaco pastorious?
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
when i did the techno thread i didn't know that you even liked techno (let alone that it was your own personal playlist) till reynolds mentioned it after i'd done 40 of them or something. so this notion of my not getting it being something i chose to do so as to toy with you doesn't really apply (assuming i'm at all barking up the right tree).
i remember the first time i tried to get into techno would have been when i was learning all about the hardcore continuum. so my cognitive bias going in would have been "i love the hardcore continuum, techno's a crucial element in it, so i'm sure i'll love techno". the fact that i didn't like it went against my cognitive bias and my notion of myself. i thought of myself as somebody who liked dance music and it turned out i didn't.
same goes for little 16 year old, old school rap head barty. he loved wu tang and mobb deep and all that. everyone banged on about rakim being great, so i went in assuming that i was going to love it. liking rakim would have totally fit into my 16 year old 'i love old east coast rap' notion of myself. but i heard it and it didn't click. so (again assuming i'm not just being really dumb and going off on one that's totally missed the point) i can't particularly see that as being some attempt to protect a notion of my identity. isn't it just that it wasn't my cup of tea?
i'm sure i've got the wrong end of the stick, but hopefully i'm acting as useful idiot catalyst for this thread
i remember the first time i tried to get into techno would have been when i was learning all about the hardcore continuum. so my cognitive bias going in would have been "i love the hardcore continuum, techno's a crucial element in it, so i'm sure i'll love techno". the fact that i didn't like it went against my cognitive bias and my notion of myself. i thought of myself as somebody who liked dance music and it turned out i didn't.
same goes for little 16 year old, old school rap head barty. he loved wu tang and mobb deep and all that. everyone banged on about rakim being great, so i went in assuming that i was going to love it. liking rakim would have totally fit into my 16 year old 'i love old east coast rap' notion of myself. but i heard it and it didn't click. so (again assuming i'm not just being really dumb and going off on one that's totally missed the point) i can't particularly see that as being some attempt to protect a notion of my identity. isn't it just that it wasn't my cup of tea?
i'm sure i've got the wrong end of the stick, but hopefully i'm acting as useful idiot catalyst for this thread
It's an old cliche but in my own experience techno and house didn't make sense until hearing it on a big soundsystem at a bangin party with lots of chemicals. And even when I got it I didn't like to listen at home and if I did I'd have to imagine how it would sound at a party. Jungle/garage etc made alot more immediate sense to me but house/techno have had more longevity for me.
techno and house came to the UK (relatively) fully formed, so in that sense it has more longevity for us.
jungle was dead after 96 relatively speaking, apart from an underground-of-an-underground people i rate who stick to their guns.
it's the difference I have with barty and Luke's approach really, for me as wanting to understand how elements interract with each other, you could say the post-dub revolution, you can't just choose what you like out of context - well, you can, but then I feel the map is never fully revealed to you. it reminds me of those people on twitter who are still talking about rap city from 95-96 just cos they were *there.*
and an astute observer could now object to all of what I've said with aren't you accentuating the less poppier, more abstract strains to represent the culture, why is said culture important in the first place? Granted, fair point, let's not go too far in mistaking my personal preferences for a cultural dynamic.
but then, why on earth should we give credence to people who bang on about being there? it's the same shit.
because structurally speaking, most accomplished jungle follows the same template of house/techno. with hardcore this lack of structural conservatism made it eventually untenable for djs, corpse did a good thread on that last year. and if you say yeah but house/techno is gridlocked whereas jungle isn't, that's not always been the case with h/t, and drum and bass became even more gridlocked than h/t. this is why I have an issue with music which is made for clubs. dance music is eternal, club music isn't.
people liked Jungle precisely because it was quite musical, despite chatting up how amusical the darker tunes were relative to the intelligent tunes they couldn't see why they had to get off at tech step (bliss told me about how david toop wrote a rejoinder to him about this very subject.) because the way the breakbeats drop relative to the sub bass in jungle is like dropping the bomb in 60s hardbop like Art Blakey. in that regard some tribal house and german techno is far more anti-musical than jungle, just squealing acid lines or grinding noise.
I dunno for me jungle is a form of tactile poetry, and that's how I can square it with my love of techno/electro.
but if i was like oh this da intalex tune reminds me of my first family visit to the beach at marmaris, fucking hell that's just so miserable isn't it? you just become enslaved to the past, to someone elses system.
It's like the people who say they can't read Wuthering Heights or whatever, because it reminds them of breaking up with their ex. like fuck that, I'm not about that, I'm about constant physicality. you clearly liked wuthering heights to lay claim to some kind of authenticity then. stop being rarsclaat.
jungle was dead after 96 relatively speaking, apart from an underground-of-an-underground people i rate who stick to their guns.
it's the difference I have with barty and Luke's approach really, for me as wanting to understand how elements interract with each other, you could say the post-dub revolution, you can't just choose what you like out of context - well, you can, but then I feel the map is never fully revealed to you. it reminds me of those people on twitter who are still talking about rap city from 95-96 just cos they were *there.*
and an astute observer could now object to all of what I've said with aren't you accentuating the less poppier, more abstract strains to represent the culture, why is said culture important in the first place? Granted, fair point, let's not go too far in mistaking my personal preferences for a cultural dynamic.
but then, why on earth should we give credence to people who bang on about being there? it's the same shit.
because structurally speaking, most accomplished jungle follows the same template of house/techno. with hardcore this lack of structural conservatism made it eventually untenable for djs, corpse did a good thread on that last year. and if you say yeah but house/techno is gridlocked whereas jungle isn't, that's not always been the case with h/t, and drum and bass became even more gridlocked than h/t. this is why I have an issue with music which is made for clubs. dance music is eternal, club music isn't.
people liked Jungle precisely because it was quite musical, despite chatting up how amusical the darker tunes were relative to the intelligent tunes they couldn't see why they had to get off at tech step (bliss told me about how david toop wrote a rejoinder to him about this very subject.) because the way the breakbeats drop relative to the sub bass in jungle is like dropping the bomb in 60s hardbop like Art Blakey. in that regard some tribal house and german techno is far more anti-musical than jungle, just squealing acid lines or grinding noise.
I dunno for me jungle is a form of tactile poetry, and that's how I can square it with my love of techno/electro.
but if i was like oh this da intalex tune reminds me of my first family visit to the beach at marmaris, fucking hell that's just so miserable isn't it? you just become enslaved to the past, to someone elses system.
It's like the people who say they can't read Wuthering Heights or whatever, because it reminds them of breaking up with their ex. like fuck that, I'm not about that, I'm about constant physicality. you clearly liked wuthering heights to lay claim to some kind of authenticity then. stop being rarsclaat.
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luka
Well-known member
luka
Well-known member
Barty this isn't a thread solely about you not liking techno music! The two immediate prompts were catalog feeling some weird need to slag off my lovely poems while at the same time saying "but I want to understand" (not that I think that was an act of bad faith, exactly, more some weird psychological mechanism I recognise in myself too) and Woebot talking about the futility of trying to get someone else into something. (Can you remember what thread that was?
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luka
Well-known member
Obviously there is a tension here, one I've never been able to adequately resolve , between, I guess, the notion of a core self, our 'true being' the one that does not and will never like jaco pastorious, and the notion of self as sphincter, which clenches the orifice to resist the experience.
luka
Well-known member
From my own experience there is a danger in assuming your first 'instinctive' reaction to something is reflective of some inner truth or whatever. One of the reasons it is so important to smoke a lot of weed as a teenager while your brain is still developing is that it allows you, as a listener, to move around the sonic object, unweave the layers, hear different aspects of it in turn, isolate drum or bass or voice, uncover emotional resonances, discover patterns, in short, to discover how inadequate our everyday perceptions are in regard to experience itself.
the minimal house/dub reggae convergence.
luka
Well-known member
This is the crux the whole thing, I think. This is still the only place where we can get real results. And it's still fraught with indissoluble contradictions. What is the perfect encounter?
We know that the face an object shows to us changes with each encounter. We know that sometimes we seem to see more, and sometimes less, sometimes with clarity and vigour, sometimes dimly and indistinctly. Sometimes the figure stands out bold and vivid from its ground, at other times it fades into it.
So that even if we reject the idea of the perfect encounter we at least have a scale implicit in this, degrees of clarity and strength. That we may be more or less equal to the encounter. The doors of perception more or less cleansed or cloudy.
And the same holds true for other qualities, for emotional resonance for instance, that we are touched or we fail to be touched. That we are roused by what is rousing, hushed by what is soothing, that we are saddened by what is sorrowful, excited by what is stimulating, aroused by what is arousing, or we are not. That that excitation crosses over into us, or it doesn't.
And also we have some sense of this emotion transmitted being either genuine or false, the true coin or the forgery. Some sense of it being worthy of us or beneath us, something we willingly share or something we are bound to reject, or that we feel cheapened and soiled by.
We have also an axis which runs from the mundane to the sacred and again, separate encounters with the same object can fall anywhere on this scale. Being now numinous, now banal.
And we have some implicit sense of how all this might be coloured by our own moods and prejudices, fears and desires, what we might project onto it or filter the perception of it through.
There's a phrase in Northrop Frye's book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, that reads, 'perception is self-development'. I think that's right. I think we can learn from Blake here. And from all sorts of other people, particularly those concerned with perception and relationship. From Martin Buber and his notion of I and Thou, and from the whole psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tradition and the various ways they have tried to facilitate a kind of perception which is free, as free as possible, from the kind of delusions and pitfalls and failures we have described. Even from notions which perhaps seem messianic, like Carl Rogers demanding unconditional love towards the client. Can we adopt that attitude towards what is before us?
To not interrupt the stimulus before it reaches the heart, to avoid rushing to name it, categorise and define it. Keeping that openness and suspension of judgement as a way to let it work upon you and unfold in its own time-span and time-pulse. To see more of something is always to see it better, to see it in its full magical dimension, as a thing which exists, a part of the fabric of the universe, to see the full extent of its implications and the forces and modes of being it partakes of.
There's a kind of valve, an aperture which can dilate and close, as faith expands and doubt contracts, which governs the immediacy and intensity of the encounter. To what degree we allow it to touch us. What is demanded of us is attention, not a critical, guarded attention but a surrender. This is gestalt's contact boundary, Reich's armouring, any conceptualisation of closing down and opening up.
This work is what the 'listen to this thread' was for but as soon as trust is broken it falls apart which is where the Carl Rogers comes in, where the necessity for an attitude of good will becomes vital. It's very tricky and any impatience or irritation or suspicion of motives makes it impossible. Mostly we fail. Mostly we are inadequate to the encounter, not equal to it. Personalities intrude and position coarsen and harden.
We don't read what people write, we alight on this or that word and fill in the blanks ourselves. We hear assumed intentions and not what is actually said. We don't wait for the stimulus to reach us, we preempt it before it reaches its target define it and calcify it.
And the rock all this founders on, or at least what makes this problematic, is what is discussed in prior posts, how does this relate to an encounter with what we hate, or what we consider second rate, or fraudulent, or pernicious? What happens when we recoil, or sneer or snarl. How do we marry this ideal with our desire to value and to judge, to rank and order and condemn? We don't want to become pious and we don't want to only see 'the good in everything.' We have to be able to see what is rotten too.
I'm not sure how that works yet but I am sure that the old model of music criticism, of liking and disliking and the attempt to impose our own subjectivity on the world at large, has been exploded, is completely defunct and good riddance.
"What'" it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
We know that the face an object shows to us changes with each encounter. We know that sometimes we seem to see more, and sometimes less, sometimes with clarity and vigour, sometimes dimly and indistinctly. Sometimes the figure stands out bold and vivid from its ground, at other times it fades into it.
So that even if we reject the idea of the perfect encounter we at least have a scale implicit in this, degrees of clarity and strength. That we may be more or less equal to the encounter. The doors of perception more or less cleansed or cloudy.
And the same holds true for other qualities, for emotional resonance for instance, that we are touched or we fail to be touched. That we are roused by what is rousing, hushed by what is soothing, that we are saddened by what is sorrowful, excited by what is stimulating, aroused by what is arousing, or we are not. That that excitation crosses over into us, or it doesn't.
And also we have some sense of this emotion transmitted being either genuine or false, the true coin or the forgery. Some sense of it being worthy of us or beneath us, something we willingly share or something we are bound to reject, or that we feel cheapened and soiled by.
We have also an axis which runs from the mundane to the sacred and again, separate encounters with the same object can fall anywhere on this scale. Being now numinous, now banal.
And we have some implicit sense of how all this might be coloured by our own moods and prejudices, fears and desires, what we might project onto it or filter the perception of it through.
There's a phrase in Northrop Frye's book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, that reads, 'perception is self-development'. I think that's right. I think we can learn from Blake here. And from all sorts of other people, particularly those concerned with perception and relationship. From Martin Buber and his notion of I and Thou, and from the whole psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tradition and the various ways they have tried to facilitate a kind of perception which is free, as free as possible, from the kind of delusions and pitfalls and failures we have described. Even from notions which perhaps seem messianic, like Carl Rogers demanding unconditional love towards the client. Can we adopt that attitude towards what is before us?
To not interrupt the stimulus before it reaches the heart, to avoid rushing to name it, categorise and define it. Keeping that openness and suspension of judgement as a way to let it work upon you and unfold in its own time-span and time-pulse. To see more of something is always to see it better, to see it in its full magical dimension, as a thing which exists, a part of the fabric of the universe, to see the full extent of its implications and the forces and modes of being it partakes of.
There's a kind of valve, an aperture which can dilate and close, as faith expands and doubt contracts, which governs the immediacy and intensity of the encounter. To what degree we allow it to touch us. What is demanded of us is attention, not a critical, guarded attention but a surrender. This is gestalt's contact boundary, Reich's armouring, any conceptualisation of closing down and opening up.
This work is what the 'listen to this thread' was for but as soon as trust is broken it falls apart which is where the Carl Rogers comes in, where the necessity for an attitude of good will becomes vital. It's very tricky and any impatience or irritation or suspicion of motives makes it impossible. Mostly we fail. Mostly we are inadequate to the encounter, not equal to it. Personalities intrude and position coarsen and harden.
We don't read what people write, we alight on this or that word and fill in the blanks ourselves. We hear assumed intentions and not what is actually said. We don't wait for the stimulus to reach us, we preempt it before it reaches its target define it and calcify it.
And the rock all this founders on, or at least what makes this problematic, is what is discussed in prior posts, how does this relate to an encounter with what we hate, or what we consider second rate, or fraudulent, or pernicious? What happens when we recoil, or sneer or snarl. How do we marry this ideal with our desire to value and to judge, to rank and order and condemn? We don't want to become pious and we don't want to only see 'the good in everything.' We have to be able to see what is rotten too.
I'm not sure how that works yet but I am sure that the old model of music criticism, of liking and disliking and the attempt to impose our own subjectivity on the world at large, has been exploded, is completely defunct and good riddance.
"What'" it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
luka
Well-known member
The Negative aspect has to be explored. If everything to be believed is an image of truth then we don't want to censor scorn, hate, disgust. But I suppose it has to be detached from any sense of it being wielded as a weapon and taken personally. This is tricky because we all definite ourselves to a large extent, by our taste. In some very real sense, it is who we are. So an attack on what we cherish is an attack on ourselves.
shiels
_
Judgment is about survival, this filtering or categorisation can be a self-protective measure against manipulation, resisting seduction. Because deep emotional responses lead to investment, the nervous system gets hooked. The censor can say yes this key-change on an x factor tear-jerk moment is giving you goosebumps but this is not to be trusted. So the openness you're describing with blake etc maybe isn't just a matter of getting rid of some conditioned response it's probably a result of a life spent toying with perceptions, through play and creating things, trying on enough modes, ways of seeing.. exploring roles and relationships through writing and art you can get to a stage where you don't take any of your reactions and responses too seriously, self awareness/ awareness of selves that allows you to honour and give space to all of the impulses and refractions and odd trajectories that come off exposure to a thing without having to settle on some essentialist truth