The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..
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blissblogger
Well-known member
Luka is on to something re. soul versus psychedelia
soul (despite its name) is about the raptures and agonies of being embodied, the human animal with desire, needs...
it's worth remembering that "passion" as we use it today descends from its original Christian meaning of suffering (as in the Passion of Christ)
actually this is reminding me of Mark K-Punk and his Spinozan line about "sad passions" - and how enlightenment comes with leaving behind all the mammalian wants etc - clarity versus the muddiness of emotion
emotion as an affliction, something to be transcended
soul (despite its name) is about the raptures and agonies of being embodied, the human animal with desire, needs...
it's worth remembering that "passion" as we use it today descends from its original Christian meaning of suffering (as in the Passion of Christ)
actually this is reminding me of Mark K-Punk and his Spinozan line about "sad passions" - and how enlightenment comes with leaving behind all the mammalian wants etc - clarity versus the muddiness of emotion
emotion as an affliction, something to be transcended
luka
Well-known member
that's right. it's the soul/spirit distinction hillman takes from jung. and it's what rilke is talking about in the 9th elegy. this idea that what is most precious, and deep and human about us is our soul and not our infant spirit.
or as a kind of temporary malfunction. a knot or blockage.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
And to define yourself - which is the pressure the self exerts on us 24/7/365 until we die. Hate to invoke Lacan since I barely understood him when I was learning about him about eight years ago, but I remember being quite disturbed by his insistence that the self was a complete fiction, nothing more than a blend of external influences. It disturbed me because I thought he was probably onto something. OTOH perhaps that's simply as (potentially) beautiful a fiction as anything else. And emotions - whether or not they're stimulated 'honestly', they're the real thing. I emote therefore I am.
re: Luka's posts above, is today then the least psychedelic time in your life because of the dominance of the self (and the selfie)? The pressure to define oneself has perhaps never been quite as mercilessly exacted on people (particularly young people) than by the internet and social media. We're constantly assaulted by advertising and brands, we're pressurised to advertise OURSELVES.
blissblogger
Well-known member
yes it runs through the culture - the constant obsessive consideration of how you present, a performative sense of the self
as well as social media, YouTube - "broadcast yourself", vlogging etc - is a big part of it.
My son became a cult figure on YouTube with his "montage parody" meme-collages, experienced a sort of micro version of the arc of fame and then decline. As his subscriber base approached 100,000, he did a face reveal - which is apparently something that the fans clamor for, they want to know what the content creator looks like
my daughter obsessively watches vlogs, people doing challenges, cooking strange things, throwing phones off high buildings swaddled in stuff to see if it'll survive - the vlog hosts are insanely hyper, projecting to the camera, just sort of drinking up your gaze with a quality that i've seen in performers like Amy Whinehouse, where their eyes sort of eat you up, that's the best i can describe it - this hunger to be looked at and be the center of attention
if psychedelia is about self-loss and de-individuation, then yes the current culture is the antithesis, it's all about hyper self-consciousness of image and presentation, of constantly seeing how you appear to other people
and having a President of the USA who used to pretend to be his own publicist under the alias John Barron and call up newspapers to give a line of PR self-propaganda (as with the Forbes exaggerating his own wealth thing) is just too Zeitgeisty
droid
Well-known member
Chimes with Nietzsche, Zappfe, Schopenhauer, Thacker, Ligotti... the whole spectrum of pessimist philosophy as well as modern neuroscience & buddhism.
Surprised to hear that Lacan might actually have been right about something.
Mathematics innit.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
I think that's really what I was trying to get at above when mentioning the non-existence of truly separate underground culture
psychedelic exists in the potential between the real + the imagined, the mundane + the mystic. whatever threshold of hyper-reality extinguishes that liminal space, we've crossed it, and absent some heretofore unknown new way of interpreting reality - be that artistic, technological, whatever - I don't see how it's a threshold that can be recrossed. even technological domination (control/alteration) of reality - AR, VR - is a magnification of the real. there is nothing left to imagine.
to paraphrase, welcome to the desert of the hyperreal (and/or the hyperlink).
the prosaic manifestation of that is constant, obsessive self-awareness, and further the constant self-awareness of that self-awareness, or in the words the history of the internet. to know, or be able to know, everything, is to eradicate the unknowable, which the psychedelic requires.
I've listened to much, much woolly psychedelic business of all kinds + good or bad it's inevitably shot through with some kind of wonderment that cannot be artificially recreated. again why I'd distinguish between drug music - which will exist as long as people do drugs, i.e. always - and the psychedelic. think again on the original human psychedelic experience - sacral, the conduit between the mundane + the otherworldly, that is to say the unknowable.
which makes me think again on that hollowness WB mentioned. I feel it, I'm sure we've all felt it. the cliche spiritual of crisis of a post-modern person with no otherworldly beliefs. but you cannot believe what you don't believe, nor go back to some prelapsarian bliss. no answers to the questions, but as ever enjoyable to speculate on. thanks to luka (welcome back!), blissblogger, corpsey + others for thought provoking posts.
i want to get into the really fast hardcore samba stuff for that reason. if anything is psychedelic today its speed, but not in the sense of a monotonous drum pounding at 200 bpm. something that is on the verge of disintegration.
Acid shouldn't be a pleasant experience in the 2010s imo. we live in paranoid times.
Acid shouldn't be a pleasant experience in the 2010s imo. we live in paranoid times.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
I don't have the poetry, philosophy, or crit theory backgrounds of some people here, but I do wonder what Baudrillard would've made of now
social media, VR, authorless memes, constant hyper self-aware self-awareness. how can one simulate an already hyperreal simulation, auto-construct?
I grew up watching Sportscenter on ESPN + it was always an impossible show to parody well b/c it is already simultaneously an outlandish self-parody of itself.
the whole world feels like that now. the psychedelic requires some kind of distance.
social media, VR, authorless memes, constant hyper self-aware self-awareness. how can one simulate an already hyperreal simulation, auto-construct?
I grew up watching Sportscenter on ESPN + it was always an impossible show to parody well b/c it is already simultaneously an outlandish self-parody of itself.
the whole world feels like that now. the psychedelic requires some kind of distance.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
I got you covered over in the other psychedelic thread - hard machinic etc
I disagree about psychedelic but I would agree that speed verging into disintegration is very much a feeling of now, tho as ever I'm sure in music its mostly if not all functional
Yeah i have a warped interpretation of psychedelia since the visual component of psychedelics is entirely abscent for me — its kinda scary being on acid in a crowded room when all your senses blur into synaesthesia.
Hence my favourite psychedelic musics are more alien, hardcore acid, early 80s industrial, darkcore, free jazz scronk, japanoise, etc. the pure psychedlia of the tactile.
There's an artist called ash koosha who is doing a weird vr take on glitch hop, its, they oversell it a bit in the reviews but its worth a listen.
Arca too... but its quite calculated again. graduate seminar aspect as SR put it in one of his blog posts. I don't have a problem with that per se but I find the psychedelic has to go to a place that is more elegant and spontaneous.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
well sure anything can be psychedelic drug music when you're on psychedelic drugs
I personally can't imagine any scenario where I'd want to listen to any kind of harsh noise or skronk on drugs but to each their own
this thread really has 2 related but different conversations, one about the psychedelic, and another about drug musics
blissblogger
Well-known member
Probably feeling smugly vindicated!
He does seem to have anticipated a great deal of the Now - not the actual technical specifics, but how it would play out in terms of the effect on emotions and affect, the phenomenology of a hyper-mediated existence
He was v. early to see the significance of reality TV
Jean B owes quite a bit to Guy Debord and McLuhan - and i'd be surprised if he'd not read The Image, a remarkable book that came out in 1961, by Daniel Boorstin, about a creeping unreality corroding American culture (the book was partly inspired by the first really TV-based presidential campaigns).
Going back even further, Borges anticipated some of the effects of telecommunications on the sense of self in his story "The Aleph", which is fantastic - and quite short. In this passage, some say, he imagines the internet:
"On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to
add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it
“interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern
man.
“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner
sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs,
phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries,
timetables, handbooks, bulletins...”
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our
twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain;
nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed."
luka
Well-known member
it's a bit like looking at clouds without turning them into pirate ships, castles, witches etc.
i think of that type of music as analogous to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry.
first of all, to what extent and in what ways can a single word, take HORSE for instance, operate as a poem?
before you introduce relationships between words, what resonances, what networks of association, what images before the mind's eye, what memories,
does that single word contain/evoke/engender? and the sound of it? sing it
round stretched syllable then sibilance, discreet vocables....
and this is really just the beginning. but it demonstrates how the basic units and building blocks are themselves alive with meaning and affect, have their own irreducible mystery or aura.
as i said on some other thread, it's microscope work. show me the atoms and the molecules, how they interact, which 2 elements combust or otherwise combine, which stay separate and inert?
it asks for a heightened sensitivity, focussed but not fixed attention and an expanded awareness, attention to both sound and your own response to sound. how does this relationship work? how exactly is cause and effect operating here? what's mine and what's yours? and so on and so forth.
there is neither rhythm nor narrative to be carried along by, no downstream to float on, and unlike drone there's no bedrock, no ground. sound emerges from silence vanishes into silence. void. no ground at all.
everything is always starting now. it's always starting anew. and there's no redundancy or repetition. no pattern to forewarn you of what comes next.
all these characteristics can be powerfully synergistic with psychedelics. i wouldn't characterise it as psychedelic music per se but the radical sobriety of it dovetails with psychedelia in a peculiar way just as the radical sobriety of phenomenology also dovetails with psychedelia. the act of attention. you remake the world this way.
be your own brand. yes but. the interesting thing about the internet is that it doesnt change the direction, it accelerates it. that's what i found striking about Jameson's big postmodernism book-(complete with Reynolds quote of endorsement on the back cover)
all the trends and changes and ruptures we associate with the internet are already present and identified in classical postmodernist theory of the '80s. ('70s?) it's textbook.
and certainly the demise of psychedelia is connected with the demise of the shared dream more generally (and how shared dreams merge and morph into Grand Ideologies and back again) and in particular with the fallout from the '60s. it's still all Capitalist Realism with not much Acid Corbynism in sight. the Reality Principle hogging almost all available bandwidth. presumably, at some point the right drug or the right revelation will coincide with the right historical moment and the story will continue.
the vision, or as woebot calls it, the dreaming, is always there, in the way that fascism is always there, dormant but as potent as ever. as empty form. as potential. waiting to be activated.
"but where there's a Way In there's a Way Out... to leap into Faith is always to fall into Darkness" etc etc
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blissblogger
Well-known member
yeah some suggested (artist or art theorist called Seth Price i think) that a lot of what we think of archetypally "internet culture" is just a "more and faster" version of postmodernism
things like vaporwave, or the montage parody meme-collages, or any number of music micro-genres and their attendant video aesthetics - it's just a more frantic and overloaded version of things that were happening in the Eighties - drawing on a much vaster source-bank with much greater combinatorial facility
so things like psychedelia, and rave, are the rejection of "we live, as we dream, alone"?
i was thinking recently about the cultural decline in prestige of dreaming (in the night time sense) .. how people don't see or seek significance in dreams, let alone oracular powers
"dream" now seems to be a wholly secularized and not-at-all oneiric concept - it means "a statistically highly unlikely but nonetheless plausible ambition", usually attached to some kind of poz-think sentiment like "fight for this so hard and it will come true", "if you want it hard enough, you can't fail" etc etc
and this kind of dream is never shared - it's always an individualistic, private dream (fame, success, money)
at the same time they are shared in the sense of being endemic - widely subscribed to, by many more people than hope to achieve it
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Been reading about Yeats's gyres today. Interesting how he describes a cycle of subjectivity and objectivity (not sure if he uses those words, Ellman does) not only in individuals but in history itself - Yeats believing that the rise of ideologies such as communism represented the return of the objective, the individual seeking to be subsumed by the crowd. If you follow Yeats's thinking (a big if) then now I suppose we'd be in a subjective stage, where the individual is almost all that exists.
luka
Well-known member
yes the modernist diagnosis is that we are living out the fag end of an age basically.
everybody should read the vision. it's an amazing, nutty, inspired, magical book. and unlike the white goddess (for instance)
it's fairly easy to understand.
right, aside from some economic ramifications it's already all there. i think that's quite fascinating.
everybody should read the vision. it's an amazing, nutty, inspired, magical book. and unlike the white goddess (for instance)
it's fairly easy to understand.
right, aside from some economic ramifications it's already all there. i think that's quite fascinating.