The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..
- Thread starter Woebot
- Start date
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Reading a biography / critical study of Yeats ATM - the imagination is something intrinsic to our nature, as is pretence (the world's a stage). There is an artfulness to all human life, since so much of it is pure invention - right down to our sense of a self. We have learned to lie, to others and to ourselves, in order to survive and prosper.
I always find it fascinating remembering the elaborate imaginative games we would play at school when we were very young. We would assign ourselves roles in some theatrical rendition of adult life and stick to them, and feel often that we really had become something else. The extraordinary strength of the imagination, something we reacquaint ourselves with when on psychedelic drugs.
Of no interest to anybody else but I find it fascinating how the Yeats book chimes in with so much of what Luka is talking about - his desire to transcend reality, and then his recognition that by dreaming so much he has lost touch with his intuition and passion.
yyaldrin
in je ogen waait de wind
what book is this? i like the sound of it
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
The book is 'Yeats: The Man and the Masks' by Richard Ellmann.
Compelled to bring all that up, but reading back I wonder what relevance it has to music - as an abstract thing, at least. I suppose singers and rappers are wearing masks, playing roles. But what about Music for Airports? I suppose I am thinking of how the imagination is this overdeveloped thing in humans, so that we can project all sorts of images and associations onto 'mere' sound. But then there is the mystery of the emotional power of music, which I don't suppose has anything to do with imagination (is that true? Does a minor key sound 'sad' to people wherever they're from?). Its delight in the senses, which is another psychedelic thing - intensification of the senses to awaken our forgotten sense of reality's immanence.
Compelled to bring all that up, but reading back I wonder what relevance it has to music - as an abstract thing, at least. I suppose singers and rappers are wearing masks, playing roles. But what about Music for Airports? I suppose I am thinking of how the imagination is this overdeveloped thing in humans, so that we can project all sorts of images and associations onto 'mere' sound. But then there is the mystery of the emotional power of music, which I don't suppose has anything to do with imagination (is that true? Does a minor key sound 'sad' to people wherever they're from?). Its delight in the senses, which is another psychedelic thing - intensification of the senses to awaken our forgotten sense of reality's immanence.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Also this brings up another of my flogged hobby horses - music criticism. Instrumental music specifically, how it is written about. It's written about as if it conjures up mental images. Are these images conjured up for the average person (including the critic when not in critical mode), and what are these images - do they mean anything? Are they simply a way of translating music into words?
I wonder if we can ever hear sound 'purely' - can a person listen to Ambient Works e.g. as sound, without even the vaguest mental images floating in front of their minds eye?
I wonder if we can ever hear sound 'purely' - can a person listen to Ambient Works e.g. as sound, without even the vaguest mental images floating in front of their minds eye?
luka
Well-known member
soul is the emotions, it's upheaval and torments and exorcisms. i don't think we have emotions
any more and i don't think soul music is possible from where we stand.
in psychedelia the movement is away from the emotions, ultimately, perhaps after a contest,
to rest at a point which tends to be experienced as 'above' or beyond, emotion, transcended.
the impulse is to unknot the emotion, lance the boil, not to wallow in the pain, or to mask it.
which is why psychedelia is distinct from other drug musics. painkillers, booze, opiates, uppers
none of these things can be psychedelic.
i would disagree with sloane and say the present moment is as unpsychedelic as any in my
lifetime. the last real moment of psychedelia (which always has a utopian aspect) was acid
house, and you can see the ripples, jungle is utopian in the proper sense but that's as far as
it goes. after that it's just ghosts and traces and echoes.
psychedelia is a shared dream.
any more and i don't think soul music is possible from where we stand.
in psychedelia the movement is away from the emotions, ultimately, perhaps after a contest,
to rest at a point which tends to be experienced as 'above' or beyond, emotion, transcended.
the impulse is to unknot the emotion, lance the boil, not to wallow in the pain, or to mask it.
which is why psychedelia is distinct from other drug musics. painkillers, booze, opiates, uppers
none of these things can be psychedelic.
i would disagree with sloane and say the present moment is as unpsychedelic as any in my
lifetime. the last real moment of psychedelia (which always has a utopian aspect) was acid
house, and you can see the ripples, jungle is utopian in the proper sense but that's as far as
it goes. after that it's just ghosts and traces and echoes.
psychedelia is a shared dream.
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luka
Well-known member
psychedelia is not just a vision of the perfected self but of the perfected society
"if we could only live like this all the time!"
it's not 'adult' it's magical. it believes in the miracle. the moment of transformation.
for that reason it doesn't 'struggle' for that reason it doesn't believe in history.
"if we could only live like this all the time!"
it's not 'adult' it's magical. it believes in the miracle. the moment of transformation.
for that reason it doesn't 'struggle' for that reason it doesn't believe in history.
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luka
Well-known member
there is a point at which you become less not more than human. it's all a kind of dial twiddling in a sense. body without organs. what can it do where can it go what can it feel what can it process what can it intergrate what does it exclude what threatens it what does it seek what does it shun. does it work in the way you want it to?
luka
Well-known member
where psychedelia connects with futurism is that the impulse is exploratory. to discover. the voyage out.
but again what i think psychedelia discovers is the timeless as opposed to the future.
the Odyssey is psychedelic but it concerns the return home, the other side of the arc, to soul, Penelope, Ithaca, Time.
the cantos begin with the voyage out.
but again what i think psychedelia discovers is the timeless as opposed to the future.
the Odyssey is psychedelic but it concerns the return home, the other side of the arc, to soul, Penelope, Ithaca, Time.
the cantos begin with the voyage out.
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luka
Well-known member
in psychedelia, the subject, the I who suffers, is dissolved.
soul music is all soliloquies, impassioned, made by a particular self
at a particular point in historical time, a particular situation,
and speaking out of that, joyful or lamenting.
a particular, coherent, slice of the timestream, point of personal history,
lurid as a bruise.
with coltrane, as a rule, you still have a subject, the aspirant/seeker
reaching out, striving, attaining, reaching out again, looking for lift-off.
the quintessential motion is climbing, clambering, ascent.
with davis it's already desubjectivised. it's turned inside out
and subjective states become landscapes. it happens on the
horizontal. there's no transcendence posited, allowed for,
no attempt to bootstrap to a higher plane.
it's doubtful whether there is any movement, in the usual
sense. there is change but here the miles move through us
the still point of all becomings.
with coltrane there is variation in affect and intenstiy
with davis variations in landscape and atmosphere.
the desubjectification leads to this turning inside out, and it's disquietingly objective quality.
feelings becoming enviroments
soul music is all soliloquies, impassioned, made by a particular self
at a particular point in historical time, a particular situation,
and speaking out of that, joyful or lamenting.
a particular, coherent, slice of the timestream, point of personal history,
lurid as a bruise.
with coltrane, as a rule, you still have a subject, the aspirant/seeker
reaching out, striving, attaining, reaching out again, looking for lift-off.
the quintessential motion is climbing, clambering, ascent.
with davis it's already desubjectivised. it's turned inside out
and subjective states become landscapes. it happens on the
horizontal. there's no transcendence posited, allowed for,
no attempt to bootstrap to a higher plane.
it's doubtful whether there is any movement, in the usual
sense. there is change but here the miles move through us
the still point of all becomings.
with coltrane there is variation in affect and intenstiy
with davis variations in landscape and atmosphere.
the desubjectification leads to this turning inside out, and it's disquietingly objective quality.
feelings becoming enviroments
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luka
Well-known member
"The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis burst thru from quotidian into ‘divine or permanent world’” as Pound puts it is absent from Miles but it underpins everything Coltrane does. to use Woebot's terms, enlightenment exists in the Coltrane universe but not in the Miles universe (which is infinitely varied and expansive but takes place on the horizontal, a single plane of immanence) .
luka
Well-known member
the first real moment of psychedelia, it's official inauguration, comes with Rimbaud's Lettres du Voyant
"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed - and the supreme scholar! - because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!"
this is where it frees itself from all tradition (including occult and heretical ones) and goes rogue.
"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed - and the supreme scholar! - because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!"
this is where it frees itself from all tradition (including occult and heretical ones) and goes rogue.
luka
Well-known member
the rites of Dionysus, while sacred, are not psychedelic.
affirmatory, yea-saying, celebratory, cathartic, transformative,
but they don't bestow vision in the same sense, are not initiatory in the same sense.
conventionally speaking
Apollo-classicism
Dionysus-romanticism
while the psychedelic would belong to a third, visionary stream.
not measured intellect nor upwelling emotion, neither Reason nor the Passions.
affirmatory, yea-saying, celebratory, cathartic, transformative,
but they don't bestow vision in the same sense, are not initiatory in the same sense.
conventionally speaking
Apollo-classicism
Dionysus-romanticism
while the psychedelic would belong to a third, visionary stream.
not measured intellect nor upwelling emotion, neither Reason nor the Passions.