The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..

luka

Well-known member
(is that true? Does a minor key sound 'sad' to people wherever they're from?)

someone called rogues foam wrote a bit about this here (he only posted for about a week)

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=9223&page=3

I would strongly dispute that the emotional aesthetic of major and minor scale are universal. It wasn't until the eighteenth century that the dichotomy of happy and sad really took hold. Some Renaissance theorists (eg Zarlino) had it the opposite way around. French Baroque music is often in the minor key simply as a convention and it still expresses positive emotions, and some very joyful Yiddish music uses scales that sound to our ears like minor scales. Musical cultures all over the world that don't use major or minor scales at all still manage to produce music expressive of or suited to particular emotional atmospheres.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Lol, you really are a professional sourfaced cunt, aren't you?

I Try, Darling.

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So you've got something like this right. Sonically this is fairly close to psychedelic in my mind, even though I feel very much opposed to psychedelic attitudes or at least a perception of them - the choral reverb on the Tracy verse, the chorus alternating between keys, the droning of the production and the way the 808 bass hits right upon that first verse sounding like plunging and immersion/submersion INTO the record.

I don't know if this fits in the psychedelia Luka's describing however because its so in conflict and obsessed with its sense of feeling, although I'm perhaps childishly taking it a bit too literal.
 

luka

Well-known member
I Try, Darling.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h_d8UexY9yQ" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So you've got something like this right. Sonically this is fairly close to psychedelic in my mind, even though I feel very much opposed to psychedelic attitudes or at least a perception of them - the choral reverb on the Tracy verse, the chorus alternating between keys, the droning of the production and the way the 808 bass hits right upon that first verse sounding like plunging and immersion/submersion INTO the record.

I don't know if this fits in the psychedelia Luka's describing however because its so in conflict and obsessed with its sense of feeling, although I'm perhaps childishly taking it a bit too literal.

it sounds a bit woozy/melty/druggy/altered statey but not psychedelic. it stays within the frame. it doesn't morph into anything else. doesn't change register. none of the mercurial and protean properties of the psychedelic state.
in psychedelia meaning multiplies while form melts away.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The assertion being that music isn't psychedelic anymore so it's not nourishing

But music takes us away from the mental machinations required to attain a psychedelic distance from the self

It returns us to emotion and physicality. It cuts like a ray of sunshine through the clouds we conjure with our frontal lobes.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Moreover

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury

Music can be as transcendently directed as it likes

But without the emotional charge it might as well be the sound of an engine droning

(I'm drunk)
 

luka

Well-known member
it sounds a bit woozy/melty/druggy/altered statey but not psychedelic.

to expand a little on this distinction psychedelics are not diassociatives. at the heart of the experience is clarity rather than confusion. not bad information (seeing things, delusional thinking etc) but more information. meaning multiplies. (which is why Mcluhan called LSD the lazy man's Finnegans Wake)

the nub of the experience is not the hallucinations and perceptual and cognitive distortions which surround the threshold, as entertaining as these may be, but the space we break into (" "The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru' from quotidien into 'divine or permanent world" E.P.), beyond that threshold.

before that, waves, which roll in, break over us, submerge us completely, before receding again, so this rhythm of in and out, under and back up again. this exchange of one element for the other. how long can you stay under? adjusting to this new medium.
until ultimately you realise you can breathe there.

and paradoxically it is here, at the furthest reaches of the unknown, we feel as if we have finally made it home. flush of astonished recognition. as if this were our rightful inheritance and homeland, withheld somehow (why? by who? and how?), until this moment.

the trance. the pearl at the bottom of the lake.
or as if you could sit under the bo tree until every one of your sequential incarnations unspool before the minds eye from now to single molecule squirming in the prebiotic yoghurt, monad of blind instinct in the cosmic slop.
keeping all this as immanence, that is to say, deliberately postponing transcendence, that is, surrender, the white light and the vision annihilated.

increasingly i link this blinding white light of transcendence, this overload of bliss and awe, with Burroughs' Orgasm-Death Gimmick. A limit. A locked door. An expulsion even. tricked into repeating the level, or ride the snake back to square one.

you've seen enough, time to go now. and you think of all those occult secrets Sting posesses, techniques of tantric ecstasy in which orgasm is delayed indefinitely.

were you there long enough to take notes? did you keep your wits about you or were you overawed? another reason I think Miles with his extended planes of immanence is so interesting.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
But without the emotional charge it might as well be the sound of an engine droning


whats wrong with an engine droning? Sound is pure creation, it is the pure absolute. even in the beginning there is a singularity, pure light as absolute sound. and then the split occurs.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You know what looking back you're point is well taken... And really this is what Luka's been talking about soul vs psychedelica - the emotional self, the transcendent total (it's all very Yeatsian - stages of the moon and all that)

I was harking back to Woebot's original assertion, that people weren't engaged with new music because it isn't psychedelic, isn't transcendent. And all I was saying (redundantly or not) is that being transcendent isn't enough for people to be engaged by music - the nuts and bolts of music, though technical, are emotional.

But then - am I falling prey to a simplistic idea of the emotional spectrum? I'm thinking of the obvious emotions - happiness, sadness, wistfulness (hello barty), excitement, anger, etc. To feel contemplative, to feel depersonalised, to feel transcendent - these are all emotions too

But for most people, I'd assert, the most people that Woebot refers to in his original post, they want the obvious emotions, the all-too-human emotions, to be triggered - actually this loops me back to what I was saying earlier about the perfect music for me being that which balances a psychedelic manipulation of sound (and might even lyrically allude to inhuman/transcendent states) with those simple, most powerful emotions and passions. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' balances 'Nothing is real' with a beautiful chord sequence and melody and so on... Obvious stuff.

Anyway, I'm happy that I felt empowered by booze to throw aside all this nuance because alcohol is the least psychedelic of drugs and so albeit accidentally I've shown the power of the alltoohuman will in forming a clenched fist.

I'm also increasingly interested in this idea that we live in an age where the self has been of supreme importance, at least in our Western culture. As mad as Yeats's ideas sound there is wisdom in them.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
You know what looking back you're point is well taken... And really this is what Luka's been talking about soul vs psychedelica - the emotional self, the transcendent total (it's all very Yeatsian - stages of the moon and all that)

I was harking back to Woebot's original assertion, that people weren't engaged with new music because it isn't psychedelic, isn't transcendent. And all I was saying (redundantly or not) is that being transcendent isn't enough for people to be engaged by music - the nuts and bolts of music, though technical, are emotional.

But then - am I falling prey to a simplistic idea of the emotional spectrum? I'm thinking of the obvious emotions - happiness, sadness, wistfulness (hello barty), excitement, anger, etc. To feel contemplative, to feel depersonalised, to feel transcendent - these are all emotions too

But for most people, I'd assert, the most people that Woebot refers to in his original post, they want the obvious emotions, the all-too-human emotions, to be triggered - actually this loops me back to what I was saying earlier about the perfect music for me being that which balances a psychedelic manipulation of sound (and might even lyrically allude to inhuman/transcendent states) with those simple, most powerful emotions and passions. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' balances 'Nothing is real' with a beautiful chord sequence and melody and so on... Obvious stuff.

Anyway, I'm happy that I felt empowered by booze to throw aside all this nuance because alcohol is the least psychedelic of drugs and so albeit accidentally I've shown the power of the alltoohuman will in forming a clenched fist.

I'm also increasingly interested in this idea that we live in an age where the self has been of supreme importance, at least in our Western culture. As mad as Yeats's ideas sound there is wisdom in them.


I don't know enough about Yeats but...

Are these obvious emotions tho a byproduct of the commodification of music? Mind you one could argue that the transcendent, and the avant-garde (and especially the underground) is equally as commodified.

i mean you can't escape the black market aspect of acid whichever way you slice it. It's not even a question of squares but circumscribed deviance. How would psychs seem in a world that wasn't structured with the current social relations?

It's not easy to shrug off the critique of pop culture essentially acting as a safety valve. And even an inherent conservatism through fragmentation and reterritorialisation.
 
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luka

Well-known member
a properly psychedelic music in 2018 would have to teach us something new. whether that is something we always were able to do without being aware of it, or if it's genuinely new trick doesn't much matter. it has to expand us in some way. we know all these tricks already. this is the nub of the matter. we know how to do these things. it's easy. we need new challenges.
 

luka

Well-known member
this is why it's possible to believe that music can both act as a safety valve (most of the time) and change the whole world
(more rarely, but it happens)

are we being held back deliberately? this is the kind of tack i would take as regards those sort of questions.
 
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