Let's think about thoughtlessness

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Interview with Aphex in CRACK magazine:

Do you find yourself more of a thinker or a doer these days?
Definitely a thinker, that's why I'm aware of it. When I'm telling you this I'm telling myself, I'm trying to coach myself. It's like a tool, your mind. It's good for working out problems but if you start letting it decide too much in your life it can go wrong.

Does music help with that?
Totally, yeah, it's meditation. Certain things you have to think about. If you wanted to put some plugins into a folder and get them authorised you're going to have to use your brain to do that boring shit. But the actual composing, you don't want to be thinking for that. You need to think to set things up then you want to channel whatever it is from wherever it's coming from. If you can concentrate long enough and you get to the right place then hopefully you've stopped thinking completely.

My favourite tracks are ones that I can't remember making. I didn't think about them. From running a label for years when we used to get [demo] tapes I'd start at the end and go backwards. Because it was always the [tracks] that people thought that nobody else was gonna like that were the best ones. The first ones, the ones that they think are the best, the ones their ego has decided is the best, are always the most boring.
 

luka

Well-known member
Learning to step aside is very important. The ego is bankrupt. There's something much bigger behind the scenes.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Our project here is to think about music, we're all brainy egghead types, did music once offer an escape from the egg and now we're scrambled?
 

Leo

Well-known member
I feel like i used to walk into a gallery or museum and just have the art wash over me, experience the sensations in the moment. as I've gotten older, I've found I'm immediately thinking -- what is it, what's it trying to say, how successful is it in saying it, how does it stack up against other works by this artists and others, where does it fit into the contemporary scene and the historic arch, etc. -- instead of just experiencing.

there are good aspects about both, but I miss the sensation of experiencing without the evaluating.
 

luka

Well-known member
Ideally you want to be able to switch from mode to mode. To have conscious control of how you interact with, intersect with and receive the FACT.
 

luka

Well-known member
Ideally you want to be able to switch from mode to mode. To have conscious control of how you interact with, intersect with and receive the FACT.

This is what the 'listen to something' thread is about, at least in part. It is a consciousness raising exercise.
 

luka

Well-known member
I touched on some of this stuff in 'the depths' thread. Access to other strata of self and not self.

So the principle here, again, is don’t stare. There’s something very cold in the stare and you can see it especially I think in a lot of the novels, American novels and their English imitations in particular, of the 20th century where there is no sympathy with what is being described. There’s a sadistic element to the stare, always, I would say. I had a vision a few years ago horrifyingly vivid and unarguably 'true' in as

much as it represented something real, of an aspect of myself represented

as a cold, sadistic, hard face, just like mine can be sometimes in fact, kind

of like Foucault's, with the bald head and glasses and trace of perversion-

and it was hovering above the other faces, as though there were a series of

masks, and this the uppermost, and it represented the intellectualising aspect

which detaches, which deliberately puts a screen between self and world, which

treats perception as the scientist treats the frog he's dissecting. it is a self which

is incapable, by design, of experiencing pleasure, hence the perversion and the

sadism.

And this is always the temptation and the trap when we are looking and wanting to capture and describe and encapsulate. Or, lets say, you can have that Lucian Freud attitude with thinks of itself as unflinching, and as honest, whereas in fact it is perverted and sadistic. Very cruel and unnatural. And so what we do again, is we place ourselves within what we are looking at, we get in there, experience it from the inside, what that feels like, the physicality of that, that range of movement, what temperature is it inside there? and how much room do we have to move, is it a kind of fussy space, or a slovenly space, is it rigidly regimented or wildly anarchic? We feel our way in- we note our reaction to it- and we ask, does that reaction tell us something important, and is it telling us about ourselves or about what we are looking at? What is the nature of that content?
 
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droid

Well-known member
Consider Radigue, her detailed and intricate scores, months or years in the making, every twitch of potentiometer mapped and planned before execution. Composition in the classical sense, at odds with others in her mileu. Take Le Monte Young or Lucier and their immediacy - experiment, find the sound, the groove, hit record then extend it, stretch it out, let it breathe.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
This is kind of what the idiot energy thread that petered out p. quick kinda meant to be in some respects.

People kind of think of idiocy/hooliganism in a inherently negative connotation, as a prescriptive element rather than it's more freeing, characteristic elements.

Hendrix was essentially "dumb" in music theory compared to say Miles Davis, who he supposedly sought consul from, but he had a good instinctual feel and approach. He felt it out, rather than charted it out.
 
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