Low End Theory. A book by Nomos

Leo

Well-known member
You can get amazing near audiophile earbuds from China for about €40. Orders of magnitude better than anything Apple or most most phone manufacturers sell. Just received a new batch in the post and the bass is delicious.

got a link?
 

droid

Well-known member
https://penonaudio.com/earphones/earbuds

I always go for earbuds as IEM/ear canal phones don't sit right with me. I'd recommend the toneking tomahawks for budget niceness. Clear, crisp highs and mids and nicely rounded bass.

https://penonaudio.com/earphones/earbuds/musicmaker-tomahawk-mrz-earbud.html

Head fi is the best place for reviews: https://www.head-fi.org/

And if you want to take a chance on a pair just remember to stick with 3.5mm and that anything over 32ohm will = low volume on a phone or anything without a pre-amp.
 

luka

Well-known member
So territorial. You're like a rutting stag. Good job I never wrote a book about music, I would have had my head flushed down the toilet
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not a book of music criticism. It is a book that tries to think about what sound does at a material level, not just in at ear but throughout the body inside and across the skin surface and tries to start thinking a sonic body.

Me and Barty have done lots of very good work on this already. Very intelligent and profound and world changing.
 

droid

Well-known member
Look forward to reading this, I for one still believe in the redemptive power of bass.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
blissblogger's prbably just some failed music writer. thought he was going to be the next reynolds or something. come off it mate.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
probably works for the citizens advice bureau. tries to start twitter feuds with polly toynbee. she's not even reading them mate!
 

luka

Well-known member
Winchester is mentioned in this book.

A communist world government with the masses enslaved through a micro-chip world currency and I believe robotic soldiers. NOT GOOD for any of us. Could you explain why the 2016 Olympic stadium is shaped like a giant Triangle with an Eye over the top of it? Which is the major Illuminati symbol.I believe that they are going to try and make the world believe that it is a good thing.
 

nomos

Administrator
Jesus. Haha. Thanks, Luka. I started drafting a post a week ago and then didn't check back until today. Now this.

I'll add some things...
 
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nomos

Administrator
FIRST OF ALL: The book has almost zero to do with dubstep, and dancefloors are just one chapter.

What it's really about is how low-frequencies recast sensoria and surroundings and how people in various times and places have experimented with that, developing technologies and strategies for exploiting and intensifying those effects, for various purposes. It draws on sciences of sensation and acoustics, histories of sound technologies, philosophies of materiality and a lot of other things.

I started by looking at sound system cultures, but when you start following vibration around - across time, cultures - you end up discovering a lot of peculiar stuff that's usually mentioned only passingly, as a curiosity, and that's never been examined in any sustained way.

So the largest chapter is on ritual/religious uses uses of low tones and bass-making technologies (there's a section on pipe organs, for example; another on burial mounds acting as massive, earthen Helmholtz resonators, 600 000lb bells and so on). Another chapter looks at sub-perceptual waves implicated in various sorts of hauntings ('ghosts', hums, etc.), piecing together offhand comments by scientists about eerie presence-absence effects of infrasound that have never been properly followed up. Then sound art and experimental musics looks at how artists made taken vibratory perception as their medium.

LET.JPG

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/low-end-theory-9781501335914/

CONTENTS:

1. The Sonic Body: An Ethico-Acoustic Toolkit
Sonorous Relations
Tales and Strategies
Myth-Science in the Vibratory Milieu

2. Spectral Catalysis: Disquieting Encounters
Spectres of the Manmade Unknown
Infrasound
Unhomed
Boo! (toward an operative reality)
The Hum
'And it was only by analogy that it could be called a sound at all...'
Blinkered Science
We still do not know what a sonic body can do...

3. Numinous Strategies
Learning to Play the Sonic Body
The Nervous Piano
Numinous Instruments
Religious Audiogenesis
Numinous Sound Design
Playing the Resonances
Tellurian Organs
The Organ-Church Assemblage
The Arcanum: An Ambulant Myth-Science
The Nervous Organ
Baroque Affect Engineering
The Gothic Assemblage: Applied Synaesthetics

4. Tone Scientists I: Vibratory Arts
Cymatic Arts
Documentary Practices
A Speculative Turn
Perceptual Abstraction
Transversal Strategies
Incipient Dance
Sonic Architectures
Dance With the Speaker
'A people of oscillators'

5. Tone Scientists II: Bass Cults
The Lab
The Science
Bass Science
Dubplates and Mastering
Engineering the Vibratorium
Affects and Affectations
Entering the Rhythmachine
Three Physio-Logics
Jungle (1994)
Dubstep (2005)
Footwork (2009)
 
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nomos

Administrator
i haven't read the book, but i do feel a bit like bass as a theology is a little worn out

i'm afraid the very title "low end theory" makes me droop a little bit

by the time people started going on about "bass weight" - circa the height of dubstep - it felt like something that had been canonised into almost a form of sonic virtue, after a good decade or two of writings about dub etc

In fairness to me, I started working on the book in 2005 (PhD thesis, right after launching Riddim.ca), finished in 2012. Set it aside and then it came out in hardcover in 2016 ($150 so why bother promoting), softcover 2017. So if anything feels a bit dated, that would be why.

BUT it's also not trying to work on a contemporary timescale. Most of the things it describes go back decades, if not centuries, millennia, eons.

The original title was: BASS: A MYTH-SCIENCE OF THE SONIC BODY. But publishers like more digestible things.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hey nomos, I haven't bought your book but I thought you might like to know I still give your 'Vibration Sympathique' mix a spin now and then when I want to get spooked out with some good dread-y, drone-y bass. :love:
 

vimothy

yurp
I asked myself why these projects always seem to lean so heavily on Deleuze and Guattari (with Spinoza & Nietzsche hovering in the wings) and it's really just cos they're the only ones who allow you to have fun without the finger wagging isn't it.

but still very strange when you consider the importance of purposeless causality to deleuzian metaphysics - in contrast with music, for which purpose and intentionality are obviously central
 
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