Beyond Soul.

thirdform said:

Blue Cantrell was a deconstruction of this homeliness. but noone really followed it. When you listen to Aliyya it's like she's telling u to come chill out with her. I don't chill out anymore. noone chills out. chill out is dead.

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version said:

This makes it sound as though he lives like Varg Vikernes now.

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luka said:

when he said that you werent shagging. how times change. theres always hope.

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craner said:

Precisely, I did a Des Esseintes.

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version said:

"We don't want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content; geometry is everything."

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version said:

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pattycakes_ said:

Sounds pretty close to spiritual to me! A lot of what you wrote is exactly what I meant when I posted you should go and see him if you want that kind of experience. But are you saying it wasn't what you'd class as one? I went 2 nights in a row at the jazz cafe years ago. Was nice to be so close to him. That's the optimal setup for jazz imo. Small and intimate. Archive Shepp was on the same level too. Guess guys who were 'there' are still able to keep the fire burning. Which begs the question, are we able to hack ourselves and un-self-consciously attain the same level? Not talking about musicianship. More the spiritual level. Because that's what it is.

Personally I believe it's possible. But it ain't got shit to do with being woke or anything constructed in the last 20 years.




In case it wasn't already apparent, I definitely do. It's the thing that most effectively calms my soul. Other than valium or xanax. There are times when it's as effective as those.




This is fake soul. Modern pop music is the art of playing at being emotive while actually draining you of your life force. All those choruses with oh-o oh-o and all that guff are part of a plot to dumb us down and think website names like momodo are acceptable vernacular. Singing in vocal fry like winehouse or adelle is effectively pandering to a dumbed down audience who have been Pavlov-programmed to respond to token signifiers rather than anything real. And when faced with the real, they're likely to turn away because it's too close to madness or some other undesirable state of being. Conversely you have people like Pete Doherty being seen as real because they take smack and squirt their needles at the camera during interviews. How dumb and Immature have we become that that show of total soullessness could be construed in that way?




That same yearning mechanism is what got us into that whole dubstep mess. Somewhere around the millenium some great spell was cast and all the nutritious art was neutered and slowly we were conditioned to accept the mediocre. We've been stripped of our instincts which used to be the compass for navigating our likes and loves.




Outside looking in. Self awareness curse.

We've been medicated out of any state of being which would lead us to a level of personal spirituality that would allow us to reach the heights of jazz music in the late 60s, early 70s. Medicated by media, pharmaceuticals, our own damn crabs in the bucket selves. Looking at what's been pined for recently on this forum.. A return to the organic, a break from the grid of the daw, more complexity etc.. That was all ironed out when samplers took over and anyone could be a musician. Of course plenty of talented people managed to do interesting things with those tools, but on the whole it was a step back for culture because the human feel was progressively weeded out. The early days of many genres were creatively explosive, but almost every one of them followed the same chart pattern. Volatile beginnings, a few spikes of greatness and then eventually plateauing and fading out slowly.

One thing I find interesting is how there's a yearning for two opposing forces in here right now. Some want to go beyond the human, and yet clearly what's been lacking for so long in modern music is the human element which is all the off the grid shit i just mentioned.

And what if a new musician came out who matched Pharaoh's spiritual prowess? Or Joni's sweet and homely vocals? I think we'd revere them as much as we do the originals. But somehow it just doesn't seem to be happening.

The main question I take away when thinking about all of this is why? Why are people unable, or unwilling to go 'there'?

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thirdform said:

Will you be gracing us with a musicological explanation of why it does what it does? I was swooning but this post has my heart broken, my very dear Pomegranate.

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woops said:

the phrygian mode:

i missed this at the time but it's worth pointing out that a lot of the classic grime rhythms, especially wiley ones, like eskimo and wot do u call it, make good use of the flat second that is characteristic of this scale. it goes beyond minor sadness to a doomier feel because of additional dissonance with the root note. musicology

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luka said:

I still think of Pattycakes invocation of 'soul' as the ultimate determination of value in music. A lot of us (eg Bartys pop music, thirds anti humanism) would disagree strongly. What is soul. When did we lose it? How did it happen and what are the consequences? What opens up on the other side- beyond the soul?

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