Crystalline/Glacial

Winter wonderland

entertainment said:

Winter wonderland

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i see you and raise you



the "solo" at 2.45

nice

Northern lights dancing prismatically off glaciers.

most of their discography probably qualifies

I suppose that whole continuum of post-punk/post-rock spindly/splintery guitar:
This one-off curio from '85, prefiguring Slint by half a decade:

Some acid-folk, when it's not hazy, has a stark crystalline quality, e.g.
Feat. teenage Mike Oldfield:
Maybe to do with those cut-glass schoolgirl voices...

I noticed a bunch of the terms we've been using to describe this stuff and 'the surface' whilst rereading some of the cyberspace bits in Neuromancer last night; lots of mentions of ice (although in a different sense in the context of the story), frosted glass, blues, neon, windows. . . .

Case’s virus had bored a window through the library’s command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color- coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-echelon saraiman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks.

Here. This one.

Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a subprogram that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.

Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window.

Done.

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Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

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version said:

I noticed a bunch of the terms we've been using to describe this stuff and 'the surface' whilst rereading some of the cyberspace bits in Neuromancer last night; lots of mentions of ice (although in a different sense in the context of the story), frosted glass, blues, neon, windows. . . .

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consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.

Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information than the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.

The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)

Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.

The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).

When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=14358

SCREEN IS NOW PRIMARY ENVIRONMENT.

This is pretty damn icy:

Surprised we haven't had this yet:


The pre-eski eski sound.

There's something I've been meaning to sketch out for a long time about the cut vs lingering

Any mention of ECM records yet? That shit's jazz ice

version said:

I associate warmth with mess and cold with organisation.

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Running Water freezing into crystal.