This or That.

[luka]

usually there'll be one filtered up and then one down,, very reminiscent of breathing.

this can also be a space-time effect. and you get a lot of this in dub, not just with the echoes
but with the sensation of a sound approaching you and then receding. as the noise of a train would
if you were standing in a fixed position by the tracks. it helps create three dimensional space in time.

or think about how bird-song in a forest makes distances audible. situates you within a matrix of sound
coming from multiple positions and along multiple axes. multi-dimensional.

 

[sadmanbarty]

in term of music as a language, there are concrete, repeatable things you can do to create dissonance and resolution. the feeling of resolution as he says he's easy is because he's going from the 5th chord in the scale to the 1st

 

[luka]

in term of music as a language, there are concrete, repeatable things you can do to create dissonance and resolution. the feeling of resolution as he says he's easy is because he's going from the 5th chord in the scale to the 1st

this is the stuff that goes way over my head. i cant hear it intuitively so im deaf to it.

 

[sadmanbarty]

one for corpse

the verses are harmonically ambiguous, it's not clear what key it's in (not a clear feeling of tension of resolution). so there's a feeling of confusion and searching. the harmony becomes clearly functional during the chorus making feel like you're back at home, you're grounded again.


this one doesn't ever really let on what key it's it, where home is so it sustains this feeling of searching

 

[sadmanbarty]

this is the stuff that goes way over my head. i cant hear it intuitively so im deaf to it.

what's the feeling you feel when he says 'i know it sounds funny...' or 'that's why i'm easy'?

 

[sadmanbarty]

there's a suspense that is then relieved at those moments of the song.

 

[luka]

there's a suspense that is then relieved at those moments of the song.

oh ok gotcha. and youre explaining how its acheived. im with you now even though i'll never know what a key or a chord is.

 

[luka]

in a purely aural medium how do you situate yourself in space?

bird-song in a forest makes distances audible

you rely on these coordinate points.

 

[sadmanbarty]

drums

authoritative, stable. straight 8's, snare on 2 and 4. no syncopation. lock step


pimp stroll. still authoritative, still know where we are, but a bit syncopation, a stride in your step


suspended, unrelsolved. flailing. gasping. snares on quarter notes, on off beats, irregular

 

[sadmanbarty]

'jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms' reynolds

avoid the safe ground of the 4, off beats instead

 

[luka]

as i remember it both reynolds and kodwo would try to map this out at the level of the body. there's an exercise which comes up again and again and again in therapy and meditation and relaxation. you will have all come across it. you lie down, or perhaps you sit, and you make a deliberate effort to become aware of each individual part of your body. to become conscious not just of the major points of contact with the enviroment and the major engines of motion and the joints, but of everything in turn.

and i think what those two were suggesting, or what i intend to suggest, or reiterate at any rate, is that with jungle you invoke the same kind of all-body awareness and control, given you are being pulled in multiple directions at one, and at multiple time signatures. to use that charles olson world again, you get a much more sophisticated sense of proprioception than you do with the billie jean, for instance.

 

[luka]

so i would claim that it is, potentially, consciousness expanding music.

 

[luka]

what is tension? the held breath.
what is release? the exhalation.

bartys just sent me an email saying

If you play a metronome to a baby, their brain we’ll be active just before the beat. It’s inherent in us to expect it. It’s confusing if you defy that expectation.

in other words you condition them to a stimulus, in the behavourist sense. when a happens b follows. which is another fascinating way of looking at this stuff. you're learning patterns, not at the conscious cerebral level, but at the level of the body, of muscle memory and etc

 

[luka]

found this very relevant section of more brilliant than the sun

"clenched resistance to rhythmic psychedelias usually manifests as a return to mere musicality. to follow the breakbeat is to reject this [r]earview response, to land on the planet of your body made newly audible by rhythmic transvaluation. the rhythmachine captures your perception sa it switches from hearing individual beats to grasping the pattern of beats. your body is a distributed brain which flips from the sound of each intensity to the overlapping relations between intensities. learning pattern recognition this flipflop between rhythmelody and texturhythm drastically collapses and reorganises the sensorial hierarchy.
THE BODY IS A LARGE BRAIN.
the body is a large brain that thinks and feels a sensational mathematics throughout the entire surface of its distributed mind."

or in other words

the self is not centred in the brainbox it is a distributed cybernetic system of maximal information and communication, feedback loops and bliss accelerators

 

[luka]

or from the same book
"breakbeat science's rhythmic involution forcibly inducts you into a new motor system"

 

[sadmanbarty]

im just trying to put your drum stuff into my language. i dont want to call it metaphor because i want to claim a kind of objective status for it.



There’s a comfort to things landing when you tap your foot. A suspense or tension when they land elsewhere. How long do songs maintain that tension before releasing? Do they put the tension at the end or beginning of each bar (musical sentence)?

Sent from my iPhone



no i get that. youve explained it.

i want to give reasons for these techniques produce these effects




If you play a metronome to a baby, their brain we’ll be active just before the beat. It’s inherent in us to expect it. It’s confusing if you defy that expectation.

Sent from my iPhone




yeah youve conditioned them to a stimulus


when a happens b follows





The off beat (in the middle of tapping your foot, like the hi hats in house) is up, the beat is down. Garage and ska with lots of offbeat emphasis is called bouncy or bumpy because of this vertical up and down. Suspension happens when you emphasise the off beat without the down beat (up without coming back down).

Quarter notes (in between down beat and off beats) are horizontal. They pull you sideways. Dancehall girls move with their hips.



Sent from my iPhone

 

[sadmanbarty]

make a deliberate effort to become aware of each individual part of your body.

Klangfarbenmelodie

 

[sadmanbarty]

i write loads of rubbish edm music for work so use a lot of white noise sweeps. usually there'll be one filtered up and then one down,, very reminiscent of breathing.

same thing with reverse cymbal sounds

brushes probably work similarly

lee perry's phasers too

 

[blissblogger]

there is also a social element to the kinesthetics

if you enter an unfamiliar subculture, hearing unfamiliar music, you might be initially confused by what you're supposed to do in terms of responding to the rhythms and to the demands made by the music

but you look at how the crowd is moving and they are showing you how it's done, so you pick it up almost unconsciosuly

there is an instinctively mimetic thing that you get into, where you want to fit it, join the tribe

i think entrainment is the word some would use for this process - a kind of synchronisation with the collective and its rituals

so for instance as much i found the techno releases in 91 - things on R&S and Orbital and so forth - thrilling when i played them at home, it wasn't until i went to a rave and saw the crowd that i really understood what the music was for, what its modes of release were. it was the sight of the crowd going crazy, but going crazy in particular structured, ritualized, social ways, that so impressed me to the point of a conversion experience

i read this amazing book Stolen Lightning: a social theory of magic by Daniel O'Keefe a few years ago and one thing discussed in this enormously long, dense book was a phenomenon that occurs in certain tribes or tight ethnic groups particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia - called latah. And it has other names in other cultures. It's a form of compulsive, often collective mimesis:

"... the widely reported propensity of primitives to get fascinated by any prepossessing sight around them. in some societies, individuals caught by such fascinations compulsively imitate them: they imitate waves, birds. As late as the nineteenth century whole Cossack regiments would be seized with this compulsion and endlessly mimic an officer. Such phenomena are called 'olon' in Siberia, 'latah' in Malaya, 'atai' among the Mota... Latah is surrendering to outside fascination, becoming what you see"

So there is some kind of nexus here of tribalism, authority, group-mind, cybernetics, the urge to merge, oceanic feelings, ego-diminishment...

(one might also note the proximity of the word fascination to fascism, although i think the etymological roots are different)

perhaps the heightened (drugs, loud sound, darkness, flashing lights) environment of a club or rave is where we can regress to a more primitive (and open to mimesis / conformism) vibe-tribe mentality

shed our individuality

of course some find that scary - hence, IDM - dancing alone inside your mind

 

[Corpsey]

It's interesting how crowds are described as going 'crazy' and 'mental'. With drugs too there's often a wilful thrust towards derangement - 'im going to get off my head'.

Actually the crowd isn't going mental it's going physical.