thirdform

pass the sick bucket
which also explains why eurotrance is undergoing a sort of revival atm. a very electronic music that is essentially song based. its 100% synthetic but that separates it from the kind of industrial techno we're talking about. it's also less entrancing as a result.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I mean there is a zen element to it. like you're saying what should i be thinking about or feeling. i mean who am I to tell you?

That's what i mean by proper music. it tells me too much. I have to be in a specific mood for it. and usually I'm not. that's the antihumanist impulse its in a dialectical relationship with my alienation of a lot of real human interaction unfettered from bureaucracy and the like. but without turning this into a sob story that's how i approach it. if life is so regimented by time and if capitalism reduces everything to exchange time then it makes more sense to just go along without rather than trying to recover lost organic ties. and unfortunately a lot of the most historically interesting music, like proper folk music, worldwide etc, tries to do that in a 21st century context. like you can pick up (in tr and the turkish shops here in Haringey) turku album after turku album with glossy world music production values and overly sickeningly sweet orchestrations. I prefer the old records where they were recorded to mono straight to 45 or compillation lp, sometimes the electic saz in a very primitive form but it had the clatter to it. I don't see why one would need to update that. we don't live in the 1950s-1970s. these are post-industrial times. I'm similarly ambivalent about jazz revivals.

I do think if humanity makes the leap to a reintegrated world tribal community then the idea of folk music as being something in the here and now will come back but it's not really possible outside of subcultures atm. this is what Jeff Mills has been trying to do with his universalistic minimal reductions, ditto rob hood. just strip everything down to perpetual event rather than climax and build up. where as with the progressive house bods its more like a rationing regime. it's a totally reactionary tendancy. I wouldn't put hood and mills in that bracket. the climax and the chug simbiotically merge with each other. as cerebral as it is banging. the principles of the universal drone applied to the beat.

apologies, the crackling in my ear from this infection has still not gone away so I can't be arsed correcting the spelling mistakes.
 
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pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
As was said earlier in the thread it's a search for the soul in the machine. Imagine driving through the streets of Detroit after midnight in the 80s. Industry on its last legs. Totally ravaged landscape. You've got mojo on the radio and he plays something from computer world. He doesn't say anything. You have no idea what it is but somehow it all clicks.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
what i mean by proper music. it tells me too much. I have to be in a specific mood for it. and usually I'm not. that's the antihumanist impulse its in a dialectical relationship with my alienation of a lot of real human interaction unfettered from bureaucracy and the like. but without turning this into a sob story that's how i approach it.
a guy on rym used to say that pop music (as in, listening to it exclusively) is only for people with really exciting, emotionally fulfilled lives who just need a soundtrack that matches whatever they happen to be feeling at the moment. whereas more experimental music (but i think "antihumanist" might apply as well) might appeal to people more if their lives are monotonous and otherwise fairly devoid of wonder. it was kind of a joke but i think there's some truth to it.
 

luka

Well-known member
What pattycakes is saying is true for what I've dubbed Detroit Romanticism but I'm not interested in that. I think it's reactionary (albeit frequently beautiful) The antihumanist (not anti human incidently. No seam of ore in rock or distant star is anti human) is what I want to focus on and I'm drawn to it for similar reasons to third. I'm sick of music. Im sick of soul. He's also right to focus on experience rather than listening per se and it's there we get some cross-fertilisation with the various ambient and drone threads
 
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luka

Well-known member
a couple of thoughts in the mean time:

rhythm's my main means to attain that thing when you're listening to music and the eyes roll to the back of your head and your mind goes blank like you're having an orgasm. it's fairly specefic rhythmic things that make me do so, which lots of this stuff seems to be lacking. it's rhtymically stable enough as to not be dissasociative or to trancend the capabilities of the body.

the distorted stuff is like one of those shock comedians who think they're all edgy. they only work if you think it's shocking. if you don't care then it loses all it's value.

a lot of it's missing a foreground. it's all background. nothing central to sustain intrigue.

a lot of it's quite camp.

This is where I would insert the wedge chisel crowbar to get movement.
 

luka

Well-known member
And it's probably what third was getting at when he accused you of wanting a surrogate literature.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Antihumanism is an interesting sideshow for me but romanticism is the whole reason I'm obsessed with music in the first place.

Electro that sounds like the terminator is of only passing interest to me, I only really cherish the stuff with melancholy chords, the T1000 choons do my head in within a matter of minutes.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One thing I really love in jungle/hardcore is the slap and tickle of romanticism meets machinism - one minute it's soaring strings and plaintive vocals, the next it's thundering snares and cymbals. But it's never just one thing - or rather, it becomes just one thing and becomes boring.
 

luka

Well-known member
One thing I really love in jungle/hardcore is the slap and tickle of romanticism meets machinism - one minute it's soaring strings and plaintive vocals, the next it's thundering snares and cymbals. But it's never just one thing - or rather, it becomes just one thing and becomes boring.

I've never quite got a handle on exactly what people mean by dialectical but perhaps it's something like that? Internal conflicts arguments and contradictions?
 

firefinga

Well-known member


I love those years 1986-1988, when stuff like the above was referred to as "house", and the tempo most certainly is, but it feels totally like "techno" to me.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Interestingly, music that exists at one extreme (e.g. black metal and the sort of grimacing bubblegum pop that appeals to toddlers) often has an inhuman feel, being monoemotional.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's certainly true but let's get off the emotional axis entirely, at least for now.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Cos it's tinny by nature (like the rap group!!)

the kickdrum is important but the mid range is where the action is
 

luka

Well-known member
I think you get this with electric Miles where coke mania abd cold sweats have taken him past any recognisably human region of affect. Into landscape and other, larger time spans and time pulses
 
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