I finished reading that book 'Rave' by Rainald Goetz on holiday, was OK. He wrote the original novel in 1998, has just been translated to English now. Some good paragraphs here and there, but a bit fragmented. Picked up speed as it went on, but I had to come back to it (read the third reich by bolano in between which was excellent and just what i needed, despite the flawed ending).
Anyway, towards the very end of Rave, there's a longish ode to Basic Channel, which I thought might sit well on this thread:
BASIC CHANNEL
takes you away from it, from the music, and from yourself. That takes you away from thinking, from attentiveness, from the precision of retracing the distinctly conceived individual steps of thought, from reflection in the sense of recalling successions of thoughts. Which exempts all others' collective vote of life and even the living cells that keep the cerebral cortex alive from the absolutism of inevitably exclusively discrete thinking, which the cerebral cortex can only grasp in discrete terms at a discretely defined moment, not to abrogate the absolutist thinking structure, but to complement it, as it were.
A kind of biological surplus of intake normally to be found in the nightlife through dancing, the grandiose violence of clamour, and drugs: a perfect translation of all that into music, so the effect is still there when you're home alone listening with the volume down: that is what Basic Channel accomplishes.
A monotony that actually speaks the language of living, and therefore, however externally minimal it appears, actually generates a maximum of fundamentality and depth. For many this takes root so deep inside the body that it brings a spiritual element into play. Well, then. The body is an unfathomable sanctuary infinitely distant from nomenclature and epistemological manoeuvres.
Maurizio
Basic Channel
Main Street Records
Burial Mix
And then, in a kind of secondary, often even more fascinating reflection on these basic elements, lots of Chain Reactions. It's hard for me to really grasp how a couple of people in Berlin were capable, in the Hardwax and Dubplate and Mastering climate, to penetrate so deep and so effortlessly into the hyper-individual. Where did they get that from? How did they manage to break out? An absolute riddle."