live digital music dissapointing shocker
- Thread starter zhao
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noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Marshall Jefferson in David Toop's Ocean Of Sound:
"Really, I was trying to get a mood something like the old Black Sabbath records or Led Zeppelin. So that's how it got the name Acid Tracks, because it's supposed to put you in a mood, you know? For one thing, the tune is eleven minutes long of the same thing. Slight changes, but not that noticeable. Like when you listen to a real long solo in the old days it's the same bass line going and everybody's doing something different over it. That's supposed to capture a mood. Now what everybody thought acid house was after that was a drum machine and that acid machine, the Roland TB-303, which was not the truth. Acid house was meant to be the capturing of moods. You don't have to use the same machine all the time. You can use different instruments. I hate that machine with a passion now. Everybody's using it wrong. The way they're doing it now it's not capturing any moods. It's disrupting thought patterns, man. That just hurts when you listen to it all night. It stabs your brain, man."
"Really, I was trying to get a mood something like the old Black Sabbath records or Led Zeppelin. So that's how it got the name Acid Tracks, because it's supposed to put you in a mood, you know? For one thing, the tune is eleven minutes long of the same thing. Slight changes, but not that noticeable. Like when you listen to a real long solo in the old days it's the same bass line going and everybody's doing something different over it. That's supposed to capture a mood. Now what everybody thought acid house was after that was a drum machine and that acid machine, the Roland TB-303, which was not the truth. Acid house was meant to be the capturing of moods. You don't have to use the same machine all the time. You can use different instruments. I hate that machine with a passion now. Everybody's using it wrong. The way they're doing it now it's not capturing any moods. It's disrupting thought patterns, man. That just hurts when you listen to it all night. It stabs your brain, man."
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Sun Ra and Fela Kuti both talked about how the wrong music could be bad for your wellbeing - even dangerous.
i saw an ikeda thing last year and it was bad, like an artsy powerpoint presentation, the sound was fine though. arrtss fuuunn dddead.
mms: If that was his datamatics thing then I can't help but disagree with that, I thought it was pretty excellent.
I've not actually seen the installation/sculpture stuff that Carsten Nicolai does in the flesh but going by some shots of it I saw from an exhibition in Berlin a couple of years ago he's probably an even better visual artist than a musician.
I've not actually seen the installation/sculpture stuff that Carsten Nicolai does in the flesh but going by some shots of it I saw from an exhibition in Berlin a couple of years ago he's probably an even better visual artist than a musician.
i think this comes down to the fragmentation vs. unification thing (remember that one kid who was all into spiritual practices that stopped by here for a few days? some of the stuff he said mades sense to me). or at least that's one way of thinking about it.
Do you want to elaborate on this Zhao- Fragmentation vs Unification??? At what level? In terms of genre of music, of the audience-performer relation, at the level of sonic texture or what, exactly?
Martin Dust
Techno Zen Master
Who decides if its wrong?
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
I dunno, who decided that stabbing yourself in the face is wrong?
You'd have to ask them really but Ra and Fela both said that musicians playing the wrong music were harming themselves, and by extension their audiences. Wrong is not a judgment here, if it's aimlessly damaging then it's 'wrong'. You may or may not subscribe to that view but that's at least partly the idea. Music as a spiritual language can promote unity and integration or disunity and alienation, or other weird things in between. Obviously using music to explore dysfunctional states is valuable as long as you know that's what you are doing and not just fetishising the sickness. Many ancient musics around the world are all about this kind of healing and are highly developed with it.
the last laptop performance I saw was a performance with Marc Leclair aka Akufen doing his thing (hitting play?) to a film called 5mm which just seemed like particularly well-done visualisation of the music. Everyone was seated as in a theatre, and it didn't really work. The guy who'd played before him, "Des cailloux et du carbone" was actually more interesting, ambienty soundscapey stuff that eventually (over the course of 40 minutes or so) morphed into some pretty cool minimally stuff. Which we were all sitting down to. But before either of them was this incredible improvisation by Pauline Oliveros on accordion and Anne Bourne on cello and voice, and it really really really showed how much more interesting it is to watch two very talented instrumentalists interacting very deeply than it is to watch a (probably very talented) dude with a macbook.
well hopefully the listener knows the difference between something that makes him/her feel bad, and something which makes him/her feel good.
and this is coming from someone who considered purchasing the Merzbox when it came out... obviously it's not so cut and dry when it comes to avant garde practices (like noel said there is value in exploring dissonance and other states of mind) --- but in terms of spiritual health it is very clear that some patterns of sounds/images make any human being feel disturbed, imbalanced, stressful, psychotic, and some make you feel balanced, peaceful and whole.
i think many people are confused about this, and are addicted to masochism / self torture.
may have something to do with anger, and without a proper release anger becomes directed toward the self -- when i was younger i loved to have my head repeatedly slammed into a wall by brutal, violent music. i found some kind of comfort in this, and sought after the most extreme forms of sonic pain. this impulse is very clear -- as i would get so angry that i would actually physically harm myself: scar on my left fore-arm to prove it.
the following i dug up from an old thread started by our bestest pal toccowich. there is some interesting stuff in there, i was glancing through it a bit just now...
The killer for me is anything sentimental in the way which triggers any tendency towards nostalgia (on a psycho-emotional level), I hate that stuff. I'd rather listen to alienation that keeps me at peace than that. There is something very calming about horribly discordant ugly music, a kind of depersonalization and de-identification which is emotionally soothing. However any music can build an emotional bond, which over time becomes one which can create nostalgia which is sadness, mourning. So you can never go back at all.