Henry Flynt

[Leo]

@wektor, I assume you've been through this site: http://www.henryflynt.org

 

[wektor]

Can it be adequately put into words? You'd have to take a massive dose to completely eliminate the cultural load and at that point you're probably beyond intelligible language.

The way I look at it is that's two separate problems, the culturally pre-conditioning of the trip is one, accurate reporting/memorising is another.

Both seem to have a different set of technical issues, ie. setting and even one's memories in the first case and reporting things accurately in-the-moment in a way that will be comprehensible later on, which on higher doses borders on impossible, like you mentioned.

What impressed me in PIHKAL, was the ability to hold on to any detail at all from what Shulgin described as plus-three experiences, still the most of it was not too specific at all.

Is it even possible, with experience and training to either memorise or report in real time in a way that will not be just mumbling or vague descriptions of mind-images specific only to one's individual mind and personal context?

 

[Murphy]

(didn't Lilly have plus-six?)

Guitar Rebop is one of the most majestic, simple, instinctual pieces of sound-attitude out there. Had it on a tape jumbled in among random picks, then lost the tape (nooo). Even when the internet grew, i couldn't remember the name of the piece. Eventually got the title but, as a previous poster stated, some of these pieces are almost too short. You could loop Guitar Rebop for an hour and i'd still be entranced. Brilliant mixing tools too fwiw

 

[catalog]

Don't forget

feels good to be associated with such a charming genius https://incels.wiki/w/Creep_(book_chapter)

And the ensuing discussion is also interesting.

Luke liked it.

Someone posted a really good piece of writing here called Creep which is concerned with these basic themes

I just read it now. Interesting. You can get past the immediately "cancellable" bits I think, and understand where he's coming from.

When did he start working with Hennix?

He does also mention that there are female creeps too...

And you can sort of see how much public ridicule he might have faced for some of his stuff, how this would have caused much sadness, converted to hate.

He might have made a different choice if he was around now.

The bit for me that's interesting is the very end, where he's talking about wanting to become something superior to humans. That pushing out for the beyond.

 

[wektor]

When did he start working with Hennix?

This is from The Wire October 2010.

So the HESE list is as follows:





Also in another interview Flynt says that You Are My Everlovin' and Celestial Power are actually the same composition just played on different notes/with different techniques, so I suppose the both of the two would also count as a HESE.

No doubt Glissando No. 1 is as properly psychedelic as it gets.

 

[wektor]

Just read a thread on him on RYM forum and I swear it was one of the most garbage discussions I've read in the past few months.

Apparently he does mention Emily Dickinson as one of the creeps that have "developed uniquely their own individual thoughts and actions (aka creep acognitive culture) and possibly returned them to culture in the form of artistic expressions or accomplishments".

Creep theory does seem like a decent (and reasonable, minus the misogyny) take on otherness to me. Raising the creep in rejection to any assimilation to adult human values. Outside of the traditional gender norms, forming an indeterminate sexual identity.

Also I find rather interesting his acognitive culture take where he advocates validating and affirming action one finds pleasing without the need to make them comprehensible to others nor putting them into any pre-existing framework (ie. poetry or music).

Just enjoying what you do in any given moment should be enough. It doesn't even have make sense to you later.

Why hasn't anyone told me earlier.

 

[william_kent]

Just enjoying what you do in any given moment should be enough. It doesn't even have make sense to you later.

presumably that's where the talk of psychedelics comes in? I can vaguely remember dropping a tab and then sometime after "peaking" sitting with one hand on the keyboard of a monophonic roland synth and marvelling at the single note for what seemed like hours, totally in the moment until I suddenly realised I had some LSD..spell broken...

 

[wektor]

presumably that's where the talk of psychedelics comes in? I can vaguely remember dropping a tab and then sometime after "peaking" sitting with one hand on the keyboard of a monophonic roland synth and marvelling at the single note for what seemed like hours, totally in the moment until I suddenly realised I had some LSD..spell broken...

During the last active phase of my episode, I recorded a forty-five minute electric violin improvisation with the Celestial Power guitars as accompaniment. I had already made experiments in adding a line to Celestial Power, including notably having Peter Gordon add a saxophone solo to it. Christer's perspective of making cultural stimuli to experience during trips helped impel me to do this. Also, I wanted a way to portray my trip objectively.

The activity of playing the violin was entirely different from what it had ever been. Usually, playing the violin was tense work for me. I tended to work in formats shorter than ten minutes, and had to make repeated takes to achieve an acceptable one. Only the energy generated by having exceptionally conducive accompanists had impelled me to do long, single-take improvisations. This time, my improvisation was as I had already planned it when experimenting with this piece--flute-like, tonal, melodic. But I passed immediately to a daring, ranging style--pieced together from long glissandos, harmonics, and "illicit" techniques such as "soft-stopping" and legato on the bridge. Instead of being tense work, playing was an unhurried exploration. Everything I was doing was fascinating; I was confident that everything I was doing was interesting. I recorded a single forty-five minute take. Realistically, of course, I already had a planned format for the piece; and I had been developing my genre of electric hillbilly fiddle for two decades.

While playing, it seemed that I was achieving miraculous effects, such as causing an ordinary stopped note to sound an octave above itself. In fact, I was using legato on the bridge to isolate harmonics, probably aided by the amplification, which tends to make overtones more prominent. No doubt the drug helped with the bow-sensitivity and steadiness needed to achieve this effect.

The late afternoon sun was streaming in the window; and I saw a glow, a nimbus, on the fingerboard of the violin. Sublime relish, the glow of illumination. Fascination, floating, drifting away in light.

I ceased to be conscious of the somatic exertion of playing the violin and only attended to what I wanted to hear and my relish of what I heard. Yet that somatic exertion of improvising a new piece was indispensable. (Without a thematic stimulus perfectly matched to the occasion, one is left fidgety or vegetating thoughtlessly.)

My assumption that the recording would be able to convey to anybody what I had done and what it had meant to me was shattered when I played it to the girlfriend of a classical violinist a few years later. I thought I was doing her a favor; but she found it to be aimless scraping. Once again, the drug is found to be an insignificant component; it is nothing compared to character and socially inculcated values.

 

[Murphy]

I’d stick with his altered interpretation, articulated sublimely too

 

[william_kent]

I’d stick with his altered interpretation, articulated sublimely too

yeah, it's a bit more descriptive than "I held one note down for ages"

 

[version]

yeah, it's a bit more descriptive than "I held one note down for ages"

 

[wektor]

Listened to (yet another) radio interview with the man, finally managed to gather some substantial info on ISEs:

Hallucinatory/Ecstatic/Illuminatory sound environments are not meant to be competitive with music in any way
Root note does not change
Scale choice is a sensitive one
Source of sound is unidentifiable
Many attacks
Periodicies or pulses but no beat
Wide freq spectrum
All sounds are pitches from a scale
No ethnic references
No thematic articulation
Susceptible of arbitrary prolongation
Loud enough to drown out distractions
Typicall using modal scales and sensously appealing timbres
The output is layered electronically producing fraction effects or phrasing
Resulting aural events are illusive and saturate the spectrum
You should get pushed and pulled and feel like a marshmallow
It’s nice to have quadrophonics (if possible)

To clear up, seems like I got the list wrong, Glissando No. 1 is not an ISE, the other, rougher track on the record Stereo Piano is.

Also Celestial Power has a quadro version, it was squeezed down to a stereo mix only for the sake of releasing the record. Makes me wonder how the spatial version is like.

 

[version]

Henry Flynt in New York

"Composer/philosopher/activist Henry Flynt reflects on his years in the downtown avant-garde and the sectarian Left. Autobiography / history / geography / polemic."

 

[wektor]

there's new books of him coming out via Emily Harvey Foundation soon, afaik cont of the recent Three Essays on Spirituality and Art which have been an excellent read

 

[Benny Bunter]

Forgot about this. I'm gonna listen to everlovin' later, one of those rare times for me an "experimental" music recommendation on dissensus actually lived up to the hype.

 

[version]

 

[wektor]

nother book update, grabbed the latest published work about Transformations while at Oto last week, getting through it now

still finding that his ideas are something that's easy to take for granted at this point and kind of simple: think multiples of applicable models available at hand, the technologically speculative or speculatively scientific directions so popular in the arts these days

still, what he seems to be proposing is that such speculation or construction of an individual outside should be taken seriously, and more than that, rigorously

"useful irrespective of whether one likes it or not"

 

[wektor]

so far there is a mention of carnap's logical syntax of language, symbols and tokens, etc., might end up digesting here out in the open if I have the energy
what's very funny he goes a few times over introducing some context to his concept art work, in that even though he is very much against the mathematicians and musicians he was around, he still deems necessary to explain what they were proposing.
hence, one has to become a competent teacher of ideas one opposes, as otherwise the entire project can be easily brushed off.
he assumes not much of initial knowledge of those contexts from his reader, which is a very gentle approach, though I cannot imagine anybody stumbling upon his works without knowing Young, or, and that's for certain, Cage

 

[wektor]

this makes sense though after giving it a thought: I recalled my conversation with Kieran Daly I had a couple months ago, after he told me he's from Carolina I brought up Flynt and asked if people know about him there. First of all, Daly is from South Carolina (Flynt is from North), second of all, there's fuck all there in South Carolina.
To quote: "To ask about whether someone knows Henry Flynt or Fluxus is just about as far as asking if they have been to the moon".
So this attempt to make the reading accessible makes sense, or would make sense at least until we started getting internet (leave alone some people still do ignore such access and just live their lives, ie. plenty of locals native to where I live in The Netherlands function like proper small town folk, while in my native Poland it's quite the opposite, the kids from the smallest towns have the highest motivation to be the informed about anything happening on any given art and music scene that can be looked up online).

 

[0bleak]

second of all, there's fuck all there in South Carolina.

You would be surprised.

this makes sense though after giving it a thought: I recalled my conversation with Kieran Daly I had a couple months ago, after he told me he's from Carolina I brought up Flynt and asked if people know about him there. First of all, Daly is from South Carolina (Flynt is from North), second of all, there's fuck all there in South Carolina.
To quote: "To ask about whether someone knows Henry Flynt or Fluxus is just about as far as asking if they have been to the moon".

That much is true only if you consider that a very small, miniscule percentage of people in the entire country will know anything about Flynt or Fluxus - no matter if you're in NYC or South Carolina.

I'm not even from here (South Carolina), but I spent some formative years here decades ago, and I can assure you there are and have been people from here that know about both Henry Flynt and Fluxus.

These days, there's even experimental music courses, studios, workshops, and concert series at University of South Carolina...