mvuent

Void Dweller
repeating something with no changes can be great of course, but maybe you can add some degree of variation without losing the 'stay on it' appeal you're talking about? guess i'm thinking of how acid house or dub techno will be built around the repetition of one motif that gets filtered, sent through reverb, etc. in different ways without its basic character really changing--or even how old delta blues musicians will play the same riff over and over slightly differently each time. (there are probably a lot of relatively minimalist styles of music that wouldn't qualify though.)

idk, just wonder if it's possible to the combine the 'repeat the best part' ethos of dance music with the 'river-like' flux possible with generative music to an extent.
to elaborate on this thought slightly: saying that, to some extent, you can vary something 'perfect' without ruining it might seem obvious and beside the point (or alternatively, obviously wrong). but it's exciting when you realize that it might be possible to unite musical directions that seem like opposites, because it changes your conception of what's possible with the medium. (in other words, it's exciting to think that what seems like an "either/or" situation might actually be a "plus/and" one.) and to me, variation certainly has an appeal of its own--so the idea that you can repeat the best part and change it at the same time is more interesting/consequential than it might initially seem.
 
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version

Well-known member
The Cicada is Already There - https://journal.hkw.de/en/die-zikade-ist-schon-da/

"I guess by default I take the digital to be convincing in its own right, with each increase in resolution or fidelity being a threshold step in conscious experience. So, I sort of believe in the marketing language of flat-screen TVs, virtual reality, theater sound systems, etc., in a kind of primitive way. I’m not interested in “problematizing” this relationship we have with the digital realm in a generic way. I think you can be native to an environment and still be critical. I’m glad that I got online just before social networks, and got to experience as a young person the internet as a wide-open but also very private place."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
In retrospect I'd have liked to bring red dead redemption into this thread, back when I was obsessed with it and thought it was a digital hymn to the natural world, a possible exit point through the vortex into a bygone life of hunting, fishing, and gentle walks.
 

version

Well-known member
Finally.

I've never been into touchscreen technology, it's still isn't responsive enough to be worth using. The same goes for that bollocks of dropping the aux port from one of the Apple products. It's not an improvement yet.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
interest in smartphones is waning i believe. look at how all these manufacturers are desperately trying to come up with new "innovative" idea's. why the fuck we need a screen we can fold? there's no point in buying a new one if your old is still working. same what happened with televisions. there's no excitement anymore. that don't mean they lost though, they already got what they wanted: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

 

version

Well-known member
The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction — conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options of and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills of hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.


- Ballard, 1995
 

luka

Well-known member
Quote Originally Posted by sufi View Post
i'd like to hear matthew woebot on this topic, but he seems to have wandered off again

We talked about this actually. He said the reason history stops with grime is that is the last music to be released on vinyl. After that there is no magical artifact and without the magical artifact reality cannot be altered, material reality, doesn't change without the material fetish object being produced and inserted into the fabric of the real. After that we enter the virtual and in the virtual nothing can ever happen because time is abolished.

(I'm extrapolating here somewhat)
 

body_wall

Member
^^^

I would support grime as the last 'futuristic' genre. because there hasn't really been anything startlingly, frighteningly new since.

But is physicality all it takes for something to be real? Drill wouldn't be a real genre because it's hard enough to even get mp3s. But don't you think it definitely raised some hackles of the powers that b? Thereby altering some reality in the process?
 

version

Well-known member
It strikes me as a thread which managed to zero in on something everyone had been thinking about in some form or another for a while so it just erupted.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
I made my best tag in this one.

Also, there were a bunch of other great threads going on around this time. Often they'd interweave with each other. Sometimes you'd forget which one you were in. My head was swimming with ideas about them when I was out and about irl. I think people were generally being nicer to each other back then too
 

version

Well-known member
I'm struggling to remember the others but I think Beyond Soul was a good one. They were all around April this year. I wonder what the moon was doing at that time.
 

version

Well-known member
Actually this one started at the end of 2018. April was good though, the month of Craner's Top 100.
 
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