luka

Well-known member
there is nothing resistant to being put in a dialectical frame here. its not dependent on that frame but it is amenable to it. try it and you will see.
 

luka

Well-known member
ive woke up this morning stewing and i had to write a whole essay. im going to type it up now and if you lot still cant get onboard i dunno what i'll do. im trying so hard.... bear with me...
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Which music sounds like twitter? Vine?

Rapid fire small fragments of disparate information. cognitive strobe lighting. Footwork, ad-lib centric rap, skrillex, the resurgence of todd edwards’ cut up technique in edm and pop music


Which music sounds like the blue-white light of a computer screen glowing in a dark bedroom?



Is apathy a trait of the digital age? If so what music sounds like apathy?

uk drill, pbrnb, large swathes of 2010’s rap have been dominated by ambience and apathy


Which music is devoid of texture? No grit? No friction?


there’s not much in the way of texture in the digital age. no grit. smooth swiping of the phone screen.


Music which blurs the line between human and machine?

alkaline...

Music in which human’s mimic machines?

chris dave…


What phenomna is unique to, or amplified by, the digital age? Which music reflects those specific things?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Which music sounds like corpse ruthlessly rejecting your online pleas for affection from him for years on end, going so far as to not even follow the parody twitter account you made of him?

 

luka

Well-known member
consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.

Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information that the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.

The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)

Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.

The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).

When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)

One interesting thing to note here is that while this is primarily conceived of as a process of becoming-inorganic (the organic being characterised as textured, grained, warm, irregular) digital tends not to take on the forms of solids but to emulate the liquid, or the emulsion or molten. This future was inaugurated by The Abyss (1989) and more importantly and definitively, by Terminator 2 (1991) You move from the heavy-metal, solid-state Terminator 1, (Arnold Schwarzenegger, the embodiment of strength and rigidity) to the quicksilver, protean T2, able to adopt any form at all, able to pass through solid walls or to let a bullet travel straight through the body without damage (and played by the relatively slight Robert Patrick)

The process of dematerialisation is also a process of becoming weightless which is why we move from the solid to liquid. Think of the curves of 30 St. Mary Axe ('The Gherkin') and the new buildings clustered around it. Think too of the 'blobs' Simon Reynolds talks about in his piece on autotune.

"The program captures the characteristics of a vocal or instrumental performance and displays them graphically, with each note appearing as what Celemony calls a “blob.” Sound becomes Play-Doh to be sculpted or tinted by a huge range of effects. The blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor."

Think of the move away from rapping in blocks (bars), as heard in its most sophisticated and developed form with Young Thug, where both the line becomes fluid (overrunning or falling short of the bar-limits), and the individual word is made fluid, also able to be stretched and squished, morphing in pitch, volume and duration.

We are no longer confined to grids and boxes and straight-lines. If we think back to grime, and 8-bar in particular, it is all grids and boxes and cubes, reflecting the visual interface of the software programs. Now these rigid, structural supports and dividing walls begin to melt away (albeit still implicit and implied.) .

Or, finally, consider another quality, the quality of speed. Not straight line speed which can only ever end in the unbroken note, drone or blur but as event-density. As information feed - and this is where (one reason) hardcore and jungle are so prophetic, arriving from the future- the BPM is not the important measure of speed, it is the amount of information within the bar, (and this is why the return to linearity post 95 was so regressive) different timbres and textures, sheer amount and variety of individual sounds. There is just a little too much information to track and keep hold of, which, as rap pundit sadmanbarty has noted, is homomorphic with a platform like twitter or any other rapid-fire information delivery service, and, furthermore, as he points out, the rapid-fire, staccato triplets are also homomorphic with the same.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
, sheer amount and variety of individual sounds. There is just a little too much information to track and keep hold of, which, as rap pundit sadmanbarty has noted, is homomorphic with a platform like twitter or any other rapid-fire information delivery service, and, furthermore, as he points out,

"the rapid-fire, staccato triplets are also homomorphic with the same."

is the end of that sentance
 

luka

Well-known member
if between the pair of us we can't teach dissensus to play this game im going to take myself off into the wilderness and eat thistles and locusts
 

luka

Well-known member
i can make it a bit better as a piece of writing, as a single unit, an essay, but it wont make the ideas any clearer.
 

luka

Well-known member
or, to put it another way, dialectics models the interaction of solid parts whereas fluid dynamics are vastly more complex.

or, to put it another way, we're not in the 19th century any more Dorothy.
 
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