Simon Reynolds K-Punk Memorial Lecture

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
As for 'not being comfortable' with Acid Communism.... Well, it doesn't exist does it? It didn't get written. So you can make your own one up!

I know this is a response to whispering dave but bruv i invented dat ting in 2009 why would i need to make it up?

played this to my mum that time and it freaked her out turn it down what is this noise baba will be furious.


It's the sound of communist revolution, mother.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
communism being the return to and integration of primitive man as a unitary higher level social man the first step of acid communism is unhinged machinic sex, delirium, amnesia and loss of control. the 60s did not go there. chicago house did. acid/jack was the biggest revolution in music after the delta blues, droid can splutter indignantly all he likes.


 
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luka

Well-known member
Lots of interesting resonances there for me - Reich and the muscular armouring of the throat for one. I've screamed spontaneously in therapy sessions when I got in touch with terror I was holding elsewhere in my body. Was reminded of Hakim Bey's TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) as well. Which is basically asking how might we live if this bloody revolution is never going to happen? Where can you find some space? What's that going to be like?

Yes absolutely. How we interpret any particular shout depends to a large extent on the pattern of muscular tension we pick up on in throat and jaw and etc when we hear these sounds we reverse engineer them and can feel to some extent how they are produced.

this is the basis of how we distinguish between shouts of pain fear exultation ecstasy etc
 
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luka

Well-known member
This is what we have been banging on about here for the last three years or so isn't it.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
am not unclenching my throat tension and letting out a scream in front of Margaret McBurney lads. have some blimmin standards. therapy is dress-2-impress.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
this is my problem with anti-marxians. by all means convince me what marx said was a load of total hogwash, but first handle the masters tools with grace. turn him out from the inside. Can't think of many people (even anarchists) who do this.

Did you try Ludwig von Mises?
 

catalog

Well-known member
Did anyone read Will 'big dada' Ashon's book about Wu tang clan's '36 chambers'. He has a lot of stuff in there about the sax/trumpet (can't remember which) howl/squeal. The honk. I think with reference to 'The grunt' by the JBs and lots of other tunes. Is this the same thing as the shout??

Will try to find the bits and post em up. I read it and enjoyed it but don't really like or know Wu tang (apart from that album) enough to remember any of it. But I do remember he had this thing about the horn. I'm sure I've heard it somewhere else as well, the 'mutant trumpet' by Egyptian lover.
 

luka

Well-known member
Do us a favour please. When you do it can you start a new thread called 'The Shout.' l reckon there's enough to justify it having its own thread and maybe Simon would like to expand on it as well. Could be good.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
. eventually the restrictions of non-autonomous zones end up asserting themselves first as a dull compulsion and then as an overwhelming brute necessity. .

This may be true but the point is the "temporary" surely? I think you can absolutely make a case that the free spaces found in raves, squats, even therapy encounter groups are autonomous zones where different rules come into play even if it's only for a few hours. That's the point.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Shout in black pop music can certainly be linked to free jazz (think Abbey Lincoln on Freedom Now Suite + Coltrane's saxophone runs + James Brown even calls on Robert McCullogh to "give me some Trane brother!" in the middle of Superbad). But don't think its a borrowing, more part of a continuum, a set of borrowings/adaptations/resonances. Also the shout in black pop (and therefore its transfer into 60s pop music more broadly) is more complicated than "cry of freedom". It's also a register of something like pain or at least a history of negation.

Which is why I think Acid Communism needs some work, or I'm not all that comfortable with it. If Sly and The Family Stone are seen as key figures in making of AC, then also need to recognise how much that sound (and those that precede/follow it - Hendrix/P-Funk) also grappling with/modulating a set of almost totalising social restrictions (ie being black - historical experiences of racism as debilitation). The weirdness/looseness/joy/funkiness of Sly Stone is all bound up with that, and therefore the account of freedom is also much more complicated than something like a default sense of liberation.

Could kinda sum it up as between the following positions/statements: Bob Marley's "when music hits you you feel no pain" + Wadada Leo Smith's "It hurts to play this music".

all this stuff about the Shout and loudness is just something (a personal and recent obsession) i've glommed onto Acid Communism - Mark doesn't mention it as i recall. the main focus of that intro chapter - all that he finished - is The Temptations's "Psychedelic Shack", but he also mentions Sly and the Family, Beatles, and various other things.

so it's not an integral concept that needs to be reconciled with any specific ideology

but yeah of course the passage of certain modalities of expression, etc from black practitioners to white changes them

the paradigm of that is the transfer of "I'm a Man" in Muddy Waters et al to performers like The Animals, Them - the racial element of defiance gets lost, and it becomes something else -
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Shout in black pop music can certainly be linked to free jazz (think Abbey Lincoln on Freedom Now Suite + Coltrane's saxophone runs + James Brown even calls on Robert McCullogh to "give me some Trane brother!" in the middle of Superbad). But don't think its a borrowing, more part of a continuum, a set of borrowings/adaptations/resonances. Also the shout in black pop (and therefore its transfer into 60s pop music more broadly) is more complicated than "cry of freedom". It's also a register of something like pain or at least a history of negation.

Which is why I think Acid Communism needs some work, or I'm not all that comfortable with it. If Sly and The Family Stone are seen as key figures in making of AC, then also need to recognise how much that sound (and those that precede/follow it - Hendrix/P-Funk) also grappling with/modulating a set of almost totalising social restrictions (ie being black - historical experiences of racism as debilitation). The weirdness/looseness/joy/funkiness of Sly Stone is all bound up with that, and therefore the account of freedom is also much more complicated than something like a default sense of liberation.

Could kinda sum it up as between the following positions/statements: Bob Marley's "when music hits you you feel no pain" + Wadada Leo Smith's "It hurts to play this music".

Most Sly stuff before There’s a Riot is so up full,affirmative, unifying, come together in vibe - that the element of pain etc that you are talking about, correctly, as being inseparable from the liberation - it can be hard to hear

But then on Stand! - in amidst the celebration and acceptance of all those songs like “everyday people” there is “Don’t call me nigger, whitey”. And there you can hear centuries of it, alchemized in the most extraordinary way so that it sounds like triumph and agony at the same time. And it goes on and on and on, this almost unendurable ecstasy

One of those songs where you just can’t believe music like this can exist
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
This may be true but the point is the "temporary" surely? I think you can absolutely make a case that the free spaces found in raves, squats, even therapy encounter groups are autonomous zones where different rules come into play even if it's only for a few hours. That's the point.

nah.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
fuck raves. they were just corporate events playing the same 20 anthems for 8 hours on loop. it's all about smoking crack in a tower bloc flat broadcasting on pirate radio playing music to give people nightmares. nothing autonomous about that, it is extremely disciplined and cloak and dagger. the more communal the studio is, the more likely it is to be busted by police. if you don't wanna get caught (and some pirates did this) you'd leave a vhs cassette running with an empty studio.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I know what acid communism is and I know how k-punk would have conceived it. and I'm saying being afraid of people perpetuates the current categories of authoritarian society, even if ideologically conceived as a TAZ. therapists and cops share this thing in common. they are terrified of seeing their primitive double in the mirror. If I wasn't locked up by mental health cops when I was going through a schizophrenic episode I would have probably coaxed this out of Mark.

That's why I like music like early chicago acid, dark jungle and speedcore. it takes a mirror to society, shows us all the rave dreams never were, not that they are over. liberation comes from the daily social relations we perpetuate in our lives, not a pleasure prison time set aside for capital to reduce us to the idle spectator. noone goes on strike to go to a rave, and that should say miles.
 
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luka

Well-known member
The enclosed space, like the magician’s circle, is a given. Within the circle the magician is protected. The demon is safely contained. The therapist’s room, like the magician’s circle is a special kind of space. The rules are suspended. Reality is more malleable there, and experiments can be made in relative safety. Old habits are sloughed off, new selves are tried on for size, like costumes plucked from the dressing up box.

This is the frame. The bubble. It is unimportant whether the frame is formally demarcated but it is must be there, at least implicitly. By sealing off the outside world, what is formed is analogous to the bubble universes of speculative physics. Ideally, what happens in the bubble universe allows the client to be stronger, wiser, kinder and more contented on returning to the wider world.
 
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