scenes as musical universes

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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
recently ive been thinking about what attracted me to jungle obviously wasn't (not directly at least) the shock of the new, which in any case would not make much sense outside of my own consciousness, (as in, jungle would probably have given the kids in my school the shock of the new, but it obviously didn't) but the shock of a universe forming in front of my eyes. i get a feeling with some of the synthy post-punk stuff as well.

I like that emphasis that Kodwo Eshun put on hearing the impossible. that's always been my insatiable drive. if the shock of the new is the shock of the novel then it's quite boring and tawdry isn't it? better to have the shock of the impossible.


 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I like the phrase "shock of the impossible".

Of course, this effect wears off too - I think I ruined it, actually, by getting into production (only to total n00b levels but still). Peeking behind the curtain. Suddenly jungle rhythms don't sound like impossibly fast drumming so much as a grid of rigidly defined triggers.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Corpsey said:
I like the phrase "shock of the impossible".

Of course, this effect wears off too - I think I ruined it, actually, by getting into production (only to total n00b levels but still). Peeking behind the curtain. Suddenly jungle rhythms don't sound like impossibly fast drumming so much as a grid of rigidly defined triggers.
Click to expand...

yes but there is jungle. and then there is junglism. the two are different.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's precisely those triggers which sound impossible to me though. indian classical rhythms go twice the speed of jungle beats, if not even faster. i knew that because we had asian radio on AM in london and you could hear that stuff in the morning.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
what attracted me precisely to jungle is that you'd take a drum hit loop from a rhythm section in a band and then chop it up. so even when you're defining those triggers you get this effect of disjuncture. if someone actually did live drums and bass, but with a live drummer, it would sound horrifying. it's precisely the cut up nature of the breaks which do it for me. even stuff that flows more organically still has that element to it.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
Corpsey said:
I like the phrase "shock of the impossible".

Of course, this effect wears off too - I think I ruined it, actually, by getting into production (only to total n00b levels but still). Peeking behind the curtain. Suddenly jungle rhythms don't sound like impossibly fast drumming so much as a grid of rigidly defined triggers.
Click to expand...

i think for me it's been the opposite. the more i get into production (like you said, just the basics so far) the more i'm impressed by a lot of jungle.

having an idea of what's normally possible increases the shock when you encounter something impossible. so now that i've made stuff with breakbeats i can better appreciate when it's done really creatively.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
then of course you have leftfield dubby electronica records like this.

they open up a whole avenue of history to explore, a lineage that was never accessible to me because i never read the NME or listened to six music or whatever. my approach to the post-punk continuum has always been refracted through free jazz and jungle, it's the least white way to view it.


which then goes here...

 
luka

luka

Well-known member
With music you have a counterpart of inner space, it's a kind of externalisation of inner space. It's an environment (musical universe) but in addition to its being an environment I think it also implies a vehicle which moves through and within that environment. A kind of body.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
unlike our flesh and blood bodies that body is not bound by gravity. Is not bound to the rails of linear time etc etc etc.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
As you say Kodwo Eshun makes this fairly explicit in his book. I think it's very important.
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
the shock of the new and the shock of the impossible are mysterious phenomena - because, you would think, simply by your experiencing it, the Newness would almost instantly evaporate - it would by definition be no longer new, it would seem increasingly familiar - something you were used to and had assimilated

likewise, simply by dint of existing, the quality of impossibility would immediately cancel itself out, becoming part of the realm of the possible and thinkable

but in fact that doesn't happen

the shock of the new can sustain itself quite a long time, through slightly differently inflected iterations of that newness

and moreover, even more mysteriously, if you hear something from the past that was once shocking newly / inconceivable / impossible, it still has that effect on a listener (or viewer or reader or...) even though all kinds of things have subsequently intervened and surpassed it - even though the art in question has been domesticated and become middlebrow or institutionalized

there's something about the breaking through into the unknown that permanently adheres to that work, continues to inhere to it

i really think it does and it's not an effect that relies on historical projection or mentally establishing the original context

it's a mysterious quality of the work itself
 
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kumar

Well-known member
newness can sustain itself for longer than you might imagine compared to how quickly many things become boring,


but considering the hundreds of thousands of years of human life that took place before amen breaks theres many things that retain the special effect of impossibleness after theyve become commonplace. the audible seams of a cut up break made people move in a different way than they ever had, the instantaneous digital jumps in a recorded drum loop can't be replicated in a continuous analog physical space but they make people dance like cgi characters.
 
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