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I wonder if we can ever hear sound 'purely' - can a person listen to Ambient Works e.g. as sound, without even the vaguest mental images floating in front of their minds eye?
thirdform
thats how you're supposed to listen to the french GRM stuff.
Try Francois Bayle Toupie dans le ciel.
it's a bit like looking at clouds without turning them into pirate ships, castles, witches etc.
i think of that type of music as analogous to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry.
first of all, to what extent and in what ways can a single word, take HORSE for instance, operate as a poem?
before you introduce relationships between words, what resonances, what networks of association, what images before the mind's eye, what memories,
does that single word contain/evoke/engender? and the sound of it? sing it
round stretched syllable then sibilance, discreet vocables....
and this is really just the beginning. but it demonstrates how the basic units and building blocks are themselves alive with meaning and affect, have their own irreducible mystery or aura.
as i said on some other thread, it's microscope work. show me the atoms and the molecules, how they interact, which 2 elements combust or otherwise combine, which stay separate and inert?
it asks for a heightened sensitivity, focussed but not fixed attention and an expanded awareness, attention to both sound and your own response to sound. how does this relationship work? how exactly is cause and effect operating here? what's mine and what's yours? and so on and so forth.
there is neither rhythm nor narrative to be carried along by, no downstream to float on, and unlike drone there's no bedrock, no ground. sound emerges from silence vanishes into silence. void. no ground at all.
everything is always starting now. it's always starting anew. and there's no redundancy or repetition. no pattern to forewarn you of what comes next.
all these characteristics can be powerfully synergistic with psychedelics. i wouldn't characterise it as psychedelic music per se but the radical sobriety of it dovetails with psychedelia in a peculiar way just as the radical sobriety of phenomenology also dovetails with psychedelia. the act of attention. you remake the world this way.
is today then the least psychedelic time in your life because of the dominance of the self (and the selfie)? The pressure to define oneself has perhaps never been quite as mercilessly exacted on people (particularly young people) than by the internet and social media. We're constantly assaulted by advertising and brands, we're pressurised to advertise OURSELVES.
be your own brand. yes but. the interesting thing about the internet is that it doesnt change the direction, it accelerates it. that's what i found striking about Jameson's big postmodernism book-(complete with Reynolds quote of endorsement on the back cover)
all the trends and changes and ruptures we associate with the internet are already present and identified in classical postmodernist theory of the '80s. ('70s?) it's textbook.
and certainly the demise of psychedelia is connected with the demise of the shared dream more generally (and how shared dreams merge and morph into Grand Ideologies and back again) and in particular with the fallout from the '60s. it's still all Capitalist Realism with not much Acid Corbynism in sight. the Reality Principle hogging almost all available bandwidth. presumably, at some point the right drug or the right revelation will coincide with the right historical moment and the story will continue.
the vision, or as woebot calls it, the dreaming, is always there, in the way that fascism is always there, dormant but as potent as ever. as empty form. as potential. waiting to be activated.
"but where there's a Way In there's a Way Out... to leap into Faith is always to fall into Darkness" etc etc