Are you a Rasta?

[john eden]

@borzoi yes it’s the lack of ego, that’s good. Small cog in a massive machine vs let me tell you everything about me.

 

[Woebot]

never a bad moment for this

 

[thirdform]

Yeah you are

 

[luka]

My boys!

 

[thirdform]

There was a time when I thought rastas/rastafarianism was one of the coolest things ever, but somehow now I see it as terminally uncool. I don't know how that happened. I'm not saying I saw the light, I think I've gone astray.

I really like the lester bangs article about visiting Jamaica and trying to lose himself in the rastafarian ritual and failing. And how he gets across that people see them as these gentle hippies but they're actually fundamentalists.

There's obviously a powerful attraction to western cultureless people like me in something as fervent as rastafarianism - but also it's the fact the music is amazing and you get to smoke weed all day.

No you don't. it's all very ritualised and ceremonial. On average secular euros smoke far more weed on the daily. + a lot of jamaican weed is actually quite bad quality bushweed.

 

[thirdform]

I think we've discussed before the religiosity of Todd Edwards music.

The joyous spirit of Christ the child that's in it – could an atheist ever have invented music like that?

Sure, Xenakis, though it's a different type of joy, more cosmic, more atomic, ironically more abstract...

 

[luka]

There's a warmth, at the most fundamental level, that it seems can only come from having a personal relationship with the universe.

 

[luka]

Everybody know this is a question of temperature. That's why they talk about the cold hard light of science.

 

[luka]

Religion opens out onto all sorts of terrors and sublimities but on a day to day level you have the comfort and foundation and companionship of constant presence

 

[luka]

In my life, and probably yours too, this sense of presence comes and goes, there's nothing as devastating as it leaving, possibly for good. But it comes and goes and sometimes it is near and sometimes far off.

 

[thirdform]

Religion opens out onto all sorts of terrors and sublimities but on a day to day level you have the comfort and foundation and companionship of constant presence

yeah, which is why it's more ideology than true gnosis most times. like disorganised religion isn't religion, it's mysticism.

 

[luka]

But you can certainly make the heroic and self mutilating choice to stand in the cold, all alone and isolated. And that opens out new possibilities for expression.

 

[luka]

You get that with artists like Prynne and Xenakis, where there is a principled commitment to materialism and the austerities it demands.

 

[luka]

this is the beyond soul premise.

 

[luka]

For me where the value lies is in being taken out of a human frame of reference, human scale, human values, human affect
And it's not unique to techno. You have it in the microscopic events of parmagianni, or in the off-world landscapes of xenakkis.
(Sp?)
You can't ever quite get past the fact of listening as a human but you can identify yourself with what is heard as opposed to the hearer

So that what you are placed into a relationship with isn't another human, with a body, emotions and ideas, but with matter itself. As machine. As landscape. As deep space. As molecular bustling, combining and recombining. As DNA script. As geology. The collisions and cleaving of tectonic plates.

Not human bioenergy but the energy of the national grid. Or of stars. Or of the mantle beneath us. Or of atoms. "The fixed adamant zones of matter" as JH Prynne put it.

"where the adamant fixed zones of matter resist the pressures of the imagination. "

This is a fundamental facet and direction of modern art, in music as much as anywhere else. This os what I'm trying to talk about I think. It's not a rejection of the human, it's just seeing what's outside that. Letting the imagination reach past the confines of the human world.

 

[thirdform]

You get that with artists like Prynne and Xenakis, where there is a principled commitment to materialism and the austerities it demands.

 

[thirdform]

 

[thirdform]

big fan of untitled tracks personally.

 

[Corpsey]

Interesting thread this

Dissensus is a library/cave of infinite wonders

 

[Mr. Naga Pickle]

Yeah you are

no im a spanish squatter.