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.
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?
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
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.
You get that with artists like Prynne and Xenakis, where there is a principled commitment to materialism and the austerities it demands.
no im a spanish squatter.Yeah you are