Actually the first point in any process is deciding what something won't sound like! Once most avenues have been eliminated, a beginning can be made. Then slowly shift the thing into a new position, by a process of rejecting what does not work... very negative I know! I was in a friendly argument with Simon Reynolds last year via email about his proffering up of the Arctic Monkeys as a "good thing" partly because as he said "the raging-against is stronger and more convincing, rhetorically, when there is something to rave-for out there and in 2006 you take your pleasures where you can" but to my mind, providing you have a beginning and a list of dislikes, you have all you need to create something... though this might be an artifact of computer based composition, its more about solving problems...
Reynolds' Pazz & Jopp essay
- Thread starter gek-opel
- Start date
Actually the first point in any process is deciding what something won't sound like! Once most avenues have been eliminated, a beginning can be made. Then slowly shift the thing into a new position, by a process of rejecting what does not work... very negative I know! I was in a friendly argument with Simon Reynolds last year via email about his proffering up of the Arctic Monkeys as a "good thing" partly because as he said "the raging-against is stronger and more convincing, rhetorically, when there is something to rave-for out there and in 2006 you take your pleasures where you can" but to my mind, providing you have a beginning and a list of dislikes, you have all you need to create something... though this might be an artifact of computer based composition, its more about solving problems...
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nomadologist
Guest
Ok, I can see wanting to resist that, too. But how can we? Please explain, if you've successively avoided being a consumer, how to do so. I'd love to know myself.
N
nomadologist
Guest
Oh, definitely. This is, again, where I think it helps to have experience making music when you go about trying to understand others' music, and their process. I think making something is a serious of omissions as often as it is "additions." Part of knowing what you want to sound like is knowing what you *don't* want to sound like. I think very interesting music is made from an even more explicitly negative standpoint--say, Cabaret Voltaire--where you add to the intial "what don't we want to sound like?" part of the process a sort of deliberate push toward what no one wants to hear, what is outside listenability, what is wholly uncomfortable to experience. I always end up appreciating music made like this, even if I don't always *love* it uncritically.
The alienation from yr own work comes in a sense because of this micro-management, lots of tiny decisions each one accessible to the mind of the creator, but the total sum of them is not, and can never be (given the 1000s of micro decisions required). Hence the whole "oh- how did I make that- and why?" thing.
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nomadologist
Guest
Right: nothing is ever exactly deliberate, or ever entirely within your control. The dadaists played with this element of chance explicitly, made it thematic in their work, and collage (i've always thought) prefigured the shift out of modernism and that "sublime" mode of production...the dadaist foresaw works one day having their primary significance completely outside the influence of the intentions of the artist. After modernism, it became hard to believe in intentionality or the "artist" at all, given the residue of capital that is all over art objects and the phantasmagoria that results.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
I think just because under capitalism you are supposed to buy things doesn't mean that you wouldn't want or need to have access to those things under a different system. Like music for instance. Or food.
To resist definition as something you don't want to be defined at is simply a mental exercise. Define yourself, it's easy.
Also, don't consume so much. If you are really dedicated you can try Freeganism. It is possible to eliminate money from many areas of your life, hard work though.
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nomadologist
Guest
Well, Noel, I don't really think it's possible, that was a rhetorical question 
I just wish more constructive points were made (like yours), rather than so many strange nitpicky ones.
I just wish more constructive points were made (like yours), rather than so many strange nitpicky ones.But no matter what you think as you consume, yr access point is through consumption, and yr excessive desire has been inculcated by consumerism, and functions to maintain societies and financial systems which rest on the foundation of consumerist artificial desire.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Personally speaking I really don't think I consume excessively, although I will accept that if I do it is sometimes as a way of compensating for the lack of what's really needed.
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nomadologist
Guest
Exactly: we only access desire through capital, there's no real escape hatch. Merely existing is a form of participation when even the air you breathe is redolent with the byproducts of capitalism.
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nomadologist
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And I believe that you don't consume excessively. But you still consume. So you're still a consumer. Hipsters just consume in a more complicated way than others--I think it's unfair to say "more", because some of the hipsters I know own the least amount of stuff of anyone I know. Most of them don't have playstations, or multiple TV, cars. A lot of hipsters I know seem to be all about disavowing certain fetish objects that are common in our culture. Wearing vintage clothes instead of new, that sort of thing...
Its the artificiality of grotesquely inculcated and maximised desire which is hard to grasp, having been inside capitalism all our lives (presumably)... imagine minimal desire before- music would have been at the level for most of folk music to dance to once a week, rather than an unending need for further aesthetic kicks, each one discarded whilst the next is queued up on soulseek or whatever.... 99.99% of people consume excessively, (certainly in the West at least...) its what we have been taught very well to do, its how we express identity, which is central in an age of individualism where almost no-one is really capable of being an individual...
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nomadologist
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Yeah, Gek. Here's another point where I hesitate, though: were people who only experienced music once a week necessarily listening "better" or somehow morally more righteous than someone who queues up songs on soulseek? I don't think so. That's why I'm getting more and more into Virilio, because he describes these shifts, the dematerialization of the fetish object, without getting mired in moralism. Which I think ultimately opens up the ontological horizon for miles on all sides...
(preface by saying: really need to read some Virilio- so feel free to shoot me down as an ignoramus here...) Its the system which consumerism keeps in place which is immoral, fundamentally, rather than the act of consumption itself.
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noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Did you ever go camping and avoid music for even just a few days, just listen to insects and birds and the wind and stuff? The simplest things can be amazingly rich sensory experiences when you strip away the oversaturation.
I think that if you do feel this need for the constant stream of aesthetic experiences it works as a kind of crude jamming signal and alternative to the official cultural narratives (myths?). Now we all attempt to create our own or smash them all. Sometimes scenes develop where groups work together.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
I think that's just mentally capitulating to capital. Did you choose this system? Why feel implicated?
At the very least until we evolve beyond these bodies we will need to consume food, water and oxygen. I think we also need culture, sex, trees, beaches and other things to be happy and healthy, however the systems make it possible or impossible for us to have access to these things.
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For Marx, I think the act of consumption within a free market itself has a negative sort of aura about it. For Virilio, the way the subject is organized is the product of many many more forces than just markets. That's why "Lost Dimension" is so interesting to me, the subject, and its milieu the city, are organized in *time* rather than in *space* for Virilio. He's more on the Heideggerian tip, even though he doesn't quite agree with Heidegger entirely. I think you'd really like him, Gek. (I have one of his entire books going up for next week's "Digital Media Theory" readings as a pdf. Let me know and I'll put it up today.)
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nomadologist
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Noel, intuitively, I don't feel bound by this. Virilio comes in here, too: our representations now exceed the real. Marx was all bogged down in the real. I want a way out of capitalism: I don't *feel* bound by it, but at the same time, I see how my actions are enslaved to its systemic stranglehold on our culture.
I'm not a huge music addict, actually: I go days without putting music on naturally. I love the industrial music of my Brooklyn Avenue daily.