Gavin
booty bass intellectual
Hang on how do I get lambasted (rightly) for using "organic"... but Zhao gets away with endless pontificating on "humanity" in music... and fetishisation of ethnic "other" music as so earthy and natural and human and blah de blah blah... which is equally bullshit if not more so and for identical reasons- its not the sound of sounds which is the problem, but the delivery system, the social and economic context etc. If you attempt to find some raw unmediated dance music of sex and earthy passion, all you can find is the image of such a thing, which just like the image of inhuman dance music is just that AN IMAGE. If there is any "outside" left (and I reckon there isn't) then it would be at the level of unrecorded immediate music between you and others as musicians (maybe again).
If anything I sense a way out of the impasse through the embracing of entirely post-human, the building of a subject which is suitable for the media-capital environment. Human-as-becoming, not as falsely naturalised end-point. In an anti-Marxist sense perhaps alienation and an environment of technocratic affect is the very point of the human... digressing here into bollocks...
For me the entire point of music is finding new ways of hearing, new methods of comprehension.
Yeah, I was thinking about this on the bus ride home... Zhao's humanist stance seems borne out of a particular kind of crowd response, but breaks down when you get to the level of sonic signifiers which are inherently unstable -- siginifiers of "organicity" or "humanness" are contingently ascribed, and *surprise surprise* subject to well worn Western binaries. Mind/body; rational/emotional; male/female; white/Other --> thus not that surprising really that international booty bass gets that humanist/sexual/emotional response that Zhao's looking for from German crowds
Thing is, even Zhao's humanist club situation is still working on that level of people plugged into a technological grid: human beings interfacing with technology (turntables, mass-produced vinyl, amplification, synthesized sounds) to produce particular responses, practices, networks, etc. Which of course is what techno is all about -- the music produced not from ideal self-contained humanist subjects but that comes from the intersection of humans with machine creativity (repetition, mass production, rational order, etc.). Perhaps ultimately that machines in some sense use human beings to produce music out of an immense but finite amount of choices, calibrations, settings, etc -- the music that was already there, just waiting to be activated. And that's why there's such a strong element of formalism, exploring sonic possibilities bereft of any particular human response, in electronic music.
As far as post-humanity.... weeeellll... I sort of like the idea of music acclimating people to new social/cultural orders, but it gets the little Adorno sitting on my shoulder all riled up.