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Re: [microsound] techno-mysticism (ne purple) with a side of Ae



Joshua Maremont wrote:

> What is fascinating to me about
> electronic music is that it is generally non-representational (except maybe
> to the geeks among us who can picture the mechanisms by which the sounds
> have been made), allowing the pattern-matching overlays generally imposed
> upon perceptual experience to be left aside and giving the subconscious and
> unconscious realms of the listener's psyche a chance in which to direct its
> experience not by logic but by emotion and association and recollection;

This reminds of the beginnings of what could have been an interesting
discussion that occurred between myself and my roomie recently. He´s a drummer
(in the most traditional sense). Some drum´n´bass was playing on top of some
extreme sport on the telly, and I told him what it was. He contemplates the
music for a short while, then discovers the music is programmed (or at least
that something isn´t "right"), and then dismissed the music as "unlikely".
I´ve never heard d´n´b classified as "unlikely" before. I suggested that
perhaps that kind of representational thinking should be abandoned and that he
shouldn´t think of d´n´b in the context of "real drumming" -- what´s possible
and what´s not. "But it sounds like real drums", he replied. End of story.

> I cannot pretend to state a Truth here about music

I´ve learned to distrust Truth as an interesting substance (my pomo
heritage?), at least if you are referring to its scientific connotations. What
should this truth be? Isn´t Rob Young constructing or designing a kind of
truth when he writes about the glitch? And isn´t this "truth" being redesigned
and reconstructed on this very list? I can´t even begin to imagine what the
Truth about music would (should) be. The truth about the glitch. Where would
we find it, and how? As long as the wittgensteinian notion that logic has to
be dismissed from the field of aesthetics is accepted, in other words: as long
as logic is out of the game, how can any substantial truth (understood as One)
be found?

Anyways, this discussion has been quite enlightening and very interesting. And
your way with words is astonishing, Joshua. Obviously you are having a good
game.  :)

/Oeivind/