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Re: [microsound] re: oh...




I think, when you throw the concept "bourgeois" as wide as, say, "privileged few who maintain the hegemony" (and that's how I'd use the term) you're damn near fucked. Computers are a joke - what proportion of the world's population has even used a phone?

Well, the bourgeois is a concept of which to speak (A) within the context of computer music and (B) on an internet mailing list with only the most knowing of Monty Pythonesque nudge-nudge wink-wink know-what-I-means. Anyone who can afford to run the software and hardware required to generate much of the music discussed on this list IS firmly bourgeois, as is anyone who discusses this music by way of the internet, for after all, is not much of our bandwidth devoted to the reified products of creativity - CDs for sale, software for sale - rather than to the abstraction of sound itself? Which is NOT to criticize the discussions here - on the contrary, the high level noticed here is certainly not to be measured on many music lists - but to point out that our very context is a bourgeois one. And the bourgeois itself is chiefly a topic of conversation among the bourgeoisie - those above such a class need not be bothered by such trivialities, and those below have more pressing matters for word and thought. To crawl toward the topic of the 20" to 2000 series, I can understand how one might get offended were a musical product to wrap itself in counter-bourgeois claims (one recently departed French philosopher is popularly abused for such purposes), but Noton - unless I missed a part of the "campaign" - made no such boasts, its series appearing instead to aim at a purely aesthetic set of effects. I cannot speak for the entire series, but given that it included a lovely morsel by Senking (the installment I own) and was unified with a striking and minimal design I can find no aspect to which one might attach such theoretical fault. It even avoided the jewel case in favor of less wasteful (and less breakable) packaging, making it if anything praiseworthy in materialist terms, and it was not priced in the high-stratospherics of arcane pre-auction collectibility, calling into question any claims of market exploitation. And in experimental music the only difference between a limited edition and a normal edition is the notation of "Limited Edition" on the former, although I suppose one could offer some discourse upon the commodification of scarcity were one really inclined...


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