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Re: [microsound] On the subject of coil...



In a message dated 8/26/00 9:26:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
ezueled@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> Well, if you see Coil as the road back to essentialism than I must say I´d
>  rather stay with the techno fetishists.

I said nothing of the sort, and i am saying nothing of "essentialism". I am 
aware that the search for absolutes is a complete dead end. When i say 
"essential nature", I mean that which is inexplicable, idescribable, and 
intangible. I say this merely to counter  the overly intellectual nature of 
so much of the music that we discuss here. So much of the micro-music and 
"glitch scene" music is so steeped in conceptualism that it leaves me cold 
and bored. It has little heart and substance to me, merely being comprised of 
art-school rhetoric which can only be described in self-serving and 
masturbatory manifestos for the home-bound and inert thinker.  This is all 
well and good, as I myself am occasionally a home-bound, inert thinker... but 
i also go out and dance, get laid, and EXPERIENCE the world outside of 
thought and c-sound programming language. THIS is what i speak of when i say 
essential nature...that which makes us whole animal beings as opposed to 
merely thinking machines in flesh casings.  Coil have perfectly interfaced 
the intellectual and animal for me, so much more so than, say, tetsuo inoue.  
His music is brilliant, but has little to say to anything else within us 
besides the intellect. His music definitely has a pertinent place, though, in 
the whole scheme of things. I'm just saying that Coil's music is much more 
well-rounded and integrated for me.
 

>And essential nature? We all know the
dangerous places that concept can lead to.< 

....and yet you use the concept of
 relativism in your argument?

??

>the astrological can just as well be
categorized as fetishism and "self-serving ideology".<

True dat, but when is speak of self-serving ideology, i mean when an artist 
has to describe the reason behind his work, or simply give the purpose behind 
what he does as an effort to validate it. Take the new Oval, for example. 
It's a fucking beautiful record, but when you read his interviews, he's 
basically ruining himself by over-intellectualizing what he does. He should 
just shut up and forget about his "new radicalism" and make beautiful music, 
or rather "audio" as he calls it. THAT is the new radicalism, simply 
foregoing irony and creating sincere, radical art. He is already in the music 
history books, so he should just keep making good music and maybe create his 
own forms instead of TRYING to be so radical. It seems that his whole idea of 
the consumer becoming the creator is just his own rhetoric to make himself 
seem much more innovative than he is. Any kid who buys vinyl and mixes his 
records together is "the consumer becoming the creator". Markus Popp should 
go to a few raves and not take himself so seriously. Me and my friends were 
scratching cds and recording the results years before systemisch came out. 
It's really nothing new.

And that's why i love Coil. They don't claim to be making anything new, they 
even state that they are tapping into something ancient and presenting it in 
a modern format.  Yeah, they get cheesy and sound dated at times, but they're 
in their forties, whaddaya expect? If you look through the surface, beyond 
the Jarre-type synth lines,   into the intent of what they do...it's much 
more beautiful than most conceptual music. And that's because, like autechre, 
they make it mostly for  themSELVES, and not to create a dissertation or new 
concepts of how music is created. As they themselves have said before, the 
best music is being made by people in their garage somewhere purely on 
INSTINCT , and not as the end result of some agenda.  You can tell that 
people like Markus Popp make their music by instinct, but there are other 
artists (some who are on this list, and therefore remain un-named) that come 
up with the concept and then go from there. That's fine, but it makes for 
very assymetrical and unbalanced art in my opinion. The best art is a 
culmination of the instinctual AND the conceptual.

>Are we back to Enlightenment?<

I think we never left it. The only way for humanity to keep it's sanity is to 
believe that there is more knowledge to be learned, and that the future IS 
enlightenment. 

And since  I rarely post to this "micro-music" list, i have to give props to 
toni aalto's total motion ep, which I think has the most INTENSE "micro" 
grooves of any tech-house single in ages. It is totally physical and mental 
at the same time, a complete aural orgasm for those who actually MOVE  more 
than the fingers that stroke their chins when they listen to music.

peace!
random
--Boundary_(ID_PhzV1iGZWfjkYCsCKHmwuA)
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