Bring it back to microsound

[John Vincler <jvincle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am not a particularly vocal person on this list but I value it as a resource and often find the dialogues, debates, etc. insightful, intelligent, and worth my time reading.  

But lately it seems like the list has become a mouthpiece for nonsense childish rants (the taylor d. name game), microsound ebay sales, and for vague shameless self-promotion of non-microsound music (and this is not a stab at Twine, I respect and enjoy their work).  

I'm interested in learning about new microsound music, and peoples intelligent/passionate thoughts about it.  Talk equipment, talk software, talk theory, network...that's all beautiful and this list has been great, but it seems to have been slipping.  

Does anyone else feel this way?  Or is it me?

And sorry to contribute to the nonsense by complaining.

-john


SOMETHING PROVOCATIVE I'M WORKING ON -- MIGHT BE OF INTEREST TO SOME OF YOU....PERHAPS...JUST A TASTE

"The glitch aesthetic" is the soundtrack to the civil war raging within the body of the cyborg-self -- flesh in conflict with the mechanical prosthesis, rejecting and subverting, turning functionality against itself.  Tools for increased productivity (the pc, the network, etc.) subverted for increased pleasure and in defiance of unwilled participation in agendas not one 's own, reclaiming space for the body (the micro to the macro of techno's first wave of reclamation and appropriation of abandoned urban spaces).  It is mechanical sadomasochism of sorts, but on a whole new complicated playing field.  

Designers, Coders, Digital artists and musicians -- we are a new class.  We are the first wave of cyborgs.  We are in the midst of a class war.  It is not amongst ourselves, but within ourselves.  

Why?

The tools were developed by the future members of the cyborg class(by us) but the orders for the purpose, the functionality, the ideology behind these tools came from above (military, corporate interests, et al.). [see 1] Thus we are in conflict, torn.  Committed to yet dissatisfied with.  The glitch is just one way of giving voice to these struggles.  Turning the "productive" and discipline rendering functionality on its head.  

Chemical Equation:

Take the modern tech-savvy worker/creator (i.e. cyborg man and his machine) add (for clarity): 
Foucault's "microphysics of power" [see 1], 
Deleuze and Guattari's "micropolitcs and microeconomics" [see 2] 
Deleuze and Guattari's "microtextures" [see  3]
(please add some Virilio if you'd like -- to taste)

mix  --->

MICROSOUND (sonic subversion - not without it's contradictions)          

[1] "microphysics of power...Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion; subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious; mechanisms that obeyed economies too shameful to be acknowledged, or pursued petty forms of coercion..."  
-- from Foucault's "Docile Bodies"

[2] "[P]ower centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power.  In short, the molecular, or microeconomics, is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its 'mass'--the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line.  The task of making the segments correspond to the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta, implies hit-and-miss changes in rhythm and mode rather than any omnipotence; and something always escapes." 
--from Deleuze and Guattari's "a thousand plateaus"

[3] The microtextures--not masochism--are what explain how the oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere."
--from Deleuze and Guattari's "a thousand plateaus"

MORE TO COME HOPEFULLY AT KM'S CONFERENCE IF I CAN WRAP UP THE FORMAL DRAFT THAT THIS WAS IMPROV-D FROM AT 5:00 A.M.

night night 

glitch on