Re: [microsound] the black, the white, and the Mutek @ Stylus

["Nicolas Grenier" <greniernic@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Very interesting reflections... I just wish to add my view on techno music. 
I won't quote your article or the discussion but just express my opinions on 
some of the ideas mentionned.

The effects of repetitive music on a mass, the unity that is somehow formed 
between the dancers; this strange phenomenon can generate a lot of 
fascinating thoughts. My little theory is that repetitive music is a kind of 
mind control applied to art, not necessarely in a political sense but in an 
artistic sense. By that I mean that repetitive music limits our world and 
gain control over our imagination; it's a dream in a box.

What I don't like about techno is it's rythmical previsibility. I think it 
kills the vigor of the listener's mind in order impose him a sonic universe. 
To me, repetitive music seems like a drug, a drug that kills our imagination 
by imprisonning it in a tiny time space (a space in time created by a loop). 
This is not an uninteresting effect at all, I've had 'mystical' rave 
experience too, this feeling is undeniably interesting and can bind people 
together. But what is even more interesting, is to create a complex time 
space (or space time maybe?... in french it's 'espace temps') which exceed 
our comprehension in the immediate; you feel the order, you can't understand 
it now, it defy your judgement and makes the order greater than you. This is 
why I love experimental music, deconstructed music, because the rhythm is 
there, the order is there, but it's complexity exceed your faculties during 
the moment you listen to it and you can only feel it; I love to feel a 
complex rythmical organisation. This is a little bit like a religious 
experience; god is the order that you feel but that you cannont grasp, the 
feeling that there's an order that includes you but that you cannot be 
aware. There is an order exceeding us, our counsciousness cannot assimilate 
everything; feeling this order is a humbling experience that makes us aware 
that there is so much more out for us to make thinkable. Experimental music 
is a way to push the limits of the thinkable, to look deeper into chaos and 
give it a meaning.

Fascism, authoritarianism, this is mind control by a body of people who lack 
humility, who desperatly want to set rules to the life of people. Music 
should be the ennemy of this arrogance that grows in us, it should 
extinguish it because it is unjustified and lead to self-destruction. Music 
should make us aware of how unsignificant we really are in the universe and 
by that encourage us to invent a signification for our existence.

This is why I'm cautious with repetitive music, I think it can become a 
pathology, a dangerous addiction leading to a kind of psychosis that makes 
us anthropocentric. But I hope you understand that I don't hold my views for 
absolute, I respect people who like repetive music and I don't consider them 
like 'sonic junkies', now I just try to be cautious toward music that's too 
repetitive because of the reasons I've tried to explain.

Cheers,
Nicolas Grenier

aka Dynamite Bob
http://www.besonic.com/dnb

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