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

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

dear Nicolas,

I have a question as to your argument. You begin by arguing that repetitive
music can lead to a kind of "mind control," a "dream in a box." Later on you
tie this into the possibility of reinforcing an anthropocentricism, in fact,
to a desire for setting "rules," and thus, linked to various modes of
fascism and authoritarianism.

You oppose this to experimental music, which has a "complex rhythmical
organisation." The effect of this complexity is that "you can only feel it,"
and by this "it" you mean "an order that includes you but that you cannot be
aware." You then tie this "order" into "god," "religious experience."

Is not that which defies explanation--the mystical, the unknowable, of the
chaos that nonetheless contains meaning--the very *basis* of religious
hierarchy, and ultimately, the self-destruction of the order to chaos that
is fascism?

The mysticism of the Nuremburg rallies; the magical uses of uniform and
symbology--the sense that, in the case of National Socialism, its very
essence was a part of a large, unknowable destiny of the Fatherland that
simply could not be explained. And that this must be *mastered*, but only
from the unknowable (again, Pynchon's description of the double-helix
mineshafts, of the Schwarzkommando all come to mind here). Thus, from the
chaos of the unknowable, comes the mastery and control that drives the
magical experience of fascism, thus:

>Experimental music is a way to push the limits of the thinkable, to look
>deeper into chaos and give it a meaning.

I would tend to believe that one of the most highly anthropromorphic and
humanist constructions is the entire power structure of mysticism, i.e.
"god" itself--at least in the manner of which you describe, of giving
meaning to chaos; that one of the most powerful marks of an
anthroprocentrism is the drive to give meaning to that which is chaos--to
that which *is* unknowable, to that which is wholly other, and yet always
translated.

What if I were to say: let chaos be chaos, and let us dance to the
asignifying rhythms between milieus?

One of the mistakes that Deleuze and Guattari identify in their chapter on
Rhythm is that of associating rhythm with meter. I would argue that both
experimental music and rhythmic-based music offer the potential for sonic
deterritorialization, just as both contain the underlying conditions for a
closed line of flight, a fascist experience, a stratification into hierarchy
and oppression, and that what is perhaps most frightening is the (perhaps
unwittingly) dangerous argument here: that one exceeds the other in that it
is in touch with the creative power of the mastery over chaos, and that the
other is somehow reductive and *essentially* dangerous, and thus, must be
excluded and denigrated, to bow to the higher, mystical order of the
unknowable rhythm. This is a basis for extreme violence.

best,

tobias

tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxx

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