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

["Dominic Lanzone" <dubvurt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tobias,
good and interesting response! 
do you think that a "religious experience" and a "mystical experience"
refer to the same thing? 
also, were you saying that "the mystical, the unknowable" is inherently
chaotic, or that humans perceive it that way and then try to order it with
religious meaning? 
just curious.

~Dominic

> Subject: Re: [microsound] the black, the white, and the Mutek @ Stylus
>
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
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--- Dominic Lanzone
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