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



>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?

Dear Tobias,
Chaos is a label we put on what we cannot understand. I say we must push the 
limits of our understanding of the world by "fighting chaos", by creating 
meaning, by complexifying our art and not reducing it to it's simplest form. 
Religion and fascism treat chaos in a totally different way than what I try 
to:
Fascism by exploiting it (political ignorance, anger) and generating even 
more of it to the profit of self-desctuction.
Religion by making this chaos sacred and untouchable in order to convince 
people into blindly accepting arbitrary moral values.

When I make an analogy with religion, I never want to reproduce this blind 
fate that characterize it in my vision of music; it's just a way to 
illustrate the way I look at it. To continue this illustration a little bit, 
I'd say that music in its ideal form is a god that keeps growing and growing 
toward a perfect organisation of the universe. I imagine a process that 
looks like that:
1st - God exists and exerts it's fascination, the illusion lives.
2nd - He then is separated into multiple gods wich repeat the process, the 
illusion gets fractalised.

This is just a way to illustrate an ever growing complexity of music by the 
incorporation of chaos into it; music as an expanding life form of our 
creation.

>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.<---

Yes, chaos is the unknowable but when chaos is given a meaning, it's no 
longer chaos for us; everything we believe in, every word we use, everything 
we think really just is pieces chaos and repetition of chaos from an outside 
perspective. The meaning exist in us and we must make it grow, not let chaos 
take over our minds. I think our purpose is to make sense of this chaos and 
to transform it into order, not to see it as a god or as a justification to 
destruction. He who let chaos take over his mind is on its way to death.

But, (and that's a huge but... got it? :) there's a huge difference in
1 - incorporating chaos into our order and
2 - considering chaos as something magical and mystical that has it's own 
counscious existence / meaning / supremacy.

I choose the first option, I see the second one as a mind control tool and I 
hope you understood that I never meant to use it in my message!

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

I say chaos will always be chaos, but chaos is the opposite of life; life 
exist as an organisation of chaos. To me, to let chaos infiltrate you is to 
let yourself die.

>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
>

I completely agree about rhythm being not directly associated with meter; 
every sound has its own beautiful rhythm. The line is hard to draw between 
what I label as repetitive music and music with a complex structure. I like 
techno when the sounds are in a sense chaotic, when they impose themselves 
as an opposition to meter, like a life form that has its own existence over 
a strictly mesured rythm respecting the meter, it's just that this respect 
of meter is often exaggerated in techno and thus pathological. What I target 
most when I speak of repetitive music is music that has too little chaos in 
it, music that is too focused on an illusion of perfection caused by meter 
and tonality.

The chaos we include in the song no longer is chaos, it acquires a meaning 
and make the musical experience richer, greater. It is by including the 
chaos in music that we somehow make it disappear, that we transform it into 
something that has a meaning.

I enjoy having this very interesting discussion with you! You've cited a 
couple of thinkers that I'll add in my notebook...

Best too,
Nicolas

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

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