Re: [microsound] State of Music

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

hi Peter,

You're missing my point -- and several others here -- and it's most clear by
the way you dismissed the beginning of the post: that is, the part of the
argument that said, yes, you are right, but WHY does it matter that we can
'zoom out'? What does it DO?

The point is this: you can reduce any subject to any element: you can zoom
in, zoom out, etc. So?

The point is, WHY?
    And moreover, what tools are you using to modify your perspective--for
these tools remain properly metaphysical, that is, outside of the zoom
function of your analysis. You keep them locked up and they don't get
effected or changed by the zoom operation.

Thus it is interesting to see that as you have continued your barbed email
retorts, you seem quite comfortable with maintaining a transhistorical
element to pseudo-musicological analysis (rhythm, meter, etc) while
practising a "calculated" disdain against the ways in which permutation
fucks with the schema to produce, as I wrote below "experience."

I.e., the singular EVENT of sound: its limitless context is only and
necessarily drawn by a feedback relation wherein we, as people, fit in
somewhere. Yes, you have proven you can draw that circle really gosh darn
big, and you have done so with various modes of analysis that you leave
outside the circle.

But Why?

As you didn't answer the question, I can only do some "structural" intuition
of your own argument.

Well, one answer might be that you don't wish to admit the EVENT into your
analysis, the latter which is very clean and mathematical almost, a very
clean little perspective that leaves out all the nasty bits, like, for
example, slavery, or the memory of slavery in technoculture, what Paul
Gilroy, Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, Alondra Nelson, George Clinton, Sun Ra
and Samuel R. Delaney (as well as a few others) have been known to call
"AfroFuturism." Now this is an example, and one I favour as I happen to like
the music that is called AfroFuturist.

    http://www.afrofuturism.net
    http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0822365456
    http://www.visioncircle.org/archive/cat_afrofuturism.html

(If you read a bit, you might learn about Motown and disco's connection to
Africa, to systems of thought that Paul Gilroy calls "Afrological," and not
"Eurological" -- I don't see this as a "metaphysics of funk," I see this as
a scenario of specific aesthetic elaboration that was and is part of
cultural/racial oppression -- and yes, I DO see the black man coming over to
shake the white man's ass: now ain't that the Truth.)

So, it's interesting to see points below from, for example, Paul Gilroy and
Kodwo Eshun, deemed "racialist romantic fantasy" in order to reduce the
power of the event this sound produces, to disqualify its historical
rupture, its in-your-face-fuck-you or, as Deleuze put it, up-the-ass buggery
to the Euro arrogance of presupposing that truth (in this case, music) has
anything to do with mathematical isomorphism and that such analysis is
somehow beyond the politics of imperialism, slavery, knowledge and power,
the redefinition of "history" itself..

Thus, to answer above the question of "WHY?", it is perhaps easier: from the
distant perspective you have cultivated, it is now very easy to dismiss any
troublesome _difference of the singular, irruptive event_ as "racialist
romantic fantasy." It ALSO allows you only to acknowledge "traditional"
African music (quite patronizing: only the West can "evolve," "Africa"
however must remain the same, as "traditional"). Thus you can carefully
avoid all the great jams of the continent, you know, people like FELA, SUNNY
ADE .. . i.e. all the places and spaces where spaced out jazz transacted
with the temporal rhythms of that "black" continent to generate the shifting
sands from which disco, house and techno sprung -- an "origin" quite
different than the audience/performer arrangement of the West (another
element your argument reduces: the situational architecture of sound; do you
dance, or sit? This might have something to do with this.. you know, both
colonial and class analysis too -- don't forget the pagans got down and
Bakhtin has something to say about carnival as flipping around the town's
hierarchy, if only for a few missing Gregorian calendar days ..)

Now, at the end of your email you are right again: "blackness" in Western
disco has just as much to do with this as gayness, as sexuality, as drugs,
cocaine, LSD, ECSTASY, love, group relations -- and we can go on -- this or
that mythological relation to space and place (UK Travellers, the "ruins of
Detroit," etc) -- and this is EXACTLY the point I am trying to make. This is
not, and never will we be able to limit this singularity to a "question of
style" (as if STYLE wasn't everything already). So, to summarise in a
formula:

- structure and style are irreducible elements to which neither can be
designated a primary term - each structure permutates its style(s) and the
structure _itself_ is an expression of style, that is, structure IS a style
of thinking, of logic, and this is what you leave so carefully exterior to
your thinking .. 


I dunno, I read what you're saying but it's certainly not giving me any
great mojo lovin' toward generating forms of sound that might propel social
change, for the social, political, cultural contexts are utterly pissed at
in your cool disdain as the epochal sage: or, you respond my picking on an
end example because you didn't take the time to think the beginning of the
email.

Social disruption and profound experience is the answer to the question I
posed above when directed back at myself.

What you dismissed in the last post was the bit that required thinking:
which is what the social/political/cultural context requires, forever,
limitlessly, and this is called responsibility.

This email and these posts are a rhythm, and they have little to do with
calculated meter: here (heaR! HEAR!) writing rewires the digital's binary
divisibility -- all other step in, chorus to the left, and refrain:

    REPEAT


"writing like a fiend, giving you a taste of what you dish,"

    tobias


> Dear Tobias,
> 
> I will not respond to the first 3/4 of your post because frankly I don't
> understand it. You are obviously a more erudite individual than I am. I will
> respond to the following however...
> 
> 
>> .....HOLA! Disco as 'western'? What, Africa just jumped into Germany? That's
>> later--that's post-Detroit AfroGermanic. The EVENT of sound might require
>> not a reduction to disco, but an opening to jazz and disco's isomorphic
>> descent from the experience of transatlantic displacement, the diaspora and
>> memorialized slavery.
> 
> If disco is not western, what is it. I think your idea of "isomorphic descent
> from the experience of transatlantic displacement," etc. is perhaps a
> racialist romantic fantasy. Can you honestly deny that Motown is immeasurably
> closer to Mozart than to ANY traditional african music. I am not an
> ethnomusicologist but I know of no traditional  african culture that uses
> equal tempered major and minor scales. I know of no traditional  african
> culture that uses the "functional harmony" of western classical musics "common
> practice period." And one could continue looking at melodic patterning and
> structure, etc.
> 
> I was trying in earlier posts to make a distinction between style and actual
> significant structural change. I think that your "isomorphic descent" issue is
> if anything a question of style. I wonder if you are being influenced by a
> kind of Metaphysics of funk, where the true, the absolute, the good, streams
> from mother africa to shake the booty of the white man.
> 
> Furthermore I am not sure why "blackness" should be more associated with disco
> than say "gayness," or cocaine consumption for that matter.
> 
> 
> well, thats enough for now.
> 
> peter
> 



tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com --
McGill Communication + Philosophy
ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot +++ 


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