#marcus boon

Dark Matter quotes probably

Music moves us; in doing so, it appropriates us. It does this affectively—through “affection.” What is called in our world today “appropriation”—the taking of something and making it ours, making it belong to us—operates in a fluid way in the realm of sound where the interaction of different sounds, which is called “harmony” or “rhythm,” is manifestly a mutual appropriation. The sound world requires us to think through the possibility of “appropriation” precisely in the Heideggerian sense of a “belonging together” that is not a unity. The sound world “takes us out of ourselves” (ecstasis), and yet we experience that which takes us out of ourselves as part of ourselves, because we are emotionally affected, and we identify ourselves with our ability to “have” emotions. David Byrne struggles with this in his essay accompanying the reissue of [My Life in the] Bush of Ghosts when he writes about an emotionally affective music that is composed through montage, which “tricks the emotions” because it is not a representation of an authentic performance. But in the realm of sound, the affective power of sound is not the product of authentic expressions of particular subjectivities, despite the tradition of writing about music in the west that takes this point of view. This tradition would be the Platonic tradition that Heidegger is criticizing, in which identity is an essence that is revealed by an expression or representation. A variety of non-Western musical traditions around the world have developed rituals, practices, and cultures built around this appropriative potential of sound. Possession by deities and spirits is initiated through drums and percussion throughout the African-Atlantic Diaspora, as well as the Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia. In Hindustani classical music, singers and musicians evoke the spirit of a raga by performing it; a successful performance is measured by the appearance of the spirit, which is simultaneously a sound form, a picture, a color, a mood, and a deity. In all of these situations, the performers make no claim that the power of the music is the result of a particular personal subjectivity revealing itself. … All technology, as Heidegger tells us, is a framing. Within the framing, certain kinds of appropriation are possible, in that certain materials are taken, transformed, and renamed. Thus, the whole history of recorded sound constitutes a framing of sound and music, turning it into a kind of raw material that stands ready to be called forth and used by humans. It may be the case that the appropriation of human voices, as opposed to musical instruments, is particularly problematic, because voices are particularly unmediated sources of sound. These voices have not only been copied, but also edited and manipulated, and they thus have the intense ambiguity around them that surrounds all montages. Anthropologist Michael Taussig has written about the power of defacement as a way of negating and politicizing form (the montages of John Heartfield or Adbusters come to mind). However, any sonic appropriation (meaning a sound taken and used outside of its “original” context), regardless of the intention behind the appropriation, might be considered a defacement if those who claim the ownership of the sounds object to the editing or recontextualization. Montage is disrespectful of form. What montage reveals is the inherent mutability of all forms. As Taussig shows, the incendiary effects of montage reveal the politics of form, of what is appropriate, and the ways in which what is believed to be appropriate is enforced. In other words, montage reveals the power structures that give to us the form of the appropriate and the inappropriate, as well as the fragility and delicacy of particular forms.

'But despite Pran Nath’s reported fondness for Chivas Regal and watching television, he was not unduly impressed with the West either. Mathematician and composer Catherine Christer Hennix, another Pran Nath student and protegé of Young, recalls, “The only time I remember he was enthusiastic, we were in San Francisco. He liked to watch TV, and we were watching a programme about whales. He heard the whales sing and he started to cry. That was his most profound spiritual experience of the Western world.”'

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the way I love it. ---Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1934

One of the first records I bought when I was a teenager in London during post-punk was the vinyl 7" of Scritti Politti’s 2nd Peel Session EP. I was fascinated by the black and white sleeve, housed in a clear plastic jacket, which detailed the production costs and the different suppliers used to put together and manufacture the record. The group were debunking the mysteries of commodity production, telling everyone they could do it themselves. They aimed to break the monopoly of the record companies, but out from the shadows of punk emerged the DIY businessman. Dreams of freedom, the most violent acts of sonic negation, would find their place within the structure of the marketplace. Musicians, journalists and record company people are all reliant on an economic system that seems to be failing them, but this is no less true for other workers today, who are seeing their prospects evaporate due to outsourcing, automation and digitisation. That’s the paradox of what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’: we’re told there is no other choice than to accept the existing political and economic structure as the only guarantor of our existence – at the very same moment that the system has ceased to fulfil its promise. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek rightly calls this the fantasy of the liberal utopia – it’s a fantasy because the dream of a folky, highly local and ultimately stable capitalism (independent labels, small record stores, DIY groups) goes against the deeper reality of capitalism in which, as Marx and Engels wrote, “all that is solid melts into air”. Today this means digitisation, faceless uploading, global telecommunication. The irony is that the history of musical subcultures is actually rich with attempts to think beyond capitalist realism and the dream of a liberal utopia. Outlaw raves, backyard concerts, alternative distribution models from mail art to cassettes to filesharing, pirate radio… all of this happens in a grey market that is mostly indifferent to the law. What if all this activity is actually an experimental laboratory for the construction of a post-capitalist society?