”Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know of any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.”
“I do,” said the other– “martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”
Author Archives: d.perry
And what is the point of praying to be somewhere else, someone else? You spend your whole life sweating in the heat, and you pray to be born again somewhere cold and you spend your next life freezing your ass off and wishing after warmth.
In the winter feel the flame inside your chest, and in the summer nurse the icy shards dangerously close to your heart. Never turn away cold drinks or a warm hearth.
Start to see that what you see in your heart, from there it is that you, that you start. Your perceptions define where you are at, at least perhaps more so than you thought.
Diedrich Diederichsen
I pick up a musical instrument and produce a sequence of tones. These tones enchant my surroundings and me as I produce them. At some point I grow tired, the tones cease, and the enchantment passes….Dolphy said: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again.” What I produced has vanished without a trace; it created no value—nor, however, did it depend on a providential nature and the miracles of the land of milk and honey. It was me.
I myself, using my talents and abilities—that which belongs to me as a human being and sets me apart from the animals—gave expression to something; that is, I lent inner states, which are also exclusively mine, and yet whose form is familiar to all other human beings from their own internal, subjective states, a form that was understandable to others and may thus have been beautiful. I realized myself as a human being in the dialectic between my nature as a unique individual and my nature as a social and collective being, and I did so entirely without economy, without reification, without the creation of value, without storage, costs, or profits, without the calculation of future time and hence without speculation, without interest or the creation of secondary value, and without valorization.
This is how utterly utopian music is, or rather how utopian it would be if it could exist in this way, as music in itself.
…
So while we see that the notion of an absolutely valueless music—a music free of all value, valorization, or fixation—has often been projected into the past, its actual place would have to be in the present and in the future, and not just because we are speaking about utopia. Except in Arcadia, such a music has never existed as a social practice. On the other hand, it may have existed innumerable times as a mode of communication detached from society, as the song one sings to oneself, the whimsy with which one rhythmically structures one’s steps, the drone that one produces with one’s own body as a resonating chamber. And out of those countless individual moments that never solidified into objects, when individuals or little groups had musical experiences that had nothing to do with musical objects or any social purpose, music and music-like behavior have gained the reputation of being able to touch one’s most intimate subjectivity.
The elevation of Gangkhar Puensum was first measured in 1922 but, until recent years, maps of the region were not at all accurate and the mountain was shown in different locations and with markedly different heights. Indeed, because of inadequate mapping, the first team to attempt the summit was unable to find the mountain at all.[4]
“An ultimate simulation needs an ultimate computer, and the new science of digitalism says that the universe itself is the ultimate computer — actually the only computer. Further, it says, all the computation of the human world, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggybacks on cycles of the great computer. Weaving together the esoteric teachings of quantum physics with the latest theories in computer science, pioneering digital thinkers are outlining a way of understanding all of physics as a form of computation.
From this perspective, computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes or no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, “Who are you?” the being says, in effect, “Am.” One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible.”
‘In that text, you write about life and nonlife: not as two distinct categories, but rather, as “time-bound oscillations.” You mention, for example, that seeds sometimes turn to stone if you wait long enough.’
An electric light bulb doesn’t give off a constant light, it pulses but we don’t perceive it as pulsing. There are actually constant very brief instances of darkness.
-Tom Ze
“Suisalu reminds us that historically, lawn has been a symbol of power and wealth as it required substantial upkeep and unused land. Today, it still indicates wealth, but is mainly maintained by the owners themselves. This puts us in a schizophrenic situation where we strive to be privileged by taking the role of the servants.”
—Kevin Shields has a habit of making it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world one minute – bands are loud, he shrugs, but most gigs are “laughably quiet … something you’re consuming, not being consumed by” – then admitting that My Bloody Valentine reached a point where they were playing at such volume that they were causing structural damage to venues. “Chunks were falling out of the ceiling. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I’m serious – we were really concerned that eventually some roof was going to fall down,” he says. “It was a matter of time before a serious accident happened.”
Not everyone was impressed. There is a bootleg recording circulating among fans of a late 80s London gig degenerating into chaos – the sound man has given up and fled the building. Shields says that was one of the less extreme reactions. “At one gig, a butcher was literally chasing my sister with a cleaver – he wanted to chop the cable because it was shaking his shop so much when we were doing You Made Me Realise. The police turned up and arrested our tour manager during You Made Me Realise. They arrested him, put him in the car, questioned him and let him go and when he got back we were still playing it. Countless, countless situations.”—
Henry Birdsey interview excerpts
(https://www.15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-interview-henry-birdsey/page-1/)
HB: “Sound is innately terrifying and haunting. And it holds this magnetism over us because of that. We’re talking about physical pressure waves that are invisible and inescapable.”
…HB: “I think making music might be closer to the work of archaeology or geology than anything creative or constructive like sculpture or carpentry or something like that … with sound and music it seems like the game is uncovering things that are buried already, within this strange frame of time …”
…Interviewer: “What can music express about life and death which words alone may not?”
HB: “Well I won’t waste too many words, but making music is the same as engraving the markings on your future headstone …