“I try to reason and I tell myself you’ll return.” / “It is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening a desire for another world.” / “We have noted how a song borrows existent physical bodies in order to acquire, while it’s being sung, a body of its own. […] And the song shifts unpredictably from one borrowed body to another.” / “No sequence, only a being. No journey, only a dance.” / “What night endeavors must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency?”
Friedrich Nieztsche’s statement that “God is dead” is often misinterpreted. Drastically at that. In Nietzsche’s time, there was a wide emergent awareness that institutions such as the Catholic Church, which attempt to stand in for God on Earth, are decadent and corrupt and have strayed too far to the status of robber barons. Where do you find the equal-to-all, endless love of God, the examples of His wonders, the perfection of His creations in His image? Nietzsche proposed that now God as a concept is “dead” due to its ambassadors no longer representing all that our Creator stands for, we have reached a spiritual crisis. The only solution to this spiritual crisis is the introduction of boundless beauty, he wrote. Art would be proof of God’s miracles. We must create and consume the things that prove that God created us in His image, and he gave us the power to imagine and empathize and to elicit strong emotions in our audience, to reach for something Holy and boundless, to create viscera adorned with His love and His omnipresence. “Fake Opulent” is what happens when beauty comes pouring out of the gutter. When all the extraordinary things contained in the mundane start, without coordination, pouring out as if a great flood. In this constant flow, inevitably, much like if given a typewriter and infinite time a monkey could produce the entire works of Shakespeare, order will emerge. Surrounded by hellish amounts of beauty, and Holy amounts of curiosity, our nature, in His image, will allow us to discover the true order of the universe, to tap into God’s Work amongst the entire spectrum of lights and metaphor encircling us. If Man were made by God to grasp His miracles, we would be able to take the fruits of our actions as His creation, the results of our being in His image, and use this ignored but spectacular detritus to come to fully appreciate the breadth of beautiful possibilities we were given by our Creator. “Fake Opulent” is the hypothetical music that emerges. With components unrelated across personal circumstances, time, place and genre, it comes together to create a Possible music, one that would not be made if all the unwitting collaborators in the process of its making were to meet and be put in the same studio and make decisions communally and what this music should come to be. “Fake Opulent” accepts the authority of God. If everything is beautiful, and everything is made in His image, this music made of the creative efforts of His sons and daughters, and all of his children, without anything but Luck assured by our Creator, this music should come even a step closer to imitating the Endlessness, the beauty of God’s love. A clock ticking constantly produces entropy. Chaos is the only constant. With every each motion, we contribute more and more disorder to existence as we know it. Our chaoses, our feeble attempts, will inevitably knock on the right door and out will come a version of music that we love and find beauty in, assembled with no contributions by the artists it imitates, a Bootleg crafted by the Hands of God. The job of a sound collagist is to mine the beauty and produce even a crude approximation of what God’s Version, with access to all the untapped vastness of human creativity and the deep, rich lives that come with it, would theoretically resemble.
MOIST MIND Is technoetic multiconsciousness is where dry pixels and wet molecules converge is digitally dry, biologically wet, and spiritually numinous combines Virtual Reality with Vegetal Reality comprises bits, atoms, neurons, and genes Is interactive and psychoactive embraces digital identity and biological being erodes the boundary between hardware and wetware is tele-biotic, neuro-constructive, nano-robotic is where engineering embraces ontology Is bio-telematic and psi-bernetic is at the edge of the Net
– Roy Ascott
The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It’s very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It’s a space of becoming… ‘something’ that dwells in the presence of the work… that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance.
“Sometimes I call myself trans, and I think in my head, like transit. I’m trans not because of where I might end up one day but because I am going somewhere, away. More than I am a woman, I am not a man…”
‘Snead asserts “[i]n black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it’. If there is a goal in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start…” (Snead, 67). While Ra’s science may be an advance, it is still done with the notion of the “cut” in mind; one of Sun Ra’s goals is to ultimately transport black people back to a time before the taint of the white society on black culture, and the new science helps accomplish this.
In contrast, white science, represented by the two men from NASA, only has advancement in mind, without acknowledging the importance of the past. This illustrates the difference between the two cultures that Snead details in his piece when he says “[i]n Eurpoean culture, repitition must be seem to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth” (Snead, 67).’