Category Archives: music

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

‘I‘ve written about love before. I’m not going to write about love again. Maybe this is selfish, maybe it is foolish. But I hope it will lead to nuance.

I’ll write about not-love-yet, maybe, about into-love. I want to write through it, to remain porous.

Or: “I’ll write about the process of becoming other: vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi). Maybe then I can return to love.

…

“Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form”

…

“But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. ‘Love is not consolation,’ she wrote. ‘It is light.’”

…

“like planting a flag on the moon after forty countries have landed there before you, or on a moon whose sole purpose is to host flags” (Maggie Nelson, 2011).

…

“I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.”

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“Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late.”

Excerpts (from https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/lips-in-the-streetlights-pop-future-pop-bops)

‘Marker, who continually challenges his viewer, has provoked me to search the origin of “ornate” and I find that it comes from the Latin verb “to equip.”  It means, originally, well equipped; then later, adorned and elaborately embellished.  I remember that when I played the partitas of J. S. Bach, there came a point when the embellishments were so thoroughly learned and accomplished that they became, in themselves, only music:  that is, the notes being embellished and the embellishments upon those notes ceased belonging to separate categories, and there were no longer any embellishments at all.  To see adornment is always to presume the true “unadorned” nature of a thing.  Schivelbusch, for instance, notes “the typical nineteenth-century desire to disguise the industrial aspect of things by means of ornamentation.”’

‘I was inspired by the image which Ornette Coleman had at the beginning of his career: the image of the untrained “folk creature” as avant-gardiste.’

“It [AMM] continues to want to play and in playing fails; appears at times to be succeeding then fails and fails. The paradox is that continual failure on one plane is the root of success on another […] We certainly must not look for failure any more than for success.”

“Music, chanting, and dancing are indispensable elements of the Phi Fa ritual. The khaen, a bamboo mouth organ, is the primary musical instrument of the ritual. It is creates a sacred atmosphere accompanying ritual prayers and devotions and encourages dancing around the sacrificial altar. The khaen is accompanied by the phing, a guitar-like stringed instrument, by a drum, and by ching, small bells, cymbals. The chanting is very similar to mor lam, the traditional music of Lao and northeast Thailand.

Phi Fa ritual participants dance around a decorated sacrificial altar. The dance lasts a full night and creates trance conditions for many of the participants. They believe Phi Fa will participate the ceremony and they expect healing and protection from unfavorable fortune.

The steps of the ritual are related to the songs chanted by the shaman and are always accompanied by the khaen. This is because the khaen is believed to be an important mean to communicate with the gods and the spirits. The steps of the ritual are as follows: inviting the gods or spirits, explaining the reason for the invitation, praying for assistance, praying for protection, consoling the patient, re-calling the spirit that has fled the patient, inviting Phi Fa to accept the offerings, Baasii ritual, fortune telling, and taking leave of Phi Fa.”

Unordered Old Top Ten “Albums” List (2019 or 2020?)

Incredible String Band – Wee Tam

Animal Collective – Campfire Songs

John Fahey – Great San Bernardino Birthday Party

Fishmans – Uchu Nippon Setagaya

This Heat – John Peel March 28th, 1977

Terry Riley / Don Cherry – Koln February 23, 1975

Jim O’Rourke / Christian Fennesz – It’s So Hard to Say I’m Sorry

V/A – Naturalism (off Nature Tape Limb Records)

Yoran – Montparnasse

Train Fantôme – Manémeur

Asked in 1969 why he doesn’t play “serious” music, Persson replied: “Well, I’d say we’re more serious [than professional musicians]… You have to realize that people exist. They don’t think of the people, they only think of their culture, a culture that no longer exists in a way that’s relatable… The purpose of that culture is to impose some kind of oppression.” The broader social implications of this perspective are quite clear. An inclusive music not only challenges the economics of pop culture, it does so by employing an aesthetic approach that incorporates the methods of that pop culture. Another band member put it this way: “If not everyone can join in and play, then it’s the music itself that is at fault.”