Tag: music

Thursday January 4, 2018

There are no rules. Mind can go pretty much anywhere we let it, so long as we feed ourselves a steady supply of new semantic units with which to think. Badges, heralds, insignias, emblems, flash in vertical bars across a screen. This is easily interpretable, I tell myself, as an expression of anguish on the occasion of the Justice Department’s decision today to rescind its so-called “safe-harbor” policy with regard to federal marijuana law. American society is utterly contemptible. The discrepancy between is and ought has made of adulthood a dull dough. “Take a drag, pal,” I tell myself with a light pat on the back. Levitating drum kit taps out subliminal instructions. With Akira Sakata & Chikamorachi with Masahiko Satoh, I go crazy and come back again.

Lightning-fast information processing sounds to the censors like shrieking gibberish. Not for the many, these supreme outpourings of free music. I respond with similar passion and focus to Tashi Dorji & Tyler Damon’s Leave No Trace: Live in St. Louis.

Unusual forces are afloat and at play, but the sun’s gonna shine in my backyard someday.

Tuesday January 2, 2018

Houses, cars, restaurants: all are inhospitable and lined with icicles. Clad with love, though, one can despite it all still have it made. But lo and behold: what kind of fascism is it that parades the Rolling Stones in front of inert, stadium-sized masses in Hal Ashby’s 1983 rock-doc Let’s Spend the Night Together? The film is a cruel parody of rock’s once joyous, raucous, incendiary stirrings. No consciousness-expansion takes places there whatsoever. Arena-rock of that sort served in the fashion of an experimental prototype, a formalization of what has now become our permanent social relation. I admit moments of beauty, however, when the band slows down for “Beast of Burden.” If we try real hard, sings Mick a few songs later, we get what we need. Keith Richards, for his part, manages by way of drink and drugs a kind of sleepy-eyed authenticity in the film’s punked-up version of “Little T&A” — that, too, I admire. The film is ultimately about industrial workers doing what it takes to make it though their shifts as America becomes a bomb-dropping monstrosity. We witness this, for instance, in the haunting use of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the film’s closing credits. Cinema enables and makes use of a variety of narrative models, meanwhile, in an unrelated 2013 Belgian film called Violet, producing fluctuations across several realities at once. Sonics and visuals reveal a multi-layered ontology: interiors and their external substitutes. Sound sculpted variously around a muted center, as in the song of that name by the band Deafheaven.  Consciousness inhabiting different sound-worlds and temporalities. Every reflection also a distortion. As Robert Anton Wilson reminds us, one should always juggle several. Never commit to just one.

Saturday December 30, 2017

I hope to reset my emotional matrix in the days ahead away from anger and depression. It helps to sit and talk with Sarah, the two of us true, loving life companions, helping each other pass the time as one and then the other of us endures another run-in with the flu. We rewire our brains by submitting to the oscillating tone progressions of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and Alfred Bruneau’s “Requiem: Dies Irae & Tuba Mirum.” We laugh at the thought of the residents of utopia waking and greeting one another in the streets each morning through choral performance of Handel’s “Hallelujah.” They prep themselves, though, with Margo Guryan’s “Someone I Know.” One ought to keep one’s eye out, I tell myself, for The Eye in the Triangle, a book about Aleister Crowley by Crowley’s secretary Israel Regardie. Christmas trees topped with stars resemble the emblem of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Robert Anton Wilson, talking ’til blue in the face, introduces me to a synchronistic phenomenon known as the “23” enigma. In pursuit of “deliberately induced brain change,” I turn to Sarah, lying beside me reading in bed, and ask her, “What page are you up to?” gesturing with my hand toward her copy of Aldous Huxley’s Island. “223,” she replies. When I explain to her the story of the enigma, she adds, “It’s also my birthday: April 23rd!” There is magic in the woods, if you know where to find it. So sayeth the Robert Redford character in Pete’s Dragon. Smoke rises from a votive dedicated to Lady Columbia, appearing before me in the form of a giant wall of light.

Best of 2017

Without too fine a point on the order in which these are ranked, here are my picks for best music releases of 2017:

25. Hiro Kone – Love is the Capital
24. R. Lee Dockery & Smokey Emery – Cathedrelic
23. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 3
22. The War on Drugs – A Deeper Understanding
21. Don Gero – Wizarding
20. Megabreth – Ultra High Noise
19. Primitive Fiction – Stone Fruit
18. Magnetizer – Reality
17. Sea Moss – Bread Bored
16. Julie Byrne – Not Even Happiness
15. Kikagaku Moyo – Stone Garden
14. Crown of Eternity – Dream Architecture
13. Padna – Rimessa Truppa Suite, Vol. 2
12. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Kid
11. Tonstartssbandht – Sorcerer
10. Mac Demarco – This Old Dog
9. Nadah El Shazly – Ahwar
8. X.Y.R. – Reflections
7. Kamasi Washington – Harmony of Difference
6. Giant Claw – Soft Channel
5. SAICOBAB – Sab Se Purani Bab
4. Jlin – Black Origami
3. Joan of Arc – He’s Got The Whole This Land Is Your Land In His Hands
2. Brett Naucke – Multiple Hallucinations
1. Nmesh – Pharma

Thursday December 21, 2017

Notes diminish slowly, like particles falling through space across brief durations. A friend’s voice, heavily masked, brings light. Does my focus increase or diminish when I convince myself that the object-world is no more than a single, alien form of consciousness: one, however, that will grant me the power to decode the messages it sends me, so long as I let it? And say this conviction were a fiction, however much the external world might seem to confirm it. Would that in any way lessen its therapeutic validity as an orientation toward being? Experience is often like a pull toward a hesitant positivity — until something terrible gets in the way. Let us turn our gaze toward the means of worship pioneered by Akhenaten. As if in reply, Alfred Bruneau performs Verdi’s “Requiem: Dies Irae & Tuba Mirum.”

How much do I wish to read into that? Is it wrong to think that Rochester has become a fun place to visit while stoned? Bars, bookstores, restaurants. Diverse neighborhoods. Homes and storefronts lit for the holidays. But I worry — albeit only in a distant, abstracted way — that I’ve become the kind of person who prefers to withdraw, to subtract from extended community with others. Perhaps this is the lesson one learns when visiting with family under capitalism. Dull, shiftless, emptied of concern: these are words I project preemptively into the thought bubbles of others. My sensitivity to a certain kind of anxiety leads me to imagine those around me acting the part of the killjoy, the spoilsport, the moralist. In thinking this, I grow cold, I go brittle. Morals are not the rules we invent by which to live; nor are they the rules we obey simply so as to attend to the cares of others. Rather, they’re the rules we follow for no reason other than that some part of us desires to uphold tradition — traditional biases, traditional prejudices — as lifestyle, as aesthetic. Thinking this strips me of volume and capacity. “Step back,” I say, ears awakened by fireworks. “Get up and try again.”

Tuesday December 19, 2017

A TV set tells me to let out my “inner child,” so I settle back into an armchair in my in-laws’ living room and prepare to watch some crappy-looking movie called American Ultra. Cardi B interrupts, though, cuts me down, says “Don’t get comfortable.” Tastemakers toss out “year’s best” lists, ’tis the season, but the bests they tout are all boastful belligerents, earnest Garbage Pail Kids, self-assertive jerks. The competitive dynamic of the capitalist star system rewards the most cutthroat, the most rapacious — those among us who, thinking they possess royal blood, fashion themselves fully in the image of capital. No more music from these suckers.

Monday December 18, 2017

Tobacco’s “Yum Yum Cult” tunes me in, helps me switch on to life in an alternative future, the psychedelic machine-in-garden paradise of Richard Brautigan’s “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.”

Long-haired commune-dwellers sit on grassy hillsides worshiping the moon with cups of wine, the night sky a thing there for them to ponder while listening on headphones to Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra.”

Shapes drift across an inky cosmos. Here in the other future, the one in which you and I reside, where ordinary folk are born to be hurt, the words most appropriate are those of the Talking Heads song, “Born Under Punches.”

The tea leaves that show up sometimes in my Facebook feed suggest that in the days ahead, we may be facing another constitutional crisis. Imagine a harrowing chase scene. Will we take to the streets and participate in work stoppages? Or, like dogs, will we roll on our backs and submit? For answers, I look to John Berryman’s “Desire is a World by Night.” The poem’s reply is none too reassuring. “If anyone could see,” he writes, “The white scalp of that passionate will and those / Sullen desires, he would stumble, dumb / Retreat into the time from which he came / Counting upon his fingers and his toes.” Jingle bells, morality tales, big webworks of meaning. Hissing voices whisper. Recruit the right words, intones a booster, and we can give and take — everything multiplied sevenfold.

Sunday December 17, 2017

Without willing it so, I nevertheless recall to consciousness that version of myself employed in my teen years: washing dishes, breaking down cardboard boxes, condensing the remains with a baler. Let us endure again brief clips from these episodes—the hot summers, the cold winters—but let our minds drift as these clips unfold, consciousness regrouping to ponder in a featureless inner elsewhere the star system’s relationship to the class system. Hands wave in symmetry to re-center hemispheres. Saicobab steps in, instructs us anew, with “aMn nMn.” I listen anxiously as voices multiply. Sound translates into something I can see. I still myself, I hold my breath. I land uncomfortably in a new book by Irwin Leopando on Paolo Freire. Leopando identifies three mid-20th century French Catholic humanists—Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—as leading influences on Freire’s thought. Together, he writes, these thinkers inquired into what it means to be “fully human.” Wary of Catholicism’s neurosis of sacrifice, however, I soon replace “Paolo” with “Roberto” and delve into the world of “somatherapy.” Quickly, though, I intuit a schism internal to consciousness, or perhaps to the universe: I am a self, imagining myself to be real, while aware as well of my apartness from, my adjacency to, the full potential of ways of doing or being. The human “person” performing its self-authoring awaits a transmission from an absolute Other. The stories persons tell themselves, their mysticisms, says the Other: these are proper vocations, forming threads by which selves are sewn.

Wednesday December 13, 2017

Does it help? Does growth occur when subjects reexamine their origins? Their earliest fears, for instance? Reality says, “Follow the signal! Create a new world.” Beautiful old decrepit landscapes, abandoned train tracks. Consciousness imagines itself occupying other identities. Matter, form, laws, energy. We know ourselves only in the midst of higher and lower orders of being. We play games and hope to attract others to join us. Utopia is a place where we all descend into our own mazes, families of selves who improvise being in keeping with the teachings of the Emerald Tablet or Tabula Smaragdina. Another afternoon, another walk timed to the sun’s descent. Pine needle arrangements on a piece of blacktop. I know not why the sky is so gray, but I like it. Gusts of wind lift ends of ribbons tied to trunks of trees. Heads lift, too, with help from Asheville, NC improv duo LULO.

The day starts to stack up, one stimulating experience after another. Everything creator David O’Reilly supplies a brain-busting animated short called RGB XYZ.

I experience a confusion of levels, political reality seeming a mere myth-performance atop an abyss. Imagine this abyss as an infinitely large room, where Left, traveling through a wormhole in space-time, comes out Right, time an eternal beast one can’t defeat. We are only ever here and now, even when compelled to bring growth and wealth to the owners of capital. Yet we puzzle over our origins and seek purpose. There are no truths, just stories. And presumably bodies. I lose myself amidst a collapse of images and memories. Some shifting space of menace. And then, like that, I can breathe again. Montage transmits a composite of synoptic slices of a person’s narrative arc so as to prompt recognition of archetypes. The composite governor, Zhuangzi, drives paradoxes into the grammar of reason. Noise enters the oikos through the psyche. Of course it does, we add: the future self who at other times plays the part of the Big Other, commands it.

Saturday December 9, 2017

Mike Oldfield sets the scene with “In High Places.”

Let us seek, as Denis de Rougemont did, another order of realities: those involving “the nonillusory multiplicity of persons” united by Love. For “love,” some translations of 1 Corinthians 13 substitute “charity” (King James Version, most famously). Let us treat those terms, then, as synonyms. The dream of the commonwealth founded upon love, or what we could equally call Communism, when spurned, gives rise to songs like Curtis Mayfield’s “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go.” Spurned long enough, and the sentiment sours, the subject resigning itself to shouting, as Greg Graffin did, “Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell.” Biography accepted as total and continuous creation spirals upward, collecting detritus in its tornado of personhood. Mind sees constellations where before there were stars. Such passions are born of dreams, not doctrines. I stood on my back deck last night smoking, branches drooping, laid low by falling snow. Is it a crime to want to resurrect old myths in order to talk to nature? There’s that word again, I nod. Are we cool with it? Are we monists or dualists? What is nature’s relationship to this Subject that we call “person” or “self” or “mind”? And what about that third category, language, the constituent of all calling, hailing, and naming? A transformer blows a few houses down. Lots of sparks, several loud explosions. Some friends and I grab dinner at a bar up the road while waiting for the energy company to restore power to our homes. Afterwards, while reaping the benefits of that power, like the ability to read and write at night by lightbulb, my cellphone delivers footage of a polar bear’s final hours, the creature’s food supply destroyed as a result of global warming. Of course, neither my ability to narrate my culpability, nor the guilt I feel in consequence, will change the bear’s fate one whit. Our dreaming minds are able to create fully immersive, fully believable semblances of other worlds, so why can’t we save bears in this one?