1. 21 May



    Nice collab.

    (Source: Spotify)

     

  2. 15 May



    Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, but when everybody has the ability to make
    magic, it’s like there’s no more magic.
    — Thomas Bangalter (http://m.pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9131-daft-punk/)
     

  3. 14 May



    Kafka and E.B. White’s Take on Nothingness

    As I am working on my recent project, a trombone quartet for the Guidonian Hand called Die Lärmtrompeten des Nichts I have become acutely aware of any references to “nothingness.” The text which I am using for the title of my piece comes from an entry in Kafka’s Tagebucher. I came across it when I was working on my dissertation over the past few years and stored it up for future investigation. And, learning of a project that involved trombones, I knew the text would serve as a great title and muse. I think Kafka would chuckle, or at least snicker, at the appropriation of his text for music that is so non trumpet-y. 

    Furthermore, in  Constructive Destruction, Kafka’s Aphorisms: Literary Tradition and Literary Transformation, Richard T. Gray cogently observes  ”what is especially curious about this remark is that it occurs as an isolated entry, devoid of any disernible impulse. It remains unclear whether the text was composed in response to some empirical stimulus; whether it is the conclusion of abstract deliberations; or if it is merely recorded out of pure pleasure in the paradoxicality of the conception itself.” (p.133)

    My bet is the latter. There is something brilliantly poetic and emotive about noise trumpets heralding in nothing. Not just trumpets that are noisy, but actual noisetrumpets, as the German construction and transliteration gives us. And not just nothing, but, nothingness. Reaching so deeply into the symbolism of paradox it seems that the aphorism itself is the apotheosis of such. Heralding trumpets of disorganized sound followed by….?

    Then, the other day, while reading Charlotte’s Web to my 4 y.o. son I came across this amazing soliloquy by Wilbur. He was responding to the lamb’s unkind and clumsily stated insult of “pigs mean less than nothing to me.”

    “What do you mean, less than nothing?” replied Wilbur. “I don’t think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It’s the lowest you can go. It’s the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something––even though it’s just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.”

     

  4. 25 Mar



    These shifts––from musical production/innovation to postproduction/recombination––paralleled what was happening to the wider economy: a transition from making money through making stuff to wealth generation achieved through information, services, ‘signification’ (style, entertainment, media, design, etc.) and, most unrooted of all from the real, the finance sector’s manipulations of monetary value…The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness. The imbalance in Western economies towards financial and real-estate speculation meant that too much of the wealth generated was meta-money: not cotton money or steel money, but money money. Similarly, the profusion of hyper-referential bandsand micro-genres whose stylistic involutions are understood only by hipsterati and bloggerati resembles the ‘complex financial instruments’ that only a handful of people in Wall Street and the City of London comprehend.
    — 

    //…aannddd thus begins the moment where Simon Reynolds becomes a rambling fogey. “The meaning of music has been depleted.” What?// 

    from  Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (p.420) by Simon Reynolds

     

  5. 5 Mar



    If the tragic artist stares into the pit and sees at the bottom a ground that is unacceptable, the comic artist looks down and sees almost no ground whatsoever
    — From “Fantasia––On Absolutely Nothing” by James Currie
     

  6. 16 Jan



    Stars and Trix Fornever. 

    (Source: Spotify)

     

  7. 13 Jan



    Man, this song (and album) is still so trippy and amazing to me. It has weirdly aged in a way that still seems fresh and relevant.

    (Source: Spotify)

     

  8. 8 Jan



    Curatoriship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.
    — Brian Eno (ca. 1991)
     

  9. 8 Jan



    Live music not only insists on, it ‘imposes’ undivided attention and uninterrupted listening. To today’s option-overloaded music fan, that kind of subjugation feels like liberation.
    — Simon Reynolds, p.124, “Retromania”
     

  10. 27 Dec



    But just as listeners have accepted the ‘lossy’, thin-bodied sound of MP3s because of the advantage of compact storage and ease of exchange, nobody seems to mind the reduced fidelity of television viewing via computer screen (even though it is running in the opposite direction elsewhere with high-definition TV, 5.0 surround-sound home-movie theatres, 3D movies and so forth).
    — “Retromania” p. 61, by Simon Reynolds