I Ching/RNA Descending sequence
Produced by Bob Phillips for MythMathFilms
Produced by Bob Phillips for MythMathFilms
A sound anesthetized, when it beats rhythmically in time with your faltering senses,
is no less cacophonous than it was before its edges were dulled.
"A digital cowbell in a digital pasture," Mom said, "just think of it like that."
It can mean that your heart is acting up, beating too fast or just inefficiently.
It can mean shock, relay that to people standing upright,
shock them to that signal,
countless times daily.
More often than not, it just means that your finger's sweating.
Wails a failed suicide, it's there despite its own sound.
Sounds its own alarm and it just wants some water.
Not to hydrate (that's already happening),
but to drink.
is no less cacophonous than it was before its edges were dulled.
"A digital cowbell in a digital pasture," Mom said, "just think of it like that."
It can mean that your heart is acting up, beating too fast or just inefficiently.
It can mean shock, relay that to people standing upright,
shock them to that signal,
countless times daily.
More often than not, it just means that your finger's sweating.
Wails a failed suicide, it's there despite its own sound.
Sounds its own alarm and it just wants some water.
Not to hydrate (that's already happening),
but to drink.
* * * * *
Since the Lemierre Incident, I've been more drawn to what Erik Satie called "furniture music" in 1902. As Kenneth Goldsmith puts it, this was essentially the first ambient music, "music as wallpaper, music to be purposely not listened to." One aspect that I keep coming back to in my justifications of this fact is the desire to hear the air in a space in which a sound is resonating. No matter what one does with reverb, there is no air inside of a computer. Digital sound can be as claustrophobia-inducing as an MRI.
David Grubbs - Pianoless Vexations
This is not to say that I have become some sort of technophobe. In fact, the pieces that resonate most with me lately play with this tension by including live electronic and acoustic elements. For example, play one of these mp3s while playing and watching the clip I embedded up top. Bent notes subverting the oppressive constancy of sine waves, irrational numbers to these more 'natural' coefficients; undulating phrasing expanding perceptions of time and space within the confines of an authoritarian beat clock--it's not music that pulls one in because it forcefully changes his or her mood. It opts instead to put one in relief by extracting a tense background from silence and creating a situation that is more easily shared as a result of its new explicitness.
Kenta Nagai - Pianoless Vexations
Since the Lemierre Incident, I've been more drawn to what Erik Satie called "furniture music" in 1902. As Kenneth Goldsmith puts it, this was essentially the first ambient music, "music as wallpaper, music to be purposely not listened to." One aspect that I keep coming back to in my justifications of this fact is the desire to hear the air in a space in which a sound is resonating. No matter what one does with reverb, there is no air inside of a computer. Digital sound can be as claustrophobia-inducing as an MRI.
David Grubbs - Pianoless Vexations
This is not to say that I have become some sort of technophobe. In fact, the pieces that resonate most with me lately play with this tension by including live electronic and acoustic elements. For example, play one of these mp3s while playing and watching the clip I embedded up top. Bent notes subverting the oppressive constancy of sine waves, irrational numbers to these more 'natural' coefficients; undulating phrasing expanding perceptions of time and space within the confines of an authoritarian beat clock--it's not music that pulls one in because it forcefully changes his or her mood. It opts instead to put one in relief by extracting a tense background from silence and creating a situation that is more easily shared as a result of its new explicitness.
Kenta Nagai - Pianoless Vexations
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