Digital Provocation · 27 February 2008

For emotional provocation, a girl with a piano is most powerful. A piano was my self-expression during the terrible years—high school—so maybe that’s got something to do with it.

But anymore, the strongest mood-shifter (mental state-shifter) for me is electronica. The Editor, bard to the core with thick icing layers of rock and jazz, protests: “It’s a wall. No movement in it. It is music that tells you to stay still.” 

Yes, sort of. The monotony of digitalism is part of what sucks me in. All that space between the data shortens the distance between 0 and love. Shit, I mean 0 and 1. In a way it’s subversive when beeps render you bliss, but in another way it’s almost easier.

The experience is like this: I want to waltz to its monotony. Interpolate my body in to it while my heartbeat/brainwaves just do what the monotony tells them to do. (Somewhere here there's a connection to Karen's jazz practice... but for me practice music, if any, is devotional cornball stuff: the triggers to downshift and become rhythmic in that context seem to be more about supercalming content than about BPM/form.)

Zero/one. Form/emptiness. Yadda/yadda.

Specifically, yesterday I finally stopped listening to Hot Chip (who sing about bodhi trees--not burning trees!). A really nice wakeup record, in all its moods. Now there are post-digital, yet similarly Enoesque, musics in my stereo: and I don’t know if I should cringe at the signposts in the lyrics or just take it as a indication that we have a little bit more than 1 and 0 in common.

Robert Wyatt (Comicopera, Be Serious):

I reall envy Christians. I envy Moslems too. It must be great to be so sure as a top Hindu or Jew. And I don't believe in willpower; self-expression's such a fraud. I mean how can I express myself when there's no self to express? Be serious! Put a sock in it. Then put a lid on it. Do us a favor.

It's a little more convincing when it's sung.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. And you have such a pretty voice!

   I’m not familiar with the type of music you’re describing but I wanted to say that you can sing to me anytime you want… : )

   Posted by: Anna · Feb 27, 05:29 PM · #

2. (blah, blah, regular complications and objections mounted).

   For some reason I have Baudrillard in my head. His take on not having a self is that all selves are purchased and purchasable; commodity first, selfhood second. Sort of Marxism turned inside out, a falsehood which denies a truth which, in his heart of hearts, Baudrillard could never stop believing in; he fell for his own logic trick and made an argument about anti-agency that was top notch popular throughout the eighties in many humanities disciplines.

   BUT

   that isn’t how reality works. There isn’t a self which is INDEPENDENT from the cosmos; for most people, the paradox is that they aren’t TOTALLY independent, but here, the paradox seems to be that there IS some independence from the cosmos. The largest organism on the face of the Earth, so I’ve heard, is a rhizomatic root system for a forest somewhere; one massive organism, acres across. Nonetheless, that organism MANIFESTS as perhaps hundreds of SEPARATE trees. Multiplicity is REAL. Put another way, God helps those who help themselves. Put another way, will is a manifestation of the will to power. Put another way, everyone who is not a jivanmukta must, however illusorily, ACT until action can be realized as the illusion it is. If realization is NOT this complete, acting must, however bitterly or with whatever resentment for whatever reason, be taken to be REAL.

   I should have emailed this, probably. I see this chewing-on-will question in each post, serially, and I’m not annoyed with it, or trying to be snarky about it, but I feel like saying, “dude, you’re a tree.”

   Posted by: patrick · Feb 27, 07:12 PM · #

3. Just for the record, my comment wasn’t about “electronic music in general.” I was specifically referring to the new Hot Chip record; which I appreciate in many respects, but which I failed to get how the owl lady was experiencing as highly rhythmic—because yes, to me, rhythmically, it felt wall-like.

   :)

   Posted by: R · Feb 27, 08:17 PM · #

4. “For some reason I have Baudrillard in my head.” I laughed because I imagine you intended that to mean “at this moment,” and I read it as: “Well, duh, yes! And all the time!”

   I’m happy you didn’t email your rhizomic notion, Patrick. I read about that system a while back, and am delighted to be reminded of it this morning!

   Posted by: karen · Feb 28, 04:19 AM · #

5. how do you feel about Postal Service?

   Posted by: tova · Feb 28, 06:50 AM · #

6. oh, also i would like you to sing to me too!

   Posted by: tova · Feb 28, 06:51 AM · #

7. I really loved Tweekend by Crystal Method, but they’ve never recorded anything like it since.

   Posted by: Boodiba · Feb 28, 08:31 AM · #

8. This is, I think Patrick, where a lot of everyday thinking in the western yoga zone falls down. Around the paradoxes of action. Around the stuff that gets thrown up in your way the minute you get around to coping, on a practical sensuous everyday level, with the fact of being both the experiencer and the creator of your line of existence. The creator and the subject of your “karma.” This is either ironic or just to be expected for us, having stumbled as we have into the yoga of action—in to karma yoga. Action and its paradoxes in the central subject of the Gita and, I think, of the RF riffs that many of us are dwelling in these days.

   The internet and the rhizome are good metaphors of each other. Here we are, an aspen grove. I’m good with that.

   Tova, Postal Service yes. Boo, Crystal Method, didn’t know that before. Youtubed it and liked: very Chemical Brothers. Good fun.

   The digital half of the P.S. is Dntel, Jimmy Tamborello. Here he is collaborating with a fellow Los Angeles artist, whose voice I love.

   I haven’t liked Mia Doi Todd’s records too much, personally, since Zeroone (which is GOOD, and whose first track, “Digital” is beautiful and apropo), but I still admire her so much as an artist and am fascinated by her soulful but hollow, selfconsciously “deconstructed,” voice.

   Makes my singing sound like nothing. My voice is ok but unpracticed the past decade (except for frequent car-singing)—would love to be in a choir some day, just to be able to lift voice with a group. The only thing I’ll ever miss about church. The Editor fears I’ll one day fill this longing by becoming a big kirtan person.

   Hi. I’m free-associating now. Awesome! (Following Arturo.)

   Here’s a recent MDT that I think a couple of you here specifically will like. I love to watch this woman sing.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 28, 02:28 PM · #

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