01.28.07

Amp Up Your Hyperlinks

Posted in Personal, Things on the Web at 3:02 pm by Moody

I love it when something that is really useful is also easy to install, and Snap (Snap Preview Anywhere) is both. It comes as a WordPress plugin (which I installed in a couple minutes, thanks to Ajay D’Souza’s good work), a TypePad widget, and can also be installed on Blogger.com or googlepages.com accounts. It’s also fairly configurable in other ways.

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.

And as you can see for yourself, I’ve enabled my blog with Snap. I hope you will find it to be a useful addition here, and on your own blog.

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01.25.07

Of Noise and Data, Pt. 1: “Noise”

Posted in Bands, Music, Society and Culture at 10:37 am by Moody

Merzbow: Metamorphism

Noise — true and unadulterated noise — is not the chaos from which order emerges, it is the great annihilator that devours all order. The television, the radio, the movie, the CD; the text, the word, the letters; emotions, senses, thought; in the end, noise consumes them all, consumes everything but itself. Noise is the yawning void, the infinite string of random ones and zeros tangling and raveling in a blinding light of overload and feedback, simultaneously attack and decay. It is the amorphous and indefinite haze of shattered alphabets, all babble and insentient glossolalia wrapped, bound and layered over and over in and by and with discordant choral voices saying nothing. It is the utterly unstable, timeless, roiling destruction of all alphanumeric and otherwise information-bearing codices. Noise cannot be reasoned with; it neither hates nor loves, fears nor desires, hopes nor despairs, laughs nor weeps; it is not simply illogical or irrational, it is nonlogical and arational. It lays all composition to waste, and no composition may overcome it.

So it may seem odd, right from the start, to discuss a “noise composition” like Merzbow’s Metamorphism [iTunes link]. Then again, the four tracks that comprise this release are not only or not simply noise — there is, in fact, some recognizable instrumentation — although anyone who’d deny that they each attain a level nearly tantamount to ultimate noise (and for almost unbearably sustained intervals) has apparently not yet listened to Metamorphism. What instrumentation there is is ultimately broken and violently obliterated. But what should be considered here is that Masami Akita, like minimalist electronic music composer Ryoji Ikeda (see “Of Noise and Data, Pt. 2: ‘Data’”), is the composer of the sound we finally hear and interpret for ourselves. The point is that however thought-numbingly anti-harmonious or deafeningly destructive/deconstructive each song is in-itself, it was an ordered mind that made it and laid it out before us. So, then, let’s ask a useful question. What motivates Masami Akita; why does he make noise?

What drives Akita is of course best summed up by him, and in his answers to the questions posed by Perfect Sound Forever, the following exchange is illuminating:

PSF: Your work has little connection with what we think of as music- melody, rhythm, chorus- [what] are your thoughts on this?

I like melody and rhythm and I was listening to many different types of music. But my project is in a very different way. My music is not only my reaction against other music. It’s just my way.

PSF: What are you trying to communicate through your music?

My own sensation. I don’t see it as something that I’m communicating. I’m not of any special opinion about this. I’m just doing my work. Of course, I need listeners to hear my work but I have no control about how they hear it.

How does one hear Merzbow? That depends on a number of factors more or less obvious. For instance, what are the presuppositions at the point of exposure? Let’s assume two things: assume that 1) whatever Akita’s intentions/reasons, you alone shall hear what you hear, and 2) whatever you think or feel about it, whatever you’ve presupposed, the noise that Akita has created/composed shall defy you — it will persist as noise regardless of your or my or his interpretation or attitude regarding it.

As to why one would want to listen to Merzbow, I am sure there are any number of reasons. One that comes to mind — and perhaps it has come to yours, possibly colored by sarcasm — is masochism. This is not at all a bad answer. But let’s remove any ambiguity by providing the straight, general definition: masochism is “the enjoyment of what appears to be painful or tiresome” (source: Apple Dictionary). Masochism is also “the tendency to derive pleasure, esp. sexual gratification, from one’s own pain or humiliation” (source: ut supra). In short, control issues lie at the heart of the matter. There is, in listening to Merzbow or to noise compositions generally, a risk of losing control, consciously engaged in, or a willing relinquishment of control. The subject may be further illuminated by pointing out that early Merzbow releases were frequently wrapped in pornography and images of bondage (taken by Akita). However, by presenting a triad of masochism-bondage-noise, important as it may be, I am opening the door to a subject too abstruse to be comprehensively taken on here. Caution must be taken. And in the end I can do no better, pragmatically speaking, than to recommend “Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music” by Paul Hegarty, who tellingly said,

Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in a position to accept or deny.

and then cite at length from another interview with Akita:

You have been quoted as saying, “There are no special images of ideology behind Merzbow”– unlike the early Industrialists such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Whitehouse that used shocking imagery. Yet you have repeatedly used pornography. Isn’t pornography a shocking image that creates a certain ideology, whether intended or not?

I have two directions in the use of pornography. In my early cassettes and mail art projects I used lots of pornography. I made many collages using pornography as it was a very important item in my mail art/mail music. I thought my cheap Noise cassettes were of the same value as cheap mail order pornography. These activities were called “Pornoise”. In this direction, I would say that I used pornography for it’s anti-social, cut-up value in information theory. I soon started to release Merzbow vinyl which was very different from the cassettes of this same time period. I think my vinyl works concentrated more on sound itself because I think vinyl is a more static medium. So, Merzbow went in two separate directions in the ’80s- a cassette direction and a vinyl direction. In the ’90s, these directions were mixed for one Merzbow. I know you’re thinking I’m still using porn images like bondage but these images are not porn to me. I use bondage images only for the release of connected works like Music for Bondage Performance I and 2 and Electroknots. My reasons for using bondage images are very clear- not for shock element but for documentary value. In fact, all bondage pictures I use are taken by myself. I know who the models are and who tied them up. I know the exact meaning of these bondage pictures. This is very different from people using Xeroxed bondage images from Japanese magazines. I know that there are many bondage images associated with Merzbow releases. But many of these releases use stupid images without my permission. I should control all of them but it is very difficult to control all products abroad. I don’t like the easy idea of using images without the knowledge of the image itself. So, it’s meaningless to create ideology by using pornography without the correct knowledge of the image itself.

I don’t wish to stray too far afield, here. What I am driving at is simply this: one submits to Merzbow, one submits to noise. There is, in Merzbow, a distinct BDSM quality and an implicit association with it. Fans of W.S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard will immediately get this. In listening to Metamorphism, all that is allowed, in a de facto sense, is the experience of hearing. One’s conscious attempts to find order or sense in the extremely cacophonous assault are beaten down over and over, one’s thoughts sheared off at the root. The apparent order that on occasion arises in the four “songs” comes not as a false hope, and not in bad faith, but as a prop made for destruction that, in its destruction or in the process of destruction, brings about a more profound submission by the listener. It is, or it can be, a liberating experience, even if most people would not find it even remotely pleasurable per se.

It can also point to a more subversive understanding of control structures generally, structures which noise inherently undermines. For example, what is more patriotic than a march (vide “The Military March Form”)? Here we see structure with intent. In the military sphere, the uniforms (uniformity, homogeneity), the discipline of order, the very specific patterns displayed in a myriad of ways, all serve to strengthen the military structure, and this structure reflects the implicit goal of maintaining an ordered, harmonious society. The march is the heartbeat of the structure. It is the celebration of order opposed to chaos. That it may also become dangerous, especially when left unchecked to pursue its own ends, is apparent to anyone with some knowledge of the history of fascist, imperialist, communist, dictatorial and totalitarian regimes. In these may we see how the circle runs round. Consider the following: order needs structure, which in turn needs discipline, which in turn needs submission. In submission we have returned to bondage, which noise destroys (as it destroys everything but itself). Noise is, in terms of the discipline of the march, the war. It is no small point that all discipline, structure, and order eventually fails in a war, just as stone succumbs to the sea. But noise is not simply, militarily speaking, war, any more than it is, politically speaking, anarchy, any more than it is, medically speaking, cancer, any more than it is, sexually speaking, BDSM. One may submit to noise but, unlike the submission to order, that submission will ultimately be annihilated. The listener (the body reduced to being an ear) will be left to wonder about the realities of submission. In the submission to order, so long as it is maintained, so long as the march is kept up, there is no allowance made for asking questions or for self-reflection as such would be perceived as indicative of indiscipline and disorderly conduct. Thus it can be concluded that the submission to noise, however flawed, is or leads to the act of subverting the rule of order, discipline, structure, and society, if only in oneself. Put another way — in the tyranny of the mind, noise is the act of terrorism itself.

– — – — – –

On to “Of Noise and Data, Pt. 2: ‘Data’“

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01.21.07

A Window’s Haze of Sunlight

Posted in Bands, Music at 9:25 pm by Moody

Grizzly Bear: Yellow House

Edward Droste’s Grizzly Bear seems to have sprung almost fully formed from the lo-fi bedroom studio scene into the world of well polished lo-fi wonders. On Yellow House, the music of Droste’s band — including members Christopher Bear (the last name is coincidental), Daniel Rossen, and Chris Taylor — induces shivers of heightened emotion and varying inner states of calm by turns as it evokes respectful comparisons, sometimes broad and sometimes specific, to the likes of Radiohead, The Beach Boys, Arcade Fire, and Iron and Wine. Once you’ve listened to just a few songs from their new album, this is not at all surprising or eyebrow-raising.

The new material that comprises Yellow House (released on Warp Records on September 4th) puts the band at the vanguard of contemporary song writing. The album was self-recorded during an idyllic summer. The makeshift studio was provided by Droste’s mom’s living room in a yellow house just off Cape Cod. Magical, haunting melodies are still their mainstay. Grizzly Bear always craft their songs from start to finish - meticulous instrumentation and arrangements are their specialty. On Yellow House, Grizzly Bear still flex their lo-fi connoisseurship, but with a better recording - DIY embellished with Taylor’s fine sonic engineering acumen. Droste and Rossen share initial song writing duties, although the entire band collaborates to breath life into the tracks. [Source: Bio.]

Magical, haunting melodies, indeed. As in “Plans”, when the layered voices croon in your ear “Every option I have costs more than I’ve got…”, as the song’s odd beat (like a slow waltz performed from a burro’s back) dances you forward through time grown oddly syrupy, as the choral voice rises and falls (à la the aforementioned Beach Boys) and is finally cut-up among the odd electronic noises…. And also in “Marla”, with its nude-descending-a-staircase echoing piano and its strangely Seussian lyrics…. But, then again, “On a Neck, On a Spit” winds up with a much more straightforward alternative rock association in the end, shifting gears as it does into a slowly careering wall of sound that would, at the peak of the song (close to the four minute mark), be at home at Lollapalooza even as the initial 2:50 of the song puts me in mind of Pink Floyd’s “San Tropez”. “Reprise” follows all this up with banjo and a folky structure. And yet nowhere on Yellow House do you ever feel lost or snagged by a nagging sense of disjointedness.

Grizzly Bear hold together in their varied compositions with a refreshing musical vision that, for all the comparisons that could be made, is absolutely their own.

See two videos from Grizzly Bear: “Lullabye” (live), from Yellow House, and the more experimental and lo-fi “Deep Sea Diver”, from Ed Droste’s first effort, Horn of Plenty.

Thanks are due Pitchfork, whose review turned me on to the band.

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01.07.07

The Real Illusion

Posted in Personal at 2:42 am by Moody

You will never know the whole of life, not by a long shot, not anything even close to it. What you will know will be yours alone, however much you apparently have in common with another person. The moment you taste something, you will immediately infuse its actual flavor with your own interpretations, associations, biases, feelings, etc. Chocolate merges with passion, which itself is meaty like a tomato but redder. Pomegranates merge with November’s secret fire and the scent of burning wax. Nothing tastes the same for any two people. The same goes for your other senses. It simply can’t be helped.

When I touch you, I touch all the memories I have of touching that which opens me like a knife of living bone as it touches me.

From the moment your mind began to form, before you were conscious of yourself, it began to build a web of relationships, and these became irreversibly intertwined, ineluctably interrelated, so that, eventually, nothing new could be experienced that was not, at the moment of apprehension or conception, caught up and illuminated in this web.

Is every city street the same? No, but the orange tint of sodium lights splashing and dispersing darkness, diluting shadows and smudging their edges, is always associated for me with vigils and loneliness.

This had to be the case. And it has to be the case for all of us. Were we unable to build this web we’d be at sea, awash in a chaotic world of countless experiences we could never comprehend or even fully grasp. I imagine that we would be overwhelmed in the end by events infused with an unsettling paramnesia (déjà vu) made terribly daunting to our sanity, for memories would still be made but they’d be devoid of the anchoring sense of historical-personal context. So it is a necessary trade off, and in the end a perhaps academic one because, unanchored, what sense could we make of the world? A goldfish would be as equipped to deal with life as us. But the cost remains: the raw experiences of life are poignantly fleeting, their truths immediately subsumed, their essential (existential) reality unknown and, finally, unknowable.

Have I touched you, or only the force field evoked by my conceptions of touch? Did I hear your voice, or was that the song of fluid and poignant associations sluicing through the pipes in the walls of my desire to hear you?

We live in individual webs of personal experiences that cannot be shared, cocoons of historical-personal context that will not be breached by “life as it really is” so long as the spider specter of mind that calls itself “I” is there to weave it, and without that spider specter there is only a cobweb devoid of meaning — in fact there is not then even a cobweb. If one becomes (one with) life — that is, if one leaves the web, struggles free of the cocoon (egg?), loses oneself, loses “I” — then there is no one; to leave it is, for all intents and purposes, to die. To live is to exist in the bondage of a de facto individuality that is completely insular and isolated. Yet this is hardly a punishment or tragedy; it is simply the natural state of human beings, and the lives we (or most of us) lead are, for the most part, none the wiser nor any more foolish for not knowing the unknowable.

And yet, did Shakespeare not put these words in Hamlet’s mouth (q.v., II, ii):

268. O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
269. myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
270. have bad dreams.

There is for me the understanding that I am caught in myself, trapped on my island, ensnared by the web of “my” life’s historical-personal context, the only reality I can truly be aware of. I wonder how it limits me. That it inevitably does is a terrible thorn in my aching and bloody side — at least sometimes, should I happen to take notice of it. Worse, I am aware that it does so more effectively the older I get. How could it not? Every day brings innumerable new relationships to tie into the web… (poetry! stereo instructions! faces, glances, hands! pictures at an exhibition! the latest song by that band, you-know-the-one! driving to the sea!). And so, now, no amount of passion, no amount of desire, no amount of will, no matter the quality, can propel me from its hold for more than a fleeting, bittersweet instant. I long to be free of it, of this web of “mine”; I long to be free of myself, free of me, free of “I” — the specter spider. Yet, to quote another source: “The struggle to free myself of restraints, becomes my very shackles” (Meshuggah, Catch 33).

— § —

How else could I know the world? For all I lose in the endless construction of my web, I gain in terms of being capable of functioning in the world. The web, the web-making, makes sense. Naked reality makes no sense at all, because sense is predicated on there being comprehensible associations, and naked reality is sui generis at any and all points. In other words, what is — just is, — completely, totally, wholly, absolutely, for and in itself. The moment you think about “what (it) is”, you wrap it up in language — in a sense, you encode the raw data, though not into a digital form, so that it may be processed — and the language you know is itself subject to associations. You do not know a single word that is free from personal (ergo limiting or restrictive) understanding or associations (every word to other words, for a start). Again, making the web makes sense, and it is necessary and unavoidable.

But still, there remains the itch and the desire to scratch it, the thirst and the desire to slake it, the urge and the desire to assuage it. Reality (qua “that which is really real”) is the wordless and omnipresent je ne sais quoi of life, and it is what we want to know. It is as if I ache to be the experience I think/feel/believe I am living; I want to be rid of all obfuscating factors, want to rid myself of self-perpetrated illusions or diversions from the experience’s reality.

Or is it that reality, naked reality, is — because it is inherently without meaning — effectively an illusion, insofar as our minds cannot grasp it as it is but only as we make it out to be? Is it that, in the end, the whole of life cannot therefore be known — because, forever outside of the personal experiences of countless beings, its quiddity is a senseless void? And what does this say about our relationships to others? (Please note that I do not suggest this with a view toward legitimizing or even positively acknowledging a solipsistic outlook. There is no reason, so far as I can see or conceive, to believe for a second that “others” do not exist independently of me.) How is it we know others? What is the reality of mutual love, where the desire is strongest for us to experience the reality of the other? With all the associations we have and make, taking every experience into our historical-personal context, weaving them into our web before we can realize them, what do we have?

Perhaps what reality is for us is the meaning discovered where the unknowable outside touches and affects the known or knowable within. And when that touch is brought about by another sentient being with any intensity, perhaps the dynamic — the product of the interplay between two webs — brings us closer to finding our compass, our orientation, in reality. In the limitless sea of the unknowable naked reality, vast as space itself, maybe it’s the interaction consciously engaged that soothes and reassures us that, even locked in our webs, we are real, we are touchable, we are not alone. And possibly that helps dispel the real illusion.

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