Non-Time and Hauntology

[Allegro]

Hey, you ^^^ guys, there’s not much I can add about teevee programming and its celebrities ’cause I haven’t given that much time to either, so I’ll pitch some random art onto your screen .






^ I think that was BPH’s avatar, once.

[NeonLX]

Oh Lord, "Grease"...That was horrifyingly foul. In spite of Olivia Newton-John. I did like "American Graffiti". I'm old enough to have experienced the cruising scene. Ya, even in the rural midwest, we engaged in that. Lots of that.

[Allegro]

I suppose if there’s one thing that brings all art forms together, in my philosophical point of view, it would be neuroartsology. I think the inventors of the neologism, neuroartsology, want to conscientiously augment conventional Eurocentric perceptual preferences of art and music with definitions of art and music as what people do, as actions or behaviors of doing alone or in a group. Or, as the authors wrote: “...a neuroartsology that seeks to explain the full array of cognitive, neural, and cultural phenomena involved in the universal behaviors of artification.” See pdf The Arts are More than Aesthetics: Neuroaesthetics as Narrow Aesthetics.

Artification considers activities that produce, as examples, a piece of art or music or dance, but artification isn’t a final product of music heard on a CD or during a radio stream or in concert halls; or art observed in exhibitions; or watching a dancer on stage. Something humans do naturally by movements of our bodies becomes a creation through painting, sculpting, drawing, playing piano, singing, dancing, conducting a group of musicians, writing, photographing, filming, acting, applying stage or film makeup, designing costumes, etc.

As memories and their associated feelings are unconcealed, as recent responses in this thread have indicated, everyday hauntology seemingly encourages an occasion for appreciation of art forms that have already manifested as well as art forms presently being manifested by transforming what has been.

[Allegro]

All that was written in the above comment space was to say I believe Mark Gertis is on target, as I would support his critiques of “world music” label producers and management, who have learned from each other to alter, diminish or delete artists’ originally intuitive, musical explorations during artists’ stage and studio performances. Thus, in my opinion, forcing an hauntology for those who wish to perceive it as such.

I’ve highlighted Gertis’s ideas in the following quotes. Thanks to IanEye and cptmarginal .


^ http://youtu.be/pgRUHIeaKOk | ^ http://youtu.be/meBUGk0EJCA

To the left are selected videos from IanEye’s post plus this excerpt | Mark Gergis said: Sublime Frequencies was formed as a way to try and get this music out there and share what we were learning and hearing with a listening audience that might also be interested. You could say that the label was also a direct response to what “world music” had become – and aimed to combat the negative stigma – and ultimately terrible sounds and presentation – that so much international music had developed by the 1980s and 1990s. Even today, many presenters of international music in the West show a proclivity toward taming sounds in the studio – over-producing the music – cleaning it up – tempering and softening it for Western audiences. It is a form of aural globalization – very appropriate for an increasingly sterilized world.

That I Remember Syria compilation/field-recording they are talking about in the interview is pretty good... "Sonic Suriya" is the best track

Have you heard Wenu Wenu, his new Four Tet produced album?

MG: I have heard Omar’s new record, and it’s not so compelling to me. Though some of the performances are decent, it’s missing a lot of the urgency and edge, in my opinion. I found this to be true of many of Omar’s previous studio recordings in Syria as well. He’s made dozens of studio albums back home, and in my opinion, with a few exceptions, he is best outside of the studio. It boils down to aesthetics and the choices made by the producer or management in the end.

The new Omar Souleyman album sounds great to me so far, but then his old releases on Sublime Frequencies never appealed to me all that much. The tracks sounded too similar, but sometimes I can get into it.

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REFERENCES. Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped | Non-Time and Hauntology

[IanEye]

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Time, post-internet, works in two ways online. There's the slide/slice: the object, the moment, the discrete unit of time that acts as a node in the flat internet universe. Then there's the scroll/stream: this is stuff like Facebook or Twitter feeds; it appears to flow linearly, but it's essentially a skeuomorphic calendar filter applied to an aggregation of the flow of slides, because once new things are added, and then become part of the flat agglomeration of data, they are never lost. Lived time is another beast entirely: it seems to be linear, but memory isn't; bodies droop and look progressively worse in selfies; the second law of thermodynamics kicks in. There's a lot of post-net art that addresses the possibilities and trauma caused by the first two conditions while completely ignoring the third.

Chance Of Rain is one of the first albums I've heard that fully acknowledges, let alone addresses, these contradictions and compositionally works across all three modes of perception. All the tracks on Chance Of Rain are instrumental, anonymised and therefore more universal. Halo combines the time-sliced gloss of the digital eternal present - the short-phase loops of sound, the textural stamps decoupled from their eras of vogue declaring the infinite, brutal flatness of everything ever imagined available all at once - with the kinds of jazz piano chord progressions last seriously heard in the early 80s. Opening track 'Dr. Echt' begins with unfolding rolls up and down the keyboard that evoke the expansive wonder of structures used by new age composer Pauline Anna Strom, recording as Trans-Millennia Consort, on tracks like 1984's 'Alpine Flight'.

LINK

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[Allegro]

Here’s the excerpted continuation of Ian’s excerpt in the above post. The music journalist, Ms. Bick, does have a way with words in that it took maybe three times reading the Halo review and listening to several of Halo’s recordings to get with Bick’s handy use of words on Halo’s behalf. I rather enjoy her writings since reading her reviews of others, too.

Highlights mine.

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The Quietus | Chance Of Rain Review
Emily Bick on Laurel Halo | October 29th, 2013 09:39

Halo’s sonic palette combines this with cartoonish noises, filtered to sound scuzzy, brittle, gloopy, melted. These effects highlight manipulation and play, and blend with the soft-focus keys of some fern bar and quaaludes Paul Simon late 70s come down to create something grounded, specific to place, anchored in time. The track names here are all about dreams, what is real or archetypal, chases, mirages, all ideas that depend on a material foundation. The cover art - a drawing by Halo’s artist father from the 70s - shows gravediggers pulling up as well as burying coffins, while random men hang around, lounging in other coffins like they’re squashy coffee bar couches, or staring out into a distant field. In the foreground, a man who looks like a cross between Freud and Dracula grouches away.

In ‘Serendip’, Halo cues up about ten layers of low end, skittling around each other at different speeds and occasionally coming together. It sounds like one of those gravity well coin funnels at science museums where the coins all spin past each other, speeding up as they reach the bottom. When these reach a peak, hi-hats build an out-of-phase cicada chorus of fog, while swipes of clear, bright chords doppler past before the bass drops. What Halo does here is play with time, with these loops and layerings, these stacks of slides, while also staking territory within it as the track picks up pace, and scrolls ahead.

Her great leap is to move beyond retro-emulation for its own sake (conjuring ghosts from half-recalled soundtrack textures, however treated, is well and good, but what about the present, or the future? What comes next?). She also avoids the post-internet aesthetic of manipulation prevalent in both images and music. That sort of tweaking acknowledges the modular nature of pixels or bitstreams as objects in their own right, and applies filters, steps and repeats to create uncanny products that bear so little resemblance to their original sources that they can pretend to have sprung from the void. The album’s press kit points out that all instruments were played by Halo to generate the source material used. To be clear, this declaration of and pride in an origin point is, thankfully, not the same as authenticity. That’s a fetish that should stay in the twentieth century where it belongs, along with the idea that disconnected individualist atomisation is viable or even possible. (Would it even make a difference where Halo got her samples from? It’s not like you can say “pics or it didn’t happen”. It’s more interesting that she was bothered to make this kind of declaration at all.)

< end excerpt >

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In this Spin interview of Ms. Halo, she talks about how she constructs her works, how she produces dance music, and why she prefers not to sing live.

[Allegro]

You might think that both Halo (in the above comment space) and Maus explore within their music constructs yet seem uninspired during muses of their results, and, in my opinion, their music shows commitment to perhaps a still unknown musical wave of syntactic aims; although, I feel Maus’s music is simply new-age common, as you may hear in his videos at the bottom of this post.

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Towards A New Language: John Maus Interviewed

< begin introductory excerpt >

As John Maus releases his brilliant new LP We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, Emily Bick engages him in a fascinating discussion on why we need a new language for punk rock, nostalgia, and agreeing with the sentiments of Ice T’s ‘Cop Killer’

John Maus is a man of many talents. He’s a composer who met Ariel Pink at music school and was part of the original Haunted Graffiti lineup. His new album, We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves combines a Moroder/Jarre/Vangelis synth palette and sinister, fog-veiled images straight out of the Ridley Scott playbook with a vocal style that sounds like it comes from a monk who’s spent too long in some echoey dungeon, precisely copying illuminated manuscripts. For all the talk about hauntology, retromania, and all the hand-wringing about how the current moment is a tail-eating cultural dead end, Maus’ aesthetic is much more considered, and ambitious. Maus has spent years studying towards a PhD in political philosophy, and he explains how his songwriting choices are made in protest against neoliberal ideals. He’s looking to write music that uses elements from the 80s soft-rock palette and action film scores, as well as medieval modes, to create something both of this moment and beyond. It’s not about literal copying, but choosing the right sonic responses to articulate a universal response to right now.

Maus is a talker; he gets excited about ideas and then describes and re-describes them to communicate precise lines of thoughts, like the kind of lecturer who really wants to make sure he’s understood and hopes he’s challenged by his students. Transcribing this went well over 20 pages and gave me carpal tunnel, but that’s cool.

His main argument is that we need a new language to talk about how people relate to each other that goes beyond lofty references to theorists with tongue-twister surnames or the kind of blogging that is so subjective and neophiliac that it degenerates into slanging matches of who got where first best. So where this conversation goes is also where it falls apart, suspended between talk of singularities and theorists and all the filler of ‘awesomes’ and ‘you know what I mean’s and lots of other vocal tics that happen when your brain’s racing faster than your mouth, when you’re trying to talk about important and complicated things without coming off as an alienating, pompous asshole bling-flashing the cultural capital. Can music offer the tools to bridge that gulf? John Maus is giving it a go: it’s worth thinking about, until language catches up.

< end introductory excerpt >

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A preferred reference. Quietus Anthology

[Elvis]

Do you what REALLY galls me? When a teevee show or movie tries to capture the spirit of the 1950s or '60s, but fails miserably.

..and may I add the 1970s, with That '70s Show, to which I looked forward, imagining I might see myself, in the way a New York mobster might see himself in The Sopranos. No such luck. I was appalled. Watching it for the first (and last) time, I shouted at the TV: where's the fucking smoke?

[Allegro]

People are exploring with electronic sounds, noise complexes, contaminated traditional and exotic chordal progressions until their hauntology just might reveal one day diacritic music with noticeably obscure melody lines.

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Industrial Audio & Absolute Sci-Fi
© Eftos Ent. | Eftos-Epos, Eftos-Opus and Eftos-Design.
http://archive.org/download/Eftos_c10h15n_2.1_edition_radio/EFTOS_C10H15N.mp3

[Allegro]

My highlight bolded red.

Citizen Kane is an interesting example to choose. Welles was a strong force, and if the stories are true, the Mercury Theater thrived because of the enthusiasm, dedication, self-sacrifice and belief of its artists-- in just doing what they were doing, making their art. Kane might be described as the product of a bold grassroots collective from New York that muscled its way into Hollywood under Welles' leadership. (And of course got punished for their audacity not long after.)

Refer art and music as what people do. Thanks, norton ash .

[Allegro]

A very precedented aspect of today's Hauntology is just the common artistic cycle at work, something that has been seen over and over in all civilizations.

I picked up this set of ideas in working closely with an author I translated, the art historian and critic Sandro Bocola, author of an epic textbook treatment on Modernist art that very wisely included pocket histories of the world itself (since he refused to see artistic development as magically independent of its times). His scheme isn't original, he would tell you, but he refined it to define three broad stages in any artistic development (archaic, classical and baroque) and four major perspectives from which artists within the development approach their work (realistic, structural, romantic, symbolist). Pick up this book, The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture and Society from Goya to the Present Day, if you want a full rendering of his excellent thought.

Anyway, a new idea emerges, or a new period of political and social history begins. (Hey, let's electrify jazz and folk -- it's the postwar sound!) It's energetic, raw, strange, exciting, unknown, fantastic (archaic). It is learned, picked up by more practitioners, and developed by a few of the most gifted to what seems like a perfect, fully-developed set of works that in some way can no longer be topped while still being the same thing. That is the classical stage (with rock and pop I think it came in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's and Jimi Hendrix and the San Francisco acid sound as a few mighty exemplars). Classic is always accompanied by an immediate rejection, critique, or detourning: the anti-classic. (In Bocola's telling of modernism, to simplify it perhaps unfairly, that was Duchamp arriving just a few years too late to be Picasso, so he drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa. In the line of development I'm identifying, that would be the Velvet Underground, another example would be Frank Zappa). This tension gives birth to a flourishing of variations and discovery of sub-genres (artists maintain the drive to find something new). This is an early baroque (the break-up into many genres in the late 1960s and 1970s). At some point these directions are mostly exhausted, and you enter a late baroque with many examples of technical perfection and endless repetitions and samplings and recombinations and covers and revivals. Late baroque can last a long time, maybe most of artistic history is spent in it. It prefigures but does not necessitate "end-times." The seeds of a new archaic are usually somewhere in there, widely unnoticed. Mini-archaics continue to happen all the time. The cycle is born anew with each subgenre and subculture, and after each major or minor historical break lending new impulse. (It can also be interrupted by the destruction or conquest of a society.) All this to Bocola (and to me, he convinced me) seems to be a natural outgrowth of how ideas spread and develop. Many cycles run simultaneously, but currently most forms are in a late baroque with a tendency thanks to modern media and markets for convergence to an unprecedented global late baroque. We're far from the end of the development, but most of it will have the texture of late baroque until there is some really new and radical historical break. Again, the mere presence of late baroque in most of the culture is not in itself an indication of imminent "end times." (Those are coming for different reasons.)

[Allegro]

< abridged and reformatted extract, which would be edited today, but it’ll do as is >

...my intention is to expand the hypothesis by adding a broad assumption that brilliant graphic artists such as Alex Roman may create pieces that bring together various art forms, which could then count as another of hundreds of thousands of breakthroughs throughout this 21st century baroque period before a few breakthroughs emerge as those did during the baroque period of architecture, art and music ensconced in Roman Catholicism in the late 16th century through mid 18th century. (Also to be considered are psychological aspects of repressed memories wrt to Hauntology.)

Anyway, this video is so entirely brilliant, I thought some at RI would appreciate the orchestrated sensibilities and exhaustive detail involved in the creation of the piece.

The Third & The Seventh | exquisitely created by Alex Roman

[From here down are NOTES FROM 3DUP DOT COM.] Alex Roman, aka Jorge Seva born in 1979 in Alicante (Spain), and he is one of the most admired artists in this CG Arena lately. Alex is considered as a master by many 3D designers and we are really pleased to publish his creations as a sample of how Computer Graphics are changing our visual experience in this world little by little...

According to Alex: “This is a FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal”.

CREDITS

Computer Graphics: Modelling, Texturing, Illumination, Rendering: Alex Roman. Done with Autodesk 3dsmax, V-Ray (Chaos Software), Adobe AfterEffects and Adobe Premiere.

Postproduction and Editing: Alex Roman.

Music: Sequenced, Orchestrated and Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar and EWQLSO Gold Pro XP).

Sound Design by Alex Roman. Based on Original Scores by Michael Laurence Edward Nyman (The Departure), and Charles-Camille Saint-Saens (Le Carnaval des Animaux).

Directed by Alex Roman.

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REFER ONE, FINAL VERSION | REFER TWO | REFER THREE

[Elvis]

People are exploring with electronic sounds, noise complexes, contaminated traditional and exotic chordal progressions until their hauntology just might reveal one day diacritic music with noticeably obscure melody lines.

_________________
Industrial Audio & Absolute Sci-Fi
© Eftos Ent. | Eftos-Epos, Eftos-Opus and Eftos-Design.
http://archive.org/download/Eftos_c10h15n_2.1_edition_radio/EFTOS_C10H15N.mp3

wow, that music is fantastic, omg

Is that an ensemble performing "live"?

[Allegro]

^ Elvis, I LOVED it, too! I’ve listened to their discography over here.

I don’t think EFTOS is a live ensemble, and I could be wrong.

The listening enjoyment of EFTOS derives, at least for me, from blends and progressions of many familiar (electronic) sounds and noises, familiar chords, human (sounding) vocals, sounds of other animals, familiar acoustic instruments, etc., which hang onto the hauntological ambience without so much of the industrial abrasiveness that I thought was unappealing several years ago. I’ve not finished reading this very interesting Industrial music wiki page.

More later.

[kelley]

quick skim and looks fantastic

very dense and lots to ponder

thanks for posting