Tuesday, July 11, 2006

more from k-punk on scritti and the voice
[i must read that Dolar]
[i think this thing of voice-as-hinge between abjectly moist pulsional/pulmonary interiority and transcendence/abstraction/nonhuman & inorganic realms of alien otherness, that's the reason i'm so interested in and affected by the avant-classical vocal-extremism thing, whether choirs--Ligeti's stuff--or solo--joan la barbara doing morton subnotik, cathy berberian doing berio, meredith monk, et al -- then there's that whole other realm of freejazz voice (patty waters, phil minton), edge-of-rock voice-sculpture ([tim buckley "starsailor"), furious pig, tuvan whatnot, shamanic this'n'that.... i think i mentioned here before long time ago my fantasy project, a box set of outer-limits extremists of the human voice -- any suggestions for candidates?]

and also on dubstep
[is it just me or is the whole Bass Theology thing getting a bit tired, both as sonic praxis and a belief system? the ideas have something of a lived-in air about them at this late hour... i was at Dub War's ist birthday
bash(ment) coupla weeks back, excellent vibe, good fun, but the way people got worked up about the most bog-standard eruptions of low-end was quite bizarre, it seemed out of proportion to what was actually being done in terms of creativity or impact... and it was very much case that the tracks that stood out through the night were the ones with something going on in the treble zone, those "high end flitting sounds" Kpunk identifies in Skream, or flickering dub-tingles in the intro.... that's where the rush comes in for me, these intermittent echoes in dubstep of 2step's great innovation, its discovery of the mind-altering properties of excessive treble... whereas when the bass heaves itself into view i often felt insufficiently whelmed, "that's it?!"]

K-punk also directs us to a great john foxx interview over at the Ballardian website.
[the interviewer, Simon Sellars, has asked about doing one with me at some point about the postpunk/Ballard nexus; i warned him i probably don't have a lot of cogent things to say, although s.f. of the non-pulp/Sixties-new-wave-of-sf was the big thing i was into just before i got into music. also mentioned a fantasy project of mine from a few years back: a dual-biography-of-ideas about Ballard and Eno as the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century. (that's probably a monstrous exaggeration, but certainly they could claim to jointly bestride that perhaps most interesting decade of them all, the 70s. and they both have a certain un-eradicable Englishness... Ballard with his whiskey and soda... one mystery, addressed elsewhere on Ballardian, is that JG talks of having virtually no feeling for music and really trite, non-vanguard taste in music). Trouble with such a twin-biography is that Eno and Ballard are both so aware of what they do and so copiously eloquent about it, that a critic could bring little to the table.... ]

and while we're on the subject, ever visited the other Kpunk?

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