Tuesday, January 25, 2022

chasing the virus / chasing the divine

Over at No Bells blog, here's a piece in which genre epidemiologist Kieran Press-Reynolds tracks and traces the mutation and proliferation of new audio variants - nanogenres with names like sigilkore, slung, dariacore, murder metal, maplekore, hyperplugg. Even someone like myself - triple vaxxed with scepticism, ears shielded with N95-like taste-filters - finds his diagnosis compelling. 

In the '90s, folks liked to talk about the dub virus. Which never made sense to me - why compare something sacred and healing to little bitty entities that wreck your computer or make you feel like shit? Dub and roots makes you breathe better, it rebalances your system. Here's a luminous-numinous piece by Matthew Ingram about his lifelong love of dub and the music's connections to his latterday concerns with health and spirituality. There is also a Woebot in Dub mix, #3 of a series (here's 1 and 2).

One my favorites (a Woebot turn-on, in fact) and as a good a reason to believe in God as any I can think of.