Foreshadows, future ghosts, and a night on itself choking…

…Artifice and relic, ecclesiastically shuffled.

I started writing this late-night rant in light of a discussion I was having with a friend this week about our approaches to composition.  We both trained as classical/western notated composers, but it is a training that I have significantly moved away from, toward beatmaking and a more abstracted pop practice.  I have as many issues with the world of classical contemporary composition as I have with the world of contemporary improvisation and other allegedly radical practices that position themselves as counter to what they perceive as more traditionalist/conservative music-making.  Classic FM is a particularly turgid bastion of self-satisfied conservative bullshit, but then to a lesser degree so is Radio 3, which relegates the most left-field of its output (generally the more accessible pickings of “experimental” music) to extremely late slots at night – mere novelty freak shows – but perhaps it is comforting that they broadcast these shows, if only to a small number of enthusiasts.  The problem is that Radio 3 could probably convince you that Nitin Sawhney is leading the vanguard of “experimental” music making, but the problem is, he probably is, and I have a feeling that the people who own Sawhney records are the people who own the Nu-Jazz wankfunk of Quantic Soul Orchestra, or the soul-sucking-deadness of the Gotan Project.  Of course what I’m really doing here is exposing my qualms with a certain brand of wishy washy, Alain de Botton*-reading London-centric middle-classness, where a need to appear to embrace or try and identify with the multiculturalism of the city is met by Sawhney and his cohorts who provide the appropriate stonewashed cultural signifiers in the form of this particular monstrosity, where we follow yet another gorgeous girl in a big red dress as she smugly fannies around affluent London neighbourhoods, singing a song so bland that my face melts off every time I hear it.  It is so fucking safe that it makes me consider slipping some hideous airborne poison into the air conditioning system at Waitrose.  But no, I wouldn’t do that, I like Waitrose…

*An Anglo-Swiss public pseudo-intellectual with a tumorous presence on the BBC’s Culture Show who has managed to forge, in Charlie Brooker‘s words, ‘…a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane’.

Mannequin Licker Backroom Dj Set @ Cooly G [7th May 2011] by Mannequin Licker on Mixcloud

CLICK HERE!

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss.  The light shines through it, and the dark enters it.  Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea.  Hanging, swaing, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will…

…And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking…

-Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

After the breaks, the story begins…