Supersonic Alien Theory
This weekend I have been in Birmingham at the Supersonic festival. Suffice to say, it was pretty damned special. Two days of high quality left-field music. I will most probably post a more detailed review once I have had sufficent time to digest it all. For the moment, the brief highlights, with photos from the quite brilliant Toby Price. Crikey these photos are good.
Miasma and The Carousel of Headless Horses
Absolutely Progged my bloody face off.
Sunn0)))
Quite frankly the loudest thing that I have heard in my life. Slow, occasionally beautiful, occasionally a sound of pure terror.
Chrome Hoof
Incredible Live Show, great brass, great interpretive dance.
The work of Ray Brassier and his Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter is being chatted about over at Larval Subjects. I too am making my way through Brassier’s PHD thesis, and I am slowly making summary notes (to let people know what he is rattling on about), as well as a occasional notes towards a critique of some of what he says, that might just blurt out on this blog, or might write up in a more substantial way. It is brilliant fearsome stuff though, that gets my philosophical motor running, as much as I don’t agree with all of it. And given this article, Genre is Obsolete, Brassier may well have appreciated some of the noise contributions to the bill at Supersonic: Equilax (who since it was their last show treated to an Atari Teenage Riot style 20 minute blast of harsh white noise – quote the NME on ATR last gig “an attempt to punch a gaping hole in the space-time continuum and rip its throbbing purple guts out with a sonic pitchfork”), Jazkammer, Migrant not to forget everyones favourite quasi-macho fist pumpers Wolf Eyes.
Noise has become the expedient moniker for a motley array of sonic practices: academic, artistic, countercultural; with little in common besides their perceived recalcitrance with respect to the conventions governing classical and popular musics. Noise not only designates the no-man’s-land between electro-acoustic investigation, free improvisation, avant-garde experiment, and sound-art; more interestingly, it refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres: between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrete and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut. Yet in being used to categorize all forms of sonic experimentation that ostensibly defy musicological classification; be they para-musical, anti-musical, or post-musical, noise has become a generic label for anything deemed to subvert established genre. It is at once a specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be subsumed by genre.
I am not at my standard computer, so I am posting this on a Windows PC. I have to say that the recently release Windows Live Writer, a desktop (eg not browser based) blog writing tool, is pretty sexy software, which set up incredibly easily. Colour me surprised.
Nice blog, but it’s je (suis) un autre. Pardon.
According to the original letter by Rimbaud that the title of this blog refers to, its “Je Est Un Autre”. While grammatically awkward, this phrase is drawn from Arthur Rimbaud’s letters on 13th of May 1871 to Georges Izambard and then on the 15th May to Paul Demeny, his famous “lettres du voyant”. You can read them here – http://www.rimbaudhtml.freesurf.fr/lettres/lettres_voyant.html . There is much discussion of its meaning, naturally.