Kodwo Eshun - Abducted By Audio

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http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm

My timing in posting this is probably a little random. Still, I just read it again tonight for the heck of it. The stuff on these ccru.net pages are real hit and miss but it seems like the stuff that's good (this one and Darkcore are both recommendable) is pretty damn captivating. I don't know how many of you are into sort of flirting with the irrational, I mean that in the sense of being rational but at the same time letting that rationel detach sometimes and fly upward just to meet that call of a higher existence - for me this kind of stuff, when done right, is about as close as you can get to actually articulating what music does for some like myself. Its not synaesthetic, might really seem that way but its something a little bit more about having a mystical experience - is an emotional state where you feel like your expanding on something profound and epic but it doesn't have to go anywhere. It doesn't have to foster a religious belief, it doesn't necessarily bring you to all the answers of how to cure the world's ills, but the experience - whether you believe in a god or not is irrelevant - its fulfillment in and of itself, its worth having just for the mental health effects that sense of getting in touch with the divine really has. Kodwo hits it pretty well in this write-up from a lot of angles, I don't think its so much flight or flight so much that my mind's eye gets taken to this very sublimely beautiful place (and as we all know sublime aesthetics can range all the way from The Dark Crystal and When Dreams May Come to Event Horizon, Saw, or Aliens) - that kind of beauty that takes real stark and surreal elements, which is extremely multi-layer; especially when you can see and feel something almost celestially innocent glowing behind, around, and overlaid in something very raw,urban, and concrete; those sorts of pairings, sometimes something as weird as having a blue-grass twang to a really dark and grimed out acid techno track - not in a way where they clash but that strange wormhole or portal, a stretch of terrain where two things that shouldn't coexist not only find a very appropriate melding point but coexist with great harmony but they amplify the power of each other and it totally f's with your head, pulls your mind and emotions in so many directions that you start to feel that numb tingling in your head like your f'd up - and the more you feel that the more you mind, body, and soul just surrender to the experience, depth, and almost ultra-reality that truly inspired music provides. The beat becomes more intense, your mind gets even more drawn into the anomalies within the beat which make you get lost on one part of the rhythm that seems to almost run contra to the other part, and the experience just amplifies until the song is over or until the dj who's throwing down that extremely rare and unique set steps off the decks. For people who can't relate to this, wow, I wish I could just take a camera and not just snap a picture but pass along the totality of it - I think its one of those things where once you've really experienced it that's it, you crave it from then on, you become far more sentient about it all and from that point on and you just get it, the internal loop of music.

IMO when these guys get to it, that's sort of the rift these guy's minds are sliding into. They're letting their minds run, recalling the places where their minds have run to, and if you ever find 'Unspoken Reality' by Underground Resistance (yeah, the Detroit record label), you can see pretty quickly even before your halfway through it what it's a coded story of and through all the abstraction and emotional embellishment and morphing what they're fundamentally getting at. I know this isn't everyone's style but still, I know from my own experiences that I'm always dying to find something fresh or new and the knowledge of how many great things are out there that I'm not in touch with gnaw at me plenty. So, I thought I'd just share something a little unique and different for a change, take it or leave it as you chose .

Interesting text. I've never had any real drug experiences, let alone drug experiences together with music. But even without drugs, (even alcohol) I've had that kind of experience, both when being on a club and when listening at home, but I don't any more. My problem is now that I've started to understand music, which means that I can no longer let go and just go with the flow. My brain has a need of analyzing the music, which ruins those magic moments. Another way to express could be that I've become tolerant to the drug that music constitutes and would need to go a step further and introduce chemicals to get back to the highs that music alone used to give me.

I think music in all times, and all cultures, to some extent has been connected with the use of drugs. But the determinating factor is whether the drug use use is a defining factor for being able to get the full intended experience, when it is intrinsic for music of a certain genre, artist or tune. I think this is something which is commonly overlooked in the context of western culture, partially because of taboo, partially because the only really widely accepted party drug around here is alcohol.

In a way I think the following statement by Tim Exile is very true: "Drugs don't make you play better, they just make it sound better."
But that of course only can only be applied to those who create music, not the passive listeners. But maybe I "need" to experience music on drugs in order to understand and appreciate some aspects of it. I don't know.

The only drug that I've been using, really, is caffeine. That is so because it sharpens my mind rather than blurring it. Knowing myself, if I were to try some drug for a party, it'd probably be a stimulant, like meth or e. But probably I won't.

I'd have to consider myself lucky then, just in the sense that while I analyze the heck out of music I might be doing it in different ways - like less in terms of music theory and more in terms of what sounds achieve what emotional aesthetic? If anything I think gaining understanding of music and sound has just enriched the whole process for me.




Again, for me I really don't think its ever really required drugs, I had it to begin with even as a kid and that's probably why music sort of pulled me in and never let go. I'd imagine there are a lot of people out there as well who can achieve that level of understanding without them. Over all though I think when Kodwo talks about it like its a drug thing I think he's just trying to use support and spell it out in ways that most people, who have smoked weed, can hold it up to their own experiences and understand exactly what he's talking about.



Well, the whole thing of immersing one's mind in sublime beauty or really profound and intense emotion, its an exercise - drugs can help point the way there for some people but I really don't think they're necessary. I think when people don't see this stuff (I wonder if I'm really that alone in it or whether people know it, feel it, but just don't have the means or words to discuss it), when they truely don't see it I think its just because its a superficial read-out of what they're hearing, they're missing the core concepts, core driving force, and I think a lot of time it requires a high degree of artistic empathy and being able to see and feel through the eyes of the artist actually making the music. One good example, I went back to a local music store and re-bought Skinny Puppy - Last Rights; something about the realness in their songs, stuff by Alice In Chains, Tool, even Sublime to a point - they're all not only self-guided but its like they're all driven by a very clear inward image of what they feel, what they want to express, and they have that intelligence to where they can articulate it crystal clear. I find the same true of good hip hop, good jungle/drum & bass, its getting something out there deeper and more profound than what words can really do alone. So many of even the hard rocker bands these days even have this campy energy about what they do, its like they're about headbanging, getting on stage, partying, and getting laid, but they don't really have an aim and it sounds like they're just spitting sad tired cliches. If you sit there and listen to something like Love In Vein by Skinny Puppy when your in a real receptive mood, especially if you decide to sit there and read the lyrics as you go through it, something just clicks about the dynamics and especially if you know Ogre's story behind the whole cd. Also, when you listen to Killing Game you want to think of all the whirring effects, the bass drones that kick in sometimes, and that whole real desperate, nasty, and sinking - but very real sort of sensation of an existential reality we live in. With Tool and listening to something like Aenima or Undertow you have to know Maynard's dark sense of irony and sarcasm and how he'll take it many layers beyond what a lot of people can read through. With Alice In Chains you almost have to try and envision the sludge of a sort of rotting factory world, you have to sort of envision as well Lane Staley's mind, what he was going though, and again as with the last couple artists I mentioned you have to think of the real pain-driven melodics (particularly behind stuff like Down in a Hole), or you think about how they flip between real grimed out low end guitar for the verses and then cutting of on a strange tangent to major scale-ish sounding stuff. For good jungle, take a listen to some of the stuff from Grooverider Presents: The Prototype Years, Metalheadz: Platinum Breakz I, Dj Fabio & Cleveland Watkiss - Promised Land Pt II. I guess I don't mean to tell you how to listen to music but I'm still just trying to point out a few for-instances if you wanted to actually take aim at recovering some of what you feel you may have lost (may or may not work but still its there).




The most effective way I can say this is that its really how you envision the music as you hear it. It involves taking it for what it is, listening for specific sound qualities and seeing how the artist themselves recognized what they had started with and intensified that quality through all the other supporting sounds, the whole flow of the track, to make something very immersive where it all adds fuel to it. I think the more you can get in touch with that, the more you can take the emotional grime or alternatively the mental images or glimpses of things in life that you get which give you mad shivers from how divine and not of this world that they may feel, the more it'll really ill out your tunes in some profound ways. Its all about cultivating that fire and then seeing which artists you listen to have it, see which ones don't, and for the ones who do you want to do your music analysis based on what the energy is (you don't need to put words to it, just know that you really get it) and what they did to add to it, intensify it, and make it the kind of music that can give you mad chills when you listen to it in the right moods. When you analyse their success on that and feel like you're able to immerse yourself in that abstracted end of the soundscape through mental exercise and letting your mind kind of probe the abstrace, you find you don't need drugs. If anything I think people tend to just need drugs to get that innitial contact to really know what it is, after that they can self-perpetuate it as long as they wan't really without them.