Autechre - PLUS 20.11.20

i mean i guess i really don't find myself moved to ponder the meaning of my existence when i listen to music i don't like lol. i'm completely fine just enjoying what i think is cool and moving on from what doesn't grab me. i think a lot of people get really hung up on what they are supposed to like based on a work's cultural value, ie liking beethovens late quartets is *better* than liking "can you feel it." and i suppose this can be a stimulating intellectual topic but at that point it's already a "pleasure" of a different nature from what i value about the experience of actually listening to a piece of music. this is why i don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" - i think the notion is an appeal to authority that isn't real. 

but yeah i'm not denying the pleasures of creative intellectual inquiry, i'm just saying when it comes to music i'm looking for something well beyond what i read in books or what my feeble mind can even comprehend. i look at it maybe more like love - sure it's extremely value to understand the subject on a deeper level, maybe bust out some illouz books or read keirkegaard or something. but i'm not going to be consulting scientific papers to figure out why i love my girlfriend or why i should have loved some one else but didn't. you just go with the flow dude.

I like music specifically because it's one of the few things that I can enjoy without analyzing it. That's why IDM as a term has sounded always so weird to me, because I'm not really using any rational intelligence while listening to it. It's just a kind of subconscious emotional response to sound and rhythm. And the best part is when I get into the kind of hypnotic or meditative state where the music just sucks me in and I'm in a trance of some sort and my whole rationalizing intellect seems to shut down and there's just the sonic space. A kind of thing that's hard to describe, but I think some people here know what I mean.

  On 12/9/2020 at 11:10 PM, Alcofribas said:

i mean i guess i really don't find myself moved to ponder the meaning of my existence when i listen to music i don't like lol. i'm completely fine just enjoying what i think is cool and moving on from what doesn't grab me. i think a lot of people get really hung up on what they are supposed to like based on a work's cultural value, ie liking beethovens late quartets is *better* than liking "can you feel it." and i suppose this can be a stimulating intellectual topic but at that point it's already a "pleasure" of a different nature from what i value about the experience of actually listening to a piece of music. this is why i don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" - i think the notion is an appeal to authority that isn't real. 

but yeah i'm not denying the pleasures of creative intellectual inquiry, i'm just saying when it comes to music i'm looking for something well beyond what i read in books or what my feeble mind can even comprehend. i look at it maybe more like love - sure it's extremely value to understand the subject on a deeper level, maybe bust out some illouz books or read keirkegaard or something. but i'm not going to be consulting scientific papers to figure out why i love my girlfriend or why i should have loved some one else but didn't. you just go with the flow dude.

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Yeah, in answering I took a drift of my own, losing sight of the origin of the discussion ... it happens to me ... but my tone was not controversial, I enjoyed it, I hope this can be seen..

 As for the suggestion of being able to live with phenomenology and the simple enjoyment of direct experience like love, well, you have touched a precise point that does not stop me from writing a tragicomic episode. That business of "memento mori" I do not exclude that it is just my characteristic way of going with the flow ... well, my girlfriend (is it still possible "gf" after 40?) Does not share with too much enthusiasm my "Cartesian" adage. So she reflects: "The fact that you like me is because of the chromosomes that hold the information to recognize my shapes as interesting as a vessel to save the genetic heritage from death, right?" ... "I'm afraid so, it's not something that I have decided or asked for". "And, if you love me, it's still because of the self-preservation instinct, which instilled this phenomenon that seems noble to us and we have called feeling, but it has an adaptive purpose, right?" ... "yes, but don't see it as a trivialization of things, if anything, it is now that we observe this mysterious device that oscillates in history through us that it starts to get interesting" ... "but .. you see, the problem is not the fucking trivialization, but the obvious fact that the only thing you feel for me is a disguise of the fear of death. I'm the Fear Of Death. i mean, nice! you never stop discovering something here!". That night I felt like the miserable version of Woody Allen, and I have yet to figure out if it was good or bad.

  On 12/9/2020 at 11:29 PM, zkom said:

I like music specifically because it's one of the few things that I can enjoy without analyzing it. That's why IDM as a term has sounded always so weird to me, because I'm not really using any rational intelligence while listening to it. It's just a kind of subconscious emotional response to sound and rhythm. And the best part is when I get into the kind of hypnotic or meditative state where the music just sucks me in and I'm in a trance of some sort and my whole rationalizing intellect seems to shut down and there's just the sonic space. A kind of thing that's hard to describe, but I think some people here know what I mean.

The pleasure of music, compared to cinema or literature, I think lies precisely in this profound language which, if you are in the right condition, does not require any active effort from you (critical, interpretative, analytical) but solicits strings of the subconscious that are guided without offering resistance. In cinema and literature, for example, we look for a narrative, a complete meaning (and it is a consoling thing), while in music we have pure moods, where by pure we mean not subordinated to a fact, but existing in itself. and for itself, which seems exceptional to me. A few pages before I just wrote about how, generally, the pieces click for me when I turn down any attempt at analysis. After all, I don't think it's a coincidence that music, and only music, is the most widespread and distant means of collective transcendence in history. Then well, there is what can happen by associating psychoactive substances with autechre, but here I would get out of the sow once again, I think I've already exaggerated this night..

i just want to inform you all that i just listened to axel f by crazy frog for the first time again after many years and to my astonishment, it's actually a terrible tune

my whole perspective on life has just changed for the worse i'm afraid

thank you

Draft78 - that reminds me of that bit “as a great poet once said, I love you.”

also in case anyone want to take my watmm incel card away id like to clarify I am divorced and don’t have a girlfriend

  On 12/10/2020 at 2:34 AM, Alcofribas said:

Draft78 - that reminds me of that bit “as a great poet once said, I love you.”

 

also in case anyone want to take my watmm incel card away id like to clarify I am divorced and don’t have a girlfriend

I'm not gonna go scrolling back through these pages after all that stodgy debate BUT.

I am kinda in agreement with what you were saying earlier but from the opposing end of things.

Main example would be that Barker LP. I listened to that once and was like 'huh, it's like Mark Fell but with all the interesting and challenging bits stripped out' and never felt the need to listen again. But everyone seems to love that album (on watmm).

Where am I going with this? I don't remember tbqh.

I think mainly being in agreement with jaderpansen and 50/50 on what dcom is saying. I think you can be intuitively more drawn to the 'challenging' stuff. Rather than it being about 'forcing yourself to listen' (which really is a very tired meme)

  On 12/9/2020 at 10:46 PM, dingformung said:

Yeah, this is why I don't get when religious people say that a scientific view on the world takes away its divinity and that rationalisation has led to a disenchantment of the world. The opposite is the case. The strangeness of objective reality (if there is such) is much more magical and divine than religious dogmatism. Who needs dogma and lack of understanding to add magic to the world when the world itself is a fractal?

Perhaps magical and divine are not synonymistic? Note that magic is much more fashionable word nowadays.

I believe the problem with the scientific view, broadly speaking, arises when it goes full reductionism (there's no free will and we're all basically sophisticated automatons etc), in that moment the science forgets its foundational limits.

Here's a rarely consistent argument about those limits https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/reading-rosenberg-part-viii.html

  On 12/10/2020 at 8:01 AM, hello spiral said:

I'm not gonna go scrolling back through these pages after all that stodgy debate BUT.

I am kinda in agreement with what you were saying earlier but from the opposing end of things.

Main example would be that Barker LP. I listened to that once and was like 'huh, it's like Mark Fell but with all the interesting and challenging bits stripped out' and never felt the need to listen again. But everyone seems to love that album (on watmm).

Where am I going with this? I don't remember tbqh.

I think mainly being in agreement with jaderpansen and 50/50 on what dcom is saying. I think you can be intuitively more drawn to the 'challenging' stuff. Rather than it being about 'forcing yourself to listen' (which really is a very tired meme)

 

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that's a good point about being intuitively drawn to challenging music and it is basically what i was saying. i wasn't trying to oppose simple music with complex or challenging music - i meant that in my youth i was more drawn to things that were "fucked up" and extreme. i don't necessarily regard those as challenging as much as i once did tbh.

that barker record can be challenging though, it just depends on how you listen to it. it's a masterpiece of synth programming and has an insane amount of nuance, depth and control. to me it's quite staggering, it's a very "wow" record honestly. but it is presented in a more simple fashion, it's less macho than the example i gave of ceephax's bro.

  On 12/10/2020 at 3:59 PM, Amen Lare said:

Perhaps magical and divine are not synonymistic? Note that magic is much more fashionable word nowadays.

I believe the problem with the scientific view, broadly speaking, arises when it goes full reductionism (there's no free will and we're all basically sophisticated automatons etc), in that moment the science forgets its foundational limits.

Here's a rarely consistent argument about those limits https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/reading-rosenberg-part-viii.html

I don't want to derail the thread too much, but as a physicalist type "neurobabble" type I just want to lay out the case real quick, since it was brought up.

There is no issue with the scientific view or full reductionism, all of the universe, earth, biology and human brain can be reduced to molecules, then atoms, then quantum physics, then whatever else might be down there.

Let's take the issue of something simple: Is Autechre a good idm band act artist or is it a bad one?

If we use the scientific image vs the manifest image as a template - each brain that has ever heard Autechre will have had some response to it, and this response will be dictated by the physical order of the brain as it was received, and at any time after that might influence how they think about autechre. This includes the full belief system they have, their prior experiences with music, maybe even their biology or where the speakers were in the room that affected the sound or even what type of headphones were used.

And so you have a physical system 1 (autechre) affecting a physical system 2 (the brain of the individual). At some point they come to a conclusion about whether they like it or not, or at least, they are in a situation where they are forced to tell someone a conclusion or tell it to themselves. The entire description of this system can be described with anything from molecular biology, to physics to whatever else.

Then to introduce the "magical", you simply introduce a second brain, go through the same process as above, and that individual comes to a conclusion about whether they like it or not. 

And so you have physical system 2 vs physical system 4, the two brains, and that is essentially the entire system that exists in the universe about autechre and whether it is good or not.

But you might notice, there is no recipe or conclusion in the physical systems together, each system is merely a description of how each state arises. If one person likes ae and the other person does not, that is 2 distinct states. Reductionism cannot answer or conclude about whether something is good or not, but it can explain /how/ that question arose and in which physical systems it exists in.

But that also, I'm afraid, means that as everything is "ion the brain", there is no "bigger" truth or mystery outside of the brain. The only authority you can appeal to is first yourself, and second the group consensus. I think that's where the issues arises for non-physicalists. They want to remove physicalism so as to create a higher authority for their manifest image beliefs. But to me, that is fascism. The best we can do is to have group consensus where a group of brains agrees to something that is hopefully evolutionary advantageous and that doesn't harm any individual or group. I also think humans need the magic and need the manifest image in order to reduce the world to a simpler order, so that they don't spend so much energy that isn't needed for survival. It's better to make the world simple and symbolic than work in the scientific image which would get extremely complicated real quick.

And that's why the whole debate about consciousness is annoying because imo, it literally doesn't affect the meaning or magic of the manifest image at all. Conscious experience is simply a part of the physical state of a system just like everything else about the brain.

To me the more I have thought about everything as brains and systems, the more obvious it seems to me about the arbitrary nature of human life and existence. And for it to be any other way is very hard for me to believe. I would need some real hard evidence that our brains and the manifest image are somehow non-reducible or bigger than the physical system... And that's essentially why I'm a physicalist. And I like Rosenberg tbh

  Quote

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

Autechre = sufficiently advanced technology.

@blir don't think i don't know what you did

Sorry alco I had to

u

  On 12/10/2020 at 3:59 PM, Amen Lare said:

Perhaps magical and divine are not synonymistic? Note that magic is much more fashionable word nowadays.

I believe the problem with the scientific view, broadly speaking, arises when it goes full reductionism (there's no free will and we're all basically sophisticated automatons etc), in that moment the science forgets its foundational limits.

Here's a rarely consistent argument about those limits https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/reading-rosenberg-part-viii.html

Perhaps scientific doesn't equal mechanistic? And actually I promiscuously used the word "scientific" while I maybe meant "rational" and "based in logic" (speculative since I don't really remember what exactly I meant). Total amateur mistake on my side for which I want to apologise sincerely.

I finally listened to my PLUS vinyl and it fucking bangs.

  On 12/10/2020 at 3:59 PM, Amen Lare said:

Perhaps magical and divine are not synonymistic? Note that magic is much more fashionable word nowadays.

I believe the problem with the scientific view, broadly speaking, arises when it goes full reductionism (there's no free will and we're all basically sophisticated automatons etc), in that moment the science forgets its foundational limits.

Here's a rarely consistent argument about those limits https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/reading-rosenberg-part-viii.html

Well,  "magic" was in quotes, referring to Alco's statement in the end if i could just read scientific literature and stare at a memento mori while pondering why i like lush pads, they'd probably lose some of their "magic" so to speak.  The magic is understood in a merely suggestive sense, "abandon yourself to listening stop thinking" .

My thought on reductivism is this: knowledge, in order to progress, must necessarily be fragmented, the figure of the humanist scientist is romantic (Leonardo Da Vinci), but not applicable for a practical matter: to know a topic in depth, specialization is inevitable, human mind can handle a limited amount of information. It is therefore thanks to the dialectic of the scientific community that this boundless network of "particles" collaborates in an interdisciplinary system, which results overall in civilization. If the ideal purpose of knowledge is (the chimeric) "absolute" (which today could be configured in the hope of a unified theory of physics), the method is, on the contrary, the relative. And science is essentially that thing: method. The method is based on data, and the data have no moral relevance, it is limited to exposing the facts, in the most direct, clean and incontrovertible way possible. Morality, unlike data, is not based on the objective, but on the subjective, and can vary profoundly depending on the culture or historical moment or the specific identity of an individual: it is a constant and arbitrary fluctuation. And in fact it seems to me that religious thought, which represents the adverse pole, is the highest representation of the arbitrary; no method but dogma. If I look at the thing from an "aesthetic" point of view, I could say that introducing morality into science means introducing the aleatory into the methodic: they are two antithetical languages, you get a short circuit. But I don't want to be misunderstood: I don't mean that science can cross all limits, reduce us to automatons or lead to an Orwellian nightmare, maybe I'm a bit of an asshole, but something is still saved. But to avoid this, I don't think it is necessary to introduce ethics into scientific language, but rather to prevent research from crossing into ethically unacceptable territories, and this limit should be established by an external system, which is the constitution. As for me, who, in all honesty, am a person with very modest, laconic and more than anything else suggestive knowledge, I can have fun exasperating some ideas, transforming them into slightly raving hyperbole, considering conscience and feeling as a whole of forced functions, when then, in life, if I exceed, I exceed by drive not by rationality. In the end, I have not understood a shit yet

plus thread transformed into deep psychomusicological analysis, nice

on the melodically dense tracks, my ability to understand the implied harmonies and connect with the music emotionally really does grow with repeat listens. like there will be melodic phrases that feel disjointed at first, but over time I realize that they're hovering around satisfying notes in the negative space, or that they hint at a chord change that comes later in the song or something, and it becomes a more satisfying listen

  On 12/15/2020 at 12:14 PM, Freak of the week said:

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...the long awaited unified theory? 

I absolutely love this album. Wish I had something more insightful to say, but honestly I'm just so happy that this music exists 

it looks like I burned this thread and sprinkled the salt on the ashes (to think that I have also refrained from venturing into a reckless discussion about how the rejection of the scientific method in favor of humanism creates taboos) 

This thread is the epitome of

It was totally appropriate

i'm still tweaking a SING/PLUS playlist on the ipod. i think i have a good flow going. interspersed a bunch of the tracks for one long player style list. omitted some tracks though.