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Posts Tagged ‘music’

2 cheers for lava lamps & Lego blocks

Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, tagged , , , on January 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »

Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position. The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t […]

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My smile is stuck… (moonlight in vermont)

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged , on December 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »

From the very first moment of hearing Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica many years ago, I was hooked. The first crashing guitar chunks of “Frownland” followed by the Captain’s growling happy voice “My smile is stuck, I cannot go back to your Frownland”… When I read Lester Bangs’ lines, they rang […]

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vinyl flowing on…

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged , , on June 24, 2010 | 3 Comments »

It’s difficult to say this, but I’ve decided to – [sob, sniff, sob] – sell my record collection. It took many years building it, though there was also a lot of sifting through and whittling down every time I moved (including two major cross-country moves in the past decade). From what remains (about 900 pieces), […]

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relationalism, earth jazz, & the solstice

Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , on June 20, 2010 | 9 Comments »

If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.

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like a ufo…

Posted in Music & soundscape, Spirit matter, tagged on March 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »

And while we’re on a Christian thematic… here are a few beautiful videos set to songs by Sufjan Stevens. Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland: And two more…

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mercy mercy me (the ecology)

Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged , on June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »

The explicitly ecological piece on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On was Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), which, like a lot of his music at the time, fuses a clear-eyed realism with an optimistic, gospel-tinged sense of possibility. I’m not sure where this video comes from (or why David Bowie appears in it), but the shots […]

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earth songs: Michael Jackson’s cultural ecologies

Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , on June 30, 2009 | 13 Comments »

The death of Michael Jackson has prompted eco-bloggers to take another look at Jackson’s 1995 “Earth Song“, which some consider the most popular environmentally themed song ever produced. The song remains Jackson’s biggest seller in the U.K, having sold over a million copies there — more than either “Thriller” or “Billie Jean” — but it […]

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metadata & musical geography (from album covers to cultural policy)

Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »

One of the more oblique threads I’ve been pursuing on this blog has to do with what new media are doing to aural and musical information. Music is, of course, much more than information: it is embodied affect (in a Deleuzian sense) that carries, channels, activates, mobilizes (sets into motion), transforms, and disseminates cultural meanings […]

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Pandora’s Last box of musical delights

Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, tagged , on February 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »

I’ve been getting into music networking/streaming radio sites Last.fm and Pandora.com and thinking about how they and related forms of social and artistic networking relate to the ideas this blog is exploring. Google can search for words, but not (yet) for snippets of musical melody, harmonic progressions, jazz solos, visual images. But once these are […]

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more musical colors

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged on January 19, 2009 | 1 Comment »

After writing about Jon Hassell’s “coffee coloured” global music of the future, I was intrigued to find out that Timothy Morton, author of “Ecology Without Nature,” has been writing about the ecological implications (or something like it) of Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament. For those unaware of the fine details of musical tuning, Just Intonation […]

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music as coffee and as philosophy

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged on January 15, 2009 | 1 Comment »

I just came across this interesting tribute Brian Eno had written to trumpeter and experimental composer Jon Hassell, which gets at a few very deleuzian and immanentist notions: about music as “embodied philosophy”, and Hassell’s idea of a “coffee coloured music of the future” that reflects “a globalised world constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences […]

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