Mork and Mindy

Good to see the annual Shamanic-Depression Dance again... I tried myself last year after staying up all night trying to get tickets but stubbed my toe on a discarded chicken bone and felt the full power of Glastonbury Voudon bursting my skin at the seams.

Also a chance remark on a meme post at The Original Soundtrack set me off on a mini-bender in the comments box (i can see why people sometimes choose to turn comments off) which I figured I may as well use my own space to continue...

It concerned two books on Dance/Ambient culture which seem to sum up the two approaches to music in general.

For inconvenience, we'll call them Mork and Mindy:



Mork approaches rave culture from the standpoint of someone grateful to be ecstatic again. It's a social directive, one strewn with lost memories and impressions but essentially reflective. Mork looks back and tries to piece together not so much what he thought at the time (which is perhaps necessarily unspecific if you're in the midst of the flash) but how that experience has been attenuated after the fact. It looks back and allows music to be detached from private language; in fact implies the (Wittgenstein?) idea that private language, and therefore understanding/perception/assimilation, is essentially impractical if not utterly impossible.

It's a book written from a primarily social perspective, seeing music as an essentially communal experience, one best understood from the middle of a large crowd while trying to avoid that long haired guy from Mudhoney who's always auditioning for a Silvikrin hair-swish advert (target market: the homeless)

It is the same guy at all gigs where people move, isn't it? You never seem to see him anywhere else.



Mindy takes a more solipsistic approach, wandering through music like a lucid dream. It's written in a light-touch stream of consciousness style, aiming perhaps to evoke the old Mixmaster Morris misquote: "I think therefore I ambient".

Mindy writes as if the world existed of one. He travels alone with his ears tuned outwards only to suck information in. It's a black hole approach: nothing can escape. Even the cover seems to suggest a notebook approach, as if these are comprehensions written while experiencing.

I guess Mork's notebook fell out during his body-popping.

Mindy seems to experience music on an individual level, heading towards the drift of ambience as a means of getting out of the social world and into the inner. Mindy seems uncomfortable with the 'tribal gathering' aspect of music and instead of bitching about the kids decides instead to celebrate the spinal fluids that can be condensed when you're alone in a darkened room with nothing but your own mind for company.

Together these books act towards an understanding of the point of music and seem to illustrate its ability to act as internal working model for contemplation and for action.

Today, I went into the local shop (for local people) and the woman (think a post-op transsexual 1976 Darts Champion) said: "Is it me or is it hot in here?"

"Both of those things seem to be true," I replied.