Jodie and I wander the multiverse. She is my muse, I her ghostwriter - appropriate given yesterday's conversation about the Ghostbox record label and, more specifically, the Derrida-derived term 'hauntology' which has been pinned upon this music in various corners of the blogosphere.....But surely, reflected Jodie as she delicately shifted her weight on the sunbed, Derrida would require us, nay compel us, to read the text against itself and unearth the textual subconscious of the debate? For example, let us fixate, in true deconstructionist style, upon a single term as representative of fractures and discontinuities in the argument - specifically why does Loki feel compelled to 'anthropomorphisise' the music? Why does music, the most intrinsically human of activities, need 'rehumanising', unless we see through this chink in the surface of the discourse a latent awareness that the entire enterprise is, at heart, a dead one? Does not the very term 'hauntology' chime so readily with this insight? Not alive, once alive, now dead, or undead - an atavistic, regressive picking over of the bones of the past. The symbolic resurrection of long-mourned inner children with myriad repeated references to seventies telly and the school music room. The zombification of visceral human experience, ossified beneath ontology, mummified and mortified.....
Well, says I , fetching a bottle of Tango Tan from the cupboard, there's a lot of nostalgia out there on the internet these days Jode.....
Too true, but it's never the good bits though is it? said Jode, as she adjusted her little blue goggles. Where's the funky futurism of the Joe 90 theme? The demented disco of Monkey? The lyrical majesty of Ulysses 31? Why, beneath all that theory, does it all sound like the theme from bloody Fingerbobs? Uuugh.... earnest beardy guys making elaborate hand movements I can do without....
Remind me never to take you to a Circle gig Jode, I said, passing her a towel. But maybe you should head over to dissensus and antithesise their thesis?
Not likely, said Jode, reaching for her robe, I'm auditioning for the Blakes Seven relaunch this afternoon, only so many hours in the day, I'm only human you know.....
That Jode, said I, is probably the problem........
5 comments:
Well, er, Jodie (the mental image here alone is a little unnerving so forgive me if I'm a little fragmented...), it's an interesting pint but if Derrida would want to unearth the textual subconscious then perhaps he'd look at your idea of 'music, the most instrinsically human of activities' from a few more angles...
intrinsically human? well, i suppose the term 'music' is a human contruct applied to patterns of sound - and some have a more limited definition than others ;) - but I think you've missed that music (or the intentional recording and systematising of sound) is an essentially lizard-brained activity, present in most creatures in one form or another and is thus decidely pre-human...
George Herzog asked 'do animals have music?' and since then various attempts have been made to show precisely that animal music (whalesong, birdsong, chimpchatter) is composed along much the same paradigmatic principles as human music...
so the idea that music is somehow intrinsically human seems a little far-fetched...
As for the need to anthropomorphise music, well... i guess it's there in all human and animal cases as a form of communication and thus requires translation in exactly the way Derrida might argue all texts require deconstruction...
As for your yearning for good bits i can only agree - though I'm pretty sure someone has already had a go at Monkey...
Fingerbobs would be cool; I'm imagining a re-imagining that kinda sounds like Four Tet's version of folk...
Great - I get to play Skill B Golden Nugget Four :- 'difficult to extrapolate between species'....
Anyway - not seen any Meerkat MP3's on here lately....?
And 'it's an interesting pint'? - now if I were in a psychodynamic frame of mind........
meerkat mp3s to follow... though i'm a little dulled by their incessant jauntiness... and as for other albums...don't tell me that you've missed the fact that practically 1/3 of all the music on here is composed by our animal cousins...
that which haunts speaks more about the subject which it is haunting than the object itself.
it is always the present we are dealing with... just like every work of science fiction is about the "now" (even Ballard), so every reminescence and nostalgia is a reflection of the current situation.
and what repeatedly comes back to confront us with unfinished business must be a part of ourselves we never fully came to terms with.
I think a Circle show would make a believer of this Jodie person.
"I think a Circle show would make a believer of this Jodie person".
Nah.... she always worries about the paparazzi at these things.....
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