[ctrl] on all fronts: Plastikman, the State and your Brain, Ghostface and soul techno



Only in Montreal does summer arrive with wind ...
In my email arrives bits and bytes of art.

[CTRL] LIVE. I think of Friday's encounter with the controlling aspects of Plastikman's desire. Hawtin's dream is of ultimate tekhne: the technology to integrate all control. And is this not the desire of the DJ? The tactility of manifesting the unconscious infiltration through the fingers of the ethereal phantom of sound. The long tendrils of the DJ spins a most touching prosthesis.

The neurochemical balance of freedom we submit so readily to aesthetic masochism through sound has always been the desire of the State. As we enter the brave new world, its gone from desire to weapon. This article in the New Scientist talks about anti-trauma drugs: erase your memory of trauma in three easy installments. Or have it erased for you. Never experience a mind-shattering moment with the pleasure of consuming drugs that keep you off those other, immoral drugs. As in: take some drugs to keep you sedated from the desire of doing other drugs. Keep on truckin'. What desire is the War on Drugs? Why, [CTRL] too. Just a different sort of [CTRL]. Who would you rather having as your master? The State of the Consumer or the State of Masoch? Are the two really that different?

Route around it. In a concise commentary that samples Steven Shaviro's analysis of Ghostface's Pretty Toney album, Abe discusses the way in which the album is increasingly becoming the collection of detritus. The album as tombstone. The static emblem or trophy of what could have been, had sample laws been lax enough to celebrate the creativity that thrives underground. In other genres, the album simply becomes the archive. Like hip-hop, techno music's best releases are on 12"--often dub plates and white labels--although recently the techno album has returned with a vengeance (such as Ricardo Villalobo's Alcachofa). This tension is exemplified in the loss of DJ mixtapes in technoculture whereas in hip-hop it thrives. Wherever I go, I feel this downturn of global technoculture. It doesn't speak to a generation the way in which hip-hop continues to do so. Why? As Abe says, hip-hop is the art of exaggeration. And more often, of violence, power, wealth. It's representational and as the above sentence says, it speaks. What's techno? Techno is the sound of power too. But it's the sound of power passing through. It's the conduit. It's soul - wired. The dream that you can't put into words. Like Ghostface, techno is a soul man (and the indie critics will never, it seems, be able to understand this unless some skinny white kid sings it to them in emo falsetto--which is my slightly more acidic take on Philip Sherburne's harangue).

The [CTRL] conference: in Montreal in October. Submit.

posted. Sun - May 30, 2004 @ 03:14 PM           |

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