“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, June 16, 2011

Jarrod Fowler's P.S. (sleeve note)


Here is my sleeve note for his new release, now available from Leaving Records.

To generate, or rather to discover from within music itself, substances that resist not only classification as music, but music as such. To locate music as a small island of pseudo-consistency in a gigantic ocean of non-music, after François Laruelle. To locate noise as the infinitesimal subsidence of this island into the ocean, much bigger than noise, quiet, sound and silence.

To force music to think about itself, as music. To see thinking about music as distorted by what is exterior to thought, and even to human being. To discover, with a slightly uncanny horror, that the wall between human being and nonhuman is the appearance of the nonhuman itself. To realize that this wall of resistance is a symptom of what the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls hyperchaos.

To delineate through this method a working model of causality itself, which operates by what Jarrod Fowler calls rhythmicity. To investigate beats, which break up sonic continua: one beat as the minuscule flicker of causality. To realize that this causality floats on top of and emerges from the ocean of rhythmicity. To see, to hear that there is only this ocean, continually sampling itself, breaking itself up into itself. To announce this inherently contradictory reality in a sonic form as dialetheia, double-truth: p ∧ ¬p.


1 comment:

Ruth Solomon said...

These words roll very nicely like the ocean they mention, locating and subsiding any point of reference. Replace body with music and it still rolls very nicely.