maybe I misunderstand you, but its OK for mills to go on and on and on about
what is basically 4/4 bangers, while hawtin (who IS innovating and changing
sound through the years) is looked on as getting a bit too wanky?
please correct me (respectfully) if I misunderstand you
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tristan Watkins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'SeanDeason C'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "'fwdthought'"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 3:57 PM
Subject: RE: (313) Metro Times: Detroit
-----Original Message-----
From: SeanDeason C [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 11 November 2004 02:09
To: fwdthought; [email protected]
Subject: (313) Metro Times: Detroit
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=6949
see huge Hawtin cover story. discuss.
"Hawtin recommends the tunfisch a l'nero or the wildschweinpfeffer, orders
bottles of an appropriate cabernet, and rapidly begins to choose thoughts
from another palette, this one sonic. He talks to Neumann about making
music
that, if it's done right, is devoid of directed thinking, entirely driven
by
impulses that can't be explained, then set free into the unknown. And then
what? Richie Hawtin disappears?
"It's kind of like that," Hawtin says. "There's no me there anymore. It's
not important for me to control anything. There's nothing conscious about
it. There's no ego in it." He closes his eyes and allows free play to make
the picture clearer. "In Detroit you just play; you turn your mind off and
play." Interesting words, especially when they come from a man whose last
series of Detroit-based parties was known as Control."
This stuff interests me, but I don't like that the aritcle makes it sound
like a new groundbreaking thought, or that all DJs don't experience this
in
some degree, or producers (likely) even more so. It's this *immersion*
that
has always appealed most to me about both activities. If you follow Sartre
(who I think probed this best), he'd say it's pre-reflective
consciousness,
and that this is what actually defines us objectively, rather than our
ego.
In other, much simpler terms, I like to think of it like being 'in the
zone'
when playing a sport, writing code, knitting, meditating or whatever.
People
achieve this egoless state through lots of different means, and the idea
is
anything but new.
There's a Derek Jarman movie on Michaelangelo de Caravaggio
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090798/, called Caravaggio oddly enough)
that
has a chunk of it devoted to the painting where a lizard is biting his
hand
with the paint brush, which is meant to symbolise the moment when he steps
back from the canvas, shifting from immersive to specular. I'm sure that
anyone who has spent 3 or 4 hours in front of their gear or a computer
working on a track knows this feeling, when your mind shifts into
'critical
listener mode' rather than creator. It's not like Hawtin has discovered an
enlightened mode of being or anything, he's just found something he can
focus on.
Given that this is the starting point for the artistic angle of this
article, it feels way too overblown. Why the need for the added
significance? Can't good music just be good music without dressing it up?
It
seems to me this article is a prime example of why throwing out lofty
ideas
in journalism is generally a bad idea. I mean, does anyone who's actually
read Hegel think the paragraph on him in this article is that compelling,
completely removed from the history of philosophy, and does anyone who
hasn't read him give a sh*t?
Tristan
=======
http://www.phonopsia.co.uk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
