it's interesting to me because i wrote essentailly the same article for urb this past summer. and i'll admit, a blinding weekend in berlin with hawtin and company is a heady experience that'll get you thinking about what it all means.
of course- i don't have the capacity for such verbos (pretentious?) prose as walter, which i think it's a benifit as a writer but a weakness in myself. but enough about me- whatever they're doing over there, a lot of it is just drug induced mumbo, but then again, how much of the crap about spacefunk and drexciyans and fear and loathing in las vegas and electric kool-aid acid test and french romantisism and all that other old stuff i don't know enough about is basically unrealistic babble. not all drug related (although a LOT is). But my point is that any sort of valid artistic movement will (and should) have a fair amount of pretentious and abstract thought that never amounts to a hill of beans. so yeah- what he said... On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Tristan Watkins wrote: > On Fri Nov 12 5:13 , '/0' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sent: > > >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 > > Well, I never said anything about Mills, but I'd level the same criticism if > he was saying that what he does achieves something grand, rather than saying > that > he achieves inspiration from grand ideas. And for the record, I wasn't so > much having a go at Hawtin as the author of the article. who seemed to want > to make it > all seem earth-shattering. On Fri Nov 12 5:13 , '/0' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > sent: > > >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 > > Well, I never said anything about Mills, but I'd level the same criticism if > he was saying that what he does achieves something grand, rather than saying > that > he achieves inspiration from grand ideas (which is generally how I read his > pontifications). And for the record, I wasn't so much having a go at Hawtin > as the > author of the article, who seemed to want to make it all earth-shattering > (although I do think Hawtin has a tendency to get caught up in philosophical > flavours > of the month, from what I can glean from interviews). And this is not to say > there isn't significance to the events we witness in a club, nor that some > projects > can't achieve lofty aspirations, but I don't like the idea that we need to > intellectualise music in order to give it *extra* importance. Music *is* very > important, but it doesn't need the window-dressing to make it more than what > we experience in the immediate, in 99.99% of the cases. > > Tristan >
