Text Dump

this is the topic where i will post my texts.

Social Networks And Delay Effects

delay, echo and reverb are some of the most important effects in music, often the effects that define the whole feel of a song, or even a genre. (Krautrock, New Wave, Shoegaze without these effects? impossible). it is actually one of the most basic and simple effects, compared to some of the more complex forms to process music. yet for literally decades, it was quite tricky to create before the advent of digital sound procession. basically what you have to do is to take part of the audio of a track, loop it (play it again) with slowly (or faster) fading volume each time. when perfoming live, the room the band plays in automatically adds reverberation to the sound. but how to recreate this with electric or electronic equipment? engineers came up with all kinds of adventurous solution to this... from reverb "spirals" and echo "plates" to tape delay effect units, which were amongst the most logical and most consequential solutions back in these days. but all these were far from being perfect. they could neither fully reproduce the sound as it was intended, nor the natural ambiance of a real room. often even change in temperature while perfoming would alter the sound slightly, or even more. they often had an artificial, outerwordly sound to them.
with digital sound processing, all these seemingly problems were over. a sound program, or workstation, or plugin could take a 100% copy of a sound and 100% correctly repeat it in echo and delay.
now, seemingly, all was well.
yet people started to realise that something was wrong. yes, the sound was perfect. but exactly because of this, it suddenly felt cold. dry. it has lost its sparkle. so a lot of people went back to the analog reverb units, especially those using it for their bands, but also people in the analog electronic music field.
it turned out that the imperfect, artificial, often low in frequency feel of the early reverb units was actually what added a lot of magic to the songs. it stood out. it gave the music a spacey feel. an otherworldly attribute.
the early sound of new wave and postpunk are unthinkably without the specialness of analog reverb. same goes for the krautrock of the 70s. or the rock'n'roll of the 50s. the outer world looped "woo!" shouted echos of the rocknroll singers that spiralled into psychedelia made up a large part of the impact of this type of music (note: for rock'n'roll, often even more "primitive" methods were seemingly used: the bands just played in large empty buildings during recordings, like farm silos).
the disadvantage was the advantage. the problem was the solution. that the units recreated the sounds imperfectly was the biggest plus. it was the whole point of them.

now on to social networks. before the advent of the internet and social networks, if you had a, let's say, strange taste in music, culture or politics, it was hard for you to find likeminded people. to reach out and get in contact with the others. to attain the music you like. to find out more information. to get fanzines or books if they were available.
now with social networks, this is wholly different. you can reach out to thousand of people. find dozens of new songs everyday. find every info about every band you ever want. see their concert videos or their studio work.
seemingly, this is good. but just like the example with the digital reverb units. it killed the magic. it made a lot of things disappear.
because that you had to *struggle* if you had a different or more sophisticated taste or point of view was the whole point. it was what made it worth it. it was what created results. that everything is so easy now in the internet age destroys so many things, it feels like too much to mention.

let me give an example. imagine you were the only one in your place to discover, krautrock, or punkrock, or techno first. at least the only one you knew of. so in order to spread this music, the ideas, to reach out to others, you had to do something. create a fanzine. annoy your record store to stock these records. organize a small concert in a local youth centre or another place. hand out flyers.
and by this, you already had created something. something beautiful. and out of this, more could grow. in your local record store you meet a girl that has similiar taste and you both start a band. and maybe you get picked up
and become known nationwide...
do you think you would start a band because you and others clicked on the same song on a social network page or commented on the same video? (note: one out of a billion it might happen... but much, much less than it was the case with real record shops).
the struggle was the point. it was what put things in place, enabled growth, and make wonderous things happen.

but don't get me wrong. life doesn't have to be hard. there are the solutions. but social networks are not the solution. and most other things on the internet are not either.

all you do is click, click, click, and nothing happens. watch videos like videos read biographies get news look up biographies. and nothing happens.

thoughtsonsomethings.blogspot.com/2014/0...d-delay-effects.html

We Need A Revolution

we need a fucking revolution.
in the past, almost everyone i knew was about revolutions, riots, uprisings, resistance... the bands and artists i listened to, too. when 2000 came nearer, and afterwards, this changed drastically. the demand for radical change, revolution, was now seen as something childish, immature, a thing of the past. mind you, not only by these artists and people, on which you could perhaps blame it on "growing up" after they went past the 30 year old mark, but *especially* amongst the new bands and new generation.
but apart from this very easy to see through strategy to associate radicalism with "childishness", which is a very often used as a conservative tactic - for the monarchs, "democracy" was a child's dream too, "women's rights" were a "childish concept" for the men of the 19th century - there was a not as easy to refute criticism and analysis of revolution, riots, and radicalism.
that consisted of two parts, that were joined together. had the revolutions of the past not made everything worse instead of better? was the regime of stalin not worse than that of the tsar? what about the revolutions in south america, that just installed a new dictatorship in place of the former?
so would it not be better, if things stayed as worse as they are - instead of going into the horror of a post-revolutionary society in which everything is worse?
the second critique addressed revolution and politics in general. are politics in general not *always* a trap?
and so, isn't revolution, too, a trap? with politics, you have a program, a concept, ideas, a structure, and are these things not bound to create an even bigger failure than the status quo? people are oppressed because of the ruling class. but if you establish a society in which everything is geared towards the ideal of "equality", doesn't this turn into a form of oppression too? just like stalin, who justified his deeds, not by proclaiming a thirst for power and extension of his rulership, but with the ideals of justice, equality and freedom of socialism.
i can only hint at this critique in this text. the question of the "tyranny of the ideals", the tyranny of symbols, could fill a whole book. or rather, a whole library. just let me add that a lot of thinkers, philosophers, and also poets, have pondered about this question.

this critique convinced me too, as it convinced almost everyone, consciously or subconsciously.
i too tried to purge the "revolutionary" vocabulary out of my statements, my thoughts, my demands.
my interest switched to authors, art and music that i deemed subversive and radical without overts claim for a revolution, such as psychobilly, early punkrock, rock'n'roll, krautrock...

there was two things i didn't notice at first.
the first of these i quickly learned, though.
which was that often, those people that now laughed at and criticised revolution, social upheavel and the rest of the political radicals that were still around, were the same people who were amongst the most radical proponents of radical change before. so the same people who hurried people to change everything, were now the ones who tried to tell people that they should stay calm, accept the status quo and accept the way society is.
this for themselves secured a position of intellectual leadership and social status, as the people were eager to listen to and follow these ideas.
there was something extremely fishy about this for me. these persons often had now found success - if even only in their "underground" extended social circle - and it seemed these recommandations to abstain from social radicalism and change also handily helped them to maintain their own "comfortable" position they had in society now.

there was something i didn't notice at all at first, and which took me a very long time to realise.
which was that it was the radical left - or if the word "left" is not the right description for all these people and groups, that espoused change in the direction of freedom, anarchy, anti-authoritarism - that dropped the concept of revolution. the right didn't think twice if they should drop the idea of radical societal change and a large scale "upheavel" or coup. they didn't say that "reform" or "moderate demands" should replace the concept of a total recreation of society. in their minds, such a change was "necessary", and more important, realistically possible, while for the left a revolution in the near future had become an "unrealistic" concept.

for many people, a claim by a hippie, an anarchist, a leftist for a revolution was completely laughable.
but if a rightwing person called for a radical, profound change of society, they were suddenly eager to agree.

it's horrible that we ended up in such a situation and it's necessary to change it.

let us get back to revolution, let us get to the desire for revolution, for freedom, for anarchy, for liberty, for creativity and expression. let us not get bullied by the others into thinking that revolution is a thing of the past or a child's play (keep in mind a child's concept can be full of wisdom too).

let us go... for revolution.

thoughtsonsomethings.blogspot.com/2014/0...need-revolution.html

Why I Left The Breakcore Scene In 2001

the breakcore and experimental hardcore scene in the beginning revolved around a lot of radical, extreme, interesting, exciting, subversive and anarchist ideas. they were closely related - or similiar to those of guy debord, raoul vaneigem, hakim bey, ken knapp. even if one could argue that some artists did not directly espouse these ideas, at least they were similiar and it worked both ways. there were a lot of connections between, situationism, neo-luddites, "extropism" and the scene back then. especially, but not limited, through the free party scene then.
i don't know if i discovered these topics and ideas "through" the hardcore movement, or just around the same time, but both things fit very well together for me. in record names, track titles, interviews, and especially the magazines that were put out by the people, this connection of both things should probably become very clear. "pirate utopias", "chaos, mayhem and anarchy", and temporary autonomous zones, anyone?

now around 2000, things changed completely in the different direction. a new breakcore scene emerged, quickly replacing the old one, and they were very quick to jettison all the radical ideas. instead they took a for me extremly reactionary stance, celebrating market mechanisms and corporate pop culture, abandoning any attempts at social change, or radicalism.

this was the situation back then; i had started doing my own activites regarding hardcore and breakcore in 1997. my involvement was always about putting the aforementioned, and similiar, ideas accross. but with these new breakcore people this was simply not possible anymore.

now the thing is, you might say, okay ignore the others, and still try to put ideas accross, the majority will ignore them and maybe someone will listen to them.

but it was not as simply as that. the breakcore people, while maybe not understanding, were at least somehow aware of the ideas of the situationists and the others, but trying to coopt them and turning them around.
i came to the conclusion that it was simply not possible to put these ideas across, without them overtaking them or jamming them.

an example of this was pop sampling in hardcore tracks that was around in the 90s too (i'm not talking about the dance-scene related ID&T stuff here, but the extreme hardcore music). back then it was quite subversive. taking some bullshit pop singer crap, pitching it up until it sounds like a squealing weazle and give it the full-on 909 drum treatment. it was simply a "piss-off!" of all that pop crap that was around at the time.

with the breakcore crowd, this turned into pop crossovers, that were simply safe, that everyone done (and still does), and is not subversive at all. or does anyone claim these pop-breakcore tracks will incite any form of radical social change? not even the artists think that.

so for me it was very clear that i had to leave the breakcore sound behind, since it was simply not possible to get these radical ideas through anymore, not for me or for anyone else. now, in hindsight, this conclusion came maybe a bit early, and other artists and groups still tried to bring these things accross. but for me it is still the right decision.

especially, since back then, the upcoming speedcore, dance-orientated and doomcore scenes were very and extremely open to these ideas, so it was much better for me to be there then it would've been in the breakcore scene.
today, i wouldn't say the same about the current speedcore or mainstream hardcore world, but doomcore is still going strong.

addendum

i don't want to add this addendum, but i feel like i have to. some people might complain that i'm about "politics" or "ideology" and music should be kept free of them. while i don't think music should be free of it, principally, and situationism and neo-luddites, etc. were already beyond politics - and ideology - then simply drop the "politics" and think of radical, creative, extreme, exciting and interesting ideas. the sound was full of them - but with the breakcore scene, not anymore.

also i should add that i see this change in breakcore around 2000 as a - basically - totally deliberate move - not something that just (or inevitably) happened - even if the artists and people involved were not fully aware or conscious about it - to ultra-reactionism, or rather, ultra-boredom.

thoughtsonsomethings.blogspot.com/2014/0...e-scene-in-2001.html

i understand and agree with you.
Added to situationism, i want to talk about Jaques Derrida and his "deconstruction" theory.

Breakcore and extreme splittered music are totally based on this philosophy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

it's very difficult for me to explain it in english but "Deconstuction" was the subject of my " Memoire" for the end of my bacchelor in photography.

if you want send me your email adress bu private message and i will send you my work about it ( but it's all in french)

Anarchy After Modernism

anarchism was the only thing that had any sense, any meaning in the last 200 years or so, in the west. all subcultures that had any meaning, such as punk or subversive techno, gained it by their entanglement in anarchy. the anarchist theory was ahead of its contemporary theorists, starting with monarchists, bourgeois democrats, authoritarian socialists, more liberal democrats after WWII or even more modern strains of thinking such as 'focaultism'.
yet anarchism, from its conception on, had one big, painful, crippling flaw, that was the sole reason a lasting anarchist society was never created during its times. which was that it was created during modernism, and was a modernist ideology through and through. from modernism it inherited the one big misconception; that action and activism relating to the 'real world' would be more important than theoretical, intellectual efforts. anarchism was all about activism; the man who is 'all talk no action' was always the main antagonist in anarchists' thought. so they stormed into the real world, agitated, organized, creating protests, rallies, even sabotage and terrorism. and met the fierce opposition of the powers that be and - failed.
in modernism, action speaks louder than words, the real world is more important than thinking.
but this is all wrong; theory is more important than action; idealism is more powerful than realism; the intellect is the one driving force in human behavior; and the intellectual is the one who holds the key to changing society.
the humans who had the most impact on the course of history, did do this solely by picking up a pen or using their voice. marx, freud, countless of other 'theorists', or if you believe the myth: buddha, christ, etc.

the theoretical, abstract, 'ideological' defines society, its tangible structures, its concrete happenings, its everyday life, not the other way round. the belief in the 'idea' of military has more power on people than the military forces, the idea of anarchy would have more impact than anarchist activism.

we don't need anarchist terrorism, we need 'anarchist theorism'. direct action, while still important, has not the place of - abstract thinking.

there is something that has happened to almost every anarchist. when turned to anarchism, the idea of anarchy seems within ones grasp, the revolution just around the corner. then one ventures into 'the real world', into anarchist organizations, activism, struggles, and meets disappointment after disappointment, until the idea of anarchy seems so faded and weak. what happened? not the idea of anarchy was weak - you just turned from it by choosing activism and 'real world action' over furthering your ideal by thinking, idealism, spreading the ideas. you should have stayed with your ideal - you should have stayed an idealist.

i'll give you examples. there is a generation of people that grew up with movies in which 'blacks' have as much wit, impact, smartness and appeal as 'whites'. this has changed minds more than any activism.
even mainstream movies now often, quite routinely paint politicians as utterly corrupt and incompetent. this has corroded the popular belief in government institutions more than our own ittle work.

music such as punk, political hip hop, subversive techno did more propaganda for our rebel cause - by purely artistic and intellectual means - then we could have done otherwise.

if all anarchists had turned into writers, philosophers, musicians, directors, painters, instead of ralliers, 'activists' and bomb builders - we would already live in perfect anarchy by now.

even with the classical anarchists, what is most remembered, admired, and recreated to this day? their countless acts and their activism, or not rather - their thoughts, books, theories?

let us get rid of modernism and its painful reversal of things, with its replacement of the theoretical with the practical.
let us be idealists - dull 'realists' be gone - let us embrace the theoretical, the abstract, let us embrace thinking.

let us not be unbalanced.
we likely need *some* action for our anarchy (or do we?) - 100% theory and 0% could be a trap.
but the main focus should be on theory and the abstract. the right form of activity will almost automatically arise when our theories, and our framework of theories, are strong enough.

let us be artists and dreamers, for these inspire, and for these have have the last laugh.
let us be philosophers.
let us be intellectual.
and let us spread ideas - and let us spread ideals.

Plato's Anarchy

plato's theory of forms can be seen in a purely intellectual way. of certain theories, ideas, concepts, thoughts, pure versions can be conceived. this can be seen best in the field of mathematics, with it's pure, irrefutable logic, formulas, theorems and abstractions. what is noteworthy is that in the history of philosophy, these thinkers that dealt with plato's theory of forms usually put their focus only on ideas that are friendly to existing society and hierarchy; such as the question of a pure government. yet if we assume that on an intellectual level we can imagine a pure version to any idea or thought (such as pure justice to justice, or pure freedom to freedom), this also goes for ideas that are neglected by and are dirty to society. pure rebellion, pure anarchy, pure resistance, pure chaos. the theory of anarchism and resistance has to exist on an abstract, wholly intellectual, "higher" level too (while at the same time, of course, staying a real world affair). so let's indulge in that.

Towards Revolution

in the heyday of the experimental hardcore scene, when breakcore, acidcore, speedcore, were still developing, there was something in the sounds, parties, records, manifestos, but also above it, that is hard to put in words. an inspiration, something bigger, something great.
but i can try to put in in words nevertheless. society is ruled by rules, regulations, categories, hierarchies, orders and servants, but not only society, the whole culture, the whole world. in the 90s, when record after record came out, and we felt like we were moving forward and had a common goal, it felt like all those rules suddenly became bendable, as if the regulations turned liquid, as if the whole world was in a flux and it was suddenly possible to change the world and program a new path.
when all this crashed down a few years later, it felt as if that time was a feverish dream, a memory almost unreal when thinking of these impressions and motions. but, before that, anarchy had become possible. rebellion was true and revolution seemed round the corner. this then felt faded - quickly.
other points in history where similiar things happened were the sixties in america, or the punk explosion in the 70s.
it took me a long time to realise, that there was a wrong thought to it, when all this was dismissed so fast.
society is always fluid, and always changable - not only in 1968, 1977 or 1999. rebellion, anarchy, a true+just+pure society is possible at any point in history, at 1901, at 1981 and at 2011. a small group of man and woman can change the turn of the world and set a new destiny and unravel everything and built something new. the only people who still seem to know this is a small group (or large?) of capitalists, who turned society into capitalist 'paradise' in the last decades. but this is not necessarily so. anarchy is round the corner. revolution is round the corner - again. so better get things going.

Anarchy Is Real

i talked about anarchy and revolution, and these are not only true but possible; not only more possible than everything else but the only thing possible. the thing is, how do people see revolution and anarchism? they think one day, the president or chancellor or whatever is addressing people on TV or a stream, announcing he will step back in the light of some 'revolutionary forces' that have overpowered the state. this is unlikely, people realise this is unlikely and therefore think anarchism is a pipedream. it would be an official message by an official power. but that's not how anarchy works! there is always anarchy, there is always people who rebel, who fight for justice and freedom, who challenge oppression and exploitation, at any point in history, around the world. there is never 100% control by the state or capital or whatever. there is never control. even the sheltered kid by some politician or businessman or politician turns to drugs and fucks things up and gets wayward. often in a negative way but it shows there is never really any control. people do not really believe in society or the laws or politicians. who would not disregard the interest of (hierarchic) society for self gain? people know no government or political affiliation when the pure self interest is challenged. we live in an anarchy, but we live in the anarchy we were warned about; where people don't play by the rules, but in a very egotistical way. when they go against the morals of the masses or hierarchies they often do this for petty reasons or petty gains. still - this shows there is no control.
what we need to realise that anarchy is all around us; that anarchy is a daily choice we can make. but that it has to be a positive anarchy of mutual aid, of cooperation, of freedom. and we need to realise that we are already part of a large matrix of likeminded individuals who do this thing already, even if they don't call themselves anarchists, even if we don't know them - yet. this is the real revolution. let the president believe he still has some power; he never had any.