From Thad Biggerstaff Sent Fri, Sep 3rd 1999, 19:44
----- Original Message ----- From: <xxxxxx_xxxxxx@xx-xxx-xxxx.xx.xx.xxx> To: <xxxxxxx-xxxxx@xxxxxx.xxx> Sent: Friday, September 03, 1999 9:24 AM Subject: [Severed-Heads] plunderphonics > the cool thing about the rise of turntablism and sampling is that, in > counter-reaction to all of it, the pendulum will swing back to real > instrumentaion/playing after a time. > > i have no problem with using a "direct" (i.e. recognizable) sample, but for > god's sake, using really really OBVIOUS ones is just _lazy_ (hello puff daddy, > mariah, etc...) > > (the exception to that rule is the JAMM/KLF's "1987: what the fuck is going > on?") > > thought id share this indulgent rant across a few lists. pardon if my randomness bores you (it was not meant to)... This whole pendelum swinging back and forth thing makes me wonder (once again) at how often popular discussion of music of whatever type sidesteps and circumscribes the idea that perhaps, with the appropriate experience and knowledge, music might have the potentiality for actual specfic _functional uses_ , beyond the cyclical emotional and reactional cultural spheres. (Please note my understanding of culture as not an end in itself but rather as something that people can use [or not use] functionally as well, beyond itself as it were, rather than wearing its customs as pseudo clothing, conceptual fodder, as an identity tag, or the like...) Comments anyone? CD's on the newish label Kodama purport to strive towards this goal of functionalism of sound/music, though Im having trouble determing whether I have been healed after listening many a time to Jake Mandell's "Healing" CD. Perhaps I was not sick to begin with? Or I did not have the appropriate virus...? The liner notes did not include instructions for what time of day to listen, or with whom. I assume that if the Kodama folks know what they are doing, such specific instructions were unnecessary/counterproductive. Of course it just might be another mass marketing ploy (for their limited to 100 releases?) Or I might be being too critically hasty, as seems to be (have been?) the fashionable plague of the 90's. Or I simply might not know what I am doing (this has been known to happen ;) Then again, I am presently thinking that if it was not for a variety of forms and levels of "functionalism" going on all around me (us), crisscrossing currents through the structures of music, culture, politics, what have you, that I am just not capable of currently percieving (one might call such activity by others as disguised or hidden functionalism), I wonder whether I would have the time and space to choose to, in my own way, functionally use or waste my time and space, with music or whatever else... Feeling grateful I have the time and space to have just read an old, overly ambitious college philosophy paper I once wrote... :) -Thad "An event in which we participate is not knowable apart from our knowledge of our participation in it." "what the fuck is going on(?)"