<nettime> corrected catalog essay - Sonar Festival, Spain 2002 Sonartext

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

Hello All. This is a brief blurb kind of essay written at the request
of the people who do Sonar and basically, it's about software put to
a real social use. Sonar is one of the largest electronic festivals
in Europe... and the piece, "Sonartext," is one of several essays
that will be in the catalog that accompanies the festival. There's
images that go along with it, but hey... at the moment, it's just
text...
more info on Sonar:
www.sonar.es

Paul



catalog essay - Sonar Festival, Spain 2002 Sonartext


By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
www.djspooky.com

cd>dir>>goto>> the text begins here>

First, as always - a series of invocations:

"There was no book of the forest,
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died.

Handwriting occurred on waves,
on leaves, the scripts of smoke,
a sign on a bridge along the river.

A gradual acceptance of this new language."

Michael Ondaatje "Handwriting"



"...New Babylon will first be realized by its inhabitants"

Manifesto for a New Babylon
Constant, 1960


"...synthesis logics will be those points of connection between
mutable and stable logics, based on the identity and particulars of
the terrain or composition. As such, a given sonic occurrence will be
=2E.. there'll be local events, territorial events, national events,
and there'll be individual events. In the same way that New York
State has its own laws, Texas has its own laws, but there are
highways connecting them..."

Anthony Braxton "Strategies of Composition" 1993



Code 404 on the linguistic flow chart: root source not found>>goto>>

Is it live? Or is it a sample? Is it an algorithm or a sequence? What
are the codes written in the invisible sounds of the electronic here
and now? The permutations of the questions cue up like an old
familiar track on a record that we all know, a sound at the edge of
the collective imagination. The rest as the button says is basically
for you to press "play."

Flash animate the situation. Check the wildstylz.

Sonar. Like any street corner intersection in the city, you have to
always look in every direction, and that's what makes this kind of
electronic music just as fun to create to as to listen to. That's one
of the core issues for me for the festival. How to balance between
all of the new impulses electronic music has unleashed in us. Whether
its "electro" retro-1980's techno, hip-hop, drum n bass, or whatever
title you want to call it, the basic sense is of total theater. Think
of Wagner's "gesmakunstwerk" mixed with, oh, I don't know, Basement
Jaxx's "Where's Your Head at" that was directed by TRAKTOR or the
Avalanche's Kuntz & Macguire directed "Frontier Psychiatry" - check
the vibe: pop culture staged as a freak show, cracked up musicians
from the planet of the apes, every musical element on the stage of
the theater of the mind gets its proper musical meaning - the
patients entire analytic scene lies open: a nightmare come to the
surface. Call it bootleg mentality, and like Philo T. Farnsworth
showed us a long time ago - you have to balance the vertical and
horizontal lines of the picture to get good resolution. Flip the
metaphor from the t.v.'s that he invented back in the 20th century
and recast the crucible as total text. The digits get  jiggy....
Think of the circumstances: we all use software, we all use
programming. What changes the mixes are the cultural conditions each
person brings to the situation. What Guy Debord called the "d=E9rive"
you flip and take out the =E9 and get: drive. Or even better, think of
it in the same way that Gaudi used surface elements for his
architecture of the unconscious in Barcelona. The impulses are the
same. The format is what's different.  Use your eyes to hear and your
ears to see - check the rhythm reality. Basically, its a new way of
doing something that's been with us as humans for a long time:
creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The constraints
get thin. The mix breaks free of the old associations. New contexts
form from old. The script gets flipped. The languages evolve and
learn to speak in new forms, new thoughts: the sound of thought
becomes legible again at the edge of the new meanings. After all, you
have to learn a new syntax but the modus operandi remains the same...
Think of it as an inheritance from Charles Babbage's "Difference
engine" - but alot more fun. With no specific hardware to weigh you
down, the mix becomes open ended - a new kind of magic opens up the
situation to all sorts of interpretations in that liminal space
between physical and non-material space - music is how we interpret
the process  - the graphic interface of urban culture translated into
digital environment. Sonar. Sound Text.

skip/transition/code 404>>

Soundlab - an event in NYC or a template for festival culture in the
age of the invisible machine. It's all about the "Happening." Sonic
rotation=8A. Geographic dislocation=8A Think of Duchamps "roto-reliefs"
mixed with Thelonius Monk's "Notes From Undergound" and flip 'em both
through the Dostoyevsky novel with the same title, and you'll get a
drift of what I'm talking about here. Sound. Invisible. Transient.
Patterns in the air. Think of it as a new way of engaging electronic
culture with what Amiri Baraka called the "changing same." Take the
idea and fold it in on itself.  Think of it as laptop jazz,
cybernetic jazz, nu-bop, illbient... a nameless, formless, shapeless
concept given structure by the rhythms, and that's a good start.
Optometry: it's a new way of thinking about something that's in all
of our lives every day: patterns, codes, ciphers... whatever angle
you look at it from, it's all about speaking with the invisible and
letting the conversation become total media, total text. The end
result: optometry. Gesamkunstwerk or "total art" becomes source code
for the context. The soundtrack floats away and leaves the film
altogether. Sound and image divorce and re-configure before they
re-unite in the mix. Please think of that when you listen to the
sounds. The wheels turn, the discs spin, the hard drives flow with
the recursive logic of the tyranny of the beat - the times change,
and the music evolves. It's a stream of consciousness thing=8A But at
the end of the day, its all about the changing same, the core of
repetition at modern thought that Duke Ellington liked to put as a
question: "who is playing in the shadow of whom?" It's the 21st
century. Afro-Eurasian eclipse meets nu-bop in the streets of the
remixed city. A list of ancestors: Bud Powell, Fats Waller, Duke
Ellington, The New York Art Ensemble, Erik Satie, Morton Feldman,
Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, Vannevar Bush.... the litany is long,
and could go on forever. But that's kind of the point. The samples
and fragments speak the unspoken, the ascent remains unbroken.
Nu-bop, nu-forms, nu-soundz: flip the script, open the equation,
check the situation. Guy Debord used to call this style
"detournement,"  Freud called the "uncanny" - we call it "wildstyle."
Its a relational arcitecture where sound and samples all mix - like
Kraftwerk vs Afrika Bambaata, but like a shareware version of their
core rhythm codes reverse engineered for the new styles. Code as
context: We call it carnival. We call it parade. And it's a way of
life that's here to stay. Analog era becomes aura - like Benjamin,
but a little more erasure of the physical forms (the keyboards, the
guitars, whatever...) it turns into Deluezian "abstract machine"
code. The 20th century was all about situations then, and its like
that now, only a little more entrenched, a little more like the
"theater and its shadow." What's that sound coming out the laptop? Is
it live? Or is it a sample? After almost three decades of rhythm
science, the question remains just as powerful as ever. The Uncanny
remains with us. Charlie Parker and Charlie Patton played notes from
an underground that were about content rather than context. The music
of the invisible machine comes to us from the software of the day.
MAX/MSP, TRAKTOR, SUPERCOLLIDER, NATO 55, REASON, REBIRTH, RECYCLE,
MIXMAN=8A the names go on, but the picture emerges. Software is
infinite. Sonar is about the reflection of sound to ground us in an
electronic environment. Think of bats flying in the night. Navigate
the metaphor, cut and paste it into the here and now. Commedia del
arte becomes digital, becomes total theater, becomes
electro-acoustic. Feel the frequencies. Sonar 2002


goto:>>John Cage> sound:>>situationist>>architecture of quotation>code 404:

Before
	the groUnd
	hypnotiC
	      maKe life

                   	Manhattan the age for
	real socIal wealth
	 away aNd it

 for ultra high voltageS global
	      liberTy
                      sociEty
  	            pRoblem
                liberty oF each
	     by virtUe of
	          deepLy with
 	        buwaLda for daring to


                      brutE
	laws of ouR own individual nature

John Cage, "Anarchy" NYC 1988








Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
www.djspooky.com



=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe
they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Subliminal Kid Inc.

Office Mailing Address:

Music and Art Management
245 w14th st #2RC NY NY
10011
--============_124370==_ma============
Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hello All. This is a brief blurb kind of essay written at the request
of the people who do Sonar and basically, it's about software put to a
real social use. Sonar is one of the largest electronic festivals in
Europe... and the piece, "Sonartext," is one of several essays that
will be in the catalog that accompanies the festival. There's images
that go along with it, but hey... at the moment, it's just text...

more info on Sonar:

www.sonar.es


Paul




catalog essay - Sonar Festival, Spain 2002 Sonartext



By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

www.djspooky.com


cd>dir>>goto>> the text begins here>


=46irst, as always - a series of invocations:


"There was no book of the forest,

no book of the sea, but these

are the places people died.


Handwriting occurred on waves,

on leaves, the scripts of smoke,

a sign on a bridge along the river.


A gradual acceptance of this new language."


Michael Ondaatje "Handwriting"




<bold><italic><fontfamily><param>Times</param><bigger><bigger>"...New
Babylon will first be realized by its inhabitants"


</bigger></bigger></fontfamily></italic></bold><fontfamily><param>Times</par=
am><bigger><bigger>Manifesto
for a New Babylon

Constant, 1960



"...synthesis logics will be those points of connection between mutable
and stable logics, based on the identity and particulars of the terrain
or composition. As such, a given sonic occurrence will be ... there'll
be local events, territorial events, national events, and there'll be
individual events. In the same way that New York State has its own
laws, Texas has its own laws, but there are highways connecting
them..."


Anthony Braxton "Strategies of Composition" 1993




</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>Code 404 on the linguistic flow chart:
root source not found>>goto>>


Is it live? Or is it a sample? Is it an algorithm or a sequence? What
are the codes written in the invisible sounds of the electronic here
and now? The permutations of the questions cue up like an old familiar
track on a record that we all know, a sound at the edge of the
collective imagination. The rest as the button says is basically for
you to press "play."


=46lash animate the situation. Check the wildstylz.


Sonar. Like any street corner intersection in the city, you have to
always look in every direction, and that's what makes this kind of
electronic music just as fun to create to as to listen to. That's one
of the core issues for me for the festival. How to balance between all
of the new impulses electronic music has unleashed in us. Whether its
"electro" retro-1980's techno, hip-hop, drum n bass, or whatever title
you want to call it, the basic sense is of total theater. Think of
Wagner's "gesmakunstwerk" mixed with, oh, I don't know, Basement Jaxx's
"Where's Your Head at" that was directed by TRAKTOR or the Avalanche's
Kuntz & Macguire directed "Frontier Psychiatry" - check the vibe: pop
culture staged as a freak show, cracked up musicians from the planet of
the apes, every musical element on the stage of the theater of the mind
gets its proper musical meaning - the patients entire analytic scene
lies open: a nightmare come to the surface. Call it bootleg mentality,
and like Philo T. Farnsworth showed us a long time ago - you have to
balance the vertical and horizontal lines of the picture to get good
resolution. Flip the metaphor from the t.v.'s that he invented back in
the 20th century and recast the crucible as total text. The digits get
jiggy.... Think of the circumstances: we all use software, we all use
programming. What changes the mixes are the cultural conditions each
person brings to the situation. What Guy Debord called the "d=E9rive" you
flip and take out the =E9 and get: drive. Or even better, think of it in
the same way that Gaudi used surface elements for his architecture of
the unconscious in Barcelona. The impulses are the same. The format is
what's different.  Use your eyes to hear and your ears to see - check
the rhythm reality. Basically, its a new way of doing something that's
been with us as humans for a long time: creating with found objects.
The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin. The mix breaks free
of the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets
flipped. The languages evolve and learn to speak in new forms, new
thoughts: the sound of thought becomes legible again at the edge of the
new meanings. After all, you have to learn a new syntax but the modus
operandi remains the same... Think of it as an inheritance from Charles
Babbage's "Difference engine" - but alot more fun. With no specific
hardware to weigh you down, the mix becomes open ended - a new kind of
magic opens up the situation to all sorts of interpretations in that
liminal space between physical and non-material space - music is how we
interpret the process  - the graphic interface of urban culture
translated into digital environment. Sonar. Sound Text.


skip/transition/code 404>>


Soundlab - an event in NYC or a template for festival culture in the
age of the invisible machine. It's all about the "Happening." Sonic
rotation=8A. Geographic dislocation=8A Think of Duchamps "roto-reliefs"
mixed with Thelonius Monk's "Notes From Undergound" and flip 'em both
through the Dostoyevsky novel with the same title, and you'll get a
drift of what I'm talking about here. Sound. Invisible. Transient.
Patterns in the air. Think of it as a new way of engaging electronic
culture with what Amiri Baraka called the "changing same." Take the
idea and fold it in on itself.  Think of it as laptop jazz, cybernetic
jazz, nu-bop, illbient... a nameless, formless, shapeless concept given
structure by the rhythms, and that's a good start. Optometry: it's a
new way of thinking about something that's in all of our lives every
day: patterns, codes, ciphers... whatever angle you look at it from,
it's all about speaking with the invisible and letting the conversation
become total media, total text. The end result: optometry.
Gesamkunstwerk or "total art" becomes source code for the context. The
soundtrack floats away and leaves the film altogether. Sound and image
divorce and re-configure before they re-unite in the mix. Please think
of that when you listen to the sounds. The wheels turn, the discs spin,
the hard drives flow with the recursive logic of the tyranny of the
beat - the times change, and the music evolves. It's a stream of
consciousness thing=8A But at the end of the day, its all about the
changing same, the core of repetition at modern thought that Duke
Ellington liked to put as a question: "who is playing in the shadow of
whom?" It's the 21st century. Afro-Eurasian eclipse meets nu-bop in the
streets of the remixed city. A list of ancestors: Bud Powell, Fats
Waller, Duke Ellington, The New York Art Ensemble, Erik Satie, Morton
=46eldman, Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, Vannevar Bush.... the litany is
long, and could go on forever. But that's kind of the point. The
samples and fragments speak the unspoken, the ascent remains unbroken.
Nu-bop, nu-forms, nu-soundz: flip the script, open the equation, check
the situation. Guy Debord used to call this style "detournement,"
=46reud called the "uncanny" - we call it "wildstyle." Its a relational
arcitecture where sound and samples all mix - like Kraftwerk vs Afrika
Bambaata, but like a shareware version of their core rhythm codes
reverse engineered for the new styles. Code as context: We call it
carnival. We call it parade. And it's a way of life that's here to
stay. Analog era becomes aura - like Benjamin, but a little more
erasure of the physical forms (the keyboards, the guitars, whatever...)
it turns into Deluezian "abstract machine" code. The 20th century was
all about situations then, and its like that now, only a little more
entrenched, a little more like the "theater and its shadow." What's
that sound coming out the laptop? Is it live? Or is it a sample? After
almost three decades of rhythm science, the question remains just as
powerful as ever. The Uncanny remains with us. Charlie Parker and
Charlie Patton played notes from an underground that were about content
rather than context. The music of the invisible machine comes to us
from the software of the day. MAX/MSP, TRAKTOR, SUPERCOLLIDER, NATO 55,
REASON, REBIRTH, RECYCLE, MIXMAN=8A the names go on, but the picture
emerges. Software is infinite. Sonar is about the reflection of sound
to ground us in an electronic environment. Think of bats flying in the
night. Navigate the metaphor, cut and paste it into the here and now.
Commedia del arte becomes digital, becomes total theater, becomes
electro-acoustic. Feel the frequencies. Sonar 2002



goto:>>John Cage> sound:>>situationist>>architecture of quotation>code
404:


<fontfamily><param>Times</param><bigger><bigger>Before

	the groUnd=09

	hypnotiC

	      maKe life


                   	Manhattan the age for

	real socIal wealth

	 away aNd it

=09

 for ultra high voltageS global

	      liberTy

                      sociEty

  	            pRoblem

                liberty oF each

	     by virtUe of

	          deepLy with

 	        buwaLda for daring to



                      brutE

	laws of ouR own individual nature


John Cage, "Anarchy" NYC 1988









</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that
Subliminal Kid

www.djspooky.com 




=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are f=
ree...."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



Port:status>OPEN

wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com


Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


Subliminal Kid Inc.


Office Mailing Address:


Music and Art Management

245 w14th st #2RC NY NY

10011

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