sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Hello new posters and welcome to the forum.


A small contingent of us have developed an ever expanding aesthetic framework which we on occasion make reference to. Of course the vast majority of users have no interest in it whatsoever, so it is by no means necessary to understand it to enjoy the forum. However if it does interest you, the following is an overview of what we’ve got so far. We look forward to your contributions to it in the future.

The framework is based on a series of loose, interconnected polarities. Everything to the left of the hyphens here is in one broad group and everything to the right of the hyphens is in another.


Womb-Orgasm

Pantheism-Iconisation aka Anti-humanism

Feminine-Masculine



Womb/Orgasm

There are two archetypal psychadelias. The womb and orgasm; cognitive obliteration through tranquility and through over-stimulation respectively.



Pantheism/Iconisation

Iconisation is the worldview presented in Witgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus’ experienced phenomenologically.

It is about hyper-atomisation. The world reduced to single units. Mechanisation.

Musically it expressed best via individual staccato stabs interjecting with one another like the teeth on cogs:



It is a means by which to achieve the “over-stimulation” of Orgasm.

We haven’t mapped out much of the Pantheism yet, other than to note that the Womb is pantheistic.


Feminine/Masculine

We wholly appreciate that these terms are problematic and understand that gender is a harmful, arbitrary social construct. We are not using them to signify men and women or xx and xy chromosomes or people with penises and vaginas.

We use the terms as two shorthand’s for wider aesthetic parameters.

They can be seen as expressions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. In other words they reflect our cognitive processes during ‘fight or flight’ scenarios or when we’re resting.

During the former we register velocity, movement and information, but are unable to register feelings (if you’re punched during a fight, you only actually feel the pain afterwards). Whereas during the latter you are able to experience touch, taste, breath, emotion, etc.

This idea of information-centric Masculinity corresponds to Iconisation and Orgasm. Feminine corresponds to Womb and Pantheism.




We also have some other bits and pieces:


Shockwave Theory

This is a way at looking at cultural influence. A cultural event is the impact point and we see its potency diminish the further away from that impact we get.

For example 1988 was the impact year for dance music in the UK. It resonated throughout the 90’s, but by 2003 it’s presence, by way of grime, was diminishing. By the time we reach UK drill 15 years after that, it’s presences is very faint.

There’s an atemporal-adjusted version of this in which the impact point is decided not chronologically, but by when a cultural event was at its most potent. In the case of UK dance music, that’d be the latter half on 1993, with influence running both forwards and backwards in time.


Dematerialisation

This is the phenomenology of the internet age. The lack of anything tangible. The smoothness of touch screens. The blue hew of computer light. Constant information and stimulation.



Bladerunner

This refers to the aesthetic preoccupations of some styles of music, most notable mid-90’s Metalheadz.


Psychedelic materialism

Rappers talking about cars and jewellery with such poetic coyness as to render them quasi-spiritual.

"Pull up in a demon on God"

"Raindrops like a storm on me"

etc.


The Time Barrier

the time barrier is the invisble wall you hit when tracing music back through time. the historical point at which any pleasure becomes detached and scholarly, or patronising, or simply impossible to access
 
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luka

Well-known member
Phwoar! Im en route to work but good job. Looking forward to the new esperanto era already.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
At the risk of sounding like a dullard.

What is the aim of this framework?

I understand you've established these polarities - but what do you do with them?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm not hostile to this framework btw, I think you need to clarify it a bit.

I was reading about pantheism yesterday in a book of lectures by Borges - I think it might have been Coleridge who believed in it, after Spinoza. There is only one being that exists, and we do not exist.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Are we attempting to get beyond value judgements? Or is this a way to determine value?

other good questions.

i'd say the former.

one thing they might do is help you analyse music that you're not yourself into. dissensus has a good three decades in between the older posters and the younger ones, so these establish ways to mediate between these different people.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The use of artistic theories

1. Discovering new things about art
2. Inspiring new art

Borges talks about how English writers have never been as enthusiastic about movements and manifestos as e.g. the French. He puts it down to our sense of individualism. (I will not be enslaved by another man's system.)

Course we're enslaved by some other person's system, whether or not were conscious of it.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i mentioned witgenstein in the first post. before we get into the actual content of what they're saying, you can neatly suggest that nietzche is the mirror of witgenstein in terms of writing style.

he's broad, expansive and emotionally charged. the tractatus of the other hand is pedantic and cold.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Have you read the Tractatus?

What I am interested in here is something which has preoccupied me lately in literature - the escape from the self, the obliteration (temporarily) of the self.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
What I am interested in here is something which has preoccupied me lately in literature - the escape from the self, the obliteration (temporarily) of the self.

in literature i assume it's far harder to achieve than in music. what have you read that does in fact achieve it?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Even reading about it on Wikipedia is giving me a headache.

the important thing to remember with philosophy or critical theory and all that stuff is that it is the art of saying something unremarkable or simple in as convoluted a way ass possible so as to appear smart.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
in literature i assume it's far harder to achieve than in music. what have you read that does in fact achieve it?

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." - Flaubert

“The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”

― James Joyce

And Eliot's famous essay on impersonality:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

These are some jumping off points. Also, naturally, Yeats's theory of masks.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
the important thing to remember with philosophy or critical theory and all that stuff is that it is the art of saying something unremarkable or simple in as convoluted a way ass possible so as to appear smart.

I think some minds are just made for certain types of thinking, and mine wasn't made for Wittgenstein's. I'm irrational, illogical by nature.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I think some minds are just made for certain types of thinking, and mine wasn't made for Wittgenstein's. I'm irrational, illogical by nature.

you're a whizz at close reading though. you can take something and pull a million different ideas from each part of it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
http://tseliot.com/preoccupations/Impersonality

"The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden."

But also, I think readers selves are somewhat obliterated by reading, or can be. Their selves, that is, as a subconsciously maintained (physiologically underpinned) fiction.
 
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