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That Robin S bassline will never die. I think I told a story on here before about being stood in the street with two clubs on either side and as the doors opened two different tunes came out, both with that bassline, and synced up for a couple of seconds.
 

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"A central tradition of the 19th-century decadence, a hyperaesthesia prizing and feeding on ecstatic instants, fragments of psychic continuum, answered a poetry time had reduced to fragments and endorsed the kind of attention fragments exact if we are to make anything of them at all, a gathering of the responsive faculties into the space of a tiny blue flame."

-- Kenner, The Pound Era.
 

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Well-known member
Do songs, as pieces of art, have an essence, a soul, some non-reducible entity that is conceived upon production, and could only have been conceived in the way that it was, and remains constant through time? Or is it a bunch of different elements, instruments and sounds cobbled together to create the illusory idea of a soul?
I'd say 'a bunch of different elements, instruments and sounds cobbled together to create the illusory idea of a soul', but that 'could only have been conceived in the way that it was'. This being influenced by having recently rewatched the bit from Terre Thaemlitz's RBMA thing about music not being universal,

Can a fragment of a song give you some of the same nominal experience as hearing the actual song, or is it innately compromized? Does the fragment carry a piece of the essence or only the shadowy residuum?
I think it depends on the song. You're closer to the essence of grime when you listen to a pirate radio snippet than you are listening to a full studio track, but the reverse is true with something like Basic Channel. You need the duration and hermetically sealed studio thing. The space and repetition has no impact if you aren't listening for long enough to get lost and numbed by it.
 
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