Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult

nobody knows where you’re at…

We could begin anywhere. A history of techno would be too obvious and would imply that the creative phase was over. Any attempts at a genealogy, a hierarchical archeology, or a precise pinpointing of musicians prohibit an understanding of the simultaneity of multiple codes, the overlappings between styles and forms. Techno cannot be alloted a place as either pop or an avant-garde music – on the whole it doesn’t take refuge in art and slips awa from categorisation as the net of naming is unfurled. It avoids the discipline of nostalgia which keeps people in the thrall of the past, unable to even think of the future but always referring back. Nostalgia is a language of lack, a language that fills people with longings for a past that never happened, a present that never comes, for the gift that never arrives.

it is difficult for words to say that which is their purpose to deny…

Who knows what happens when we hear the sounds? Thoughts can race without being apprehended as thoughts and it is an indication of the tyranny of words that experience must pass through language to make it ‘real’. As we listen in the network of composition there is a challenge to invent new vocabularies to communicate what it is that occurs, to express explorations and to rewrite the multiple personalities of the music. As a challenge to language that is imbued with hierarchisations, techno conducts the fleeting awareness that, just as what is possible is limited by pre-conceptions, listening demands more ignorance than knowledge. For then we are mobile… stammer bass kick unfurling in blue analogue… tabula rasa.

techknowledge…

The music studio is re-defining the human as a continuously mutating collage of old and new technologies, as adaptions designed through play and experimentation. In this model, samplers are the hyper-concentrated representation of the subjective experience of time, with possibilities for time travel through stretching, combining, looping, compressing and reversing sounds. Sequencers form new desires for composing, connected to the breaking up of an individual into a collection of experiments. Drum machines and synths are tools for the survival against mediocre audio programming and the restrictions of commerciality, fashion, competition and self-promotion. Routes constructed between music studios and dance floors circulate into resistance against unacceptable states of mind. Only with machines can we recognise that most information is data trash. Only with machines can repetitious sound blocks crash to create unexpected forms.

feeling like another self…

As distance dissolves into space and space dissolves into the haze of continual abeyance, the new celebrants loose track of time. The dance becomes a beyond unmarked by archaic calligraphy of computer text, irreducible to mystic yearnings but all the same a kind of blank. A nothing. A nothing so far imagined. A nothing that gives the lie to the word-net we throw over it. Body movements in strobe/smoke. We are here suspended in a slow motion that lets sparks fly as it visually contradicts the call to speed-emotion of the music. This is our sovereign moment, spreading a virus of pleasure and awakening. The moment when future and past no longer meet in consciousness, where the music reverses the effect of gravity. Lost hours. Lost days. Intertwined in ever escalating cycles of repetition whose pulsations present unimaginable sounds almost heard in the sudden space surrounding acres of bass drum. AnarchOz.

Sensorimotors…

The listener as the operator. These sounds are eminently favourable to the birth and contagion of an intense excitement with its inferred incitement given propulsion by a rolling flanged bassline that chases melodies away with accentuated off-beat boosted cymbal rushes that touch internal organs by impatient percussive patterns that encourage waste pure and simple. Dislocated dance. Social magic. We stumble across limits to conceptualising. Close your eyes and listen to blurred vision. Eyes cease to order things. Your senses overflow into one another, emerging as a senseless confusion of taste smell and memory. The very air is tormented into an audio gel. Body music surrounds the listener who thinks as a pack intuitively knowing how to go all out… The secret is to hear what you never heard before.

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