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"I'm playing around town," said Lester Young, softly. "Whoever needs a reed man. Bill Basie called me, so I'm with Bennie's band this week, maybe I'll be with some other band next week. Long as nobody tells me how to blow, like Fletcher did."
He spoke with a slow, dreamlike fluidity, as if his intent was less literal meaning than tone and nuance.
-Harper Barnes, from Blue Monday
The world of phenomena and the phenomena of the world have their existence, but it's quite apart from us, from our language, from our naming, from our categories. No piece of reality can be discrete, completely apart, and no edge or boundary can cut off or contain. I think maybe music can depict this mess more precisely than can language. All these different strains come out of the past, frozen on records, sucked into the cloud, digitized, replayed. In record stores categorized, I go to the rock section, the international section, the jazz section, the classical section, the metal section, the hip-hop section, I select.
All we do is try to freeze time. All we do must fail. Thunder, Lightning, Strike. The Go! Team recombined signposts of disparate musical strains to make a kind of easy listening, birth of rap electro thing that was inconceivable until they did it. Now it's all these indie kids want to do. The genres, they used to mean something, but the kids have less and less respect for the boundaries the more and more they go on the Internet. I had the legacy of a hundred years of recording available to me, before the Internet, and I lost respect for those boundaries too. It's taken till now for the thaw.
We've still got them. Glue. Gravel. This guy I met sixteen years ago, Angus, was in this band. Scottish. Like Heroin kinda, more on the punk side. Why not Glue? The production's not so magical as the Heroin records. Maybe not the songs? Would those Heroin songs sound so much like the heart inside my body if it weren't for the production? Would that one earnest guy's vocals be so perfect if they were higher or lower in the mix? Maybe Glue's got too many words. Fuck, that's my problem too. And too they actually only have a passing resemblance; the comparison is misleading. The production pulls me out though. And the words. I like the vocals. But wait I wanted to make a more eternal point. Quibbling. Bickering about the details. Caring too much about the individual things.
There is no eternal. There is no everything. There is only an infinity of little things. Every little thing is a big thing, just not so big as the really big things that are collections of littler things. And anyway any thing I talk about is only a thing because I call it that; the infinity
Nations are like that. Races too. India's a big damn place, man, it's arrogance to the extreme to characterize such a thing as anything
What happened was, Frances didn't want to go out somewhere, and she has some techniques for stalling. Idol Omen. This was a new one, that she hadn't tried before, and which she hasn't done since: she grabbed a bunch of records and wanted to take pictures of them. Now here I am listening to them all cause that's the rule I made for myself. Rules are arbitrary but the only way we can have order is to respect them. Hence, nazis.
Words are rules. They fill the space and they can never contain infinity. North Star. I kind of can't bear to play this one again. Phil Glass goes for the heart of the matter by working that same thing into a froth or a drool, he batters your mind with this violent hell that you can't escape. It works really well and in an enjoyable way on Koyaanisqatsi, but this North Star record maybe has too much of a cheesy synth sound? You guys dig classical? Me too. Classical promises freedom by making room for so many sounds, but classical allowed Phil Glass to have a cheesy synth on this record. Classical's freedom is produced through an insistence on very explicit rules and sets up a framework where the only way forward is to infinitely break those rules over and over again. It has less and more respect for those genre boundaries than the kids do. Love it / get so frustrated. North Star. Tells you where to go.