(an emission statement - part 1)
I had to backtrack and formulate a cogent answer to this question after raising some eyebrows with a poster used to promote a MOM² performance at the university where I teach. The April 7, 2009 concert was also the campus premier of Luma 1.0 a film done by a former GMU student and intended to accompany MOMMOM's performance. I had asked Mike Sargent to develop a design for a color poster that we could use to push the show and he promptly worked up a crisp, eye-catching design using some of the frames from his film. At the bottom of the poster he had included a catch-phrase describing our collaboration....as a mind numbing experience. Now assuming that such a thing as minds do exist (see Gilbert Ryle among others for arguments against the existence of the transcendental mind) as academics there are many things we are supposed to do for and to human minds, but numbing is usually not considered to be one of them. I thought the line would stir some controversy, but didn't have it in me to rain on my student's volunteerism so I punted, forwarding the poster up to my boss for his approval prior to reproducing them, without, of course, drawing his attention to the suspect text. By the time mind numbing came up in the post-performance Q&A, I had managed to see the apt brilliance of Mike's turn of phrase.
In many ways, what unites the music and sounds featured on this site is their shared propensity to make their mark, that is, to fulfill their function with minimal involvement of mind. Mind (again, allowing that such a construct might not refer to any actual condition of the world) is usually thought to be the denizen and overlord of Normal Waking State Consciousness (NWSC). That is, the state of ordinary, socially grounded, linguistically mediated and anchored, clinically normative consciousness from which we perform our roles in society, chief of these being that of consumer-producers. Within the normative folds of NWSC, we behave, cognize, and feel as happy ants, content in our demographically etched identities and socially conscripted duties.
Small wonder that the philosophical systems of the East see mind as a bit of a restless monkey, easily distracted and more prone to obscure than reveal the true nature of the world and our place within it. Through the agency of our minds as simultaneously a product and enabler of dualistic consciousness, we cleave the world in two self versus non-self. Through this false division, we come to fragment the unitary truth into a collection of disparate objects and events, each deriving its meaning through a brute calculus of appetite and fear, desire and aversion, want and dread. Through our minds we read the world as an action movie in which we (the ego) are the chief protagonist racing towards some complex of illusory goals.
Much of what has defined musical convention across cultures and across time has been the business of mind and NWSC. There's nothing really wrong with that. I guess I weigh-in here for a kind of musical liberalism where there's an ear for every possible type of sonic expression. From pop to slop, it's all good. But the music-sound that motivates the existence of this site and all of my activities in music (broadcasting, performing, curating) is increasingly an agenda that breaks with the stranglehold of both mind and normality and seeks its meaning on the most tentative cracking ice of what we call culture. We are speaking here of an expeditionary music that works its magic in a pre-cognitive moment before the discriminating intellect, that is, mind, has had a chance to parse the received sonic experience against a socially constructed code of value-laden associations.
This music, which is both very new and stunningly ancient, lives very close to its sonic material which springs forth from its creators as a kind of avatar of every human experience that does not fully fit beneath the umbrella of NWSC. As the experiential terrain mapped by this strange music expansively unfolds, NWSC the minds given to us by our parents, pastors, rabbis, imams, teachers, etc begins to look more and more like an impoverished ghetto, a bleak landscape of worn concrete, dirty streets, and broken glass.
So this music is maybe not so much over mind as before it or perhaps around it. Where so much of music has been built to accommodate (long-term) memory, this music is based on an immediate engagement with a strongly felt presence. It is not particularly responsive to a critical habitus that weighs musical achievement against a narrative about the history of musical rules, a critical habitus that seeks to evaluate sound structures in terms of the sophistication of their conception and/or the difficulty of their execution. There should ideally within this music be no rules at all no enforced minimalisms or eccentric affectations, no particular preference for the tonal or the atonal.(to be continued...)
