Thoughts of the day #1/2011: Serge Margel (1)

Serge Margel

(copyright: Radio France)

(dear copyright owners please read p.s. at the bottom of this page)

Since this will always be an international blog, I start my new daily series called Thoughts of the day with a french posting. This is also a friendly reference from an attentive listener to the very strong and always innovative and ever expanding french HNW-scene. Viva Vomir and all the others !

Pour toutes les lecteurs françaises de mon blog, je suis heureux de présenter ici les premières pensées du jour. Aujourd'hui, c'est un passage d'un livre du philosophe Serge Margel:

"Un jour viendra, où l'âme saura qu'elle n'est qu'apocalypse. Elle se dira apocalypse, elle dira l'apocalypse. Elle dira: maintenant, je suis l'apocalypse. Je suis le sujet de l'apocalypse. C'est ce que je dis. C'est ce que je puis dire, en ayant écrit ce que j'aurait écrit, ici, maintenant. Mais par là, mon âme ne dira rien. Elle ne dira même plus le rien. Elle ne dira ni quelque chose ni rien. Mais elle sera le mort, elle fera le mort. Elle fera le deuil de la mort. Elle sera ce deuil. Elle sera deuil. Maintenant le deuil est fait, maintenant l'âme fait le mort. Voici, c'est fait (facta sunt), dit l'Apocalypse (XXI, 6)." (Logique de la nature. Le fantôme, la technique et la mort, Paris 2000)

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected !

P.S. Dear copyright owners of this picture, please contact me, if you don't want to see your picture above in this context! Your picture will of course be instantly removed! Thank you!

(HNW #4/2011): HNW is the Art of Separation.

Ad Reinhardt says:

"Art-as-Art is a concentration on art's essential nature. The nature of art has not to do with the nature of perception or with the nature of light or with the nature of space or with the nature of space or with the nature of mankind or with the nature of society or with the nature of the universe or with the nature of creation or with the nature of nature. Art's nature fixes a boundary that separates it from everything else. Anything cannot be Art. Anybody cannot be an artist."

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected !

(HNW #3/2011) HNW is pure individualism and nothing else.

This blog will bring out the diversity inside of HNW. There is no and there will never be uniformity and conformism in true HNW. HNW is pure sonic individualism - and nothing else. This blog respects the singularity of real artists and the singularity of their works. No real artist repeats himself! Only a parrot repeats himself and imitates everything around him. But HNW is not PNW (=Parrot's noise walls)!

It is like Ad Reinhardt said about Art:

"Art is Art-as-Art and everything else is everything else. Art-as-Art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not Art. Art is not the spiritual side of business. The one standard in art is oneness, fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence."

Thanks a lot for reading my blog !
Have a nice weekend !
Stay tuned and expect the unexpected !

Sounds Reviewed #1/2011: Flesh Coffin - Seven Sermons

Sounds Reviewed #1/2011

Flesh Coffin - Seven Sermons to the Dead.

(Zvukovina 2011)

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

Everything starts with the sampled voice of Carl Gustav Jung saying: we know nothing on man - far too little - his psyche should be studied - because we are the origin of all coming evil.  And this is the most appropriate starting point for one of the most remarkable, intense and poetic releases this year. It is appropriate, because the whole composition seems to be based on an pseudepigraphic text by Carl Gustav Jung called "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos" ("Seven Sermons to the Dead" click here ) written in the year 1916 after his break with Sigmund Freud. This cryptic, gnostic and desperate text contains Carl Gustav Jung's theory of the soul in nuce; it seems to be a very short version of Jung's famous "Red book". When you try to cross-reference Carl Gustav Jung's text with Brandal's FLESH COFFIN music, it should be clear, that the composition Seven Sermons to the Dead will be the most impressive, thoughtful and consistant composition of nocturnal sounds this year.

During the masterly designed 90 minutes and its 7 Tracks Brandal sends the attentive listener on a gnostic journey of the soul through all known dichotomies of the human mind: fullness and emptiness, the effective and the ineffective,  the living and the dead, light and dark,  hot and cold, energy and matter, time and space,   good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly,  the one and the many, to reach Unity - Pleroma - Nothingness. So it is only natural that Brandal's compostion is full of tension, expressivity and sudden explosions, since it is nothing else than a giant complexio oppositorum - a coincidence of opposites. To say it in the words which were printed on the 4 bookmarks which belong to this 2 CD set: in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

You should listen to this pitch black requiem on headphones at night. Only on headphones you will admire and discover all the details Brandal has put in this music. And only on headphones you will get the impression to be in the Kugelauditorium (Spheric Concert Hall) in Osaka during the World Exposition 1970; or to listen to a really dark, distorted, diabolic and sometimes anarchic re-invention of Karlheinz Stockhausen's octophonic cosmic music. But Brandal is far away from Stockhausen's obsession of a pre-established cosmic harmony Brandal's music is situated at the very dark crossing of drone, noise and the best extreme electronic and experimental music. On his blog Brandal has called this unique branding of music: harsh-noise-junk-metal-muddy-drones-cutup-horror-weirdness. When you take the challenge of this uncanny journey into the depths of your own tiny soul, you will experience it yourself. When you take this challenge your soul will be cleansed  by a giant noise-shower full of terror, silence and beauty.

During this 90 minutes Brandal uses all possibilities of extreme electronic music (using sometimes real drums , very distorted guitars, the sound of water, shattering glass or sampled xylophons) letting the attentive listener constantly floating between heaven and earth, time and space. This music is like a sonic action painting, or like one of Arnulf Rainer's overpaintings, since this music is constantly moving, changing its texture, its volume, its density, its appearance and its colours. The music is breathing, exploding, pulsating, shifting, expanding, droning and sometimes melting and glowing, or reduced to one very high tone. And sometimes there is light. Eternal silence and eternal darkness probably awaits you, but there will be no allmighty father, who is waiting for you. Your soul will never find a place to rest, since your ashes will be blown apart by a cosmic windchannel. Sometimes it is like listening to the sound of rotating planets or like listening to a choir of exploding angels. Or is this the birth/death sound of a new universe? A giant sonic supernova ? Or is it the performance of dark ritual ? Or is it a very deep meditation ?

Maybe death is nothing else but reverse birth - like on El Greco's famous painting The Entombment of Count Orgaz (1588). Listening to the Seven Sermons will be like Walter Reed described it a few years ago: between my eye sockets is where i will build my sky rocket you don't need any passport all you need is thought suddenly the soul becomes like hot coal a flame blow from out my brain hole like an volcano the brain begins to process as i start my conquest from out the physical bondage the thought launches voyaging 144 billion light years through the shadows of your imagination i feel myself getting older -sitting on a sofa in the position like yoga ... And during the final passage of this marvellous 2 CD-r's you will almost feel like a tibetan monk standing on the top of the world with a soundbowl in his hands, totally cleansed after casting off body/mind, only waiting for a wind to make his soundbowl tremble and finally make peace with life and death. The highest possible recommendation for Flesh Coffin - Seven Sermons to the Dead.

(written by S.K.G. in March/April 2011)

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

 

Flesh Coffin - Seven Sermons to the Dead

is available at Zvukovina (Europe 9 Euro, World 9,50 Euro).

The set comes in a beautiful designed DVD-Box, 2 pro-printed CD-R 

with poster and 4 bookmarks.

(HNW #2/2011) Even Noise has a History.

The loudest noise ever made in our tiny little universe was the big bang. This incident clearly shows that there is a  striking coincidence between noise, destruction and creation in our universe. But sadly no one ever heard it, since in space there is no medium for sounds.

Only in the Cosmic Microwave Background there are still traces of the Big Bang. The Astrophysicist Amedeo Balbi called it recently in a book the "music of the Big Bang".  Maybe only in real good NOISE something of this primordial noise is preserved. But there are still other non-human sounds in our universe. The first music ever heard (maybe also by no one) was sung by the birds, the rivers, the trees and the wind working together with hail, rain and snow.

So it would be absolutely stupid to believe that NOISE is something new or something which should be dated. NOISE has always been there since the beginning of the universe. And NOISE has always been present in the history of music. And NOISE has always been a challenge for beauty and order in the cosmos and in music.

NOISE has to be related to the subversive history of modern music. If NOISE is not related to the history modern EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC (i.e. John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley and Morton Feldman to name only a few) and at the same time to the history of minimalism in so called MODERN ART (i.e. Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Jackson Pollock, Paul Klee) NOISE would be solely related to itself and in thus would be autistic and totally meaningless. And than there never ever will be established any quality standards or conceptual standards in NOISE.

NOISE will be used here not for music alone, but also as a general metaphor for everything which is capable to interrupt the so called universal consensus of reason.

NOISE must have at least some sense.

NOISE without concept is not NOISE.

Sometimes SILENCE is louder than NOISE. And often NOISE is as radical, subversive and innovative as ABBA. So don't expect that NOISE will be praised here just because it is NOISE. NOISE can be found everywhere: sometimes in really uncanny places, sometimes in full sunlight. But never where you expect it .....

So stay tuned ...

and expect the unexpected ...

Next post is coming soon ...

Thanks a lot for reading this blog ...!!

(HNW #1/2011)Sound follows function.

The reviews of HNW will not focus on the description of the sonic appearance alone - which would be rather silly - but will also focus on the effects which HNW has on the brain:

HNW will be treated here as a psycho-acoustic phenomenon
or as a psycho-active event.