Blogging my way through Grosz’s “Chaos, Territory, Art”: part 2, more thoughts on ‘music’ and (algo)rhythm
Signal & Noise Why does a chapter nominally about “vibration, animal, music, sex” begin with a long discussion of philosophy, what it is and what it does? Is this evidence that “music” is really just philosophy’s other, its negative? Are…
Sexual Difference, Indeterminacy, & Open Works: a few thoughts on Grosz
I’m starting work on my third book, which I am tentatively calling “Signal & Noise”. This involves a lot of reading; I am going to try to post short reflections on what I’m reading as I work my way through…
Bro-gemony & dubstep
[This is a cross-post from Cyborgology. It’s also a very rough, thinking-as-I-write piece. It may jump around a lot. If I’ve left something underexplained, let me know!] Yesterday, Mike D’Errico posted a wonderfully provocative essay about brostep, the Military Entertainment…
Doctor Who and Pop Music
With the 50th anniversary fete this weekend, I thought a quick post on Doctor Who and (mainly pop) music was in order.First, the arrangement–and the signature sound–of the original theme song was performed by none other than the amazing Delia…
Seeing Music For What It Really Isn’t
or, “‘Reality’ is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes” This is cross-posted from cyborgology. __ I get really nervous when people start making claims about what is and isn’t “real” music. Like Princess Leia in The…
Nietzsche, Wagner, Biopolitics, Race, & Music
“Wagner makes music sick” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 664). “Life itself has become a problem” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 681). To mark Wagner’s bicentennial, the Guardian published this essay on the connection many of his contemporaries made between his music and mental…
Why does Plato hate the flute/aulos? And what does this have to do with women?
These people, largely uneducated and unable to entertain themselves over their wine by using their own voices to generate conversation, pay premium prices for flute-girls and rely on the extraneous voice of the reed flute as background music for their…
More outtakes from my article on Attali, music, & neoliberalism
I’m editing down an article on Jacques Attali, Foucault, music, & neoliberalism. I’ve posted some outtakes before, and here are some more. They’re somewhat disjointed, as outtakes tend to be, but they’re generally about Attali’s theory of subjectivity. “Composer” as…
Attali, Acoustics, Neoliberalism
I had to cut this from an article I’m working on b/c it doesn’t exactly fit with the flow of the argument, but the point is really important: Attali thinks repetition, or the “statistical and global conceptions of movement of…
Sweet Nothing — Musical Logics of Intensity
The Diplo remix of Calvin Harris’s “Sweet Nothing” exemplifies a musical logic of intensity by which noise–or, “nothing”–is used to intensify/amplify/augment signal into something even more powerful than its original form or articulation. “Nothing” sweetens listeners’ musical and affective pleasure….
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