John Cage Once Again

If there is a book that has affected my attitude towards music and has actually materially changed my ideas about music and my own musical practice, and there is, then that book is without question John Cage's book "Silence". Specifically, for I can be specific, it is the section near the beginning headed "Experimental Music". It is not a very long section of the book and it is also one of the parts of the book which, I think, it is relatively easy to understand. Both of these factors are fortuitous for other parts of "Silence" I find so dense as to be impenetrable. The section "Experimental Music" I find so fundamental to an understanding of music that I would count it as a great loss if I had never read Cage's words and understood what he meant by them. Before beginning with the meat of my blog I should, of course, say that Cage was writing in the 1950's. His musical situation was not that of our's today. In the 1950's no one had yet built a viable commercial synthesizer and magnetic tape was the cutting edge tool of the day. Cage, we may say, was at that time creating the future. But he wasn't yet in it and we can look back on specifics that he helped to bring about but could not describe in detail as we can today.

So what is so great about this section of the book? I have written about this before and I recommend that you search through my blog to find those blogs too. They may add to what I say here or re-emphasize things. What is so great, if it is to be put like this, is that Cage is not afraid to get embroiled in the big questions about music that many either assume in their ignorance or ignore in their stupidity. Cage is not afraid to take a stance on what music is and should be seen as. This is an important question and all the more so in the 60 years since he wrote in which any number of electronic musical genres have been invented (and, in some cases, passed away again). A definition of what music even is is important and for at least two reasons. It informs what it is you think you are doing if you make music and it gives hints as to how you should do it.

Most musicians and musical writers, even today, are primarily concerned with pitch. When picking up their instrument or sitting in front of it they primarily intend to affect pitches and weave them into a pleasing union. Indeed, many traditional instruments were made specifically as devices to produce and affect pitches as their primary function. Melody and harmony are the endgame. For such people so fixed can their ideology be and so unthinking can their appreciation of music be that it never occurs to them to think that music might be anything else. Music is melody and harmony as a statute. If something is not melodious or not harmonious then it is not music. It does not take a genius to realize that this definition completely destroys the claims of some forms of music to then be music at all. Specifically, these are electronic ones, ones that were coming to birth as Cage wrote. Fortunately, there are others who see things a different way and Cage was one of these. Cage came to regard such music as happily "experimental", including his own, a judgment many wouldn't quibble at today but which, in his day, was controversial.

The crucial factor in this, Cage finds, having realized that as long as he is alive there will always be some sound even if it is only the flowing of his blood or the high pitched whine of his nervous system, is to turn away from the idea that music is something deliberately done to the idea of music as sounds that are not intended. There will always be these sounds of course and for the musically conventional they would regard their task as to eliminate them as much as possible. But not Cage. Cage sees this fact and these sounds as his orchestra. Cage freely admits that many will see such a turn as giving everything away. If music is not a musician deliberately creating with authorial purpose then it is nothing for many people. But Cage retorts. Cage sees human beings as at one with all the sounds around them. In this context there can be no concept of music as some artificial, deliberate creation. Music is any sounds occurring "in any combination and in any continuity". As I would put this, "Music is any combination of sounds". I summarize Cage's thought here as "Give up music as a collection of deliberately made and organized sounds. Realize that any combination of sounds is music."

It is this "any combination of sounds" idea that seems to scare many people though. And some people do seem bound to their idea of music as something deliberate, an authorial intent, a matter of canonized forms and sanctified approaches. Cage was right to say, even in the 1950's, that some people regard, for example, the use of noise or a random approach to a collection of sounds, as "not music at all". The years between his writing and our present day may have removed some of that anxiety as electronics gave birth to industrial music, ambient music and an appreciation for abstract forms or, alternatively, rhythms which endlessly replicate themselves and morph, seemingly forever. But this is not entirely so. There are still those who regard things without a tune as not music. For Cage I think this would be to focus on the lesser thing (that you can form pitches into melodies) to the exclusion of a much greater thing (that tones and timbres are all around us in any number of naturally occurring combinations). 

For a number of years I have been an enthusiastic fan of the analog synthesizer enthusiast and educationalist, Marc Doty. Doty, known as Automatic Gainsay in the online world and a man who works as part of the Bob Moog Foundation to prosper the legacy of the great synthesizer inventor, Dr Robert Moog, has for a number of years produced demonstration videos for numerous vintage analog synths on his You Tube channel. I freely admit that I have spent hours watching, and re-watching, many of his videos which I find to be both educational regarding the synthesizers he is demonstrating and in relation to synthesis itself. In my way, I have also found many of the videos musically significant as well for I have found music in the tones and timbres that these usually vintage synthesizers have produced. Indeed, I have found no difference musically between the theme songs Marc has written for his videos and his pawing at the keyboard during the demonstrations. Why is this? Its because, like Cage, I am not seeing "music" as the production of deliberately intended tunes. I am not seeing "music" as a matter of deliberation or intention at all. Music is sounds in juxtaposition with one another. And nothing more is needed. 

Of course, it takes a psychological shift to come to this position and Cage sees this. But Cage does not see it as a giving up of anything. He sees it as a gaining of so much more. "One may fly if one is willing to give up walking" is how he puts it. And this is very much how I see it. Recently, not least from watching Doty's videos, I have become somewhat disturbed and a little claustrophobic, musically speaking. I've wanted to shout at Marc as he was demonstrating "Stop flinging all these pitches at me!" I look at the keyboards Marc is demonstrating and there they are in all their fixity with a keyboard attached as the user interface. A keyboard, of course, is an interface primarily designed to affect pitch and in some, but not all, keyboards pitch is all it does affect. How limiting, how narrow, how blind. In contrast Cage talks about "sound space" and the technical possibilities of the use of magnetic tape which, in his 1950's context, was cutting edge. He speaks of being able "to transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of operation into art". Now, reading that, can you say that this task is even primarily a matter of pitch? Surely not. 

Lately my own musical output has become what I now refer to as "texture music". When approaching the creation of a piece I look to create the conditions for a piece of electronic music's arrival. But I don't look to play it or even really create it. I try to stand at a remove and let it come to be. I juxtapose things and let them be and let the music come from their juxtaposition just as in nature things are just juxtaposed. You will perhaps not find it surprising that, in this context, I prefer electronic and technological means to do this. Both software and hardware solutions are available today that Cage cannot have foreseen in detail and one wonders what he would have done with them. However, in my own practice I approach music as something primarily of timbral and not melodic interest. I can write melodies and have done so. But this is very rare for me and, frankly, I just find timbre both more interesting and more vast as a range of possibilities. There are only so many notes and people will keep playing them over and over again. But there are endless timbres. So lately I find myself wanting to smash all the keyboards and I want electronic things to play with that make it difficult or even impossible to be precise with. This is not unusual in the electronic arena and instruments from the theremin to certain flavors of modular synthesizer are difficult to play melodically, especially if no precise interface is used. For me the more interesting question is why you would feel the need to play melodically in the first place. Such an urge is surely indicative of cultural teachings and a leaning towards conventionality that I just want to give the finger to. Nature is full of timbres. Our music should be too. I see it as more human.

I see this very much as Cage sees it in the end. Cage talks about a choice between wanting to "control sound" and, on the other hand, giving up the desire to control sound, clearing your mind of "music" and setting about discovering means to let sounds be themselves "rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments". I see pitch-based music, music that wants to be a tune, as very much music in the "I am a human who wants to control things" mold. And that kind of music disturbs me. Its not even a question of if such music is "good" or "bad", subjective judgments that are largely meaningless in the end anyway. To me that approach says something negative about human beings themselves and their motives in wanting to act that way. It seems blind to many of the insights Cage raises, not least that we are part of a greater whole and that fitting into this whole, letting things be what they will and being at peace with it, is a greater good than the ability to say "this and this will be so". "Pitch music", as I have started calling it, is narrow music and narrow not just musically but also in terms of what it means to be a human being expressing yourself that way. Cage, of course, did not see music as necessarily about expression and even less so as about meaning. For him sound just was and it was the human task to let it be what it will, to enjoy the intermingling of any and every sound together.

Postscript: I am currently making a podcast series about electronic music, as you may know, and the first podcast came out last Friday. In the course of making the show I have had reason to speak to a few people about putting one of their songs in the show and this has led to fortuitous connections. Thanks to one person I came across the idiosyncratic synths of Rob Hordijk and specifically a little box he made called the Blippoo box. This table top synthesizer seems, to all intents and purposes, to generate random noises which change in entirely unpredictable ways as you either move its 12 knobs or use either the CV inputs (and outputs if you patch it into itself) or the light sensor that is built into the unit. The unit itself is a mix of oscillators, filters, his unique "rungler" circuits and FM possibilities. I've seen more than one comment about this synthesizer that it plays you, you don't play it. I mention the Blippoo box because it strikes me as an instrument encapsulating entirely the kind of musical freedom I was expressing in the piece above. The Blippoo is impossible to play melodically and is nigh on impossible to play in any conventional sense at all and yet it offers seemingly endless opportunities for making sounds you could never imagine and putting them in the context of lots of others. It is an instrument that you can affect but cannot control.

Perfect!

                              Rob Hordijk's Blippoo Box

Electronic Music Culture

Recently, quite spontaneously, I decided to make a 13 episode series of podcasts called the Electronic Oddities Podcast. I think I was probably stuck in a rut with my own work and I wanted a way out, a way to let my creativity and mind flow that wasn't concentrated on producing yet more music of my own. What better way to do this than by concentrating on other people's? The idea behind the podcast is a give a survey of what now amounts to almost 50 years of commercial and non-commercial electronic music, all the way from 1967's "Silver Apples of the Moon" by Morton Subotnick, the first commercially commissioned electronic music album, right up until the present day. (The series goes even earlier than that though with music from "Forbidden Planet" in 1956 and from Pierre Schaeffer and his Musique Concrete in 1948.) Of course, what electronic music even is is a big part of this subject. Most modern music has something to do with electricity in that it is amplified through speakers. The primary modern instrument in popular music, certainly in much of the mid to late 20th century, was the electric guitar where the electric part was crucial to the sound. And yet when we talk about electronic music in the context of my podcast or more generally we do not mean this. We mean music that specifically uses electronics to create or manipulate the sound. 

The pre-eminent modern electronic instrument is the synthesizer. This replaced the tape recorder as the primary instrument in electronically generated music when it began to be invented as a viable commercial instrument between 1963 and 1966. Subotnick had commissioned Don Buchla to create an electronic musical instrument that he could perform electronic classical music on. But Subotnick did not want to be bound within the confines of a piano keyboard and so Buchla's instrument did not have one. This meant that the music produced was unlikely to be strictly melodic or 3 minute pop songs which needed to have easily repeatable hooks and themes. The instrument Subotnick got was more suited to abstract sounds and exploring the realm of musical timbre. Of course, at broadly the same time Dr Robert Moog had also invented his Moog synthesizer. This did come with a keyboard attached and this enabled Moog synths, and all those that followed this lead, to stay within the prevailing musical paradigm, that based on the chromatic keyboard. Thus, with these two first commercially available synthesizers was set up a distinction which demonstrated something that was to run straight through the heart of all electronic music: your tools determine the boundaries of what you can do with them.

                 Buchla system 100 as used by Morton Subotnick

We can demonstrate this point further in a story told in a BBC documentary about Funk music that I watched recently. The documentary related how Funk was invented in the late 1960s by James Brown and Sly and The Family Stone. This music, in terms of the rhythm, emphasized the 1 and the key to the whole performance of Funk was a rhythm section of drum and bass which emphasized this 1, the first note of the musical phrase. Later on this became replaced by Disco in which a rhythm guitar became the key to the sound (think of anything by Chic that is driven by the playing of Nile Rodgers). But now think what happened in the 1980s. Up until this point the primary dance music of the era had been played by skilled musicians. But in the 1980s viable electronic instruments had been produced that could, in some sense, replace these people. Your rhythm section could now be a TB-303 or an SH-101 and a TR-808. And these weren't musicians playing Funk, Disco or Soul rhythms. They were machines. What you got instead of Funk, Soul and Disco was House, Techno and Electro. The tools and their boundaries and limitations dictated what came out the other end of the creative process. (Hip Hop, of course, would make use of sampling technology too to start to rework the old licks that people had actually played.)

                        A TB-303, your replacement bass player

In today's electronic music culture there are even more choices. People can make electronic music on tablet computers, the latest iteration of something which revolutionized electronic music yet again: the home computer. This particular device acted as something of a leveler and a democratizer in the field of electronic music because a computer was something that many people were likely to have in their homes anyway. Users were, thus, already familiar with the device if not with using it to make music. It was simply a case of buying a music program, installing it and then using it to make your music. But this music wasn't necessarily played. It could just be drawn. This was a world away from the early synths which were created from the ground up from electronics and were based on the model of oscillators and other devices which came from radio studios which is where the early pioneers in the use of electronic sound were originally to be found. At that time electronic music was a niche activity enjoyed only by the rare few and made with cumbersome machines. There was still, however, a physical connection between the music-maker and the physical instrument. Today popular music has been completely overrun by electronic sounds, not least due to the convenience of the computer. As Jean-Michel Jarre has said in his many recent public utterances around his "Electronica" project: "We won". He means that electronic music, once frowned upon and despised, is now the king of the popular music world. This is at least partly because it can be made with stuff already to hand and with the Internet even for free. Like a virus it has mutated and affected everyone. 

It was partly in this context that I decided to create my podcast series. Recently, I rejoined Facebook to get access to a number of the discussion groups that are there of a specialist nature. Electronic music is, or should be, partly about the community. It is good to refresh your own thinking by partaking in the thoughts of others. But on Facebook, as we all know, you also open yourself up to the hordes. And so it is that the other day I came across the latest video of Deadmau5 and his studio full of electronic music bling. Now I wasn't so fussed about the studio itself. Deadmau5 has made his money doing what he choses to do and he gets to spend it how he wants. No, it was more the comments of the young kids who consider themselves his fans that caught my attention. When I see a young kid of 15 or 16 writing in all seriousness that Deadmau5 is "the best electronic musician of all time" then that makes me step back and think "Hold on a minute. Do you know the history of electronic music, kid? Do you know how we got here and who brought us?" The answer, of course, is no, he doesn't. He has no idea that there has been 50 years of electronic music nor of the myriad types of electronic music that have been made in that time. He is not aware of the innovation and experimentation that has taken place in that time. He just likes Deadmau5's four to the floor beat and software sequenced chords. He's allowed to like it. But when he makes bold statements we are allowed to step in and say "Hold on a second!"

Another recent event was the precursor to my podcast series too. I happened to start listening to 80s House and Techno music one day recently. This was music made with hardware synthesizers and drum machines. It was made with hardware only... because there was no software at this time. It had not yet been invented. It would have been recorded to tape as well. All a very physical, analog process. I was struck in that moment by just how full and rich it sounded. I thought to myself that my ears had become used to thinner things with less presence, the result of software and computers coming to pre-eminence. I thought to myself that there may be people who think that software synths and computer sound are normal. I pitied them for not knowing how things sounded "in the old days" because, believe me, it was like night and day how the 80s stuff sounded compared to modern EDM which, to my ears, is weak and sugary. Back then things were dirty and gritty and full of saturated presence. Swedish House Mafia or Avicii do not hold a candle to Frankie Knuckles or Kevin Saunderson in terms of how they sound.

There's another story I can tell. This week has been the music technology trade show in Frankfurt, Musikmesse. This is where manufacturers come together to show their new wares. One of these is a new software which emulates Eurorack modular synth modules. I posted the news story about this new software to a Facebook page for Eurorack users and the response was largely predictable. Lots of people who use real Eurorack synth modules pointed out that doing this in software is actually missing the point of modular synthesis in the first place. 

                     A Eurorack format synthesizer

But what is the point of modular synthesis in the first place? The point is its tactile nature. The complaint was that by making it just another software you maybe replicate how it looks on your screen and maybe even model quite accurately how it sounds with your computer. But you don't emulate the process of using it because one is a hardware instrument and the other is a program on a computer. Someone jokingly said they would need to create a hands-on controller for this new software.... *chuckle*

A lot has been happening to me musically in recent weeks. Another thing that is new is an interest in exploring noise music, a particular flavor of electronic music which is harsh and without compromise. I'm totally clear that it won't be to everyone's taste but there is a community that seems fascinated by it and that interests me. Of course, there is good and bad in all forms of music and this is no less the case here. Its a matter of taking time and stopping to smell the roses to find out which interests you and which doesn't. As one who has an interest in all forms of electronic sound this seems one well worth studying for a while at least and you can be sure it will be featured in my podcast series. This is not least because noise, in the form of industrial music, has penetrated far enough into musical culture in general to have even reached the mainstream and, at this point, it becomes a significant socio-cultural phenomenon in its own right. As I see it, noise shares in something that has been a feature of electronic music from the start, the ability to throw away the script, go off piste and just chart your own course. When you have instruments, from the cheapest, crappiest, circuit bent piece of crap to expertly manufactured super synths costing thousands of your local currency to play with then the sky (or space) is literally the limit. Noise musicians, as with ambient and kosmische musicians, are some of those who have taken this ability and run wild with it.

This is just one reason why I probably like electronic music above all other forms. It has the ability to create new timbres and textures and to keep doing it. You can create something that is yours that nobody else has. Of course, you can also use the presets and create something that other people do have. But that's up to you. I see electronic music as forming a broad spectrum of sounds, potentially as broad as human beings can imagine in fact. With electronic instruments you cannot just create songs or melodies but entirely new sounds themselves. You can create the actual building blocks. The very early pioneers did exactly this with tape machines using noises manipulated to make other noises and then combining them to make longer artistic pieces. Fascination with sound, I think, is at the heart of electronic music and this is what the Electronic Oddities Podcast, I hope, will be all about. In all the many and varied ways that people can now make electronic music, in ever greater numbers, the scope and variety of the possibilities is, perhaps, the most attractive feature of all.

Episode one of the Electronic Oddities Podcast is now available  HERE!

Music, Meaning and Harsh Noise

I am back blogging again and, as usual, it is thoughts on things I've observed that is animating me. If you are an electronic musician the first quarter of the year is an interesting time because it is the time when all the manufacturers show their new products for the year. There is much wonderment and awe at what boffins in sheds or industrial scale manufacturers in corporate headquarters have produced. There is then the febrile atmosphere of the Internet to deal with as any number of informed and uninformed people (the Internet does not discriminate) comment on what has been revealed and say where they would have done things differently, what they want and what they hope to get. Or, like me, they just stare and wish because they are poor. Of course, this is not to suggest that making electronic music is about a big, fancy studio full of thousands of pounds worth of gear. This is to fall prey to the commercialist myth that if you don't have something expensive then you don't have anything worth having. This is snobbish rubbish and I utterly reject it. The simplest piece of battery-operated electronic crap is enough to make electronic music with if you can find something to record it with.

Now I have lots of time to look at the Internet. Probably too much. And so, naturally, I see a lot of these discussions as well as product demonstration videos, people jamming with their gear and round table discussions such as the plethora of electronic music podcasts which have sprung up lately. If you were to take too much notice of all of this stuff, stuff which is growing exponentially, then you would certainly never have time to do anything else. You become a person who talks about doing rather than one who simply does and music is about doing not talking. But these things, should you pay heed to them, are indicative of a kind of community sense of ideas that are at large amongst your average common or garden electronic music maker. Its some of these notions that have animated me this week enough to want to blog about it. Specifically, I have found over and over people commenting about what they regard as "music" or "musical" uses of things. Worst of all is that phrase "musically meaningful" which I find sprayed about from time to time. Its worrying.

A typical scenario of the type I'm talking about here (for example, a demo) is some person noodling on a modular synth or with some small electronic device. Often there will be some simple arpeggio or sequence playing at these times and if the person concerned hasn't prepared in advance it might not be the sweetest melody you've ever heard. At some point someone might well say, embarrassed by the sound they are making, "Let's try and make something more musically meaningful". Its at this point that, should I be drinking one, I will splutter out my cup of tea across the computer keyboard. What, I wonder in my provocative way, is "musically meaningful" when its at home? Now in the sense these people usually mean it this is saying something about what they perceive music to be at all. In short, they are revealing their prejudices. These prejudices are often on display when, for example, modular synth music is discussed. Its bleeps and bloops and that is "not musically meaningful" is what they mean. But when did this rule come out? Who decided that bleeps were devoid of meaning? Who says static isn't beautiful? Who, indeed, got themselves elected to the Chair of Musical Meaning with the right to decide what sounds mean something and what sounds don't? Wouldn't an arbiter of meaning be a god?

With such nuclear prejudices on display one can start to wipe out whole areas of culture. One form of electronic music today is known as Harsh Noise. This is exactly what that description makes you think it is. And I am sure that to people who talk about things being "musically meaningful" it is the exact antithesis of that kind of music that they would find meaning in. It has no tune, it is not sweet or subtle and it is extremely challenging to even listen to. I have dabbled in this form myself recently but not with any conviction because I seem more constitutionally drawn to the abstract nature of sound rather than its harshness. Harshness for me is part of a palette of sounds rather than the palette itself. Harsh things can be brutal and brutalising and that is not where I am. But I can appreciate that others are and I have been listening to some lately. I get it but at the same time I know that if I was doing it myself it would not seem authentically me. But this world of ours is about more than just you. There are a multitude of voices out there and trust me when I tell you that you are not unique in wanting to be heard. Its a basic human need. This a good thing for I find, in my idealistic and optimistic way, that the multitude of human voices comes together somehow in a choir of all human possibilities, hopes and fears.

We are many people with many voices. You get the point. And none is valid and none is invalid. Or, if you prefer, all are valid and all are invalid. For they just are, extant in our world wherever someone feels the need to make a sound and say it means something. And that is really all it takes for something to be meaningful. A sound is made and someone finds meaning in it. There are no overarching arbiters here. We do not live in a situation where we can ascribe meaning to something and then someone else can come along and rule it out of bounds. Well, we live in a situation where people will try to do that all the time. But so long as someone gives something meaning then, for them at least, it has it. That might be bleeps and bloops, abstract, wandering sounds or 10 minutes of harsh, full volume static. Who are you or I to decide when or if something is meaningful for anyone but ourselves? What arrogance would such a leap take? What bogus notions are involved in coming to such a preposterous conclusion?

Harsh Noise I find to be an instructive category in this respect. I do sometimes wonder at the motivations of people for doing what they do. It is very easy (all too easy) for each of us to imagine that everyone else is like us and this is a common human failing. Having recently been put in contact with some Harsh Noise makers who had joined together to make an album I ventured to ask them what it meant. It turned out that what they thought about their music was much like me about mine. They seemed to be people with ideas who wanted to interpret those ideas in sound. I suspect that it is important to them that this is "sound" or "noise" and not a melody because, as with the Kosmische musicians from the late 60s and early 70s in Germany, they want a sound which marks them out as different from other people and which leaves them free to bring self-expression to the fore. They want themselves or the improvisational situation they find themselves in to be the boundary and not some imposed social notion of what "music" is or of what is acceptable. They want something which they can regard as theirs. 

To make music in someone else's recognizable style is to associate yourself with it and what it means, either consciously or unconsciously. Nothing exists in a vacuum of meaning for us and so there will always be links to something else, a network of relationships. So where you insert yourself in this network matters. It has meaning. Harsh Noise has a history in socio-cultural and political contexts. It is a form of music about thought, ideas and social action. For example, I have recently added a track to an album of noise makers protesting at the UK government's social policies called "These Are Those That Kill With Cuts". In addition, one person from the Harsh Noise Movement told me that the records he releases through his Bandcamp page are about "free thinking" and I think that describes it very succinctly. Harsh Noise music is not about other people's conventions. It does not bow down to someone else's idea of meaning. It makes its own.

So here we have very deliberate harsh noise and we have people who find it meaningful to listen to and to make. Are they wrong? Are any of my readers prepared to say, definitively, that these people are mistaken and that's actually not the case? I suspect not because I expect that my readers are self-aware enough to realize that meaning comes from within and not from without. We human beings are the meaning-makers. We make meaning. If we are electronic musicians like me then we make it with electronic devices. There is no such thing as a sound that has no meaning just as much as there is no such thing as a sound that is inherently meaningful (although we have been trained to regard certain sounds in certain places as having certain meaning such as a door bell, for example). Sounds are tools we use to inscribe meanings into performances and recordings. It may be the maker is the only one who understands or even hears the meaning that they put into it. But this doesn't matter. Each of us has our own network of meanings and each of us can slot any sound we hear into that network. Indeed, we don't even have a choice in this because it is going on autonomically without our express permission. We are meaning-makers and we seek meaning. We can't stop so long as we are still breathing.

So what of those who find no meaning in the bleeps and bloops, the static and the distortion? Being polite, they haven't thought it through. They are, at best, merely dressing up a preference as a fact and this is another common human trait. Its one that jars with me because I see a broader canvas for musical meaning than a trite tune that relies on melody and harmony. I remember reading recently that in the late 90s Thom Yorke of Radiohead felt a similar way. A quote I remember is that he said the very idea of writing a melody at that time simultaneously depressed him and filled him with dread. He wanted freedom from the artificial socio-cultural boundary that said "music" was a melody and that anything else was somehow not ok or out of order. He wanted to flee into abstraction and I can well understand that because I have myself fled there too. I don't want to write a tune. A tune would say nothing I want to say. A tune would just be playing someone else's game by someone else's rules. For some people their music is therapy and a means to their survival and so, in this scenario, self-expression becomes very important and if other people conventions must be confounded to do that then so be it. I feel myself in a very abstract world and so it is a matter of some importance to me that I can express myself abstractly. I imagine that the harsh noise makers haven't chosen their form of musical expression by chance either.

But is it musically meaningful? You better believe it is. Its often a matter of life and death, or so it seems.

In writing this blog I referred to some harsh noise makers. I feel it only respectful to name check their album since they kindly replied to my questions so helping me formulate the blog today. 

The album is THE DANGER OF BEING SUBJECTIVE and is by @waynerex80, @Ghost_Jazz_ and @NoizeMuzik (to use their Twitter names). The album can be listened to at https://harshnoisemovement.bandcamp.com/album/the-danger-of-being-subjective 

The other album I referred to is These Are Those That Kill With Cuts  on Sonic Entrails Records which can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. It is soon to be released as a cassette.

I Am An Atheist: So Why Do I Despise So Many Atheists?

"There is nothing more fundamentalist than those who say they know. And it doesn't really matter what they say they know either."

For many years now I have been a very unassuming kind of atheist. I do not believe in the existence of a god, of any god. I can claim to have given much thought to this subject and show you the books I have read, both historical and theological, that have explained how various people from the past have approached this question. I have theological certificates covering studies I have done in various theological schools of thought and I have assessed varying different ideas of what it might mean to believe in a god (for not all ideas of what a god is are the same). Not all atheists can say remotely the same thing that I can here. Many, especially the more vocal ones that have entered the public square in the last 25 years, would probably dismissively regard these studies as worthless nonsense. But I would beg to differ with them because even if one doesn't agree with a certain idea or set of ideas this is not to say that one cannot learn something from them or in studying why others take a different point of view. I may not believe in a god but it would be an extremely arrogant and self-regarding person who judged that, therefore, the whole subject area was pointless nonsense and its adherents all moronic fools. Sadly, many of my fellow atheists are just such arrogant and self-regarding people.

Whenever I come across a religious debate these days, most often in some serious newspaper, I turn my eyes to the now compulsory comments section. This is where the great unwashed of the public under the cloak of anonymity get to fling whatever shit the newspaper's moderators will allow at each other. Of course, in the vast majority of cases all you see are entrenched positions lined up against each other. A genuine discussion or the remarks of reflective or thoughtful people never seem to make it here. I find that a great shame. Everything becomes either agitated polemic or enraged apologetic. It is a battle of the convinced fundamentalisms. There are those who like to think (in their self-deceptive ways) that only a religionist can be a fundamentalist. But this absolutely is not so. The prominent face of public atheism is no less fundamentalist. I say this with no pride since I think it gives my side of the argument a bad name. Fundamentalism is an ugly thing wherever it is found. It is representative of that truth that 10% of conflicts are started by disagreements and 90% by tone of voice. The public tone of voice of atheism is condescending, aggressive and arrogant.

Arrogance and aggression are not promoters of understanding and this is that thing which all participants in a debate should hope to promote. People do not really learn much from shouting or even from telling people what they are certain they know. What matters about a belief, any belief, is what might recommend it to me as something I should hold as trustworthy and true. Surely those on either side of this debate would hope to convince people of their truth and thus share it? I am afraid my hope here is somewhat naive. But the truth remains that if you are too busy pounding your debating opponent with what you are utterly convinced of the truth of then you are not very likely to be very persuasive or to flick on any switches elsewhere that might lead to fruitful paths of thought. I today read a book review by a former Archbishop of Canterbury which was of a book which was trying to explain the Christian god in a more sophisticated and less simplistic way. The atheistic hordes below basically ignored his entire argument in their comments below and reacted to notions of god that neither the reviewer nor the author had expressed, choosing instead to destroy the beliefs of relative simpletons who also happened to be Christian believers. Yet, as I remarked in my own comment to this review, anyone can defeat the arguments of a moron. But only a bully would choose a moron for an opponent in the first place.

And this is what I think many modern atheists are: bullies. I'm also not entirely sure that so many of them have a right to be. Can they claim to have given the matter much thought or done any research? Have they struggled over the hard yards? It seems that for some it is just self-reflectively obvious that no god exists. Such people would throw up their hands and go "Duh!" at the very question or the notion that you might have to do any kind of work to come to such a conclusion. "Stop being dumb," they would say "of course no god exists!" However, as Rowan Williams (the aforementioned Archbishop) points out in his book review, its not really as simple as that. What a god even is or might be conceived as (the subject of the book Williams reviews) is not a simple matter nor a simplistic matter. Many atheists in the comments below the review pointed out that your bog standard religious person does not hold the high falutin views of a professor of theology or of philosophy. This is true. But in choosing the dumbest and simplest understandings of a view they do not ascribe to is it not the case that they are just rigging the debate to make sure that they win? It would be like a 100 meter runner choosing a kid to race against rather than Usain Bolt. But Usain Bolt is a 100 meter runner too. Pit yourself against him and see how you do. That, to my mind, is much more intellectually honest.

One commenter, who took umbrage at the suggestion of Williams that there was a phenomenon called "New Atheism" (this is broadly attested and refers to a marriage of the modern, materialist, scientific mind with anti-religious sentiment) wanted to know what this was. He received replies from his fellow atheists that were a mixture of snarky comments towards Christians and the promoting of a scientific agenda (people who believe in "evidence", etc.). I chipped in with my own definition though. I said that new atheists are those who "have a simplistic understanding of Being but pretend to have a complex one because they say they know". This, I think, articulated a number of things about how I see these new atheists who, in one matter, I agree with but with whom I disagree about many others. Indeed, under the article concerned I have salted about 10 comments of my own all of which start arguments with atheists and, in some measure, defend a theist position. I think this is because it articulates my belief that it is not good enough to think you are right. After all, everyone does and its the easiest thing in the world to do. For me, you have to be able to say why you are right and show your working out - just as your Mathematics teacher taught you in school. You also have to be able to account for new problems or issues arising. Belief, in this sense, is about your story and how you come to be where you are now and orientating yourself to everyone else who lives in the same world as you do, but differently. That is as important for me as what your actual conclusion is. Knowing an answer is one thing. Explaining your system and how you get to your answer is entirely another.

Of course, in order to do that you have to do the work of being able to explain yourself in the first place and many atheists, especially the kind who write in newspaper comments sections, don't appear to have done much work in this area. To hear many of them talk you would imagine that atheists with an interest in science are the only people who ever think in the first place. The rest of us are not capable of rational thought it seems. They combine an unseemly scientism with a dismissive tone and this, for my taste, is not an attractive combination. Even putting relatively straightforward questions to such people asking them to lay out their position for you is met with a snarl rather than an open and welcoming exposition of their truth. Such people regard any who do not fall in line, not just with their beliefs but their stance, as enemies. 

The other side, those who might believe in or be open to the divine, to spirits or to an unseen realm, are regarded as uniformly stupid as, for example, the person who commented below the review I have referred to above by stating that in church schools people are taught the birth narrative of Jesus Christ "as a fact". Since he, and those he thought like him, all regard this story to be a fiction and those who believe in it as dummies he found reason here to lump all Christian believers together as equal to the dumbest and most literal of believers. But this isn't true. I was myself taught at a church school where, rather than teaching the story as fact, it was in reality dissected as the biblical sources were shown to be both different and multiple. This then went into a quite mature discussion (for 14 year olds) of how religious texts come to be formed from earlier stories. What was taught was thinking not dogma. But the dogmatic atheist making his comments in a newspaper simply imagined that his intellectual foe was as dogmatic as he was. He reduced all opponents to a lowest common denominator.

My point here is that it is easy to entrench yourself and consider yourself on a side. Isn't this what the Internet is for, after all? But I find this intellectually dangerous, not least for yourself. It makes you lazy and you settle into cliched arguments. You stop thinking and start defending a position. But you should never stop thinking because you never know everything and there are always loose ends. Its also for this reason why you shouldn't merely test your beliefs against the weakest opponent you can find. I posted a reply to one commenter questioning his atheistic beliefs. He had argued that there was simply no "evidence" for a god. But I asked him what would count as evidence and I pointed out that "evidence" is a category that we decide for ourselves. It is we who even decide what counts as evidence. "Evidence" is a universally accepted category for pretty much everything but is it not also a little self-deceptive if we ourselves get to make the rules of the game? How can we know we are not finding what, somewhere deep inside, we want to find? I asked my atheist colleague more questions. I asked him how he would know what to look for when looking for a god or how he would decide if he had found it or not. I asked him if not finding any evidence meant anything other than that he had himself just not found it. I told him (and I tell you) that these are all reasonable questions to ask an atheist.

In the end, of course, I agree with even the most disreputable atheist that there are no gods. But I feel uncomfortable about this just as the Christian must do who is compared to some crusader or the conquistadors, each brutal killers and imperialists for their deity of choice. This must be how many moderate Muslims feel today being compared to violent thugs who chant slogans and wave flags. But we can ourselves not be defined by those who agree with us on some things but with whom we differ on many others. We must simply be able to articulate to ourselves and for ourselves why we believe what we believe. For me it is intellectually honest not only to question your opponents but also yourself, believing that the foundations of even the strongest house can be undermined. I also think that you can learn from anyone and often even those you never imagined you could learn anything from. If we can do that learning in a spirit of mutual humility, so much the better. For few if any learn from fundamentalists and bigots of any persuasion.

Terrorism: Know Your Enemy

It is either a brave or a stupid person who, in the current climate, would choose to write a blog about terrorism. And yet I find that I must, primarily because I see so much comment about it and so much of it seems, to me, to be either misguided, incendiary, ignorant, understandable but naive, or, often, all of these things. You may take it as read before continuing to read this blog that I am not in favor of random killings of any human beings by any other set of human beings. You may equally take it as read that I am not here to take sides as much of the media-led public would like people to do. I do not see killers and murderers of any persuasion as anything but representatives of themselves and their own beliefs. People do what they choose to do for the motivations and justifications that they themselves devise. So I am here to resist the notion that some belief system or foreign deity makes anyone do anything or that any text has mandated the deaths of innocent people. There is an ancient man who was quoted as saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone". If we follow that thinking then there should be no one around picking up any rocks.

The recent attacks in Brussels are, of course, horrible. Anyone with human empathy would feel that way I imagine. But, to me, watching the reactions coming in on social media yesterday, I couldn't help but think that many of the reactions I saw from western Europeans, who are largely those I would see the responses of, were somewhat naive. Yes, the bombings yesterday were horrible. But my mind wandered across the globe a little to the east and settled in the arab region. Some people, fueled by the incendiary and barely disguised racist thinking of those who would consider themselves nominally Christian (and almost always white), would like you to believe that an area from roughly Istanbul to Afghanistan is full of foaming at the mouth Muslim killers. This is what we see on the news, right? But, of course, this is not so. The vast majority of people here are just as normal, and as peaceful, as you or I would consider ourselves to be. They are mothers and brothers and sons and daughters. They want to feed and clothe themselves, work, get some money, build something of whatever kind of life can be made out there. In other words, no, not everyone out there is a foaming at the mouth religious extremist pledged to kill the infidels. And, what's worse, they actually get bombed and killed a whole lot more then we in the West do. I find this map instructive:

What this map shows is that in the last 15 months there have been horrific attacks in Europe and America. But relatively few (this does not lessen their horror, by the way). What this map further shows is that if you happen to be an ordinary person going about your business in northern Africa or what we may loosely term "Arabic Asia" then you are much more likely to be shot or bombed by terrorists. Indeed, there are some places in that area where I imagine this is a regular occurrence. Yesterday I read that certain politicians are saying we are "at war" with something. (I'm not sure what we are supposed to be at war with - an idea? a religion? certain individuals?) But it occurred to me that for people who just happened to be born in Sanaa or Gaza or Mogadishu or Homs - through no fault of their own - that their daily experience of life is war. They do not have the luxury of declaring themselves to be at war with anything. They are just there right slap bang in bombing central. They didn't ask for this anymore than Parisians, Londoners, Brusselaars or New Yorkers. They, too, are victims. And so this situation can never be the cartoon version that Fox News will present you, a thinly disguised version of white Christian protestants versus the filthy Arab hordes. The only fight this can ever be is between those who want to live in peace without blowing people up and those who are prepared to use violence and death to bring their ideas about. And if we use that definition it muddies up the waters considerably.

Yesterday the loudmouth troll, Katie Hopkins, a Z list celebrity from the UK famous only for the fact she is outrageously right wing for money, tweeted the following:

I don't dignify Hopkins by seeking to argue here that she stands for a certain point of view. She doesn't. She stands merely for padding out her ego with the most attention-getting thing she can think of to say. She is, if we must credit her with anything at all, merely taking sides. Of course, her notion is absurd and suggests that "refugees" and "terrorists who blow people up" are the same group of people. Yet, as I have already shown, there are many, many places in north Africa and arabian Asia where people are being even more terrorized than we are. Here a terrorist is not "someone who looks like an Arab" because there they all do. Because they all are. Hopkins, of course, does not have an argument. She is, like many, a mere sloganizer. It is remarkably easy, and remarkably simple, to see people who are not like you and who come from somewhere else and to regard them as all the same, the dangerous foreigner. In polite society we would call judging people by how they look racism but nevertheless. It takes a particular kind of mind held by particular beliefs to equate refugees fleeing their own death and destruction with people who might do the same thing to you. Has it escaped the mind of Hopkins and those who would think so shallowly about this that the really bad people, the ones who do want to kill people, might be taking advantage of their countrymen? There is a certain kind of person, and Hopkins is one, who seeks no answer to the problems of violence and also has none. They merely want to cynically prosper themselves by talking about it in bigoted terms, blissfully unaware of the disharmony and enmities that they sow or, worse, very much aware and joyfully stoking the fires of division.

(NOTE: So far, the Paris and Brussels bombers have almost entirely been EU citizens. NONE are refugees. So Hopkins is wrong as a matter of fact. If we had to label the perpetrators at all "criminals known to the police" would be the best description, not a faith or state-based description.)

So one point I want to get across here is that the terrorism we are currently enduring today is not a matter of a struggle of beliefs or of faiths or of Arabs against people with other skin colors. These are all PR agendas pushed by people with their own beliefs. If we think we are ourselves on some crusade on the side of right then we are no better than those who think they are on the other side. The thinking of both is equally flawed and in the same way. So there is no Islam versus Christianity here for neither those regarding themselves as true Muslims or those regarding themselves as true Christians can stand in for the whole of those belief systems. People do things in the name of other things. But it is all rhetorical. It is their retrospective justification for things. The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik claims to be a Christian of sorts but do we judge all Christians by his measure? No. Should we? No. But in the West we find it very easy to judge an entire faith, one we don't personally happen to hold (quite coincidentally!), based on the actions of a minuscule percentage of people who claim adherence to it. This is a double standard. Instead, we should be saying that there are people who want to kill for their own reasons, criminal, violent people, and that they are our enemy. In fact, such killers are probably everyone's enemy.

Of course, it is not the case that only Muslims have ever wanted to kill people. The historian Ned Richardson-Little, who specializes in the area of human rights and has an extensive knowledge of German history from the past century, wrote a blog recently about the Deutsche Christen which was a Nazi protestant Christian denomination in Hitler's Germany. Richardson-Little makes many salient points in his blog and also gives the example of one Ernst Biberstein, a theology student and one time pastor (just like your local priest in other words) who went on to become an Obersturmbannführer in the SS and was later charged with the responsibility for over 2,000 deaths, at least 50 of which he personally oversaw during a mass shooting in which the bodies were then pushed into a mass grave. This example serves to show only that it is not only adherents to various exotic religious beliefs who can become killers. Your common or garden Christian can too when the local village priest becomes a vicious killer. The narrative of "them and us" in which they are nothing like us is both insidious and deceptive. But what makes a terrorist a terrorist is not so easy to pin down. It is not to be equated with a faith or a race. That is simplistic in the extreme, flawed and simply wrong. Should all white Americans be judged as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma terrorist? Probably not. It was not his whiteness or Americanness that was the issue.

So what unites those who want to use violence? It is often thought that religion is the answer. The trouble with this answer is that religions are followed by many hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of which are no more violent than the granny who goes to church and serves the coffee at the end of the service. For me what unites these people is not some generalized creed but the desire to use violence. Using violence is the creed that should be being attacked and not other, more easy targets which, in the final analysis, cannot be blamed. Neither Christianity nor Islam nor any other major world belief system that I have become aware of call for mass killings. It does not say in the Bible or the Koran "Blow people up with bombs". These are the actions of individual people with their own reasons and justifications. They may seek to hide themselves under a more generalized rationale but we should not fall for their rhetoric and make it something it isn't. Terrorism is a matter of making things seem other than they really are and pulling you into some huge struggle when really it isn't. The number of actual terrorists is a small number, relatively speaking, but they wish to embroil everyone in their death fantasy and we should not let them.

It is, of course, at times like these that you have to decide who you are. You need to ask yourself what you stand for. The men of violence (on all sides) want you to sign up to their fantasies and become a fantasy warrior on the side of this or that, thinking of yourself as good or bad. I think we should not do this. We should be clear-headed and think sanely. We should realize that our enemy is not anyone who looks a certain way or comes from a certain place. We should recognize that we ourselves are not mere ciphers for a state, country, land or faith. We are all individual people with individual responsibilities. Terrorists cannot palm off responsibility for what they do to a faith or a belief system or a state or an aim. And neither can we. 

We each live the lives we do and make the choices we make and are held responsible for them as individuals. That is the way it should be. Set apart and alone, each one of us wants the same things in life. But we don't all kill someone else to get it. If we are going to live together as societies without reverting to the law of the jungle (there is a whole other discussion here about whether "the law of the jungle" ever really went away but that's not for today) then those who want to live in peace need to come together to make that so. Life is ugly and we should not imagine that everyone can survive. Frankly, some will only be stopped by killing them because they are determined to live the life of violent criminals. But that harsh reality does not mandate indiscriminate killing by anyone else. American drones aimed at terrorists that kill innumerable anonymous bystanders are not defensible in my eyes anymore than suicide bombers in airports. It will simply require serious, patient work by those in our societies tasked with protecting our peace to establish who the murderers and the people of violence are so that they can be captured or, if necessary, killed. If we can do that without perpetrating our own violent stealth war for power and resources so much the better.

None of this is easy to deal with or to discuss. World geo-politics is a complicated business. There is much more that could be said here. Perhaps, in the end, it comes down to your vision of the world. When innocents die we feel many things - numbness, rage, disorientation, bemusement - and this is normal. It is hard to see other points of view but we must unless we are ourselves simply determined to destroy anyone who thinks differently to us. Revenge or a creed of killing is no better a way of living than that of the terrorist who thinks he can get what he wants by killing a few innocents. Violence is our enemy here and those who would use it. Those who think deaths are a legitimate means to a goal are those we should be against whatever they say they believe and wherever they come from.



Ned Richardson-Little's blog on the Deutsche Christen can be referenced at:
https://historynedblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/whos-to-blame-for-aryan-jesus-some-thoughts-on-religion-atrocities-and-the-fallacy-of-collective-guilt/

Musical Conundrums and Annoyances

I recently returned to Facebook after about 5 years not using it. Before you rush to add me though please don't bother. I'm not using it as the friend adding exercise that many do. The fact is there are a number of interest groups on there which are useful to be a member of and its where other people have decided to congregate. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain. However, the problem with the mountain is that it draws all and sundry to it. The breaking news is that there are other people in the world and they don't think the same as you. Now I am, as you may have discerned from reading previous blogs here, a person who appreciates a certain measure of independent thought. However, if anywhere is going to demonstrate that there are lots of people happy to go along with "what everyone else thinks" then that place is Facebook. Nowhere is this more true than with the subject of music.

Everyone, I imagine, thinks they know what music is. Music is all around us and probably most of us hear some of it every single day. But let me ask you a question: can you define as precisely as possible exactly what music is? Have a go now. I will wait.......

Got a definition that you think works and applies to every single thing that could be called music? OK, on we go.

More than once this past week in casually reading posts in synthesizer groups on Facebook I have come across people who say "music" when what they actually mean is "melody". They speak as if "melody" and "music" are interchangeable synonyms and the issue here is that they just aren't! "Melody" is something that may or may not be present within music you are listening to. It is not equivalent with music. So when someone makes a synthesizer poll asking what people do with their modular synth and the first option is "use it musically" I start to wonder what they mean by "musically". It turns out that what they mean is "does not use it abstractly or to make random noises". Because for the poll writer this seems in his mind to be a non-musical use. For him music is equated with being a matter of melody and something all about pitch. Music, for him, is what you do when you take pitches and put them together in a deliberate and pleasing way. Is it just me that finds this both a huge misstep and an incredibly narrow definition of music? 

John Cage defined music as "the arrangement of sounds and silence" (I paraphrase) and this seems to me a much better and much fuller definition of what music is. I have taken it as my own and I hope the now dead Cage will not mind if I do so. Even that very brief definition I find to be staggeringly deep and profound. This is not just because Cage includes absence of sound in his mind-blowingly simple definition of what music is. Its also because he doesn't necessarily infer that this arrangement be deliberate and the result of the actions of a person. Music is not necessarily, within that definition, something someone writes. It could be something someone sets up the conditions for, like building an experiment and seeing what happens when you do, or the arbitrary juxtaposing of sounds, the making of a collage. (Cage did both and I have unashamedly copied him in doing so.) Imagine someone who takes a paint brush, dips it in some paint and then flicks the paint on the canvas. Now imagine a musician doing the same thing with sounds. For Cage, that is music (just as for Jackson Pollock with paint it was art.) For Cage the disinterested, fart noise making noodling of the modular synthesist unconcerned with pitch and the blowing of the wind are "music". For they are both an arrangement of sounds and silences.

This very simple and, for me, profound point seems lost on most people. I'm amazed how many people don't get it even when it is explained to them. They are stuck in a world where "music" is a tune. But its not, not simply so. Some music is tunes. Other music is textures, atmospheres, noises, noise, sounds. Cage himself once stood inside a chamber at a university which was designed to block out all sound. It was meant to be a completely silent place devoid of any noise at all. He discovered that even here he could hear the sound of his own bodily processes, his nervous system, his heart beat. Nowhere on Earth is completely silent. Sound is always with us, a symphony that never leaves us while we are awake. Cage had what I would describe as a fascination with sound and it is one of the things that I hope I have learned from him. Sound is fascinating. I am drawn to musicians who seem similarly fascinated with sound and not just, narrowly, with pitch and tunes. Another great musical area, one often overlooked, is timbre, the kind of sound that is being made. Pieces of music that focus on timbre as opposed to pitch are very interesting to me as are instruments which focus on an ability to change the timbre of a sound. This is why I like synthesizers which are in many respects made to be able to do this by design. Its why in the 40's, 50's and 60's there were people fascinated with magnetic tape. They found they could take one sound and make other, new sounds by manipulating it. Such a focus on timbre strikes me as both thoughtful and intimate. It speaks to me in ways that a tune could never do.

Whatever music is about I think that one major thing about music is its ability to convey two things: meaning and emotion. Each of us dislikes a lot of music. I think that we do that primarily because the music we dislike does not speak to us either in a way that makes any sense to us or in a way that communicates to us. We would say that it does not speak our language. Each of us approaches music differently of course. Some of us do it cerebrally and with much thought. Some of us will have technical insights into the making of music or have specific knowledge about things used to make it. But most of us are just listeners. We don't care who made it or how or with what. We just know if we like what we hear. We are all in the same position there, equals with tastes and preferences.

But have you ever thought what determines why you like what you hear? You like this piece of music but not that. Why? Doesn't it all seem a bit unexplainable and arbitrary? Isn't it the case that in the end even if you can say why you like something its not really an explanation for why you liked it in the first place? Its a retrospective justification for a decision you made somewhat instinctively. I find this both strange and fascinating. To me it seems something to do with things deep within us that sense emotion and ascribe meaning to things. For example, I like the dance track "Hideaway" by Delacy. You may know it. I don't know why I like it though. I can describe its pulsing beat and its lush pad sounds that swell but is that really an explanation? It doesn't tell you how it makes me feel. And that's the really powerful thing about it. It hits some pleasure center somewhere inside me I can't put my finger on. What I'm saying is liking music is not necessarily a rational decision. And it doesn't need to be. We humans are not rationality machines. We are bio-chemical organisms fed as much by emotion as reason. We are fed and informed as much by environment as logic. This is just one reason why it is monumentally stupid to think that you can logically depict good and bad music. Music does not admit of logical description or categorization. How you feel isn't logical and may not even be reasonable.

Thanks to the Internet I am fortunate to have some interesting conversation partners along the pathways of life. Often within passing conversations something is said which starts off a chain of thought. As someone interested in music, noise and sound I know of a few other people similarly interested and its interesting for me to observe their views on what they are doing. Recently in one conversation someone said to me that they thought most dance music was shallow, for example. Now I agree with this and I think that, for the most part, its meant to be. That is the point of dance music. (Surely the banality of what is now called "EDM" is its reason to be?) But then I went past the initial thought (something that's not always done!) and thought again. Surely the best dance music tracks actually break through that barrier? Surely the best dance music tracks are those which encompass and enshrine the meaning of a whole special moment that happened? Every time you hear this kind of dance track it in some way re-enacts that special moment and reincarnates it again for as long as it plays. The best dance music tracks, I thought, are those with that ability to bring some moment, feeling, emotion, sentiment, to life and fill it with meaning - just as the ambient, pioneering 70s electronic music it came from did. But that, to me, seems to encompass a number of things and not merely just a sugary pleasant repeating line of pitches. What makes a dance song great might well be who you heard it with and where you were as well.

In the same conversation the person concerned did not want to produce "shallow" music. Shallow, I guess, was regarded as a negative in this context but it need not be. Good musicians, musicians who think, will have purposes to what they do and will be trying to inscribe feelings and meanings into their work. Perhaps what the musician meant was that they want to feel like what they made means something. This is certainly what I have ineptly tried to do. I imagine that my music only really means what it means for me to me though. What it means for others will be up to them, who they are and where they are, literally and figuratively speaking.  The strangest songs mean the strangest things to the strangest people exactly because its a nexus of things that provide that spark of meaning in the first place. But, coming back to Cage, this is why sound itself is so interesting to me. As I write now I hear the tapping of my finger on the keys but also the faint whirr of the fan inside my computer. Outside somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of something I imagine to be a cement mixer. A car is now coming towards me and will go away again producing the Doppler Effect which is the effect produced by the change in the frequency of a sound wave relative to your own position. This is the background music to this blog. I hear it as a background symphony because I have that framework of understanding. But you may just hear it as noises or not even notice the sounds at all. What sounds are there with you now that you hadn't noticed until you actually listened?

In the last 3 months I have inadvertently made two separate projects of music. One was 4 albums long and one was 3 albums long. One concentrated on the sound of a particular synthesizer and was aiming to showcase a kind of grungy, metallic, distorted synth sound. The other was willfully and deliberately abstract, an exercise in a bricolage of textures. Both of them were focused on timbres. Pitches were irrelevant to me and I barely even paid attention to them. (Cage's statement that "disharmony is only a kind of harmony that you haven't got used to yet" ends the conversation regarding talk of "dissonance" in music as far as I'm concerned.) There are a few melodies and some tunefulness but if you listen for that you will largely be disappointed. It is my feeling that the timbre of a sound can communicate something that the pitch of a sound cannot. Does an F sharp make you feel happy whereas a B flat does not? Perhaps not. But sounds themselves, their timbres, can. You hear the sound of running water, it means something to you. People talking in a bar? It conveys a message. One of my recent tracks is a whole load of recordings of trains and the sounds they make put together as a track. This isn't an original idea but it is, I think, a powerful one. The end result sounds to me like music. It feels like an experience of sound and a journey. This, to me, is what music is. This is why I am so interested in it and why my only criterion as a musician myself is to make something that is interesting to me. Music should be interesting.

I have this crazy idea. The idea is that music should not be something that you graze, something that is entirely bent to the user's will and taste. I have the crazy idea that music should challenge, educate and inform the listener. This idea holds the hope that listeners are not just cows who want to unthinkingly chew grass for their whole lives. This idea has the hope that listeners are people who want to learn, be informed, and maybe even change. This idea is the hope that people can still be curious, can still be open to new experiences, can still be so vulnerable as to allow themselves to be challenged. It is the hope that music can be a means to communicating things, maybe even things that you don't want to be communicated. Its a crazy idea, I know. But its why the music I make is what it is. That music is my communication.

Is anybody listening? Can anybody hear?

My music is at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Something to Believe In?

I've been writing this incarnation of my blog for something over a year now. And where I used to get a handful of readers I now get about 300% more, on average. That is to say that I get three times more readers than I did at the start. Thank you very much for reading. One thing I very rarely get, though, is any comments. That's a bit of a shame but I understand and its certainly not compulsory. But occasionally I do get a comment and this blog is going to be about a comment I got to a recent blog. Since the comment was made publicly (and its still there to see in full anyway) I will quote the relevant sentences (the highlights in italics are mine) so that we are all on the same page before I begin:

We all have faith in something. Some have faith in God, some have faith in their spouse, their government, their employer, their children, their income. Without faith, what is the point of living? If I don't even have enough faith to think I will see tomorrow, why should I put any effort forth living today?

I read this comment again the other day. Of course, I was very thankful that the person concerned had made it. It is part of my understanding of the world that no person is omniscient. No person has all the answers or all the insight. Some would be extremely skeptical and say that none of us have any at all. I'm not one of those people but in my appreciation of all things human there is room for the view that we human beings are bundles of beliefs and those beliefs are situated and self-interested. One corollary of this situation is that other points of view can be informative and open our eyes to things we cannot currently see. This, indeed, is how beliefs ever change at all. Someone or something happens which opens a chink of light in an area there was no light before. And a pathway to a new belief is formed. So I was very glad of the comment. It made me think about the subject of faith and especially the two sentences I highlighted in italics, above. In many ways these three sentences get to the very heart of my own worldview. First of all, I asked myself if its really true that "We all have faith in something".

I must be honest and say that for 48 hours I've racked my brains on this one. I've been asking myself if my correspondent is right. Do I have faith in something? The correspondent gave examples - God, spouse, government, employer, children, income. I don't have most of these. I think that I have faith in none of them. But, still, there could be something that I do have faith in. My correspondent, who I respect, seems quite sure that this is the case and I want to do them the courtesy and give them the respect of thinking it through to see if they are right. My conclusion is that I don't have faith in anything but I want to be as bullet proof as I can be in saying it. If you have read any amount of my blogs, particularly the more philosophical ones, then you know that I have an affinity to existentialism, to absurdism, to some extent to nihilism. You know that I have had a great deal of thought about "the void" and the essential and fundamental problem of meaning that afflicts our species. Meaning is a problem because it is open-ended and it cannot be fixed. It is always only rhetorical. No one can force you to accept a certain meaning and it can always be re-made. Things can always be seen another way.

So what place is there for "faith" in a world that is seen like that? Faith implies both belief and trust, at least in the understanding of faith I have. I have had considerable input to my thinking from Christian sources in the past and I am well used to Christian scholarship. "Faith" is, accordingly, quite a strong word in that tradition. "Faith", for the biblical Christian, should be something to do with believing in things that cannot be seen with the eyes. It is, in some respects, believing in the impossible (that God exists, that he has acted to save creation) and trusting that, even though from some angles it seems silly and ridiculous, it is true. I do not think that every human belief comes under the category "faith". It is very trivially true that every person alive holds beliefs. It is part of our human make up to take stances and hold beliefs about the world around is. Quite simply, we cannot function as a human being without doing so. But is this "faith"? I don't think so. Its simply part of the mechanics of being a human being. I think that some people do have faith in the strong, positive, "believing and trusting" sense I use here but I don't think that I am one of them. And so my correspondent's sentence is explicitly challenged. To challenge it is to say that we don't all have faith in something. It might be worth asking yourself if you have faith in anything. And then ask yourself why and if it deserves it.

So what I'm saying here is that, yes, everybody believes things but that isn't quite faith. Some surprising people do have faith, I'm sure. I've argued many times that the seemingly anti-faith person Dr Richard Dawkins is, in fact, very much a person who does have faith. He doesn't believe in God but he is more than happy to believe in Truth (the capitalized "T" is important for it denotes a divinized concept) and in what he regards as our human truth-finding abilities. Dawkins is very much a strong anti-skeptic. He thinks that we can truly know the way things are unconditioned by our context, our humanity or anything else. I'd call that a faith and I'm sure he wouldn't like the fact. Which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. So I think that people can have faith. But I don't think everyone does. I don't think I do. I don't even have faith in myself or in the void as some kind of "nothingness that resolves all things". Some try to make of the nothingness a mystery and it takes on God-like properties. Its either a re-imagining of God or a god by the back door. I think that needs to be resisted too. The natural processes of the physical universe and their apparent lack of meaning are not a savior nor can they be turned into one. The meaninglessness and emptiness is real and thorough-going. It can't be sugar-coated.

Now in the context of my correspondent's comment my belief that I don't have faith in anything (and since I think I don't I must assume that others have this possibility too) is important. My correspondent has gone on to say that "Without faith, what is the point of living?" So, naturally, this question addresses me directly now that I have taken up a position towards the first proposition. I can only think of one answer: there is no point to living. I think its a very great assumption, one which we then work on filling in retrospectively, to think that there is a point to living. Why would there be a point? Why should there be a point, antecedently? Why could or can it not be the case that an uncaring universe birthed things and there they are, just milling about in a physical universe of decay? I don't have faith in this because why would you? To describe things as you see them is not, for me, to have faith. But I believe it for now until or unless something comes along which opens up an alternative chink of light, another pathway to follow. To say that something has a point is to ascribe it a meaning. To create a creation myth, for example, is to put things in some order and say what they mean and how they mean it. It is simply to relate things one to another which is all giving meaning to things is. We humans, and this is the really interesting thing about the universe, are self-aware, sentient beings. We need to make meaning. But we have no knowledge that anything else does. We don't know that sharks or elephants or rabbits need meaning. We don't know that stars or moons or space dust does. We don't know that the universe itself does - even though some would put up vague arguments for its sentience. We only know that we do. But how valid is it to go forcing our own necessary meanings on everything else? This is the very absurd problem of human meaning re-stated once again, part of the riddle of what it means to be human.

So I need to admit to my correspondent that I don't "have enough faith" for I don't think that I have any. And I don't see any "point" to life, save that I might give it myself. I see a universe of actions and consequences and I keep it that simple. Things happen and this makes other things happen within the possibilities of what can happen in any given situation at all. When things happen there are consequences to the actions. That's about it. I like to keep things simple and this is a guiding idea behind some approaches towards logic: the simpler answer is to be preferred. I think this is based on the observation that life is rarely needlessly complicated for its own sake. Whilst its not true to say that I think we humans can, given enough time, figure everything out for ourselves (such people do exist and some of them give this as a reason for not needing any gods), I do think that things largely are "up to us" to make of what we can. We are each given a mind and being human we have certain needs and requirements. You could say that each of us is given the riddle of figuring out who we are and why we are here and what we are supposed to do with it. This, to me, is a more meaningful suggestion than saying we all must have faith in something. I don't think that life is a matter of faith. Faith is the illusion of meaningfulness and, strictly speaking, life is not a matter of very much at all. You don't need to care, think, love or even really feel in any rigorous or meaningful sense to get through life. You are just going to live the years you are allotted anyway. No one says you have to take life seriously and there's no punishment for not doing so outside of the circumstances of the life you live (actions and consequences, remember?). Lives both good and bad end up in the same dowdy funeral parlor with a few people there, some of whom you didn't like, to see off your physical remains.

So "what is the point of living"? There isn't one if by that you mean something antecedent and overarching. But such a thing, should it exist, sounds very permanent and meaningful. But where is it to be found and why wasn't it signposted very well? If everyone's life has a point I would have expected it to be more firmly recommended to us human beings rather than being something we can totally bypass. I notice merely several, sometimes connected, alternative versions of what life might mean. But, like some flavors of ice cream, I'm not sure I like the taste. All we have left are any meanings that we ourselves ascribe to things and I guess that we all, in some way, however loosely, do something like that. But, for me, life is about getting from point A, birth, to point B, death, across the arid wastelands of the world we live in. It doesn't really matter very much which path through the brush you take. Everyone gets to point B in the end anyway. And then which path you took seems just a little bit beside the point. (Its worth saying, though, that of course this answer is different while you are still alive in the world of actions and consequences. For whilst you are still alive what you think and say and do takes part in that continuum, it has consequences for you. But dead people don't have any actions and suffer no consequences. That's the difference.)

This leaves me one question left to answer for my correspondent says "Why should I put forth any effort living today?" Of course, we need to see what is being said here as all joined up together. This thought flows from the suggestion that everyone needs faith in something. For the writer of the comment a life without faith would be meaningless and empty, I assume. I once, almost, used to think this way myself. Instead, now, I am a living, breathing example of the fact that you don't need to worry about this. A life without faith need not be empty even though to those who think you do need faith it will seem that way. But how could a person who thinks you must have faith see any other way anyway? Honest beliefs honestly held do color how people see things. That is the point of them. Beliefs denote what can even be seen. That's why we have them. They are the rails on which we run the trains of our lives. Sometimes we get pushed off into a siding. Sometimes we are full steam ahead. Sometimes we are held at a red light. But we are always on the rails of our beliefs. 

But to the question. Is life a matter of "effort"? Would a person not putting any effort into their life be committing a sin? I don't believe in any gods so I literally have no deity to sin against. But let's push this further to the boundary. What's so darned special about life and living anyway? There are trillions of things that have lived and will live. Most of them you wouldn't care less about. But, in our human way, as things get bigger or fluffier, we start to care. We want to save the fluffy or cuddly things but the ugly things, the unseen or unremarkable things, well, not so much. Life is prodigious. Its breaking out all over the place. Many would want to say it is special. This is somewhat sentimental and being sentimental isn't necessarily that smart. 150,000 people die every day and 99.999% of them you never knew. The point of living is to die. When you are dead how you lived is irrelevant. How you lived only matters while you or anyone else is alive. No, I'm not sure that life is about "effort". In fact, even reading the sentence makes me want to be lazy, to put in no effort. To just exist. I see the idea of effort as some egotistical notion, some notion that somehow I'm letting the side down because I didn't try. The idea of effort suggests there is some authority I need to impress with the sweat of my brow. But I don't see myself as being on any side. I have no one to impress or disappoint. I'm just me. I have been born, I'm living and I'm going to die. In one sense these three simple facts are entirely trivial. That's the sense I would bring to bear on this question. Life, in general, is not about effort. There is no one to impress and no standard to meet. In the same way it doesn't make any abstract sense to say it makes a difference if I live 15,000 or 25,000 days either. Life is in general. Life is not anything else in particular.

I'm listening to my album "The Gospel of Existence" as I write (quite by coincidence, I might add). This is appropriate for it expresses musically the thoughts I am writing about here. The track "Joining the Dots" is playing. The idea behind this track, and the album, was of a vast chaos that has dots in it. You can really join these dots up any way you like and make whatever picture you want - just as you can with the books you can buy with join the dots puzzles in them. Of course, in the books you are meant to join them in a certain way for there some god-like figure has determined what picture your dots shall make at the end. But is life really the same as that? I stand with those who say it isn't. Join the dots any way you like. All that is is really just a "Chaos without Consequence" in the end - to quote another title from the album. 

And in the end, of course, I see things very differently to my correspondent. I don't think that is a bad thing. I think it is a wonderful, marvelous thing. My correspondent, in caring enough to write me a reply, made me question and think about what I believed and helped me to sharpen it up. We all need this and it bothers me that very many of us don't see it. We sit there always being informed by the same views or those who we know will explicitly reinforce them. This is intellectual and personal suicide. Beliefs thrive on being questioned or opposed. They need to live and breathe and do work to be healthy. Any fool can sit in a cave and believe something unchallenged. So spare a thought for those who think differently from you. It turns out you need them, their beliefs and even their faith too.