Monday, June 19, 2017

How To Incite Social Change By Purely Sonic Means

it is not accidental that "culture" has a double meaning: for works of art aswell as for a society, a civilization as a whole (as in: the egypt culture, the roman culture). farming, a millstone are techniques of culture; but a painting of a field or a windmill is "culture" too! the truth is that in any part of culture, the whole of culture is recreated. in a military society, the stories, poems will be about war. a seafaring nation will have fairytales and epics about the ocean; and so on. but this not a onesided transmission; the works of art shape and recreate the society at large too. therefore; changing the art of a society will inevitably change this society too. this is the reason dictators and oppressors always hated the free expression of art; and often feared it more than armed rebels and resistance.
so, let us look at music. every song is a model of the culture it was created in at large. by changing this model you give an impulse to change society at large. the question is: what is represented by what in the song, and exactly what is to be changed. this is, at first, a tough question. for example, the high frequencies of noise music have an unnerving, exciting, insurrectionary aspect. but the high frequencies of pop can transport the uneasiness that makes people cling to the promises of false "security" by the autocrats. the distorted midranges of rocknroll transport raw emotion that can fuel uprisings. yet the distorted midrange of nazirock supports primitive "urges" that fuel fascism. the pounding rhythm of early techno made you get going and get active; the monotonous rhythm of later techno makes you walk "the straight path" of society without diverging from it, in a monotonous fashion.
but there is one thing that is the key factor in insurrectionary music. it is song structure. it is no wonder that the most political decades of the 20th century, the 60s and 70s, gave rise to the most complicated song structures since classical music, in genres like psychedelic rock, progressive rock or krautrock. it is the one thing that defines all. the society which defines every aspect of life in a hierarchic way has pop music in which the whole structure is predefined. verse, middle 8, chorus... it's all the same in hundreds, in millions of songs. the structure of 99% of songs is so predictable, formatted, defined by rules, "by the book" that it takes all fun, all life - all revolution out of it. the first thing that happened when genres such as techno, house, drumnbass sold out was that all songs started to get similiar in structure (compare the ongoing beat and structure changes in early jungle to the monotonic "DJ friendly" later drumnbass tracks).
so, experiment in structure; combine silent with loud parts, flick through whole genres in a single track, morph frequency ranges. find every way to break up a solid and fixed structure. find the written and unwritten rules that define the structures of pop and other music in western culture, and break them, get rid of them. especially speed changes seem important to me; that's something that has nearly disappeared from music and is something that upsets the pop hierarchists the most. i cannot strain the urgency of that.
this way, you can create sonic pieces, that will have a revolutionary effect on society at large!

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Table Of Contents

this is my first book on anarchism. in it i try to explore various topics, politics, art (especially music) and philosophy. my intent is to...