Tom Blog – Page 2

yellow road

yellow road again
he must go into river

yellow road again
he must go it’s his time

I saw him looking back and smiling

https://soundcloud.com/kefny/yello-road-92/s-tdCTgVfBzlr?si=53d69a5a97d24b83bcbdc0b6890b1159&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Improvisation with melodica, contact microphone and voice.

Trying a new set up using my melodica and recording my voice. Lots of delay helps build up intensity. Do I need to rely on this? I like delay.

Reflecting an urgent desire to build a new live performance and share more vulnerability. I want to medium of my performance to reflect the values of the music. Which requires presence and submitting. Live textures, voice, mistake. I am learning to sing and it is becoming a therapeutic practice.

It moved in a direction yesterday when I used the melodica to form a drone. This is very exciting. A single tone drone, or chordal drone, creates a strong vertical presence, in which I can make other sounds meander in and out. This feels like a turn away from my music project Boy Lucid, which majorly relies on horizontal story telling. I need to move towards a non-linear looping improvisation mode to feel grounded by my practice, rather than unhinged from the feet all the way up by repeated listening to printed sound.

The contact microphone acts as a tiny percussive instrument. Rubbing my finger against it sounds like walking. So many new conceptual pathways open up in this potential method of performance.

Field recording is a going out, experiencing, playing back: repeating this experience in a new form to build worlds. Optimistically it could be a collaboration. Darker notes swim beneath. I feel strongly this pull towards connective experiences with my environment. It feels important to practice my awareness for connection: a daily practice and dedication to arriving into the body and the sensations. To practice outward gazing, imagining beyond the desire to suffer in the self. I will risk pointing a direction for this music: to act as a space of grounding, slowing, grieving, observing beautiful worlds. We often don’t make time for this. I’m wondering, how much do I need to guide these practices, such as creating formal activities of walking, and witnessing that I may channel into my music?

Imagining beyond the end of progress; beyond the sublime virtuality that pretends an exit map. Back to the dirty ruins!

out of liberation into the thick

Herbert Marcuse said “The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalizatlon of man.”

The distance between us. The human stumbles in the inevitable journey of our transformation. Our virtual technology has created a personal space for our liberation, and yet in it we are constantly exposed to otherness and carried in a rush away from the historical self, into a new kind of forgetting.

So it’s both the extreme self held tightly by accelerated rhythyms, reflections and voices of it’s own perceptual bubble. And a disembodied self; a removal from our historical flesh bag of emotions and memories.

I’m going to drink rosemary everyday and walk to remember. In the morning I will dedicate a moment to the unknown kin that will tickle my wings. And in the evening I will leak out these interactions into the form of music.

Listening, observing without judgement, staying with my own trouble, refusing to engage in the accelerated infosphere, yet I am part of that sphere, partly born from it. It’s so yummy and it’s comfortable to hang out in virtual space. Yet it’s so intense that I lose contingency, so my music gets shit.

What is solitude in relation to the current mass social media?

I want to paint this stumbling, this awkardness, of a longing to disengage, alongside a longing to connect. This is about a planet but us being on the planet. And also, a longing to engage, as the artist, a longing to share visions.

How do we practice this disengagement? Is the other further now, as we lie cosy in our perceptual bubbles, or is that the human condition?

How can music propose these questions, of the tensions within (dis)engagement? A new kind of failure, the failure to interact, the need for retreat, not into a glorious shining presence, but into the mediocrity of the thick.

Bad Gays

Final notes on “The Queer Art of Failure”

Halberstam’s chapter “Homosexuality and Fascism” takes a new turn in the book’s unpicking of the constructed categories of failure. In previous chapters the queer position is found outside of the paradigms of success wrote by the dull heteronormatives. This chapter opens a wider pool of participants of the writings of our grand narratives: gays too, are complicit in constructing histories that may reduce the dynamic multiplicity of relations between politics and sexuality. This sweet reduction gives the queer an uninterrupted position of positive victimhood. Discussing the relations between queers and fascist movements, particulary the nazi party in Germany, Halberstam shows how activists from around the world have overlooked evidence of gay participation in fascist regimes, while increasing the number of gay men killed in concentration camps. Gay activist Harvey Milk famously stated that 300,000 queers were killed in gas chambers. In reality they were imprisoned and tortured in these camps, but not murdered.

Why could this be bad? Filmmaker Stuart marshall reveals the dangers of reductionist identity politics, and in doing so suggests how helpful it can be in our movements towards liberation. “Lost in the analogy are all those aspects of difference and subjectivity that identity politics subordinates and suppresses precisely to enure polticial solidarity and action. This has, on a subtle level, far reaching and political consequences.”

So in forming a politics of identity that amplifies the victimhood of queer people, we carve a space out for ourselves. We deserve space! Who’s left behind? Halberstam’s discussion of homosexuality and fascism inevitably points towards the tensions between popular queer political movements in the West and struggles of racialisation, colonialism and xenophobia. Promoting the “good gays” by removing complex historical links between gays and fascism makes it hard to discuss the fact that some white gays are rascist, for example. Or in a structural sense, how the “sucessful liberation” of the white gay male in certain countries means a welcoming of that identity into forms of nationalism and the nuclear family that lean in to ideas of racial supremacy. Halberstam’s promotion of failure, then, sees the pitfalls in a politics of liberation that depend and cling on to certain narratives of success.

How can we reclaim these aspects of difference and subjectivity that Marshall calls for, while participating in collective dialogue and movement that aims to tackle social inequality?

More farts

more notes from chapters “The Queer Art of Failure” and “Shadow Feminisms” from “The Queer Art of Failure” by Judith Halberstam

Is there an end to failure?

Halberstam reveals the Western imperialist’s notions of success and futurity as foundational to our progressive politics. Surprise! “Progress”ive

I am inspired by their call for a passive unbeing of one’s identity. Not to become woman, queer etc to liberate oneself into the platform of visibility and normativity. Is the place of secrecy, invisibility and negativity not a place of opportunity, to act free from contraints of one’s progressive category, or the pressures of progress and success that form our politics of resistance?

Yet, winning is important too. Let’s say a Renter’s Union won a rent cap in their local area. That would require action. Action is also inevitable in our survival as a material cloud of needs. What needs, queer theory suggests? There is a possible tension between the disembodied politics of queer theory and the ecological stuff of consumption etc. Halberstam may be pushing a politics for failure beyond its function for a seductive theory book. I love it though. There is not a theorist who tames their vision.

Farty Queer

Failure, art, queer

Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam

Notes from Chapter 2, “Dude, where’s my phallus?

Learning always requires forgetting. A loop of input and output into the house of knowledge.

Discussing queer time and queer forgetting as a method of rebuilding social structures beyond heterosexual fantasies of reproduction incribed into the nuclear family unit. Halberstam does not criticise the nuclear family but criticizes the structure of family itself, suggesting we move beyond this “knowing” of the family unit to a queer diversity of relations, households and partnerships. Halberstam suggests that LGBT activism fighting for marriage “equality” is driven by a desire to organise and regulate the disordliness of queer cultures.

Can we promote and magnify this freedom of the queer experience, that is forced to unidentify with a rigid structure of social relations set out for the successful heteros?

Empathy and love for the oppressed heterosexual? Also be brave and stop being hetero 🙂

Nonmovement of everyday life

Final notes on Brandon La Belle’s “Sonic Agency”.

La Belle’s last chapter of his book, titled “The Weak”.

La Belle is outlining a politics of vulnerability and weakness, a “passionate politics” (hooks) held in spaces where our deep longings and desires are shared as a process of building community. Relating to bell hook’s work on critical education, the classroom represents this potential space to carry and educate methods of collectivising. Rather than an imposition of determined knowledge, a classroom of “enagaged pedagogy” becomes a space enriched with “the commonality of feeling”, an embodied present reflecting the thickness of social tensions and connections of everyday life. Through feeling together, the subjectivity of knowledge is displayed through living bodies. hooks’ classroom is a space in continuous flux, shifting with the present moods and dynamics of the students and teachers. The engaged classroom reflects a politics free from the subtractive qualities of the “campaign”: instead as fluid as the “nonmovements of everyday life”.

Back to La Belle’s words, these places of learning can function as “shared spaces of (erotic) becoming, sites of desire and longing, bridges between private and public life.”

La Belle’s expanding view of agency goes beyond, or before politics. He echoes Herbert Marcuse’s call for an “emergence of a new historical subject”, calling for a political subjectivity beyond ideology, a transformation of the self that goes “against the prevailing technological reasoning of our times. It is this technological reasoning of ideology that La Belle claims to reduce “the creativity of our speech, to an overarching functionality, restricting the full dimensionality of discourse.” (pg 133).

This possibility of self-transformation opens an expanding view of political subjectivity, one that is “expressed not solely in gestures of speaking up, or in rational formations of energetic attunement, ecstatic togetherness, and affective intervention – vibrational formations in which the personal is deepy political and the political is something to be shared.”

La Belle is outlining a potential bridge between the fuzzy realms of the spiritual and the rationalism of politics, that to be together as a “vibrational formation”, connecting as much through non-verbal energetic becoming as speech and ideology, is a continued expression of our political subjectivity. In this framework, subjectivity does not start and end with a ‘campaign’, but is continously emerging from our embodied interactions as individuals or collectives. Connection, joy and togetherness are seen as powerful political actions against systems that rank, divide, and alienate individuals. Perhaps to avoid the rationalisation of these ecstatic human qualities of togetherness, La Belle makes a claim for this subjectivity to be “beyond the purely political”, and refers to Václav Havel’s term the “pre-politcal”, which he describes as the “fundamental responsibility of a life lived with others, that overrides party politics.”

“in being weak, one is in need of others.”

unlearning

unlearning great

dislearning womp womp

dislearning, dis-connected to a knowing. unlearning not a return, recognising trapped energies.

there is a possibility of our dislearning, as our tools provide a constantly higher leaning away from the troublesome heart which coats the knowing. the painful heart throbs and now we can leap away in a constant flow of external spaces, virtual spaces, a stimulation peaking beyond the threshold of a sensory whole.

how to make a statement about the collective shifts from an individual perspective?

Radio Project Pilot

The W401 is booked for a pilot of the radio show, next Thursday 7th, 5-6/7pm.

So far we don’t have a title or a clear structure of the first show. The time pressure is good so we can focus on quantity over quality. Quantity means more collaboration, and this process is more valuable to me than the product of a “high quality” listening experience.

The pilot will consist of me presenting and playing an interview. I hope this interview will be in relation to the cleaners strike which is starting tomorrow. Pedro will also be curating a submissions slot, for artists to send sound work to be played on the show. We are hoping that other groups will get involved to fill in more time.

Ben is hoping to explore streaming options so that we can create a website link and not rely on a large streaming service. We are seeing if we can use the uni’s IP address to livestream with, in a way “squatting the network”.

Idiot prayer

Beginning sketches of my second creative project, a music project, working title “Idiot Prayer”. Main compositional element: melody. Melody writing is a sonic practice as sound is a medium for sharing melody. One of my EPs uses melody to represent ecological entanglement. https://soundcloud.com/wesurf/boy-lucid-dreams-on-foothill

La la la

prayer: “an earnest hope or wish.”

prayer as repetition, the simple limited idiot mind forgets it’s values. needs a practice. music can function as a prayer, an acoustic latching into a nuanced set of values, inexplicable through text.

being an idiot, being “authentic”, meaning communicating in one’s own way, slowing down the rapid communication networks or simply avoiding them ;).

“Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other. Idiotism discloses a field of immanence of events and singularities for thought; this field eludes
subjectivation and psychologisation altogether.” Byung-Chul Han

theories and research: idiotism by Byung-Chul Han, Deleuzian concepts of “being animal” & a body without organs, queer existential psychotherapy (fear, becoming, trauma), non-linear time, indigenous knowledge production, decolonising academia.

holes: prayer is often seen as a religious practice. how have I been forced into a prayer practice? in primary school we sounded prayer every morning, and went to mass on special occasions, but my parents never forced me to engage with religous beliefs. what is my agency to use this word? perhaps the dangers of idiotism is a lack of self-reflection.

my personal experiences of religion: growing up in rural (post-)catholic ireland, living in a western tibetan buddhist centre in 2018. and personal interests: agnostic buddhism (stephen bachelor), zen poetry as a spiritual & musical practice (japanese poets issa, basho). reconstruction of celtic folklore? as in my last project using Gaelic songs for electronic composition. deconstruction of catholic songs I had to sing outside of tesco to make money for our school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCN1W_Re34s&ab_channel=Alive-OSongMemories put a beat on it! DJ oatcore. but mostly, imagining the possibility of prayer outside of institutionalised belief systems and even collective beliefs, as singular expression, music.

lala la with beats. Also inspired by transition of draingang members Bladee and Ecco2K”s musicking towards promotion of spiritual values, love etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FewUrsr9XaQ&ab_channel=Bladee-Topic and Arthur Russel’s engagement with popular music, bringing together the experimental values of avant garde culture of 70s downtown New York, and the potency of rhythym, melody and the general accessibility of popular music forms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O92UBBaiI4&ab_channel=AshleyPaul

reasons: feeling limited by critical theory, I need a magical fun outlet. My younger self found electronic composition as a therapeutic outlet which has become a fundamental practice in my life. I’ve been releasing music alongside my studies, creating worlds and spreading ideas with melody. I have not been able to engage this practice within the culture of sound art.

Recently a lecturer said in class that Sound Art is more “cerebral” than music, because it “takes more research to create” and “anyone can put their fingers on a keyboard and make it sound ‘nice'”. Perhaps they had an intention to aggravate rather than make a point, but no one responded. Can we expand research beyond linguistic keyboard tapping and militant academic reading to walking, sensuality, friendships, listening, freaking out, falling over, farting, the whole spiritual voyage of being a concious flesh balloon etc. Perhaps music also takes an incredible amount of research! I know in my compositional practice I translate my life experiences into music. We deserve to validate our way of telling stories. Does sound Art culture reflects avant garde music’s distaste towards popular music composition?

What I could do with my second creative project is to analyse and problematise the distain towards melody and popular music forms in the ‘Sound Arts’ culture (western SA, or beyond?). But also I want to diverge from rational critical theory toward other ways of telling stories, and protect my music lalaing from having to contextualise it to prove its “cerebreality”. Academia says, Yes! Critique me, but you must use my tools to make a critique. It’s a trap! Whats the hack?

Oppression Conciousness

First notes on “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paolo Freire. Freire leans heavily on a binary of opressed/oppressor to explain his theories of domination. I do appreciate his usage of terms like “humanism” and love. However, in doing so is Freire relying on an essentialism to promote political action? To preserve or create more humanity, we must fight domination. The increasing of humanity is the ontological vocation of the human. This is almost Christian, I’m sure it’s ripe with problems? But also lovingly radical.

Friere interestingly brings in the concept of the oppressed’s attraction to the oppressor. He says there exists a necrophiliac attraction to death (the deadness of property and objects) in the oppressor conciousness. The oppressed somehow adopt this mindset in their own desires, since the oppressor’s lifestyle falsely symbolises the exit to their own oppression. Freire reveals the OTHER way, outside of wheels of domination: a restoration of humanity for those involved in a situation. He does suggest that violence may be a way to get there, since an act of rebellion can initiate love. While Freire promotes the resoration of humanity for both the opressed and the opressor (who lose their humanity intheir acts of domination), he makes it clear that the violence of the former is very different to the latter: the violence of the oppressed cannot be deemed as a reduction of humanity, since it is in reaction to and to liberate from an act of violence already in place in a situation. Freire is lit!

For radio project: ontological liberation, through reclaiming our spaces we inhabit, to recognise our capacities to act and change a situation, to become involved! restoration of humanity/love: something to remember if modes of spreading awareness need to become more loud/vi0l3nt. The radio project could manifest a sort of self-learning pedagogy through action, with a delicate soft promotion of horizontal learning to tackle inevitable dynamics of domination in a group.