![]() Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds? Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion. Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis. Poetry sung melodically enters the imagistic field:ĭark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes. While feeling is at the forefront, essential sensation is never fully subsumed by visible feeling, they exist contemporaneously. It is instinct, between the earth and sky, band and audience and, as the phrase goes “the music that plays the band” that will cause pattern recognitions in the space that may metamorphosize from sensation to instinct (in space) to feeling – comfort, familiarity and indeed relishing of the sublime, that comes with the entrance, finally, of melody. sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one sensation to another”. Still no melody, and as soon as one seems to emerge, we have the return of the chaos, space.Īs Gilles Deleuze wrote of Francis Bacon, “there are no feelings” in space, “there are nothing but affects, that is ‘sensations’ and ‘instincts’. A pattern begins to emerge after a few minutes, perhaps a trace of a 4/4 rhythm coming from one set of trap drums penetrating a fainter 6/8 rhythm from another, the bass physically discernible as a third rhythm. Six instruments (two guitars, a bass guitar, an organ and two sets of trap drums) are tangential relations the more contradictory they sound, the more complimentary the audience finds them. We begin with formless music, “space” as it has been termed in the Grateful Dead lexicon, “whose complete semblance is accepted and imitated by painting” as Hegel points out about musical texture. ![]() Taking as my starting point a piece such as the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”, in which a simple rhythm and melody gradually decomposes, but is sometimes still discernible from one of six instruments, for upwards of twenty minutes. I argue that improvisation is not merely utopian, but at its best, it is the sound of revolution. This is the proverbial “cold stream” of music appreciation, a satisfying exercise but more Apollonian than Dionysian. The other “way of listening”, the one I am proposing here, is a utopian “warm stream” appreciation of improvisation in music. In learning how to listen to music, one is often implicitly taught to predict where a song would go. ![]() It is music played together with the audience as active participant by its mere presence. It is my contention that there is a utopian quality in improvised music, that is to say, music that is ‘written on the spot’, or performed live - primarily jazz, rock and bluegrass music. Like the hidden erotica on a Camel cigarette pack, utopian impulses cannot be unseen – or unheard, its mark indelible like ink that will never wash away. Yet, like a mole burrowing away, utopia can be found in the strangest of places, which once apparent become obvious. More properly, the dream of utopia is a dream we cannot categorize according to the binary of nightmare and “sunshine daydream”. Not always a “good dream”, it can just as well be a nightmare. The dream of utopia is difficult to find. Part I: The Ecstatic Configuration and the Dream of Utopia
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