| Geert Lovink on Sat, 30 Jan 1999 12:05:13 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| <nettime> radio essay |
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:42:19 +0100 From: [email protected] (Bart Plantenga) 1.Radio & Aural Destabilization Exploring the Disorienting & Inspiring Openness I had a radio show on pirate Radio Patapoe that used to be located in the Silo, a giant fortress-like, reinhabited and now again deinhabited granary silo, squatted by artists and punks. It housed studios, a cafe, performance space, a radio station, and still looms Medieval and ominous along the River Ij in an industrial strip in Amsterdam's north. [It's now in the latter stages of being renovated/colonized.] Enter the metal door and you climb 5 flights up rickety, rusty, taped-up steps in the musty cavernous shaft. I think ofVertigo's belltower scenes - David Toop thinks "metal phase echoes of footsteps moving along an alleyway, wind in drainpipes..." Unlock the padlock, enter the studio, notice every horizontal surface is covered with beer bottles, empty dolmens that mark the passage of (festive) times experienced here. 2. Radio & Aural Destabilization Sub-Para-Dubabolical Vibe is slang for the invisible emanations of feeling that operate between receptive souls. Vibration is the emotional, physical and acoustical agitation of stagnant space by aesthetics, passion, jazz, dub; the amplitude of emotion that sits atop every bass string, trumpet valve, and looped rhythm. As Joscelyn Godwin described it in her "Speculative Music": "The whole universe is in a state of vibration; in fact it is a fair speculative position ... that it is nothing but vibration. There is an unbroken continuum of vibrations running from the infinitely large and slow to the infinitely fast and small ... Approached in this way, our perception of sound becomes something of cosmic significance for us ..." Humans are genetically predisposed to seek out transcendence - or kill a boring Friday night. People continue to chew, snort, smoke, inject, beat or blow almost everything, be it extracted from nature or the lab, to get into some beyond. 3. Radio & Aural Destabilization "A broad drape of sound that seems to hypertrophy the slowness of the tempo into an almost immobile song." * Philipe Carles Wreck This Mess: Remissions 1: Compilation I saw Dub Syndicate in NY where the speakers emitted deep, swelling subterranean tremors - dilated, diffuse, insistent like a heavy train rumbling through a dense fog, into the cauldron of the solar plexus until finally - vertigo, awe, breathlessness - somewhere between hangover and rite of passage; my partner was mugged by the music; it pressed consciousness from her body. There she lay, puddle of pretty unconsciousness at my feet. Further into the evening, mate in full upright revival, a young man dancing, suddenly withered and collapsed and then a taffy-legged woman wilted away, eyes lost in her forehead. Dub causes wax to dislodge from the innermost portions of our tympanic nerves - fomenting disorientation, derationalized music, blurring - sound begins residing both forward and back, as well as inside one's head (head as drum) where sound can wreak its havoc, invoke boundlessness, alter relationships to body, environment, desire, and linear time. Woofers begin to fibrilate, shred like paper flowers, let go of all moorings and we realize speakers (like our minds' ears) were not designed to accommodate such sonic tremors. 4. Radio & Aural Destabilization "To drink wine in secret & not get caught, to accept the rules in order to break them & thus attain the spiritual lift ... of danger & adventure, the private epiphany of overcoming all interior police while tricking all outward authority." * TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey Radio: The Secret Pleasure Ground [Early Draft] Covert: Radio is everywhere - and nowhere to be seen. The more obviously omnipresent, the more absent. It oozes into shopping-dining-loving and yet seldom can we recall any one moment, any one name or location on the glowing dial. If you want to lose track of something, live with it day and night. The more into absence radio seems to retreat, the freer it becomes. The freer it becomes, the more that freedom needs to be addressed, extrapolated and nurtured in secrecy to realize the pre-commercial ideals of radio - (pre-1940) radio was intended as interpersonal communication, radiowave email if you will. bart plantenga Mailing: Westerdoksdijk 24 1013 AE Amsterdam the Netherlands tel: 020 6705965 email: [email protected] homepage: http://wfmu.org/~bart autonomedia catalog: http://www.autonomedia.org --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: [email protected]