> -----Original Message----- > From: SeanDeason C [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 11 November 2004 02:09 > To: fwdthought; [email protected] > Subject: (313) Metro Times: Detroit > > http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=6949 > > see huge Hawtin cover story. discuss.
"Hawtin recommends the tunfisch a l'nero or the wildschweinpfeffer, orders bottles of an appropriate cabernet, and rapidly begins to choose thoughts from another palette, this one sonic. He talks to Neumann about making music that, if it's done right, is devoid of directed thinking, entirely driven by impulses that can't be explained, then set free into the unknown. And then what? Richie Hawtin disappears? "It's kind of like that," Hawtin says. "There's no me there anymore. It's not important for me to control anything. There's nothing conscious about it. There's no ego in it." He closes his eyes and allows free play to make the picture clearer. "In Detroit you just play; you turn your mind off and play." Interesting words, especially when they come from a man whose last series of Detroit-based parties was known as Control." This stuff interests me, but I don't like that the aritcle makes it sound like a new groundbreaking thought, or that all DJs don't experience this in some degree, or producers (likely) even more so. It's this *immersion* that has always appealed most to me about both activities. If you follow Sartre (who I think probed this best), he'd say it's pre-reflective consciousness, and that this is what actually defines us objectively, rather than our ego. In other, much simpler terms, I like to think of it like being 'in the zone' when playing a sport, writing code, knitting, meditating or whatever. People achieve this egoless state through lots of different means, and the idea is anything but new. There's a Derek Jarman movie on Michaelangelo de Caravaggio (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090798/, called Caravaggio oddly enough) that has a chunk of it devoted to the painting where a lizard is biting his hand with the paint brush, which is meant to symbolise the moment when he steps back from the canvas, shifting from immersive to specular. I'm sure that anyone who has spent 3 or 4 hours in front of their gear or a computer working on a track knows this feeling, when your mind shifts into 'critical listener mode' rather than creator. It's not like Hawtin has discovered an enlightened mode of being or anything, he's just found something he can focus on. Given that this is the starting point for the artistic angle of this article, it feels way too overblown. Why the need for the added significance? Can't good music just be good music without dressing it up? It seems to me this article is a prime example of why throwing out lofty ideas in journalism is generally a bad idea. I mean, does anyone who's actually read Hegel think the paragraph on him in this article is that compelling, completely removed from the history of philosophy, and does anyone who hasn't read him give a sh*t? Tristan ======= http://www.phonopsia.co.uk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
