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“Performance of music for me is a spiritual experience. I didn’t exactly realize that that was what it was when I was a little boy and first began to perform music. But, in Indian musical theory, they conceive of two kinds of sound. Actually, it’s best to think of it as two kinds of vibration: the struck sound, that is the sound that we can hear and feel manifest physically; and the unstruck sound, which is the Pythagorean equivalent of the music of the spheres. The unstruck sound is considered to be vibrations of the ether. We can think of this
as vibrations on an atomic level. We can think of it as vibrations on any level. The unstruck sound, we are told, is Anahata Nada. Nada means sound. Actually, it translates very well as vibration. Anahata Nada is the unstruck sound. Ahata Nada is the struck sound, this is music that we can experience as vibrations of air molecules, water molecules…

We’re told that Anahata Nada, the unstruck sound, the unstruck vibrations, are actually a concept in the mind of God, that these unstruck vibrations are like an abstract mathematical concept in the mind of God. Yogis practice bringing their energy up, the kundalini energy, through the chakras up to the fifth chakra in the voice area, the sixth chakra up here in the forehead, and the seventh chakra in the back of the top of the head.

Sound, music, the study of raga, Indian classical music, is considered a form of yoga, the fifth form of yoga. And it can be practiced in such a way that it’s a meditation. And it’s a way to find union with God. Yogis practice a discipline, nada-yogis practice a discipline where they bring the energy up and listen to the sound inside their heads, the sound of the sixth and seventh chakras, and this is a preparatory exercise for finding a way out through the top of your head to meditate on the music of the spheres, the unstruck sound, the Anahata Nada. And the Anahata Nada is a concept in the mind of God, so when you go out and find that place, you’re actually inside the mind of God. And we can think of music as the language of God, all music. Now, what we speak in this language becomes interesting. We can say that folk music, popular music, rock, rap, it’s all the language of God.”

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La Monte Young
extracted from “La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House in conversation with Frank J. Oteri”
August 2003

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You have come here, you must think about minimalism. Be it the minimalism of “rich” kinds of “idea”-based, “abstract” experiments, or the “poor” minimalism of reduced sounddesign,abstractions of substraction. You clicked, somebody delivered. Whatever happened, thoughts of minimalism, of reduced interfaces, reduction of input or musical preferences will have led you to “clicks & cuts”. And with it you will be introduced to a new differenciation of your concept of the minimalist nation. The digital routing of ideas based on sound, it´s flaws, delicacies, it´s enlightnement, and it´s value for the times to come. It´s clicks & cuts. And as you guessed, it clicks and cuts.

Remember the days when all was easy? When a new sound created a soundgeneration every couple of months, and progression was not and internal quality of electronic music, but it´s driving force? The days when compilations such as “Bleeps & Clonks” suggested that it only takes an exclusive snippet of reality, a buzzword that rings true to the technogeneration, cause it reflects their life, to construct a new world. Times when a new genre wasn´t just a sub-something of a sub-something, but fact? Well, stop remembering, these days have arrived once again, and they have changed.

As the sphere of electronics no longer belongs to the realm of transistors, translations of incompatible speech of cryptic protocols, midi, sync and such, to the originality of the “machine”, but is imbedded in a wider range of calculated reality, simulated, emulated and otherwise constructed picturing the desires of a digital residue generation, there are new collisions of man, data & machine, new collaborations, but before all, a new basis of working together, and it´s first elements are clicks & cuts. It is the Cut-Copy-Paste-Funk of the most unessentialist sounds ever, the clicks, the movements from one to zero made audible to and from a computermusicgeneration, that finds a new entente to be the departure of all relevance for the century to come. Clicks no longer are a part of what can be imagined as a cultural process, they are it´s value, it´s measuring, it´s money, rules, laws, content, communication and whatever transaction media give way to. Clicks are where the good old words, ideas, the symbolic realm translates into action on the two sides of an interface, where fragmented cuts start circulating in ways “Clicks & Cuts” is trying to accomodate you to. To make you feel at home, in a place heard of, but yet unknown, fascinating in it´s ability to change perception of processes and processes of perception and what will be.

“Clicks & Cuts” is an introduction to the functioning of 21st century minimalism, the collection of schools of sound to come, and schools of life to follow. And it sounds first of all promising.

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Sascha Kösch
Clicks + Cuts [compilation 2xcd] [liner notes]
Mille Plateaux [MP 079]
Germany, January 2000

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Minimalismo

La música minimalista es una categoría extendida y diversificada que incluye, por definición, toda la música que funcione a partir de materiales limitados o mínimos; las obras que utilizan solamente algunas notas, solamente algunas palabras, o bien las obras escritas para instrumentos muy limitados, como címbalos antiguos, ruedas de bicicleta o vasos de güisqui. Ello incluye las obras que sostienen un simple gruñido electrónico durante largo rato. Las obras exclusivamente constituidas de grabaciones de ríos o cursos de agua. Las obras que evolucionan en ciclos sin fin. Las obras que instalan un muro estático de sonidos de saxofón. Las obras que implican un largo lapso de tiempo para evolucionar de un tipo de música a otro. Las obras que abarcan todas las alturas posibles a condición de que estén comprendidas entre do y re. Las obras que reducen el tempo hasta dos o tres notas por minuto.

Quizás las formas mas antiguas de minimalismo o de reductivismo son en realidad de artistas visuales como Malevitch y de otros adeptos al suprematismo en Rusia y en Polonia, o bien de Mondrian, que trabajó algunos años más tarde en Holanda, con un mínimo de colores y de formas. O incluso de la escuela de minimalismo en la escultura, que , en el curso de los años cincuenta en Nueva York, usa las formas simples de cuadrados y cubos. Artistas como Sol LeWitt y Carl André pertenecen a esta corriente.

Las Vejaciones de Erik Satie, con sus 840 repeticiones, y la pieza silente de John Cage, 4′33″, constituyen dos primeros ejemplos musicales, a pesar de que este punto de vista no fue extensamente adoptado hasta los años 60 y 70, cuando puede ser observado en numerosos lugares, con la influencia clara de las artes visuales. Los bordones del americano La Monte Young, la serie de Presque rien del compositor francés Luc Ferrari, los motivos repetidos del americano Terry Riley, las texturas diatónicas simples del estonio Arvo Pärt, las composiciones estáticas del compositor polaco Tomasz Sikorski y los cánones rigurosamente circulares del húngaro Làszlo Sàry no son más que algunos algunos ejemplos de la producción de numerosos compositores que han escogido desde esta época explorar el microcosmos en vez del macrocosmos.

Ciertos autores han escrito “minimalismo” con una M mayúscula, y han declarado que es la invención de un compositor en particular, de una escuela o de una nacionalidad, pero el término deberá ser considerado como una categoría general, como la “multimedia” o la “música por ordenador”, más que como un estilo específico.

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Tom Johnson (del Vocabulaire de la musique contemporaine p. 91, editado por Minerve en 1992, ISBN: 2-86931-058-7)
[http://www.editions75.com/]

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Eco-phenomenology is a new field in philosophy that advances awareness for all that occurs in the interface between a living ecology and human experiences of it. Through eco-phenomenological studies, we can explore the world as infinitely more subtle, complex, and dynamic than any that could be manmade. We can also recognize that its wellbeing is presently in the hands of human beings all too dimly conscious of it.

In a wireless age, a number of potent, eco-phenomenological questions immediately come to the fore. As we use personalized, wireless technologies—cell phones, laptops, iPods—what is happening to our attention? How aware are we of skating along the surfaces of others’ voices, photos, and texts, and responding to them in kind with surfaces of our own? How aware are we of interactions stripped down, bereft of the sensory cues that occur in the presence of one another? What does this mean to our feelings for another person and to our feelings of self? Do other persons’ needs—and, indeed, whole ecologies’—grow less perceptible to us and our responses to them more arbitrary? What does this mean in a world that is already fiercely competitive and privileges the human over the other-than-human?

Is a robust ethical life tied to the full repertoire of being in a sensing, feeling body that locates itself in a place among other sensing, feeling bodies? Does the horizon of ethical potential open before us as we learn to dwell in a living world?
How is personal choice—freedom of choice—tied to our lived bodies and lived experiences in ways that are made observable for the first time through uses of wireless technologies?

By studying such experiences in a wireless age, it is possible to advance eco-phenomenological insights that would not have occurred to us otherwise. It becomes possible to leave inquiries and return to people, places, nightskies and sunrises, with new eyes, ears, whole-bodied and alert, with a deepened understanding of how and why such encounters matter.

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Institute for Inquiry : Eco-Phenomenology

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