Impurity Musicians of la musique concrete in its later years, or rather, electronic musicians, sample the free jazz, sample student demonstrations, sample cowbells and pigeon whistles, sample speeches… in short they sample everything, wash them, pare them, and throw them into a pan with onion and ginger. These impurities of meaning are enough to destroy the closed space of Absolute Listening, as the other shore of idealism will collapse because of a piece of garbage under one’s feet. In fact, Absolute Listening and meaninglessness have collapsed; they are surrounded, absorbed by systems of abundant meanings. Being scattered in the dump of the earth, today’s music doesn’t have “the other shore”. Take the minute details of a note, enlarge it, and you will get noises, grains and matter. Viewed from a distance, the note is surrounded by noises: in the past thousands of years, mankind invented melody as the ocean clashed out a few bubbles from chaos. After this thought, let’s go back to the human world, now melody sounds different, giving rise to a feeling both familiar and strange. For any language, the abolition of all meanings is a theoretical dream, which can be observed from inside and outside of the language. But even the inside and the outside are presented by the language. Or better, they must be presented by the language itself. As an improviser needs to be present, to present his ordinariness, his not-handsome, his finiteness… Language cannot be free unless it deconstructs itself. In other words, language cannot be set free from rigid thought unless it obtains the Destructive Character. Language is hired to manipulate people, like philter spilled on to a score. And it will get tired of this, thus want to stop equating a symbol to another, to show its own texture, temperature and weight. In the recordings of classic Qin masters, it is the impurities from the left hand’s rubbing on the strings that are most fascinating. And in the recordings of those rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, the most powerful moment is when the monks sneak a moment to cough and then return to the mysterious power in murmuring. The amazement of playing music and reciting scriptures consist of the fact that a new world has been conjured up. But what is more amazing is: between the new world and the old vulgar one, there’s no significant difference, and you can come and go as you like. It is because they are two faces of the same undivided world
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 10:59:19 +0000
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