Sunday 17 February 2008

The music is you 3

Further to yesterday's posts, this extracted from the artist Mike Kelley's Destroy All Monsters box set liner notes:

"Giorgio Morodor was God and Donna Summer his feminine voice, a voice that only feels the need to speak in orgasms. The first time I heard "I feel Love", it was a revelation. Here was a pure example of pop strategizing. All musicianship was removed; all pretenses to avant-garde theorizing as exemplified by rock acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience which, to preach their message of freedom, had to make the listener un-free. By that I mean . . . Progressive Rock required a god-like technician, a skilled adept that, like the catholic priest, was a necessary intermediary between you and the "truth". This focus on technical expertise produced the "Rock God" - the guitar hero. Though, at this point, before the rise of codified Heavy Metal guitar worship, there was still a symbiotic relationship between musician and listener. In psychedelic music this relationship centered on feedback and random noise, which equalized musician and listener. Feedback was a sign that the musician was out of control, and the musician and listener shared equally in their experience of this out-of-control state. Feedback was the revolutionary component of acid rock, the anarchic sign of revolutionary freedom. It is the product of the electric instrument monitoring itself, and this self-examination leads to a breakdown of control that is evidenced in the mantra of the feedback loop - the technical equivalent of the acid trip. This was the same sound produced by the Free Jazz saxophone player. The instrument becomes the voice speaking in tongues; it is a pure extension of the voice. The wail of the saxophone is the voice and instrument mirroring each other, eyeing each other, feeling each other out until the one and the other are indistinguishable."

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