General Head-Noise
21/2/24
General Head-Noise posts are started at the beginning of my day and updated throughout the day. The posts contain a semi-structured collection of thoughts, reflections, reactions, associations, and observations.
There are far from fully formed / completely thought out ideas. Instead, they are ideas in an emergent state, in the process of becoming something or failing and fading away.
7:51 am
Started writing the first entry of General Head-Noise. I got the idea from Colin Walker’s blog. I like what Colin does, and I will try to do a version of that.
Morning listening: Apple Music’s Essential Sinéad O’Conner playlist.
8:33 am
Last night, I read several articles in The Lacanian Review #9: Still Life?, which is mainly about the pass (i.e., the end of analysis, the cure).
Reading these has helped me understand something that I had been struggling to understand for a long time: the shift from a clinic more oriented by the symbolic and interpretation that reveals (heretofore unconscious) knowledge that has the status of truth to a clinic more oriented by the real of the body.
What I mean by this: The articles give many examples of ways an analyst used their body to deliver the interpretation to the analysand.
- The way the analyst got up and said, “Finally!”
- The way the analyst would change their tone or lean in and whisper something.
- The way the analyst would let an analysand in before their session’s start time (and possibly ahead of people who had been sitting in the waiting room longer).
All of these are ways the analyst made use of the body as the material that delivered what was an interpretation. These show how the use of the body changes the way the analysand experiences the interpretations.
This becomes increasingly important in our contemporary world, where the consistency of the symbolic diminishes and where the imaginary (image) and the real (body) become more closely aligned, and that link becomes libidinally invested.
12:31 pm
Doing things around the house. Listening to Plastikman & Chilly Gonzales Consumed (in Key) via Apple Music.
This album was made in 2022, but it is a new take on the Plastikman album Consumed, which was recorded in 1998. Here is a bit from the album description:
Richie Hawtin’s third LP as Plastikman, 1998’s Consumed, is, for many electronic music fans, a sacred album. Inspired by the absorbing work of visual artists such as James Turrell and Anish Kapoor, the record's sleek lines, creeping beats, and subtle synth phrases rendered club music in moody, inky blacks—stripping it back to its essence while helping to bend techno toward its ruminative, minimalist phase.
Twenty years later, pianist, composer, and singer Chilly Gonzales discovered Consumed while he was clicking around the internet, and was immediately entranced by it. “The album was getting out of some of what I thought to be the clichés of electronic music,” Gonzales (real name: Jason Beck) tells Apple Music. “It felt like it was jazz accomplished by other means. A kind of science-fiction jazz, not using jazz instruments, not with the typical virtuosity of jazz that fills up every bar with notes. But a kind of futuristic jazz that really appealed to me.” So Chilly sat down and started playing piano along to Consumed, reacting in real time and sowing the seeds for what would become Consumed in Key, a collaborative electro-acoustic reinterpretation of Hawtin’s landmark LP. Gonzales got in touch with his and Hawtin’s mutual friend, Montreal DJ/producer Tiga, and together they presented the concept along with some demos.
The album is, in my arrogant opinion, very good.
2:15 pm
Trying something new for QTS. I recorded something in the middle of the day, then dropped that into the DAW. My plan is to record something later in the day and add it to the audio I just recorded.
If this works, I think it will add to the capture of the everydayness (is that a word?) of what I’m trying to capture.
8:05 pm
I just finished recording and mixing QTS-007. (I did not need to edit it.)