by Friedrich Nietzsche 

 "Shitting, like death, is a great leveller. It renders beluga caviar indistinguishable from tinned ham, a duchess as creaturely as a dog."

Alex Blasdel

For some reason this quote has reminded me of a Brian Aldiss story I never read but always meant to. In my hazy memory,  Aldiss's speculative train of thought had begun with the fact that religions, in their imagery and their ceremonies, often spiritualize bodily functions like eating (as with the communion wafer) and sex. Aldiss wondered: "well, why not  the excretory functions?". So he spun out a story that imagines a form of religion whose rituals are based around defecation.  

Well, it turns out I have garbled this (read about long long ago, probably in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). The novel appears to be Aldiss's early effort, The Dark Light-Years  - originally published in 1964 - and here is a summary of its scenario, which involves a disorienting first-contact between humans and an alien race: 

The Utods are an ancient race who live in a distant galaxy -- they have a highly developed biological system that coincides with the rotation of their planet between three distinct suns. Their social, cultural, and religious beliefs all center on the process (and product) of defecation (no joke), which they see as a gift that symbolizes the ultimate cycle of life where bodies enter the carrion stage and feed the trees on the planet, becoming once again part of the universe. So, the Utods basically sit around in wallows of dirt and shit all day.

They are also giant and kind of hippo-like with six retractable arms and two heads, one that talks and one that shits. They are peaceful, but went through a period of revolution in their culture many generations ago where a sect of Utods shunned defecation for cleanliness, invented all kinds of spaceships and things, but eventually died out in a big war between themselves. The remaining Utods kept the technological knowledge and use it to travel to and colonize other hospitable planets.

The humans run across a pod of Utods in their temporary wallow on a planet they are both exploring. When the Utods say something to the humans (their language sounds like high pitched squeaks and screams and comes from all their orifices), they shoot all but two of the group. A scientist on board on the ship makes them capture the remaining Utods for study instead of shooting them. But are they intelligent?

All the shit really makes it hard for the humans to see the Utods as anything less than animals. All the cleanliness makes it really hard for the Utods to see the humans as an intelligent, thinking race. Both groups are at a standstill and while they have a lot of philosophical discussions about what "intelligent life" really is, neither race really makes a breakthrough.

Another precis: 

The Utods are multi-headed multi-limbed hippo-like mud-wallowing creatures which alternate genders.  They live with their lizard-like parasites in large mud and feces filled ponds which they wallow in and philosophize.  They journey between their planets in seedpod spaceships filled with their own filth.  They feel no pain, are pacifists, and are happy.

Some humans encounter a bunch of them and their seedpod spaceship....  The humans of this future time live in ultra-hygienic conditions eating their synthesized foods and drinking non-alcoholic beverages.... The  complete inability of the humans to communicate with the aliens (who have chosen not to communicate) introduces the main theme of the work:  the humans are so repulsed by the filth of the Utods that they are forced to reevaluate the meaning and criteria of the words/concepts sentience, intelligence, civilization, progress — not only as applied to the aliens but ourselves.  Does our conception of civilization completely exclude all other forms civilization might take?

Here's Aldiss's own gloss: 

A novel written in anger following inhumane experiments on dolphins. Space-going men and women find an alien race, the utods, on a planet alien to both parties. The utods enrich their lives and bodies by wallowing in their own droppings, a ceremony incompatible with terrestrial preconceptions: according to the latter “civilisation is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta”. Result: disaster. A serio-comic novel with diverse multi-national characters exemplifying human madness.

It all reminds me a bit of Bataille and the idea that higher mental faculties are built on, or over, lower bodily ones - the secret proximity of elevation and abjection, the lofty and base materialism.   

Soul and arse. 

Noticeable that none of the covers of these editions attempt to pictorialise the Utods or the defecatory concept - the images are completely unrelated. The original Faber and Faber cover below, the designer makes no attempt at all

I like the way he reprimands himself for not having bought his pale blue pegs from the right shop - “should have been from Lord John or Take Six”. The mod/soul boy obsession with these minutiae is the thing that is most alien to me still. I was once poking around a casuals forum when researching a piece and it was amazing to see how ferociously these middle aged verging on elderly types were arguing about which specific month in a particular year of the mid-80s that a certain shoe came into vogue, or the color of the laces that were de rigeur for that precise patch of time. 30 years on. It’s a kind of mystical investment in consumerism. As an indifferently dressed bourgeois from a bit further into the home counties than Burnt Oak I agree with Toyah - “don’t want to be told what to wear / so long as you’re warm who cares”. Music exists in commodity form but it transcends that and you don’t need to own it to hear it - it’s a common culture. Style culture is all about chasing overpriced stuff that only a few get to put on their bodies, a self-imposed prison of rules and restrictions.

 "If you understood everything I said, you'd be me." 

 - Miles Davis

(via Andrew Parker)

the structure / pay off reminds me a bit of this

Interviewer:  "What is the future of jazz?"

Jazz Legend (tetchily) : "If I knew what the future of jazz was, I'd be playing it already"

I wish I could remember who Jazz Legend was.... I want to say Max Roach but I can find no proof out there this is his quote. 

 "You've probably noticed, grime is having a lot of impact at the moment. That's because it's telling the truth about what's going on in our cities. We were doing the same thing twenty years ago - but we did it with sound"  - Goldie, 2017

 

Zone of Fruitless Intensification coined here in this Jan 2007 blogpost

... on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.

The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.

... I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).

[of course ZFI is a bit of a poncy way of saying  "you can have too much of a good thing" or "enough's as good as a feast"

Full post for context

Blissblog 

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Gimme danger

Rather belatedly picking up from Tim Finney’s Skykicking post on drum’n’bass and the loss of its “rhythmic danger” of December 20….

---first, if you’re going to talk about “rhythmic danger” then the role of the bass, and how that changed/deteriorated, is worth considering… “Dangerbass” is what I titled some mystery tune on an early ’94 pirate tape (still never identified, sigh)… back in those days the way the bass moved in relation to the drums, the vibe it created--stealth, trepidation, ominousness, lurking malevolence, a sort of tectonic instability--was crucial to that feel of rhythmic jeopardy Tim talks about… it also strikes me that jungle’s bass-motion was more musical, or musically interesting, than the way bass related to the beats in later drum’n’bass … from techstep onwards, the bass-riffs, as slathered as they are in “evil distortion”, operate in a much more regular and dependable-feeling way…

--- one thing that struck me is how the meaning of speed changed. The first acceleration, the foundational surge in tempo that turned house into hardcore into jungle, was felt as a cataclysmic increase. Catastrophic/revolutionary. Thousands dropped by the wayside, way more left the scene than stuck with it, they just couldn’t cope with both the speed and the choppiness of the breaks. But if you could handle the bpm surge, thrive on that sensation, then you were one of the headstrong hardcore. The headfuck, body-confound of the speed-surge--1991-1994, approx 120 bpm to approx 150 bpm--that was what made people says things like “you can’t dance to it” or “it’s just not music”.

The odd thing, though, is that drum’n’bass carried on getting faster after 94. It probably went up another 30 or 40 bpm in the four or five years after jungle had ‘arrived’ in terms of wider mainstream consciousness. But no one really noticed or commented on that further increase, it didn’t register as an equivalent amplification of intensity, either within the scene or outside it. But some people, some of the original ‘speed tribe’, did notice, and mourn, the way that as the music continued to get faster, all the interesting internal musical relationships of half-speed basslines etc disappeared. The further increase of speed seemed to narrow the music down drastically until all that was left was the sensation of pure linearity. The endless one bar loop chase-scene treadmill.

This suggests that on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.

The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.

One of the things that’s striking about jungle is that so many things were going on in the music you had multiple axes with the potential for fuck up and going into the Bad Zone and sure enough all of them were taken. The zone of fruitlessly intensified jazziness (think Wax Doctor, the later Good Looking stuff, the stuff Fabio ended up with); the zone of fruitless complexification (think what happened to Reinforced, Vortexion, all that stuff); the zone of fruitlessly exaggerated tumbly-Amen-exuberance (Aphrodite), the ZFI of apocalypticness/darkness (post-No U Turn).

(Mind you, there’s a perspectival element to this obviously. What many would think of as the Optimal Range of Intensification for hardcore>jungle is what a trad househead would think of, and did think of, as a ZFI--“fucking E-heads destroying the music”. And my ZFI for metal might be where thrash/death/black/etc headz think the key threshold into fabulousity actually starts)

In hip hop, an obvious axis on which there’s a ZFI would be Bling, also Thuggizm/Gangsta-Realism. Also, in undie, the encryption/prolixity/too many words to the bar axis.

I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).

Now it’d be intriguing to work out what the significant axis on which the Zone of Fruitless Intensification will manifest itself, looking at some current musics. With Grime, one possibility is clunkiness. At the moment the music exploits the aesthetic possibilities of clunky-but-in-a-good way -- the clunk-crunk-funk nexus (the fact that stiff and lurching is actually more funky, or more rhythmically arresting/compelling, than fluid, nimble ‘funky’ playing). But I can already imagine that good-clunk turning to bad-clunk, getting both caned into the ground and exaggerated to the point of non-enjoyability. Same with the bombastic/doomladen post-Swizz/Ludacris fanfare-riff, although perhaps that's just a subset of "clunk".

I’m curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it’s just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World’s Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill.

-- The Role of social energy. It’s not that drum’n’bass got shit because everyone ran out of ideas (or not only that--I do think most genres have finite possibilities, a seam that gets exhausted). Nor is that all the talented ones moved off to other fields (like steve gurley going into garage, 4 Hero doing broken beat, or Photek moving into house, and then onto hip hop [recent Deuce interview with rupert parkes: “‘s always been my roots, hip hop, honest! Detroit? Never heard of it.”]). A handful of producers did had the suss to move out of the negative vortex of d&B, but by and large it seems like a really high proportion of the original producers--dillinja, andy c, ed rush etc--are still involved, still at the helm. So why haven’t they been able to steer d&B in a better direction? Once a genius, always a genius, surely? It’s because of the massive. (“Scenius” isn’t a collectivized version of auteur theory, because at least 50 percent of “scenius” is the audience input). The jungle massive’s composition changed. It’s a different massive. A more studenty white M/C following embraced drum’n’bass in the late 90s; the orrrrrrrignal junglissss drifted off. Presumably, the new recruits were originally attracted by something “other”, but unconsciously, involuntarily, they gradually changed it back to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates. The DJs are the membrane for this transfer of desire-data. Without necessarily being hyper-conscous about it, the DJs assimilate what the crowd respond to; there’s a positive reinforcement syndrome. The DJs are either DJ/producers and when they make new tracks they’ll consciously or unconsciously amplify the aspects that are getting the best response from the crowd; or they are in close contact with the producers, like Grooverider with his coterie of “boys”, and pass on the data that way, by selecting certain dubs and reject others. Either way the massive actually dictates, through a selective response to the new tunes coming on the scene, the music’s future path. That’s how dance musics evolve in the first place, and that’s how they devolve, in this case.

I noticed a different kind of dancing at a Dieselboy show in NYC in probably-1998, 1999, at any rate one of the last d&b nights for me EVER. There was a lot of energy in the club, but the way people moved was totally different than how people used to dance to jungle or even d&b -- very athletic, they were dancing to the fastest rhythmic element in the music. It was especially striking with these solja-girls dancing real hard, bounding on their feet, almost jogging. There was absolutely no wind-your-waist, no hips or bump’n’grind element in the physical response to the music, because there was no space in the music for that kind of movement. Now, the only place I saw dancing since that which resembled it was, interestingly, at psy-trance parties. Same sort of athletic/amazonian girls dancing very hard and very fast, bounding like antelopes or commandos. So when I said before about the new M/C recruits to d&B unconsciously, involuntarily, changing it to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates -- I guess what I’m saying is they changed jungle into a kind of trance music--propulsive, cold techno-y textures, diminished role of MC, and most crucially the internal musical tensions that made jungle a form of black music gradually flattened out. It was exciting, the Dieselboy show, I’m not saying it wasn’t “valid” or buzz-worthy, but it was nothing to do with jungle. No danger.