'Theory is the spice of critical life'

What role theory can or should play in conceptualising musical style and its change over time (or 'diachronically') has been a major theme in writing on method in music historiography for quite some time. Among the many others, heavyweights of mainstream musicology Dahlhaus and Treitler went there in the eighties, and I can’t help but wonder what they would have had to say about writer on music par excellence Simon Reynolds’s notion of a ‘hardcore continuum’ and the encouragingly lively but often exasperating debate over its existence, relevance and current status. ‘The nuum’ to its friends, it purports to describe a more or less linear if dialectical continuity through various styles of UK dance music including, in order of appearance, hardcore rave, jungle, 2-step garage (at which point Reynolds named the nuum), grime and dubstep. The concept makes a lot of sense, particularly as a body of related work and ‘scenes’ (‘macroscene’?) and it very much deserves to stay, but some of the terms on which it is discussed would certainly have raised the eyebrows of the above-mentioned, fairly venerable musicologists. Because, as some of its proponents would have you believe, the nuum is more than (at the end of the day) a certain assemblage of certain interrelated scenes, institutions and events and a certain assemblage of certain tracks with certain family resemblances, all assembled according to certain parameters and linked in a certain diachronic narrative thread by a certain subjective mind in the pursuit of historicised knowledge, but actually an ‘empirically verifiable’ ‘fact’, and even an ‘objectively existent entity’ (00:39-00:43).

I’d say the hardcore continuum can no more constitute an ‘objectively existent entity’ than ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Romantic music’ (a much, older, bigger, more powerful continuum in its time) can. But ultimately that’s the nominalist (“categories of particulars are constructs: artificial, arbitrary, and practical, valued for their usefulness in the management of data”*) versus realist (“particulars are grouped together because of properties held in common, and general terms derive their meanings from the real features of the objects to which they refer – for the realist, the common features of particulars by which they are set off in categories are independently “true” and are to be discovered”) debate. I personally believe that the nuum, since its data set is so broad and complex, is best expressed in nominalist terms, but as it’s plain to hear in his Fact talk, Reynolds is clearly a realist, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But the danger of this sort of realism is that it’s the gateway drug to essentialism, in which “works are no longer [merely] particulars that share certain properties; they are individual embodiments of a single essence” - and some of the language that the nuum’s proponents have dressed it up in is at times decidedly essentialist, here at 01:17:40 - 01:18:54 for example, and with that sometimes bizarrely organicist.

Unless you've already got it, the reason behind these pictures from, ahem, epic space opera Dune will become clear if you bear with me.
I’ve come to believe that, apart from in a few specific instances (in particular kinds of feminism and other minority studies, for example), children should be inoculated against essentialist thought from an early age with “Say No To Essentialism” campaigns. Because it plays down the difference, independence and complexity of things by trusting in some hypothetical underlying continuity, it distorts perspectives, it’s reductive, prescriptive and restrictive, it’s ideological, it feels it can predict things and in so doing makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’, and it’s one of the pollutant-spewing engines of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. The nominalist says that all women are different, and that ‘woman’ is just a practical term useful to (though suspiciously required by) the society we live in, while the essentialist, like some dick who gives you that horrible sinking feeling when you realise what you’d invited to the party, says ‘nah, deep down women are all the same, they all spend too much money on shoes! Am I right or what lads?’

Besides which, in formulating the nuum in these realist terms, Reynolds (well-meaning as he surely was), by providing a description and talking about it like it was a thing, inadvertently kick-started a canon: a dodgy, prescriptive/reductive, ideological value-judgment machine, in which there are winners and losers, and even the winners can be losers. It’s this canonical consequence, or resonance, of the nuum idea that led in part to frustration and raised temperatures in the nuum debates, both for those who believed in it (who were often disappointed or angry that new musicians weren’t living up to the rules of its canonical ‘essence’) and those resisting the idea (or the parameters of the canon). Calling the nuum an ‘objectively existent entity’ and then praising its excellence horribly exacerbates the unhealthier consequences of having a canon, and piling on the imperative for ‘progress’, as some have done, makes things still worse.

That's Brad Dourif on the right. Easy to forget he's in this.
This is where music criticism can begin to have a detrimental effect on popular musical aesthetics – on the ways in which music is perceived, received and produced. How many independent, innovative composers were dismissed and banished into obscurity because, when peered at through the ideological lens of the Classical Music Canon, the lack of certain requirements in their music reduced them to a poor, unprogressive version of Beethoven or Brahms (Chopin, too stylised, too Polish, too effeminate, nearly could have been one)? What of the music that the UK Hardcore Continuum’s disciples deem, in the same way, to be ‘bad’ or simply not good enough? (I’ll consider the music of Joker, Zomby, Starkey, Rustie, Moby etc, the ‘mallet to a mountain range’, here sometime soon).

Dan Hancox, in response to k-punk illustrates the shortcomings of excessive theorising (and by extension those of essentialising canons) beautifully by using the analogy of the Procrustean bed. Another beautiful analogy describing the ideal use and role for theory is from Reynolds, who at the start of his Fact talk put it absolutely perfectly: ‘Theory is the spice of critical life’. A teaspoonful of cinnamon in the apple pie, a pinch of jerk seasoning in the soup – a little bit of theory added accorded to taste gives dishes interest and flavour, turning them from swill into cuisine. Since watching Reynolds’s Fact talk, reading Hancox’s piece and attending a seminar on the hardcore continuum last week, these analogies have been ricocheting around the bonce. I was groping for a new one that would illustrate the benefits of theory in moderation but also warn of the dangers of its excessive use. Since the only commonly known danger of overdosing on cinnamon is a mildly annoying dry mouth, I turned to alcohol. To adapt Reynolds’s metaphor slightly, I’m going to imagine theory as the alcoholic spice of a night out in good company.

In a shot that screams 'Look, please pay attention, we've spent a hell of a lot of money on this', Kyle MacLachlan takes on Sting while Shakespearean actor (and star of 3 X-Men films, 4 Star Trek films and 179 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation) Patrick Stewart looks on.
But even between strangers, a few pints promote an atmosphere of discussion, bonding and understanding. They get the mind going, raise confidence, refresh and satisfy the taste buds. Depending on how well you can hold your alcohol, though, things can soon start going rapidly downhill. Reality becomes strange and unmanageable as your stumbling hands and feet discover that things apparently aren’t where you thought they were or where they’re supposed to be: the real world doesn’t seem to make sense to you, though you may be able to ignore this and believe that it’s making more sense than ever, and this newfound 'clarity' can cause a proportional escalation in emotional state. People seem a lot nicer or a lot meaner than they were before or would be otherwise, and you feel you have to address this. You become over-confident, excitable and randy, so you shout and wave your arms around, drawing attention to yourself, but when you try and act on these new desires, it's awkward, difficult and embarrassing for those who aren't as drunk as you are. And despite all of this, you still think you and your actions are bloody amazing.

At college, you learn that critical theory and alcohol are quite similar in that they're both really great up to a point, but too much of either can turn good people into twats. Director David Lynch's own cut of Dune was three hours long - the scene above, though it was one of his favourites, was cut before general release.
Drunk on theory perhaps, but then another thought occurred to me. What if theory, as the spice of life, was actually the Spice from Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels (and the film – 1984 and most certainly counting – and the obscure Sci-Fi channel TV series oddly staring a young James McAvoy), melange? In this analogy, theory is a psychotropic drug made out of the dung of colossal sandworms that live on the desert planet of Arrakis. A little bit of it in coffee tastes splendid and gives the eyes an attractive shade of azure. A valuable commodity and a sign of considerable wealth, it gives you heightened awareness, a longer life-span and the ability to predict the future. Prolonged exposure to the spice gives you the power to warp space and time with your mind alone, so that two incredibly distant points in space can become close enough together that an entire fleet of spaceships can pass through this fold in space-time without moving and thus travel through an enormous and complex universe with the greatest of ease, but the downside to this is that at this point of exposure you’ll die if you go without it, so you have to be kept permanently in an atmosphere of the spice in its gaseous form, which mutates your body until you look terrible, and, with a face like a giant pair of bollocks, you have to be carried around in an enormous canister by weird fellers with extreme speech impediments and bad dress sense.

The final resting place of theory: a hermetically sealed sarcophagus full of gaseous, psychotropic worm turd. No, I'm deadly serious.
Consider those two close analogies (theories themselves) of the consequences of excessive theory - recognisable, sense-making but naturally imperfect narratives with a merely analogical relationship to reality - to be 'empirically verifiable'. It could happen to you.

And if you haven't seen Dune yet, you really should.

*I'm quoting from Leo Treitler’s Music and the Historical Imagination, Chapter 4: ‘On Historical Criticism’ (1989). I’d recommend veterans of the nuum debates give this and the two subsequent chapters (‘The Present as History’ and ‘What Kind of Story is History?’) a look, as he shows that the idea of organically evolving musical continua is hardly new (to the point where eyes will widen considerably with déja vu) and clearly explains the bases for these conceptions of music history and why they’re to be discouraged.

How could we talk about aesthetic equivalence across different art-forms and creative contexts?

In Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen David Stubbs proceeded more or less on the assumption that art and music could ultimately be regarded as aesthetics parallels. This was the major flaw in the book and its premise, and what understandably led to his protesting that experimental music isn't appreciated by the public to the degree that experimental art is (an imbalance that was exhaustively described but wasn’t very lucidly or thoroughly explained in the book). The reality is that the aesthetic experiences of art and music (and film, architecture etc) are, psychologically speaking at least, wholly different, and the dream of meeting autonomous art objects of any and every medium similarly and with detached contemplation is a myth.

But as anyone passionate about music and art or any writer on music (such as Stubbs) will tell you, music inevitably will - must even – be understood by a listener in terms other than the purely sonic. Such ‘synesthetic’ adventures may not be enough to motivate grand histories of aesthetics, but they are able to radically enrich aesthetic experience in certain instances. So in what ways might such an ‘aesthetic equivalence’ between a work of art and a piece of music be (objectively) talked about? Specifying some terms on which these aesthetic comparisons might be made allows us to imagine a number of possibilities for enriching the experience of works while preventing relatively imprecise, misguided or prohibitively subjective comparisons.

Neuropsychology has discovered some exciting evidence for the visualisation of sound and the kind of overlap of sensory-aesthetic responses that allows us to dance and understand metaphors but I'm thinking on a much more casual, generalised level. I’m not going to claim there is some literal, objective neuro-aesthetic ‘truth’ or any other kind of truth inherent in a comment like ‘this bassline oozes’ (as I should really be using an FMRI scanner for that and the family next door is borrowing mine at the moment). The related concept of synesthesia has been used and abused in writing about art and music as, at best, an alluring but vague metaphor for aesthetic equivalence, sometimes misguidedly leading to the belief that there is some similar aesthetic ‘truth’, kudos or Holy Grail in it, but ultimately it’s only a particular neurological condition affecting certain individuals, the consequences of which are subjective and restricted to those individuals. So I’m leaving neuropsychology to the neuropsychologists.

FMRI scanners know about the bad thoughts.
What follow then are four suggestions for paradigms or heuristics describing aesthetic equivalence, hopefully specifying the ways in which works or collections of works can be thought of as aesthetically comparable even when they are very unlike in medium and/or context. Naturally they are not mutually exclusive, in fact the more paradigms apply to a particular aesthetic comparison the richer and more reasonable the equivalence (and if there’s been any writing on this before, I haven’t found it yet).

Topical equivalence

When works are topically equivalent they handle relatively similar subject matters. The term is derived from topic theory in musicology, which itself is imperfectly derived from rhetorical topoi. How these subject matters are defined or divined, either by author or audience, would be a matter for debate – telling whether and on what level a work is ‘about’ something can be complex, especially where supplied texts are relatively unforthcoming or non-existent. But in many cases, this can be sufficiently unambiguous: Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (known as ‘the Pastoral Symphony’) are topically equivalent because they both explore the pastoral genre, along with many works of literature, and more specifically, they show negative ideas and emotions interrupting the pastoral bliss (death in Et in Arcadia Ego, a storm in the Pastoral Symphony). The subject matter of a work can be an emotion but that, though very similar, would technically be somewhat distinct from an equivalence of emotional effect on the audience experiencing the works, which would be better described as functional equivalence (see below): a work can clearly portray happiness but then have a very different emotional effect on an audience: indifference, sadness or anger at its artificiality perhaps - some listeners might hear The Boo Radleys' Wake up Boo in this (admittedly cynical) way.

Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The bittersweet portrayal of Utopia is perhaps where the contemporary appeal of the Pastoral genre is at its strongest.
Topical equivalence in itself doesn’t necessarily make for a fascinating insight if the subject matter is related only relatively vaguely. John Martin’s epic painting The Great Day of His Wrath is topically equivalent to Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes because both describe the Apocalypse, but any similarity of significance arguably ends there. If Martin’s painting had two tiny figures ‘lov[ing] to the sound of [their] favourite song’ as in Ultravox’s lyrics, that might be something to think about. But it doesn’t.

Topical equivalent of Rothko: Difficult to say that Rothko is ‘about’ anything, as his paintings are usually non-representational and named after the colours and shapes involved. To this end, a somewhat facile topical equivalent would be something like Michael Torke’s Color Music. Slightly more high-mindedly we could say his work is ‘about’ emotionalised perceptions of space and form, so something like J. G. Ballard’s short story The Enormous Space might be, to a certain extent, a relevant equivalent, or ‘about’ the straightforward juxtaposition of potential emotional resonances - so perhaps the more minimal poetry of William Carlos Williams.

Topical equivalent of Stockhausen: Again, as Stockhausen was a bit of a formalist, subject matter doesn’t really apply. Spiritual, cosmic, mystic awareness is something that figures in his later work, so something like Jodorowsky’s film Holy Mountain seems appropriate.

Socio-historical equivalence

Socio-historically equivalent works originate from a relatively similar social or historical context. The works themselves or their authors or audiences could be from a similar time, place or social background, or both associated with a social or historical event, idea, discourse or institution. For example, some of Egon Schiele’s paintings and Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire were created around the same time, 1912 in Vienna (more or less).

One of Egon Schiele's self-portraits and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Whoever posted Pierrot Lunaire on youtube chose some suitable images to accompany the music, one of which is another Schiele self-portrait.
Socio-historical equivalence should be unlikely to constitute an aesthetic by itself. It’s only when it’s particularly detailed, or another kind of equivalence comes into play that it becomes aesthetically relevant. Both Schiele’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music from 1909-1918 could be said to respond to a certain Zeitgeist characterised by, among other things, madness, the self, the unconscious, modernity and modernism, which can also become described in terms of a topical equivalence in some respects. There is little to say when comparing Schiele’s paintings, and say, some of Mozart’s music other than that they were both created in Vienna (the intervening century gave rise to a lot of crucial dissimilarities).

Ethel Smyth’s opera The Boatswain’s Mate and Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out were both written in the same two year period (1913-1915) by middle-class white English women. Moreover they're also topically equivalent as they both involve sea-faring, and functionally equivalent as they’re both comedic social satires (these factors may also give rise to socio-historic resonance).

Rothko: composer Morton Feldman. Like Rothko, he was a jewish man working with the avant-garde in New York in the fifties and sixties.

Stockhausen: somebody like artist Joseph Beuys, who was a German from roughly the same generation. Beuys’s work relies on symbolism while Stockhausen’s generally doesn’t, but that aspect could be variously described as pertaining to any or all of the other equivalences.

Functional equivalence

Functional equivalence means works have or have had (intentionally or not) relatively similar functions. This category is broader than it may appear, stretching all the way from similar original purposes for the works to causing similar psychological effects and states (fear, disorientation etc) in present audiences. For example, music, art and poetry can both serve the function of making aristocratic life pretty or aiding religious worship, or excite similar feelings (of course emotions can also variously be excited by subject matter – the apocalypse, socio-historic context – racist Nazi propaganda, or perhaps form, but here it is strictly in its directly functional sense). An ensuing discussion would compare the ways in which the works fulfilled that function. Strictly speaking, any art is functional if it’s consumed as art but sometimes that’s irrelevant: Philip Guston paintings serve the function of being appreciated and filling up walls in galleries, but that in itself wouldn’t usually be the basis for an aesthetic comparison with Raphael – something else would.

Rothko: Since a lot of people these days use reproductions of Rothkos to promote a mellow, mildly cerebral atmosphere (whether or not doing this is ‘correct’ is beside the point), I’m thinking piano music by Debussy, or 'chillout', maybe acid jazz. Today Brian Eno’s Ambient series would be unlikely to feature on the CD player of a place that hangs glossy Rothko posters, but it would make a good functional equivalent too, since both can be used to relax and their forms are rather similar (anyone who appreciates Rothko's paintings as artifacts of an eventually fatal bipolar disorder - for which an equivalent might, according to popular belief, be found in late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann or Scott Walker - would be unlikely to find them relaxing, but ultimately there shouldn't be correct answers in appreciation).

Two musical works which could have a similar function to Rothko's most famous paintings, one meditative or ambient, '2/1' from Brian Eno's Music for Airports and one highly expressive: the Lento Assai from Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 op. 135 (one of Beethoven's very last pieces - he was famously staring his down own mortality while writing the late quartets).
Stockhausen: You wouldn’t normally describe Stockhausen’s work as functional. He sometimes wrote commissioned works, but this is a weak basis for equivalence. Today his work is often used to teach composition students so an equivalent work, interestingly enough, could be something like Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier or Art of Fugue, and I don't know if there are any specific works of art used to teach art students (at art school some friends of mine were once made to stand in a room with a corpse for inspiration - this isn't a snide comment on Stockhausen's music).

Formal equivalence

This one is perhaps the sexiest to talk about, but for all that is also the most difficult to discuss validly. It’s the one people are usually referring to when they name-drop synesthesia, so how far objective formal equivalence can reasonably be taken will ultimately be up to neuropsychology. Works with formal equivalence have relatively similar structures and processes, so how this works depends entirely on the analogies involved. Both sounds and shapes can be low, high, rising, falling, busy, minimal, distorted, fragmented etc (it may not be a coincidence that Martin's Great Day of His Wrath and Ultravox's Dancing With Tears in My Eyes both feature prominent descending forms in depicting the end of the world). It becomes more complicated when sounds and shapes can be likened more exotically, such as with words like ‘brittle’, ‘gloopy’, ‘abrasive’, ‘delicate’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘plastic’, because it’s difficult to pin down the aesthetic bases for these descriptions (valid and inspiring though they may be) as they often involve a messy, subjective mixture of mental visualisation, conventional connotation and musical onomatopoeia.

Many structures and processes can be likened relatively unambiguously however: few would dispute that collage is a form that occurs in both art and music, see for example collage in the album covers and music of Julian House aka The Focus Group. Mathematical structures may also dictate form in art or music, such as in certain minimalist works, or in the case of the golden ratio (apparently someone sat down and started this list of works designed with the golden ratio).

Rothko: As Rothko’s painting have small amounts of large, simple, plainly deployed colour then (taking colour to be pitch or timbre) non-repetitious ultra-minimalism or drone music could be a suitable formal equivalent, such as the work of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock or even, again, Morton Feldman (a close formal equivalence could be drawn between his 'fields' of chance sound operations and Rothko's juxtaposition of areas of colour, as his work and that of contemporaries such as Barnett Newman could be associated with the movement fittingly labelled 'colour field painting'.)

Stockhausen: his work explores a wide variety of forms and processes, but I think the shapes of Kontakte are similar to those in small sections of paintings by Matthew Ritchie or Julie Mehretu: complex, three-dimensional and superficially chaotic, but cleanly carved (few Stockhausen compositions have, in a relatively short amount of time, the frantic, overloaded complexity of their paintings taken as a whole). Any non-minimalist geometrical abstraction.

Stockhausen's Kontakte and a painting by Matthew Ritchie. I'm not claiming to be a synaesthete or to fully understand the processes of perception involved - but at 0:16 don't these two 'look' and 'sound' alike? It's quite possibly just me and my big fat subjectivity.
So hopefully these are some ways to look for and describe aesthetic equivalence between different art forms. The best kinds of aesthetic comparison are those which can draw on all four paradigms of equivalence. All I have done is outline some heuristics for the purposes of orientation, so this is in no way a watertight theory. If a piece of music and a work of art give rise to the same connotations, something like ‘war’ for example, that could be down to a inextricably complex mess of topical, socio-historical, functional or formal reasons. The topic of ‘War’ could even be connoted in an abstract painting for socio-historical reasons (maybe WW2, Vietnam) and connoted in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for functional reasons, and on the back of that compared and discussed in terms of formal equivalence (busy, violent, clashing textures). None of that would be invalid. The four paradigms could be seen as food groups, primary colours or physical dimensions – abstractions that combine in various ways to constitute real-world stuff.

If there’s anything I’ve missed, anything reminiscent of something else, or any plain bad thinking, leave me a comment.

Rouge's Foam

A few weeks ago I spent most of a day wandering around Zone 2 with industrial extremists Whitehouse being piped straight into my calmly interested ear canals the whole time by way of an iPod and those earphones that serve as the equivalent of a ten foot concrete fence. That evening, perhaps feeling that all that industrialised angst hadn’t been quite enough, I curled up in front of David Cronenberg’s very early feature Crimes of the Future. Here I was introduced to a substance called ‘Rouge’s foam’. The narrator Adrian Tripod, floating under the brutalist ceilings of his dermatological clinic ‘The House of Skin’ (a name coined a decade and a half before Hellraiser, in those innocent times), ruminates:

Before the disappearance of Antoine Rouge, there were many strange creatures here, but for some time now there has only been one, and he... I believe... I have noted a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence oozing from his ears. I am not quite certain. My interns have also noted the deadly emergence of this secretion, which we call “Rouge's foam”.

Later Adrian Tripod, unable to begin repopulating the world through procreation with a 6-year-old because she has succumbed to the skin disease of which Rouge’s foam is a symptom, smears said foam onto his lips and sheds a single cobalt blue tear. I know what I’m watching next Valentine's Day.
I then thought it would make a good name for a Whitehouse-like industrial band who while at art school in 1979 had gotten hold of Crimes of the Future. I quickly realised that the name wasn’t entirely fitting as it wasn’t radically taboo, just an obscure Cronenberg reference and without that... just a bit weird really. But the foam and its name could have been an interesting metaphor for the music itself, and its effect on listeners: a messy, primal, biological matter secreted involuntarily by stricken listeners from the very organ that was supposed to facilitate genteel appreciation, while an onslaught of white noise and claustrophobic cyborg commentary engulfed them. Very Cronenberg, very Tetsuo.

Eww, gross. This image is one or two fairly significant leaps of association from an aesthetics blog that will generally aim to be neutral and liberal, but I was looking for a good name and I grabbed it quickly as I was hoping to post my review of ‘Fear of Music’ as soon as possible. In the short term, ‘Rouge’s Foam’ seemed a fitting mask to wear for an anonymous polemical review, with its connotations of ‘seeing red’ and ‘oozing a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence from the mouth’. It also suits an aesthetic I hope to talk about here, one of psychological ‘over-stimulation’.

This blog is a place where I’ll try to explore various aesthetic responses and ideas too whimsical, wild or plain indulgent to be entertained in the usual course of funded research. I say aesthetics because I’ll generally try to avoid objective interpretation, or hermeneutics – the goal won’t be to discover, understand and classify, but to suggest insights into appreciation. Neither will value-judgment figure strongly in my approach. Of course, aesthetics and interpretation are certainly not separate activities: you can’t experience a work without interpreting it, and mindfulness of a certain relative ‘validity’ of readings, once in place, can play a crucial role in appreciation. For example, now that I know that Beethoven was elderly and dying when he wrote this music, I won’t attribute its characteristics to youthfulness, and my appreciation could be richer for that. Not only this, but one's awareness of a ‘validity’ in reading a work can become (an) aesthetic in itself. I only mean to say that I will not be implying any objective accuracy for my readings, or that I have discovered some ‘truth’ inherent in the works involved.


As it was at least six years before either Throbbing Gristle or Whitehouse could have been available to provide the soundtrack for Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg made do by noisily repeating low-quality sound effects alongside the chillingly calm observations of a mentally disturbed narrator.
To this end I’ll also hope to avoid excessive theorising. I may comment on theories, but I won’t really be inventing them myself, believing in them for ever more, and hoping that this humble blog will be added to the knowledge banks of the human race. That would be formal research work. I won't be positing, for example, a full-blown theory of over-stimulation so much as an ‘aesthetics’ of over-stimulation. I just hope to explore ways of looking, listening, reading and creating. As research can enrich this however, I’ll write as well as possible against a backdrop of academic thought, particularly as a student of musicology. This is also as an insurance and a reaction against a lot of recent critical writing about music that has sometimes been painfully ignorant of current thinking in mainstream musicology.

If this all sounds ambivalent, contradictory and muddled, that’s because it may well turn out to be. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in a year’s time I’ll be posting weekly soup recipes for under £1 a day.