mardi 10 août 2010

Ancient lights and the blackcore -- David Toop



En écho à son enregistrement de chamanes Yanomami sur Ancient lights and the blackcore (disque collectif sorti en 1995 sur Sub Rosa avec Scorn, Seefeel et Timothy Leary/DJ Cheb i sabbah) , David Toop reprenait dans ses notes de pochette ce texte de 1992 :

The imagery of altered states, along with the desire to travel through intangible dimensions, cross boundaries of emotional and physical enclosure, experience a dissolution of certainties, to lose all sense of sequential, narrative time, to float and be intoxicated by rhythm and frequency, are central to the force of music. Music and intoxicants have been interwoven since the beginning of culture, and in our own, present, perpetually conservative society, the re-emergence of a milieu which consciously links drug taking with the psychotropic properties of music has unleashed a frenzy of anxiety and suppression. This anxiety -- along with the anxiety that children and the young are being suffused with satanic incursions, obscene language, sexual awareness and, as a recent piece in The Times said, "visual disturbances, deep trances and temporary loss of limb control" -- is as acute as the Yanomami belief that hungry demons send spirits up from the subworld to the Earth layer to capture the souls of their childrens and eat them. Unlike Yanomami shamanism, however, this anxiety denies a balanced universe by proscribing those supposed extremes of imagery which allow us a complete articulation of the body, the imagination and the psyche.
With its extensions into virtuality, state-of-the-art biotech music now possesses a cinematic potential for ambient fictions realised through the snapshot audio environments exposed by digital sampling. Sampling's cannibalisation of memory and other worlds, along with the impossible extrapolation of human imagination and dexterity accessed by the ultracapacity of software brains linked to enslaved machines, suggest new transformation of our animal and cybernetic selves. Informed by hallucinations and the history of trance mechanism,fusing visions and electronic impulses in mysterious space, embracing both fragmentation and ritual, cyborg music now offers the unknown.