kagablog

(photo stan engelbrecht)

*The bedroom/studio.
  
His face is pale. Some might even venture yellowish. That sickly ghost-grin: He’s not grinning at you, he’s not grinning with you.
There is definitely some subtle problem with the air trapped in this room, unwanted, as if some unspecified expiry date is breeding toward you; bored with next month (next month’s been taken care of..) it’s festering through its negative time-space, heading for next week, angling for tomorrow.
“Um, open a window?” you want to ask as you look for one, but he’s back in event horizon, the black-hole beaming proudly, taking it all in, as such.
Boy do you want to go outside, you want to go and play with the dog (you hate dogs), you wanna go for a fucking stroll..
 
“So Alex, what’s your next album.. err, about?”. Alex flinches.
“Wanna tell me about it.?”. There’s a pause (somewhere amidst the nothing something tenses..). Alex sighs. In response the room seems to wobble, sorta blur for a moment, and then undulates into a little school of wobbles, a little specie unto itself (you decide you don’t like this room).An oddly familiar mumbling sound rises above the cable-hum, the room’s resident soundtrack; ah – it’s Alex, Alex is talking.
“..randum ‘know, more with umore freedom to compuder; leddit run know, juss lay tentive beet. An thick know.. beet more crunch.. hifi..” Alex’s hands twitching to illustrate, raised in arcane angles above his head “.. no rhythm ‘know but Beet..” His eyes are lighting up, and the computer glows in response, to the side – you look at the computer, it looks at Alex and beams. “.. Beet fir melody dmension, rhythm is notime – for compuder do..” Alex has stopped talking, he’s stroking the side of the screen, he is looking at you. You try to smile (when did he stop talking? Is he still talking..?). You nod. “Going for a cigarette..”
 
You close the door behind you.You aren’t thinking at this stage (you can see him stroking the computer), muscle memory guides you through layers of doors and corners and then. You are outside and Jesus! It is pretty out – colours are celebrating. You light a cigarette.
You feel alive.
 
Elsewhere Alex’s hands are flickering over his keyboard. Alex doesn’t touch the keys as such, they depress when they sense him coming – the effect is that his hands are always suspended in the same position over his keyboard with his fingers in this beautiful spiderlike blur of dance.
Alex is feeding his black-hole. And things are happening on its other side, in the nether dimensions: weird architecture is shifting, breathing; swelling with information as it inspects itself and adjusts its environments.
 
You don’t know about this stuff, this is the other side (you smoke your cigarette in Eden). Alex doesn’t know too much about it either, he just feeds it, sensing it grow.
Bye-bye American Pie.
 
*Data.
 
Bleep bleep. That’s pretty much it. This is what has replaced the guitar, that virile instrument – that Satanic wand of destruction, or sex. Somewhere up above (or down below, it’s a question of perspective..) Jimi is scratching his forehead with long beautifully immortalised fingers, a tear pausing to gather below his brow. The Hippies have lost. Or have they?
 
This last tension of perspectives is entrenched, soaked, in elaborate codes. Electronica vs. the Fender Strat, are we dealing with the same people here? Are we dealing with the same planet? Analogues of Hippieness.. Sure, Upstream all makes sense, the Hippies now just smell better, have money, post-politics: Take one Ibiza DJ, strip him down and hide him in woolly tattery garments, swap his joint (a miracle of economy and grace – like some Concord of chill ) for the bigger, looser family member of years yonder (the 60’s, or teenhood..), give him a reeally slow acoustic guitar with fading icons of freedom and Folk heroes – Wodiyagot? But down here, in these semi-static fluvial nooks and crannies the situation is hazy.. The water here don’t move right (flashback: that room, that air), the fish look.. elsewhere.
But down here, strange as it may seem, is critical – for this is the underground, this is the cutting-edge, the teetering ‘tween present and future – Radiohead splash here don’t they? But where are they.. where are these new Hippies? What do they look like..? Where
 
You sit up in bed. Stumble into brushing those teeth. You absent-doodle onto a scrap of paper ‘Alex leave my dreams alone!’.
In the background Britney is gyrating on some FM frequency, teasing masses of innocent, perverse virgins, goading them on.. And then it hits you, what it is that bothers you so much about this whole underground electronica business – Where is all the sex, where is the death, the clichéd hates and loves? Where are the goddamn words?
 
Back in Bleepland Alex is swivelling in his chair, hands eased behind his head, its closed eyes – he’s wearing that unfortunate grin. It’s done, and his collaborator is just as proud (if computers could coo..): in about 2 weeks’ time ‘2-ZENDRL’ will hit record-stands somewhere, it might sell. Alex couldn’t give a shit about the stands, he’s on the phone with Jeff, who’ll be handling the Web-distribution.
 
You’re bobbing your head to Britney when the phone establishes its existence. “Hear it ‘2-ZENDRL’ ?”. You grimace. You don’t much enjoy talking to Alex, you don’t enjoy the language games, the exertion: “What? Is this Alex?”, “Yu. Heer it.. umWannuh..?”, your eyebrows struggle for a moment, “Oh. Ohh! Shit, is it done?”, “Um now?”. You assent, put the phone down before he attempts a new sentence.
 
*The cruddy lounge.
 
Alex is nodding at you. You frown back.
“So you say you’re expecting lots of sales ?”. Alex is nodding, his eyes are closed. You realize that he hasn’t heard the question, he’s nodding to the imaginary beat of those weird beats. You shift in your seat.
 
The album is playing for the second time (No questions would be permitted the first time round; in turn you insisted on listening in the lounge. For the sound). Two of the tracks mutually cover two minutes of frowning time, most of the others torture around seven minutes each; the disk consists of seven tracks, it is called ‘2-ZENDRL’ (”Oh, nice.”).
“Alex.. ALEX!!” Alex looks like a swat team’s just burst through the roof. “Sorry. So tell me, how.. how do you approach each track individually – tell me about the creative process.”
You wait as this sinks in.
His head begins to bob, in the background the sound of alien insects dying, whistling?- you’re losing him: “ALEX..”, his eyes flutter. “Druqks.”
You sigh mentally, this is good, mediocre, but good, you were expecting “Compudr wispers me..”. “The Aphex Twin album?”, Alex pauses, translating this, “No! No.. take drugs.”, “When don’t you ?” (you don’t say this, you nod expectantly), Alex begins to continue:
 
He tells you that he takes this or that drug depending on what design he wants to project into the music. He usually begins with an ‘initial’ percussive or melodic phrase (it might be scrapped later – it will be deformed, re-formed..); in earlier days he would then proceed to experiment with super- , juxta- and omnipositioning of random unrelated musical atmospheres (mostly percussive), or random unrelated ‘Melody-likes’ (his term meaning: musical structure vaguely resembling a melody, or music, for that matter) and mix and match from there according to will, or the drug, whichever one-ups the other.
 
For this release the computer handled production and arrangements, with Alex, when called for, making discreet suggestions, ie. filtering Initial Phrase into personally-designed program which then produces possible variations or developments for Initial Phrase, based on aesthetic continuities taking into account metrical and/or melodic and/or sound-type of said Phrase, then adding these as options in the random milieu.
So there.
 
An hour has passed since Alex began his response.
The whistling has died.
You make a mental note to scrap several questions. “How do you, as electronic artist, feel about other genres, say Rock..?”
“I luv cuntry..” He’s making a little joke, you realise very slowly.
Rock music, he has you know, is undead.
“You mean dead?”
He means undead – it exists in a void existential state, having been resurrected from its natural death, which Alex locates round the early Eighties.
“Pop?”
Pop is immortal, eternal in that it is unsusceptible to change, or rather, feeds on change: Temporality and change conspire its matrix:
‘Form’ qualitatively irrelevant.
You are beginning to suspect that Alex knows what he is talking about, in between his slurs of Ums, beyond his crippled language, his dialect’s dialects.
Piqued, you venture his position on Jazz:
Jazz is limited, self-limiting - at least the genreic body of Jazz self-limits,
but there are many fascinating (you imagine even hearing “Awe-like”) moments and figures in Jazz’ depths; Jazz is a tough one, can in one instant be as superficial as the most vulgar and self-clichéing genre, in the next be as elusive as the most haunting Electronica.
The last sentence, excepting initial clause, is a pseudo-direct quote -
sifted through the grammar filter, enunciated here and there, but a quote.
 
You nod in silence.
 
“Anna lite erspliff?”
You nod, you agree, you join him – the Hippies have become geniuses..
 
Exit: ‘Voodoo chile (slight return)’ fed backwards into Quantum Re-filter
        Program.
 
 
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