I have limitations. That makes me sad.

Justice - (Cross)

I was listening to this album today and yesterday. I can only really describe it as French electro-house. The first two tracks alone are extraordinary - packed with references to Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73, Grizzly Bear harmonies, Daft Punk and Air homages especially prominent, also less clear stuff like Cassius (!) and old-school funk bass lines straight from Parliament and James Brown. Treatment of samples from Orbital, fascination with aural properties from Chemical Brothers. Huge beats and tunes from Basement Jaxx. More than anyone I've heard for a long time they are fascinated by the real quality of a sound - when you do this to a Moog and let it sit and dwell, what is the nature of the resulting noise - fluctuations are drawn out and made to carry harmonic weight. It's very French, very European LCD Soundsystem. Fuck you, they say - this is how we do it here. White noise and glitches thrown in from Squarepusher and unplaceable samples from DJ Shadow on out.

Something that they do that really grabs me is that they insert blocks of silence - silence made to sound like glitches. Huge gouges, effectively, cut into the texture of the thing (and texture is more than in most things the way to listen to Justice). It reminds me of Dr. John taking 5 whole beats out of a solo just to let his phrase sit for a bit.

Then I wondered - could you make music in which silence was the beat - say white noise punctuated by silences? But the problem is that you can't differentiate silences. They are not variable in pitch - silences are the absence of pitch, the absence of anything. They are a null. So you couldn't, because anything more than marking time would be confusing and undifferentiated - and of course a beat is always in tension with the time that it is marking.

Spring

Whenever I buy flowers I vacillate between horror at their expense and astonishment at how beautiful they are.

Now that they have been in the flat for a few hours I have stopped wavering and settled down at wonder - and thinking about carnations & Oxford; irises and my great-aunt, whose name was Iris and who gave my mother a pair of iris-coloured marmalade jars (one of which now broken); of roses and Valentines past; of freesias wrapped in shredded paper, sent by my sister and still in their buds - too delicate to show to anyone, I hid them away until they bloomed, like a conservative parent, only, successful; heather and summers in Scotland, and hybrid flowers, and my grandmother, who bred hybrid rhododendrons and how is now wasting away, forgetting, deep in Switzerland.

I wonder how long they will last.

according to adorno, isn't a tune the notes and harmonies that you don't hear?

poetry

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?

Whatever isn't the body text or the tag or

The symphony is any form that isn't explicitly anything else. The novel is any text that isn't poetry or a play. (Ok, ok, with qualifications.) Dislike defines us, not like. Colour we see is the colour that isn't reflected. We prize originality, which is what hasn't been said before. the strongest faiths rest on doubt. Sculpture, like analysis, is the process of removing the extraneous, that which hinders the distinguishing of coherent shape. Suspense - and narration too - are knowing what not to tell. Sexiness is what not to show. Horror is what you don't see. Mourning a feeling about what we don't have. Loss is the only feeling we can truly apprehend:

XXX: "What is literature?"
Derrida: "Put it this way; we know what it isn't."