Three thoughts

Three thoughts occurred to me in quick succession today.

It's not so much about choices; there really are very few choices we make. We are guided, shepherded, into behaviours, funnelled into opinions. Whether by neural pathways or social pressures or simply the apparent logical necessity of one idea following another, of evading cognitive dissonance. The internal logic, whether physical or psychic, is oftentimes impossible to escape. But it feels like free will (and this isn't an argument for determinism as much as it is an argument for self-awareness; a call to be aware of the choices we don't make, and the opportunity for breaking our habits). Personality feels like something we own; like a choice of behaviours we make. In fact it is something more like a cage from which we cannot escape, or an opaque, striated net through which our being takes form; the most prominent features we possess are already carved into our external presence, and we assume that it is "us" that makes them so. In fact, it makes us.

Much, so much, has changed in our ways of life in the last century. And we have forgotten very quickly what life used to be like. We - those of us living since the Second World War - are the first generations ever to have not had an overriding concern with acquiring food. This to us now seems unbelievable: food is a natural resource, it simply grows from the ground around us (or even more simply - we are surrounded with opportunities to buy food in shops. The shelves are never empty. How could this change?). How could acquiring and assuring food be a problem? The system of global colonial-capitalism locates us inside a bubble almost at breaking point, but one beyond which we can see no horizon. Food is grown and sold to us; our gardens and natural areas grow plants, we can buy seeds easily for our own use. But if a shift were to occur in how global civilisation operates these finely tuned trade routes can cease to exist and communities will find themselves once more at the mercy of nature - a nature now more violent, more unpredictable, more prone to chaotic and destructive events than pre-industrial society survived.

The rate at which we are degrading the environment ("sawing off the branch we are sitting on" as one climate scientist put it) and the predictions of scientists regarding the medium-term future for our species and planet have made almost no impression on the majority of people. Governments half-heartedly pursue half-baked schemes to reduce carbon emissions but whatever good intentions exist are scuppered by more pressing short-term needs to stay near the top of the civilisation-food chain. At some point in the 21st century, the populace will experience a shock akin to Seth Brundle's son Martin: in the film The Fly 2, Martin is unceremoniously told there is nothing that can be done to prevent his - increasingly rapid - mutation into another form of "life" (to put it kindly - his genetic inheritance is 50% fly, and it is about to assert its dominance). But the injections, they help me - he protests. The injections were just water, Martin. Just for your peace of mind.

Music again

not so long since the last music post, so i guess there won't be much to include in this one. how was 2014 for the world of the aural arts? pretty decent.

I've been aware for a couple of years of Ilyas Ahmed, a Pakistani-born American who makes a blurry, woozy guitar-voice folk music not unlike Grouper. But it was only recently I invested in a couple of his albums. They're really good.





The Grouper album has been hailed like a revelation in many circles. I like it too, and it's grown on me since the first unimpressed listening. It's nice to know that after all this time music can still creep up on me. Strangely I think my favourite is the instrumental drifty closer, Made of Air. To be fair though, I think I prefer her guitar-based earlier stuff; the idea of an album all on piano was pretty nice, but I'm not sure it's amazing. When PJ Harvey did the same thing, she made something really special but this doesn't reach those heights. Maybe it's not a fair comparison - White Chalk really is something else, completely unlike Polly or anyone else's music before or since. Ruins is pretty much Grouper on a piano. Pretty, muffled, hazy, Liz Harris making Grouper songs on a piano.





Dalglish is a man who's been plugging away for many years now; but this year saw one of his best releases for a long time. The new Canadian label Ge-Stell began their existence with a beautifully presented, clear vinyl in a screen-printed PVC sleeve. In this case the package fits the music so perfectly I have no qualms about it. The music is crystalline, organic, beautiful, rich and complex, sophisticated and unlike anything else. This is really an artist coming into his own, and realising the potential for the sound he's been developing intently for the past years. It's futuristic electronic music with vision and emotion. Unwisely, I'm tempted to label it 'post-glitch'. It puts most music to shame, that which is rushed out without any sensitivity, without an  artistic approach or believing that simple passion can replace hard graft. Excellent work from someone highly underrated but who will be remembered as one of the 21st century's great composers.



Dalglish live set from earlier this year (now enabled for download!)



Thom Yorke's second solo album was unexpectedly released, as a deluxe vinyl and download. It's good - not as good as The Eraser, which was surely one of the last decade's five best albums. But it's good. It has those same Yorkey skittery beats, melodies which get more intense the more you listen to them, despite first appearing quite plain. Something Thom does which I really like is sudden injections of the sinister into otherwise passive tracks. This is most obvious on opener A Brain in a Bottle. The titles are pretty weird; "There is no ice (for my drink)"? And his mumbly singing, authentic as is possible with no hint of rock n roll stardom, is disarming as always.







Aphex Twin. Well y'know, what to say about this. Let's just skip to the music, none of the hype needs repeating again. It's good. It's not amazing, and RDJ himself described it as a pop album. No surprises, no extreme degrees of anything but it's highly accomplished and skillful electronic music aimed at the heart as much as the feet. I've got to say, though...the limited edition thing pissed me off. We as fans paid through the nose for a triple vinyl edition, and then Warp have the gumption to dangle a limited package with a bonus track in front of us and price it at £250, available only to those finding the golden ticket in their chocolate bar. After two or more people bid the Caustic Window LP up to $46K they knew they could get away with whatever they wanted with this. It looked like a nice package, kind of like owning a piece of art over and above the music. But it's like rubbing the average fan's nose in their limited pay packet. What's your game Mr James? Oh yeah, making music and occasionally taking time to selling it to us.

So yeah, The Bug's Angels and Devils. I'm actually quite surprised this garnered so much acclaim. It's good and he's developing his sound but as an album I don't feel it really hangs together so well, and there are a couple of tracks which really rub me up the wrong way. I knew I'd prefer the Angels half to the Devils and I wasn't wrong. Some great material on the first but there's not much on the second disc for me. Was surprised to find that Death Grips actually worked out the best of the latter - plus I think the depth and detail on this track is more than the others. Can't stand Function, I really don't like those cheesy horns There's something really distinctive about Kevin's sound - the pressure of it. There's no let up, and even in the mysterious downtempo tracks everything's so compressed there's no room for subtlety. It can get quite wearing after a while (but I'm sure it's amazing live for the same reasons). Love the Grouper colab, likewise Copeland's. What pissed me off most? Well a month or two after the LP dropped he released a double 12 featuring six tracks - two from the LP, and two new tracks plus two instrumentals. I wanted the new tracks, especially the second collaboration with Liz Harris which matches the one on the LP in original brilliance but no way am I going to shell out £15 for two tracks. Seriously, why - after a double 180g album on which everything sounds heavy as fuck - do you need to make a double vinyl single with repeats of two of the same cuts? My answer: it's the deluxe thing. Make things massive, expansive and luxurious and people, especially the vinyl buying music geeks, will throw money at you. That's been writ large this year and most of the time I've fallen for it too. (Note: I didn't with The Bug's Exit; I just bought the two MP3s I wanted) Annoying. OK, music fans have always been commodified and sold whatever crap could be mustered, usually by the most respectable and serious artists and labels (I'm looking at you, Mute. Don't think I have forgotten the whole 2-part CDsingle was your idea first, introduced by Nitzer Ebb of all people). Sure, it's nice to have something beautiful, a triple gatefold vinyl with a foldout poster and a 12x12 glossy booklet with lyrics hand written by the singer's mom and clear vinyl pressed with the band's piss and hair in it (yes, that bit actually happened this year). I'm not saying it isn't. But it's not about the music anymore. It's about commodity and the scarcity-created illusion of need and false-value, tagged on to your favourite band's name and music which doesn't sound much different downloaded as a FLAC from Bandcamp; only much less wasteful and a quarter the price. Why do we do it? Why do cool bands do it to us? This still confuses me. When did underground authenticity fall from distributing your sounds to whoever would hear, via any medium, to extravagant deluxe limited editions of ever more bizarre character? Of course, it hasn't...the real underground still just make their music and put it out there however they can, with or without physical release of packaging. The worst offenders are the middle ground, the successful alternative musicians. Here are some egregious examples from my collection this year.

Young Gods' underrated late career album Second Nature got a deluxe picture disc reissue. In a tote bag. With a signed film still, a postcard, and a dried flower. What does this add (apart from £15 on the asking price?) Well they fit with the visual theme I suppose. This is one of the best things they've done in my opinion. Strange, glistening, passionate, entrancing, still with melodies, rhythmic pace and unusual, processed sounds. There's nothing else like it. Is it worth buying a reissue of it? Well, it's nice, it looks great and it's good that a forgotten and excellent album can still get some extra exposure, but I was disappointed to rediscover how noisy picture discs are. Disappointing in these days of hi fidelity audio. If you want it to listen to, probably better off with a second hand CD.








Circle Takes the Square reissued - twice! - their debut As The Roots Undo. It's welcome, for many. The original has been OOP for years and the new versions are beautiful. The first was a tour edition (in 2 colour variations, in silk screened gatefold; the second was a lovely white black splatter vinyl (or brown) in a full colour triple gatefold. Yes, I caved and bought them both. Idiot. It's a nice to thing to have and of course the music is awesome but it's still just a fucking reissue of music which is available from Bandcamp for pay-what-you-want. Life was so much simpler (and cheaper) when for a few precious years I just bought CDs.



:zoviet*france made an album with Fossil Aerosol Mining Project which drew some attention, mostly for its packaging - a 12x24 sheet of distressed and laser etched steel, folded around two 180g vinyls. It comes with some detritus collected from an American warehouse in the 80s (which turned out to be...two 12"x12" sheets of corrugated card cut from random product boxes which house the records inside the steel and a tiny scrap of carpet stapled inside one of those pieces!) The surprise? It's actually very good to listen to. Warm and ambient, quite lush and with an organic hint of melody - it's an album which stands up quite apart from the concept, yet the concept works to make it better, more tactile and more emotionally appealing.



There was a new album from Blut Aus Nord, last year's black metal discovery. Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry. This is pretty nice, very accomplished and it has a rich, complex feel while being quite organic. The production's pretty tight. To be fair (is it just me?) it doesn't evil like this kind of thing used to. Maybe this is low on the Satanic index, more on the pagan vibe. Maybe it's difficult to still sound evil when you're in the third installment of a multilayered concept album. Maybe there's something about trying to make a whole album sound fully intense so that the lack of dynamic renders everything as background fuzz, which is certainly the case here. The packaging is beautiful, a gatefold with a 12x12 booklet attached inside.



Scott Walker and Sunn 0))) made a massive noise in both literal and metaphorical senses with their collaborative LP Soused. Happily, I drew the line at this and bought the £9 CD instead of the £25 double 180g vinyl gatefold. Again, it's, well it's good. It's interesting and it's original. It's not great. It might even be very good. Even with the enormous density of the sound, there's sparse times and there's subtlety (though not tons of it). I like Scott's vocals on this, they're weird and it's not a style I normally like - this eccentric, all-over the register thing grates on my nerves a little but he does it well here and it fits with the concept in a way I wouldn't have expected. No compromises, and this odd pairing works well.



So who has been making real underground, no frills music? Well, Lea Cummings (aka Kylie Minoise) had a great tape out on Kiks/Girlfriend. Two deep, meditative, beat-based soundworlds not unlike a more minimal-droney Seefeel. Very simple, very good. Kiks' tapes are simple and effective, just a yellow layout with black and white graphic. I like that style. On the same label, WASPS's Accelerone Curves tape comes in a bag with a single piece of card, not even a case. Nice.





HTRK put out a three track CD of blurry refixes from their LP. It's good, not entirely sure what the point of it is (it's not a single, it's self-released, it's all instrumental...is it just something they did in an afternoon and thought fans might like? is it just a money-making gambit?) but it's not expensive, even when posted from Australia.

The Ugandan Methods/Prurient colab paid off well - I wasn't sure I'd like this but I think the oppressive synthwork Dominic brings complements Regis and Ancient Methods' tight, bruised beats. There's always been more to Regis than techno, and this collaboration shows a nice development from what he's been doing recently.





Knifed Out Of Existence seems to be making some waves. I've seen him play a couple of times and I prefer his recordings - live it's just a bludgeoning noise scream fest but recorded there's a lot of grainy subtlety and clicky clanky rhythms. All his releases are pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp if you're not into physical or just want to check em out.



And actually - due I think to Ben's influence - I've come to a deeper appreciation of the brutal end of noise than I had before. I always liked the idea but I didn't really get how to listen to it before.  Aesthetically it really appeals to me at the moment. I'm enjoying a lot the emotional simplicity of it, which adds to the intensity of the music. Also I've got to see the underground/ outsider thing has grown on me a lot more recently in the midst of becoming more aware of the massive commercialisation of some of the music I love. S.T.A.B. Electronics are a project I know little about, one guy I think but making some unusual, taut and captivating sounds. The LP Instrument for Operating on Mutant Women is really good. Something I like about this is that it isn't just white noise - there's a lot of grainy fuzz and vocal samples, as well as some sickness-induced modulated synth sounds that are more pummelling than pure noise.






I'd really like to be able to talk next about Puce Mary's Persona LP which has got more acclaim than most noise releases could expect - but I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive >:(.



I also picked up some tapes by Bagman which are nicely extreme.





After the original CDRs these were rereleased last year by Crucial Blast. I found them through the UK label Reverse Records UK, a relatively new but interesting venture putting out noise and power electronics. Their emphasis is on packaging, which is very sophisticated compared to a lot of noise/pe which goes for an extremely underground style. They retain the gruesome/extreme imagery though, which makes for an interesting combination. I got some other stuff, the best of which is a DVD called Transgressive Collective - a collection of tracks released by RR and some unreleased, with videos created by label boss Keith Mitchell. While I have no time for videos accompanying commercial music, I think the artistic merging of audio and visual has a lot of exciting possibilities, only some of which have so far been explored. Keith does it well here and I've enjoyed the pieces as a whole.







I will say, these vids again remind me of our old video for Blaque Meat for which we cut up some old footage of Hermann Nitsch actions. Which is a nice springboard to say that I uploaded some old DisinVectant tracks to YouTube.









Finally, I rediscovered in the last few days the Von Archives releases I bought a while back. Von are doing some really interesting things in the audio-visual realm, and with a distinctive brand identity which I find very pleasing (every release is packaged in a grainy black and white portrait photograph which adds a degree of austere seriousness to everything). I only have two, and the best of these is Z'Ev's Eyear which contains four experiments where the audio track was played through various media and the resulting movement videoed.

That's all folks. See you again next year!

obligatory Charlie Hebdo post

I had no intention of writing about the Charlie Hebdo massacre until very recently (like, twenty minutes ago). In the beginning, I heard about it and didn't pay it much mind. Terrorism is a fact of life now. It's not the first terrorist attack in France, it's not unexpected, it wasn't even a particularly high loss of life. Days later two thousand (TWO THOUSAND) were slaughtered in Nigeria with a similar motive. In this case the victims were public figures, part of the establishment media in France, and doubtless the air of familiarity that carries has made people feel this more acutely than they otherwise would.

The second reason I didn't intend to write was because I didn't have a simple opinion about it, unlike most who have raised their voices. In fact it would be fair to say I didn't have an opinion at all until I started reading other peoples' and thinking "yeah you have a point there". So I wavered a lot and did some mulling and I think there's some things which I still haven't heard anyone say. I'm going to say those, along with some things that have already been said.

Let's get it clear: there's no absolutes in this. It's deceptively easy to invoke certain principles which our culture believes in an say that trumps all else. Free speech is an important principle and it's one that underpins liberal democracy - meaning Western European culture. But despite what many people say, in life our free speech is always subject to the censure of common sense. If I insult someone, mock them and make a fool of them, then they may turn violent. I have a legal right to do it, and short of slander I can say whatever I want to and about other people. But then I expect certain consequences if I go about it in the wrong way. If the victim responds violently then they have broken the law and may be punished, but me in hospital and them in prison doesn't seem a victory for anyone. For that reason, most of us do not exercise the extremes of free speech which we defend.

Charlie Hebdo did; knowing that it's a very sensitive subject they published cartoons mocking religions and religious beliefs. Islam wasn't the only religion they mocked - they also got their claws into Judaism and Christianity. They did this knowing - let's be honest - that they would face at most some mild criticism from conservative members of the latter two. It's an accepted part of our culture to offer criticism and outright mockery to religion, as much as it is to politics. It's in fact...one of the secular west's holy cows. The right to satire. Most of us believe it firmly. I'm certainly one of them. Some humour makes me uncomfortable but I deal with it. It's part of living in a freeish country, with all the benefits that entails. What is the difference between mocking Islam and mocking Christianity? Well, effectively none. And especially for those of us without religious faith, the post-religious in the West, all religious are equally archaic and distanced from our intellectual milieu as to be fitting targets. But secularism is located within a particular religious setting. It is not by accident that the secular world is basically synonymous with Christendom: It is essentially a post-Christian phenomenon - the secular world is the latest incarnation of Christendom. It is the stage that happens in our culture after the specific religious belief of Christianity is filtered out, but still our metaphysics, our cultural presumptions and intellectual baggage remain. We, in the West, the majority of us have grown up as Christian whether we practice or not - it is encoded in our culture. We know the gist of the New Testament, we know the festivals, we know the creation story and the basic soteriology of Christianity. In mocking Christianity we are mocking our own history. Judaism now is assimilated with varying degrees of comfort, to the extent that it too can be considered a part of the religious establishment of the West. Islam is not. It is still a religion - or better, a culture - which is outside the commonly conceived essence of Europe and the West.* It is not at all unusual for Western culture to hold fast the value of critique, of poking things even if it hurts as an objective value applicable to all, but then to reserve the harshest poking for that which is alien to it; the defense "hey, I do this to myself too" doesn't really cut it. Just because I punch myself in the face doesn't mean everyone else should let me do it to them.

*A large part of this is because it has external homelands where Muslims reside and from where they emigrate; Judaism does not have this to such a degree, the tiny state of Israel still being a nation effectively of refugees from other tragedies. Secondly, becasue Jewish life has been part of Europe for centuries.

There is a kind of cultural imperialism in the belief that satire is just fine, it can be pointed wherever we like and everyone should accept the insults. But then what is multiculturalism about? If Muslims live in the West, shouldn't they accept Western values as westerners would when leaving elsewhere? Yes. Simple answer. Just like immigrants to Britain should indeed learn English. It's bad for everyone if people don't attempt to integrate and grin and bear the challenges that brings to some degree. Part of living in these countries is accepting that people don't take religion too seriously, and will often take the piss quite cruelly.

Does freedom of speech mean the right to offend? Does it include hate speech? Does it include the right to incite others to violence? These are the difficult questions which free speech brings. Clearly if we're going to hold to some kind of free-speech principle we need to know exactly how far that freedom goes. There is a point at which ridicule does actually become psychological aggression. And while it is very easy for the mainstream of society to say "it's just words", words are experienced very differently by those who are oppressed by the mainstream, locked out of the warm embrace of social acceptance. It's all words to begin with, but words represent and help to form a social reality of discrimination and prejudice. Would it be different if the terrorists had targeted the offices of the Front National?

Now this makes it seem as if Muslims don't have self-control; autonomy. Everyone is essentially responsible for their own actions. It is never acceptable to say "they made me"; provocation can be an influence, but never a cause. It is worth reciting this: Jews in Europe and the Middle East (i.e., under Christianity and under Islam), in the face of centuries of oppression far worse than Muslims now face, never countenanced violent response. There has also been little evidence of retribution from Christian minorities in the Middle East who have faced severe (read: genocidal) difficulties. The black American civial rights movement had little truck with violence except in self-defence. The Roma have not committed a single act of terrorism. Oppression does not necessitate violence. People choose their own response, with a large helping hand from the peer pressure and way they interpret the culture they align with.

Is there a problem in Islam? Certainly. In Islam right now there is a huge problem. Terrorism - both within Islamic states and non-Islamic - is becoming synonymous with Islam. And it's particularly telling that this response occurs not just towards oppressive Western countries, but also within Islamic and African countries (though by no means all of them). Muslims are hardly an oppressed minority in Nigeria or Pakistan. This wasn't always the case - Islamic civilisation was for a long time much more peaceful and tolerant than Christendom. And let's be very honest - in terms of violence, in terms of numbers killed, the amount of Muslims which the modern West has killed either directly - through invasion, war, drones - or indirectly - through propping up dictatorships, quashing democratic revolutions, carrying out proxy wars - is far far more than the amount of Westerners Muslims have killed. It's a different kind of violence: either a war carried out where civilians are collateral damage, a war that is against a state often also abusive towards its citizens (and often helped into power by Western funds); or the subtle violence of sweatshops, natural resource plundering, all for the protection of Western interests and the quality of life in Europe. My point is, the West also has a problem. And it's a massive one. The urge to hold on to power, power for some, for the "free" people of the West, means subjugating and controlling those of the East who may otherwise pursue their own interests and privelige their own rights and freedoms over ours. Or at the very least compromise our total agency in the world, our right to do and say whatever we feel, with an alternative viewpoint, an Other which faces us as an equal. So, let's not kid ourselves. Western culture and Western governments have no more respect for life than Islamic ones do. Human lives are always collateral in the grand scheme of politics, a machine which chews up souls in a way nature could only imagine.

But there's no easy answers to this. There never are, are there? When we have to find a way of dealing with human relations its so attractive to say that one principle trumps all others. But we're all trying to live in this world together. If I want to do something and feel like I have every right to do something, it's still the case that I am not the final arbiter. I morally ought to think about other peoples' feelings and about how other people might interpret what I say.

The visual field and ideas about consciousness

First post for a while and it's a long one. Starts off talking about a recent New Scientist article, its implications for the nature of perception and consciousness and then goes off into waffle about politics and protest.

There's a particularly interesting article by Laura Spinney in an October edition of New Scientist which I've only just got around to reading (as I lay in my freezing bed this morning, bemoaning how little time and energy I currently have for the intellectual pursuits I love). On the website the article is behind a pay wall, so I've copied it below in the hope that if readers find it really fascinating they'll take out a subscription, or maybe just buy a copy of NS every so often.

The article is nominally about "inversion-goggle" experiments, and how we construct our visual field. I'd read about these experiments while studying psychology as a teenager. In the classical studies, an experimenter donned goggles which inverted his (yes, his) vision - both horizontally and vertically. After several days of confusion and fraught interaction with the world, the experimenter typically would report a flipping of the visual field such that suddenly the world was the right way up again. All's well (until he removes the googles, and it takes his brain another few days to reinvert his vision).

Contemporary versions of this experiment, informed by developments in the philosophy of mind and cognition, have provoked different interpretations. The experimenters (still he, as far as I could tell from this article) now find that a single flip of the visual field never occurs; rather, there is a gradual but incremental adaptation to the new way that one must interact with the world the eyes describe. Certain functions adapt quicker than others and there is a fragmenting of vision such that some objects and processes appear "right-way" up at the same time as others are inverted.

This has provoked some commentary about the nature of consciousness and the problems with the Cartesian model of a single internal representation of the world which the subject uses to navigate their way around the real world outside them.

Someone unmentioned in the article but who immediately sprang to mind for me, is Daniel Dennett who developed a fragmentary, process-based model of consciousness in Consciousness Explained. In this text Dennett uses many scientific studies to build a theory that consciousness is effectively textual (that's my wording, he never says that); our interpretation of the world is a construct based around what we expect to be the case based on the best evidence to hand at the time - and one which is constantly being rewritten. For Dennett there is no Cartesian theatre of conscious awareness (and no corresponding subconscious) - rather we are constantly in the process of adding tiny fragments of information into a bigger picture which is never complete. In one example, he cites a study where two consecutively blinking lights centimetres apart appear, to the observer, to be one light moving between different points; such movement never happens, but the brain constructs it because it expects such a pattern of information to imply movement. Dennett asks, what would happen if we paused the subject's brain inbetween the two flashes? Would they be experiencing the light half-way between the two points, as they later remember having done? No: that movement was only retrospectively written into the experience, there was never a qualia of that movement. Dozens of other examples bolster his (very convincing) argument for such a revisionary textual model of consciousness over the traditional panoramic one where the subjective world is presented as a photograph in which the subject can wonder, where facts and detail remain the same regardless of the focus of attention.*

*It is common knowledge in memory studies now that memory is not a matter of accessing stable recordings of events encoded in our brains, but rather a reimagining every time the memory is accessed; we effectively rewrite the memory each time we think it, reconstructing it along with the associations and interpretations it comes to have as we grow and learn more about the world and ourselves.

Spinney goes on to describe a theory oc perception called "enactivism". This holds that "thinking and feeling arise in the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment" and therefore "your subjective experience of being is created by your awareness of the myriad different ways your self interacts with the world as you move around an explore it." This has striking implications for consciousness because it means that the senses, and the kind of body, through which we interact with the world, determine the structures and patterns of our thought. This is important because it suggests - in fact requires - that thought has to be located subjectively within the parameters of particularity. Most interestingly, it means that other lifeforms will have different structures of thought which are to varying degrees unlike our own. Of course, life on earth is as far as we know all variations on a single theme which developed millions of years ago, sharing an environment who's nature has certain strict boundaries; but life, or thought, is not necessarily constrained to earth or the kinds of environment it provides; again, not mentioned in the article is one of my recurrent ponderings, that any kind of computer-based intelligence, even though designed by us, would evolve ways of thinking that were unimaginable to us; based on their experience, their specific modes of embodiment, and their relationship with the world (which included their relationship with humans, whatever format that might take). But the main conclusion, that consciousness cannot be reduced to a single process or substance, is well-supported by the argument and evidence and one I in particular find easy to accept.

Before I post the article, there is something related to all this which I think is important to bring forward. In these times of tension, violence, repression and intrastate conflict, there has very much been a marking of lines and separation in sides: who supports the police in their actions to "protect" society, even though they may sometimes make mistakes; who supports the protestors in places like Ferguson, and chant All Cops Are Bastards; who supports Israel's use of force to protect its civilian population and who supports the Palestinian struggle attempting to release itself from this grip. These two (four?) situations, extremely contentious and cause of many arguments, are, to me, part of a bigger issue which will long continue to blight our world - that social roles are effectively determined, once a dynamic begins to take shape then behaviour becomes almost impossible to vary. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that a single group of students, arbitrarily divided into prisoners and guards, would very quickly develop the kind of behaviours which we see in the real world and likewise relationships to each other: the guards become authoritarian and abusive, the prisoners become either passive victims and collaborators, or aggressively rebellious. There is a dynamic where if you give someone a uniform and a weapon and tell them it is their job to protect society, they will dehumanise anyone they see as acting against them: these are the troublemakers, the ones who are threatening peaceful civilisation (even if they are just selling cigarettes); for those victimised by the police, it is rather the police who are dehumanised in their eyes, becoming tools of repression, essentially violent and stupid. No one is right in their views - in the process of dehumanisation we see not the complexity of human judgment, the structures which determine our thoguht processes and conclusions, we see only the end-result, the us and them and, working back from that, we project some monstrous kind of beliefs, some un-empathisable wickedness which has led "them" to act in such a way, a way which to us is inconceivable because our own experiences - our own environment which helps to structure our thought - cannot possibly lead to that view of reality.

I have often heard it said (and this says more about the people I listen to than anything else) that white society doesn't understand the struggles of that black (or other minority) groups have to go through; likewise that men don't understand how much pressure there is on women in our culture. This is true; so is the opposite, however (and this isn't a prelude to some horrific kind of meninism). It's very difficult to step outside our own shoes. In these examples the oppressed groups are focussed on, and rightly so. But it's also the case that in debates about things like Ferguson, in questions about police violence, in discussions about Israel-Palestine, we have to see that there are two sides both of which are inhabited by human beings, but in which there are clear and distinct social roles which play out regardless of the individuals in those places. "How can people do this?" It is often asked - but only by people who've never been in that situation. How can police attack an unarmed protestor? How can kids riot instead of going to school? How can the IDF bomb schools? How can Hamas hide weapons in schools? How can Bin Laden attack the WTC? How can America and Russia use Afghanistan as a battlefield for their proxy war? How can other people make the choices they do? These very one-sided narratives always serve to dehumanise the other, to not recognise that through different life experiences different conclusions about what is to be prioritised are reached; that in the power dynamics of the human world, where you sit in the scale of entitlement has serious consequences for your understanding of the world and its social structures as liberating or oppressive; to be celebrated or fought. Whether the protestor is a menace or a freedom fighter depends already on your own location in regard to them.

The point I'm getting at in this last section is that it's very easy to see politics in monolithic terms - that there is a factual answer about how the world should be, and about right and wrong. But if we can stem our arrogance and begin to believe that other alternative viewpoints are just as logical, just as human, then we go a long way towards resolving disputes. If protestors and police can both understand that the others are human beings making difficult decisions based around their experiences, maybe there's a way for empathy and compassion to enter their actions too. Admitting that the internal world is constructed and not an objective representation is a step towards that.

A MAN walks confidently towards an open gate but instead of going straight through he raises his knee very high as if he were stepping over a low wall. He strides forward, reaching out to shake a friend's hand. But again he misjudges, and his friend draws back in alarm to avoid being punched in the nose.

This is Innsbruck, Austria, in the 1950s, and no, the man hasn't been drinking too much schnapps. He is psychologist Ivo Kohler, and he is wearing a pair of goggles with a built-in mirror that turns his world upside down. In a grainy black-and-white film that records his stumblings, the eternally surprised Kohler dives to catch a child's balloon drifting skywards and turns a teacup upside down against a stream of water being poured from above.

Kohler is just one in a long line of researchers who have used inverting goggles to try to understand how we see. The latest to pass through the looking glass is a young philosopher called Jan Degenaar. For him, however, the experiment is not simply an exploration of vision. By stepping outside his normal perception of the world and seeing it in a different way, he thinks he has gained an insight into the so-called hard problem of consciousness – how to explain the feeling of sensation. How do our brains turn a set of signals into the redness of a rose, the softness of velvet, the pungency of raw onion, and all the rest? His experience supports a new theory about consciousness – that it is not merely in the mind, but extends beyond the boundary of the body. The idea is not just weird and esoteric, if correct it has ramifications in fields ranging from animal consciousness to robotics.

Degenaar's foray into the hard problem of consciousness began with an interest in visual perception. Orthodox understanding of how this works dates back to the 16th century and French philosopher René Descartes, who suggested that our brains construct an internal model of the world, which we then view like a cinema playing inside our heads. Degenaar is among a growing number of researchers who question this interpretation. In 2011, while studying for a PhD at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, he was reading descriptions of experiments with inverting goggles when he noticed something interesting. While some experimenters described the mental image of the world flipping, others related how they learned to adapt their behaviour to the inverted image. Intrigued by the discrepancy, he decided to try the experiment for himself.

Degenaar's goggles flipped the left and right sides of space by placing a right-angled prism in front of each eye. He wore them for an average of 4 hours a day for 31 days – earlier experiments having shown that you can adapt without wearing them all the time. With objects on his left now appearing on his right and vice versa, he immediately experienced a major conflict between the feedback from his visual system and other sensory input, especially touch. He became as clumsy as Kohler. Initially, however, the most disturbing aspect of the experience was his sense of visual instability. Each time he moved his head, the scene rushed past him and he couldn't track anything in it. On the first day, the nausea this induced was so intense that he vomited.

The visual instability gradually eased and had vanished entirely by day 13. At that point, Degenaar could move his head while keeping his gaze fixed and see objects where he expected to see them. If he kept his head still, however, he had to think hard about which way to move his eyes to bring an object into the centre of his vision from the periphery. Other skills returned at different rates. Unable to orient a knife correctly with respect to a tomato on day 1, for example, he managed to cook a simple meal three days later. He developed strategies for walking that involved turning his head in the direction he wanted to go in. At first his path zigzagged but it gradually straightened out, and on day 15 he was able to walk home from the university, armed with a white stick – though it took him an hour rather than the usual 30 minutes (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol 13, p 373).

This piecemeal adaptation has been reported by others. American psychologist George Stratton was a pioneer of inverting glasses in the late 19th century. With one eye covered, he strapped a contraption over the other, inverting the world left-right and up-down. He reported that different elements of the scene "righted" themselves at different times and in different contexts. In the 1960s, a volunteer working with psychologist James Taylor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, got quite good at riding a bike around the campus wearing left-right inverting glasses. However, even when he could easily navigate between buildings, writing on signs on those buildings still appeared reversed, only becoming legible after he had practised reading with the goggles.

Illusion of reality

Everyone agrees that describing inversion effects to people who have never experienced them is extremely difficult, and researchers argue over the meaning of past accounts. In Stratton's case, for example, what was "righted" could have been either his visual experience, or his behavioural response to it. What is consistent in most reports, though, is the incremental nature of the adaptation. For Degenaar and his former mentor, Erik Myin at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, it represents a nail in the coffin of the Cartesian model of vision.

"There is no internal image in the brain, and nothing flips," says Degenaar. The real nature of visual perception is quite different, he says. At any given time we see only a tiny portion of the visual scene – the part our eyes are actively exploring. The impression we have of gazing out on a unified visual world is mere illusion, he believes, arising from the knowledge that we would see another portion of the scene if we were to move our eyes there. It's our active, if partial, sampling of the scene that gives it the quality of reality. In his view, adaptation to inverting glasses involves learning a new set of relationships between our movements and the changes in sensory input they now generate. It therefore depends on how much a person has practised a certain action, which could explain the staged return of consistent, accurate visual judgement. "You start to see vision not as one capacity, but as a set of interrelated capacities," says Myin.

One person who agrees with this interpretation is Kevin O'Regan, who is based, ironically, at Paris Descartes University in France, and in whose lab Degenaar works. "Seeing involves actively interacting with the world," he says. There is no Cartesian cinema playing inside our heads, just a mass of different interactions between our senses and our environment. "Saying that we have the impression of a coherent visual field is simply an abbreviated way of saying that we are comfortable with all the ways that we visually interact with the world." He gives an example the rest of us might just be able to relate to: shaving or putting on make-up in a mirror isn't easy the first time you do it, but with practice you get better. You reach out with your razor or mascara wand to the right place on your face, and you do so automatically, without telling yourself to do the opposite of what feels right.

O'Regan's model is not simply about vision, it encompasses all forms of perception. A decade ago, when he began talking about his "sensorimotor theory of perception", it was highly controversial. Today, enactivism – as variants of it are collectively called – is gaining in popularity. Enactivists believe that thinking and feeling arise in the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. Thus an organism "enacts" a world. And this insight might help crack one of the biggest mysteries of all – the hard problem of consciousness. In O'Regan's model, your subjective experience of being is created by your awareness of the myriad different ways your self interacts with the world as you move around and explore it.

If O'Regan is correct, the particular senses with which you explore the world shape your subjective feeling of being. And that's where inverting goggles come in. Degenaar had an insight into the hard problem of consciousness around day 30 of his experiment. Until then, he had found that coordinating his movements with what he saw required effort, and he had begun to worry that he would only ever be able to compensate for his impairment, never really adapt to it. That changed when he suddenly noticed that objects appeared to be where they actually were. In his write-up of the experiment, he describes what happened next: "A few moments later, when I had not moved my head for a while, I fell back in the other way of experiencing the visual field again, so that the objects once again appeared to be in places where they were not actually located. But when I continued looking around again, by slowly moving my head, I could now see objects where they were." In other words, he now had access to two perceptual worlds, whereas most of us spend our whole lives trapped inside one.

Previous goggle-wearers have described a stage where they saw two versions of the same object, one more ghostly than the other, though with time the ghostly one became more substantial until it replaced the first. Degenaar's experience was slightly different: his two "percepts" were rivals. He compares this bi-stable state to what people experience when they look at an ambiguous image such as the Necker cube or duck/rabbit illusion. "It can't be described as the flipping of an image," he says. "It's more like a gestalt switch." He was seeing the same objects, and nothing had moved, but the raw feel of seeing had changed. The reason, he thinks, is that his sensorimotor engagement with the world – the bodily act of seeing – had also been transformed.

Enactivism hasn't won everybody over. One sceptic is Colin Klein, a philosopher at the Australian National University in Canberra. While impressed by Degenaar's descriptive powers, he says they still leave room for different interpretations. The perceptual breakthrough he recorded on day 30, for instance, could have been the result of his brain learning to extract information from an inverted internal image – in the same way that a trained sonographer can decode an ultrasound image that appears to a patient as meaningless black and white splodges. "In one sense they are seeing the same image, but one is seeing it with expert knowledge and one isn't," says Klein.

Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the City University of New York, expresses similar reservations. When you look in a mirror, he says, "You know the image is reversed, but you develop the skills to cope with a world that has been turned backwards."

Both Klein and Prinz cite a study from 1999 that circumvents the problem of describing what it feels like to experience visual inversion. David Linden, then at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues, tested four wearers of up-down inverting goggles on a simple visual trick that involved showing them discs drawn on a flat, grey background and shaded vertically from white to black. Normally, observers assume that the discs are lit from above, and see those that are white at the top as convex and those that are black at the top as concave (see Illustration). Linden's volunteers made this assumption too, but when they put the glasses on they reported that the discs they had originally seen as convex were now concave and vice versa. What's more, this interpretation persisted throughout the 10-day experiment, despite the fact that they adapted behaviourally to the glasses (Perception, vol 28, p 469).

For Klein and Prinz, this is clear evidence for a picture model of vision. The internal image is inverted by the goggles and does not adapt or flip; rather, behaviour adapts to the inverted image. For Degenaar and O'Regan, it merely demonstrates that vision can be fragmented until a person relearns all the ways in which they can interact visually with their environment.

The two interpretations have different implications. A robot built on the picture model would passively register a photo-like image of the world, while a sensorimotor robot would learn to see the world by actively exploring it. More fundamentally, if the sensorimotor approach is correct, a newborn baby might have to learn consciousness. And the quality of another species' consciousness might differ radically from our own, given that it explores the world with different senses, such as eyes on the side of its head or the ability to echolocate or sense magnetic fields.

O'Regan's ultimate goal is to understand how the brain mediates these sensorimotor interactions to create phenomenological experience: how, for example, it generates a feeling of redness across all the different conditions in which a red object can be observed. At root, he thinks, raw feel springs from something elementary and predictable – the laws of physics – but understanding how it does so could give us an insight into what it means to be human. Imagery, symbolism, metaphor and language – the things that set our species apart – are, after all, grounded in sensory experience.

The debate over the hard problem continues, and we surely haven't seen the last of inversion goggles. Degenaar would like to repeat his experiment with a group of volunteers, having them describe their visual experiences while observers simultaneously record changes in their behaviour. So look out for people trying to spoon soup into their foreheads, or throwing themselves to the ground in an attempt to stand up straight. They will be doing it in a good cause.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Goggle eyed"

Laura Spinney is based in Lausanne, Switzerland

Twenty Months of Perfect Tunes

In the midst of a difficult time replete with heartbreak, existential angst and post-thesis blues I didn't get around to my now-traditional end of year music round up at the end of 2013, so in an attempt to redress this and talk about some of the amazing music that's been around in the last twenty months, here is my extended belated account.

First off, I discovered Firewater earlier this year. As a long-time fan of Cop Shoot Cop since their first album Consumer Revolt, I was aware of Tod A's prowess as a songwriter. After their untimely demise he began Firewater as a vehicle for experimenting with a more traditional yet avant-garde approach to music, mixing klezmer, gypsy and world musics with his trademark black humour and vituperative cynicism. I'd tried to get into the new band but failed dismally because it just didn't make sense to me. After rediscovering the fourth and final CSC album, Release, I tried again and was joyously surprised. Truly unusual music from an immense talent, and surely the greatest lyricist of our generation. The album which has drawn the highest praise (from me) is The Golden Hour, recorded over several months with musicians around Asia (Pakistan, Turkey and Israel included). Full of the energetic sense of freedom and excitement which Tod must have felt during his travels, every song tells of the disappointment and bittersweet irony which many of us have felt during the desolate years of the early 21st century. This poignant combination of uplift, enthusiasm and the bright sun of foreign climes with the tales of disappointment, of one man trying to find a way to be true to himself in a world which isn't geared towards human happiness is what gives the album it's incredible emotional depth. Tod's lyrical power on this album is amazing, as is his gift for melody and songwriting - something which the bile of CSC often masked. Every track is killer, though some took more listens than others to fully appreciate. It's difficult to select two tracks because every one needs to be heard but here are three that are immediately stunning. Right now this is album of the century and I can't get enough of it.







Sadly not every album is as good as this, though The Man on the Burning Tightrope has some fantastic moments.

Such as



Protomartyr get the second place this year. Under Color of Official Right is fucking great. Part Joy Division, part Pixies, but with a distinctive swagger and bite that (probably) only a band from Detroit could muster, they have forged a path which isn't obviously original but is cut through with their own personality. Lyrically the album is gold - Joe Casey has a unique sense of grimy disconsolation which doesn't wallow in self-pity, but externalises the resentment of outsiderdom to a highly literate attack on the shallowness of the world. Their live show is great too - nothing surprising, but they're a tight band firing on all cylinders at the moment, and they're still playing venues small enough to really appreciate them. I love all the parts, but the drummer's a master of tight, precise tattoo, a typical post-punk style but done to perfection in a way that's entirely natural - not just homage to their influences.






When Michael Gira reformed Swans I was slightly dubious, having lost interest in their later output some years earlier. 2012's The Seer had some great moments (and amazing packaging) but ultimately failed to deliver a consistent vision. This year's To Be Kind demonstrates a far more focussed experience, hypnotic and ritualistic with drive and determination, a masculine energy and discipline that characterised Swans' early output but complemented with the experience of life; stripped of the raw aggression, Gira's mature personality shines through to deliver an intense album which sprawls across three discs and two and a half hours without losing any of its captivating power. I don't like the sleeve though.

HTRK returned in 2014 with an album which, at first, I rather disliked; Psychic 9-5 Club is seductively rich and warm, as opposed to the cold dejection of Work (Work, Work) evoking a definite 80s vibe and my first impression was one of a self-confident settling into acceptance; a band trying to assure themselves they had nothing left to prove. But beneath the nondescript warmth there is a beating heart of concentrated vision; a smooth surface which is sensual only because of what it conceals, the blood and muscle which moves beneath it. Blue Sunshine. I saw them play the Southbank as part of the screening of Rowland S. Howard eulogy-documentary Autoluminescent. It was nice to see them, and great to hear their cover of Howard's Dead Radio but in a birghtly lit hall, sitting down made the experience somewhat lacklustre. I'd rather have heard their music in a dimly lit bar, that seems to be its natural home.





Thanks to my friend Ben I discovered the junk metal composer Hal Hutchinson. His career has consisted of refinements of a single artistic concept: the use of metal and machine parts to create an organised chaos of industrial noise which has evolved through dozens of iterations. Each release is very different, some sparse and distorted, some intense and manic. This CD comes in a great package with postcards and an essay explaining his approach and artistic vision.



Along very similar lines is a batch of releases from long established noise composer Vertonen. Taking field recordings of industrial machinery as his starting point, Blake Edwards composes unforgiving mechanical symphonies which admit of no apparent human element while being highly intellectually satisfying. Of the three releases, each constricted to one format - CD, tape and vinyl - it's the picture disc which is the most accomplished (but doesn't have a track on Youtube so you're getting one from the CD)




*Update: here's one from the vinyl on Soundcloud*



Possibly the most extreme variant of this kind of thing comes from Ben's own label in Nottingham - Kiks/GFR. Pursuing a singular vision of primitive electronics and found sound, Kiks have several releases on a variety of formats. It's difficult to choose one, but you can listen to most of them on the website or their Bandcamp (the tapes are beautifully packaged though, so check those out).




Bringing slightly more structure to things is Eric Holm's Andoya. Composed from recordings on an outpost in X, the album makes a subdued, lightly clanking icy ambient not unlike Thomas Koner - though with a quiet real-world sensibility that manages to carry the sustained impression of a single person's perspective and artistic intention. It's a very specific vision realised with perfection.





Boduf Songs has a long history behind them but for me were brand new last year. Reading the Boomkat review of Burnt Up On Re-Entry left me curious, but the album itself is a stellar piece of silky black ambient folk with a dark humour and sophistication all of its own. His previous efforts are all very good but this is the magnum opus.





Autechre returned with a deluxe four vinyl album, Exai. As usual with Autchre the first few listens bore little reward but as I've returned to it again and again, each time stripping away another layer of expectations about what an Ae record should be, I've found new elements which have drawn me in. Comparison and value judgment with their previous releases are pointless, it's different and it's good.









I rediscovered Dual, a project I followed when I was a mere kid. Beginning in the industrial duo Spleen, Colin Bradley progressed to more abstract sonic extremes not unlike Robert Hampson's Main. Processed guitar forms the core of the music which retains only the ghostly trace of melody but is nonetheless exquisite. There's not much online now, some sound clips on the website and this track on bandcamp, but a 50 minute live set is available here.





Ben Frost's A U R O R A has thrust him into the limelight this year - an interesting departure into rhythmic and psychedelic territory for him. It's beautiful and harrowing, rich and random. It's a record which speaks of a blinding light split into razor sharp shards. I'm glad to find that recently ambient/noise artists have begun incorporating rhythmic elements into their sound.





Sandra Electronics, the early project of Downwards Records head, Karl O'Connor (aka Regis, and recently joined by Juan Mendez of Silent Servant) have put up a slew of new and archive material. The definitive release is Sessions, available as a cassette only on Minimal Wave. This is music which draws equally on 80s and teen sounds. I'm still unsure as to how much of it dates back to Karl's pre-techno days and how much is new composition - if the former, it really shouldn't have been shelved for two decades. Clunking machine rhythms, snarling analogue synths and Karl's barked vocals amount to a brutal attack on our expectations of electronic pop music. This material confirms the promise which I've always felt Regis' music held but failed to properly express due to the constraints which the dancefloor form dictated.





Samuel Kerridge has delivered several 12s and an album of bleak and grainy, slowed down industrial/techno. Again it's only after several listens that the album has made sense to me - expecting a moody techno LP the off-beat rhythms and oppressive atmospherics left me wanting some kind of energy but now I've discovered the right way of listening to it, I'm hooked - it's great to see a hybrid emerging as a new form of music, one which takes the attitude of industrial/dark ambient and the rhythmic discipline of techno but utlilises them to create something unique.







Existing in the same musical circles is Monica Hits the Ground, a project only two 12s old but which has provided another unique take on brutal atmospheric techno which would be very difficult to dance to - the punding rhythmic power isn't one which takes you by the hips by rather grabs you by the ribs in an attempt to suffocate.





Talbot are on their third release now and I discovered them belatedly. This Estonian duo make a deceptively complex sprawling psychedelic-sludge rock which combines growl and clean singing to great effect. Can't wait for the next release.



Now, Aphex Twin. The new album is a month away, and I'm eagerly expecting great things. I still think that Drukqs is a masterpiece, surpassing his earlier simplistic efforts - great as they have been for the time. I happily participated in the Kickstarter to fund the purchase of Cat033 (yes, even to the extent of buying the blank CDR and digipack to burn the wavs onto), but I appear to be the only person disappointed by the LP. It sounds exactly like the kind of album which would end up unreleased. There is little imagination, though the trademark AFX trappings are there, they aren't realised with the panache that other albums displayed. I have yet to find a single track which I actually think is worthwhile, or even enjoy listening to. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it's out there and I think the Kickstarter project was a great thing. But musically it's pretty shit.



Didn't like The Knife album. haven't even listened to all of it but I heard was sufficiently terrible to whither any interest in investigating it. Such a shame because Silent Shout was like a revelation to me, a magical surreal pop experience which soundtracked a whole summer. On the new album they seem to have disappeared up their arses entirely. I abused one of Silent Shout's lyrics for the title of this post just to demonstrate my dissatisfaction, that'll learn em.

I'm kind of happy that I got away from the really heavy music that was taking up a lot of my time last year. I still like seeing sludgy metal and powerviolence live but I've lost the taste for it as independent listening. Possibly the stand-out of the last year is Blut Aus Nord's The Work Which Tranforms God, actually a rerelease. As black metal goes it's well-produced and has a nicely gnostic overtone which stands in contrast to the dreary Satanist tropes that the followers of the genre assume.







Nottingham's Nadir put out their first release this year, on tape only. The package is beautiful, worth the money just for that - but the music's good too. These five tracks don't display the advances their live sound has made recently with the addition of an electronic element, but it's still worth checking out (and I expect great things from the next album).



Also still riding high are Bismuth (Tanya of Nadir's other project), who've been garnering rave reviews from the underground for their brand of ethereal volcanic sludge.



Shouldn't go without mentioning The Bug's new album, Angels and Devils. I can't say much about it because my copy only arrived yesterday, but it's good and looks set to be in many end of year charts. I'm glad to see him expanding his palette a little from the dancehall distortion of previous releases under this moniker and for me the first disc, Angels is the better half. I particularly like his collaboration with Liz Harris (Grouper)



Oh and talking of Liz, her collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma saw a much needed rerelease this year. Could only find the whole album on Youtube, which I'd prefer not to share if given the choice. But here it is.



So yeah. It's been great. Hopefully there's plenty more to come in the next four months so I can do another round up in December. And don't forget to support the artists and buy their stuff if you like it. It's the best way to keep up the flow of great music.

Disappearance

Disappearance is such a powerful word. Complete absence; cease to exist - to vanish. Leaving only a memory, just the incorporeal trace. In Hiding, Mark C Taylor argues that it is the very disappearance of the body which makes it real - only its astonishing absence can inscribe the importance of its (now past) presence. But the past is as corporeal as the present for those who cannot detach themselves from it. Perhaps more so, because its influence is felt, a deadweight, inescapable and unchallengable because of its very, dead, certainty. Whereas the present projects into the future, it is unrealised, unactualised and only to be resolved. The past's shadow is upon us whereas the present's appearance is cast into the future. So, only in retrospect does the present become real - only as past. Only in disappearance does the body gain real - apparent - corporeality.

What use then is disappearance?


Many have claimed that it is only in death that we find Being - in leaving the transitory existence of Becoming, we enter a new state of eternal subsistence. Certainly the concrete presence of the absent implies this. In being not-here, it transcends and solidifies out of the living-death of the corruptible world.

Philosophy of the Body

What is needed is a philosophy of the body. This is not to say a philosophy of matter, or a materialist philosophy. The body is more than matter - encompassing that which is present through the body, the mental, that 'epiphenomenal' which can breach its own boundaries and, overflowing, exercise power over that which gives it birth.

A philosophy of the body, of human physicality, seeks to determine the humanistic aspects of the body; how the body functions in cultures, how physicality can determine and effect (even, affect) our internal and interpersonal realities.

What happens when we scratch this surface? What comes to pass when we open the body for an examination which is transphysical in nature?

In this case the body becomes not just matter, not a concentration of particles, tissue, blood and bone; neither is it a hollow vessel, second to the spirit which moves it. Instead it is the very presence of the internality which exists through it; the medium by which minds interact, through which expression occurs and as which the human being is real. In this case the body is the manifestation of the spirit in action, bloodied, strained and taut or limp, reduced and languid. The body is both unreal and the most real; it's the closest we get to presence of the incorporeal; it's the opaque presentation of the diaphanous, illogically concealing that very - postulated, always postponed - Real which we can never reach.