>>161Oh please don't single out the individual phrases. It's OK for me that they're fixed if they're fixed properly and the fixation doesn't remind me of a certain already-formed, highly stereotyped (sub)culture.
Also I'm constantly updating my conception of music and what I've said a year ago or so won't really work for me. For example one or two years ago I would have thought that music may really be about sound but now I've abandoned that position since I'm constantly being dissatisfied by contemporary music. When I say something is "great" it is not usually admiration but simple approval of a certain germ that I think is present in this something which is worthy of looking into.
The point is still to use the right sound for the right rhythmic pattern and this "rightness" I guess is not an abstract invariant. People like Subtonick have too much going on in their music so it's hard to say anything substantial when we're just going to single out the rhythmic aspect. But let's say, ultratronics 04 versus 02, the former one utilizes sounds that are more "round" and "bouncy", if these bouncy sounds are replaced by harsher sounds like those used in ultratronics 08 it won't work at all. This is not "horizontal", but its more natural for the horizontal expansion of the, say, musical structure, to be more coherent and structured, than when the sounds just are organized for the sake of, say, the richness of the overall soundscape.
If I'm to make analogy to poetry, some poets, though widely liked, are just pure shit to me since they cannot stop using their literary devices and often use them inappropriately. The breath, the flow are simply absent in their poems. For example, even though I like Trakl's poems, his poems are very "idiotic" in that he didn't seem to really notice any of the rhythmic, "metric", aspects of his poetry. Hoelderlin, by contrast, is very conscious of it, so in the "late" poems (written around 1800 not after his madness) he switches between the short terse Hebrew form of metrics and the seemless, flowing, grand metric of Greek poetry, and his language, his literary device, also transforms in accordance to the transform of the formal aspects; and his poetry is always extremely structured. Now, what I'm most dissatisfied with, say, Autechre, is that his music when made analogy to poetry is like poems that are densely filled with metaphors, symbolism, analogy, but with regard to the flow of the sentences and the general structure of the poems, especially the internal echoing and correspondences of the poetic lines are never considered. There lacks a coherence that is "musical". It maybe coherently a mass of sound, but not coherently a piece of music. Like I said before, when imageries and symbolisms become packed, it's hard to concentrate on the structural aspect, and this structural aspect is important to me; "Logos" is important to me, and there's a general paradigm in the current discourse of music that we should become more anti-logocentric and accept the unorganized mess but concentrate on the "energy" or whatever of the sound which I don't concur with at all.
I need to add just in case that by "Logos" it certainly doesn't mean sonata form or motivic development etc. Of course by a philosophical argument that is similar to the claim that everything is embodied and is present only in the mode of being embedded inside a milieu, it can easily be argued that it is simply wrong to disembody music and think abstractly about its organization without considering the acoustic etc. aspects, and then people will be composing spatial music, will try to combine sounds and produce interesting sounds, etc. but for me there must be a "point", a telos. Musicians need not be conscious of this "point" but for me I need to be able to see this "point", I'm not content with the now-popular "free exploration of sounds" and "pure novelty" discourse of certain avant-gardes at all, but this "point" should not be the point that is indicated in the statements made by some factually dead culture.
Now what is this "coherence" I'm mentioning? That's the damn question. I don't know. But I need coherence in music since for me it is music, I guess because coherence is an indication of successful self-organization and of proper mode of individuation, and that means there's a point, a telos, something that makes it itself and hence true and differentiate itself from the milieu, present.
