an entirely written in the morning blogpost

 a-ha! an entirely written in the morning blogpost 

(unless of course horsemouth carries on writing it in the afternoon)

horsemouth can't decide whether he should blog quick, go do the watering (before it warms up) and then come back to it later, or...

actually yes that's probably the right strategy. 

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ok back after a spot of watering and the milk taken over  to the garage. (32C today maybe 35C thursday). 

... and what's the thing with jacques attali's noise?

noise is a book about the political economy of music. it argues that music is annunciatory - that the political economy of music is ahead of the broader political economy. this (at least) is the rationalisation proposed by frederic jameson in his forward to the english edition - one concerning the interactions between base and superstructure proposed by engels - the relations of production can determine culture but also (reciprocally) the political economy of cultural activities can indicate how the base is going to develop. 

that would be the (broad) thesis of noise translated into marx-speak. 

whether this is an accurate reflection of marx's thought or not horsemouth is not qualified to say. he suspects not. he suspects we are dealing with a simplification by engels that leads us into temporal and causal paradoxes. 

horsemouth was privileged to live through a period when music and  musical production and consumption was changing rapidly as a result of digitalisation - first at the level of production, then at the level of consumption.

to him it seemed that attali's theses around repetition (the huge overproduction and stockpiling of musical commodities) was coming true and that a counter attack was being staged round DJ culture and rave and hip-hop and any situation where the record was becoming a means rather than an end. 

the era being ushered in is one of composition - this is an unhelpful piece of naming by attali. in attali's first attempt at theorisation in bruits (1977) attali sees improvisation as fundamentally hopeful. 25 years later much of rave, MP3 etc. has happened and so attali attempts to incorporate this, but he's not your best source on all of these things. 

it seems to horsemouth a good time to come back to these ideas as AI make inroads into music production and consumption as a precursor to its wider effects in the economy. 

of course (helter skelter - coming down fast), given the speed at which AI is restructuring things, we may not have long to enjoy our new theoretical clarity.

coming next year (of course) 50 years of attali's bruits.