Sónar 2007

Sónar was ace. Some people I’ll probably look out for (or avoid…):

A lovely vocalist in the Red Bull room. No idea who she is. She used one of those delay loop pedal thingies to sing with herself.

Les Anciens: experimental baldy blokes with very tight and clever percussion, bass, random sounding, jazzy but not with the right kind of chords to be jazz if you get what I mean.

Littleprettyautomatique: nice dubby trendy housey DJ set.

Kazumasa Hashimoto: LOVELY. live piano and piano style playing of electronica sounds with live drums.

FM3 with the Buddha machine: BIZARRE wee machines each of which plays 9 loops. There’s a button on the side to decide which loop plays. The performance looked like two people playing a game, moving the machines around, stacking them, knocking them over, sounds picked up with microphones. Looked impressive but we couldn’t really hear what was going on!

Piana: BEAUTIFUL Japanese Sigur Rós-like sounds.

FM3 feat. Blixa Bargeld: WEIRD. Yer man from Einstürzende Neubauten. Lots of delay-loop pedal madness with instrument after instrument fed into it all. Blixa’s voice was put through some kind of scary harmonising layered thing which made him sound like Satan.

Burbuja: PERFECTION. One of my favorite acts from Sónar. (I wish I’d seen Night of the Brain as well—also featured Merche Blasco and Cristian Vogel.) Here, have a listen to Roped.

Beastie Boys: after the initial “WOO it’s the Beastie Boys!” effect had worn off I just thought, whatever . Nothing particularly memorable happened.

Nettle: KINDA COOL! electronic drumming action with live Arab instrumentation.

Black Affair: vocals, drum machine and sequencer, and bass. Dull to watch but sounded like a male-led Ladytron.

Clark: looked like the drummer fell out with the electronic dude at one point. Looked boring but sounded KINDA COOL. Big fat electronica with huge drumming.

Richie Hawtin: bopped away to him for a while! Very serious—wish it had been less gurny!

[Um, some other bands and DJs whose names I'm not quite sure of. I was just kinda wandering around!]

Wolf Eyes: crap, loud, noisy, angry. People with fingers in ears for this, my shorts were flapping with the bass.

Andy Stott: I like his stuff a lot. After Burbuja, though, I really wasn’t impressed by people just nodding behind a laptop—and that’s all he did.

Mira Calix: more nodding. I like her music but visually it was totally boring.

Blackout Concert: this was KINDA FUNKY, down at the Centre d’Art Santa Mónica. Gist: they dumped us all in the basement of an art gallery and turned off everything that makes any noise (water heating, air conditioning, whatever else there is in a building), step-by-step, then the lights, bolted all the doors shut. The silence interrupted only by a bloke issuing orders on a walkie talkie, “Step 1… *tissssst* turn the air conditioning to level… 2 *tissssst*” (presumably—was in Spanish).

Christian Vogel: AMAZING. Up until this bloke’s set I’d decided that techno was no longer worth the misery. Bleepy jerky techno DJ set. The Burbuja crew [I'm not obsessed, honest, I didn't even mention that I noticed one of the Burbuja dancer people in the Blackout Concert...] were merrily bopping away! Vogel looks a bit like a PhD student trying and failing to explain something mathsy. He sort of stumbled around behind the decks, half-jerking, but still managed to mix seamlessly.

Mogwai: alright, but, MEH!, by this point I was all technoed up so ventured across to another room.

Black Devil Disco Club: AMAZING–just what I needed. Sort of Donna Summery style basslines, bongos, random singing, bloke with long hair and beard. Bouncy discotek, I guess. Audience was a happy audience—much bopping.

Milky Globe: AMAZING—still Lo Recordings. More bouncy happy stuff.

Cursor Miner: AMAZING. I think I like Lo Recordings (also home of The Chap whom I love). “There’s a battle there’s a war / Killing used to be a chore / Now there’s just a switch to flick / Oh so easy oh so quick.” This dude was wearing a ski mask, had flashing lights on his head, wearing a fluroscent vest and Y-fronts. Loved it. Mostly banging trance-techno but I’m sure I heard him sing sonething about philosophical theories of free will.

Altern8: FANTASTIC! They played a DJ set featuring rave classics and the likes of Voodoo Ray, Inner City—hmmm what’s it called—you know that Detroit tune with the vocals.

Much fun had.

Freedom of…

Short brain dump. This may not make sense if you weren’t in the Pleasance cabaret bar at around 12:45 this morning.

… thought

Thought (the phenomenological consciously accessible kind) is private, thus it’s not possible to determine what someone is thinking. At best you’ll be able to relate patterns of brain activity to self-reports of what people are (i.e. claim to be) thinking. This is always an approximation of what people are really experiencing. Also even if it’s not, I may refuse to give you my particular thought-brain-pattern relations, and so protect myself from thought detection and censorship by the fact that there are individual differences in the relations. Using your big Gaussian smoothing kernel to try to get rid of the effect of individual differences will reduce your ability to read my thoughts. So there is always freedom of thought.

This does assume the folk psychological notions of “freedom” and “thought”. You might argue that from the viewpoint of the biological machinery that’s enabling the thinking, freedom of thought is impossible and an illusion since it’s all influenced by the environment, etc.

… action

Actions, outcomes of thoughts, are already controlled for good reason, for instance to try to reduce murder.

… speech

I’m exercising my right at the moment. I can produce pages of writings on my thoughts. I can go to the pub and broadcast my views there too. It’s brilliant, but there’s a problem: nobody may hear what I’m saying. Freedom of speech doesn’t work unless there’s freedom of advertising (“Listen to me! I’m telling you the truth! Guaranteed or your time and money back!”). Advertising is only effective if you’ve got the right kind of money, the time to do campaigning. Who decides who gets the money? Society. So freedom of speech doesn’t work as it’s implicity modulated by people who want to hear what you have to say.

… listening?

This would go that everyone has the right to read, watch, listen to whatever they want. Seems dubious as then children would see things that could, perhaps, cause feelings and behaviour we’d probably rather they didn’t. You could argue that consenting adults should be allowed to watch anything, but what about specific examples such as videos of real murders, real child abuse? Something is not quite right there.

Back to the biological-level argument, if your environment, in particular what you read and hear, influences in a major way what you think—as seems plausible—then we really don’t want it to be possible for people to be exposed to every form of information. One counterargument to this is that sensible people wouldn’t try to access the bad stuff, but it’s not them that need protecting.

So anyway, here’s a claim

Censorship is a good idea, but only if (a) it’s made public the kind of thing which has been censored and (b) it’s possible to challenge censorship for specific cases.

End of braindump.