This came from some drunken Christmas late night bumbling. The vocoder track is really a place holder until something better comes along and the vocals are unimportant anyway (which is just as well, since you can’t make them out). It’s meant to be ambient, but the edges need smoothing off. It also needs a fade out. That’s right, a fade out. I have no shame.

So we were listening to the OST and discussing how cold and emotionless it all is and how I don’t particularly like funky, soulful stuff, and Hilary challenged me, saying that this was really funky. I had to concede that it has warmth. It’s the female vocals, I guess, set against a synthesiser backdrop, which serves to emphasise their frail humanity; the ‘soft machine’, prostrate and framed in circuitry. There is also sparse instrumentation (piano, guitars), but reverbed to sound isolated from the actual engine of the music. You don’t need an example – I’m not asking your opinion.

So I conceded the point, but why am I drawn to this? I think there’s a certain mindset which reviles the squidgy, organic, human element and corresponds nicely with the clean, digital (technically analogue, but still mechanical) aesthetic of filtered oscillators. Why would a human hate the concept of itself? Is this an expression of sentience? Why do some other people take pleasure in soulful folk music that delicately showcases human frailties? Alienation from humanity seems perfectly natural to me and a consequence of Cartesian thought processes; the ability to step outside of oneself and observe.

I chatted to a friend the other day about the cannibalism thing. She thought I was being deliberately dumb, citing the main arguments against it as: “it’s just culturally ingrained; we are sentient; we have a soul and you simply don’t eat your own”. This is all very compelling, plus she’s an intelligent woman and phrased it very well, so I felt a bit stupid. But it’s still not a reason. There are lots of culturally embedded things that aren’t necessarily right. It feels a bit childish – and I’m not making an argument for cannibalism. I just genuinely don’t see what all the fuss is about.

That sounds a bit pompous. I’ll explain: When you log in to Facebook, it goes straight to the ‘news feed’. Early on, this had novelty value – because Facebook was novel. Then cynicism crept in as a natural consequence of the passage of time. Now (and for a while), it just seems to be an endlessly repeating scroll of inane and meaningless dross. There is a large number of people who, when I see their photo, I know I can safely ignore. It is also ironic that those pages/things that I ‘Like’, are almost always ignored – despite the fact that I chose to construct a bespoke news stream from them. There’s a glitch on my phone which means that when I reach the bottom of the page, it simply repeats itself, rather than going to ‘older posts’. Because I barely pay attention, I often don’t notice until about the third time I’ve read something.

The ‘map’ that is the Facebook news feed is becoming increasingly derelict and ragged (despite being a dynamic entity, as opposed to Borges’ precise – but static – map in On Exactitude in Science) and the territory (real people) is disappearing from consciousness altogether. I forget that the person whom I completely ignore is as real now as when we were friends offline.

The more individualised society becomes via increasingly inclusive and complex technologies, the less meaning individual agents can convey. This implies a conservation of meaning, rendering ‘meaning’, like energy, a finite and tangible substance. So the pragmatic restrictions placed upon humanity by a lack of technology lead to more meaningful individual connections. There is an inverse proportionality going on. I could leave Facebook, but the observation described here doesn’t particularly depress me. Plus, we can’t go backwards – I’m not a Luddite; I love technology. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the mid- to long term. Charlie Brooker touched upon it in his recent series, Black Mirror, but I think the long term consequences will be more insidious, subtle and damaging. The endgame will be a cancer for the soul.

1) Kuru – which I think it a tropical disease similar to CJD that is transmitted via cannibalism. This is extremely rare and, more to the point, is not caused by cannibalism. It can be screened for.

2) Murder – There are many ways to access human flesh without killing someone. You could chop a small bit out, Merchant of Venice style; you could wait for someone to die (which is no different from organ donation); or you could grow it in a petri dish. If they can grow organs, they must be able to grow tissue. The ethical implications here are not connected with the ‘eating’ part of the argument.

I realise the concept may be slightly alien, but it’s only meat. Other species eat their own and, by virtue of the fact that they haven’t become extinct, it clearly does them no harm. Many meat eaters are quite proud of eating unusual or exotic types of flesh. I’m not one of those, but I still like meat. There may be certain circumstances (plane crash; eat the corpses of your family to survive) where it might be emotionally difficult – but that’s down to the individual and not an inherent problem with cannibalism itself.

If anyone can present a good argument against cannibalism, then I’d love to hear it. It seems like we’re missing a trick. I’d be very curious to give it a go, but must explicitly state: I am not asking for volunteers – we all know what happened to that German guy. I’m just making an observation.

In one paragraph, Jimi Hendrix was described as ‘drug savvy’. I must have been about 14 at the time, but was still pretty naïve. I definitely wanted to get into drugs (partly youthful hubris; partly the inherent attraction of illegality; partly scientific curiosity; partly the logic that drugs must be good or people wouldn’t do them), but was still influenced by the contemporary propaganda message that labelled all illegal drugs: Very Bad Indeed. So I took ‘drug savvy’ to mean ‘aware of the dangers and therefore abstinent’.

What a bell end.

Although my attitude to drugs matured over time, I genuinely believed for at least ten years, that Jimi Hendrix, the man who choked on his own vomit, was tea-total. All evidence to the contrary was simply blocked by my subconscious. I now know differently, and take ‘drug savvy’ to mean ‘experienced in a broad range of narcotic delights’. I’m not sure when this revelation occurred to me, but why would my subconscious (a convenient scapegoat for just about everything) do such a thing? The initial mistake is easy enough, but why perpetuate it? I hope I didn’t argue the point with too many people.

The human mind is a funny thing. I know it’s a hackneyed cliché to ask what childhood memories assert a completely wrong influence on the adult experience – but it does make me question what other ridiculous myths I might be labouring under.

As a result, I don’t expect anyone to take an interest in my own writing/music. I don’t promote, link-exchange, SEO, index or publicise in any way (so why put stuff online? It’s a good storage facility, easily accessible and easy to signpost). Deep down though, I really want people to listen to my music and read my writing. I enjoy it, but cringe with embarrassment if anyone else shows an interest. There must be a discrepancy between the way I perceive myself and the way I think others perceive me (studies of human self-perception show the latter to be nearly always way off the mark). For mental wellbeing, there should probably be some harmony between the two.

In the meantime, I will continue to write screeds of guffle on the grounds that it’s good practice; it might be therapeutic; and it’s nice to have a hobby. But should I live in a bubble? Is it possible to create solely for oneself? Is ego-gratification more necessary than I think? What I need is time. Time to make nice things. But then I’d struggle with the concept of being all surface and no substance. Authenticity comes into play, establishing a malevolant apparatus with the ego (whose health is already under question) that penetrates the dark meniscus of postmodernism. Again.

Incidentally, I used to have semi-lucid dreams about a tall thin postmodernist who stood in the corner of the bedroom. He’s long gone now, but I’m still here, talking about (rather than actually doing) stuff. I don’t explain things very well, but ‘stream of consciousness’ has internal logic and is useful to cultivate, so that’s what I’m doing. The previous few posts may give the impression of someone who’s a little dissociated. I can’t say that I’m not, but being a weirdo can only get you so far. So I’m ditching PoMo in favour of action.

The girl is CB. I need to stop compensating for the fact that I have no vocals by dropping samples of people I know/knew. I should also place the tape stops a little more tastefully. This is quite nice in and of itself, but it needs more of a narrative arc and perhaps cleaning up a little before mastering.

The argument against visual cues is strong. Put simply, you shouldn’t use visual cues (e.g. spectrum analysis) because it should be the actual sound – the end product – that informs any adjustments. It’s particularly bad in my case, since my settings have to be even numbers or at the very least, integers. I don’t even have the benefit of OCD, otherwise my studio would be far tidier. Do I use light compression with a very high threshold, so that only the peaks are attenuated, leaving the maximum dynamic range? Or do I set a really low threshold and subtly compress the whole mix to maximise loudness? Thinking about it, the answer’s obvious: do the research.

Some people say that you should always stand up whilst mixing or mastering. This allows more freedom to move and, through dancing freely in response to the audio, fewer restrictions are placed upon the body/stimulus feedback loop. This allows for greater integration of ‘the human’ within the mix. It’s applied cyborg theory, in a sense. So it looks like I’m in for a weekend of spazzing out with the curtains drawn and a blindfold on. Kinky.

Mastering is a pain in the ass – but it would be nice to have a decent little mini-album to show for the last few months. I have enough back catalogue to be able to mentally relocate to the time/place when I was working on any given track. If I’d actually read any Proust, then I’d make a pithy observation on involuntary memory… and if I can get the mixes sounding at least realistic (I don’t really have the fidelity, but will do my best), then this phenomenon will hopefully re-emerge.

Postmodernism (PM) must be some sort of joke. The counterintuition required to navigate cultural life these days is more than just a chance coalition of ‘weird shit’. I’d love to believe in some eschatological scenario, but that’s unlikely. Why is PM so heavily geared against reflexivity? Is it more of a window to the soul than we’re comfortable with – a defective sublimation of repressed desires?

Probably not that either – seems too easy.

It just seems that previous cultural movements had direction (although I wasn’t there at the time) and PM doesn’t, really. Perhaps some distance would be useful. Right now, there’s nothing to reach for and when you think you’ve got something of substance, it just falls through your fingers whilst someone laughs in the distance.

Granted, you could plot a narrative from The Great War, through Modernism and WW2, then postmodernism and into the digital age – but I could do that for the duck-billed platypus and still wouldn’t understand its existence. Digital cultures are heavily enabling and, of the myriad intangibles driving PM, ‘digital’ (and by extension, quantum) is big enough and unknown enough to contain something sentient, like outer space. Sub-atomic research might help – and it certainly has been well-timed – hence the ‘ghost in the machine’ myth.

God (not the Higgs boson) for Atheists?

So is it all coincidence? I’d normally ignore that question, since the alternative means we wouldn’t even be asking. But we hear cosmologists asking the same thing about why the earth is the perfect distance from the sun and has just the right conditions to sustain and evolve sentient life. If my instincts rule out the end of the world and psychoanalytic theory, leaving me with [God], then what does this demonstrate? You shouldn’t always trust your instincts.