on that note, here's an image: the world as a sound synthesizer perpetually producing and reproducing "music" which is recorded on several billion tracks (the currently living breathing synaptic memory banks that are not unlike editable tracks). circulation of information (signal) creates glitches (noise) and in the process emerges something aesthetically valuable (life as the soundtrack to our existence).
I've been using this as a demo mix since April (mixed it up in Miami), so it's high time I released it for general consumption. It's not your usual hour-long transnational cocktail (tune in to the radio mixes for that), so think of it instead as a hyper-concentrated shot for generation ADD.
Distilled Mix by joro-boro
A situation for a violinist, a Stradivarius, a metro station, a camera, and 1,097 pedestrians - the Washington Post article (which won the Pulitzer Prize) maps out something beyond journalism and art and science and even language. It points to a different plane of storytelling magic. Instead of narrating along an arborescent plot line, some storytellers create indexes: setting up lists of things from which one pulls out and weaves a story. Favorite examples: Wittgenstein's Philosphical Investigations, J.G.Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition (as well as obviously The Index), and most of Matthew Barney's work. But let's not hastily limit this magic to the hands of (post-)modern white men. The first book to turn me onto this style of writing/thinking/perceiving was Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book.
The reason I bring this up here (and the reason I insist on calling it magic) is that it avoids the causal bias of after-the-fact explanations. In trying to make sense of the events in our life, we recognize patterns and project them backward onto the past: we call this history. However, these patterns are almost always presented to us as causal relationships (the assassination of the Archduke "set in motion a series of events that shaped the world we live in today"). Still, the world is not a direct input > output system and nobody at the time of the assassination (which was just one of many that year) predicted that it would lead to WWI (a central example in Nissim Taleb's brilliant and suddenly very current Black Swan). Patterns can have more than one explanation/application: other than causality they can point to a correlation, can be presented simply as fascinating data or used to make a dress. A pattern is something the observer may notice or create. It is magic inasmuch as it permits us to look and act in a reality unrestrained by causality. And it is magic if it makes us stop and take notice of what is outside the traffic flow.
