cultural amnesia...
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...:::...i find myself off-kilter. accelerating into an unsteady and blind orbit. mostly, i just need to slow down. but pace aside, what i find much more disturbing is that many of these 'task-oriented' work habits have begun to trickle into other parts of my life. it's a little like traveling with the shade pulled on the plane window (you are either here or there but nowhere in between)...i've been missing content in context...

the urbanist thinker and writer jane jacobs wrote a collection of essays shortly before she died a year or two ago called the dark age ahead. in it, she posited that today’s society is so overwhelmed by digital information that the world faces the looming threat of slipping into cultural amnesia…of finding itself lost and disoriented in haven forgotten where it came from. detached from it’s past...

i wonder what that means for music, especially as mp3’s become more and more prevalent. i’d say my own listening habits have suffered from a kind of sonic attention deficit disorder. similar to michael gill’s process piece, there is an enormous amount of rapid-fire shuffling and discarding of information that goes on. so many songs are lost and found and re-lost. there are very few i find again outside a 2-week window of procurement. i think that is the very warning jacobs’ was trying to make in her book… that there is this attitude of disposability related to digital information and if that doesn’t shift soon, if we don’t find a way to make the binary tangible (at least in our thoughts about it), than we will have forgotten what it is that was worth remembering. there will be no guide, no precedent to launch from...

i was reading the liner notes (written by benny green) on an old ella fitzgerald album saturday night and this line grabbed my attention:

the truth is that such songs are more representative of the society that produced them than anybody, composers included, ever suspected at the time. if poets were the unacknowledged legislators of shelly’s world, then the songwriters have been the unacknowledged poets of our own. only the other day there was a letter which surfaced in a london salesroom, written by dylan thomas to his wife, in which he observed, with a perception beyond the capacity of most literary critics, “dance tunes are always right: i love you body and soul. i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake."...

i read that twice and it gave me hope despite the possibility of a darkness ahead. it gave me hope because i believe that love letters will still be written, that music will continue to reflect world orders and lonely hearts…that i can find friction in the things that bring me meaning, things that start with slow...:::...

download: 070609-modyfier-part01

apparat – hailin from the edge feat raz ohara : may 2007 on shitkatapult
agoria – les violons ivres (super remix) : jun 2007 on different
sierra – natursekt (lopazz remix) : may 2007 on anny-jack recordings
touane – morso : may 2007 on persona
pakt – carousel : may 2007 on the dlame recordings
soul ad – get all hot (indo phunqe remix) : may 2007 on mode music
paul kalkbrenner – altes kamuffel : may 2007 on bpitch control
nick muir – i feel real (chopstick remix) : may 2007 on mashtronic
tg – cave the speakers (konrad black remix) : may 2007 on four:twenty recordings
kiki – jako tai : may 2007 on bpitch control
dj herr – litte me (u make me feel like junior lopez mix) : may 2007 on acktivism recordings!
julian poker & john-e & diego miranda – wahnzinn (phonique remix) : may 2007 on new breed
gui boratto – mr decay (robert babicz universum disco mix) : jun 2007 on konpakt

download: 070609-modyfier-part02

pan-pot – lancelot von camelot (barem remix) : may 2007 on einmaleins musik
dapayk solo – didn’t i (3dots remix) : may 2007 on mo’s ferry
dave robertson & jon gurd – our execution (phonogenic remix) : may 2007 on cr2 records
jamie anderson – time is now (radio slave panorama garage mix) : may 2007 on nrk
dole & kom – twenty four (deutschmann & pornbugs remix) : may 2007 on bondage music
trentemoller & buda – gamma (perc remix) : may 2007 on kickin records
spektre – dark horse (audiofly x) : may 2007 on dance electric
looseheadz – the party (guido nemola remix) : may 2007 on sound division
mr. g. – u askin (marcel dettmann remix) : may 2007 on rekids
oliver klein & martin eyerer – tiflis : may 2007 on mbf
elon – tamingo (rekleiner mix) : may 2007 on infant records
mihell – the gritt (dos mix) : apr 2007 on mono-type
plasmik – pitch it : may 2007 on connoisseur recordings
venturi & aquilina – disco bus : may 2007 on traum
16 bit lolitas – non verbal language (loafer remix) : apr 2007 on hope recordings