I mention this because last night at this show, Richmond Afrobeat Movement at Starr Hill, a friend brought someone along who seems to have been a happenstance subscriber to that old rag- said he hoped, or had me promise to write a book someday, to which I reply but of course, monsieur, this is my goal. and Hendry Mutton this economist in a demi-important study of Nobel laureates has determined that 85% of these make/do their groundbreaking work between the ages of 30 and 44. (note. A: here, a verb lent from another tongue would help, a poiein/facere/fare/faire. B: statistic is real, culled from Foreign Affairs, I just don't have it in front of me) So I have eight years to masterwork go time. And of course it was nice and unsolicited to have my editorializing missed, and I haven't written in a long time, and I thought I might try, and it feels quite nice.
On sound: Richmond Afrobeat Movement was good, not great. You need to be in Ghana or Cote d'Ivoire on an evening punctuated with geckos and mosquitoes to get that kind of thing up; they were milliseconds off, they don't work and sweat together, they didn't perhaps know how to relax together on a horn section and a few gourds. You need a Fela Kuti grumbling underneath it instead of a white kid with a gourd. Suffice it to say, though it could have been any number of things else, that I was only distractedly moved to dance.
B
ut then there's this! 'The ANS functioned through an "array of tiny chisels" that engraved "lines and points on rotating black enamelled glass discs." These engravings would then "regulate the brightness of light rays" that passed "through the discs onto photoelements," like the sun streaming through carefully shaded windows. The "level of intensity" of this light then produced specific sounds.Elsewhere (scroll down in this link till you hit the COILANS review), we read about the ANS's unique compositional process: "The composer inscribes his visual 'score' onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators.'
Also, since I <3 robots of all colors and sizes, this rules. Goes on to say about combining this and architecture; modernists take note, this is what would maybe make the Villa Savoye livable. Let us pause and think upon a great glass Palace of the Soviets, more in the style of Le Corbusier's proposition than Boris Iofan's, and shot through with veins not just for air and trash but also for rotating music plates of this kind. The result of this thing sounds like we imagine a pass through a cloud of spacedust. I imagine it being marvelous at first and then, our reactions reaching an apogee and falling through irritation into terror.
