"Stockhausen vs. the Technocrats" (plus Björk!)

Here are music videos and performance footage for works by Stockhausen, Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner, and Björk, plus lectures, interviews, and documentary footage of the artists.



To jump to individual chapters of the video program, here's a direct link to the playlist.

Next, here is Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Advice to clever children," an article from The Wire, November 1995.

And here is Björk's interview with Stockhausen, "Compose Yourself," from "Dazed and Confused" (#23 1996).

Aphex Twin’s ‘Acrid Avid Jam Shred’

Aphex Twin’s ‘Acrid Avid Jam Shred’* begins with a heavy bass-bomb sequence; as sonic layers pile in and interact they engender a percussive phenomenology of ecstasis, or undecidability of the overall dominance amongst many layers of rhythm and harmonics. This ‘dominance’ reveals itself as the ephemeral focus of my attention-structure on a particular layer or mixture (the dynamic experience of ‘groove’). Gradually, ‘Acrid’s’ seven or eight layers reach crescendo, followed by various deconstructions, solos, and inter-mixes of polyrhythm. It might seem that each percussive ‘track’ is phenomenologically a kind of rail involving speed and motion, because of the pleasurable dips being felt in my spine each time grooves do oscillate. When I realize that groove has switched rails, it is not only a rhythm track; my very attention structure has switched focus, perhaps onto melodic counterpoints or the slower bass-bomb patterns. Is there some existential meaning of this strange poignance when a strictly rhythmic motif infuses with the trope of ecstasis – an entirely new, vast space-time designed by the Mind accustomed to postmodern economies of speed, while utterly transcendent of any conventional ‘dance’ beat psychology?

(*07:38, I Care If You Do, 1995)