Re: Repetition

[mark francombe <markfrancombe@gmail.com>]

Very interesting reading Sylvain, repetition has never been boring to
me, and is possibly one of the things that grabs me with looping. I
don't personally use boredom ( consciously) in my work, but enjoy
greatly watching repetitious or indeed monotonous musics. I dont feel
i have the courage often to do it, but admire greatly when artists
stretch the viewer and can apply retraint to change to subtle change
over long periods.
Drone music or ambient noise or improv can sometimes be physically
difficult to listen to, but often I find that I can really start to
listen deeply and can be lost in my own thoughts, making time seem to
speed up, in a way that a conventional but boring band playing 4
minute songs cannot.
I do find however that, for me, this only works live. Living in the
world of mp3 it's all too easy to skip instead of listening to the
whole thing as it was intended. For that reason, I generally only
listen to this music in my car, on cd.

mark

Sent from my (advertisement removed)

On 10 Sep 2012, at 18:00, Sylvain Poitras <sylvain.trombone@gmail.com> 
wrote:

> Some thoughts on repetition for your consideration:
>
> "How then is repetition associated with boredom? The goddess of
> repetition shows a triple aspect: there is repetition itself, which is
> lively; there is répétition, or rehearsal, which is only re-animated,
> a zombie or revenant; and there is slavery, which is dead. The
> differences among these three aspects have to do with telos, or final
> cause. "
>
> "Slavery lacks telos. One thing is enslaved to another when the second
> repeats the first without final cause; nothing is happening; they have
> no future, no exit: Sartre's hell, without possibility of
> transcendence. Boredom."
>
> "Répétition is repetition in the presence of a given global telos, a
> goal with respect to the thing repeated. There is already an idea or
> picture of the whole thing repeated, to which successive presentations
> are supposed ever more closely to approximate. The telos, however
> admirable, does not change or grow, and the thing repeated changes
> inessentially and perhaps only in small increments from presentation
> to presentation, yet the process of successive approximation imparts a
> certain wan glow of pseudo-life to the series and thus to its
> components, les revenants."
>
> "In contrast, what I would like here to call "repetition" is
> repetition within a larger thing whose telos is not given (as in
> répétition), but is in the process of being formed. Such subglobal
> repetition is not répétition because the point is not to perfect the
> thing repeated, by accomplishing its telos, but to point beyond the
> thing repeated to the thing being formed. This is lively because it
> escapes the dead hand of some prefigured order; like life, it is a
> process of continual transcendence toward who knows what end. The
> focus is always forward, un-self-ish, opening away from the current
> entity in the direction of something larger and unconfined."
>
> From: Rahn, John(1993) 'Repetition', Contemporary Music Review, 7: 2, 49 
> — 57
>
> * * *
>
> While my interest in livelooping stemmed from my desire to create
> music in a live context that I couldn't create otherwise, I've lately
> become interested in the more 'philosophical' aspects of that choice.
> Anyone familiar with the myth of Sisyphus?  He was condemned by the
> gods to roll a rock up a hill only to see it roll down once at the top
> (repeat ad infinitum...  life-looping?).
>
> The threefold aspect of repetition that Rahn describes makes a sort of
> intuitive sense.  However, it seems to me that the distinction between
> them might have a lot to do with perspective or state of mind (one
> man's slavery is another's repetition).  For instance, Albert Camus
> envisioned Sisyphus as an absurd hero who happily got up the hill
> everyday to rebel against the absurdity of his existence.  Quite a
> different point of view on what most take away from the myth (you mess
> with the gods and you'll be enslaved for eternity doing pointless
> shit).
>
> Just some thoughts for a Monday morning.  How do you (do you?) address
> some of these considerations in your music?
>
> Sylvain
>