Music most fundamentally functions on the basis of monolithic entrainment, to pull along and explicitly guide the perceptions on a single track. In this one gives oneself to the artist, believing the relative benevolence of their intentions. But if we are experiencing music that has primarily been created as vehicles for the marketplace

[entrainment]

In the video you see a bubble (imagine this is you) finding itself in contact with a stream of air [music]. As the bubble stays with the air, connects to it, it begins to follow the same path, it aligns itself and for a moment they are joined in time and gesture. This is music. We choose to connect ourselves and from there we often allow ourselves to be lead. Mostly we don’t listen as we would read theory or the news (critically), but like we digest sitcoms. Wonderful people are working to change this, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening perhaps the most widely known, though many composers and improvisors have been missionaries for this under many less coherent banners.

The most widespread use of the idea of entrainment is the rise of “digital drugs” or I-Dosing where binaural beating patterns are used to create certain brainwave patterns. :

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Inter-species communication: it’s a moment when the inner and outer are bridged, sparking — and perhaps like any short-circuit or irreconcilability, there is a kind of silence in the gap. It’s the ultimate reality testing guide for pragmatism —

[How to make a homeade silencer]

[Michio Kaku on searching for alien communications]

[Elephant + Dog Communication]

[alien communication system]

[Monkey Delousing Cat]

[parrot + cat]

[robert dean . . . ]

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Silence is speaking and having no response. This non-response, a projection from someone or some institution is understood as silence. But this again would be to confuse the projector, the projection, and the screen. Cage was himself a silence, he made himself this, but he was not a screen, but a projection coming throught the screen, backlighting what could have been an echoless space. He provides the echo, free of charge.

Musical silence is non-linearly temporal – it’s associational in a constellation model of dynamic, interactive threading across flexible time domains not a Newtonian model where it is solely what is just before or after. Context in music is built in many ways and from many directions. The most important feature of 4’33” was not the supposed audacity, but the fact that Cage chose to have movements, indicated by an opening and closing of the keyboard. For me, the piece itself says more about what it means to make something parenthetical, to frame, to quote than it does, unto itself, say something meangful about listening, about time, about form. How it has been historicized is quite different from the piece itself.

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Silence is the sound of perfected interconnects — on any kind of circuit for audio or transmission you can measure signal-to-noise. The possibility of 100% signal is the sound of a perfectly empty space — it’s the ideal white cube — an open channel that can embody any signal, form, or property that can enter the space. Silence as the ideal space for embodiment.

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Silence is not nothingness, it’s a clarified thingness. As we replace this inner sense of clarity, we lose our personal voice — and we lose the capacity to hear our inner time.
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Silence = Singularity = Minimalism = Formal Coherence via Self-Similarity = Modernisms =

Positive View of Death, Today! = Delusion that the current global Empire is a Democracy that

Once Was = Sparks for All Possible Imaginations

Silences = Multiplicity = Not Modernism = Necessary for survival = Possible Democracy
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Silence is fundamentally a synonym for the impermissible. John Cage’s most famous work was not a great piece of music, but an act that had an incredibly generous effect on many people. It was the skeleton key for many, an escape from the dubious arguments going on in Europe at the time as to what was or was not music. Cage, on the other hand, a Duchampian at heart, flipped the bird, and in a great linguistic irony, unCaged generations of composers to follow.

Cage’s work is about silence in as much as silence is a temporal archetype. Time is the core unknown that structures the nature of being — a substance that we can only know via the manner through which we flow through it.
In music silence is the signatory of perforation, of dynamic interaction, of a breath passing beween one side of anything to another side of anything. Beyond parallelisms, comparative debate or lurches toward a coagulated pastoralism, silence offers, at it’s best, a method towards liberating it all as otherness. In the ideal silence there is only other, there is nothing else. The confining, stifling energy of SILENCE, the directive, is something entirely different and deserves a word of it’s own.

Style is the enemy of revolution. Style is a glaze — no, it’s like paving — not of a street, but of a cake, with the most delicious whipped cream. Have you ever noticed that cakes that utilize this format are almost always using the pavement to hide something uninteresting beneath. We must not pave ourselves with style if we want silence.
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Music as a self-colonizing force — musical that silence the history of the listener/musician.

Silence is carried by sound, it does not exist without it. In the loss of non-European harmonies and rhythmic structures, by performing identities cast onto us by media, we are operating in silence — keeping our ancestral voices at bay — and to align with the current bio-physical and genetic model of the universe: eradicating the history of our bodies, deconstructing the unconscious and long-trained propensities of our genes.

[1987 — Bombay Boogie by Ashwin Batish]

Gamelans retuned to perform with orchestras, Indian strings retuned to provide backdrops for fusion jazz in the 70s, the recasting of history as possible flavors.

Sound is literally touch — an action is made is sends compressions to the ear, the ear represents this external touch to our inner world. How will we let ourselves be touched? Can we do as a species with a single definition of an emotion? With music, the touch, the literal massage of history or ancestral voices. Can we know ourselves without them?
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Does revolution come from this connectedness to a global space or from a level of incredulity that can only come from silence. I believe the latter — it is from the inside out that revolution occurs and as we grow more and more layers of insulation around our inner being we may miss the very impetus to fight for ourselves.

Silence, not acoustic silence, but a real inner silence puts us in touch with death, knowing we are heading only towards that one certainty.

And as we can’t have meaning, we have discovered we can have media.