The Inheritors

William Golding, best known for Lord of the Flies, considers his 1955 novel - The Inheritors, to be his best. It follows one of the last remaining tribes of Neanderthals as they make first contact with strange, godlike beings... homo sapiens.

Now, more than 50 years later, this classic piece of work is finally getting a soundtrack! It took James Holden 7 years to deliver this groundbreaking record that fearlessly pushes into new territory but it has been worth the wait. It's hard to describe but it sounds a bit like a mix of krautrock & shoegaze mixed together with techno ideas and a rave ethos. He crafted The Inheritors using his extensive analogue modular system and hand-coded computer programs, which he used to build a series of unique analogue-digital machines. The result is something far removed from the clean overly produced dance music of today.

Hypnotic. Raw. Tribal. Powerful.
Struggle. Life at its peak. Beautiful.

An analogue|organic machine is dying, crying for help cause it doesn't want to lose what it loves but it's doing so triumphantly because it believes its love was great and will not be replicated. Holden desperately tries to keep it alive, infusing it with digital space magic. Life is always more beautiful on the edge of death and here Holden nudges us beyond that edge. Frankenstein's monster was misunderstood. Welcome to the war between organic chaos and digital structure... or are they making love? What will the inheritors make of the past that brought them to be?

It's definitely something to be experienced. The album comes in at 75 minutes and is designed to take you on a trip.

Some more background on how he arrived here; he's approaching the creation of trance from a scientific perspective.

"The driving factor behind being in a “trance state” (that is, transcending your standard conception of “the self”) is thought to be a universal property of the brain. Brainwave entrainment is the act of causing various body systems to synchronise by altering the frequency of brainwaves. “Entrainment” is a physics term, referring to the fact that two vibrating bodies will synchronise if exposed to one another for long enough – it’s what makes two people walk in step, it’s what makes an audience applaud in time and it’s what makes a couple fall asleep at the same moment.

It’s thought that this effect can also be achieved with an audio stimulus. In preparation for his performance at the Barbican, James Holden researched some of the science behind altered states and found correlations between playing music and different states of mind that, in his own words, blew his mind. The theory of sonic entrainment suggests that the brain will synchronize to an external rhythm – it means that two musicians playing music at the same time are actually synchronising brainwaves. Whilst the normal, alert brain’s frequencies are usually between 14 and 22Hz, they’re slightly slower whilst playing music – around 8-14Hz. Crucially, the brain is in a similar state whilst meditating, or, indeed in a trance.

If everybody in a room is focused on one audio source, then brainwaves are synchronising, putting everybody into a similar state of mind, creating a collective consciousness. Ensuring that everybody is (literally) on the same wavelength is important if the state is to be maintained. “We’re naturally sensitive to those around us,” says Holden, “In the same way that if someone near you isn’t into it, it can ruin the effect.” This might go some way to explaining the almost instinctive annoyance that comes with seeing people who are glued to their smartphones or bringing up Shazam at a gig – it’s not just distracting, it’s literally putting you into a more alert brain state.

This isn’t to imply that the entire phenomenon is down to suggestion. Particular frequencies often recur in religious and ritual music – Indonesian gamelan music, for example, uses ultra high frequencies that are nearly impossible to record, and these are allegedly what create the trance phenomena. In Yoruba-derived drumming, it’s the tiny delays in timing that create miniature moments of tension and release in the deeper drum tones. Ultra low frequencies are attributed to having strong psychic effects, something that experimental art groups like Throbbing Gristle experimented with.

Besides, there isn’t really one golden recipe to achieving this state – tastes vary and people perceive things in different ways. “The event’s producer set up a meeting for me with Vincent Walsh, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCL.” Holden says, “It was near the start of my research, and what I was basically asking him was: is there anything in the science that I can take to make more effective hypnotic music? His response nailed it: he told me to go with my instincts. Music has had thousands of years evolution towards this purpose, musicians spend a lifetime intuiting how to achieve these results.”

“And that’s the take-home fact,” Holden says, hitting the nail on the head: “Our subconscious intuition is the best bit of our brains. I couldn’t do the maths to tell you where a thrown ball would intersect my arm’s reach, but I could probably catch it.”


Renata - a girl's name of Latin origin, meaning "reborn".
http://pitchfork.com/advance/136-the-inheritors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(William_Golding)

Pickings from the four pillars of pop culture

Taking a look at someone's bookcase can tell you a lot about that person but so too does their taste in film and music. It's almost like reading someone's life lines from the palm of their hand... Only, you know, this actually sort of works. :p As stated before, I feel defined by what I love so in keeping with the previous posts in which I shared people and places, for day 4 I am sharing some of the stuff that gets my blood pumping every time I so much as catch a hint of it.

Feel free to share the creative works you have fallen in love with! In fact, that's kind of the main purpose of this post. You don't have to list your favorites as exhaustively as I did but I very much would like to know what you guys and girls are into. I've been obsessed with lists pretty much from the day I was born so if you could make it at least top 10s, that would be greatly appreciated! :p

A Circle Inside a Circle

Holden - A Circle Inside a Circle

For my second #fivedayquest post I'd like to share with you the place from where I communicate with you all.

As you lay your eyes upon this hallowed ground, you must pay respect to the gods of geekdom, for this is an ever changing shrine to their most precious gifts. From the arcane and hyper modern knowledge stored in the books around me to the spine tingling thrills and heart-string tugging tragedies of the 20th century myths that live on an now ancient DVD collection, these are my most beloved non digital treasures. Surrounded by these most exquisite fruits of mind, this is where I play, eat and sleep and have spent so many hours of my waking life that no matter where I go from here, this will always be home. This is my sanctuary.

Apologies for the crappy picture quality, my phone is old and before you ask, no I do not have a girlfriend. :p

I'd like to say I had to resist the urge to clean up before taking these shots but who am I kidding, I've not once experienced such a feel in my entire life.

Juice Rap News - History is Happening

Giordano Nanni and Hugo Farrant have been broadcasting their satirical news show from a suburban backyard home-studio in Melbourne, Australia for quite a while now. Given how awesome their productions are it amazes me that they still aren't household names! I've shared some of their shows before but their latest creation just might be one of their best yet. ;)

"Today we travel into the pure world of sci-fi to investigate the much vaunted, mysterious potential future event known as 'The Singularity'. What will a machine consciousness mean for humanity? What are the ethical, political, military and philosophical implications of strong A.I.? And what would an AI sound like when spitting rhymes over a dope beat? All this and more shall be revealed in Rap News 28."

Net Neutrality [RAP NEWS 25]
The Energy Crisis - feat. Copernicus [RAP NEWS 22]
Big Brother is WWWatching You - feat. George Orwell [RAP NEWS 15]
"THE NEWS" - feat Sage Francis [RAP NEWS 21]

Clark - "merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso" -Pitchfork

Clark was born Christopher Stephen Clark in 1979 in England. He started making music as a teenager, and also began experimenting with building his own primitive equipment, including a "home-built stylus made out of a hook and some masking tape". He went on to attend Bristol University. As a student, his music teacher told him that if Chris were to buy a drum machine, he would give up all hope in Chris' musical ability. Whilst still a student, Chris first impressed staff at Warp Records playing under the moniker Chris From St Albans at their Nesh party in December 2000. He was subsequently signed to Warp, and released his debut album Clarence Park in April 2001. He currently resides in Berlin.

Clark's music is generally considered to fall under the genre of electronic music, although Clark himself finds this label ambiguous and describes Turning Dragon as a "techno album". He often experiments with forms of degradation, distortion and decay associated with different mediums, employing techniques such as re-recording samples and field-recordings in different environments. Describing such processing, he has said "What I tend to do is just jam stuff through as many boxes as I can, until everything sort of bleeds into itself and all its surrounding parts".

For your convenience I've made a playlist collecting some of what I believe to be his best work. Check it out!

The Lisps - Singularity

I’ll live to see a million things that men were never meant to see
my senses and my faculties i'll augment with machinery
auditory, optical, touch and taste, olfactory
converted into data streams and floating bits of binary
every piece of food you taste and every thought you cogitate
every sound that you can hear and sight you see for years and years
all stored up so conveniently on peta-bytes of memory
so you can always reference them in case you forget anything

Singularity, I don’t know

now once all that experience can fit into an easy grid
the existence is no longer something mentally projected
the wires that you have inside are very easily realized
through artificial imaging you duplicate 10 at a time
your consciousness can be enjoyed by anyone forever more
and you live in whatever state that you or anyone creates
you could be a Giant Squirrel, a statue or a talking cat
the Goodyear blimp, an etch a sketch, an octopus or a brain in a vat
you keep all the memories and feelings that you ever want
and now you can commence your life as an uploaded extropian

Singularity, I don’t know

my mother is so horrified by this post-human fantasy
she says we’d lose that special thing that makes us human beings be
but I don’t know I’m not so sure if humans are so good and pure
perhaps we’d be much better off if we took these violent bodies off

once everyone is in the cloud we’ll move beyond this earthly ground
expanding into outer space as an informational signal race
matter in the solar system converts into computing mass
and the sun becomes a central orb of a brain that grows into the vast
expanse of space and emptiness for light years and light centuries
it replicates exponentially like a Russian doll in a cosmic dream
Once every spot of the universe is filled up it will promptly burst
eradicating finally the experiment that we grew from earth
as it explodes the brain will breathe into the dark impossibly
and anti-matter all around will collapse the universe back down
and right away what you would see if you were a fly in the vacancy
is all the light and color in the universe is collapsing

and Time would stop

and from a tiny pinhole point a massive bang erupts into space
and trillions of new particles fly away at a photonic pace
and once again the clock would start to tick and tock and tick and tock
and Years would pass, billions or more before the tiny proteins locked
and once again in the boiling seas of a minuscule blue anomaly
a planet floating helplessly around a tiny ball so fiery
an unextraordinary corner of the universe would cradle it
the flicker of intelligence that led us here and brought us this…

Singularity, I don’t know