Anarchy

Anarchy has a bad reputation – no doubt. In recent years Anarchy has become synonymous with angry young men & women with red balaclavas tied around their mouths running through streets smashing the windows of Nike shops. Or in other cases dressed in white padding & holding home-made armour, ready to charge police lines, as did the English Wombles. These men and women are passionate about the future of society and strive to influence it. Feeling powerless in the face of a seemingly unconcerned society on the brink of destruction, this is their way of fighting back.

However, the problem with violent revolution is that it is ineffective. Society has a history of violent revolution that is never successful, because revolution is absorbed by a society that thrives on conflict and violence. It is everywhere all the time. In war. In the police force. In the criminal class. In the school yard. It is inherent. A system in which violence is inherent will never truly be overthrown by violence – it will just re-emerge in a new form (from feudalism to communism/capitalism or from communism to capitalism). The other problem with violent revolution is that it places too much faith in political power. It works on the basis that those in power are corrupt, and those without access to power would do a better job if they could take power for themselves. One only needs to look at the left wing revolutions around the world to see that society continues to chug on with disregard to wealth distribution, environment and humanity regardless of who is in charge.

The capitalist system is like a machine that carries out processes. And we all participate in its processes. The machines sole purpose is to increase economic output. The machine will carry on this function regardless of the fact that the human race and the Earth is being pushed into catastrophic territory (over population, climate change, ecological destruction). Now, we can say that Rupert Murdoch or some other rich and powerful person is responsible for this and he/they should be overthrown, but this is missing the point. Rupert is as much enslaved to the machine as any other member of society. How do we know that under his powerful smile a heart does not lurk that wishes for a more meaningful life? If he disappeared, someone would simply take his spot, which is true for any job. If society is a machine and we are its parts, then parts can easily be replaced. Violent acts of revolution can arise from anger and jealousy - they have more than me and this is unjust. But if you replace the rulers, you also have to take the stress, illness and complications that come with the rewards.

Calling society a machine is not as abstract as it may seem. Speak to many who work full-time and they will talk about its drudgery and meaninglessness. Talk about the problems of the world that our lifestyles are exacerbating and people will tell you how powerless they feel to stop it. That’s because we are! We are locked inside something that we can’t change. The machine carries on relentlessly. If in violent revolution we try to overthrow it the machine either flexes its muscles through the military, the police force and the media, which crushes dissent, or it allows its leaders to be overthrown and simply has someone else fulfilling the function of leader. Are the leaders of feudalism, capitalism and communism, in practice, really that different?

So what does Anarchy propose? And I am not talking about the Anarchy of angry protesters, but the Anarchy of organised alternatives to the self-destructive machine of human endeavour, which in our present case is Capitalism. I lift some ideas from the book, Bolo Bolo; (a bolo is a kind of anarchist collective that would survive by growing their own food). The only way to defeat the machine is to devalue the concept of work! This is the truly radical idea in the book. It is the obsession with work in recent society that threatens our existence. Work on an individual level, an organisational level, a national level, an international level is what drives the machine onwards, ever forward, toward the dangers we all can sense; yet we can’t stop doing it! (On tonight’s news Julia Gillard, the deputy prime minister of Australia, was interviewed and stated: ‘the most important thing to do in life is to work’). The author of Bolo thinks we should spend four hours a day tending the collectives agricultural needs. And the rest of the time we spend doing what we want. Sounds unlikely? Well yeah, of course it is. But in principle he’s right, I’m sure of it.

So having lost faith in politics or revolution to affect real positive change, I began to realise that trying to implement the ideas of Bolo Bolo on a personal level was the best way forward. Working part-time. Creating a vegetable patch. Making the home as environmentally friendly as possible. Cutting down on car use. Trying to leave as little an imprint on the planet as possible. Concentrating on creative tasks. There are some that have gone further, and pushed into the realm of the collective – (check the link, these people do not look like anti-capitalist crazies!).

It would take a mass transformation of consciousness for an anarchist system to work. People turning their backs on work, money, the demands placed on them from the cradle to the grave, and working towards a more Earth-friendly, human-centered co-existence. But it seems so implausible. Too easy to crush such a way of life, such is the incessant desire for wealth and power. But like John Lennon, we can imagine!

Postscript:

Some years ago my wife and her previous neighbour agreed to pull down the fence that separated their front yards, and created a shared garden. Recently a new neighbour moved in and started pulling out all the plants they had planted and is demanding a new fence to be built. This is a micro-cosmic example of why anarchy will only ever be a Utopian dream, and never a reality. (Perhaps we can retreat into a practical-fantasy reality and build our own bolos within our physical-social networks?).

A Girl from East Berlin

Capitalism: the new cool?

There was a schism appearing in the minds of youth when I was at University in the early 90′s; between the old socialist mindset and the blooming Capitalist mindset. I still had a foot in the socialist camp – believing in ideals, the possibility of a people-led movement, the hope for equality. On the other side was what seemed a bizarre phenomena at the time (though now is completely normal), capitalism was becoming the new cool. This is well covered by Thomas Frank in his meticulously researched book One Market Under God, in which Capitalism’s ability to become the new cool is described. I saw it happen first hand with board members of the student union bragging about money, material goods and discussing which big brand they should invite to advertise on the new tele-info system spread throughout the campus. It was anathema to us left-leaning types. They simply laughed at us when we brought up points like – ‘a university should be a place of learning free from commercial influence’ and ‘a student union should be about collective action, not profit’. Twenty years later I’m back at Uni and Capitalism is now the order of the day. The majority don’t do politics, and they are certainly not anti-capitalist. There are a few socialists hanging on and even the outline of a student union or two, but they are essentially toothless.

East Berlin Crossing Man

In 2002 I was in East Berlin, visiting, trying to imagine life under the Communists. There wasn’t much to suggest it except for different shaped men at crossing lights, a few depressing looking buildings, and groups of people, who did not seem imbued with the stressful countenance of the Capitalist citizen, sitting around drinking . Sitting in a cafe I met a girl from East Berlin and her Mother. The daughter was about my age and the mother in her 50′s or so. They had lived in East Berlin, seen the wall come down and watched the resulting transformations in German society. I asked them what it was like to live under communism. After all, this seems as exotic and foreign a life as any to a boy brought up on the fat of Capitalist success in Australia. The mother’s answer has always stayed with me. ‘It was like’ she said with flat, tired eyes, ‘there was nothing to look forward to’. She waved her arms as if to suggest she never wanted to experience it again.

Recently, I was reminded of this conversation while watching the upsetting documentary ‘When Borat came to Town‘, which describes Sacha Baron Cohen’s unethical exploitation of a Romanian village when filming Borat. The villagers made 3 Euros from their involvement. Lawyers promised them a windfall if they sued. Nothing happened. (The uninformed being exploited by entertainers and lawyers – is this not the perfect metaphor for the West?). The man who led the law suit was broken by the end of the documentary and claims, ‘I have given up on dreaming. Without money there is not point in having dreams’.

Borat: the face of exploitation

So here we have two characters, both recent citizens of Communism, that see Capitalism if not as a shining light, at least as an opportunity to build dreams and have something to look forward to in life. Yet in my own country of Australia, a bastion of Capitalism, I see a community becoming fractured by the pursuit of money. Neighbours who don’t talk to each other, drivers that abuse one another, a society increasingly stressed. I don’t see much happiness in my country. But I do see a lot of people moving fast, climbing over one another to be the best and being increasingly suspicious of their fellow citizens. In East Berlin people seemed to have a lot a time to sit around and talk with one another. In the documentary I mentioned, people were dancing in the street and again there was a lot of sitting around and talking. There was community.

It seems the drive for Capitalism is irresistible (all that lovely stuff!), and its destructive impact only apparent when it’s too late. It’s all terribly confusing! We want to suck the fruits of Capitalism; even anti-capitalists seem pretty content with the lifestyle on offer i.e. embracing technology cheaply disseminated by Capitalism, yet when we have obtained it we become miserable, suspicious, competitive. Can we create the perfect society? Is happiness possible? Or are humans, like the Buddhists concluded, destined to suffer because that is the nature of life?

More time for this please...

It’s a fine balance, I think, between the different ideals and approaches to life. If any one extreme dominates (as Capitalism presently does and Communism once did) things go awry. I would like to be able to spend more time with my fellow citizens with a non-competitive, non-suspicious countenance, drinking and discussing life. But I would also like to be working toward something that I desire (not what the state tells me I should desire). Perhaps anarchy could deliver this balance (a system that has little hope of succeeding), or perhaps a people-focused democracy (rather than economic focused) is the answer. More on that in next week’s blog!

The Noise of Silence

Gee, the world is busy. There is no moment when the air is not filled with intrusive sounds. Anxious footsteps scurrying on there way to ‘somewhere’. The roar of an airplane’s engine, a passing car. Or the constant bombardment of images from the television or from roadside advertising. Our brains are constantly confronted with human made images and sounds – our very own synthetic environment, where our divorce from ‘naturalness’ is complete. You have to go a long way to be immersed in the world of natural sounds and images. But we aren’t going that way, we are pouring into the cities, all around the world. And the cities are growing, and getting louder and bigger. We have become experts in noise.

Silence has become terrifying. When was the last time I heard silence? I can’t think. And when silence comes what impact does it have on the brain of the individual, used to the bombardment of noise? To the point that the noise becomes a comfort, a blanket, a masking of the internal noise. That’s what happens when you hit silence. The internal noise becomes apparent. And its instant busyness is so confronting we turn on the television or see a movie or ring a friend. Just to turn up the the external volume.

What of the moving image? Always something moving before our eyes in the city. The brain is constantly stimulated. What happens when a brain used to movement is dropped in a zone of naturalness? And there is nothing but the sway of trees and movement of waves for hours and hours on end. And the view like the sound is forever changing, although it is slow. For there is no rhythm as such. Not like the daily predictability of the time when the car motors will start roaring, or the television will start bleating, or the school teacher will say, ‘pick up your books!’.

For we are caught in a machine of our own making. A world that runs according to the needs of machines. Times, boundaries, deadlines, demands, seductions. Our brain is slowly being reprogrammed so that its relationship with the natural is eliminated, while our willingness to fall into quotidian rhythms as required by machines becomes complete. Take that brain into an area of ‘naturalness’ and it will seek the lights of a fast food store and the distracting sounds of a passing car.

But the brain won’t get it! Only the rustle of tired leaves until the shocking squawk of an eagle breaks the sky. The heart pumps in this break of predictability. For now the body is being forced into a different relationship with its surrounds. What mystery lies in the sudden surge of an animal’s body through the undergrowth, or the moaning violin of two tree branches sawing in the wind? To what depths of understanding can these seemingly simple moments take us? These are the questions that will become redundant when the world is one large city, living on the soulless flick of a clock and the demands of the machines we have created.

We who are extensions of the loud & luminous system we have created, blind to our participation in the grand symphony of cosmic unpredictability.

Twitter: halfway post!

I’m proud to say I am at the half way point of my self-imposed twitter project: one short story on twitter everyday for a year! Check my twitter site here. The ‘tweets’ are anecdotes, short-stories, vignettes, or simply imaginative captions for the photos. They range between humorous and serious!

Here’s a few examples.

It was a traumatic birth. The doctor who used forceps for the delivery was incompetent. The boy learned to adapt.

In the psychedelic hour she will come. From the sky she will drag a dark sun so all can see their buried shadow.

Two armies meet; bold shapes of rationality vs. random strokes of chaos. A war that forever hangs in the balance.

In terms of enlightenment he really was the thorn between two roses; a shadow ignored by the creatures of light.

My Great (×10^100) Grandfather was a grumpy old bugger. But he was a good provider & he looked out for the kids.

All concepts, regardless of the content, substitute the wholeness of reality for the safety of a stepping-stone.

 

I imposed a few rules on myself.  As you can see each story is attached to a photograph. When I am wandering around I take a photo with my mobile phone as something takes my interest . As twitter only allows a 140 character entry, and I have to include the URL linked to the photograph, each story has a maximum of 113 characters.

You can find my twitter site here. Have a look around. You can get a feed from my twitpic site and of course if you want to follow me, I will follow you.

Everything is in Balance (or, its the end of the world and I feel fine).

There is a great line in the REM song (which is also the title): ‘It’s the end of the World as we know it, and I feel fine‘. I used to find this line strange. How can you feel everything is fine if it’s the end of the world? Perhaps you’ve given into substance abuse, and so, have anesthetised yourself to the coming gloom, or perhaps you are nhilistic and couldn’t care less if it is the end of the world. Or perhaps you’ve figured something out which gives you joy even in the face of hopelessness. Regardless I have always loved this line and sing it with great gusto, as it somehow makes sense.

And it possibly is the end of the world as we know it. That is not to say the end of all life, but the world as we have come to know it. We show no signs of reducing our rapacious consumption of goods to which the bounty of the world must perpetually relent her sustenance. Even after 50 years of dire warnings about the future of our civilsation we show absolutely no intention of doing what needs to be done to ensure the survival of our civilsation. Instead we continue to buy bigger machines, buy bigger houses and constantly shop! And the rest of the world that do not have what we wealthy citizens have crave our lifestyle. This is reflected in the growing capitalist economies of China and India and the flow of economic migrants from poorer regions of the world to the wealthy regions of the world.

Meanwhile the world’s climate is becoming more chaotic (even if Australia is full of climate change deniers), the world is running out of potable water and we have a population forever growing and forever demanding more goods and services. We are in a word, stuffed! Having faith that all of humanity will wake up one morning and say, ‘my God we are destorying ourselves, we must change our ways immediately’ is a way to avoid the malaise that such knowledge inspires; though it is a fairly ignorant viewpoint. Go to a local shopping centre and watch the lust on people’s faces as they greedily eat up all the goodies on offer. They ain’t gonna stop. Even though, overall, if you spoke to these people over a coffee they would be concerned about the state of the world and would wish they could do something about it…

Anyway I have accepted it is the end of the world as we know it, and after years of anxiety and anger I feel pretty much fine about it. My reasons are philosophical. Let me begin with a description of karma. I do not see karma as a moral law. I see karma as a natural law that ensures equanimity in existence. At the ground of existence is a harmony that keeps all things in check. This is necessary to ensure order. From order all arises including me here typing on this computer. It is the fundamental coalescing force of existence. (The nature of this existence is left for physicists and mystics to ponder. I have written an earlier blog on this.) Karma is the law which ensures that this state of equanimity is never compromised. Anything that goes to the extreme will be be brought back to a harmonious position through balancing actions.

In the case of our planet, Earth, we have a harmonious system that has developed over billions of years. The huge diversity of life, ecosystems and environments on our planet is testimony to the extraordinary range of possibilities that the harmony of existence implies. Karma works throughout this process causing extinctions, population growths, transformations and whatever is necessary to ensure harmony. The special case connected with homosapiens is our furious pace of change! We have changed things so rapidly due to our extraordinary level of intelligence that the few billion years of fine tuning, which created our planet is being transformed almost overnight. Unfortunately our intelligence does not always translate to wisdom and we have pushed things so far and so rapidly in one direction that karma will inevitably pull things back in another direction.

Time for an analogy. I picture a nail embedded in wood as an image of the point of harmony to which existence is held. The actions of existence are like a rubber band hanging off the nail. They will stretch in any number of directions depending on the circumstances. This is one of the extraordinary aspects of existence, it is harmonious and ordered yet it can take on many forms. One only has to reflect on the diversity of existence to appreciate this. The law of karma is analogous to the elasticity of the rubber band. If it stretches to far from a state of harmony it will bounce back. In the case of humanity we are stretching the rubber band to breaking point here on Earth, and it is going to bounce back. The form of this change is hard to predict. But pretty clearly, by recent events around the world it is going to be catastrophic.

The question arises as to why humanity would knowingly walk towards its own doom when it knows that it is walking towards its own doom? Not only that, we also have all the solutions to ensure our survival and the flourishing of our civilisation(s). And we have the intelligence and the imagination to pull it off. So what stops us? I don’t know! But I try to imagine a person who holds a gun to their head and is surrounded by loved ones who tell them they will help and that they will be there for them. But still they shoot. Why? Do they hate their self? Are they inherently selfish? Do they have an unexplained death wish? Are they blind to the love that surrounds them? Can these questions be translated to humanity at large? I am sure their are psychologists with some answers somewhere.

So getting back to the song. I feel fine because I am sure that universal processes are playing our whether or not humanity is able to hear it. Humans are a fine and extraordinary emergence from the ground of existence as is all life on Earth. If we were to destroy ourselves it would be tragic, but it would not be the end. It would mean a major transformation in existence on Earth as we know it, due to the laws of karma, but it would not be the end of life. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor collision. They were grandiose creatures whose life ended with a type of climate change that will dwarf ours and yet life found a way and thrived, including our mammal ancestors.

I continue to fight for this beautiful world and the amazing creatures that live on it – humans and otherwise – but if it is the end of the world as we know it, it is not the end of all the world’s as existence knows it, and so yeah, I feel fine about that.

Exhausted

I am recovering from the efforts of putting on two musical evenings in Melbourne. ‘Blow the Fuse’ and ‘hiddensounds @ Horse Bazaar’. Its hard putting on events. You work your ass off to promote the event and bring in a crowd and in the end its your solid core of friends who come to support you. And I’m not complaining as it makes for a fun evening. But in the end I am left thinking, ‘why didn’t I just do that at home?’ Bring all my mates to my house, put it on in the backyard and have a good time. No need to charge that way, and the kids can come along and have a good time as well. Not to mention the fact I have control over my own sound system, rather than having to get to know another system that more often than not has been thrashed around. Here’s some photos of Bulke playing at ‘Blow the Fuse’. Get ready for a gig in my backyard soon

hiddensounds performance

My blog is late this week and I deeply apologise! I am madly busy getting two gigs together for this week: Blow the Fuse and hiddensounds @ horse bazaar. If you are on facebook you will easily find both events. As preparation for the hiddensounds gig has obsessed my mind for the past week I am going to talk about it.

hiddensounds is my experimental project. And my set up for the gig this Saturday is growing exponentially. I now have a sampler, a synthesizer, a lap top, a bass guitar, a 6-string guitar, vocals and a mixing desk. They are all wired up by by midi and audio. I also have a vj, Paul Rodgers, shooting out images behind my head. So it is going to be a multimedia performance that deals with most of the senses (taste is beer – there is a bar – smell is electricity!). With my set I am exploring different aspects of musical expression. I am starting with a singer-songwriter approach and then moving into soundscapes where I will be overlapping the energy waves of various scenarios including the ocean, a football crowd and passing footsteps. This will meld into an exploration of frequency beats mimicking the movement of a bird’s ear drum as it engages with the magnetic field of the Earth. Then a space-rock exploration in the old krautrock sense of the word. Experimentation to me means not just playing around with sounds but also horizontally mashing up genres. In the end it’s about creating an effect that is exciting! Hope you can make it. All the details are in the poster below.

The true story of the Lion King

Disney studios gives us a distorted view of the story of the Lion King. I put this down to the fact that Simba and the writers of the Lion King were closely aligned – it is well known that history is written by the victors. What was the true ambition of Simba’s uncle, Scar, and were the ‘Pride Lands’ truly degraded when Simba returned to reclaim his throne? I hope to set things straight in this blog.

Simba’s father, Mufasa, was an arch-conservative who justified order in his kingdom through archaic philosophy. He continually repeated the mantra that, ‘everything has its place’. He used this philosophy to repress the hyenas who were forced to scavenge as outcasts in the unproductive lands of the ‘elephant graveyard’. When Simba asked the reasonable question to his father, ‘why do we eat the antelope?’, Mufasa answered: ‘we eat the antelope to survive, but when we die we become grass and the antelope eats us, thus the circle of life continues’. What he failed to tell Simba is having your throat ripped out by the high-pressure jaw mechanism of a lion is a lot more painful than your decomposed body being masticated in the form of grass.

Scar: a misunderstood visionary.

Scar (actually pronounced Sear) on the other hand was a diplomat; an intellectual who believed in discourse and a more harmonious kingdom where the outcasts, hyenas, would be embraced in a greater Utopian community. Mufasa would never agree to this break in tradition and used his brute strength to keep Scar subjugated. Having no choice, Scar eventually orchestrated the death of Mufasa by organising a stampede of wildebeest that crushed Mufasa. He then banished Simba from the Kingdom when Simba made it clear he would never support his Uncles desire to found a new community based on equality. While this act of murder and banishment is portrayed by Disney as an act of deceit, it was in fact an act of strategic brilliance that was the beginning of a new age bringing a new order to the pride lands.

On taking power Scar immediately invited the hyenas into the kingdom. All animals were now able to live as equals within the Pride Lands. Liberated from the conservative rule of Mufasa, some of the herds choose to move on and start their own communities, a move unfairly portrayed in the film as the herds escaping from Scar’s mis-rule. Lionesses were considered equals and were able to hunt for food alongside the males. Herds were encouraged to establish communal gardens in which their own food could be gathered. Dead animals were offered to the carnivores and simultaneously carnivores were encouraged to develop a vegetariain diet.

There were those in the kingdom who were opposed to the revolutionary overturning of the old order and set about undermining Scar’s new order. In particular the baboons, warthogs and meerkats (loyal to the ways of Mufasa) worked as agitators for the old ways and continually undermined Scar’s new utopia in preparation for the return of the exiled king, Simba. It is they who  eventually encouraged the inhabitants of the new order that Simba must be returned, paving the way for the counter-revolution that saw the murder of Scar, the return of the repression of the hyenas and the reestablishment of Mufasa’s conservative rule through his son, Simba.

The Pride Land inhabitants could not cope with the de-centralised utopia achieved by the visionary Scar, and choose instead the order of the old ways where thought and participation were not required. The antelope, it appeared, would prefer to be crushed by the teeth of lions than graze in peace. Of course the Disney account of history presents a land lost to degradation under the leadership of Scar; and the hyenas, in keeping with Mufasa and Simba’s propaganda, are presented as evil rouges. What we are not shown is the brief period of equality and communal living that thrived in the pride lands after the daring revolution instigated by Scar. Instead we are emotionally manipulated by music and imagery that suggests a brief departure from peace and tranquility in the form of Scar’s ‘evil rule’.

It is time the world remembered the extraordinary period of decentralised control and communal living achieved by the work of the visionary, Scar.

What is Nature?

The wild paths of nature?

The love of Nature in industralised countries is, looked at historically, a bizarre phenomena. We spent centuries (even millenia) being frightened of nature, wary of it and struggling within it to survive. It was only when we had dominated it, repressed it, that we suddenly came to develop a love affair with it. Once we were safely divorced from nature, and her powers had been tamed to such an extent that we could control our own destiny, did we come to love the concept of ‘nature’.We have been locking tracts of nature up into small parcels called parks dominated by human law (fences, signs, boundaries a.k.a. environmental management) for the last 150 years, about the point that the industrial revolution had succeeded in divorcing us from our natural surrounds and encapsulating us in the mechanical life of the machine.

We use nature for two purposes. Firstly, recreation. For some people this means tearing up the ground with 4WD or deafening birds with the roars of motorbikes or disturbing possums with the riotous thump of a rave party. At the other pole it means days of walking alone absorbing the beauty and stillness of wondrous sites. But most people would not enter a park when it has, for example, been raining. I remember a friend who was going walking in the You-Yangs near Melbourne. It was raining and he received a phone call from the organiser to say the walk was canceled. It caused me to think that the group was going for a walk in a park, not ‘nature’, and only when the weather was right. This is a perfect example of the way we have controlled our relationship with nature. It is only in that control that we become comfortable enough to enter it. In effect we have created parks for our pleasure. The wildness of nature is destroyed or at least pushed away to a safe distance.

The other relationship people have with nature is reverential. It has become a kind of religion; ‘she’ is worshiped. Hordes of Green voters plunge through national parks for days on end and come out the other end with a glow you never see in an urban dweller. There is no doubting the power nature has to restore and regenerate those willing to tackle her distances. However this is still a park mentality. We follow paths erected by environmental managers and are safe in the knowledge that several helicopters followed by the media will come to our rescue should any danger befall us. How many people would actually disappear into nature? In the movie ‘Into the Wild‘, based on a true story, we see a man face the reality of living in nature when he truly leaves civilisation behind him. Another rare story is that of the ‘Squatters Arms‘. A couple traveling around Australia on a yacht discovered an isolated part of the bush in the Kimberlys and decided to stay put. They battle with typhoons and hordes of snakes and isolation (and they love it), but these experiences are truly natural, unlike rambling down carved out paths, ready to run back  to the car at the first hint of rain.

In his book ‘The Tuning of the World’, Murray Schafer describes a soundscape survey (conducted in the seventies) where people around the world were asked to respond to different sounds. Here is what he had to say:

As people move away from open-air living into city environments, their attitudes toward natural sounds become benign. Compare Canada, New Zealand and Jamaica. In the two former countries, the sounds of animals were scarcely ever found to be displeasing. But every one of the Jamaicans interviewed disliked one or more animals or birds – particularly at night.

This doesn’t require much explanation. It is suggestive that the further we are from nature the more we romanticise it. Jamaica is now a developed country. I wonder what the survey results would be now?

I love absorbing the power of ‘nature’ and I think it is important lock up tracts of land so other animals have the space to survive and evolve. It is people’s relationship to nature I find fascinating. How can we come to worship something we spent so long escaping from? Or is that we didn’t escape, but were just seduced by a lifestyle that took as further away from the source of our existence? Is our ideation of nature a reflection of our desire to return to it? There are some cultures that remain intact with their natural lifestyles, notably in the Amazon and PNG, but how long can they resist the prying fingers of the Western machine and the allure of the bright lights of civilisation? We had hundreds of years to have our link with nature severed while we got used to locking her wildness away in manageable parks. But true ‘nature’ dwellers who are thrust out of their lives in the modern world have insurmountable challenges to face.

What if civilisation should one day fall, and our buildings crumble and nature slowly swallows our cities? We would be back in nature. Struggling to survive, eking out an existence. There would be little time to walk along paths and gasp at natures beauty then. What would our relationship with nature be like in this scenario?

hiddensounds Gig

Horse Bazaar presents
hiddensounds, Infinite decimals & Bulke.

A night of sonic exploration at Horse Bazaar on Saturday the 7th November from 6pm to 8.30pm.

Hiddensounds (www.hiddensounds.net) is the audio-scrawl exploration of Jordan Lacey. Frequency beats. Buttons holding secrets. Knobs and faders telling lies. Fretted instruments stroked. Silence. Noise. The sounds underneath. Three veg and mash. Happy Accidents. On the night exploring highways, rivers and crowds.

Amplified string duo Infinite Decimals (www.myspace.com/infinitedecimals) [Barnaby Oliver / Don Rogers] produce waves of vertically complex sonic texture filled with phantom melodies and psychoacoustic surprises. Intellectual concentration, anti-rationality and sustained physiological effort obliterate mind-body duality to produce organic and richly detailed auto-compositions.

Bulke (www.myspace.com/bulkesounds)[Pradip Sarkar & Jordan Lacey] is a blend of dub-tech, bassline, and krautrock, geared towards the dancefloor with tracks varying from midtempo electronic ballads to 130 BPM four to the floor beats. The band was built on the basis of a love for the electronic sounds coming out of Berlin. Bulke will be joined by Prem CJ on Electronic Tabla.

Paul Rodgers, a.k.a. Arnold Eye Irons, avant-projectionist & VJ will wave his fingers through all three acts, and DJ post-punk sounds on the in-betweens.

Where: Horse Bazaar
When: Saturday 7th November 2009
Time: 6 – 9.30 pm
Cost: $5