pattern recognition

I'm a cool hunter making you my way
Like a brand name you'll replay
I will know you
I won't show you yeah yeah
You're the one
You're the one
You're the one
You're the one

Sonic Youth, "Pattern Recognition"



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Sonic Fiction (parallel to Science Fiction): the design of new worlds. The experiences, ideas and intensities that exist in those new worlds are impossible to translate back into traditional terms like 'identity,' 'roots,' 'street credibility,' or the framework of autobiographical testimony.

KE: I'm not so much interested in narratives. I'm more interested in patterns, the recognition of patterns and sequences, and the breakdown of them.

DVW: ...music [...] is very much about these patterns and the power of them, but it disguises itself as a storytelling moment, like a confession. It disguises itself as a story, but it keeps mutating as a pattern [...] When they are talking about keeping it real, they want this authenticity, their problems, to be talked about. This seems to be their power. But the real power, the subversiveness, is in the sounds...

KE: All those writers [...] go wrong. It's got something to do with trying to discern the politics of sound in politics, not in sound. As if sound can't carry politics in itself.

DVW: The sound is a politics in itself; it doesn't represent anything at all. That is the problem [...] they cannot make a problem of representation. But we have to. It's our mission and our way to be free. So much appears to be normal, negotiable and democratic that you have to find where the freedom is, where the tricks don't work...

Kodwo Eshun, Dirk Van Weelden, "Some Excursions Into Sonic Fiction," Mediamatic

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I'm a bubble in a sound wave
a sonic push for energy...
take me to the source of chaos...
could you invent a world for me...
could I turn this place all upside down
shake you and your fossils out

Sleater-Kinney, "One Beat"

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U.S. Maple, "Songs That Have No Making Out"
Bongwater, "Rock & Roll Part 2"
Bad Brains, "Pay to Cum"
The Ex, "Contempt"
Captain Beefheart, "Frownland"
Pussy Galore, "Rocks Off"
Penetration, "Don't Dictate"