HAQQ the divine name of The Real, which is ordinarily obscured in society, which is painful and exciting to contact, and contact with which generates a heightened state of consciousness with ethical and creative characteristics. Music can contact HAQQ in two ways - through form and through matter. The technique for contacting the real through matter is The Burst Beat, and the technique for contacting it through form is General Tremolo. Only music can make contact with HAQQ; nothing else can. Philosophy makes contact with OIOION, and drama makes contact with HCSC.
MUSIC AS THEOLOGY
A central religious mystery that is not often enough emphasized is that God is the alpha and omega in the same stroke. God did not create the world at the 'beginning of time', nor is the world drawing towards God at the 'end of time'. These are not two separate things; they’re the same. God is simply a singularity, an attactor, a retroactive futurity hovering over the world; God is the reason for the world, its cause and goal in the same stroke, the Aristotelian 'final cause'. Eternally the end and the beginning, the 'end' in the sense of terminus and the sense of goal simultaneously.
Aquinas states that theology is the queen of the sciences, and he is correct - however he did not understand that theology is music. Music is privileged access to God's nature, because when God is born at the end of history, this will be the same as the entire world becoming music (a self-causing existence that is the same as its own essence, composing, performing and improvising upon itself all in one stroke). Aquinas believed that philosophy depends upon divine revelation, positing God as a source of genuine knowledge that cannot be discovered rationally. Again, he is correct, but only if we understand that God simply is music, or that music is a window into God's nature, with the 'truth' that is revealed being nothing other than the particular joy and striving that music is and activates in the soul of the listener, composer or performer.
ICONS
I'm always a little confounded, when I am working to develop a theory of the nature of music, with the problem of the icon - e.g. Kurt Cobain. It is easy to imagine reconciling theories of music as pure will, as cosmic naada current, as a cultivator of divine organization, as true being - but these all tend to take instrumental music as their model. The power of musical icons seems to be something different altogether - it has very little to do with the way music sounds or with an experience of union. Instead it centers around an object of love, often a sacrificial one. One is tempted to remove iconhood from the question of music - positing that it is something different altogether (after all, there are actors, politicians, gurus etc who are also icons). But this seems a little facile. There is nothing quite like the death of a musical icon - the recent untimely death of Lil Peep has really been troubling and fascinating me me along these lines. I didn't know him personally or even really pay attention to his music until now. It's so sad, and also so beautiful, so inescapably glamorous.
——
I wrote the above in November but abandoned it out of shame. There’s something perverse about one musician commenting on th death of another. Anyway, the point I was driving at is that music should not be separated from the personality of the musician. Even in an abstract theory about the nature and use of music, the iconhood of the musician is extremely important, whether avowed or not. This holds true for composers just as much as for figures from the rock era. Can we really subtract Beethoven himself from Beethoven? Even though music presents itself as somehow pure structure, ontological, beyond culture altogether in some way - it does this only as a kind of hologram of the future or the outside. These holograms are always authored, always situated in a history, even when their author endorses the death of the composer (or even especially - it is even more difficult to subtract the charisma of John Cage himself from his work than to do so with Beethoven).
I was so close to suicide at age 27, in particular; it was so palpable to me the way my death would encapsulate my music. I would have been frozen in time, my face never seen without a certain youthful flow that it has since lost. The irony of the fact that I am technically a ‘rock star’, that suicide would have initiated me into the sacrificial cultural logic alongside Ian Curtis or whatever - what do those suicides represent? That the world is a hard place for a sensitive person to live? Is it that people draw strength from a certain tragic heroism that they themselves are not strong enough to pursue (these two options being opposites)? It’s as though suicide is the ultimate logical conclusion of music as such, because it represents a concrete transcendence of social and biological norms (suicide does no good for the species or for the economy). But then again, there is an unmistakable collective bloodlust that charges society’s reaction. I’m finding it difficult to draw this post to a conclusion (this is the third time I’m returning to it; I rarely go on to elaborate on posts months after they were first written). I guess I need to think more about the relation between music and death.
MUSIC BEYOND HEGEL
Nietzsche's basic discovery is that consciously held convictions are rationalizions - they are employed by a deeper will to expand the aim of which is different from those authorized by the convictions. The ultimate conclusion is that Christian-derived values like equality and justice are both false and contingent, and they can and should be replaced by new ones - perhaps ones that are more brutal.
This thesis depends on a metaphysics of will to power, but this metaphysics is merely an hypothesis, derived from 19th century discoveries about energy and evolution. With a little more conceptual labor, we are able to arrive at a more profound philosophical insight: that any ontology is itself contingent and false, and that in human history there is a vector towards erosion of these as knowledge and technology improve. Hegel. But this thesis has a limit too. It cannot account for the progress of history or the existence of reason (except circularly), and it seems to foreclose access to certain truths available to higher states of consciousness.
It is here that music must take over from philosophy. Music at its best makes contact with something that simply cannot be expressed - neither aesthetically nor rationally. But it nevertheless has a great deal of quasi-articulable content.
So the passage from SHEYMN to YLYLCYN is accomplished by art, the passage from YLYLCYN to ANANON is accomplished by thought, and the passage from YLYLCYN to OIOION is accomplished by music.
But this is just the way -up-, the arrival at true freedom. From there we must travel back down. This is the work of perichoresis - passing from music, to thought, to art, and back to music.
HISTORY
Music always has to be understood as wielding historical efficacy. What was Wagner's music doing? And Machaut's? What are rock and rap doing? The answers to the questions are not all the same - but they all pertain to the social bond.
It is obvious enough that rock as such (including techno, rap, dub and any libidinally charged music distributed as recordings primarily etc) effectuates the dissolution of the Urizenic power structure. But if it is to do more than simply service the Varizenic structure, i.e. be subsumed by the capitalist feedback loop, it has to make contact with musical forms outside of its orbit - primarily forms that make up the Western classical tradition
MIND AND BODY
Transcendental Black Metal aims at a perfect harmony between culture and nature as the difference between mind and body. The Burst Beat heightens material intensity as an accelerating hypertrophic blast beat. General Tremolo explores and seeks to resolve cultural and phenomenal antagonisms as an extension of special tremolo beyond its original substrate (i.e. the guitar). The difference between these two techniques - the point at which they are joined together as different - is the opening through with the future of TBM charges heroically... in this way TBM is a template for the productive torsion between mind and body.
BEFORE AND BEYOND THE HUMAN
What points more clearly to an outside than music? We are overtaken by its power, a resonance that is beyond what we know otherwise and serves no purpose.
There are ways to mathematically model what music does - bringing a system close to a threshold beyond which it would transform into something else. This place, the edge just before dissolution, has special properties: it is a window into AESTHETHICA, the heaven of becoming where forms are made and unmade.
Music is essentially hydraulic in this way. It is a convection generating a strange combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and enjoyment of an object that remains withdrawn from view, transforming the subject that it inspires - even producing this subject. And then, out of nowhere: a thought is born. A new thought. A discovery, an insight, a new color or quality. It leaps out of the whirlpool, seizing the subject with astonishment.
This thought and its accompanying astonishment is the threshold between music and philosophy.
Thought can't happen on its own. No logic that is only a logic within thought can be adequate to becoming. The dialectic begins with music, which never negates or establishes anything. All music does is whirl and grow in intensity, yielding, ultimately, an idea.
Wagner believed that music was meant to amplify the idea, but this is not so. Music generates the idea. And it does so with a pre- and post-human efficacy
MUSIC AS HAQQ
The one thing that can be said about music: it exists necessarily. It isolates existence, in a way, from appearance and all other entanglements.
Of course there is an auditory aspect and a psychological aspect to these things. But there is an auditory and and psychological aspect to any hearing.
Music tends towards pure existence in its positivity. As such it is the most reliable theophany there is. Something is activated and activates.
Mulla Sadra proposes a logic wherein God qua pure act generates the divine names, in an act of primal negation, and then affirms those names in a secondary negation - without any effect whatsoever on God's own existence.
God is the most existent thing there is. Music is theophanic to the degree that it is able to yield a higher level of existence in the system in which it is interacting.
What is the value of that? It is at higher levels of existence - near dissolution, that greater freedom is possible, and the veil of maya is partially rent.
Music therefore has an imperative to maximize existence. Higher existence in any system means freedom, wisdom and communication - it is in this state that new ideas suddenly emerge: music gives birth to thought.
Transcendental Black Metal is designed to yield thought in this way - and its techniques for this are the burst beat and general tremolo
HABIT
Music is simply habit - differentiated integration. Music has nothing to do with society, revoluton, the social bond. It cycles, pulses and resonates. Music is the activity through which the absolutely unprecedented can travel. It is the transcendental horizon that is itself subject to transformation. It is the medium of grace.
GENERAL TREMOLO AND LOVE
We can define love as concern with someone or something not because of its ontic predicates and their desirability or usefulness for an already-existing end, but rather because of a spectral not-yet-definable characteristic, in some sense projected onto the beloved by the lover, in some sense immanent to the beloved and yet only visible to the lover, a sort of agalma with the power to transform.
General Tremolo is simply love in this (somewhat) precise sense, instantiated as a musical technique. The sign of love is a willingness to sacrifice - to give up certain pleasures, opportunities, roles in the name of the beloved.
Thus Transcendental Black Metal sacrifices even black metal itself, its crypto-fascist racist aesthetics, its refusal of the European project of secular emancipation.
Thus the secret and unspeakable true name of Transcendental Black Metal: Christian Rap Metal
MUSIC
I can never decide how technical to go when investigating the nature of music and defining its relationship to ethics and politics. Currently reading through a massive three-volume textbook on music and topos theory. One can go as deep as one wants in that direction - and somewhere down there a meaningful pythagoreanism is possible.
PYTHAGORAS AND FOURIER
Although the term 'Pythagoreanism' is inescapably vague, it surely in part names the following position: number has an absolute and generative reality, and the experience of music points the way both to legitimate apprehension of absolute reality and to a foundation for conduct and normativity.
My concept of the HAPTIC VOID is a gesture towards the commitment to access to absolute reality via the experience of music: in particular the experience of simultaneous satisfaction and dissatisfaction. I'm sure there are phenomenologies of music out there that could fill in the blanks of this idea - and I'm interested in developing it further - but I am also interested in developing a sort of revised Pythagoreanism at a more detailed level in conversation with philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of nature. The general shape of what I have in mind is this:
The Pythagoreans were especially interested in standing waves and ratios. Just as ratios like 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 produce unique harmonic tones that are correlated to these ratios and yet do not 'resemble' them in any obvious way, so, surely, ratios and vibrations underlie reality itself.
This has, of course, turned out to be quite literally true, as far as we know. The orbitals in an atom are literally standing waves, and the different elements on the periodic table are made of of the possible combinations of harmonic resonance between atoms of different atomic weight - and although the level of description at which these phenomena occur are subject to experimentation, they are imperceptible - the quantum level of reality is purely mathematical, and it is made of waves.
It was Fourier who discovered the equations that govern waves (heat waves), and his work was translated to sound waves - and is the foundation of all electronic music synthesis. The basic idea - that a wave can always be described as the sum of a number of sine waves - this is the idea the philosophical significance of which I'd like to look into more closely. One encounters this in music all the time - run Melodyne on a vocal track and it resynthesizes the track as a sum of sine waves, making it possible to alter it in the most fundamental waves. Here, where does reality end and simulation begin?
THE BURST BEAT AND GENERAL TREMOLO
These are the two fundamental techniques of transcendental black metal, forming a sort of x axis and y axis; the space and time of transcendental black metal