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reviving this little blog for love and whimsy.
Likely to feature other useful things pertaining to classical music, cycling, databases, design, digital humanities, etools, food, librarianship, musicianship, piano, performance, social media, web development, yoga.
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From Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari we take the related idea of the interweaving of musical and existential refrains (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 310ff; Stivale, 2003; Murphie, 1996; Tagg, 1994). In this context, a refrain is ‘any kind of rhythmic pattern any repetition, musical or otherwise that stakes out a territory’ (Bogue, 2003: 17). Refrains — and the mixing of refrains — not only produce new musics but at the same moment produce new cultural territories, holding them together (or dismantling old ones).
Refrains have three aspects. First, they emerge from the desire to reassemble a context. For example, ‘a child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 311), thus reassembling not only the environment as a whole but the rhythms of his own breath. As is echoed in many events in the history of Australian electronica, the song ‘is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is always in danger of breaking apart at any moment’ (1987: 311). Secondly, refrains bring one home. More precisely, refrains create ‘home’, as ‘home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space’ (311). This is again something that can be seen in the rhythms and sounds of electronic music, whether re-assembling the rhythms of the living room or the rainforest. Thirdly, ‘one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way … One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself’ (311). In short, the refrain not only enables the staking out of territory or home, but becomes the basis for a movement away from territories towards the new. This ongoing creation, dismantling and shifting of territories via refrains and rhythms is something very obvious in a country such as Australia in which the population is so dispersed through such wide-open spaces (in Australia the processes of differentiation and invention are often enhanced by distance). This can be seen, for example, in the opening up of electronica in forests in regional Australia at a time when Sydney events were almost closed down by new forms of regulation (St John, 2001). Another example would be the complex musical/cultural re-assemblages surrounding Aboriginal group Yothu Yindi’s hit 1991 single (remixed by Filthy Lucre), Treaty (Hayward, 1993; Nicol, 1993). As Deleuze and Guattari note, in such events the three aspects of the refrain ‘are not successive movements in an evolution. They are three aspects of a single thing’ (1987: 312). Bringing specific rhythms together, for example to rework the milieu of city warehouses or regional rainforests, is always simultaneously the bringing of order in chaos, the drawing of a fragile circle around something that feels like home, and the ‘opening of a circle a crack’ in a new direction.
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