(Electronic & Others) High or Middle Culture?

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A/Z's post on Instagram: sound & video in the background: The Knife's Silent Shout (from Disk III of Silent Shout's Deluxe Edition);

A Rough Sketch of Tommy Cash, drawing by A/Z available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 

The Knife (Networking);

The Knife (Tomorrow in a Year); 

Björk (Mouth's Cradle);

Björk (Pluto);

Madonna (Material Girl);

Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi's Dead);

DAF (Der Räuber un der Prinz);

DAF (El Que);

Japan (Ghosts);

Orange Juice (Rip It Up);

Public Image Limited (Albatross);

Chrome (All Data Lost);

Factrix (Phantom Play);

The Residents (Swastikas on Parade);

This Heat (A New Kind of Water);

The Flying Lizards (Money);

Wire (I'm the Fly);

Talking Heads (Psycho Killer);

DNA (Detached);

Mars (Helen Forsdale);

Teenage Jesus (Orphans);

Contortions (I Can't Stand Myself);

Throbbing Gristle (Greasy Spoon);

Cabaret Voltaire (Silent Command, Kino);

The Future (Future Religion);

The Pop Group (We Are Time);

Devo (The Truth About De-Evolution) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];

Donna Summer (I Feel Love); 

Blue Jay Way (Beatles); 

Cambridge 1969 (John Lennon & Yoko Ono); 

The Crucifixion (Phil Ochs); 

Ornette Coleman's Sound Museum (montage A/Z);

Bat Macumba (Mutantes);

Saúde (Rita Lee) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];

On the Rocks (Rita Lee);

Morton Subotnick (Silver apples of the Moon); 

Alack Karis & Kian Freitas/ Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra; 

Milda Vitartaite plays Mario Davidovsky Synchronisms N 6 (for piano and electronic sound, Youtube);

Code Morel & One Hundred Forty Nine Inches (montage A/Z) [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

"In one of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative."

A. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

"After we'd sniff glue we used to call up number on the phone. We knew these numbers to dial where you could get these weird sounds. We'd call the numbers and it would go Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep."

Dee Dee Ramone (Please Kill Me)
"... remettre en usage des instruments anciens et oubliés, créer des instruments nouveaux... rechercher,  en dehors de la musique, des instruments et des appareils qui, basés sur des fusions spéciales ou des alliages renouvelés de métaux, puissent atteindre un diapason nouveau de l'octave, produire des sons ou des bruits insupportables, lancinants."
A. Artaud (Le théâtre de la cruauté)

"Zuletzt fehlt mir jeder Grund, die Hoffnung auf eine dionysische Zukunftder Musik zurückzunehmen."

"... wie der das Schwerste von Schicksal, ein Verhängniss von Aufgabe tragende Geist trotzdem der leichteste und jenseitigste sein kann — Zarathustra ist ein Tänzer —;" 

Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)

"... long live dancing in the eddy of the infinite!" 

The young person in Repetition (translation by M. G. Piety)

"... une des divinités caractéristiques du Panthéon brahmanique est le Danseur Suprême. Etre universel, il détient le fil du labyrinthe cosmique. Seigneur jouant au degré le plus élevé: son passe-temps est, inextricablement, de créer et d'anéantir."

André Masson (La tentation de l'Orient/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Você acredita que eu ia pro Dancing Days dançar a noite inteira, sozinho?"
Ney Matogrosso

"When the mood came over him, he might suddenly interrupt a Saturday afternoon walk in the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse by flinging his loose limbs about in a kind of spider dance, the effect accentuated by his tight trouser-legs and wide cloak, diminutive hat, and thin cane."
Richard Ellmann
"Voisin d'un dancing for populaire connu plus tard sous le nom de Bal nègre, un vieille maison marquée pour la pioche... De l'autre côté: deux ateliers d'artistes... Cette campagnonnage n'avait rien de typiquement 'intellectuel'; parler et sentir ensemble, prendre ses repas en commun, travailler d'une même élan, et danser."
André Masson (45, rue Blomet/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Na gravação de Adeus Maria Fulô, usei um instrumentinho que os palhaços Torresmo e Fuzarca faziam com tampinhas de garrafa afinadas que, ao soltá-las no chão, tilintavam a nota certa... regravamos Bat Macumba e Baby..."
"Éramos apreciados por nossa esquisitice visual e sonora."
"Quando lançamos Saúde, a crítica me crucificou porque pela primeira vez no país usei em algumas faixas a bateria eletrônica Korg. Diziam que eu havia tirado o trabalho de bateristas humanos. Enquanto a crítica vinha com a farinha, minha antena futurista já comia o bolo. Ser pioneira tem seu preço."
"Minha preferida dessa safra é On the rocks, trenzão, pesadão e chique, letra bem colocada, instrumentália precisa, mixagem perfeita, uma de que muito me orgulho."
Rita Lee

"Com sua trupe panfamiliar, suas mulheres e filhos músicos (virtuoses de vanguarda e jazzistas-roqueiros), Stockhausen é o elo perdido entre a grande música e uma outra música que poderá surgir."
José Miguel Wisnik

"Je me souviens avoir discuté avec Stockhausen... l'idée selon laquelle 'notre musique' (cette notion commune existait encore un peu)... aurait pour mission... d'édifier un 'space' suffisamment étendu et complexe pour que puissent s'y rencontrer... soit l'ancien et le nouveau, soit le 'savant' et le 'populaire'..."

"... des échanges, parfois secrets, s'établissant entre les 'genres', et même certaines des acquisitions les plus aventureuses des musiques expérimentales s'acclimatant dans des régios moins 'distinguées' ou même plus commericales (qu'on pense à la subversion du langage qu'a représente le 'free jazz' ou l'assimilation de l'électronique par le pop, le rock et, surtout les musiques illustratives et 'fonctionelles')..."

Henri Pousseur, Musiques Croisées

"La pauvreté reprochée à beaucoup de sons synthétiques, et pas seulement sur les appareils 'bas gamme', provient souvent du fait que peu de paramètres varient, par exemple que seule la hauteur change, alors qu'entre une note d'un instrument acoustique et la note immédiatement plus grave ou plus aiguë, une foule de variables bougent (pente de décroissance d'intensité, timbre harmonique, vibrato...) simultanément avec la hauteur, même si c'est plus discrètement qu'elle. En même temps, c'est cette pauvreté qui fait le charme propre des sons synthétiques, et des groupes et auteurs 'pop' comme Kraftwerk ou Brian Eno."

"Alan Williams défend l'idée — que nous partageons — que 'ce n'est jamais le sont littéral, 'original' qui est reproduit dans l'enregistrement, mais une perspective sur lui."

"... le son pourrait avoir d'être 'inréifiable' tout en étant accessible à une description et une appréhension plus précises."

Michel de Chion, Le Son

"[Nos áureos tempos na Rádio Nacional] a sonoplastia era coisa de 'alto nível'... Apenas composições dos grandes mestres da música clássica é que integravam as trilhas sonoras daquele período. Mais que isso, os sonoplastas davam preferência ao repertório de vanguarda da música do século XX. Enquanto o público 'consumidor de cultura' torcia o nariz no Municipal ao ouvir as execuções dos mais avançados autores de nossa época, as donas de casa, ao fritar suas abobrinhas, estavam ouvindo no rádio, através da sonoplastia, nada menos que Stravinsky, Schöenberg, Webern, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Dukas e outros."

"No fim dos anos 60... Numa era das mais criativas da história, a molecada agarrou a tal caixinha, o sintetizador, e saiu pelo mundo ejaculando frequência por todos os poros... O Japão, o país do futuro, ativava ainda mais sua indústria eletroeletrônica produzindo centenas de maquininhas infernais, práticas e portáveis, que faziam da manipulação do som eletrônico um brinquedo infantil."

Julio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"The 1980s were a great time for innovation with regard to electronic music. Pop music was starting to incorporate new types of keyboards and drum machines, with new ones coming out every month that helped refine and define the sound of that era."
"You would be surprised how many happy accidents make it onto the records. Robert used to call me 'the X factor,' as he was never quite sure what I might come up with."
"We also liked the way he played his leather trousers with his hands. Yes, that's what you hear on 'The Carterpillar' that sounds like butterfly wings beating: Mr. A.'s leather trousers."
"I have always had a great love for all kinds of experimental music, especially the early synthesizer pioneers like Morton Subotnick, and I loved Don Buchla's electronic machines."
Lol Tolhurst
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"Recorded in West Berlin, Bowie's Low and Heroes, Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life (both of which Bowie produced), hugely impacted listeners [and] signaled a shift away from America and rock'n'roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars..." 

"...  1977's most significant singles [were] 'Trans-Europe Express,' a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash 'I Feel Love,' made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, and Italian based in in Munich."
"Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. 'The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,' Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. 'You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brains waves, blood flow.'"
"Devo found Alan Myers, 'this incredible metronomic drummer,' and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like 7/8 and 11/8. 'Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,' says Casale."
"... all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheet of sound recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick. For a while Cabaret Voltaire didn't even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk's primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the spychotic-bucolic Fuse Mountain."
"Initially, the Future came up with 'the rather radical idea that we'd have shared vocals,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'We dispensed with our names and called ourselves A, B, and C. I was all very computer oriented...' A cybernetic version of Burroughs's and Gysin's cut-ups and surrealist automatic writing..."
"Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanization of Mallinder's voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being."
"COUM started as a rock band of sorts, making up music on the spot, undeterred by lack of grounding in improvisational technique, using broken violins and prepared piano as well as conventional rock instruments like drums and electric bass. Inspired by John Cage's writing and by primitivists like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, P-Orridge believed that 'the future of music lies in nonmusicians.'"
"Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises."
"Byrne was reading books by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists... Eno and Byrne became fascinated with American radio's menagerie of evangelist preachers, right-wing pundits, and callers phoning in to live talk radio shows. Radio was America's seething id."
"Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side."
"Factrix quickly  realized that 'you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, 'let's see what happens if we do this wrong.'"
"'The mystical for Factrix was teh  same as Coltrane or any musician who's trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really  did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback' [Bond Bergland]."
"'Most  bands get a synthesizer and their first idea is to tune it! They want a clean normal sound. They don't work with the power you get from a synthesizer. We want to bring together this high technique with body  power' [Robert Görl/DAF]."
"DAF and their offshoot group Liaisons Dangereuses influenced the embryonic black electronic sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno, while Kraftwerk almost single-handedly inspired New York electro."
"'You could do a vaguely experimental film thing as cheaply as you possibly could, and if it was connected to a song, MTV would play it because they needed stuff desperately in those days' [David Byrne]."
"Rave music teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises that came straight out of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire... Acid house essentially fused postpunk futurism with sixties Dionysian frenzy."

Simon Reynolds

"As Stockhausen showed in the 1950s, electronic instruments unify the time field between the audio or intoned frequencies above about 20 Hz and the infrasonic or rhythmic frequencies below this threshold. This means that we can compose throughout this zone, where rhythms morph into tones and vice versa."

"A sine [in a simple sinusoidal wave] repeats at exactly constant intervals of time. Repeating waveforms are called periodic. If there is no discernible repetition pattern, it is called aperiodic or noise. In between the extremes of periodic and aperiodic is a vast domain of quasi-periodic tones. The rate of repetition of a periodic sound is called its fundamental frequency, measured in cycles per second."

"Many frequencies can superimpose in a waveform. A frequency-domain or spectrum representation shows the distribution of frequency energy in a sound... A working definition of spectrum is: a measure of the distribution of signal energy as a function of frequency. Such a definition may seem straightforward, but in practice, different analysis techniques measure properties that they each call 'spectrum' with diverging results. Except for isolated test cases, the practice of spectrum analysis is not an exact science."

"Myriad alternatives to Fourier-based spectrum estimation exist (Roads 1996). Among them, one family is of particular interest, as they decompose a sound into a collection of sound atoms (analogous to grains)."

"... the ear is especially sensitive to frequencies between 1000 Hz and 4000 Hz. Tones in this region sound louder than tones of equal intensity in other frequencies. Thus the measurement of loudness falls under the realm of psychoacoustics."

"The subject of masking inevitably arises in discussions of loudness perception. In its most basic form, masking describes a phenomenon wherein a low-level sound is obscured by a higher-level sound. For example, standing in a shower masks many sounds, such as someone speaking nearby."

"... other types of masking effects are time-based: forward and backward masking. Consider a short sound that ends abruptly. The human auditory system continues to react for a short time (about a half second) after the sound ends. This 'resonance' can blur our perception of the onset of a second sound. Indeed, when the time interval between impulses is less than about 50 ms, the ear no longer perceives them as separate impulses... Backward masking is a curious phenomenon. Basically, a loud click or noise coming less than 100 ms after another sound can obscure our perception of the earlier sound. The masking sound can disrupt the brain’s ability to hear a preceding sound, hence the term backward). It is interesting that both forward masking and backward masking occur in the visual domain as well."

"Low-frequency impulsive events are perceived as rhythms. These are the infrasonic frequencies in the range below about 20 Hz. The infectious beating rhythms of percussion instruments fall within this range."

"Structure-borne sound is vibration that one can feel, like the vibration caused by a train rumbling down nearby tracks. These are typically low-frequency vibrations that one’s ear may be able to hear, but they are also felt through the body. Of course, we can also feel high frequencies, such as the buzzing of an electric razor, which is felt by the hand, as well as heard by the ear."

"Ultrasound comprises the domain of high frequencies beyond the range of human audibility."

"Sound propagates at different rates, depending on the medium of propagation... Sounds at extreme sonic velocities are destructive. Explosives can generate powerful transonic shock wave air currents traveling at up to 8000 meters per second, corresponding to Mach 24. These destroy everything in their path."

"Sounds have a specific physical size as well as shape. A quiet sound is physically petite. One has to put one’s ear close to it because the body of air it perturbs is tiny. Other sound waves are gigantic, such as the Krakatoa explosion of August 1883. It was heard 4800 kilometers away, and the pressure wave traveled around the earth for 127 hours."

"When rhythms are sped up, they morph into tones. When modulations like tremolo and vibrato are sped up, they morph into complex spectra. Streaming around the thresholds of this zone of morphosis—where discrete events turn into continuous tones—is intrinsically fascinating."

"... as [Paul] Griffiths observed, electronic music can resolve an antagonism between music and text since words themselves can be transformed. Extreme distortions obscure the meanings of the words, so that the sonic contours of the vocalisms are more important than their literal sense. Moreover, the freedom of the electronic medium encourages composers to make smooth connections between vocal and non-vocal material."

"In the ideal, a source of noise should generate random values. To define an algorithm for generating truly random numbers is, however, impossible mathematically (Chaitin). Any software method for random number generation ultimately rests on a finite, deterministic procedure. Hence, an algorithm for generating 'random' numbers is actually a pseudorandom number generator... Stephen Wolfram famously developed a new type of pseudorandom number generator that he called rule 30 based on a cellular automata algorithm that is much more random than previous algorithms. A main challenge for digital synthesis is creating more sophisticated algorithmic models for noise... Natural wind, sea spray, waterfalls, and thunder are excellent sources of wideband noise. Speech and animal sounds contain many evocative noises, especially the fricatives and plosives of speech [s], [z], [sh], [f], [k], [t], [p], [g], and so on. I have already mentioned the rich noises of the unpitched percussion instruments. Collections of samples recorded at industrial sites are available. These feature the sounds of crushing, creaking, scraping, squealing, squeaking, and grinding... Analog devices produce some of the most complex and unstable noises. For example, the noise from a diode section of a transistor is widely considered to be one of the most random phenomena in nature... The ear is attracted to changes in noise, to trends... As early drum machines taught us, white noise is a poor substitute for a cymbal crash."

"The early electronic music of Stockhausen is a classic example of the integration of pitched and non-pitched elements. Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) juxtaposed sung serial melodies and chords against such elements as 'sine complex showers,' 'impulse complex showers,' filtered and broadband noise, and 'chords' of narrow noise bands. His Kontakte (1960) takes the contrasts even further. At any given instant, Stockhausen pits noise against pitch, fixed against moving, close against far, short against long, high against low register, soft against loud—always in sharp relief. This unrelenting counterpoint of contrasts marks Kontakte as an especially inventive composition, as Stockhausen discovered oppositions that were never before articulated."

"The lush spatial effect of artificial reverberation is characteristic of the electronic medium. Early recordings used a real physical space—an echo chamber—to produce reverberation."

"Spring reverberators in electric organs date to the 1940s and were later common in guitar amplifiers. In the 1950s, Elektro-Mess-Technik (EMT) introduced the massive (2.4 meters long, 200 kg) model 140 plate reverberator, a higher-quality reverberator renowned for its concert hall-like sound. Plate reverberators consist of a large, thin piece of sheet metal suspended from a steel frame by springs... Equipped with vacuum tube electronics, these units were installed in early electronic music studios like the historic WDR studio in Cologne, where Stockhausen realized many of his electronic pieces, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio... The classic EMT 140 impulse response is accurately modeled by contemporary software reverberators and still marries well with electronic sonorities."

"Portable field recorders enable composers to integrate natural spatial environments (both interior and exterior) into their work. Interior recordings bring us into living spaces, while recording the open space of the outdoors environment allows us to enter the realm of free field acoustics, characterized by a total lack of reflections. Of course, there can also be reflections outside, but the distance cue becomes especially important as we hear the natural foreground/background of the soundstage... Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) pioneered this genre, depicting the urban soundscape of Berlin. Two decades later, musique concrète used natural sounds, but typically in short clips spliced together rapidly. In contrast, Luc Ferrari’s breakthrough composition Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970) began as a long, continuous recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach."

"Sound spatialization presents two facets: the virtual and the physical. In the studio, composers spatialize sounds by means of tape echo feedback, delays, spectral filtration, phase shift (for image displacement, widening, and narrowing), convolution, granulation, panning, Doppler shift (for simulation of moving sounds), and reverberation. These transformations give the illusion of sounds inhabiting and moving in imaginary virtual environments."

"Tape echo feedback (TEF) is a classic tape-studio approach to sound transformation that creates a ping-pong panning echo effect, but it can also lead to a transmutation as the original input sound is submerged in distant feedback. There are many variations on TEF, but the classic version requires an analog tape recorder with a continuously variable speed control."

"Another class of reverberators based on convolution is especially interesting... we can take the acoustic signature of an existing space such as a concert hall, and through convolution, impose its spatial characteristics on any sound, creating the illusion of sounds playing in the portrayed space... In the theory of convolution, the acoustic signature of a physical space is sampled by recording the response of a room to a sharp impulse. This is its impulse response."

"Since convolution itself is straightforward, the added value of convolving reverberator applications comes in the form of extensive libraries of proprietary IRs of exotic spaces, including concert halls, cathedrals, stadiums, theaters, churches, recording studios, rooms, scoring stages, clubs, tombs, car interiors, closets, and even acoustic instruments... it is also possible to create synthetic IRs that model strange imaginary rooms with otherworldly echo patterns."

"Starting from the edge of the conventional loudspeaker, we can treat dif- ferent sounds so that they appear to emanate from specific depths behind the loudspeaker. This leads to one of the more interesting possibilities in electronic music: the possibility of a counterpoint between foreground and background elements, where the perceived depth of each element is a function of its virtual acoustic properties. A low-pass filtered sound—bathed in reverberation and diminished in amplitude—recedes into the background, while a bright, present, loud sound jumps to the foreground."

Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music

See also:

- liste des déclencheurs;

- Kur-d-t My Ghost;

- God Save the Queen;

- Darkwaves beyond the 80's;

- Call me Helium;

- Elements of Musical Language;

- Piano Playing;

And also: 

- Kitsch, Neokitsch, Antikitsch; 

- Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs & Ney Matogrosso;

- Audrey Hempburnt Haunted by A/Z;

- Genug! Manifesto;

- Favorite quotes from Detlev Claussen's Theodor W. Adorno;

- Umberto Eco about Nietzsche (& deconstruction); - Warszawa;

- movies about musicians;

- Série, presque à genoux with thread; 

- Brazil in the 80's;

- Tropicalismo; 

***"Who May Speak? From a Politics of Popular Music to a Popular Politics of Music" (by Richard Middleton); 

***"The Politics of Passion: The Impact of Bolero on Brazilian Musical Expressions" (Samuel Araújo); 

***"Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla" (Victoria Malawey, MTO);

***"An introduction to the poetics of sacred sound in twentieth-century music" (Luigi Irlandini, Revista Vórtex);

***"Sound-Generation by Means of a Digital Computer" (James C. Tenney, Journal of Music Theory, 1963);

***"Pulse as Dynamic Attending: Analysing Beat Bin Metre in Neo Soul Grooves" (Anne Danielsen, 2018); 

***"Time and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali" (Rainer Polak & Justin London, MTO, 2014);

***"Waltz" (Paolo Prato, Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, 2017); 

***"The Polka Before and After the Polka" (Egil Bakka, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2001);

L'affirmation de l'âne + non-locality (into the very regions where clouds and thick darkness encompass & as far as the tenuity of our understanding would hold out)

Anselm Kiefer's Für Ossip Mandelstam: Das Rauschen der Zeit [Gracious Heaven!] (1996), Image from Daniel Arasse's Anselm Kiefer;

Pierre Laurent Aimard/Karlhein Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX [Angels & ministers of grace, defend us!];

A documentaire sur Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [this was taken out of Youtube by the father of confusion];

Intervista a Paul Feyerabend, per Vittorio Hösle;

Paul Feyerabend interviewed by Rüdiger Safranski; 

Necessity of Complex Numbers (Barton Zwiebach, MIT/Youtube, Spring 2016) [an open minded, honest & serious nutshell explanation of a fundamental question in physics & mathematics many scientists would rather not talk about];

International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva (Harvard GSD, 05/03/2020); 

The String Theory Wars and What Happened Next (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube);

The 2nd Quantum Revolution - Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube); 

Physics are Afraid of Eric Weinstein: and they should be (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube); 

Gregory Chaitin: No Scientific Innovation since 1920... (Curt Jaimungal, Youtube); 

German top research institution 'Max Planck Society' accused of abuse and institutional silence (DW, Youtube)

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Curious conclusions to fancy, in this night of our obscurity:

"Man schweigt, man behandelt mich in Deutschland mit einer düstern Vorsicht: ich habe seit Jahren von einer unbedingten Redefreiheit Gebrauch gemacht, zu der Niemand heute, am wenigsten im 'Reich', die Hand frei genug hat. Mein Paradies ist 'unter dem Schatten meines Schwertes'... Im Grunde hatte ich eine Maxime Stendhal's prakticirt: er räth an, seinen Eintritt in die Gesellschaft mit einem Duell zu machen. Und wie ich mir meinen Gegner gewählt hatte! den ersten deutschen Freigeist!"

Nietzsche

''Zarathoutra, dès lors qu'il a voulu l'éternel retour de toutes choses, a d'avance choisi de voir tourner en dérision sa propre doctrine... Quel autre sens, si ce n'est celui-là, attribuerait-on à l'extraordinaire parodie de la Cène où le meurtrier de Dieu est aussi celui qui offre le calice à l'âne — figure sacrilège du Dieu chrétien du temps de la réaction païenne, mais plus spécifiquement animal sacré des mystères antiques, l'âne d'or de l'initiation isiaque, animal digne par son infatigable Ia (ita est!) — son infatigable oui donné au retour de toutes choses — digne de représenter la longanimité divine, digne donc aussi d'incarner une antique divinité, Dionysos, le dieu de la vigne, ressuscité dans l'ivresse générale. Et en effet, comme Voyageur le déclare à Zarathoustra: la mort, chez les dieux, n'est jamais qu'un préjugé."

Pierre Klossowski (Un si funeste désir) 

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Accounts to reconcile, stories to wave in: 

"On aurait pu croire que l'âne, l'animal qui dit I-A, était l'animal dionysiaque par excellence. En fait, il n'en est rien; son apparence est dionysiaque, mais toute sa réalité chrétienne."
"La complicité fondamentale entre la volonté de néant [la volonté du prêtre] et les forces réactives [le Christianisme laïc soit-disant éclairé] consiste en ceci: c'est la volonté de néant qui fait triompher les forces réactives..." 

(Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie)

"But with an ass, I can commune for ever."

Tristram Shandy

"... c'estoient ceulx qui estoient peritz au deluge urinal de la jument."

M. Alcofribas

"(...) We doctors know a hopeless case if—listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go."

(e. e. cummings)

"... nous ne sommes plus qu'au bord du monde..."

(Paul Virilio, L'Université du désastre)

"... et ce qu'ils érigent en beauté qui est moins que le vent, et leur régime estupide des distances et des perspectives..."

(Hervé Guibert)

"... ce vieux réflexe atavique de la tourbe... qui fait de toute homme de science une sorte d'ennemi-né et inné de tout génie."

(A. Artaud)
"Acreditamos na teoria da evolução até a página três."
(Rita Lee)

"... if particle physics was solved then there was nothing left for high energy physics theorists to do. Unwilling to pack their bags and leave the field... [they] began to look around for a new far-out cult to believe in... many made their offerings at the shrine of grand unification..."

(Andrew Pickering)

"El Universo es una esfera cuyo centro está en todas partes y la periferia en ninguna [Nicolas de Cusa]: ¿podría extenderse al tiempo está concepción tradicional del infinito? ¡Qué mejor símbolo del fin de la confusión entre irreversibilidad y degradación! Reencontraríamos aqui la flecha del tiempo asociada a la inestabilidad y a la probabilidad, y ella no significaría ya evolución hacia la muerte térmica, hacia el fin de toda historia, sino posibilidad de un eterno volver a comenzar. El Universo sería creación continua, sucesión infinita de Universos que nacen por doquier y van hacia el infinito... No podemos pensar en un nacimiento absoluto del tiempo... la cuestión de saber «cuándo empezó el tiempo» escapa más que nunca a la física, como sin duda escapa también a las posibilidades de nuestro lenguaje y nuestra imaginación... El tiempo «absoluto» que precede a toda existencia y todo pensamiento nos sitúa así en ese enigmático lugar que reaparece una y otra vez en la tradición filosófica, entre el tiempo y la eternidad."

Spanish translation (by Javier García Sanz) from the end of chapter 7 of Prigogine & Stengers' Entre le temps et l'eternité [it is an ill-fated instance of the malignancy of this world that it happens I don't have the French original of this book, & shall therefore by my ashes stand forever indebted to the heroine soul (chaste star!) who peradventure send me, with all her fraternity, the French original of just this choicest morsel so I could definitely pen it down here as a seasonable kindness to our whole parish!]

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Commentary scholium for the amusement and instruction of the world: 

A criticism of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin's The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy (now the oddest book in the universe!) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015):

1. First, la affirmation de l'author de la critique: these people are all wrong!
But I mean string theorists as well as Smolin and Mangabeira Unger.
The problem lies in a presupposition: "unification of science" (relativity and the standard model of particle physics). Unification of science is l'affirmation de l'âne. It echoes not only in many worlds, but in many books, including the most pedestrian.

2. The book's more central idea that laws and states of affairs can both evolve in cosmology is a very good one. But it leads to the same dead end of string theory, given Unger and Smolin's strict (I mean narrow) understanding of time and mathematics (under the imperative of the unification of science) [perhaps here also lies the difference between their perspective and the perspective of Prigogine or of Sheldrake].

2.2 One can find the idea that history is prior to structure in deconstruction, but in deconstruction dichotomies (laws/states of affairs, history/structure, ideal/material) are handle much more consistently, in a way that shows that it is actually impossible simply to cancel out one category for another (and deconstruction demands a profound revision of phenomenology, that is, of occidental conceptions of consciousness, intentionality, and perception—Smolin's qualia, for that matter; this profound revision is perhaps equivalent to just accepting the paradoxes implicit in both quantum mechanics and relativity).

2.3.1 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of time (and becoming) is poor, one-dimensional, and linear (that is, chronological). Even l'âne might not pass. Contrast their view with the views of Bergson or Heidegger. For Bergson, past coexists permanently with the present (the past in its entirety had never really ceased to exist) (see Matière et Memoire). For Heidegger's view, see "Die transzendentale Einbildungskraft und ihr Bezug zur Zeit", section 32 of his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik.
Unger and Smolin’s conception of history is not compatible with Vico (as Unger sometimes seems to suggest). Vico don't say only that we are able to understand history because history is something we do (it results from our own action). He says that history is the only thing we are able to fully understand. He didn't claim we could understand nature as history, much on the contrary. To him nature is not fully understandable. 

2.3.2 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of mathematics is also poor. For instance, as much as string theorists, with a slight-of-hand, they merely invert and mask some fundamental issues: the problem is not simply to recognize that mathematics and logic must have limits when applied to temporal phenomena. The problem is rather how can one make sense of the "timeless quality" (p. 16) of mathematics and logic by subsuming them to a one-dimensional and linear (chronological) understanding of time (as change). L'âne crashes or freak out.
It is understandable that the idea of infinite is problematic for them. It is not convincing that they can really make sense of it (kick it out), neither of the idea of a continuum. Smolin at least recognizes that it is going to be difficult to eliminate from physical theory the continuum of complex numbers (in case it were possible to eliminate the continuum of real numbers) (p. 517).
Their understanding of probability is merely epistemological, as for instance when Unger suggests that one cannot use the metaphor of a dice to explain probabilistically "the most general framework" (that is, the cosmos) (p. 159). Even if that we call cosmos were a chaosmos? Mallarmé was not a scientist neither a philosopher and had a much bolder understanding of what is at issue here. (L'âne don't run, but if it were a horse...!)
I wonder if Unger's criticism of marginalism is fair. His understanding of economics, on the other hand, might go along (and not just once) with the conceptions of politicians in Brazil, with whom he associated. They seem all to believe in linear pretty cumulative conceptions such as "growth," which turned out as a sure recipe for social, environmental disaster and political backlash. 

3. Unger and Smolin share with string theorists an obsession: the unification of science, l'affirmation de l'âne. Differently, scientists of the first half of the 20th century (Heisenberg, Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, but not Einstein) had a much healthier (if stealthy) attitude. They were able to straightforwardly face paradoxes and inherent limits in scientific knowledge and practices (in relation to other areas of culture). They were all much more at ease with ideas such as non-local entanglement (Bell inequalities) and "ontological" indeterminacy (which don't have to be "solved" by a complete and coherent, ultimate understanding of either time or space). John von Newman is another case that instead of remaining in a defensive attitude, proposed (notwithstanding l'âne) even a revision of logic making room for the paradoxes in the foundations of both mathematics and quantum physics (people with different agendas all refer positively to von Newman in relation to this point: see Friedman, Dynamics of Reason, p. 122; Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 156; Susan Haak, Philosophy of Logic, p. 228). One should add Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck to the list of people who were able to stand, to bear the most paradoxical aspects of science, freeing l'âne from its spell. 

4. All that was said above should be read as an advise that Unger and Smolin (as much as Brian Greene's) direction (and I don't mean merely their arrow-of-time) is wrong-headed. Outside both well-paid mainstream &/or exceptional academia, l'âne actually do nothing but chew. And that beyond eternity, don't having to put up heroically with our unimaginable natural rationalistic indigestions. We are just in the beginning of the century, and the situation has approached again the limit once described by Heisenberg in what matters the whole 19th century: 

"The nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people. This frame was supported by the fundamental concepts of classical physics, space, time, matter and causality; the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided. Matter was the primary reality. The progress of science was pictured as a crusade of conquest into the material world. Utility was the watchword of the time... This frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul... It was specially difficult to find in this framework room to those parts of reality that had been the object of the traditional religion and seemed now more or less only imaginary" (Heisenberg, "The Role of Modern Physics in Human Thinking," Physics and Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1959, p. 169).

Heisenberg thought that one of "the most important changes brought about by modern physics [read quantum mechanics] results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century" (Phisics and Philosophy: 170). But alas, l'âne is tougher, and our ambitions bolder. I mean, strengthened with the most advanced techniques in pharmacology and biomedicine, l'âne now stands in the middle of the world, on the verge of social and ecological collapse, and whinnies infuriately against any approaching asteroid. It is indeed better to have it at least all alone (and for a very brief moment) than with infinite others.
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***My view is somewhat warped, and a fair, accessible statement of Smolin's position can be found here,  written by himself: What should be worried about (Edge.org).
The comments written by him (3/26/2018, 3/23/2018) in the following blog of Peter Woit are also interesting: Not Even Wrong.
And this is a video of a talk in which he explains his views very clearly, and point to political implications of it, in particularly concerning our present situation and global warming: A New Theory of Time (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts);
***NEW (Nov/2018):

"If this particle really exists, then it is not just outside the standard model but outside it in a way that nobody anticipated. Just as Newtonian gravity gave way to Einstein's general relativity, the standard model will be superseded. But the replacement will not be any of the favoured candidates that has already been proposed to extend standard model: including supersymmetry, extra dimensions and grand unification theories," Roger Barlow, LHC is hitting a tantalising new particle (The Conversation);

Non-locality:

"For D'Espagnat, it is exactly if we consider seriously and realistically certain results of physics that we have to open the two complementary perspectives. D'Espagnat welcomed these complementary perspectives grounding himself on the many violations of CHSH-Bell inequalities obtained experimentally since the 1980s," Alessandro Zir, Luso-Brazilian Encounters of the Sixteenth-Century: A Styles of Thinking Approach (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2011, p. 66).
"Since the 1960s... the rigid determinism of old-style physics has given way to a recognition of an inherent spontaneity in nature—through indeterminism at the quantum level, through non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and through the insights of chaos and complexity theories. In cosmology, there has been the recognition of a kind of cosmic unconscious through the discovery of 'dark matter,'the nature of which is utterly obscure, but which nonetheless seems to constitute some 90-99 percent of the matter in the universe. Meanwhile, quantum theory has revealed strange and paradoxical aspects of nature, including the phenomenon of non-locality..." Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World (Riverhead books, 1995).
"... locality comes when we try to force it into a particular framework. And, that’s the explicate order. So, what I’m saying is, what traditionally science has felt is essential, is only an outward manifestation. And I, I don’t think many scientists would agree. I don’t think they have grasped, are willing to grasp that, or willing to think about this idea," Basil Hiley, interview.

"The distance between two particles [in microphysics] is determined by the minimal number of particles necessary to form a chain of coincidences between the given particles" (Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, 1993, 188).
"A profound epistemological analysis of certain quantum-mechanical principles seems to suggest that the traditional conceptions of space and time are perhaps not the most suitable frame for the description of microphysical processes... In his discussion of electron transitions between stationary states within the atom, Niels Bohr already called such processes 'transcending the frame of space and time'" (Jammer, 189).
"Les données de nos perceptions nous conduisent à construire un cadre de l'espace et du temps où toutes nos observations peuvent se localiser. Mais le progrès de la Physique quantique nous amènent à penser que notre cadre de l'espace et du temps [as classically or ordinarily understood] n'est pas adéquat à la véritable description des réalités de l'échelle microscopique" [Louis de Broglie] (Jammer 189).
"[concepts of space and time] arise from, but do not have analogs in, the properties of microscopic particles, in the same way that thermodynamic properties arise as a result of interactions among the many actually existing particles of the universe" [E. J. Zimmerman] (Jammer 238).
"... it has been suspected that the perplexities of quantum phenomena may arise from the tacit assumption that the notions of length and duration, acquired primarily from experiences in which the average effects of large numbers of quanta are involved, are applicable in the study of individual quanta" [Arthur Stanley Eddington] (Jammer 238).
"A detailed prescription for constructing space according to purely combinatorial principles associated with the spin of particles was put forward in 1971 by Roger Penrose. His point of departure was the awareness that the two basic space-time manifolds of modern physics, the real four-dimensional space-time continuum of relativity and the fictitious infinite-dimensional complex Hilbert-space continuum of quantum mechanics, are unrelated to each other" (Jammer 238-39).
"Geometry in the small would seem to have to be considered as having a foam-like [stochastic] character" [John Archibald Wheeler] (Jammer 240).
"... the idea of using noninteger dimensionalities had been used in statistical physics in the early Seventies... After Benoit B. Mandelbrot had shown that the study of physical phenomena in noninteger-dimensional spaces, or 'fractal dimensions,' is a logically consistent possibility, such investigations gained wider attention" (Jammer, 248).
"That galgaxy-galaxy and cluster-cluster correlations as well as other cosmologically large structures can be studied, preferably in a framework of fractal dimensionalities, has recently been show by Siaochun Luo and David N. Schramm" (Jammer 250).

Now, here lies the WRONG path:
"During the classical period of work on unified field theories in the Thirties and Forties, [theories that unify fundamental forces by postulating space-times of more than four dimensions and incorporate quantum mechanics] became the subject of considerable interest... In some cases, as in the case of Einstein, this work was motivated by the hope that the unobserved fifth dimension could provide hidden variables to eliminate the indeterminacies from quantum mechanics" (Jammer 245).

On entanglement, see also:
- The quest to test quantum entanglement (Symmetry);
- Entangled photons make a picture from paradox (Nature);
- Classical Imaging with Undetected Light (Physical Review A);

Other issues:

- actual infinite falling (against Carlo Rovelli's pseudo-problem);
- the dogma of semantic uniformity & Python Gored Naturalism; 

- the odd transformation of Der Herr Warum (Gödel & Resnais);

- the only three types of ingenuity (with Cantor & Dedekind);

- self-help books (with Rupert Sheldrake);

- the most auspicious tetrahedron;

- what is REAL space? what is REAL number?

- Timothy Leary in the 1990s;

- 5G?! Get real...

- list of charming scientists/engineers;

- pick a soul (ass you wish);

- view from Berthe Trépat's apartment;

- list des déclencheurs musicaux;

- Dark Consciousness (with Yasuo Yuasa);

- The Doors of Perception (with Huxley);

- Structuralism, Poststructuralism (with Julia Kristeva);

- List des figures du chaos primordial (Deleuze);

- Brazilian Perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro vs. Haroldo de Campos);

- Piano Playing (with Kochevitsky);

And also:

- Dogen with Hagakure;

- L'articulation (Maurice Blanchot);

- L'intelligence des fleurs;

- Spooky Blue;

- Interactive while indifferent—Kinds & Phantasmagoria circa 1900;

- What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us? (N. David Mermin); 

- Chaos and Indeterminism (Jesse Hobbs/Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1991);