Friday, October 26, 2007

Striborg - Ghostwoodlands

Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, a French 18th century musician, musicologist and man of letters "...had an interest in spiders and played the violin for them to see what music they liked..." (quote sourced form Claude Lévi-Strauss's "Look, listen, read").

Alas, Lévi-Strauss's book does not tell us what music spiders did like.

For Georges Bataille, the spider was an almost formless creature, an invertebrate that is not like anything: "To declare (...) that the universe is not like anything, and is simply formless, is tantamount to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spittle" (Documents 7, 1929).

Certainly, Bataille's perspective on the spider is anthropocentric. Nonetheless, though highly sensitive to vibration, spiders have no ears. For that reason alone, the music spiders like would sound formless to us, unlike any music hitherto made by man, the audio equivalent of spittle.

Translating the music spiders like to human music is impossible. As Lévi-Strauss notes, translation "... is impossible in music, for lacking words it possesses as many languages as composers, and, ultimately, as compositions. Musical languages are, relative to each other, untranslatable, though conceivably they could be transformable - even if this has not, or has hardly been attempted".

In my imagination, if the music spiders like could be transformed to human terms, it might sound something like Tasmanian Black Metal band Striborg's latest album, the predatory and poisonous "Ghostwoodlands".

5 comments:

Dominic said...

Oh, I love Striborg - Nefaria makes completely redundant my secret plan to record a black metal album in the style of Flying Saucer Attack. Music for spiders, yes!

Anonymous said...

His release Nocturnal Emissions - Nyctophobia puts Ghostwoodlands to shame.
Nice blog btw. :)

valter said...

Dominic: Black Metal album in the style of FSA - what about an Black Metal album in the style of FSA renegade Third Eye Foundation? Sometimes (in my more starry-eyed moments) I think Lurker Of Chalice might be evolving in that direction...

Anonymous; thanks!

Anonymous said...

check out the poem by robert frost (oddly striborgian name), "design". i like your take on striborg ...

Dimaension X said...

Odd how something that was once considered raw and ugly is now considered "high art" for the very same reasons of its existence.

It is raw and ugly, yet beautiful. Though I am not a big fan of Striborg, I do like his work with Sunn O))) - "Pentemple".