This can serve as a notes repository . Listening to an album called 'songs for the nervous system' by AUTORHYTHM. It is pretty good. I found it due to the fact that AUTORHYTM has some records out via the same organization as Miharu Ogura. It is electronic music. Here's the description:
" Joakim Forsgren started to work on what was to become Songs for the Nervous System in 2015, after having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The album is a series of intuitive compositions drawing from the latest medical research on how light and sound at specific frequencies has a potential to affect bodily functions, down to the cellular level. The resulting contemporary but surprisingly human electronic music is a dynamic mix of driving rhythms and meditative soundscapes. While the polyrhythmic beats suggest a kinship to some contemporary club music, the work of Brian Eno would be a more obvious point of reference in its genreless amalgamation of music, life and conceptual art.
Except for mixing and minor adjustments computers were shunned, with Forsgren instead relying on an assortment of synthesizers, of roughly the same age as himself and thus all members of the pre-digital generation. Conventional sounds and solutions were avoided, as much out of incapacity as imagination. The name and the impetus for the music were born out of the question of what music his electronic devices and machines themselves would play if Forsgren were not able to play them himself.
Songs for the Nervous System was very much created in a dialogue between the artist and his hardware. At times a stern taskmaster, Forsgren forces his synthesizers to perform outside their intended parameters in a manner reminiscent of how legendary band leaders such as Captain Beefheart and Miles Davis would push their musicians out of their comfort zones. A case in point is on Neurothropic Factors where Forsgren changed a preset on one of his synths by lowering the tempo to a mere fraction of the original BPM, thus forcing it to push its envelopes and present its flaws as perfection. The idiosyncratic use of instrumentation adds a further dimension to a music that is suffused with an unlikely – yet strangely natural – mix of ordered restraint and anarchic urgency.
There is a sense of effortlessness to the music that belies its experimental nature, a naturalness that suggests that it couldn’t have been done in any other way. Like it might well be topping the mainstream pop charts in some dysfunctional but beautiful parallel dimension. While in no way a retro project, this music nevertheless conjures an era when electronic music was still a new and undefined field. Autorhythm's music will appeal to fans of electronic pioneers like Bruce Haack, Mort Garson, Charanjit Singh and Delia Derbyshire, and for aficionados of electronic Krautrock it may well elicit comparisons to the relentless rhythms of Conrad Schnitzler, the sober elegance and analytical approach of Kraftwerk, the iconoclasm of Cluster and the beauty of Deutsche Wertarbeit and Harmonia. At times Songs for the Nervous System captures the same elusive sense of promise and wonder that those pioneering artists did, before conventions taught us the correct way to create, exploit and consume electronica. "
We were watching a movie upstairs. It is about a marine. The marine is an officer, and on the last day of his squad's tour, as they are celebrating the upcoming return home, they are instructed to deploy to a town. The marine (being the boss) "rallies the troops" and they go to the town, though not without reluctance, dissenting opinions, etc. It does not seem like they have much of another choice. So they obey the command. When they go to the town, they hit an IED. Nobody is injured by the blast, but it becomes clear that they have been walked into some kind of trap, and are now facing an active combat situation. This situation quickly devolves - the movie then cuts to an old fisherman who collapses, fishing alone at the river. So the story hinges on the fisherman and marine stumbling into one-another.
Ultimately the marine suffers from severe PTSD. He becomes stuck in the bureaucracy of the VA, wantng to return to combat but unable to pass the requisite physical/mental health evalutaions. So he is basically sent from place to place. Eventually he goes to a facility in Montana. Turns out the fisherman and the marine have the same doc as one-another at the VA. So they begin to fish together, which 'heals' the marine. There is a convenient falling in love with a librarian, and the fly fishing heals him and stuff like that.
It is interesting that at moments the lead actor (the marine) has a kind of amazing performance. But in his romance with the librarian, he becomes almost juvenile, like the proverbial high school guy trying to get a girl. It is weird. It is strange that in the romantic dialogues this line repeats: "just say yes." The librarian is one who often says no to going to parties and going on dates and basically seems troubled. Later on we learn that her trouble is complex. Her fiance died and she cares for her nextdoor neighbor, a woman who had lost her son and become vey mentally ill. The librarian is encouraged to be the "yes"- sayer, to enjoy. It is the supergoic injunction: the tacit command of our times is : "enjoy!"
The movie has to do with enjoyment and meaning. Where there is a real trauma, one might hope to find enjoyment and meaning, coupled together. The problem is that one suffers from the coupling of enjoyment and meaning. This is a point that has been made forcefully by Duane Rousselle. Fishing is the cure. And in fairness, I think it works for some. Some make it work in one way, some in another. The old fisherman made it work somehow with fishing. That isn't to say things functioned seamlessly all along, without trouble or bitterness. But fishing anchored the fisherman, such that when the time came, he was capable of helping the young marine.
At the same time, the film perhaps makes too much of a promise of this seamlessness. It is why the film is so cringe in the romantic dialogues - there is the promise of an untroubled sexual relation. Of course this is not explicitly the message, but this seems to be what ends up being at stake at certain moments in the film. Here the movie reacts to the trauma of its beginning, forging the promise of healing or wholeness there where there is an imossible-to-say. It is the same as the promise of intercellular comminucation. It is like mistaking a datagram, which is an invention of discourse, with a cell. A cell is not an invention of discourse. There is the signifier 'cell,' with its particular net of resonances and associated images, and there is the real cell "as such." The promise of intercellular communication is the promise that there is a meaningful dialogue where there is a "beyond the limit of" signification. A the real cell is not a gadget produced by discourse, which is something that distinguishes it from a computer chip that is hard-wired.