kodwo-eshun-more-brilliant-than-the-sun-adventures-in-sonic-fiction

10[170)10[171)Nuclear death gives us back a mythology on theuniversal level, it promotes a new humanism foundedon destructionSylvere lotringerJazz during the Pax Atomicajohn Coltrane's '65 Ascension (Version 11 is Atomic Age jazz - acontrolled explosion, an atomic detonation blast sustained andintensified over 2 sides. As harrowing as the thought of skin flayed aliveby the backdraft of the Nagasaki bomb, it's not so much listened to aswithstood. As A. B. Spellman pointed out, this 'p lexus of voices' isdesigned 'to empty his audience's spiritual reservoir' until 'your nervoussystem has been dissected, overhauled and reassembled.'At 4 mins into Side 2, sound blocs pulverize each other, massingenergy peaks. In the Sleevenotes to Ascension, Archie Shepp theorisedthe breakthrough into a unified energy field: 'Most of the playing is aboutenergy and sound. Miles was able to create the ensemble effect utilizingmodes. john gave it the dimension of energy and created blocs of sound.'Blaring sonic matter is dredged up, driven by cymballic explosionswhich level out into the plateau phase of a new psychoaffective state.Shepp drew an analogy to 'what the action painters do in that it createsvarious surfaces of color which push into each other, creates tens ionsand counter tensions, and various fields of energy.'Turning jazz into Energy Music meant the exploration of 'texturesrather than the making of an organizational unity. You can hear in thesaxophones especially, reaching for sound and an exploration of thepossibilities of sound.'By doubling all horns, The john Coltrane Orchestra's 3 tenor saxes, 2alto saxes, 2 trumpets, 2 basses, drums, piano amplifies jazz into asunship powered by the hydraulic engine of lungpower.As Ben Sidran realized immediately, 'Coltrane's stress on innerstrength on the liner notes of his A Love Supreme album' becomes anenergetics of sound, 'a complex theory of energy playing' conceptualizedby Shepp and Pharoah Sanders.Ascension's surges, like those on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz orEgyptian Empire's The Horn, build towards planes when all the hornssynch in a powersurge, the belching exhaust fumes of a colossal rocketas it tilts into the air like a vertical city. Energy music entails anawakening of the world: 'We're taking them with us. We're getting readyto leap off an d wake these people up.'The volume of doubled percussion drew them into energy fields,draining the spiritual reservoirs Spellman perceived, releasing tensionthrough counter-tension, flooding the barriers of cool until emotiongushed. As an Energy Music drummer told Sidran, 'We are getting to thepoint where we can make the audience laugh or cry or scream.' Sanders'music even created an 'energy field' that made the drummer levitate,feel that he was hovering 'six inches off the floor'. Detonated in thecontrolled conditions of your room, Energy Music is a mind, body andsoul bomb that melts down psychic armour.Kiyoshi Koyama: What would you like to be tenyears from now?Coltrane: I would like to be a saintColtrane Liquid Computer: John ColtraneAmplification is sacred, the vertical energy of holy noise. As Sidranobserved, 'When john Coltrane was playing, he was praying.' Coltranehears jazz as a tonal communication medium. As Sidran realizes, thisimplies a new jazz consciousness in which the sax becomes 'aninstrument which can create the initial thought patterns that can changethe thinking of people.'In '65 Coltrane listens to john Gilmore from the Arkestra, meets Ra,takes LSD 25 in the Fall. Afterwards he declares: 'I perceived theinterrelationship of all lifeforms,' immediately condensing Manuel DeLanda's explanation of LSD's neurochemical processes: 'When you tripyou liquefy structures in your brain, linguistic structures, intentionalstructures. They acquire a less viscous consistency and your brainbecomes a supercomputer. Information rushes into your brain, whichmakes you feel like you're having a revelation. But no one is revealinganything to you. It's just self organizing. It's happening by itself.'