“The Suyá reaction to my recording was one of the clearest statements I obtained about the importance of the different parts to the total sound. The melody line - the clearly organized tone and rythm being performed by the older men - was only part of the desired effect, which also included the apparently irreverent calls, shouts, and giggles.”
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“You know, the sound of a 45 rpm record being played at 33 rpm. But as soon as I remembered that this is a CD and not vinyl, I could only marvel at the fact that these guys are so gol-darned HEAVY [author’s emphasis].”25 In an interview with the now-defunct influential extreme hardcore band Lärm, a band member recalls an incident in which the band’s definition of music collided with a sound engineer’s more mainstream ditto: “The sound check of our first concert ever was funny, the PA guy kept asking us when we were actually going to play a song…we already played three, we said.He shut down the PA and left…”
― Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate
― Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate
“A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.”
― Distinction
― Distinction
“The radical questionnings announced by philosophy are in fact circumscribed by the interests linked to membership in the philosophical field, that is, to the very existence of this field and the corresponding censorships.”
― Distinction
― Distinction
“When pressed, the Suyá would say that the only ones who still knew what they meant were the beings that taught the songs to the Suyá in the first place. One can go no further, for it is hard for an anthropologist to get translations directly from jaguars, birds, bees, and extinct enemies.”
― Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People
― Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People
Minerva’s 2025 Year in Books
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