Article: Too much stuff
We live in an age of stuff. In multiple aspects of our modern lives, we are confronted with an oftentimes overwhelming abundance, and an insidious demand for our attention: the colossal archives of services such as Spotify and Netflix offer more entertainment than could be ingested in several lifetimes, and this with only a superficial appreciation of the material; superstores and online merchants stock a consistently shifting and seemingly bottomless assortment of products, most of which you don’t know you need until personalised advertising hits you; out-of-sight technology graveyards overflow with discarded smart- phones and tablets, considered obsolete before a lightbulb has run its course; social media platforms open a window onto others’ lives, making a soap opera of the world around us, whispering promises of absolution and fulfilment with just a little more scrolling. The message is clear: more is better. That spiritual hole which yawns inside so many of us can only be satisfied by more stuff.
[Drawing by Ruth Garner]
From the archives.
Recommended Reading
Jacques Attali - Noise: The Political Economy of Music [1984]
Derek Bailey - Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music [1993]
Ran Blake - Primacy of the Ear [2011]
Sidney Finkelstein - Jazz: A People’s Music [1948]
Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz - The Fierce Urgency of Now [2013]
Andy Hamilton - Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art [2007]
George E. Lewis - A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music [2008]
Pauline Oliveros - Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice [2005]
Edwin Prévost - No Sound Is Innocent [1995]
Ronald M. Radano - New Musical Figurations [1993]
Christopher Small - Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening [1998]
David Toop - Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom [2016]
David Toop - Ocean Of Sound [2001]
Val Wilmer - As Serious As Your Life [1977]
