domenica 26 novembre 2017

Deleuze e i palestinesi @ Intervista a Selma Dabbagh @ Mangialibri


Selma Dabbagh è una scrittrice britannica con un legame familiare ed affettivo molto forte con la Palestina. Nipote di un esiliato, ha difeso la causa palestinese prima nei tribunali come avvocato dei membri della Freedom Flotilla per Gaza, poi dando voce su carta a un popolo le cui istanze sono state spesso imbavagliate dal pregiudizio. La incontro al Pisa Book Festival per una chiacchierata che prendendo le mosse dal suo ultimo libro (Fuori da Gaza) spazierà verso molti dei temi che le sono cari.
Una recente ondata di revisionismo in chiave anti-araba ha investito l’opera di grandi filosofi che come Gilles Deleuze sono stati liquidati come “antisemiti” per la loro sensibilità alla causa palestinese. Non pensi che alcuni popoli sembrano essersi arrogati l’esclusiva sul vittimismo? 
Penso che la confusione voluta tra l’antisemitismo e l’antisionismo nell’ultimo decennio è stata portata a livelli di ambiguità senza precedenti. La distinzione tra in due termini è stata resa sempre più blanda da molti sostenitori di Israele, tra cui alcuni gruppi di interesse all’estero, come negli Stati Uniti, ma per fortuna ci sono anche gruppi che combattono questa confusione. La cultura ebraica è molto più ampia e varia del sionismo. Hai assolutamente ragione, penso che alcuni sentano di avere il monopolio della sofferenza a causa dell’Olocausto, ma credo che sia una visione pericolosa.
Sempre Deleuze ha definito i Palestinesi “il popolo scomparso”, paragonandoli agli indiani d’America. Pensi che siano davvero destinati a scomparire inghiottiti dalla colonizzazione? 
Deleuze non è stato l’unico a fare questo paragone, anche Mahmud Darwish ha paragonato questi due popoli che hanno in comune il fatto di essere stati vittime di un colonialismo basato sull’idea che si possa affermare il diritto ad insediarsi in un Paese, semplicemente cacciando quelli che lo abitavano prima. L’unica differenza sta nel fatto che gli Israeliani proclamano una sorta di legame con quella terra, anche se si tratta di uno molto tenue, quasi esclusivamente sentimentale. Quello che tento di mostrare nel libro è la lunga storia di resistenza che hanno i palestinesi. Penso che mai ci siano stati dei legami forti come in questo momento tra i palestinesi che vivono a Gaza e tutti gli altri nel mondo e questo sta facendo sì che escano dall’invisibilità in molti ambiti, e anche se questo mi dà speranza rimane il fatto che abbiamo perso la leadership. Nonostante le mie molte paure io rimango però fiduciosa.

sabato 18 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XVII La Machine Informatique dub •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
La Machine Informatique dub


Similarly, even Nietzsche’s fragment The Strong of the Future, known as the “accelerationist fragment” so dear to accelerationists today, is «Rhythm», a rapid deafening change of milieu, or a fast scream to the homogenizing of the dwarfed species in industrial societies of any time. On such a Rhythmic edge, outlines a deep echo between the anti-mechanistic «process» of the revolutionary path, as expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and the acephaly of Spinoza’ and Nietzsche’ s anti-deterministic «process».

Chaos sive Natura’s last definitive conceptual post is the Chaosmos event opposing the Cadence-Dogma, the eternal sacred «constraint» of the god of the rhythms.
A sonic passage - hopefully not worse than those preceding it - implying obscurity of sounds, abysmal intensity, sonic intermittences taken to the limit of the rhizosphere:
non-orientable accelerationism.

Chaos Sive Natura: “Dance” to Chaos Rhythm! “Is that what you want?”


Coda: Barrel-organ song and little Recurrence

“We can't stand it anymore', they shout, 'stop, stop this raven-black music! Are we not surrounded by bright mid-morning? And by soft ground and green grass, the kingdom of the dance? Was there ever a better hour for gaiety? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so full-fledged that it does not chase away the crickets but instead invites them to join in the singing and dancing? And even plain, rustic bagpipes would be better than the mysterious sounds, such bog-cries, voices from the crypt, and marmot whistles with which you have so far regaled us in your wilderness, my Mr. Hermit and Musician of the Future! No! Not such sounds! Let us rather strike up more pleasant, more joyous tones!”

venerdì 17 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XVI Irenica (Private Collection, RE) •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017



Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Irenica (Private Collection, RE)


If, according to Deleuze, the «territory» “is not a milieu, not even an additional milieu”, but “an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that «territorializes» them” what OCSS experiments with Chaos sive Natura is the mobile creation of a sonic surface, a chaotic plane where the space of the sound-to-come is changeable, deformable in n-dimensions until the creation of a n-sphere, a rhizosphere. Nature, thus Chaos, as music. Among the possible thousand virtual ways of making a Refrain of a diverse thought work different, OCSS has chosen the Rhythm non-science, namely the non-orientable accelerationism, where the non-oriented acceleration of a sound no longer represents the rhythm that makes its velocity change - the derivative of velocity with regard to time - but the Rhythm which changes its milieu every time the sound «marks» the passage between a milieu and another, becoming in such a way the derivative of the milieu with regard to time. A topological rhythm, a new topology of sound which accompanies in a randomly «chaotic» way the raise of the mutation between analogical and digital, between sonic and timbric planes, between the «becoming sound» of the Rhythm and the «becoming rhythm» of the sound, among sonic objects, between melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters. In short a chaos-interval which “becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but […which] has [always] a chance to”.

giovedì 16 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XV Irenica (Private Collection, RE) •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Irenica (Private Collection, RE)

If the spatialization of the milieu as theorized in Deleuze is no longer uniform because it postulates the non existence of an absolute space, than we can subvert the Cartesian philosophical coordinates that have been ruling our western world since XVII century. Starting from 1837: Of the Refrain the project Chaos Sive Natura tries to elaborate a path of musical transcoding because “a code is not content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such.”  This happens for example in the first track entitled Bass Slight Swinging where the two bass-lines, reworked in Adrian Sherwood’s “rough” On U Sound style, mix with Klee’s slight swinging sails which lead the secret movement of the track, offering an oscillation between the sails and the bass in a precarious balance between Abstract and Figurative. The same «tres/passing» is present in D’Andrea Dancing Colors’ desert dub version, where the dancing colors of the desert turn into rhythms and spaces which intertwine with visual compositions of the most famous Italian colorist director, Michelangelo Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970). Particularly in the scene where the two protagonists, in a post-coitum suspension, are surrounded by the bright color of the improbable red cabins and by a shade of white-grey-pink colour of the alien mountains of the Death Valley, we discover Paul Klee’s indefinite gray point of his chaotic materic lines. To conclude the analysis of the rhythmic sequence-plane, we may consider the narrative development of La Machine Informatique dub where the fragment on the «computer machine» stated by Guattari in Vincennes (1975) about the impending algorithmic and computational reductionism of the data-economy, becomes a «sonic writing» thanks to a Jah Wobble-style bass-line which engages with Electric Tree’s abstractions and the soundtrack horns of Enemy (Villeneuve, 2013), a movie focused on the fascist pattern of  a «world order» in today societies of control. A composition inside a chaosmos is in other words the fragile sum of forms in a continuous transformation, of rhythmic paces and of «timbres», impossibile to be written in traditional music notation, being the unresolved, the challenge thrown by Roccatagliati’s electronic improvisation to Electric Tree’s abstract jazz.

mercoledì 15 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XIV Irenica (Private Collection, RE) •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Irenica (Private Collection, RE)


(...) If the spatialization of the milieu as theorized in Deleuze is no longer uniform because it postulates the non existence of an absolute space, than we can subvert the Cartesian philosophical coordinates that have been ruling our western world since XVII century. Starting from 1837: Of the Refrain the project Chaos Sive Natura tries to elaborate a path of musical transcoding because “a code is not content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such.”  This happens for example in the first track entitled Bass Slight Swinging where the two bass-lines, reworked in Adrian Sherwood’s “rough” On U Sound style, mix with Klee’s slight swinging sails which lead the secret movement of the track, offering an oscillation between the sails and the bass in a precarious balance between Abstract and Figurative. The same «tres/passing» is present in D’Andrea Dancing Colors’ desert dub version, where the dancing colors of the desert turn into rhythms and spaces which intertwine with visual compositions of the most famous Italian colorist director, Michelangelo Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970). Particularly in the scene where the two protagonists, in a post-coitum suspension, are surrounded by the bright color of the improbable red cabins and by a shade of white-grey-pink colour of the alien mountains of the Death Valley, we discover Paul Klee’s indefinite gray point of his chaotic materic lines. To conclude the analysis of the rhythmic sequence-plane, we may consider the narrative development of La Machine Informatique dub where the fragment on the «computer machine» stated by Guattari in Vincennes (1975) about the impending algorithmic and computational reductionism of the data-economy, becomes a «sonic writing» thanks to (...)

martedì 14 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XIII Afecsana Blues •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Afecsana Blues

In the wake of writers like Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, McKenzie Wark, Louis Chude-Sokei e Achim Szepanski, Jamaican bass culture has become the great catalyzer of the music experimentation since ‘70s, through beats and remixes practices jammed with western urban black electronic experimentation. The polyrhythmic and polymetric vibratory of the afro-digital psychedelia subverts the reproducing measure: from King Tubby to Kool Herc, from Dillinja to Burial, the scheme of repetition with no variation is no longer present: milieus and rhythms re-appropriate their centrifugal force and take off to an imaginary Atlantic, creating an analogical and digital diaspora full of imaginative, utopian lines, fugues, back and forth returns. In fact “rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm” being it New Orleans with its primordial jazz or Monk’s New York recalled by D’Andrea, Dillinja’s London or Russolo’s Milan. Deleuze will say: “…chang[ing] milieus, taking them as you find them: such is rhythm.” Landing, bifurcating, jumping as it happens with Underground Resistance’s afro-germanic sound of Detroit, Zulu Nation’s suburban Autobahn from New York, Kool Herc’s phantasmatic Jamaican vibes, Burial and Valve Sound System’s London, as well as D’Andrea’s rhythmic echoes of Monk’s New Yorker aphorisms. Everything vibrates “and all three at once: forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain.” It is from the Chaos that Milieus emerge because “It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition”.

lunedì 13 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XII Afecsana Blues •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Afecsana Blues

Hereby we witness an overturning in the concept of Rhythm as it has been acknowledged since ancient times. From a genealogical, anthropological and ontological point of view, Nietzsche identifies in the rhythm the poetic «compulsion» needed to open the sacred to the profane so to reach the cosmic forces of the future. Deleuze, on the other side, operates a cesura between the «rhythm» seen as the cadence of measure, and the «Rhythm». The Meter of the rhythm is a measure-rule imposed by men to decode any territory, while the pace of the Rhythm is a critic intrusion, an anomaly, a rhythmic singularity, a pure meeting-event among different milieus. Deleuze and Guattari write as follows: “It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march (…) Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Through the above lines runs the echo of experiences marked by the «aleatory music» which strongly influenced XX century contemporary music of artists like Xenakis and Boulez. With an appreciation of Breakbeat science, originally derived from the afrodelic and diasporic tradition, and through the use of its pulsed rhythmic unit - the single beat, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System offers a possibility to overturn the codified rhythm. Dub and breakbeat techniques, sampling and turntablism variate the rhythm dissolving and reworking the metric code, distributing always renewed space-time blocks. ”Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction (…) [the rhythm]  produce[s] a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu.”

domenica 12 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. XI Zabriskie Point (Dancing Colors Variation) •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017


Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Zabriskie Point (Dancing Colors Variation)
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari introduce a concept of Rhythm different from Nietzsche's. In the pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the god of rhythms is substituted by the dreadful god of the Rhythm, the god of Chaos. It is important to start from the idea of Chaos as introduced in A Thousand Plateaus, in particular in the chapter entitled 1837: On the refrain. Deleuze and Guattari describe it as follows: "Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable "pace" (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects, and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a"gray point" for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as nonlocalizable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of aberrant lines.”
The «gray spatiality» is then indistinguishable, untraceable, a point-form cacophony and chaos a clot of forces crossing colossal abstractions. More radically, Deleuze and Guattari say: “Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus” and “What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos

sabato 11 novembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism Sound System •• Chaos Sive Natura •• Pt. X Zabriskie Point (Dancing Colors Variation) •• Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF011.eng, 2017



Obsolete Capitalism Sound System
Chaos Sive Natura
Zabriskie Point (Dancing Colors Variation)
Whereas D'Andrea marks New Orleans as original fulcrum of jazz and meeting point of polyrhythmic sounds from central and western Africa with the harmonious Atlantic European experience, Obsolete Capitalism moves the focal point of the sound to an imaginative Jamaica, linking it to north-eastern African hypnotic acoustics, which suggest slow and deconstructed lines derived by dubbing practices of masters like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry. To the Atlantic Electric Tree, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System offers the electronic diasporic rhizome, thus molecularity of perpetual variations, dancing iridescent morphemes in electronic darkness. Deleuze writes:Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical.” O.C.S.S. is a"rhythmic dance" in the Nietzschean way of incessant form, of timbre intensity, but its concept of the "rhythm" is Deleuzian.