The physical configuration evolved by a given species determines the way it perceives the world, and hence, the design of the tools that it deploys to understand it. This has profound implications for the scientific enterprise which most initiate driven by the curiosity that comes from self-awareness.There is an interesting loop here: our environment shapes our conciousness, and our conciousness is the lens through which we observe that environment, and eventually, act upon it: large scale structuration.

Likewise for artistic endeavours which in all fairness comprise but another language with which life makes sense of its circumstance in the universe. So- a planet with an average gravity of 9.8 m/s² where the only carbon-based self-aware species emerged after a history dotted with twists and catastrophic events, and stark competition between different evolutionary lineages would produce art, indeed, music which is radically different from that which would occur in an ecosystem with much less diversity, constraints in mineral resources, no land-mass or a weaker gravitational field.

Although we have not yet made public contact with species adapted to such environments, we can listen to snippets of their variegated song in the music that many an Earth-bound biped mammal produces, perhaps after dreaming of an awakening somewhere else without the rules and constraints to which we are subject- or where novel constraints force us to express ourselves in alternative ways.

Let us revel in their dazzling, otherworldly beauty.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is the brick-wall upon which we stumble upon trying to elicit the intimate operation of particles spinning in their secret dance. When we blow up matter to its ultimate limit, our ham fisted attempts at measuring introduce disturbances in the systems we are trying to understand. We find ourselves forever groping, building quantum edifices on contested grounds.

Alas, imagine a different situation, say one where brain mass had been able to expand unfettered by the need to stand upright, develop the opposable thumb and build tools with which to manipulate nature to survive against predators and enemy tribes. A number of variables- e.g. reduced gravitational pressure, or less competition for resources could have sent us in an alternative evolutionary path, and in doing so possibly provided us with the perceptual instruments necessary to zoom into vast spaces of emptiness where particles spin like lonely stars in a pilgrimage through the sidereal void, without distorting their path.

Perhaps this would have led us to develop an introspective astronomy, and a mikrokosmische music to go with it- it could have sounded a little bit like this.

Rhythm Based Lovers- Stargrove

We already told you last week, when talking about Innergaze, that Rhythm Based Lovers were heading your way. And you should consider yourself lucky now that they have hit you, because this is synthetic boogie of the tallest order- a delicate configuration of chiselled robofunk rhythms and bass lines modulated in animated dialogue with each other, nonchalantly leaning on the corner as they await for a rotund piano whose keys are steps up a staircase leading to subtly ecstatic, abstractedly sexy dancing.

Get it here.

The development of language is, undoubtedly, a crucial milestone in our evolutionary path. Think about it: arbitrary sounds referring to things, arranged in a mostly coherent way to produce statements about the world that surround us. Attach arbitrary glyphs to these sounds and you have writing, through which knowledge can be codified and communicated  across space and time.

We have come far this way, but we still should wonder whether the leaps of abstraction that were outlined above haven’t taken their toll in removing us twice from the world where we live. One could conceive a different state of affairs where, say, the impact of a message didn’t so much hinge on the meaning attached to the words of which it is made, but to their sound.

We wouldn’t speak, we would sing. Some say that’s what Neanderthals did- and look the way they went, wiped-out by their better organised Cro Magnon brethren. What would have happened in Earth in the absence of such competition- say, another glacial period favouring the sturdier, stronger species? One can only wonder what would our stories look like, and how would we tell them. Perhaps the basic unit of expression would be the loop, and its Beats Per Minute would indicate urgency, melodies as adjectives and content embedded in the dancing. The Untold remix of Ramadanman that we are leaving today would surely be thriller.

Ramadanman- Revenue (Untold Remix)

Untold seems to be hellbent in stripping dubstep down to its bare rhythmical content, it hits hard. We have been jamming a lot to his remix of XX’ ‘Islands’. And of course the James Blake remix of ‘Stop What You Are Doing’ is already a modern classic. Here you have him getting down on Revenue by another Dubstep iluminado, Ramadanman. The outcome is somewhere in between Afrika Bambaata and the Boredoms, the dancefloor effect the equivalent of a sweaty battle between the Rocksteady Crew and a Kabuki troupe. Just think about it, get excited.

Heard this first here, get it here.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with kosmische