“We breathe background noise, the taut and tenuous agitation at the bottom of the world, through all our pores and papillae, we collect within us the noise of organization, a hot flame and dance of integers. My acouphenes, a mad murmur, tense and constant in hearing, speak to me of my ashes, perhaps, the ones whence I came, the ones to which I will return. Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages.” - Michel Serres, Genesis
Nothing I have seen or read can persuade me that Faust were anything less than a bunch of absolute nutters. Gigs in recent years have seen them deploy gangs of knitters live on stage. And I love them for it. Hallogallo seeks the kosmische Musik infinite through subtraction. In contrast Krautrock hurls the listener into a vortex of maximalist noise. Clocking in at 12 minutes, the drums don’t even start until 6:57. The results are as if rather than lapsed Catholics, Black Sabbath had been tantric sex adepts addled with gonorrhea of the ears. Incidentally some tantric traditions are obsessed with semen retention - there is absolutely a No Fap wing to Buddhism, possibly with its own Reddit community. Others are edge(ing)lord antinomian traditions that view sexual fluids as suitable offerings to tantric deities.
Krautrock is a raging 12 minute orgasm - if such a thing even exists. Who can conceive what Lovecraftian horrors this piece of music was designed to supplicate.
It’s also what I do a lot of my admin work to.
I can’t deal with music with lyrics while I’m crafting emails about things like project scheduling. The lyrics just start appearing in the text. “As you can see from this week’s RAID register, I ain’t no goddam son of a bitch, you better think about it after the next project milestone”. But I need something going on in the background. And if I’m going to have something on in the background then it might as well be a 12 minute aural Teutonic petite mort - or kleine Tod if you will.
I am absolutely microdosing to Faust as I work.
“I hear and I understand, blindly, when evidence has vanished and intuition has faded out: they’re the exceptions. I begin to fathom the sound and the fury, of the world and of history: the noise”
In his 1982 book Genesis, French wannabe junglist DJ Michel Serres seeks to find order in chaos and chaos in order. I find myself simultaneously drawn to and repelled by Serres’s work. I often have no idea what he is trying to say but I sometimes like the way he says it. This entire Substack might be seen as an attempt to talk myself into finishing one of his books.
What I particularly like is his complete disinterest in disciplinary boundaries. Of course, mathematics and classical history and C19th novels and memories of being mariner all go together. The world has no interest in our post-hoc classifications. I lose myself in the raging vortex of his prose but eventually I must come up for air.
Part of me wants Krautrock to go on for ever. Maybe that’s what my heaven is - losing myself in the noise.