I could not live without an Ipod. Every day I need music, I need to disconnect from the world and control the audio input. I need to dance. I dance alone in the kitchen, I dance alone in the metro, I dance in the shower, I dance in my head.
When I go to a concert I dance alone with other people. I have always been a fan of electronic music. I am not talking about the crap you can hear on the radio. I am talking about hard-tech, drum’n'bass, clicks’n'cuts, novo-dub, dubstep… When I listen to music, arabesques are forming in my mind. Complex fractals expand from the earbuds to my brain.
Electronic music is a term I don’t really like, actually most of the music we hear contains an electronic process. Pop artists are more electronic than musicians from the electronic scene. But for the rest of the post we are going to talk about “electronic music”.
I find electro more appreciable when there are many people. Yet we all dance alone. There is no physical communion like you could have at a rock concert i.e. a mosh pit. We are all alone together. It’s bit like yoga. Feeling the energy of people around you transports you. In fact we dance alone from an external point of view. We are clearly in the community but on a another state of sharing. The sharing here is not visual or kinetic. Through an external source of sound, communion happens in the rythm. The resonance created by our synchonized bodies is like a wave. We become equals.
I like to think about this resonance conveying brain waves like an AM signal. Is there a correlation between the frequency of the music/dance and the brain waves? I don’t know… This is a pure and not founded hypothesis. I won’t work on trying to demonstrate it. Belief is better than proof in this case.
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Tonight I am going to the new Amon Tobin show. His last album called ISAM is unbelievible. Some might say it’s too abstract, I don’t think so. Give it a shot and listen to it here. The rythms, the patterns, the sounds all had been worked so finely that it’s hard to believe machines are behind this. These machines are not cold; they are alive and their veins are pumping digital blood.
This will be the fifth time I will see Amon Tobin live. The first time is one of the best memories of a concert, ever. It was at 3 or 4 am at the end of a music festival in Brittany. All my friends were already back to their tents but I was there with around a hundred people dancing in the middle of the field. Cascades of drum’n'bass were flowing to our ears. The “dance alone” community was there resonating as it never had for me before.
Like an addict I try to recreate this feeling when I go to a concert. It’s never happened. Other feelings, other brilliant times in concerts, but different.
Will tonight be the repetition of this experience? I don’t know, but for sure I will find my community of lonely dancers.
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Also I changed my twitter handle. The underscore made it too complicated. Now you can find me at @mloigeret. Follow me! And retweet! Thanks.
Take care everyone,
Manu
