I had to exchange media with my friend Mica of Mind Temple Productions who is working on a documentary with me, Logos Beheld, (about my theories about evolution and visual communication) and he was setting up to do the music and lighting for a film wrap party or something like that, and he invited me to stay, and out of politeness I did, not expecting to stay for long. But I found myself involved in interesting conversation with a young ethnobotanist named Evan, and while this conversation unfolded I noticed that Mica, who was spinning records, and John, a drummer, were in a egoless mind meld of flawless musical virtuosity. I already knew that Mica was a master at matching beats and flowing musically with the energy of rave or club, but John, who I had never met before, was obviously one of the best drummers I had ever encountered, and the unexpected brilliance of this collaboration kept me there despite my usual allergic reaction to socially dense environments, especially those that involve the usual combination of alcohol and the frenzied collision of sexual agendas which is, after all, practically the definition of a party or a club or a primate populated prison planet or whatever this plane of incarnation is supposed to be. Although my body had long since been exhausted by an extremely taxing and over-long day the musical intensity kept me transfixed and eventually reaching for my hand held computer gadget to record a stream of consciousness on one of those Tom Thumb type keyboards lit by a candle helpfully placed at the table where I was sitting.
Cross Fader Cross Sections © 2005 by jonathan zap
Turntables slipping back and across each other,
spinning hemispheres in cross-fading neural dialogue,
and bongos,
bongos slapped by mental intention,
“ I do not drum with my hands, I drum with my mind.”
says the drummer by his actions, as
spinning engines of musical thought wind up and down, and
drums, rendered of animal skin and wood,
mix beats with heavy electromagnets,
firing black polymer cones,
vibrating with electrocuted machine frenzy
behind black on black grills,
and the many thousand wattages of electricity, from
distant coal-fired plants,
pump electron juice
through black rubber-coated wire,
to become percussive beats
massively realized by black on black speakers,
as the primeval black gold of dead dinosaur energy is
alchemically transmuted into
vortices of sound spinning with electrical cross contention
spilling out into summery night.
and yet,
the percussive crossfire of beats and rhythms,
also fires adrenals of narcissistic hominids,
presenting as spinal cords
flailing herky-jerky across dance floor,
knees and elbows pumping to rhythm of heated primate sex-politic,
fired by rhythm, hormone, alcohol, frenzy of social density,
as hands slap animal skins alchemically taut,
on bulging tubular seeds of polished wood, and
rhythms shimmer with precision, as
fatty deposits of
dinosaurs and fermented ferns,
decaying sweetly through geological time,
come to explode as electromagnetism of gigantic bass propulsions.
speakers aggressive with electricity and stretched polymers,
vibrate from the marrow of Japanese hardware,
commanded by needle of diamond,
tracking discs,
shiny and black as coal,
spinning and glimmering,
needle fine etchings, on
hydrocarbons of dinosaur metabolism,
pressed into discs,
great densities of acoustical energy, and
super compression of carbon,
become knife edge of diamond,
cutting out vortices of acoustical patterning,
as the fate of spinning vinyl,
rests on the edge of a diamond knife,
straying but a little,
to the ruin of all,
while hominid digits sheathed in protein,
slap electrically,
flickering skeletal tongues of rhythmic intentionality,
slapping animal skin on animal skin slapping,
slapping air, slapping ear drums,
convoluted inner skin drums,
vibrating within
protein solid hominid agents,
who, to the possible ruin of all,
are moving and jerking automatons of
joints and tendons, acting out
alcohol-fired rhythmical-arhythmical movements,
ever so slightly recalibrating positions
in the evanescent nexus of
primate hierarchical relations,
intermingling the effulgence of
nonverbal gestures and
primate olfactory cueing
of synthetic perfumes, sweat, pheromones.
and yet,
drummer and dj are in the zone—
focus and flow yielding
free fire to power
grab n’ gusto of
sloppy, sprawling social agendas,
sweating fermentingly and
jerking with percussive rhythms,
as massive cascading of musical energy
heightens something,
heightens each in kind,
heightens jerks and grinds of pelvic gyrations,
forever at the root chakra of existence, as
dinosaur electro-magnetism
heats throbbing tape loops of sexual agenda.
And so,
Musical intelligence becomes energy source,
becomes meat puppet espresso,
becomes neurological stimulant,
becomes spinning gyroscopes in my head—
spinning out rhythmic-patterned cross sections of
primates,
acting out stoboscopically,
stroboscopic flashes revealing hominids on hottie quests,
with tools and anti-tools, of
attraction and rejection,
punctuating the ecstatic frenzy of social maneuverings,
stimulated by combustion of
simple sugars and neural peptides of
excited hydraulic intentions,
throbbing simultaneous with
phasing sounds, creating
strange hemispheric fires,
spinning out rhythmic word energy to
cross section primate density,
and my own inner mechanicalness,
musically submerged and skewed, becomes
perceptual flashes of primate hydraulic intentionalites,
throbbing with percussive dynamics of sex-politic, which
thicken and become sloppy and sluggish as
music s l o w s,
and then,
as music reignites,
it boots up again,
into flight or fight giddiness, and
dinosaur fat throbs shimmeringly
out of Japanese electronics, and
the vibratory hysteria of
polymer cones electrocuted behind black on black grills,
and mind become drumming,
keeps up with edge of excited electromagnetism, as
musical thoughts extrude from massively black speakers, as
twisting, fabric-sheathed, sound-baffling primates yield space to howling, phasing phantasmagoria of spinning hardware that
needs no social density before it,
but lives for analog signaling of diamond point knife,
extracting musical thoughts at
thirty-three revolutions per minute,
stroboscopically lighting up
cascades of diamond on black vinyl,
unfolding etched layers of acoustical patterning,
spinning and shimmering outward
into the darkness of summer night.