Hexenschuss by Burnt Friedman

liner notes

The vocabulary of modern ‘Western’ music or of the so–called Global North has finally been spelled out. The ever more hasty striving to move forward led to a music that is ‘starving among this embarrassment of riches’. In those days, the music that was oscillating in a state of “permanent obsolescence” — often in short cycles of a few months — and preserved as a sign of the times in musical codes, has gone in the completely opposite direction, into a state of obsolete permanence.
In this drive forward towards refining and expanding a catalogue of superlatives, a never changing, underlying, but underdeveloped isometric schema has irreversibly and imperceptibly cemented in the body. The corresponding theory – the persisting phantom terms of academia – seek to break free of its phenomena. In contrast to this, in the music beyond the 'Global North', a nature of 'polyrhythms’ is detected, or, in other words, every beat that can not be grasped easily must therefor be a polyrhythm and African in essence.

Now, shift the focus away from the contrafactual cultural connotations of the record sleeve towards the animating principle of the music, the phenomenological vectors of rhythm and view ‘groove‘ as the intrinsic attribute of regular harmonic motion patterns. This formulaic, animating principle is solely based on the law of the octave (doubling and halving). It appears repetitive, or circular in nature as opposed to linear and progressive. Such a formula is derived from a recurrent, balanced body movement from which every impulse originates as something sensed, as opposed to being subject to will or notation. What sounds merely technical or sophisticated in theory turns out to be basal in practice. It can also be grasped as an energy structure. In other words, a controlled regular movement yields stable interrelated time intervals with the least expenditure of energy.
In 'grooving', or 'composing a guiding path' all those involved (sequencer, drummer, dancer, etc.) become attuned to one another in a resistance against arbitrary dictates such as cultural appropriation, man–made aesthetic framework or notions of folklore.
Such a 'guiding path' seeks to dispense with taste as much as possible, ultimately in favour of an experience of harmonic accordance, strangeness, displacement and not least, freedom.
(Burnt Friedman)


In regard to the people depicted on the cover:

The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia.
They have lived in substantial isolation on the islands for thousands of years. Although the existence of the islands and their inhabitants was long known to maritime powers and traders of the South– and Southeast–Asia region, contact with these peoples was highly sporadic and very often hostile; as a result, almost nothing is recorded of them or their languages until the mid-18th century. Until this period, the Andamanese were preserved from outside influences by their fierce reaction to visitors, which included killing any shipwrecked foreigners, and by the remoteness of the islands. The various tribes and their mutually unintelligible languages thus are believed to have evolved on their own over millennia. Some of the tribe members were credited to having supernatural powers. They were called oko-pai-ad, which meant dreamer. They were thought to have an influence on the members of the tribe and would bring misfortune to those who did not believe in their abilities. When the British first established a colonial presence on the Andaman islands, there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living on Great Andaman and surrounding islands, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct but closely related languages. From the 1860s onwards, the British established a penal colony on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent. This coincided with the massive population reduction of the Andamanese due to outside diseases, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961.

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