burnt, yet

The title of the piece is an honest answer to the question “how are you?” circa the time of composition. It might invoke Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” but there’s also something these days in the malaise these days that’s too self-aware for platitudes, so even in shambling, there’s something of interest in what shambles, how, the dynamics of holding together or at least alongside each other. I think of Byung-Chul Han’s “The Burnout Society” and how it is shamefully content to shake fingers at us individuals exploited into self-exploitation and exhaustion and refuses to recognize what we’re up against. Yet in slowing down, thinking, noticing, attending to what is as solution...it will probably not be sublime, but awkward, embarrassing, difficult. Oh well.

At the same time, there’s a delightful history of music that aspires to the condition of “Boring Formless Nonsense” (after Eldritch Priest) that bears repeating and spinning out because it does that and can’t do that. Take this piece for example: there are microtones, microtimings, there are usually 2 or 3 simultaneous independent tempi. How is it so involved only to sound like this?? Not exactly ‘inner necessity’, but the calculated wisps of will and curiosity that we invoke for sharing, salvation, submission, something other than what there was.