Self-portrait in an uncut vinyl disc

Rarely could a mind be so well equipped as in performance of its internal force. Its viscera laid out at the agora — surfeit, as an eruption, even zu viel in its cratered aftermath. But tasked with sifting the overwhelm it hardly has a say in the act itself. A delegate from the opposition can as easily arrive with a tablet where the sun queen has written ‘your people will forget this day, for they shall be scrubbed from the earth upon which they stand.’  

Worse yet, you think as you admire the legions made ready for action, it could all cross the threshold to a written account. A scribe could be loose among the ranks—what worse for a battle, a performance, than a critic at large in the loot pack. So valiant a stance would be taken that in the abrupt explication of a nation state’s value, suddenly a susceptibility to the mediocre could creep in, condemning immortally the performance to an appendix note, the sacrosanct spleen of valor. 

‘Dear husband,’ said Andromache to Hektor in a willing plea. ‘Your valor will bring you to destruction; think on your infant son, and on my hapless self who ‘ere long shall be your widow—for the Achaeans will set upon you in a body and kill you.’  

‘Dear music,’ said I to my library, hopeful in my act of intuition. ‘Dear music, think about me. I must play you for a crowd, don’t play me for a fool; think on my tendency, my status as your keen listener and on your explicit cartography of desire.’ 

To play Tom Ze is…the mistake of a curator who thinks themself a mere listener. It would be more wise to play House, something they don’t need to question to move their sunken bodies. Melodies are risky—even though it’s a dark room in Bushwick, are we not celebrating? Might not a minor scale be too steadfast a vessel for ghosts? In sunshine life is easy, everybody loves the sunshine even if they do not; we retain instinctively our positive, public-facing personae in the light. At night, a crowd of one hundred is a crowd of one hundred individuals, not a unit of one as the Achaean body.  

The universal shape of music is a four-to-the-floor kick drum pattern at 84 bpm that has a gentle ghost-note in its scission. It is the middle ground where the group’s heartbeat can synchronize, as a moon cycle. Theo Parrish did it right, but his Detroit is not my New York. I require a murky color red as my selective projection, while he dealt in warm tones left to cool in the oven overnight. Milford Graves took it a step further, recording the heart and transcribing it, making his acoustic arts.

My music education was under a student of Graves and it’s always made playing to the public an act of self-effacement, the body vessel I occupy long left behind the curve. While I can run a great distance and box at an amateur level, I traded as a child my sense of body dance for proficiency on a drum kit. It’s still dance, I could quip, but you would know I say it as one does while looking askance.  

A body with no dance in its bones has little reflection on what makes a crowd move, even if its respiration requires rhythm to function, and even if late at night it still seeks an unheard and glistening pair of eyes. To gather research on the science behind the phenomenon, experience is paramount. As in anything physical, there are formulae for what works: 

Destiny’s Child  

Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison 

That one song by Mr. Fingers 

ABBA 

just as there is for that which do not: 

Erik Satie 

Ahmed Malek 

A single car horn (though traffic could work) 

The issue lies, however, in the center of the diagram, where a calculable infinity comprising Música Popular Brasileira, Angolan experimentalism, and Neo-soul are left unsifted and without a tag. A botched translation here is not met with a smile and wave but a wave of mild hesitation. Indeed, if the research proves anything, it is that the research is selective at best and without control. 

A good DJ goes out and listens to other good DJs DJing well. 

And a bad DJ stays at home on Saturday reading Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, again. In literature there is rarely a presence of music for the people. Cortázar references jazz musicians, whatever it really means. Though their nucleus was life at the party I still have to fork over a nice dinner price to visit the Blue Note. There’s even a Spotify playlist dedicated to Haruki Murakami’s musical references, filed under the catch-all ‘Music to Study by’.   

Perhaps paralysis is the curse of the novelist, a sacrifice made to weave movement into their prose, like Robert Johnson at the crossroads. A poet craves experience, but to compile a set from poetry’s recommendations would leave us with mostly the bottom shelf, where reference usurps style.

I have written a thesis on collage, on the posterity of the avant-garde tradition in music, then succeeded in translating these theories to the practice of making cut-up sound sound coherent. Indeed now, when the term experimentalism is thrown around, there is hardly any room for critique. Duchamp ruined it for the rest of us, whose admirers flip through their index and find that sculpture before deciding if they should deviate from instinct.  

Dada, praise them, never had to face the public as the public qua public. In preparing this set I feel like Lorca’s audience, masquerading outside the bounds of performance, feigning ignorance of the spinning vinyl upon which my face is reflected amorphous. A solid curator knows that el público is as much a part of the show as the actor. The best, however, forgets that such a distinction has even been made.