Drum machines are an ersatz experience.
Drum machines offer an ersatz experience to an ersatz world, a world saturated in images of the image, extended studio recording techniques, special effects, and marketed youth feeding on there own personality image.
In the postpostmodern world ersatzism is accepted to the point of invisible unremarkability and has been for quite some time.
The ancient law giving 'lords' (the blue cone head flat faced almond eyed beings?) have been replaced by confused mirrors of cultural strains.
People being quite blatently and even knowingly guided by image media culture, living ersatz pop lives, until maybe one day they find themselves in a situation that television etc has non prepared them for, what then, well it's called freedom my friends.
The attractiveness of the ersatz is maybe a vast clue to that perhaps reality itself is an ersatz experience, on a technologically and psychologically level to the point that maybe life as we know it now is infact some kind of advanced bionetic video game, a simulation where the participant user has forgotton they are taking part in a simulated world/a simulated reality.
ReplyDeleteBeware/be aware of the sophisticated subtle distortion that is 'likeness of anything'; are we living in a simulated likeness reality?
ReplyDeleteProgrammed percussion events (i.e. drum machines) are a hit and miss affair for this listener, music such as the band Skinny Puppy produces seem to offer drum machined sounds where there ersatzism is a given and a weird theatrical sampled aesthetic makes it all OK. Drums delivered or 'played' via machine! Ersatz drum experience! Skinny Puppy gets away with it (in my opinion) because of their dense electronic sound usage, a postpostmodern vibe of movie samples, theatre, and outright 'noise', with them everything is permited, nothing is untrue (nothing is ersatz).
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