A Certain Ambiguity
It started with a joke on the Erol forum - well, two jokes that somehow got interconnected. The first, about one of the winners of the AA24/7 remix comp needing a new name, the second, the usual "OMG, Dance Area is really... ::santa claus and the easter bunny::" joke.
I seem to have good luck getting band names from maths and science textbooks. I had read something on the bus to work that struck me as "that would make a good band name..." Axiomatics. I checked to see if there was already a band of that name, and there is not. Decided it was too good to give away, and grabbed it for myself - joking around that we should make up fake Dutch electro names and start another forum project a la the Trance Orchestra (I immediately named myself "Evren Van Der Blogge", Shadow Dancer called "Edam Oranjeboom" and away we went...)
I don't think it's gonna happen in the form I originally envisaged (a collaborative project where each person recorded a new piece, remixed what had gone before, and then passed on the stems to the next person) - well, because I didn't feel like herding cats, especially when the first person who said they wanted to join up threw a hissy fit and blocked me on twitter because apparently I didn't tweet back fast enough - oh grow up...
But whatever.
Anyway, reading the same book, on the bus home... it's called "A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel" by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal. Ed gave it to me for my birthday last year, but, without a commute, I hadn't got round to reading it. Which is a shame, as it has turned out to be AMAZING. Every time I think I've got a bead on what it's about, it changes. At first I thought it was just a kind of mathematical equivalent to "Sophie's World" - the story of mathematics told through a kind of detective novel. But then it changed into something else, and I thought it was going to be a post-Dawkins lambast against religion. But then it changed again, and... not to give away the plot too much, but by exploring the twin mathematical alternate universes of Georg Cantor's infinity theory, and Non-Euclidean geometry (if you paid attention to Shimura Curves lyrics, you know I'm a big fan of that) it seems to be going off in completely another direction again.
And in a flash, it came to me.
I've been experiencing musical writers' block for months now, maybe even a year at this point. HATO was initially a spur to motion, but now I can't even seem to find the time to finish the mixes. And finally getting a release for the long-lost Shimura Curves album ended up being a double edged sword, and I'm still so conflicted about it I haven't even shipped my hard drive off for data recovery, let alone got to work on it. (I know, I just know, that I will end up doing all the work on it, yet again. In the two months since it was first mooted, not one of my bandmates has even mentioned it, so that just goes to show the kind of back-up I can expect.)
I mean, I had my theories on where the block was coming from. It's totally tied up with the death of my libido - or, well, not so much my libido as my decision to become celibate. I was talking about it on the forum yesterday - about how music and sex are so intimately tied together for me - especially dance music. It's one and the same, music is the theory, emotion is the practice (or maybe the other way around.) Well, no wonder. The person I was talking to said that they were able to totally compartmentalise - that music and sex weren't connected. But how can you separate music and emotion? It's impossible. Music isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a visceral, physical, messy, emotional one.
But love/sex is not the only emotion.
Another big, positive one for me is my sense of wonder - and it's my sense of wonder, of awe, of amazement, that fuels both my love of mathematics and my spiritual sentiments. (I hope that this is where the book is going, and will be disappointed if it doesn't - that spirituality - note, not religion - is as much a valid worldview as non-euclidean geometry is logically consistent, even though it makes no sense to a literal mind.)
I don't know. Perhaps I shall write a "concept album" about Euclid's elements, a piece of music for each postulate or proposition? I have no idea. But I hope that this direction of thinking is the stream that restores the dry well.
I seem to have good luck getting band names from maths and science textbooks. I had read something on the bus to work that struck me as "that would make a good band name..." Axiomatics. I checked to see if there was already a band of that name, and there is not. Decided it was too good to give away, and grabbed it for myself - joking around that we should make up fake Dutch electro names and start another forum project a la the Trance Orchestra (I immediately named myself "Evren Van Der Blogge", Shadow Dancer called "Edam Oranjeboom" and away we went...)
I don't think it's gonna happen in the form I originally envisaged (a collaborative project where each person recorded a new piece, remixed what had gone before, and then passed on the stems to the next person) - well, because I didn't feel like herding cats, especially when the first person who said they wanted to join up threw a hissy fit and blocked me on twitter because apparently I didn't tweet back fast enough - oh grow up...
But whatever.
Anyway, reading the same book, on the bus home... it's called "A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel" by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal. Ed gave it to me for my birthday last year, but, without a commute, I hadn't got round to reading it. Which is a shame, as it has turned out to be AMAZING. Every time I think I've got a bead on what it's about, it changes. At first I thought it was just a kind of mathematical equivalent to "Sophie's World" - the story of mathematics told through a kind of detective novel. But then it changed into something else, and I thought it was going to be a post-Dawkins lambast against religion. But then it changed again, and... not to give away the plot too much, but by exploring the twin mathematical alternate universes of Georg Cantor's infinity theory, and Non-Euclidean geometry (if you paid attention to Shimura Curves lyrics, you know I'm a big fan of that) it seems to be going off in completely another direction again.
And in a flash, it came to me.
I've been experiencing musical writers' block for months now, maybe even a year at this point. HATO was initially a spur to motion, but now I can't even seem to find the time to finish the mixes. And finally getting a release for the long-lost Shimura Curves album ended up being a double edged sword, and I'm still so conflicted about it I haven't even shipped my hard drive off for data recovery, let alone got to work on it. (I know, I just know, that I will end up doing all the work on it, yet again. In the two months since it was first mooted, not one of my bandmates has even mentioned it, so that just goes to show the kind of back-up I can expect.)
I mean, I had my theories on where the block was coming from. It's totally tied up with the death of my libido - or, well, not so much my libido as my decision to become celibate. I was talking about it on the forum yesterday - about how music and sex are so intimately tied together for me - especially dance music. It's one and the same, music is the theory, emotion is the practice (or maybe the other way around.) Well, no wonder. The person I was talking to said that they were able to totally compartmentalise - that music and sex weren't connected. But how can you separate music and emotion? It's impossible. Music isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a visceral, physical, messy, emotional one.
But love/sex is not the only emotion.
Another big, positive one for me is my sense of wonder - and it's my sense of wonder, of awe, of amazement, that fuels both my love of mathematics and my spiritual sentiments. (I hope that this is where the book is going, and will be disappointed if it doesn't - that spirituality - note, not religion - is as much a valid worldview as non-euclidean geometry is logically consistent, even though it makes no sense to a literal mind.)
I don't know. Perhaps I shall write a "concept album" about Euclid's elements, a piece of music for each postulate or proposition? I have no idea. But I hope that this direction of thinking is the stream that restores the dry well.
Labels: euclid, maths, writers block
posted by Masonic Boom | 8:39 pm
1 Comments:
I read this book as well and I must say it lit up the sense of wonder you talk about.
BTW one of the authors has a blog and even though it isn't current, it's interesting. I don't have the link, but i think it's called the philosiphical implications of maths (or somesuch)
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