"... he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something."
- Arthur C. Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Delusions of grandeur and low self-esteem being different sides of the same coin (as are manic and depressive), one struggles for years to attain some sort of stable and "realistic" mindset and worldview, not to speak about... ahem, cough... "peace of mind", but the paradox lies therein that the world really does not seem to revolve around any "realistic" and "rational" standards. The more one tries to give up one's negative qualities such as the solipsistic self-centredness, egotism, greed and envy (and any other such things that were in the pre-Enlightenment times called "mortal sins"), the more one becomes disillusioned by the fact that even though these qualities are officially frowned upon, in the world of prevailing double standards (and double-binds), these are actually encouraged and found positive! Because aren't these exactly the ideals of the world of aggressive, ever-expanding capitalism seeking ever-larger profits, and also of the obsessive-compulsive media cult of celebrity? An imminent moral decline may ensue -- why should one seek to pursue any high moral standards when society and the whole world around one seem to refuse to do so? Is man in fact a higher entity full of divine potential, or just an animal amongst other animals? Blessed be those who can sleep their nights in peace without having to worry about any moral constraints!
As for yours truly, I'm at the moment seeking for strength and some sort of, ahem, spiritual guidance, even though I don't exactly know what the source of that would exactly be.
The main task at hand, of course, would be finding a publisher for
our long-prepared album. I don't want to publish
myself any more because without having any sort of decent distribution that's virtually a dead-end job, and in fact I'm planning to fold pHinnMilk Recordings after the release of Club Telex Noise Ensemble's
CTNERMX II remix collection (there's still not enough material together for that compilation, so that will yet take some time).
My own DJ activities seem to have waned, withered away and vanished altogether. I don't know why; there just hasn't been an appropriate occasion or no one has asked me to play, and I haven't been into pushing myself any more. I'm not into being a "genre DJ", anyway, and I'm not too enthusiastic about being classified as an "electro DJ" or an "IDM DJ", or whatever. Why can't I play in the same set, for example, some Drexciya tracks, a bit of Bollywood film music and perhaps an old Scott Walker song? Because that confuses people, messes up those little neatly categorized and tightly separated genre boxes in their brains. Plus of course, there's always the question of "technical competence": it was quite describing when I once asked from a local DJ if I could perhaps play at one of their clubs, and he just quipped: "Just when you have learned to mix"; then probably realising just how blunt this sounded, added something like "perhaps some time in the future, we'll see". And that was it, in the end I never heard from the guy.
So, "sore grapes, pHinn", you might say now, but the fact is that I don't really care. With DJing, I can really take it or leave it, and the scales seem to have tipped for the latter. Once there was a time when there was nothing I could have wanted more.
Anyway, "don't complain, don't explain" seems to be the rule of thumb here. Any perceived injustices don't matter, and talking about those only indicates paranoia and persecution syndrome, going against the "happy-go-lucky" ideal.
Making our own music is more important at the moment anyway than playing someone else's (I've already done here my whining about the difficulties of arranging clubs, etc. etc. etc.; just check the archives if having a morbid interest in that). Doing Kompleksi, I think with Mike Not we are a working team, and on many occasions I've noticed even a sort of musical telepathy between us (for the lack of a better word), when doing a track everything just seems to "click", and no further explanations are needed. Just like "this is exactly how I would have done it myself".
Now I have a strong feeling this is why I am on this planet. This is my purpose.
