Friday, May 3, 2024

into thinn air (the Bachelard series 3 of ?)




A poetic conjunction - "thinn air", "pure white" 

The "thinn" suggestive of an archaic spelling, or perhaps even an unusual child's name,


It's a release by Slipmaster J, aka Justin Cohen, the owner of Lucky Spin Recordings, Dee Jay Recordings, Pure White and other labels...  a Don FM regular too

For further poeticism, one track is called "Heaven" 



And the other is "Vision"





Here's a nice tune under his alias Code Blue - with more "poetics of air" imagery: "Angels In Rhythm", "Angels in Dub"

The latter, the A-side, is unusually literal in its dubbiness




"Angels" - like heaven - connotative of elevation,  ascension, altitude.... purity... serenity... radiance... light and lightness... the ether and the ethereal... the immaterial

"If we want really to know how delicate emotions develop, the first thing to do... is to determine the extent to which they make us lighter or heavier. Their positive or negative vertical differential is what best designates their effectiveness, their psychic destiny. This, then, will be my formulation of the first principle of ascensional imagination....  all metaphors, metaphors of height, elevation, depth, sinking, and the fall are the axiomatic metaphors par excellence. Nothing explains them, and they explain everything....  These images have amazing power: they govern the dialectic of enthusiasm and anguish….  It is impossible to express moral values without reference to the vertical axis.

".... Every valorization is a verticalization"

- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement

(The French title L'Air et les Songes translates as Air and Reverie, or Air and Reflections - which would be closer to Bachelard's meaning, as he is not talking about the dreams of sleep but of daydreams and  poetic contemplation


More aeriality from Justin Cohen, in collaboration with Darren Beale, as Atlas


A "second heaven" !



Not Slipmaster J / Cohen, actually an early alias of Grooverider, but on the Dee Jay Recordings label and with similar ascensional imagery:


From The Vision EP, probably the most known tune in Slipmaster's J slender uuurv is "Symphonic"


Earliest effort, with DJ Crystl 


Crystl on the remix tip, with "Angels In Dub"




Justin Cohen - a low-key figure, but clearly - especially with running those labels - a hardcore hero










 



















































2 comments:

Aloysius said...

Great quote. Reminds me of a Northrop Frye line that’s something like “in the physical universe there’s no up or down, but in the religious one they’re the only directions” that stuck in my mind. Although I guess I’ve also somewhat gotten what Bachelard’s saying secondhand from GRM people like Bayle.

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

I once got compared to Northrop Frye in a review of Rip It Up - I don't think it was meant to be complimentary (the implication was along the lines of "too systematic, too keen on categories"). Never read him though.

Meanwhile, I've compared YOU to Bachelard in a post on the main blog about your Audio Animation tour de force
https://blissout.blogspot.com/2024/05/tis-no-man-tis-remorseless-writing.html

It's really worth reading, Bachelard's stuff, particularly the poetics of air one. The parallels with music leapt out at me. I intend to do the book about the imagery of fire next, and then water.