New York duo Leena has won my attention. This is less difficult than I’ve made it sound. Truth is, I can be had in three easy steps.
First, write me a somewhat cryptic email. Something along these lines: “All of our work is improvised electronic music using hardware, pedals and synths. Everything is 30 minutes longform – feel free to extract if needed (but don’t).” Add a picture of you and your partner wearing masks.
Next, after receiving my request for a backstory, write me an email that demonstrates both your comfort with a variety of philosophies and a biting sense of humour. One or two expletives won’t hurt. Something along these lines:
30 Theses on Leena; Or, Axioms for Anti-Cosmic Expressivity
- Leena are unabashedly postmodern.
- Leena are Polytheists. Monotheism is atheism. Nothing divine can constitute a kind. Q.E.D.
- Leena hates reverb, echo or any other synonym for acoustical decay. Reverb in Western classical music is nothing other than an expression of that bourgeois institution’s stranglehold on space itself. Classical music cannot conceive of the possibility of a sound without decay.
- Proposition 2. “All that participates unity is both one and not-one” [2. παν το μετέχον του Evor και εν έστι και ούχ εν] (Proclus, ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΩΣΙΣ θΕΟΛΟΓΙΚΗ [The Elements of Theology], [Proposition] 2).
- Philip Glass is the most adored composer of the 20th century.
- For Leena, everything is real.
- For Leena, everything is natural.
- 10′:3′ is the time signature in which Leena’s cosmic symphony sounds.
- Leena are communists.
- There is no such thing as silence. Sound is preparation for death.
- “All is full of Gods” – Proclus
- “Everything is full of Gods” – Thales
- To paraphrase Deleuze paraphrasing Spinoza: We know not yet what a [sound] body can do.
- Fuck off all pseudo-intellectual noise punks wearing black, thick-rimmed glasses while reifying patriarchal forms of aggression under the guise of the avant-garde. (Cf. Julia Kristeva)
- Paint with the colors of the flowers, not the dirt.
- Most of what passes as “innovative” or “creative” in institutional classical music settings today was already done in basements by punks in the ’80s and ’90s. Lachenmann.
- What is most beautiful is as difficult as it is rare. Therefore, intuitionist logics. (In the words of Daniel R. Garton: “Why does logic have to follow?”)
- “Economically, the sovereign attitude manifests itself through the use of surplus towards unproductive ends.” (Georges Bataille, La part maudite, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), volume VIII, page 326).
- fuck modular. fuck the juilliard school. fuck harvard university.
- Music does not happen between the notes because we live in in-between being (cf. Plato; cf. Luce Irigaray).
- Those uncanny sounds which the ear has yet to feel will henceforth be known as “Sosein.”
- The Leena Method: Jainist syncretism (i.e. metaphysico-epistemic ahimsa).
- Deleuze says: “Problems repeat their possible solutions” (in Difference and Repetition).
- Our personal maxim: Problems not figures!
- As the most venerable Nicolas of Cusa remarks, when we look empirically, we find that the Gods’ divinity, “in the mode of enfolding, is all things, but […] in the mode of unfolding [They are] not any of these things”! [Nicholas of Cusa. Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449) cited in Master’s of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus by Donald F. Ludlow, 302 (brackets added; translation modified).]
- We know what the “initial sensitivity of systems” (a.k.a. “The Butterfly Effect”) actually means (because we have a working understanding of systems theory).
- This: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous. […] If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism” (Foucault, The Foucault Reader 343).
- “Not only must philosophy invent, but it invents the common ground for future inventions. Its function is to invent the conditions of invention” (Michel Serres, Genesis 86).
- We’re in love.
- If you would like a pitch that is more coherent and consistent, then we can only refer you to Nietzsche, who says: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides? […] My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity” (Nietzsche, Will To Power 490). Add to this Foucault, when he writes: “Do not ask who [we are] and do not ask [us] to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order” (in The Archaeology of Knowledge, “Introduction”; brackets added).
Finally, and this part’s important, produce a collection of electronic works that sound like the future we’re all afraid of. Something along these lines.