Wizarding Rhythm

“Is there a general concept of rhythm? Answers: yes, and everyone possesses it; but nearly all those who use this word believe themselves to master and possess its content, its meaning. Yet the meanings of the term remain obscure. We easily confuse rhythm with movement [mouvement], speed, a sequence of movements [gestes] or objects (machines, for example). Following this we tend to attribute to rhythms a mechanical overtone, brushing aside the organic aspect of rhythmed movements. Musicians, who deal directly with rhythms, because they produce them, often reduce them to the counting of beats [des mesures]: ‘One-two-three-one-two-three’. Historians and economists speak of rhythms: of the rapidity or slowness of periods, of eras, of cycles; they tend only to see the effects of impersonal laws, without coherent relations with actors, ideas, realities.Those who teach gymnastics see in rhythms only successions of movements [gestes] setting in motion certain muscles, certain physiological energies, etc.”
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis : Space, Time & Everyday Life

“Traditionally, the music of the future is always beatless. To be Futuristic is to jettison rhythm. The beat is the ballast which prevents escape velocity, which stops music breaking beyond the event horizon. The music of the future is weightless, transcendent, neatly converging with online disembodiment”
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun

The wizard of the rhythm is the one who managed to cut outside the common misconceptions of how rhythm is and what it is supposed to mean. The wizard of the rhythm is a winged archangel, who wields an acidic sword, melting time as we are “supposed” to follow. In this text, I’d like to present a few such beings.

Grace Jones — All These Sides Make Up What I Am

The first is the womanmachine Grace Jones herself. Her 1985 conceptual masterpiece Slave To The Rhythm is a biography told through speeds and clashes of sound. Intercut by various interviews, the album’s eight tracks are violent variations on the same lyrics and musical themes. Actor Ian McShane starts the album with a spoken poem, stating:

Rhythm is both the song’s manacle and its demonic charge.
It is the original breath, it is the whisper of unremitting demand.
“What do you still want from me?” says the singer.
“What do you think you can still draw from my lips?”
Exact presence that no fantasy can represent.
Purveyor of the oldest secret, alive with the blood that boils again, and is pulsing where the rhythm is torn apart.
How your singer’s blood is incensed at the depth of sound.
Lacerations echo in the mouth’s open erotic sky
Where dance together the lost frenzies of rhythm and an imploring immobility.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Grace Jones. Jones the Rhythm

Along menacing rock instrumentals, groovy electronic jams, orchestral passages and everything in between, the album presents a multifaceted version of Jones’ own eclectic taste. The liner notes theme it a biography, which brings to mind a recollection, but the recollections are not just by Grace Herself, not even by the same exact Grace Jones when she does show up. There are accounts from Ian McShane, Jean Paul-Goode, interviews with Paul Morley and Paul Cooke. It is not an “auto”-biography, maybe an automatic-biography, an assembling of “a” Grace Jones, like the one shown in the cover — cut up, inhuman, multiplied. That’s only touching on the spoken sections, there is also the lyrics of the songs itself:

Work all day, As men who know,
Wheels must turn, To keep the flow,
Build on up, Don’t break the chain,
Sparks will fly When the whistle blows,

Never stop the action,
Keep it up, keep it up,

Work to the rhythm, Live to the rhythm,
Love to the rhythm, Slave to the rhythm,
Axe to wood, In ancient time,
Man machine, Power line,

Fires burn, Heart beats strong
Sing out loud, The chain gang song

Never stop the action,
Keep it up, keep it up,

Breathe to the rhythm, Dance to the rhythm,
Work to the rhythm, Live to the rhythm,
Love to the rhythm, Slave to the rhythm.

The lyrics display a power struggle, in which Jones is the overseer of the life-factory described. Kodwo Eshun sees in Grace Jones’ version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control a “automation running down, the human seizing up into a machine rictus. The model — as girl, as car, as synthesizer — incarnates the assembly line time of generations, obsolescence, 3 year lifespans’’. Jones not only orders, for by melting her own life story into these tracks, she herself melts and fuses into this word. She essentially multiplies and clones among the working body of the earth itself. Not even the narrators of her story are free of her totalizing automatic-writing. Jean-Paul Goude says, in The Fashion Show, that “all black people were just, you know, “do it to me, sock it to me” and all that stuff, and there she was, you know, singing “La vie en rose” in French. It was great, you know. So I thought what a wonderful, erm, perspective. No, I never saw her at a fashion show”. The narrator himself admits ignorance to an integral part of Jones’ perspective. Two songs further, in Operattack (an insane track made up exclusively of vocal samples, pitch shifting and loops that completely remove the words from her voice), there is another mention of La Vie En Rose, in an interview with Paul Morley where she claims she cries everytime she sings this song, because she remembers her lovers from France. Here, again, the biographical-remembering gets played around, because we don’t actually get details on said memories. She remembers it, but we can’t possibly do so.

From the chapter Three Novellas, Or, What Happened, from Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus :

“Let us not dwell too much on the dimensions of time: the novella has little to do with a memory of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the element of”what happened” because it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible (and not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that nothing has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have ruptured? What is this nothing that makes something happen? The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable), whereas the tale has a relation to discovery (the form of discovery, independent of what can be discovered).”

From WJT Mitchell’s Present Tense 2020: An Iconology Of The Epoch:

“Time was portrayed, like every other abstract concept, by allegorical human figures in Greek mythology, the gods of time known as Kronos, Aion, and Kairos. Kronos, as his name suggests, personifies the implacable linear time that leads inexorably toward the death of every living thing.

Aion is the god of circular time, of the seasons and the cycle of the zodiac, and the ouroboros, the serpent with the tail in its mouth and the eternal return. Kairos, the personification of the opportune moment or occasion, is represented by a youth with a very strange hairdo, carrying the scales of decision on a razor blade”

Grace Jones thus takes away from Rhythm’s exclusively horizontal forward momentum, takes out the idea of circular time from the pulse, the specificity of biographical time. By claiming the rhythm is both man(i)acal and demonic, that it is like the breath of god in the christian bible, and then further holding rhythm in a tight grip (instead of the tired analogy of being trapped in rhythm), she is more powerful than Kronos, Aion and Kairos together. Rhythm is not time, it gives time orders, just like she orders the “man machines” during the album. In the introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, Stuart Elden quotes from Ada Or Ardor by Vladmir Nabokov, who says “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple — these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”.

“I’ve opened myself now, and I’ve accepted it finally, that this is all of me and all these sides make up what I am and either I live with it or I don’t live with it whether I like it or not”
Grace Jones, Ladies And Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones

Lee “Scratch” Perry — I Am The Firmament Computer, I Am The Sky Computer

Grace Jones’ Rhythm-Martiality comes from many different sources : Her affinity towards disco and the Studio 54 scene, the rise of New Wave music’s polyglottic manoeuvres of sound, her past accompanying the Art-Pop musings of David Bowie, but, undeniably, much of her voice comes from the vocabulary of Dub music. Enlisting the duo Sly & Robbie for her seminal trilogy of Warm Leatherette/Nightclubbing/Living My Life, they featured her reworkings of songs like Use Me, Private Life, She’s Lost Control (not an actual album track, but a single released alongside Private Life), and Libertango, the original single My Jamaican Guy, or how songs like Private Life and Nightclubbing got honest to god dub remixes. Her album Hurricane from 2005 got an actual full length dub remix three years later. So, to dive deeper into rhythmomancy, one shall dive deeper into dub, and The Mighty Upsetter is a good showcase of why.

Lee Perry is the total definition of a musical wildcard, an innovator to the highest degree. Quick to embrace the burgeoning sounds of punk, new wave and electronic music, he is most famous outside of the reggae community for his collaborations with artists such as The Clash, The Beastie Boys and The Orb, with the depths of his madness laying in the undercurrent of his influence. He infamously burned down his Black Ark studio in 1978 in a fit of rage, entered a legendary (and one-sided) public match against Bob Marley (who he actually produced in his early career, but covertly sold the master tapes and pocketed the money) and Island Records lablehead Chris Blackwell (who he constantly called a vampire). His wife Mirelle Ruegg tells the story of them meeting that sounds more like a cultu recruitment than a love encounter :

“No one would walk up to the gates with me — they were scared of Lee,” Mireille recalls. When she reached the entrance to the ruins of Black Ark, Perry was standing there. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. Escorting her to his bedroom, he showed her his wall, where he had written, “You will be saved by a Sagittarius,” on a Princess Diana poster. “We are soul mates,” Mireille says. “The universe wanted us to be together.”

So such a self referred madman would, therefore, be an integral spot to understand rhythmic wizardry. Perry claims he became attuned to music after his experience as a field worker, after listening to the noise of rocks:

“When I was working with the rock, I picked up those sonic vibrations, and I heard the rock. When you throw the rock it sounds just like when you hear the thunder roll. I’m sure where everything is coming from. So i hear in those sounds and the clash are like the drum, and in the wind i hear when the cymbal hit, and i hear the rain and i hear when the stone clash and i hear the thunder roll and i hear the lightning flash”

Initially working with ska legend Prince Buster, during the 70s, Perry got more and more drawn into the unconventional universe of Dub music. With his studio band The Upsetters and fellow producer King Tubby, he releases the seminal Blackboard Jungle Dub, one of the landmark releases of the genre. In this text, I would like to focus on the classic Super Ape from 1976.

This album opens with the classic Zion’s Blood, with its warped surreal mixing. Drums that sound subaquatic, vocals descending from the heavens, strange sound effects totally alien in nature. The lyrics say “African blood is flowing through I vein/So I and I shall never fade away”. That is one of the integral aspects of Perry’s sonic philosophy, any sound occurring in the song can very much permeate and continue itself through the use of the Echoplex. Reverbs and Delays clash not unlike the thunder that Perry says rolls. That analogy was not only to set a mood, I believe it is integral to the understanding of his music. Notice how he says that in the rock, he hears “The Drum ‘’, in the wind he hears “The Cymbal”. A one singular drum, a one singular cymbal. His music is effectively seeking for that original precognitive drum (a pre-cognitive drum he believes is where everything comes from). His music is populated by ghosts (as Eshun puts it), and those ghosts are honest to god hauntings from before humanity set foot on the planet. Perry claims he enjoys touring because “I like to give something special to people: that’s why I tour. I go because the people believe in God and there is no other God coming but me.”. As unnatural and surrealistic and depending on technology his music sounds, it is important to understand that there is no contradiction.

Think of the figure of the god (or rather, gods) — they predate not only humanity, but in many cases, existence as a whole. They are able to realize feats that defy human comprehension (see the greek story of the birth of Dionysus, where his mother Semele asks to see Zeus’ true form and is instantly destroyed). There is the famous Arthur C. Clarke formulation : “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Now look at how Perry claims that his original inspiration to write the song People Funny Boy, his first hit song and one of the original songs to have the groover closer to what we know as the Reggae’s slower tempo (as opposed to the Ska rhythm prevalent before), the sound came from him returning to the church where he was Baptized and wanting to make a more spiritually charged sound. In that sense, Perry recognizes how the technology of the studio and its abilities to recreate acoustics (booming bass, echoes who shimmer and distort, reverbs which are able to go from monstrous to quiet in seconds) as the way to get closer to that original sound of nature. The electricity of the thunder is the natural state of sounds. In songs like Underground and Dub Along, the delays are captured and set forward into hyperspeed. They are not mere affectations of timbre, they mess with the rhythm. The album’s focus on bass and drums is his attempt to strip back music to its essential (A harmonic center and the backing beat), while the delays are what pushes the music into a becoming — a constant middle point, no real destination in the future. It starts with a medium (man-made instruments) and then forces a parallax (the chugging along of the musicians and the delays, opposed to the search of that original god-drum). See Perry’s description of the name “Upsetter”:

“There are two parts to a story : The upset mean also means to up-set people, bring them up. And another part of it means to destroy them, you understand me? So the word can do anything, it’s a two edged sword. That means to say I am The Upsetter, I’m going to upset the people who’re fighting against me, and also it mean to uplift the people, lift up the people and set them up who are with me. The word is visible and the word is invisible”

From the article My Favourite Things: Lee Scratch Perry and Super Ape, by Will Russel :

“The Tony Wright cover art depicts a monstrous ape rampaging across the countryside, smoking a monumental spliff, his belly full of roast fish, roots, cornbread and makka stepping on croaking lizards. It hints at the experiment inside. It is unforgettable. As is the record. The sound of a place in time. It doesn’t start nor end. It flows along. And this is supposed to be the inferior mix, the original gone the way of the Holy Grail. It is a sonic planet of its own. No other album is like it. The studio dub conquers the instrumentals. For ‘The Upsetters’ may be written on the cover but this is all Lee Scratch Perry.”

The track that gives the name for the album, amongst the chanting of “This is the ape man” is permeated with an eerie flute, menacing basslines, ending with vocals folding amongst themselves. For most of the pop world, the Delay constructs an atmosphere, it paints a picture. But in dub, the echo is meant to be listened to sideways. It makes the past coexist with the present, like a fifth dimensional mobius strip. Think of the way in which dimensions work in something like the DC Universe: a series of Earths, stacked on top of each other, separated by vibration speeds (whose energy the speedster characters like The Flash can tap into) :

“It really is remarkable, the Speed Force is tied to so many things when you pull back the electrical curtain and see it for what it truly is: Time. All of time. Existence moving through reality. Kinetic energy. Temporal energy. A storm of intelligence that can connect me to everything and everyone.” (The Flash, Vol. 3, #12)

Perry’s music plays on a simultaneous remembering and forgetting (as D&G claim the two concepts are inherently tied). You hear the new possible world while having one ear planted in the current universe. It is an interdimensional travel through music: “The worlds of the multiverse vibrate together, Darkseid, and make this…. sound, like an Orchestra. Everything is just vibrations really. And counter-vibrations that cancel them out” is what Superman says while powering the miracle machine to destroy Darkseid’s essence in the final issue of Final Crisis, after Darkseid has escaped our dimension and hides in the space between vibrations. Usually, one would need the Element X (or Tenth Metal), the fire of the Fourth World, the planets inhabited by the New Gods (who are not actual gods usually, but are treated as deities in this particular event by writer Grant Morrison. Considering Morrison’s encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe, this cannot be considered a mere slipup). Superman substitutes the Element X by a specific musical note he sings, mixed with the solar energy accumulated in his body. Darkseid had previously used the interdimensional trickery of the DC Universe to send Batman back in time. Lee Perry is playing both sides — the anti-life god toying at the primordial soup of the universe, and a human-like creature bending the rules to bring good to people. His use of delay is, thus, not only timbral (like we are used to hearing), but also rhythmic in its multiplicity of speeds and times it plays at.

I did make a conscious effort to not regurgitate as much Eshun as I could, since I adore his writings on Lee Perry, but I believe it is only fair to at least close this section with one of his sections. I may have ripped him off all through the text, so it is only fair i reveal the source of my theft :

“As soon as you have echo, listening has to completely change. Your ear has to chase the sound. Instead of the beat being this one event in time, it becomes this series of retreating echoes, like a tail of sound. The beat becomes a tail which is always disappearing round the corner and your ear has to start chasing it. If you’re wearing headphones or a walkman it becomes a chase through the headphones. The Echoplex turns listening into running. You can’t catch the beat, the tails of sound as they turn the corner, disappear down a corridor. From King Tubby to Basic Channel, the cymbal is always just out of reach, always taking the corner of perception. Where rhythm should be there is space, and vice versa. Spectral dub pivots around an absent beat. Revolution Dub is The Upsetter’s mindfield. Every track ambushes you, confounds the process of pattern cognition by leaving the expected beat implied. By opening holes at the tightest moments of the groove, pulse falls through subtracted space, polyrhythm wrongfoots you, tugs and pushes at expectation, yanks the floorboards from underneath you. Echo turns the beat from a localized impact into an environment with you inside. Refractions bounce back from any surface. Initially the snare hits a stretched drumskin, the pedal depresses air between 2 cymbals so it hisses. Pneumatic metal pressure. Now the impact that runs away from your hearing rebounds back at you from the wall, the ceiling, the floor. The world turns into a giant drum with you at its centre. Beats ricochet off 360”, curving around the walls of the world.”

Curtis Mayfield — Just move on up!

Thus spoke Lee “Scratch” Perry :

“Good and faithful servant of the Almighty God Fire. Fire are the writer of our words. Ask brother Moses and read the books of Moses. Fire is my Papa, i kiss Him. His name is Ancient Phantom Elijah. He who control 200 million-billion bolts of electric lights by the power of his nostrils.”

As we recall, the original God-Drum for Perry comes from the clashing of rocks, which contain in them the rolling of the thunder, crashing from the skies. Notice how Perry does not say “volts”, he says “bolts”, like a thunderbolt wielded by Zeus. Illuminating fire-light which comes from above, just as he seeks through the power of echoes and reverbs to reconnect humanity to the original sound of god. Or, in the words of the third subject of this analysis, “Moving on Up”.

This might be the most complex fiction drawn out in this endeavor, because this is one of the most deceptive songs in the funk canon. Its simplicity is paramount, as it is mostly made up of 8 minutes of 4 minor chords, a horn riff and string arrangements. It is like a continuous structure, and it is aided by an instantly iconic and recognizable rhythm section. The thing that interests me, and will be the initial point of the text is the interplay between horizontal and vertical movement in this song.

When most of us think of rhythmically charged music, the idea that comes to mind is pushing forward. Think of the steps of a marathonist (as we need to move past the idea of the rhythm of the marching army), for example. A flat track with which the loud steps of the runner are able to completely dominate. That may be an instinctive connection we have created culturally. We associate rhythms with the music of Africa, which is one very much attached to the ground, versus the classical music of Europe, which rejected the body to seek for the stars. Think of the valorization of the music of Boulez by Deleuze & Guattari, described as “suspended”. Thus, the challenge Move On Up takes up for its ritual is one of re-materialization: scrambling the thought-of line of the rhythm.

The ever-conscious Curtis Mayfield had a thing for position and placement in his music. Move On Up. (Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go. The Other Side Of Town. If taken to the abstract, you can add songs which use expressions relative to placement and movement like Give It Up, Get Down, Underground, Super Fly. His thing was movement (Wild and free/Is the way I wanna be). Movement is certainly not a stranger to rhythm, considering most dance music after the advent of jazz and r&b is of a more rhythmically focused nature, but Curtis Mayfield does not seek the measured predictable movements of dance, he wants to use the body as a vessel for inhuman movement. Especially of note considering the songs with verticality in the title. Going to the pits of hell or flying to the heavens are the motto. Move On Up is a song that’s at the same time about social mobility and reaching a higher level of consciousness. Even when the song was sampled, it did not lose its vertical character, in Kanye West’s Touch The Sky. But, being a musician steeped in the traditions of funk and R&B, he has in his pockets the means to make the movement a lot more turbulent and complex.

At first, that is made up by a diagonal movement. The song kicks in with every instrument playing at once after the counting of the drums. This establishes a horizontal continuous line of rhythm. As the song doesn’t have a build-up or an introduction proper, it is not a segmented line, but a line who started way before the song “began”, onto which we merely jumped into. As the vocals kick in, however, Curtis Mayfield starts moving the listener on up (Just move on up/Toward your destination). A continuous line being tugged upwards, at the end of every single verse, creating a diagonal, curved line going into heaven marked by every time the refrain of “Just move on up!” comes back. A smooth, supple sawtooth. That’s how it goes for the first three minutes and fifty seconds, when an unheard of break hits, letting us get a new flavor from the horns, leading us to the next part of the song. That’s where more trickery resides.

The drums hit again, this time unaccompanied by a few bars, before getting the help of some more percussion. Soon enough, piano and guitars return, before the saxophone jumps into an amazing solo. The jam is far more loose this time, but by the time the strings come back, you start to realize what is happening : what was once a continuous unstoppable line is now multiple layered parallel lines. The fact that they are now coming back, one by one, calls attention to their difference, and thus, makes you pay attention to their vertical parallelistic organization. They are essentially playing loops, as it is a jam section, but that repetition means they have no end. Curtis’ vocals completely drop out for the rest of the song. First he told us to move on up, now he is functionally showing us how he does it. Seeing as the song does not have a proper conclusion, ending with a fade out, one can imagine this angelic jam extending towards infinity…

If we lay the song in a graph, it starts as a horizontal line being tugged more and more upwards, creating diagonal line(s), abruptly hitting a corner during the transition and then being split into multiple lines that multiply into the heavens. The drums, which lay the foundation of the entire song, is also the instrument more prone to micro-details, fills and improvisation, while something like the strings is committed to playing the few arrangements it has through the song. This is a way to break out of the assumed rigidity of the drums (an instrument that cant play melodies and harmonies, only rhythms) and the supposed floating nature of the string section. The drums are the ones crashing into the other sections, both laying the rule and being enslaved by the rhythms that seep into the song from other dimensions. If you think about the additive synthesis system, it creates a continuous, single note-sound by laying more and more pitches from the harmonic series. If you start with a complex sound, it sounds normal to you, but if you try to build a sound from scratch, adding harmonics one by one, they will instead sound like a strange, dissonant chord. Layering is contained in every single continuum, and that also goes to rhythm.

If you speed up a regular rhythmic pattern, at superhuman speeds, it will morph into one pitch. As Adam Neely shows in his Ted Talk “New Horizons In Music”, the speeding up of polyrhythms creates multiple pitches which can, in turn, make up a chord. As we know, from pitches are just certain waves working at a certain speed, and the peaks and valleys of a wave can be broken down into rhythm information (you can even see it in sampled material, if you slow down a recording to its furthest possible measure, it starts to sound like rumbling, awkward drums. Maybe the devil-drum). And, uncoincidentally, waves can be turned into light information. That brings us into some pretty magical territory.

Take the word for the Persian philosopher and theologist Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, founder of the school of Illuminationism in the XIII century. Suhrawardi’s metaphysics came from the idea of multiple strata of light, going from the highest “Light of Lights”, which comes from God, down into “Darkness”, which is anything devoid of any kind of light, with intermediary lights in between. That, however, is only thinking of light vertically. His system was actually composed of the intersection between longitudinal lights (which represent the primordial, original material of life and the world) and latitudinal lights (which are analogous to Plato’s archetypes : perfect forms or “masters of species”, which are immutable and order not over other perfect forms, but over the forms it creates) and the crossing of boths. Essentially, the light of God comes from the skies, passes through the forms on the horizontal level and comes down into the world, giving us the forms, objects and lives we encounter in the world. His thought goes even deeper, however. His metaphysics is monist (since everything is based on either light or the absence of light, and the intensities of the substance), and we should not forget the old Deleuzoguattarian adage of “Monism=Pluralism”:

“All lights inherently and from the point of their ‘light-ness’ have no difference; their only difference lies in their perfection or shortcoming or matters outside their essence”

He says shortcomings because he also believes there is an inherent “yearning” for lower lights to reunite (or, to use the Sufi therm, Annihilated) to the Light Of Lights.

“Whenever the regent light is not overcome by its engagement in corporeality, its yearning for the heavenly world of lights is more than his yearning for obscurity and as its luminous status is increased, so is its love for the dominary lights… and thus it is freed from the human body and returns to the world of pure-light and resides amongst the heavenly lights and due to the purity of the light of lights, it becomes pure too”

Or, pretty literally, “Moving On Up”.

Let us not stop here. Suhrawardi was very openly influenced by Plato. In the introduction to The Philosophy of Illumination, he says that “This science is the very intuition of the inspired and illuminated Plato, the guide and master of philosophy, and those who came before him from the time of Hermes, the ‘Father Of Philosophy’, up to Plato’s time, including such almighty pillars of philosophy as Empedocles, Pythagoras and other”. Using Plato as a link, we can jump from him to Arthur Schopenhauer, who in The World as Will And Representation, puts an important weight on Aesthetics (and especially music) as the way to “get out of one’s head” as it were, and get rid of the self to join into the infinitude of the world. Schopenhauer says :

“[I]t is the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. . . . Whoever now, has, after the manner referred to, become so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature that he only continues to exist as the pure knowing subject, becomes in this way directly conscious that, as such, he is the condition, that is, the supporter, of the world and all objective existence; for this now shows itself as dependent upon his existence. Thus he draws nature into himself, so that he sees it to be merely an accident of his own being. In this sense Byron says,

“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?”

But how shall he who feels this, regard himself as absolutely transitory, in contrast to imperishable nature? Such a man will rather be filled with the consciousness, which the [Hindu] Upanishad of the Veda expresses: “all these creatures are wholly I, and there is nothing else besides me”.
(…)
We shall then agree with Plato, when he attributes actual being to the Ideas alone, and only in an apparent, dreamlike existence to the things in space and time, to this world that is real for the individual. We shall then see how one and the same idea reveals itself in so many phenomena, and presents its nature to knowing individuals only piecemeal, one side after another”

Think of the collection of instruments working together in the first half of the song being then abstracted into multiple layers of instrumentals. Is it not the musical form showing itself as unitary and multiple at the same time? Again, Monism=Pluralism. Let us go back to the source. From Plato’s dialogue Parmenides :

“The one cannot be made up of parts, because then the one would be made of many. Nor can it be a whole, because wholes are made of parts. Thus the one has no parts and is not a whole. It has not a beginning, a middle nor an end because these are parts, it is therefore unlimited. It has no shape because it is neither linear nor circular: a circle has parts all equidistant from the centre, but the one has no parts nor a centre; It is not a line because a line has a middle and two extremes, which the one cannot have. Thus the one has no shape. The one cannot be in anything nor in itself. If it was in another it would be all surrounded and by what it is inside and would be touched at many parts by what contains it, but the one has no parts and thus cannot be inside something else. If it were in itself it would contain itself, but if it is contained then it is different from what contains it and thus the one would be two. The one cannot move because movement is change or change in position. It cannot change because it has no parts to change. If it moves position it moves either circularly or linearly. If it spins in place its outer part revolves around its middle but the one has neither. If it moves its position it moves through something else, which it cannot be inside. Thus the one does not move. The one must be itself and cannot be different from it. The one does not take part in the flowing of time so it is imperishable.”

Parmenides is considered to be one of the strangest dialogues in Plato’s canon, and no one seems to agree on an interpretation of the whole thing. It may break the whole argument, but that is what playing with time magic does. I won’t pretend to have any sort of resolution to the problem, but as it relates to the ritual at hand, the incomprehensibility of it may be fun to toy around with. “The one cannot move because movement is change or change in position”. Consider rhythm on many different levels. If we look at it on an individual level, it does indeed not change. If I play a snare drum in 4/4, 5/4 or 11/8, as far as rhythm is concerned, the snare hits are the exact same. The realm of dynamics (playing softly or strongly) is another deal, the things rhythm is made up of are functionally motionless then. If we zoom out and look at the musical bar, the macro-level of the song, it can still be considered motionless. Movement is defined as the act of changing one’s physical position. If a rhythm comes back to the start, no movement is made. Remember the Bootsy Collins formula — “You can do anything as long as you come back to that one”. “It has no beginning, a middle or an end because these are parts, it is therefore unlimited”. Well, did move on up not start as a runaway train and end on a fadeout?

Martin Heidegger once said that “In Heraclitus, to whom is ascribed the doctrine of becoming as diametrically opposed to Parmenides’ doctrine of being, says the same as Parmenides”, so i want to close off on him. For Heraclitus (as quoted by Plato in Cratylus) “Everything is movement and nothing stands still”. From Fragments:

That which always was,
and is, and will be ever living fire,
the same for all, the cosmos,
made neither by god nor man,
replenishes in measure
as it burns away.

Fire in its ways of changing
is a sea transfigured
between forks of lightning
and the solid earth.

As all things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things,
the crops are sold
for money spent on food.

The earth is melted
into the sea
by that same reckoning
whereby the sea
sinks into the earth.

(…)

Air dies giving birth
to fire. Fire dies
giving birth to air. Water,
thus, is born of dying
earth, and earth of water.

Think back to this whole endeavor. Did not Lee Perry not burn his studio down and claim a Fire God as the one he praises? Did not Grace Jones sing of “Build on up, don’t break the chain/Sparks will fly when the whistle blows/Fire burns, hearts beat strong/Sing out loud, the chain gang song”?. Didn’t Curtis Mayfield place the ultimate goal to create and be about change? Rhythmic Sorcerers are always bursting at the seams with knowledge of the world around. More than that, knowledge of the ways it can be manipulated, changed and returned, continuously, into the end-times (because for rhythm, there is no real end-times, just another place for a loop to begin again). Like the famous cover of Island Life by Grace Jones, creating a montage of the world to create something extra-human (not inhuman necessarily, but more human than human), a malleable martial skin.

In the words of the wizard John Constantine :

Magic’s just when you trick the universe into believing some incredibly outrageous lie. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about — I’ve told a few corkers in my time. Like any habitual liar, though, I spend far too much time these days trying to cover my grubby little tracks. All that bluster and bravado and bullshit — you get a right nasty headache just thinking about it.
Deceit piled upon deceit. Magic upon magic.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, eh?

Ultimately, the magical journey led us down to the beginning once again. Movement equals zero. Such is the way of the Wizarding Rhythm, after all. Following through our measly theorizing is fruitless at the face of the ones who control time itself. That was my attempt by using the written word, but to theorize on rhythm is at its best to play it. To listen to it. To make the drum skin your own skin. Melt into the groove. Get “Lost in Music” as Sister Sledge said it. Consider these texts not as me putting my pen down, but as an invitation to pick these songs up. You will learn much more from the artists speaking than you can from me ultimately.