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A Short Statement About My Music for People Already Familiar with it.

Music is particularly relevant to me for its ability to quickly and vividly communicate and record "states of mind" or "world-state-possibilities" in a way that I think transcends language or analytic schematization. For this reason, I consider it to be among the most exalted aspects of existing human culture, which I am generally critical of, and also a model for other, more vivid, departures from the model of affirmative propositions that could be possible.
My earliest (tape/electronic) music was an exploration of my own childhood alienation and strange inner states, though it was rapidly also supplemented by a different modes of musical activity that were highly imitative--ie., exploring what I could do and learning by imitating other existing forms of music (largely in the pop and intellectual "avant-gardes" and from strong personalities I met in the underground).
Really this duality has never ceased in me as I've become more and more comfortable moving in zones where my own unreduced private experience and few "original ideas" bleed right into adopted musical ideas & possibilities suggested by other people--always attempting to enliven those pre-existing forms with whatever I can bring to them and to personalize them for my own growth.
To the extent I've developed and preserved what feels like private, languageless, pre-social viewpoints in some of my music, that has been most closely felt in some solo composition and in the better moments of my free improvisation, which became another major interest in the early 90's (because of its total emphasis on conscious experience in the moment). I also have found that the escape from personal encapsulation to be found in musical collaborations is of profound value in terms continually shaking up my conception of what is possible and good. Group improvisation also suggests new possibilities in social relationships.
Although I think my list of musical interests have only grown over the years (with little ever thrown off the cart), my experience of music also has broadened "qualitatively" tremendously on an unforeseen axis through contact with forms of activity that are less "conceptually top down" (in the sense of having an idea and then realizing it programatically) where the invention of the "content" has a blurrier, more circular relationship with the phenomenon of playing the music, technique, sensuality, emotion, trance, spiritual exaltation, etc. Among these, traditional Jazz, African, Indian, Gypsy, and Asian musics have been particularly powerful teachers--though I do not think these desired phases of experience are limited to existing idioms*. At the end of the day, as much as my music may almost always contain minority or personally eccentric approaches to structure, sound choices, technique, or even fundamental philosophical content--it is most satisfying to me when it also provides for me what I can get from the best ethnic music--the directness, emotional profundity, sense of connection to go along with the expanded sense of possibility that experimentation-for-its-own-sake implies.
As usual, the goal is EVERYONE HAVING THEIR CAKE AND BEING ABLE TO EAT IT TOO.
--John Berndt, June 2007
* in general, I view idiomization as the slowing down of musical discovery (through a variety of means), primarily bringing value in the sense that a microscope or slow-motion playback might help to focus attention on more subtle factors and the precise tuning of smaller-scale relationships.

Notes on the Pleasures of Neutrality

Because we have reached a point in the "progress" of our culture in which it is socially viable to suggest that we have reached a theoretical impasse, we have reached a theoretical impasse. It is impossible to "progress" beyond this notion, and any criticism of it, no matter how analytical, is a step backward. Those who do not understand this simple paradox will waste endless energies digging their tombs in the graveyards of art, politics and philosophy.
We know the truth. The truth has always been and will always be. It is unchanging. In a state of perpetual progression, the shadow of darkness which came with the industrial revolution is drawing back, forced away by the light of timeless rationality. The lies of the last two hundred years may have been attractive, but they are nothing compared to the lies of the last two centuries. Every illusion must pass through itself before becoming true. If, in this process, it is written down, it becomes true much more quickly.
Death is the spectacle of repression. The "image of death," the darkness at the end of the tunnel, when reified by authority, is a much more efficient form of repression than the religious heaven/hell complex which came before. "Individuals" in the west realize that their lives are "meaningless," and this "existential" realization drains from them the desire to do anything other than get it over as painlessly as possible. Naturally this precludes substantive rebellions and the constructions of new forms of "meaning." The infinite potential of every second of tactile experience is given up for the apparently less difficult life of consumer-drone, the "meaningless" existence. But meaning is an abstraction created by and for the justifications of the current power structure, the reality of a living death.
The spectacular moment divides an illusionary past from a non-existent future. Our memories are ideologically organized by the "master-narrative" of power in order to give substance to the total compromise of the present. Each second spent remembering the past is a second which could have been used to construct the future. "Revolutionaries" frequently believe that revolution will take place when the master narrative is in the hands of the proletariat, but this is a load of crap. The destruction of the master narrative and the continuities it represents is the rightful demand of all those who demand the destruction of the master narrative and the continuities it represents.
The systematic extremism of this philosophy is not a cure for boredom. It is a reaction to the sadness of the "human condition" as market for general consumption by those human beings who stand to profit from the idea that we are living in a post-referential world, the "avant-garde" of literature, art and politics.
We know the truth. The truth has always been and will always be. It is unchanging.
Consciousness is the negation of tactile experience. When you see something, you cannot at the same time "imagine" it. This is because consciousness is a second order activity which acts as a parasite to experience, a caricatured re-creation of the physical world. This is the space between the repression inherent in memory and the freedom of oblivion in which ideology first materialized. We must do away with the abstraction of consciousness if we are to heal the wound of separation between past and future which gave rise to capitalism.
Progress is inevitable, plagiarism implies it. The tautological is no more or less easily understood than anything else-it is simply what it is as opposed to being what it is not.
The current trent towards "demystification" in art, literature and politics is one of the most effective mystifications practiced by "marxists," "feminists," and other ideologists. Surely the rewriting of history is no more interesting in the final analysis than the banality of its construction in the first place.
We know. The truth doesn't change. It has been around for a long time.
Why would Samuel Beckett go on writing long after having repeatedly articulated the non-validity of the role of author, and of writing itself? Perhaps his alcoholism caused him to mistakenly associate the death of creativity with physical death of the body and mind. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth-the cessation of alienating over-production in intellectual labor ("creativity") is the most alive act that human beings can engage in: the sum of all our desires and the realizations of all potentials. Throwing off creativity is the first step towards real equality between (wo)men and the destruction of time itself.
Ideology is not the only thing which makes life worth dying for. Other forces, such as perversity, laziness and "generally liking people," while no more meaningful, make do equally well as revolutionary motivations. In the time previous to the implementation of these principles, it is our duty to make them appear as heroic and ideological as possible, so that those with a penchant for the ideological will also be attracted to our philosophy. This is called the "sales pitch." The "trick" is to always seem to be contradicting yourself so as to attract those individuals who might find the ideological nature of your thinking unattractive.
"Post-modern" artists who hypocritically produce art which continues to condemn the role of the artist and suggests the non-viability of creativity should get the death penalty. After all, death should not frighten them as it is the ultimate illusion which supports the established order for whom they are the most effective publicity agents.
Meaning is a purely social phenomenon, and society is an unrealized project. The individual does not need a "truth referent," but without one, the society would be only a series of individuals. The realization of the social project will take place with the redistribution of meaning, with the truth referent moving from the social to the personal. This act of communist revolution will be equal to the perfection of "meaning," which will no longer function as a means of repression to be employed by one group of people on another, but will instead repress all individuals equally. What might be considered from our point of view to be a slight recontextualization will seem a drastic change in the human condition to those in the future who have "progressed" beyond the radical push through and cessation of all forms of creativity.