Burnt Friedman

Music composed and produced by Burnt Friedman 2019 – 2022 Published by Freibank  Cover photography – 1875, photographer unknown, group of Andamanese people, person in tropical suit presumably German ethnologist and explorer Fedor Jagor  "The vocabulary of modern ‘Western’ music or of the so–called Global North has finally been spelled out. The ever more hasty striving to move forward led to a music that is ‘starving among this embarrassment of riches’. In those days, the music that was oscillating in a state of “permanent obsolescence” — often in short cycles of a few months — and preserved as a sign of the times in musical codes, has gone in the completely opposite direction, into a state of obsolete permanence. 

In this drive forward towards refining and expanding a catalogue of superlatives, a never changing, underlying, but underdeveloped isometric schema has irreversibly and imperceptibly cemented in the body. The corresponding theory – the persisting phantom terms of academia – seek to break free of its phenomena. In contrast to this, in the music beyond the 'Global North', a nature of 'polyrhythms’ is detected, or, in other words, every beat that can not be grasped easily must therefor be a polyrhythm and African in essence. 

Now, shift the focus away from the contrafactual cultural connotations of the record sleeve towards the animating principle of the music, the phenomenological vectors of rhythm and view ‘groove‘ as the intrinsic attribute of regular harmonic motion patterns. This formulaic, animating principle is solely based on the law of the octave (doubling and halving). It appears repetitive, or circular in nature as opposed to linear and progressive. Such a formula is derived from a recurrent, balanced body movement from which every impulse originates as something sensed, as opposed to being subject to will or notation. What sounds merely technical or sophisticated in theory turns out to be basal in practice. It can also be grasped as an energy structure. In other words, a controlled regular movement yields stable interrelated time intervals with the least expenditure of energy. 

In 'grooving', or 'composing a guiding path' all those involved (sequencer, drummer, dancer, etc.) become attuned to one another in a resistance against arbitrary dictates such as cultural appropriation, man–made aesthetic framework or notions of folklore. Such a 'guiding path' seeks to dispense with taste as much as possible, ultimately in favour of an experience of harmonic accordance, strangeness, displacement and not least, freedom." - Burnt Friedman