"... of all the methods that have been devised for the division of nations into classes, unequal taxes are the most pernicious and effective. They tend to isolate each class irremediably; for when the tax in unequal, the line is drawn afresh every year between the taxables and the exempts; the distinction is never allowed to fade. Every member of the privileged class feels a pressing and immediate interest in keeping it up and maintaining his isolation from the taxable community."

Excerpt from THE OLD REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Thoughts on the French Revolution, socioeconomic inequality and current affairs.

Chiaroscuro 

"Meanwhile the Revolution pursued its course. It was not until the strange and terrible physiognomy of the monster's head was visible; till it destroyed civil as well as political institutions, manners, customs, laws, and even the mother tongue; till, having dashed in pieces the machine of government, it shook the foundations of society, and seemed anxious to assail even God himself; till it overflowed the frontier, and, by dint of methods unknown before, by new systems of tactics, by murderous maxims, and "armed opinions", overthrew the landmarks of empires, broke crowns, and crashed subjects, while, strange to say, it won them over its side; it was not until then that a change came over men's minds."

Excerpt from THE OLD REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Thoughts on the French Revolution, socioeconomic inequality and how it relates to our current state of affairs.

"All processes of expression involve a mixture of bodies whose effects, deleterious or beneficial, constitute a domain of sense from which expressive regularities evolve into clichés. In the case of music whose "bodies" include not only a body of pitch relations, but also a body of cultural relations, a body of styles, and a listening body, its clichés are the expression of their common mixture, their "common sense". So cliché is not something that is preventable, for our own very idea of music is itself a cliché that sustains the entire practice of assembling sound into expressive refrains. Instead, the musical cliché, like any process of expression, develops mutant strains that warp the common or single sense of Music by configuring new relations that make new domains of musical sense."

Excerpt from ELDRITCH PRIEST's BORING FORMLESS NONSENSE [Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure]

Thoughts on music and tradition.

"... distraction does something to musical sounds. And what it does is to make them formless. But by this, I don't mean that musical sounds become shapeless per se, so much as distraction disturbs the perception of music's formal structure in a way that makes "form" irrelevant to the experience."

Thoughts on "music's form".

Excerpt from ELDRITCH PRIEST's BORING FORMLESS NONSENSE [Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure]

"... the avant-garde is less a site of resistance and more "a system for instrumentalizing contradiction.""

     ELDRITCH PRIEST citing PAUL MANN

Modern Troubadour

An Opening

"One and the same musical activity might, at one and the same time, be about the trajectory of a body in space, the dynamic emergence or signification of an affective state, the achievement of a goal and the unfolding of an embodied perspective"

     IAN CROSS

"Sounds stripped of intention do not cease to signify, but neither do they say anything in particular"

     ELDRITCH PRIEST