absolutely adults

is the name of my new jazz punk band

that avrg is ridiculous

"absolutely everything is subjective is used as a mechanism to deconstruct the idea that functioning societies do not require hierarchies and that cohesive society does not need imposed rules regulations or the abolishment of some cultural practices for it to function."

I read this with kermit the frogs voice in my head

Album Rating: 4.5

@Solrage – In response to the first part of your first comment:

I feel you might have somewhat misinterpreted my main argument regarding the objectivity of harmony and melody. The main reason why I introduced noted that our experience of any and all things is phenomenological, is to illustrate that our experience of things, as well as our conceptualisation of things is part of a different ontological dimension than the dimension of external reality. Anything inference concerning what might exist outside of our conscious experience is therefore completely unprovable, considering we do not know of an experience not clouded by our own frames of reference. This statement seems off: “we can consistently sense and that doesn't change depending on how we think of it”. To sense something, its phenomenological quality and therefore implies its subjectivity, while to assume something to not change regardless of how we think of it, in and of itself presupposes a ‘thinking’. To reach a conclusion that their might be: “certain harmonies [that] have certain mathematical relationships with each other”, is something that is only experience phenomenologically and ultimately derived from (subjective) interpretations.

Your final statement: “caused by a combination of the objective aspects of the music and our psychological makeup, which is in itself determined by both evolutionary and socio-cultural forces”, seems erroneous in this respect: there are no ‘objective’ aspects to music, merely properties of sound derived from interpretations and expressed through a language, which in and of itself does not in any way provide a ‘mirror of nature’, to paraphrase Rorty. This renders human beings unable to ‘know’ of music objectively, as it exists detached from our perspective, leaving us unable to formulate any sort of objective conceptualisation of harmony or melody, even if we could express ourselves through a system of codes not itself as subjective, as culturally conditioned and historically limited as our very own perspectives.

Album Rating: 4.5

@Solrage – In response to the second part of your first comment:

Now, I can ensure you that I wasn’t convinced you were being entirely reductive towards music, however this statement does again come across as problematic: “You can explain differences with culture, but it's difficult to explain the similarities without evolutionary psychology and neuroaesthetics”. We could get into a discussion concerning the various flaws and limitations currently plaguing neuroscience, but I feel it is more important to refer to your appeal to evolutionary psychology. While it is true evolutionary psychology might account for the genetic factors which shape human psyches, it cannot adequately elucidate forms of cultural expression we see today, I refer you back to a comment I made earlier:

“Cultural universals, if they were to exist, are ultimately a product of the historical development of any given culture, which might be ultimately reducible to a natural state, but cannot be adequately explained through an appeal to Darwinism. Therefore culture can never be considered a direct adaptation, but merely a product of the various ways in which biologically shaped human brains interacted with their environments and, furthermore, the ways in which these environments have, throughout history, come to shape and condition these interactions.” I would argue that based on this insight, yes cultural expression are ultimately dependent on the evolutionary processes that shaped the brains which created the first cultures, but it would be highly reductive to suggest evolutionary psychology can adequately account for any sort of cultural expression. Instead, a social constructivist framework, more so informed by social psychology, seems far more adequate.

Album Rating: 4.5

@Solrage - In response to the last parts of your second comment:

I feel here you once again ignored a central tenet of my argument, which is somewhat encapsulated in a statement I made previously:

“A fundamental problem is that any comparison between cultural elements is ultimately tied to the frame of reference of the observing subject. A frame of reference which can not only be situated as a specific product of a certain historical context, making it, as Foucault would say, not a natural inevitability, but a historical contingency, but can also be seen as highly conditioned by, shaped by, the social-cultural, and by extension social-economic, environment where this frame of reference, this perspective, finds its providence. There is a relativism here: what might be considered universal to some, might be considered completely discordant to others, relative to the perspective of the observer.”

I would say that any archetypal comparison is incapable of escaping this relativism and limitations it imposes upon the constitution of any cultural universalism. This statement: “the monomyth: beginning at home, adventuring out, returning home. There's a reason that archetype is deeply ingrained in human psyches”, I therefore find highly pseudo-scientific and comes over as essentialist, since it implies a piece of text (the concept of a monomyth) can be metaphysically inserted into a psyche, which in and of itself isn’t really a monolithic property, but more so a category which describes a range of characteristics ascribed to an individual on the basis of their behavioural tendencies. I wouldn’t say psychology has adequately proven it can assess this ‘psyche’ or the supposedly archetypal essences ingrained within it. I take a fairly post-modern stance towards this type, or really any type of essentialism, that being: it’s pseudo-philosophical nonsense.

Album Rating: 4.5

@Solrage - In response to your third comment:

As I asserted in my previous response to you, I agree it is possible for the brain to be genetically predisposed to indulge in pattern-seeking behaviour and that this tendency might very well explain why it is that music created by humans itself is built upon mathematical relationships. When it comes to which mathematical relationships are appreciated at any given time however, my previous point stands: this must seen as a socio-economic, socio-cultural and historically determined distinction, not a biological one, for that would fall prey to the same type of reductive biological reasoning. Which patterns are glorified, propagated, spread around, is a matter of historical mutation, cultural conditioning and thus also socio-economic developments. I’d imagine the largest ‘difficulty’ Schoenberg and Webern faced, was the pre-eminence of a set of dominant traditions within (western) music which elevated a wildly different form musical expression than they did. It isn’t necessarily peoples aversion to change paramount here, but the difficulty in overcoming the dominance of a previously established form of expression.

This statement: “Again, there’s a reason tonality has been accepted into cultures that were historically, geographically, and culturally cut-off from the west, while the reverse isn’t true,” also seems to imply the tonality that originated in non-western regions was identical to the one elevated in the west, which I think is tad bit of over-exaggeration. Even if the same type of tonal appreciation existed world-wide, regardless of cross-pollination, arguing that this can be directly attributable to evolution, is reductive, and can only be directly explained through social-psychology, anthropology, historical research etc. Evolution cannot account for adaptations it cannot possibly, temporally speaking, have directly produced. The amount of historical layers you’d have to peel back before you reach an ontological state which can be meaningfully accounted for by evolutionary psychology, are sheer endless (and by that I mean going back to the pre-historic period, and even then it’s still inadequate).

Album Rating: 5.0

why are the comments being deleted

Phallocentrism

edit: rip

Lol congrats Sint

Album Rating: 5.0

@Shadowmire didn't know you were from Bromley, mate!

Album Rating: 4.0

Didnt take long for the other review to get deleted

Probably didn't take long for it to be copy pasta'd either

Album Rating: 4.5

I'll have to post this again, since it was deleted - @Solrage – In response to your final thoughts:

“As for the establishing of what counts as universal, simple statistics would do fine here.” Now, here I wholeheartedly disagree, if not simply because everything that could possibly be universal can be directly quantified (think every single one of Jung’s archetypes). Furthermore, before universality can be measured, it must be discovered and formulated first, and here we are again limited by the relativism I mentioned above. It seems to me that a type of essentialism is necessarily going to be involved, for to suggest that certain cultural phenomena are identitcal is going to require one to presume that, unless they are literal copies of themselves, they are imbued with certain metaphysical properties which are themselves identical to one another, allowing one to postulate a concordance which transcends cultural boundaries, much like the Christian concept of a ‘soul’, for example. I would again reject such an essentialism on the same post-modern grounds.

As for your second comment, I’ve never argued cultural conditioning made it impossible for the introduction of new forms of music, and I don’t know why it would make it so. Nevertheless, I would ascribe the westernization of Asian music and the introduction of western tonality to the imperialism and colonialism correlative to global western capitalism, and more generally the cultural cross-pollination these processes enable. Again, I find it reductive to suggest the acceptance of these forms of tonality was easily explainable through evolutionary psychology, as I find it strange why the apparent universality you ascribe to western tonality wouldn’t have caused it to emerge earlier in Asian regions, before western influence helped establish it. I don’t think, without postulating a type of far-fetched essentialism, you can easily speak of a shared human psychology, for unless our psychologies were exactly the same, which they are evidently not, you cannot speak of any ‘shared human psychologies’, not mention it doesn’t seem as if there is a objectively knowable ‘human psychology’ to begin with.

Album Rating: 4.0

I love how the mods deleted a bunch of fun shitposts but let the walls of text psuedo-philosophy bullshit that was actually annoying up.



Fuckin killjoys lmao.

why did sint get banned

Also if comments are getting deleted, this shit should probably rewind right back to 68. am disappointed.

Album Rating: 4.5

Hey man, I'm just trying to be thorough when getting my point across.

Album Rating: 3.8 | Sound Off

I'm done now. I accidentally banned two people (the delete button is next to the ban button), but I don't know who. I only hit what was reported. If there's more go ahead and tell me. I didn't delete any second review, though.

Album Rating: 5.0

Free sinternet pls



The man did nothing wrong