Writer Marcus Boon thinks unusual thoughts about music and time. We discuss his book, The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Our focus hovers around how long-form and stretched music can both create psychedelic experience and challenge the ‘time regime’ we typically inhabit. Much of this comes from Boon’s friendship with Catherine Christer Hennix, as well as his close reading of her work. Hennix’s music intersects with math, physics, and altered views of time in ways that are deep and a little bit wild. Listeners will hear tracks from Hennix as well as DJ Screw, whose stretched Erykah Badu track is a psychotropic wonder.
This is a thoughtful episode that points quietly to the political and ethical dimensions of making and listening to music. Boon asks us, ‘What would it be to allow music to be what it wants to be?’
Artist Bio
Marcus Boon
Marcus Boon is a writer, editor, and Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002), In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010) and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice (Duke UP, 2022). He also co-authored (with Timothy Morton and Eric Cazdyn) Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (U. Chicago, 2015).
Boon co-edited a collection of writings on Practice in the Visual Arts with Gabriel Levine (MIT/Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Arts series, 2018) and is editing a new edition of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up manual The Third Mind with Davis Schneiderman (U. Minnesota, forthcoming). He is the editor of John Giorno’s Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems, 1962-2007 (Soft Skull, 2008) and Sparrow’s selected poems and prose, America: A Prophecy! (Soft Skull, 2005), and is currently working on a book about waves. He has written about music for The Wire, Boing Boing, NME, The Face and other journals and collaborates in making immersive vibratory environments with Christie Pearson as Thewaves. For more info see www.marcusboon.com.