"Turkish-born musician and composer Ilhan Mimaroglu worked extensively with electronic (tape) music. The two programmatic pieces paired here are "To Kill a Sunrise," a dirge subtitled "Requiem for Those Shot in the Back" with words borrowed from a poem by Guatemalan guerilla poet Marco Antonio Flores, and "La Ruche," an experiment of reminiscences titled after the famous building in Paris that housed Picasso, Apollinaire and others."
Git it here: To Kill a Sunrise and La Ruche & Liner Notes (PDF)
A short musing sparked by this record that I just wanted to get out of my system:
During the bit in "To Kill a Sunrise", when voices read off the dates of historically significant deaths, appears September 11th 1973. Before hearing the year 1973, I immediately thought 2001 - which would be impossible since it was recorded in '76 - but still, my initial reaction to the words 'September 11th' was to imagine a sort of concept around the terrorist attacks of 2001. Essentially, when I heard Sept. 11 my immediate mental reaction was to think about 9/11, as if one was metonymy for the other, ignoring the murder of Allende and the Chilean coup completely. It wasn't until '1973' was spoken that I thought of him. This got me thinking a bit about memory, specifically historical memory, involving a recognition of major events in the past.
The United States aided greatly in the coup and death of President Allende, as well as pretty much reconditioned the subsequent political economy into a caricature of neo-liberalism. The Pinochet regime was responsible for killing thousands of Chileans, torturing more than ten times that number, and exiling hundreds of thousands. The economy concentrated wealth like you would not believe, the state was forced to adopt severe austerity measures while unemployment reached the double-digits, leaving the vast majority of the population unable to afford food or basic supplies.
That goes to say that I already know this information, and plausibly, this could be synthesized into a concept like the one I have for 9/11; moreover, my mind could intuitively imagine that concept when I hear Sept. 11th rather than the one it did before. I am quite interested in the process by which I intuitively think WTC when I hear Sept. 11th, and not the tragedy in Chile, or why I don't imagine a different metonymy altogether. Here are two cases of terrorism and of tragedy, both involving the United States and the deaths of thousands of civillians from the country attacked, both occurring on the same date. Mentally, there took place a sort of sleight of hand by which I thought one and not the other or both, which theoretically, should point to a larger social process that at least attempts to provoke this sort of event. In short, the whole thing stinks of ideology.
Maybe you're familiar with this, but contemporary Marxism claims that ideology under capitalism views the recognition of history as irrelevant. Could that explain the metonymic relationship between "9/11" and September 11th and the simultaneous absence of Allende from this picture? Furthermore, how does the absence of the recognition of US's negative role in the movement of history manifest itself in our experiences within the Social or the Political? Are there any more claims to be made from this point concerning the process of social conditioning?
If anyone wants to sit and chat about this with me I would be so happy.
