Friday, January 6, 2012

Anthro-Instrument / Soriah + Ashkelon Sain music vid

Throat singing blurs the already hazy boundary between anthro-objects and musical instruments, the voice hardly recognizable as being ‘human’ and sounding much more like a didgeridoo. The anthro-object is itself the tool for evoking what, from the perspective of the anthro-objects themselves, is “music.” Music is omnipresent, empyrean, the divine harmony that regulates the universe (according to medieval Christian theology/philsophy, at least). Music becomes embodied within the anthro-objects (see Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 2001), thus making the anthro-object nearly indistinguishable from music. Even if they are withdrawn from each other, they are so thoroughly “enmeshed” (see Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2010), that music informs any attempt to define the anthro-object. Soriah, the throat singer in this video, uses costume to conceal his humanness, and the music of Ashkelon Sain creates an ambience, a framework within which Soriah’s singing is even less identifiable as human.

1 comment:

Michael- said...

brilliant post - thank you for this. Humans are as much resonant objects as chunk of uranium or street lamp.