"What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man... The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks... Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
-Theodor Adorno, from "The Philosophy of Modern Music"
"Indeed!, bury the stinking half-dead underground alive, suffocate what breath it has left, and we shall declare the new underworld! We stand poised on the edge of history, awaiting the end of music with optimism. On the rubble of that dead city we shall erect a futurist construction of noise which will grope its terrifying tentacles of decibels and appearance with a new insolence, projecting the rash of kicks and total chaos that overturns the entirety of piggy parent-culture."
-The Nation of Ulysees (liner notes from "Plays Pretty for Baby")
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