In the extreme phase of capitalism, the world outside of fiction seems dangerously close to overflowing its boundaries: we go out on the streets to shout Enough! wearing masks that are merchandising products for a film (based on a comic book whose author used a portrait of the 17th century English Catholic terrorist Guy Fawkes, in a feedback loop between reality and fiction); the members of an international movement that fights for direct participatory democracy (that is, to put an end to democracy as fiction) call themselves pirates; and the baddie in the latest Batman films emerges from the screen to murder 12 people and wound a further 58 in a movie theatre ? the place where, popcorn in hand, we feel safest in that dream world, that perfect world that is fiction. Music plays a crucial role in establishing this perfect world. It?s easy to imagine how the Batman film could lose all its spellbinding power ? and the power to overflow the screen and kill ? without its soundtrack. I think that some of the types of music that exist today have been progressing along this path of fiction, with its paroxysm as destination. Types of music that are subsiding into themselves, shedding their obligations to form and meaning along the way, insisting on the blind affirmation of their pure existence as sound. These types of music are accompanied by gestures that started off as dance (the form and meaning of movement) and gradually became spasm, not as a sign or a symptom ? which would still be modes of representation ? but as a violent discharge, pure brimming life.

Here is some of the music that triggers these thoughts in me: three that are recent and three that I think were beginning to point in this direction decades, and even a century ago.

It?s important to listen to these videos with headphones on or loudspeakers that don?t drop the bass frequencies.