2017: Shadows Of The “West” – Burnt Friedman Talk

… in his talk Burnt Friedman explores the differences between “Western” and “non-Western” notions of rhythm – in relation to his own work and his collaboration with Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit and their concept of “secret” or coded rhythms.

In Burnt’s own words, this presentation “touches ‘the core of musical practice’, ‘physics and maths inherent to music’ which i refer to as natural laws, and how these correspond with the problems that have risen on the scrapheap of Modernity.”

In picking through this ‘scrapheap’ Friedman argues that the vocabulary of ‘western popular music’ has stagnated, drawing on cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s notion of “the slow cancelation of the future”.