THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER - 124 - FORM

Katie was talking about this new band Haute & Freddy that I turned her on to, they are really good but only have two songs! These songs were released as singles but I misremembered it as being released as an EP. I started ranting about old forms & people knowing these formats backwards & forwards because of repetition & how this familiarity has been lost because the format of music - really everything is so fluid. EPS, Singles, Albums all have structure & reasons to exist. I know that a lot of these formats grew up to fill economic voids & then were reimagined by artists, but no one has control over the circumstances of their birth. People, culture, need some structure to correctly channel the chaos of existence. You have to be ready to work with that chaos, because that is the nature of reality, endless streams of the unknown, but these streams need to be sorted & given structure or else people get bogged down in the chaos. I understand this because I have had a very chaotic mind. I used to view myself as an agent of chaos, because I was so bogged down in the chaos of life. I started to get into Taoism in my late teens & I began to understand that my chaos would serve me if it had some structure to go around it. The chaos wasn’t valuable unto itself, it had to be channeled, given form. Just as there can be too much chaos, there can be too much structure that sees itself as the end product, instead of as a tool. This is why I don’t really buy the oppositional binary between conservative & liberal - there is so much more going on, or less, maybe it is simpler. There is no need to pit these things against each other, they are both necessary to deal with reality. To make a sand castle the sand needs to be wet, but too wet & the sand castle doesn’t hold its shape. Back to ranting about form, right now I know people are so entranced by the novelty of the new & that it’s constantly screaming towards us, but these old forms are just waiting in the wings to build some structure as the chaos piles up. I keep hoping that there will be a renaissance soon, as we live through so much dissolution & chaos. Right now you just have people taking advantage of the chaos, but slowly, structure is being understood again.

x SEAN

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