In partnership with aqnb, J.G. Biberkopf presents a new Unthinkable segment for NTS Radio. This month’s mix features The Pitch’s Frozen Orchestra ‘Side B’, which forms a self-styled ‘frozen surface’ piece, as distinguished by its gradual composition of slowly shifting prolonged notes. In the context of the whole, it falls at a point of intense emotion, freezing an almost sexual, post-climactic moment, where the new is not yet normal and the old not yet recovered, whereby the mix dallies with the changing, decaying and switching of intensity over time, and the physiological danger of doing so.
Also including tracks by Ssaliva, Amnesia Scanner, Uurah, WWWings, Kentje’sz Beatsz, and Elysia Crampton, the show reflects a merging of sensuous and sensual, even sexual; you could call it the yearly spring Unthinkable-as-sex-tape —an ode to the breathless demise of newly sprung flowers against early spring snow. Or, perhaps, as life and death combine, the significance of such transience only heats up, urging us to consider the intricacies of beauty and mortality.
You can here the radio mix on the NTS Radio Mixcloud or the extended version with accompanying text below:
The creation of new knowledge is an extensive quest. Essential for survival, it is a means of endurance. While sensuousness is a brief, transitory experience prescribed by feeling, reflection is accompanied by negotiation and reconciliation, which in turn is followed by submission, whereby openness is merely a resigning of oneself to the environment. In other words, while arousal to beauty depends on material pleasure, arousal to the sublime accompanies pain and tension. All of this may install a tendency to perpetuate closure, an inclination to ‘freeze’ on prior knowledge and sustain its future.
Analogous to snow —intricately branched, formed from the freezing of water vapour in the air —it exhibits elements of beauty, mortality, and timelessness that consistently allure, regardless of the inherent danger. It proposes an affair, an almost-sexual relationship, as it continues to enthral, bringing confusion while confused itself. Beautifully deadly, danger and satisfaction are tied by a continuum with the extraordinary ability to entice us and draw us toward romantic notions of our surroundings. It comes to light with suggestion and urges us to rethink. New becomes old. It dissolves and is recovered. It feels erotic, moving us to take pleasure in its dissipation. Still, it is capable of charming us into inescapable annihilation while, at the same time, thawing itself.
In a changeable course of reflection it freezes and becomes scattered, while being repeatedly hit by air currents and shifting temperatures in an eternal, amorphous and glorious display. Its singular composition is thus the tangible effect brought about by its own struggle. It descends with enchantment, affecting us and moving us emotionally before settling. At this point, external and internal interweave. We notice limitlessness, while contemplating a limitedness that is existing albeit decaying. It is a harakiri—a form of ritual suicide —of continuation, an urgent end in the interest of a momentary, transitory timelessness.**
TRACK LISTING:
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Vanessa Amara – Untitled 6
Ssaliva – Good2love T_T refix
Haruomi Hosono – Korendor
Amnesia Scanner – AS Crust
Ms. Thing – INOJXRABIT
Boe Strummer – Aguirre
Uurah – Mini Van Crew
Uurah – Bathr
Antwood – Virtous.scr
Mike Oldfield – Evacuation
Good Safe Person – Excerpt from “A Book Unread”
18+ – Love Was Like (Party)
Vangelis Katsoulis – Picture of Another World
Crown Shyness – Scareshen Nimzow
SPK – Breathless
WWWings – Gravity (feat. Endgame)
Hi Tom – 2 Work
Mvster Mind X DJ Blue – Eastcoast Riddim
Kentje’sz Beatsz – 11 Instrumental
WWWings – Even Angels Cry
Coil – Ravenous
Nino Rota – Satyricon
Elysia Crampton – Ax Amores
The Pitch – Frozen Orchestra: Side B
See here for more ‘Unthinkable’ mixes.
