Our world appears smooth and unbroken - but we know that a mountain face is just made up of rocks smushed together, that a wave of water is made up of just droplets of water, that a ray of light is made up of photons, that your skin is just made up of cells - we know this and yet when we draw a straight line we don’t see a collection of dots that happen to touch each other - what we see is a straight line.
The granularity belying the smoothness of the world is always something of an aha! moment - a revelation - a sudden parting of a velvet curtain as when the lady being sawn in half actually turns out to be two discrete persons in the end.
Vegyn’s music has this quality of a sudden revelation. Consider blue verb.The first 7 seconds of the track in sequence are as follows - beats followed by a sample of a child asking what’s happening to? - suddenly cut of (Vegyn could have sampled what’s happening? And it would have been a complete phrase but he chooses not to), a glass shattering followed by a man saying “to the motherfucker that couldn’t keep” and then there is a pause - a pause in which there is neither the beat nor the voice sample - the song then picks up where it left and the man’s voice sample continues with the sentence he was on his way to saying - “Goddamn fucking mouth”. All of this happens in just 7 seconds and much of the song has this breezy punctuated rythm like the clacking of the keys on a typewriter.
Vegyn makes for extremely smooth listening.. and I did not realize the jagged nature of it until I was listening to it the second time. I was tapping my feet and bopping my head, tracing the pattern quite sub-consciously when I realized that there were beats my body anticipated that didn’t arrive and yet the overall effect of the song was not jarring - quite the opposite, it was pleasantly slick.
When we view a Seurat from afar - we see a smooth unbroken canvas. It is only as we start moving closer and perhaps when we bring our nose right upto the canvas that we see what Seurat has done - he has placed dots of pure, unmixed colour carefully next to each other so that it is our mind rather than Seurat that mixes the paints to produce whole hues from their constituent parts. In this way Seurat reveals our mind’s capacity to see smooth lines where there are only dots that happen to touch each other; to see a bowl where there are only grains of rice.
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