Nikolai Molecules
vocals & guitars & lyrics & musik & sturm & drang
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MOLECULES/MOLECULAR/MOTH/RANDOM ARTS FESTIVAL
previous members:
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Julian Woolsey//
Bass ( x-Imaginary Friends/Spacelord )
Phil Watt//
Trumpet ( x-Irving and Rilo Kiley )
Milo Warner Martin
( x- Moth, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tooth and Nail ),
guylaine lilian vivarat
( x-Monogroove/sky parade)
brian wotring
( x-Moth, Busride ),
peter dressell
( x-Water, Heavy Lemons, The Paper Planes, Pusher ),
georgie ramsland
( x-Heavy Lemons, Azalia Snail ),
phil cobb, hector beccera, michael albano,
aaron robinson, christina park, micah panzich,
chris mcgrath, tim leather,
david gray, dan seiden
Influences
Neu!, Swervedriver, Brian Eno, Stereolab, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, MBV, Slowdive, Elliot Smith, Mogwai etc...The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders
Norretranders is a Danish science journalist, who attempts to tie together the results of several scientists into an explanation of how consciousness works. He comes at it from an information processing point of view, treating the human brain as a computer, while pulling in results from all over the world of science. He goes from Maxwell-Boltzmann thermodynamics to information theory to Godel's incompleteness theorem in the first 50 pages to give you an idea of the intellectual ground he covers.
The basic premise that he puts together is that consciousness, the actual thought process where we think about what we are doing, is a very slow inefficient process. His estimate, based on several experiments, is that consciousness is limited to processing about 20 bits/second. Compared to the chips of today which are up in the gigahertz range (billions of bits/second), it seems like a truly paltry number. How can we reconcile this with our known ability to outperform computers at many tasks?
Norretranders postulates that most of the work is done at a subconscious level. Nothing too surprising, there. But what was interesting to me was the approach he used. In his theory, the whole point of the subconscious parts of the brain is to reduce the information flow into and out of the brain down to a rate which our feeble 20 bits/sec consciousness can handle. He points out that we perceive about 12 million bits/second (10 million from vision, 1 million from touch, and the rest scattered among the other senses). That's an enormous amount of information to process. But when we look around, we don't see 10 million pixels. Looking from my computer chair, I see my computer, my desk, the windows of the room, etc. He calls this phenomenon chunking information into symbols. To quote him, "symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into our consciousness."
In other words, our subconscious does a truly amazing amount of processing to reduce the 10 million bits we see to the 10 or so objects we actually perceive at any one time. And since we generally focus in on only one object at a time, our consciousness can now handle the bit flow rate. This is why it takes us so much work to deal with something we have never seen before - our brain is desperately trying to cope with the new input. It also explains a lot of what babies are doing for the first year of their life - developing the preconscious mechanisms to handle this overwhelming onslaught of information.
One example I use to illustrate this point that I thought of while reading this book was checking your blind spot while driving in traffic. You quickly glance over your shoulder, then you look straight ahead again. When you looked back, there's all sorts of things in your vision: the rest of your car, other cars on the highway, scenery off to the side of the highway. What your consciousness processes out of all that, though, is one bit - is there a car in my blind spot or not? And it takes a while to process that - there have been many times when I'll initiate a lane change, glance over my shoulder, continue with my lane change, before my consciousness catches up and starts screaming that there was a car in the blind spot.
Similarly, because of the poor information capacity of consciousness, there's an equally amazing expansion of information on the output end as there is compression on the input end. When we do an action, we do not try to control each muscle, or even each limb. We just think "Walk forward", and lower parts of the brain issues the proper commands. This is why it takes so much effort to learn a new action in a sport - you are having to think about moving each limb in a precise way. Later on, once your subconscious has been trained, it's a matter of just issuing the command "Go spike that volleyball", and your body gauges things, jumps high in the air, and coordinates a tremendously complex physical motion involving the legs, arms, and torso to spike that ball down. It also explains the phenomenon that all athletes have experienced - when we screw something easy up, and say "I had too much time to think about it" - Norretranders postulates that this is because the process happened slowly enough that our consciousness got into the loop and tried to control things.
One other interesting result of consciousness being slow is that it explains reaction times. Any time we have to make a conscious decision, it is going to be a slow process. However, if it is wired into the preconsciousness, then reaction can be instantaneous; for instance, if we touch something very hot, we don't wait to think "Ow!" before we move our hand - our hand flinches away, and we're dancing away in pain even before we say "Ow, that hurt!" A cute story from George Gamow about Niels Bohr that Norretranders includes illustrates the same point: "He [Bohr] developed a theory which explained why the hero is quicker and manages to kill the villain despite the fact that the villain is always first on the draw. ... As the hero never fires first, the villain has to decide when he is going to shoot, and this hampers his movements. The hero, on the other hand, acts reflexively and snatches his revolver quite automatically the instant he sees the villain's hand move. We disagreed on this theory, and the next day we went into a toy store and bought two revolvers in western holsters. We shot it out with Bohr, who played the hero. He 'killed' all his students." Norretranders would say that the villain has to involve consciousness which is tremendously slower than the preconscious.
I haven't even gotten to Norretranders explanation of the half-second delay in consciousness (which I need to re-read so that I can explain it better), or exformation, or any of the other fascinating concepts in this book. I highly recommend it obviously. It's a good read, with lots of interesting results that make you think about what how your brain actually works.
Sounds Like
Riane Eisler writes in her revelatory work, The Chalice and The Blade:
"Why do we hunt and persecute each other? Why is our world so full of man's infamous inhumanity to man - and to woman? How can human beings be so brutal to their own kind? What is it that chronically tilts us toward cruelty rather than kindness, toward war rather than peace, toward destruction rather than actualization?
"Of all life-forms on this planet, only we can plant and harvest fields, compose poetry and music, seek truth and justice, teach a child to read and write - or even laugh and cry. Because of our unique ability to imagine new realities and realize these through ever more advanced technologies, we are quite literally partners in our own evolution. And yet, this same wondrous species of ours now seems bent on putting an end not only to its own evolution, but to that of most life on our globe, threatening our planet with ecological catastrophe or nuclear annihilation.
"...Socialists and communists assert that the root of our problems is capitalism; capitalists insist socialism and communism are leading us to ruin. Some argue our troubles are due to our 'industrial paradigm,' that our 'scientific worldview' is to blame. Still others blame humanism, feminism, and even secularism, pressing for a return to the 'good old days' of a smaller, simpler, more religious age.
"Yet, if we look at ourselves - as we are forced to by television or the grim daily ritual of the newspaper at breakfast- we see how capitalist, socialist, and communist nations alike are enmeshed in the arms race and all the other irrationalities that threaten both us and our environment. And if we look at our past - at the routine massacres by Huns, Romans, Vikings, and Assyrians or the cruel slaughters of the Christian Crusades and Inquisition - we see there was even more violence and injustice in the smaller, prescientific, preindustrial societies that came before us.
"Since going backward is not the answer, how do we move forward?"
"...We are all familiar with legends about an earlier, more harmonious and peaceful age. The Bible tells of a garden where woman and man lived in harmony with each other and nature - before a male god decreed that woman henceforth be subservient to man. The Chinese Tao Te Ching describes a time when the yin, or feminine principle, was not yet ruled by the male principle, or yang, a time when the wisdom of the mother was still honored and followed above all. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote of a 'golden race' who tilled the soil in 'peaceful ease' before a 'lesser race' brought in their god of war. But though scholars agree that in many respects these works are based on prehistoric events, references to a time when women and men lived in partnership have traditionally been viewed as no more than fantasy.
"When archaeology was still in its infancy, the excavations of Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann helped establish the reality of Homer's Troy. Today new archaeological excavations, coupled with reinterpretations of older digs using more scientific methods, reveal that stories such as our expulsion from the Garden of Eden also derive from earlier realities...
"Further verifying that there were ancient societies organized very differently from ours are the many otherwise inexplicable images of the Deity as female in ancient art, myth, and even historical writings. Indeed, the idea of the universe as an all-giving Mother has survived (albeit in modified form) into our time. In China, the female deities Ma Tsu and Kuan Yin are still widely worshipped as beneficent and compassionate goddesses. ...Similarly, the veneration of Mary, the Mother of God, is widespread. Although in Catholic theology, she is demoted to non-divine status, her divinity is implicitly recognized by her appellation Mother of God as well as by the prayers of millions who daily seek her compassionate protection and solace. Moreover, the story of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection bears a striking resemblance to those of earlier 'mystery cults' revolving around a Divine Mother and her son or, as in the worship of Demeter and Kore, her daughter.
"Of course it makes eminent sense that the earliest depiction of divine power in human form should have been female rather than male. When our ancestors began to ask the eternal qauestions, they must have noted that life emerges from the body of a woman. It would have been natural for them to image the universe as an all-giving Mother from whose womb all life emerges and to which, like the cycles of vegetation, it returns after death to be again reborn. It also makes sense that societies with this image of the powers that govern the universe would have a very different social structure from societies that worship a divine Father who wields a thunderbolt and/or sword. It further seems logical that women would not be seen as subservient in societies that conceptualized the powers governing the universe in female form - and the 'effeminate' qualities such as caring, compassion, and nonviolence would be highly valued in these societies. What does NOT make sense is to conclude that societies in which men did not dominate women were societies in which women dominated men.
"Nonetheless, when the first evidence of such societies was unearthed in the nineteenth century, it was concluded that they must have been 'matriarchal.' Then, when the evidence did not seem to support this conclusion, it again became customary to argue that human society always was - and always will be - dominated by men. But if we free ourselves from the prevailing models of reality, it is evident that there is another logical alternative: that there can be societies in which difference is not necessarily equated with inferiority or superiority." [Eisler, 1987] (emphasis, mine)
" A propelling rhythmic groove, glossy organs,
and fiery guitar fretwork captures a
Cul de Sac meets Spiritualized agitation "
- SKYSCRAPER
" I'd love to drop acid and roll around in the
grass at some big music festival while
Molecules play "
- BIG WHEEL
" If making a solid pop album is a crime,
Molecules are certainly guilty "
-- SLUG MAG ---
Molecules bring yesterday and today into tomorrow
(and tomorrow into today), existing in a realm where
artistic success isn't dollar driven but rated on what
imaginative individuals have to say and how an idea
is presented. There are no boundaries for Nikolai Goodich (singer/songwriter/guitarist/visual artist), bass player
Christina Park and drummer Alek Edmonds.
Typically, vocals veer from French to English and
back again, while tunes move both gracefully and
chaotically from post-punk to no wave, shoegazer to
psychedelia and beyond, and can be equally body
thumping and brainy. Deviation from the norm is an
important component of the quartets creative zone.
A large part of the bands edge comes from diverse
subject matter that guides, personalizes or subverts.
Literature and philosophy are also stimulantes, including
novelist Thomas Pynchon, social critic Mike Davis and
Voltaire. But a specific literary icon holds a special place.
Space-rock ballad The Stranger was prompted by Camus
tale of alienation, which is mandatory reading for anyone
who wants to more closely comprehend Molecules.
On the cut, Vivarat sings in French about death while
Goodich vocalizes in English about love. We echo the
novels existentialist themes through each others
pain and subjectivity, Vivarat notes.
Science and technology also play their roles. Kraut-rock
masterpiece DNA Forever is one case where physics and
metaphysics are interlocked. The lyrics examine being
buried beneath faceless corporate factories, all atop a
driving rhythm groove, glossy organ and fiery guitar f
retwork. Critical thinking (reading between the lines) is
also an underlying belief. Heady rocker Sun/Moon/Eyes,
for example, examines freedom as an ongoing struggle
against mass media fallacies, looking past plastic television
smiles or deceptive news items.
Molecules continue to attract notice for their deconstructionist
methodology and uncommon creativity. The foursomes new
album 23 Factory Slaves is a masterful portfolio showcasing
Molecules adventurous output.
==========================
June 2006
Campus Circle Magazine -
Written By Doug Simpson
Thank You- these are the tough times- times to be thankful for all the good people we have around us to get through them though- im sorry to hear of your grandmothers passing- lots of love to you and your family also - hope ill be seeing u and everyone out there soon- xoxo emma
yo! you rock too :)
...a delicate blend of organics and synthetics...
"FBOM7" has now been released by request. Ya ready?
also, check out the beautifully orchestrated "ios".
as always, i love to hear your thoughts/feelings.
love, schwa
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