Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Leviathan is an example of early social contract theory. Written by Thomas Hobbes during the English Civil War (1642-1651), Leviathan (which refers to the Biblical Leviathan), Hobbes argues for complete rule by a sovereign, arguing that civil war and the state of nature (war against all) could only be avoided by a powerful government, a monarchy. The book was published in 1651 and offended all parties, Royalists and Catholics, and supporters of monarchy mainly because his views differed from the Divine Right of Kings, for in Hobbes' monarchy system, the sovereign would rule by the consent of the people. 

The first part deals with politics and human nature. Good and evil are terms for peoples' appetites.In nature, Hobbes says:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

He goes on to explain all these laws of nature, and how the sovereign would represent the people even when they disagree with the sovereign.

This part of the book gets the political philosophy kicking, and you get a sense of Hobbes' language, and its been said that his writing style if of a particular humor, dry humor. I didn't get that from the reading, perhaps I missed that aspect. Looking back now, I can see what these book reviewers and bloggers are saying about it.  

The second part deals with the Commonwealth, he explains how the sovereign has some twelve principal rights. Subjects can't change a form of government. The sovereign can't be put to death. To prescribe the rules of civil laws and property. To make war and peace. To reward with riches and honor or to punish with corporal or pecuniary punishment or ignominy. And more.

He rejects a separation of powers but talks in detail about Monarchy (being the best form of government), Oligarchy, and Democracy. He says Monarchy is the best form of government because it leads to peace and prosperity for the people. Oligarchies and Democracies are corrupt, and civil wars can occur. Important to note that Hobbes wrote this during the English Civil War while in exile in Paris.

In addition, Hobbes states that the sovereign has control over matters of religious doctrines, and should do so always.

Part three is Of A Christian Commonwealth. He discusses the Ten Commandments and makes so many quotes from scripture, this part of the book gets quite dense, albeit important as to the Ecclesiastical studies of the time.

He talks a lot about the Catholic Church, how the people can't obey both the Pope, and the sovereign, for a leviathan can't have two heads. Hobbes wants the preservation of a life, a world where people would be happy and live nice lives. He thinks that living in and not rebelling against a strong state is the best way to make this happen. 

He states that the Pope and Clergy don't have the ultimate say over the people, that it is the sovereign Christian Kings are the supreme Pastors of their people. He talks about which scriptures we should trust, and why. The test is done by Hobbes examining scripture and saying its very trust worthy, and because the Bible is the most trust worthy when it comes to these things.

Part 4 is called The Kingdom Of Darknesse. Hobbes doesn't refer to Hell with this, but rather ignorance and the darkness in misinterpretation of scripture. There are four causes: Misinterpretation of Scripture, Demonology of heathen poets, Vain Philosophy (of the Greeks, especially Aristotle), and by mingling with both these, false or uncertain traditions, and feigned or uncertain history.

Hobbes finishes by inquiring who benefits from the errors he diagnoses:

Cicero maketh honourable mention of one of the Cassii, a severe judge amongst the Romans, for a custom he had in criminal causes, when the testimony of the witnesses was not sufficient, to ask the accusers, cui bono; that is to say, what profit, honour, or other contentment the accused obtained or expected by the fact. For amongst presumptions, there is none that so evidently declareth the author as doth the benefit of the action.

Hobbes concludes that the beneficiaries are the churches and churchmen.

Hobbes didn't seem to like the Church or Clergymen that much. In fact, when Leviathan was published it was publicly burned. People wanted to kill him because his ideas differed from the Godly Divine Right of Kings, instead saying the sovereign reigns only in the consent of the people, and has certain obligations under the social contract. We need the sovereign monarchy because without it we are left to the Laws of Nature, in which life is nasty, brutish and short.

This was quite a read for me, over some six-hundred pages long. I started it a long time ago, but it took me a while to finish reading it. The spelling loses consistency, (dry humor perhaps), and the professorial tone over the novel is also apparent. The old archaic English can take a while to get used to. I had to look up a lot of words online on the google dictionary (my favorite Hobbes words were corporeal and incorporeal) to make sense of certain sections, which made the reading process longer. The book is incredibly dense, and can take a lot of focus to make sense of. I can't say I got the complete understanding of this text, rather I had an astounding overview from Betrand Russell, and a hands-on approach with the original text. However, I got a lot out of it, from intellectual understanding, to pervasiveness argumentation, to English civil war ideology. Its one of those important texts, and it was an accomplishment to have read it. 

There's also a certain rhythm and logical conclusiveness there too. This appears to my post-modern millennial mind to be a treatise on a particular kind of conservatism, something that relates to modern government especially now more than ever.

I already knew what Leviathan was about when I read Betrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but reading the full text, I can see things straight from the source. Many of Hobbes' ideas have transcended time and are in use in today's governments. 

Read this if you like philosophy

Electric Funeral

Here's Electric Funeral by Black Sabbath played at the open jam I play at regularly, on 9/19. We have Jim X (Ouii3) on drums and a jammer on bass, the bass player kills it here.

Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/electric-funeral-x-drums

Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th century epic poem Divine Comedy, its followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. Inferno tells the story of Dante going through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. Hell is depicted as nine circles located within the Earth. Its a famous novel despite being written 700 years ago. People know what Dante's Inferno is, even if they've never read it.


This is a challenging piece of fiction, mainly because its about hell, anguish, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Not only that but because the original work was written in Italian, its can be tough to get a great English translation. But I think my copy from the library was pretty good. If you don't see the book as horrifying and/or an evil grip on your literary senses, you can see the book the way I do, as a fantastical tale, albeit a much darker one.


The writing itself is written in cantos, in which is a form called terza rima, where every three lines rhyme. Getting that literary rhythmic sensibility has been a challenge for every translator that puts it from Italian into English. But once you start reading the book every day and don't stop, you get a sense of the physicality and repetition of the poetry, its rhythmic sensibility.


The lines are quite difficult to get used to at first. I was sort of easing myself into these epics. I started out reading a little bit of the Illiad and then I started reading Milton's Paradise Lost, and then I went ahead and finished Inferno after that, after I had a taste of epic poetry. Its not for everybody. But at the same time its not just for college lit majors either. I think of myself as someone who is intellectually stimulated by these sorts of archaic, classical works. They enrich my literary palette. I have to look up words online, learn ancient slogans, and really move up to speed, learning much along the way. I would say its all worth it.


Inferno is emotionally gripping but that's the reason why I couldn't put it down. It was exciting, human drama. It literally doesn't get more terrifying than Satan at the bottom of a frozen lake, with three heads, of which are Judas Iscariot, Brutius, and Cassiaus, accusers who got Jesus Christ crucified. It was kind of exciting that Achilles' teacher, the centaur Chiron was in hell, leading a brigade of centaurs that shoot arrows at sinners, a sort of mythology religious hybridization.


Most of the people Dante meets in hell are political celebs of that era, people everyone of that time period would have heard of and known about. There's devils torturing humans, and at the bottom of hell there's a frozen lake where people are chewing on each other for eternity, zombies anyone?


Certainly Alighieri is a religious man, a schooled religious man. His ideas on church and government are heard here in sections. Dante makes a note of it that religion is for spiritual purpose and that the state/monarchy's role was primarily secular order, and that the two complemented each other.


The work shows that Hell is a horrible place for sinners, full of real fire and brimstone. As this is only the first part of a trilogy, I'll be reading Purgatorio and Paradiso when I find the time.


Read this if you like classics and poetry

The Blazing World

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, otherwise known as The Blazing World is a 1666 work of prose fiction written by Margaret Cavendash, Duchess of Newcastle. Its considered a proto-science fiction novel, with utopian themes and political ideas that resonant with Thomas Hobbes, whom Cavendash would have read, and for the most part agrees with. This is the only utopian fiction novel written by a woman from the 17th century, making it a rare event and a feminist work, she's one of the first feminist writers in a sense. The book was published as a companion piece to her scientific work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which I ordered a while back from the library.
 
The Blazing World is a fanciful, romantical, satirical, utopian vision where a young woman enters another world via the North Pole, where she becomes an Empress of a world with talking creatures, complete with fish-men, bear-men, mer-men, and the like. She even converses with spirits, and the real life Duchess herself, that is, the author becomes a character in the story itself.

What really got me into this novel, reading it for hours every day other than the fact that its considered ancient science fiction, was the fact that the writing is different, it has a voice. Cavendash creates a poetic space with her imaginative creative style. Its one of the first ever feminist takes on utopian fiction. Its feminist in the sense that its about a woman who takes over control of a whole world in a utopian society, a kind of feminist ideological. But it doesn't end there. This is a work of many genres, be them poetry, utopia, proto-science fiction, romance, epic, morality, kabbala, philosophy, its a hybridization, which makes it even more highly unusual.
 
In the book, the Empress creates a monarchy government. Cavendash argues that monarchy is the best form of government because it eliminates separations of powers. She writes, "it was natural for one body to have one head, so it was also natural for a politic body to have but one governor … besides, said they, a monarchy is a divine form of government, and agrees most with our religion.
 
Cavendash gets her philosophy from Thomas Hobbes, who says in his work Leviathan (which I'm almost done reading) that monarchy is the best form of rule, and without it men would be at each others throats by the sword, and lastly, that life is nasty, brutish, and short. We see Hobbes echoed through The Blazing World, and its not surprisingly to me given that they're both from civil war era England and Cavendash was even familiar with the smartest men of the day. She even dined with Descartes.

But how does the book read, and is it good? The book reads kind of slow. It was some three-hundred pages but sometimes a whole day of reading (which is only like three hours for me) felt like it didn't get me very far. Its so overly detailed and all over the place that sometimes its hard to keep track of whats going on. Arguably you could say that Cavendash's refusal to write in a simplistic 'feminine' way is her being a rebel, a true feminist doing whatever she wants, saying whatever she wants, and writing whatever she wants in her own self-published books, just because she can.
 
I also think the writing is very good. The book lives up or down depending on your outlook, although it doesn't exactly keep you on the edge of your seat. I have the advantage of reading this book four-hundred years later and not only enjoying it, but interpreting it in my own way. The book gets tedious, it meanders through many, many pages, and it seemingly becomes more and more fantastical and philosophical, its exciting through and through and I would probably read it again given some time. The story is a little bonkers but if you keep going with it you can find its riches.
 
Read this if you're into creative writing, feminist writing, or archaic science fiction of the utopian variety. Also recommended: Sir Tomas More Utopia and Francis Bacon New Atlantis.

New Jam tracks (9/5/18)

So I happened to be off work last week so my drummer and I went out and played an open jam, our only real performance space other than practicing at the studio with occasional friends spectating, sometimes even performing too. 

We start the jam off with an instrumental tune, Buckethead's Soothsayer. Then we play Electric Funeral by Black Sabbath, and end the mini-gig with my original death metal tune called Spirits of the Dead. 

Enjoy! 

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/soothsayer918
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/electric-funeral-95
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/spirits-of-the-dead-95


Good news is that although my singing and death metal screams aren't "good" they are at least decent enough to pass, and I have improved a lot in my general singing and screams. Back to the shed for practice! 

Disenchantment, A Riff on Fantasy

Disenchantment is a new comedy animated show written by Matt Groening (Futurama, The Simpsons) and Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons). The show is about a princess who's friends with an elf who loves her and a demon who's possessed her for life. Its a fantasy inspired show with Futurama artwork. Not only do we get the characteristic Futurama style artwork, we also get the humor, albeit much dryer in the first couple episodes. 

Characters
Bean is an alcoholic bad girl princess to a terrible King who beheads and kills his subjects all the time. She's no saint herself, accidentally sending people to their deaths and such. She is a bad egg, a misfit, which might be because her mother was turned to stone when she was a kid and she's longed for her ever since. Likewise, her father is hell bent on getting the Elixir of Life, in order to restore his ex-wife, even though he remarried and even has a son with the new wife, an heir to the throne. 

Elfo is an elf who's completely ignorant of most things. He left his elf kingdom and almost died before he met Bean. Bean's father, King Krog keeps him alive because he believes he needs elf's blood in order make the Elixir of Life. 

Lucy
Lucy is a demon that possessed Bean when she opened up this bottle in the castle. He's the devil's advocate in every way, causing Bean to make horrible mistakes, ruining her relationships even more. Everyone thinks he's a talking cat. Despite being a terrible person, he's one of the more likable characters, joke-wise. 

The early episodes are slow and have almost rocky starts. This isn't a show that immediately envelops you in laughs. Rather, it makes you work for it, like a art-style science fiction novel, I'm thinking of Neal Stephenson, that kind of thing. Where you might enjoy the writing style, but its so dense that it takes you a long time before you get to the meat and potatoes of the story or what the writer intends to say. Same thing with Disenchantment. 

Slow early episodes
Things don't really start to become interesting until episode four, with each episode being 30 minutes that means you have to sit through almost two hours before things get rolling into a comfortable drama with jokes. In a way I've come to expect this, especially as a modern literary device, where writers can spend forever building up one idea, only for it to come to fruition and finish in two seconds. 

There are certain episodes where Bean does just this. She's put into a confrontational situation and she panics and we are wondering what she will do. Instead of something interesting or grandiose, she instead comes to a conclusion in two seconds, the plot is finished, episode done, fin. 

Now, I can certainly be critical here and say this is a result of lazy writing. It could be for all we know, we weren't there when they wrote it in their work room. However, it might not be lazy writing, perhaps they saw the easy way out and just went with the easiest solutions. Either way, I don't see it as entirely bad. Its just a cartoon after all. 

One of my favorite episodes was this one where Bean gets exorcised by a creepy guy who imprisons Lucy, and plans to throw him in a volcano at the top of a mountain, think Mordor. Turns out he had tons of Lucy's demon race people and he was throwing them all to their deaths! Bean almost falls into the volcano in order to save Lucy from death. Quite the surprise because we are given an understanding that none of these characters care about anything. When the old creepy priest is throwing demons to the fire, a female demon shouts out,"I possessed your aunt and she loved every second of it!"

End of season thoughts
The show takes a surprising twist near the end of the series when they get the actual Elixir of Life, and Bean uses it on her mother's stone corpse, which reanimates her to life. What will begin in season 2 will be a much different altogether piece of work, where Bean isn't at the beck and whim of her father, where she will be able to drink with her mother, and who knows, go on a quest and become a real warrior? They've been nudging Bean unto the warrior path a little bit. Which brings me to my next point. 

Is this real Fantasy? 
Have any of the writers of this show every read any real fantasy novels? Perhaps they have, and perhaps they haven't. I certainly haven't read any comedy fantasy novels, although I'm certain they exist. This isn't your high fantasy like Ursula K LeGuin or even low pop fantasy like Game of Thrones. In a way its just a fantasy skin, other than the fact that the time period is like the Middle Ages, albeit with swords and sorcery, this isn't like CS Lewis or Tolkien come to cartoon. Its video-gamish at times. There's a scene where the gang is flying atop a griffin, which is stereotypical of World of Warcraft fast traveling.

Critics of the show say it isn't fantasy enough, it doesn't satisfy fantasy fans. I say its okay, but that it needs to supercharge it fantasy credentials into high gear for season 2, otherwise I would say its pandering to the nerdy, intellectual, female, fantasy crowd. 

Female Lead
I've talked to friends about the show and some of them can't get into the female protagonist perspective. He said,"I don't find her funny." I think that's sexist, but perhaps this is a trend. By making progressive shows about female lead characters, TV shows are having an influence on gender politics and such. I think its great. In fact, I can relate to Bean in many ways, not because she's a girl but because of her alienation, which could be a symptom of being a woman in this universe. If the female protagonist is going to become a trend, I think its a good one because women aren't main characters much on TV (I mean this loosely, as the show is a Netflix exclusive). Its a nice touch. 

The verdict 
Although this show isn't as great as Futurama or The Simpsons I'm sold. I found it so good that I finished season 1 in three days, which is pretty fast for me because I don't watch TV shows too much. I see the entire first season as a slow buildup for more hip and happening fantasy-driven plot in season 2. I think that will be what brings in even more fans, and we'll see if the writers can 1) write better 2) write real fantasy 3) do more interesting things with the characters. I think if they do these things the show will not only become more popular, but develop into a cult classic, a new part of the geek culture, although in some ways it already is. Check out the show now, its on Netflix. 

Science Fiction, An Important Genre

Science Fiction (and Fantasy) is a hellova genre. Its what got me into reading a lot, turning me into a hardcore book worm. I used to read a lot of the classics around 2011, back when I was a college student. I was into things like Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Walden, and The Sound and Fury. Once I dropped out of college I stopped reading altogether for a while. Then around 2013, I started reading again, mostly inspired by science fiction.

I've read a lot of science fiction novels and short stories since then. Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Bester, Octavia Butler, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson, you name it. I began to build a love for ideas through these writers, at first enamored with the video game-ish ideas that can come from science fiction but eventually coming to an understanding that ideas from science fiction can help me to form ideas about real life. From Dune I learned about sociology and ecology. From Ursula K LeGuin I learned about anthropology. From Robert Heinlein I learned how conservative values can impact ones' writing. From Alfred Bester I learned that writing doesn't have to be fanciful to make an huge impact. These things are important.

Science Fiction is one of the most important genres today. Sci-Fi movies and novels help shape people's ideas and development of ideas when it comes to AI, automatons in the work place, consciousness, etc. This is an important ethical dilemma. Which is where science fiction has led me.

One day I was bored and typed in on google "oldest science fiction novels". It brought me to a Wikipedia page that listed Sir Tomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendash's Blazing World, and Kepler's Somnium.

I read Utopia and New Atlantis and didn't look back (although I want to read both of them again). At first the archaic writing style of the 1500s was super difficult to understand. However, I kept reading and reading until it eventually made "more" sense, which took quite a while and a lot of google dictionary searching. The ideas of Utopia and New Atlantis were very utopian, socialistic, and communistic. From there I read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, which I found on a pdf through google.

That's not even the end of this quest (thumbs up fantasy nerds). After I read up on some socialist/communist ideas I went even farther back to Thomas Hobbes' political economy-Leviathan, which I'm almost done with. From there I read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, a collection of essays in which he aims to prove the existence of God, quite an undertaking! For a while I became influenced by his writing, and even started to live a more holy life as a result. Holy as in being a nicer person, not fucking up at work, occasional prayer, diet and exercise. However, I am by no means religious. But the writers from the 1500s and 1600s who inspire me were mostly highly educated men from the Catholic schools.

Once my dad saw I was reading all of this without a context he recommended a great primer for me, which was Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. This book has everything, as in every great idea of man and their originators from early man all the way to Marx and Engels. Russell is not only a philosopher who understands ideas but he's also an engaging writer that knows how to write in a highly educational way without being too technical, meaning anyone can understand if they put in the time and the effort. He's a mathematical person, this is very rare to find in people who are overly mathematical. The Russell book gave me a context for all the philosophy I was reading and will continue to read. If you read this book you will know more about ideas than most of the people you will run across in the general public. It was a great feeling once I finished it, its an 840 page book.

I also read classicist Madeline Miller's two novels Circe and The Song of Achilles, two books based on Greek mythology. From there I learned that I don't have to read fiction/nonfiction standard prose. I started reading the actual Iliad and from there started reading epic poetry of the Western canon. Now I'm reading Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Although Miller's work isn't science fiction, not quite fantasy, it might as well be because its so highly unusual. Poetry is something I want to explore more of now.

Now we've completed the quest and earned some experience points. The point here is that science fiction has led me to the important things in Western literature. Its one of the most worthy genres out there despite what some people might say. A reader I was conversing with told me, "Science fiction gets a lot of shit but its done much for literature." I couldn't agree more.

My Name is Albert Ayler

My Name is Albert Ayler is a fantastic record, sounds of the new thing (I first heard that term from Amiri Baraka's book Black Music), as it appeared early in 1963. This is saxophonist Ayler's debut record, recorded in Copenhagen and first released on the Dutch Debut label. 

Personnel

• Albert Ayler - tenor saxophone (tracks 3-6), soprano saxophone (track 2), voice (track 1)
• Niels Brosted - piano (tracks 2-5)
• Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen - bass (tracks 2-6)
• Ronnie Gardiner - drums (tracks 2-6

The album has only three stars on Allmusic but what does Allmusic know? The fact of the matter is that although the band of Europeans (the two Niels) and the one American (Ronnie) is quite the typical straight ahead band, what Ayler does over the usual jazz construct, is create his own sound, playing himself, and creating a wondrous lyrical blues, a shout, a cry, a whisper if you will. This seems to be a response to Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, similar to Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders, other great sax players of that revolutionary musical era. Its great that he went to Europe to play free jazz because his fame wouldn't have gone as far if he stayed in America.

What makes the record especially engaging for me is that well, I love jazz standards. I've heard most of the standards way more than a few times so when he plays all these tunes there's a certain legendary aura to them. I know all the melodies, all the chord changes, and when he plays what is unexpected I get quite a kick out of it, he's playing the standards we all (jazz fans) know but ultimately doing something different with them. That's the genius of this record. 

The Tunes
Bye Bye Blackbird
Billie's Bounce
Summertime 
On Green Dolphin Street 
C.T. (Ayler composition) 

On quite a few of these tunes a typical jazz fan who knows all these standards might say, "Well, this is a good band but the saxophonist isn't really playing the melody." In fact, what Ayler does on a lot of these tunes is use the basic harmonic framework (chords) for the tunes for improvisation of his own melodies, playing himself. His harmonies speak for themselves, sometimes shrill, a cry, this is what Baraka means when he says that free jazz is only spectacular when it stays close to its blues roots and doesn't get all intellectual. Of course I disagree because a lot of my free jazz heroes (The Art Ensemble of Chicago and other AACM musicians) are quite intellectual, even to the point of studying modern classical composers, serialism, etc. 

In a way you can only see the genius of this record is you're a free jazz acolyte. My favorite tune here is Billie's Bounce, a Charlie Parker tour de force. Even I know the head (main theme) to this tune on guitar. Here Ayler gets more straight ahead, and you can see the John Coltrane influence in his sheets of sound, long winded riffs played very fast. Its quite stunning.

As much as I like Bille's Bounce here the number one tune here would have to be Summertime, the Gershwin classic. The opening is such a blues, a wail.  I can assure you you've never heard Summertime like this before. Its a haunting, shrill cry of a saxophone sound. It sticks with you once you hear it. This is the blues. 

Another tune I dug very much was On Green Dolphin Street. I've heard this tune a million times and it always delivers with its driving melody. Here Ayler goes to Mars, almost like Coltrane's latest period stuff, he mixes 50s, early 60s style bebop phrasing with the new thing. Its my cup of tea. This particular tracks reminds me of Eric Dolphy a lot. Some of Ayler's phrasing doesn't even sound human, it sounds like an animal, like a bird, with the rhythms of frogs jumping in and out of pond.  

The Ayler original is pure free jazz at its best. No melody, no theme, mostly just call and response from the musicians. Given that this was his first original tune on a record, I would say its quite a great introduction to his music. This is where some people would scratch their heads and say,"What?"  In a way you either get it or you don't. For most jazz fans there is a fine line between straight ahead jazz and free jazz. In 1963 that line was very much quite apparent.

The rhythm section on the record is quite good. They play in a typical 1963 jazz fashion. It wasn't until later when Ayler teamed up with American musicians like Sonny Murray, Milford Graves, and Gary Peacock, that he started to develop more of the free jazz thing with a rhythm section that was more hip to his personal sound. But what can I say? These Europeans did a great job playing with an innovator. The drummer keeps time throughout the album. 

I recommend this album to anyone interested in the so-called new thing or free jazz. Or if you like Albert Ayler and never heard this particular record. Its on YouTube, and its quite good.