Welcome to Eternal/Return: Editor’s note

This text was positioned before the “Eternal/Return” segment of Issue Two

DESTINY
Music, with her ceaseless flows of differentiation, best approximates the Eternal Return, and terrorises the rational with its refusal to be reduced to an image. For this reason, mythology, with it’s differentiality, bares a better chance of alluding to music’s secrets. Music is, after all, much older than the World, for she is sister of time himself, and sister to the parents of the Sun. She was present when the World, as a system of signifiers, was forged in ancient rituals. If we spin the wheel of mythology in a certain way, Music was a witness to both of the great revolutions. In the revolution of the Earth against the Skies, Gaia orders Chronos to use the Curve of Tethys to overthrow Ouranos, creating Aphrodite in the process; the event that signifies the coming of the Heavens on the Earth. In the revolution of Man against God, the Snake asks Man to eat the forbidden fruit, an act which marks our ejection from the Garden of Eden. Gaia & the Snake ask Chronos & Man to use something to bring forth the next epoch—if the blade Chronos uses was Tethys, then the fruit Man eats may well be Tethys, too.
Tethys is the primordial Goddess of rhythmic water, deep ocean currents, and she governs over cycles. Tethys and Chronos, or Cycles over Time, creates tempered rhythms and vibration. The secret technique of Gaia's revolution involved ordered sound. The Greeks wrote relatively little about Tethys; perhaps they did not realise her importance until after Hellenism collided with Hinduism—perhaps they did not realise who Tethys was until they heard her singing as they flowed into India as the river and Goddess, Saraswati. Saraswati, like her ancient Greek counterpart, is the ruler of Rivers, Water, Learning, and Music.
This is a significant development: we both learn through repetition, and evolve through regeneration, of which the fruit is a master signifier. The fallen fruit is dead but it contains the seeds of new life; it is the bridge from the end to the beginning. The fruit and Tree are different phases of the same cycle of water. Music, the sinusoidal, two-fold-semi(o)-circular-saw(wave), is the second primordial fire, the Fruit of Mankind, that which brings everything back around to Zero again; the center (of the numberline). Music completes the World; it delivers us. We have wanted to get back to Music, where this all started for us, our center, and Eternal/Return is our way of doing this — it is a project without a goal, without any intention, it just feels necessary, as if an energy source, a source of affirmation, identity, and negation — we carry Music through life as we carry Fire, and we would be lost without it.

WORD
As a Publisher that started as an extension of a record label, we had given a lot of time to writing about music in the early days of Becoming, and the majority of our Issue Zero was music-related—music has always been ‘where the party at’, it has always been the center around which our World turns. We were writing so much about music back then, that we ran out of time to make some beats or turn some tables like we used to. The old label, Crossdressing Diogenes, closed down so that Becoming could continue, and before we knew it, it had been years to make a release.

This realisation was not just ‘a shame’, it was a diagnosis:

“girl, you really need to go out and just music”.

We have been making recordings for years, both in the background and at the center, and we have accumulated hundreds of experimental episodes, audio sketchbooks and DJ sets over this time — and now all those recordings have become a radio of their own. What you may have known as “Good Morning, I Love You” under Crossdressing Diogenes, or as “Affects & Dreams” under Becoming, has found a new home, as “N’écoute pas!” under ÊT/RE. We have scraped together three volumes of recordings, and are serving them as an infinite loop on our own online channel. It has become a river into which you can dip and dive, and throw things.

Submissions processes will function as Becoming always has, just reach out to us; we are closer than you think.