Meet the Declinists!

Kieran and I both appear in this interesting piece by Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic, which inspects the discourse of decline in culture - mostly focused on music, but also taking into account contemporary visual art - via some well-known gloomsayers: Ted Gioia, Dean Kissick, and Jaime Brooks. 

Kieran naturally is present to represent the Anti-Declinist position - what would you call that?  Flourishism? - and I pop into view towards the end as a sort of semi-reformed /  semi-retracted declinist. We also figure as "dad hands over the family business to son", i.e. chasing after new micro-genres and giving them names *. 

Seems to me that with most eras - apart from exceptionally supercharged, forward-thrusting decades like the Sixties - there's usually sufficient evidence someone could draw on to argue  either the Declining Times or It's A Golden Age case ( especially if the positive stance is modified with a "if you know where to look"). Stagnation and  new shoots of growth are always going on simultaneously. Pop music and its unpop offshoots seem particularly amenable to these kinds of competing arguments - a schism of temperament as much as a generational divide -  because from very early on (1968, I'd say) there has been a kind of internal battle between postmodern and modernist impulses within pop music. The archive of past achievement builds up and this stokes an ever-growing temptation to revisit and reenact the high points of recent history, whether you're a consumer or a creator. Also there's something about pop music that makes it particularly susceptible to nostalgia for its own earlier phases of surging excitement, those virgin moments of emergence. You don’t get quite the same plangent yearning to time travel in other art forms or areas of entertainment, the ache to go back.

Talking about decline and the political gloomscape...  I also pop up in this nice piece by Meredith Blake about the protest song, which asks where are the anti-Trump anthems in the charts, eh? It's written for The Contrarian, which I recommend subscribing to if you need your doomscroll  jitters counteracted by some reasoned and informed analysis.  33 Revolutions Per Minute author Dorian Lynskey also appears with some astute comments. 

Update

W. David Marx chips into the declinism conversation. (He has a book out soon called Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century). And brings up poptimism as causing a "crisis of valuation" - there can't be agreement whether decline is happening if you can't agree on a shared metric. But how far back do you have to go to find anything like that prevailing? Warhol and Kael and Sontag were already complicating that in the 1960s, taking up the cause of "plastic" and "trash" and  "camp" and "sensation". By the end of the decade, Nik Cohn was making that move within the domain of pop music, refolding the fissure between high and low back into pop itself and aggressively taking up the low as crusade. (Even as many high culture elitists still continued to regard all pop culture as lowly and beneath consideration). That Cohn-style move of championing the low within the low, the lowest of the low, has remained a fixture of criticism ever since - an option on the menu of stances available, a culture-critical space you could occupy. It was over 30-years-old when the poptimism debate "kicked off" in the early 2000s. 

Marx mentions a glass half-full piece from last year, "No, Culture Is Not Stuck", by Katharine Dee at Wisdom of Crowds, that argues for new emergent cultural forms, TikToky stuff etc. Alternate title for the piece: "No, Your Brain Is Not Rotting".

*  some family busy-ness - recent columns by Kieran Press-Reynolds

on Drake shilling for online gambling sites and the get-rich-quick mysticism of luck that is so very Trumpian

on phonk  (of all the genres K has introduced to my ears this is the one whose appeal I find most mystifying - reminds me a bit of nu-skool breaks)

on the afterlives of dariacore

on the brainrot royalty of internet rap

Oh and here is a No Bells at NTS mix  Kieran made of  "the sounds of the rap abyss and beyond" 

When Mates Make Books

My Czech mate (boom boom, see what I did there?)  Miloš Hroch - a name some of you will recognize from The Wire and The Quietus - has just published Whisper Aloud: Shoegaze Between the East and the West. 

That's what the title is in English, but as of now, the book is only available in its original language. However you can get a taste with a translated chapter from Český shoegaze mezi Východem a Západem at The Quietus on the group Here.

And here is an interview, transcribed in English, with Hroch, for Radio Prague's website.

Until Miloš mentioned it, I had no idea there had been such a significant shoegaze scene in the Czech Republic during the early '90s.  But I had come across the scene's leading group The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa  - they got some positive coverage in the UK music press and I remember liking the records I heard. (Here is Hroch's piece for The Guardian from a few years ago on the group).

What intrigued me initially was the name The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa itself. Round about that time I had read Malcolm Bowie's guide to Jacques Lacan, where much is made of Bernini's famous sculpture of Saint Teresa of Ávila in the throes of mystic ecstasy.  So I did wonder whether the group had been reading up on Lacan's idea of feminine jouissance as an ineffable pleasure-pain spasm. I should imagine all is revealed in Whisper Aloud. 

This is Saint Teresa's own account of her mystical raptures, some of which involved levitation. In this vision, an angel immaterializes:

"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying"

There is an alternative title of the sculpture  - The Transverberation of Saint Teresa

Transverberation is an obsolete term that means "piercing through the breast" - but you could imagine it as a newly coined bit of wordplay that you might see in the late '80s / early '90s,.used as the name of a club on a flyer, or a song or album title.   Trance + Reverberation = Transverberation.   I can just see "Transverberation"  as the title of a Spacemen 3 EP, or a remix album of  Chapterhouse tunes.  

Talking of wordplay, this a good track title - "Interstellar Overdose" - from when E of S T went in an ambient / post-rock direction

Fun fact from the Guardian piece on E of S T - there is a fictional group based on them, The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, in Men In Space, a novel by Tom McCarthy, of Remainder fame, who was a resident of Prague in the years immediately after the Velvet Revolution. The imaginary band takes its name from a paining by Pietro Perugino that also features a transverberation.

Did I just write "paining" rather than "painting"?  An inspired slip of the tongue, or typing finger in this case.

Teresa makes a fleeting appearance in this Hardly Baked post about the sexy psalms of One Dove 

"Light spinning round a saint

Light colored wild sign...

Light talking gold into rain

Light thriving dark into saint

A cat in gold goes alone

Theresa's sound for the king"

At least one Songmeanings commenter insists this song is about Teresa of Avila. 

I'd like to think it's about Teresa Nervosa of the Butthole Surfers.

Danser le Desir de Dieu

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

This is quite a long-running series, now! 

Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which there are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. 

Matthew Ingram has done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness; and then The "S" Word,  a collection of writings about spirituality in alternative music. Not forgetting the graphic novel TPM.

And now here's the sequel-not-sequel to Retreat  -  a book about  the nexus of counterculture and horticulture - that comes out in the first week of April:

The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

The Garden explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today.

Countercultural Roots: Chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT sparked a deep interest in sustainable farming.

In-depth Exploration of Influences: Covers movements like the organic food revolution, Permaculture, back-to-the-land initiatives, radical ecology, and the impact of thinkers like Rudolph Steiner on 1970s communities.

Impact on Today’s Agriculture: Through interviews with key figures, The Garden reveals how these visionary growers, often without farming backgrounds, pioneered alternative agriculture and influenced modern sustainable practices. 

A Legacy for the 2020s: Highlights the enduring impact of these farmers, providing inspiration for today’s efforts to reconnect with nature and rethink sustainable living.

Perfect for readers interested in organic farming, environmental history, or the cultural legacy of the 1970s, The Garden tells the untold story of how counterculture reimagined food and our relationship to the earth.

Endorsements:

"I admired Retreat. Fluid and intelligent and... I could go on! The new Matt Ingram is even better... With The Garden, Ingram recuperates an even more transgressive gesture: the counterculture's attempted rethinking of our first culture, agriculture." - Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven

"The idea of gardening and farming as acts of revolution and dissent may be unfamiliar to many of us, so it’s great to have Matthew Ingram’s brilliantly readable book celebrating the unexpected ways that individuals, communities, and movements have, simply by growing their own food, found green-fingered ways to stick it to the man.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage

"Matthew Ingram has not only investigated a huge amount of material and talked to many people, he also has an ability to bring it all together in a way that makes sense and is fun to read." - Charles Dowding, No Dig

“Matthew Ingram has done all of us who care about ecological growing and a better world a big favour in this compendious but highly readable history of the gardening counterculture and its personalities. His in-depth, warts-and-all account of these past efforts will be endlessly informative for new generations wrestling with the demons of agricultural change, cultural change and climate change in our present, sobering times.” - Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

"A fascinating and detailed account of the extraordinary people prepared to counter the march of depletive systems. Matthew Ingram beautifully describes the alarm bell ringing for hippies and far-sighted visionaries prepared to stand up for soils and sustainable practices. The Garden sheds light on the characters and events that have shaped the use of our land. For those of us searching for sustainable solutions to complex and overlapping problems, this book provides forgotten information and lessons from the past for the dilemmas of the present and the future." - Ian Wilkinson, FarmEd

"Matthew Ingram has preserved and enlarged a corner of history which few have visited or are even aware of. He narrates, with the page-turning excitement of a mystery novel and the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, a pivot point that had enormous implications. If we get through the converging crises of this decade, our future will be profoundly better as a result of the shift he describes." - Albert Bates, The Farm

Buy it here

There's a book launch  - open to the public, just register at the link - taking place at the Onion Garden in SW1 on Tuesday April 8 6.30pm

I've not had a chance to give it a proper peruse yet but I do know that Matt's gone at the subject with his usual deep-diving passion. 

Here’s a piece in tandem with the book that Matt wrote for The Quietus in the subject of compost https://thequietus.com/interviews/things-i-have-learned/great-compost-tips/

And another on getting back to the land

Here's a mix Matt made of thematically attuned music and here are liner notes for the mix at Sick Veg. As he notes: 

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Sick Veg is a think tank and grow lab that he's started, whose areas of investigation include  Agriculture, Community, Ecology, Food, Growing, Health, Nutrition, Organic, Practice, Regenerative, Soil, Spirituality, Therapy, the Urban, and Wilderness.

It's also a blog. And crikey, he's been posting there for a while now - images, videos and micro-essays. I had no idea. 

Here's a nice one on the gardens of his childhood. 

There's a YouTube channel as well! Flashback to the days of woebot.tv

As of now there's just the one video up there, about Stewart Home's book Fascist Yoga. 

And here's a new one, "Imaginary Landscapes", on the paintings of Charles Pryor