"a Simon Reynolds level culture blog"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"my brain thinks bloglike"
Sunday, April 29, 2012
MAY
EVENTS: BERLIN AND ESTONIA
Later
this week I’ll be giving a talk in Berlin as part of the Apocalypse Now (And
Then) festival. The week after, I’ll be in Tartu, Estonia, to give a talk as
part of the Prima Vista literary festival
1/ BERLIN
Apocalypse Now (And Then): The End of the World in Pop Culture(Thursday 3 May
— Saturday 5
May 2012)
My talk - “The Endless End, or, Better To Burn Out Than To Fade Away” - is at 7-30pm, Thursday 3 May.
It is followed at 9pm by a discussion with myself, Jens Balzer, Falko McKenna and Tobias Rapp.
Apocalypse Now (And Then) is curated by Christoph Gurk and Tobias Rapp. Other festival participants
include Greg Tate, Kodwo Eshun, Kode 9, The Caretaker, Diedrich Diederichsen, Christina
Striewski, Jens Balzer, Tracey Rose, Aethenor...
Location: HAU 1 theatre, Stresemann Strasse 29. Hebbel am Ufer, 10963 Berlin
(The next day I’ll be heading on to Tallinn, and the day after
that, making sure to rise at 5-AM so I can see what it looks like at dawn)
nuum / post-nuum / anti-nuum
1/ "End of the Road"
probing piece by Martin Clark for FACT on road rap and its implications for the (uncertain-looking) future of the hardcore continuum
"Pirate radio is being replaced with a primary medium that is
indistinguishable from media used by all other musical continuums, road
rap is absorbing grime’s road energy into hip-hop’s traditions, house
continues to satisfy ravers’ need to dance without a strong sense of
local identity, breakbeat/bass science rudeness or flava. Grime and UK
funky continue to iterate in interesting ways, ways that show real
promise but can’t claim the seismic bursts of intense energy they once
saw. Dubstep fans who reject brostep have dispersed into either purist
halfstep traditionalist stasis (“the dungeon sound”), floating islands
of the post-dubstep archipelago, trad European house and techno,
homogenizing crate-digging revivalism and eclecticism, US trap rap and
juke. So what’s next?"
2/ same old scene-not-scene
"What all three
tracks share in common is a profound, almost militant, resistance to the
immediate, booming gratification that the vast majority of contemporary
club music promises. Turning bass-music formulae inside out, they
represent the anti-drop. But here's the other thing: these tunes are so
extreme, in their own ways, that they don't exactly invite imitation.
They're difficult and hermetic; they don't play well with others"--Philip Sherburne, fromThe Genre That Shall Not Be Named (Dubstep)
Surprised to to see Phil, hitherto a comrade in neologistic arms, taking the naming = restriction stance here
of course what he's talking about does have a name, an unsatisfactory placeholder name: postdubstep
nu-IDM is what I used to call it for a while and i couldn't help flashing on that in this description:
"Objekt's
"Cactus"... was the first to catch
my ear with a weird inversion of dance-music energies: its bass wobbles
with the ferocity of the down-and-dirtiest dubstep, but the rest of the
tune feels gutted and hollowed-out.The drum track seems to be missing
information, as though a mute button had been pressed or a patch cable
had come unplugged; for all its heaviness, it's a weirdly enervated
tune, gliding listlessly like a sailboat stuck in the doldrums. I've
never heard it in a club, and I can only imagine that it would be tough
to play effectively"
[great youtube comment on this: "it's like someone put 1995 through a paper shredder" !!]
Phil
pinpoints what may well be the most interesting and revealing characteristic
of these hybrids, which is that they are one-offs...
"Jabbed
like iron rods into the clockwork of the night, they feel less like
seeds for potential subgenres and more like weed killer, burning off the
overgrowth."
hybridisation, in the era when analogue mediation still dominated, seemed to take the form of, well, forms...
new forms... these became the focus, the centripetal attractor, for a
collective surge, a
swarming... scenius logic: a strong new template off which
myriad minor variations could be "seeded" (to use Phil's organicist
metaphor)... this then created a monolithic vibe (Amentalism... Wobblism being the last of these -isms?) that
was both
impressively/oppressively total at any given rave or club night... but that also had
staying
power (a new template like breakbeat science, or bass-science, could last five or six
years before all the potential permutations got played out)
hybridisation,
in the post-broadband era (which quickly led to the not-quite-total-but-near-enough eclipse of analogue mediation) seems to rarely lead to anything.... anything much. Hence the the one-off hybrids.... they are non-generative, non-genre-ative.... instead, there's an interminable series of momentary
agglomerations... a particular collation of networked influences mesh inside a producer's digital audio software...
offering further thoughts on this zone and "the anti-drop" Rory Gibb at Quietus notes how "these
very UK-sounding hybrid forms don't exist in a vacuum. They're all held
suspended by a tangled web of reference points, connections and
affiliations. More so than, say, many early dubstep and grime producers [i.e. early 2000s, before broadband really seriously eclipsed the analogue channels-- hard to remember, but emergent/golden-age grime barely had any web presence],
many of these producers have a deep knowledge of music stretching far
beyond their immediate surrounds."
the more
connectivity in the post-geographical sense (and atemporal,
archive-raiding sense), the less connection to a here-and-now.... the
more that artists are drawn out of a fully current,
geographically-situated musical conversation... (a continuum)
as well as undermining the conditions for scenius to emerge, this centripetal, dis-integrative logic (inherent to digiculture, to networks?) seems to extend the other direction too...
to worm itself inside the practice of the individual producer... conceivably, it's as anti-genius as it is anti-scenius
for, at
the extreme, even the artist doesn't develop a personal style...
doesn't repeat themselves... each new track is another genre-of-one
style is related to a measure of inflexibility, a measure of
predictability... that's how we recognise artistic signature.... but in
the ultra-flexibilized conditions of digiflux, the artist is
encouraged to endlessly differ from himself or herself, is pulled
every-which-way by the same forces that (as described in Martin Blackdown's piece) are
dis-integrating the nuum
genre = collectivised style... it too depends on an element of inflexibility, an element of predictability... on lockstep
3/ oh those analogue days, those economy-of-scarcity days
A: Hardcore was what got me started buying music on vinyl, yeah. And it
was literally ‘cos you couldn’t get it anywhere else. I didn’t have
decks at the time, I couldn’t mix; I was like 11 or 12 years old. But I
used to save my pound lunch money every day, ‘cos the records were a
fiver, and on Fridays I’d go down to Wax City Records in Croydon..... At the
same time I was picking up flyers and it was like the same thing with
that, I started collecting flyers and just….being part of it. Being part
of that hardcore thing... It was all
about, if you’ve got it, then you were hardcore [laughs]. What I try to
do at the moment [with Swamp81] – it’s a similar kind of ethos. The
music’s there on vinyl. If you want to go and get it, you can; I’m not
gonna shout about it, I’m not gonna try to get it into HMV or whatever
the fuck the high street record store is now [laughs], I’m not gonna go
digital, I’m not gonna do all that shit… so it’s like, it’s over here.
If you want to be part of it, you can be, but you’ve got to make a bit
of effort. And that’s kind of what hardcore was about. If you made the effort to find your local independent record shop,
if you made the effort to get the flyer to go to the rave – ‘cos without
the flyer you literally wouldn’t know about it, there was no internet,
there weren’t many adverts, at least not for the smaller raves – then
you were hardcore. If you did make that effort, then you were accepted,
you were in a kind of gang, a club. It was a special thing, and it was
linked into the record shops, the vinyl, the pirates, the flyers – it
was all this one thing together. That was hardcore for me.
Over the next two weeks I'll be visiting Harvard to deliver the keynote speech at a symposium on art + pop and going to Chicago to talk about Retromania at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
1/ TINNITUS: a symposium on art and rock’n’roll
date: Saturday, April 21
time: 9:15 AM Keynote Lecture by SR
location: Harvard Hall (room 104), Harvard University (Johnston Gate)
coming soon: details of my European mini-tour in early May: appearances at the Apocalypse Now (And Then)conference in Berlin (3rd to 5th) and at the Prima Vista literary festival in Tartu, Estonia (7th)
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
That's Not Funny, That's Ick
" 'Ick' means something. It either means you’re offended politically or you think something was morally compromised, or you find someone unattractive. So why don’t we articulate this 'ick' a little?" -- Lena Dunham, on reactions to the sex-not-sexy scenes in Girls
The Spanish translation of Retromania, published by Caja Negra, "premieres" at the Buenos Aires Book Fair on April 15th, and will be available in bookstores in other Spanish-reading nations in May.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Q/A with me, part of The Guardian's series of mini-interviews with authors on the occasion of the paperback edition of their book
audio of the "Critical Mass: Music Theory in the Information Age" panel at the Off The Page festival February, 2012 - chaired by Anne Hilde Neset (The Wire) and featuring Andrew Male (Mojo), Frances Morgan (The Wire), Jennifer Lucy Allan (The Wire)and myself
Monday, April 09, 2012
the missus interviews Lena Dunham, creator of Girls
Monday, April 02, 2012
hipster hardkore (w/ Julianna Barwick as 4AD-ethereal-girl --as per lisa deadcandance on FSOL's "Papua New Guinea" or liz cocteau on messiah's "temple of dreams" -- except not sampled but the guest-vocalist)
And another -- Bat says "you forgot Attack The Block!" which is "brilliant"
excellent mix by Mordant Music at Vice Italia
a lovely pair of pieces from Neil Kulkarni on Oliver Postgate and children's teevee then and now
which makes him a perfect icon for connectivity: the same data-flows that join together the world financial system and enable the flightiness of capital also allow for the mobility of cultural capital from local scenes to global ubiquity... at the start of the Blackberry commercial, he speaks of traveling the world "collecting influences"
reminded me of what Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinsteinwrote in the early 90s (in Data Trash) about how digital music technology prefigured transformations to cultural economy under globalisation: sampling as "the harvesting of energy from the local and the bounded for the global and unbounded"; samples as "archived body parts... disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows"; samplers/deejays as "vivisectionists, vampiring organic flesh, and draining its fluids into cold streams of telemetry..."
"Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories"
