Queasy Listening / Queasy Looking

Kieran with a fascinating Rabbit Holed dive into avant-garde ASMR - "from hyperspecific period roleplays to videos so frantic they're physically painful to perform..... this audiovisual internet-folk tradition is still evolving".

Of all the young-person stuff Kieran's introduced me to over the years, this might be my favorite. Feels like a completely 21st Century artform.  I can't really think of any precedents, whereas with most of the online music genres, as frazzled and overloaded and hyper-eclectic as they are, you can trace them back to late 20th Century constituents and starting-points, things like hip hop or jungle or electro or synthpop. Often they are supersaturated composites of all of those things and more (gabber etc). 

The fact that AvantSMR borders on - or outright bumrushes - the Kitsch  Zone just makes it more alluring.  The "cheese ahoy" warning signals, the cringe reflex -  this is your culturally-trained sensorium alerting you to the presence of the new. Push past the flinch.

The zoomed-in intimacy, the sibilant breathiness and crispy-wet micro-plosives that you normally only hear when you're millimeters from another human face - this creates a really peculiar atmosphere.  I'm surprised people find it relaxing (but then this is the experimental vanguard, so maybe it's not for that soothing sleepy-making function, or it's for the hardcore addicts who need to keep upping the dose, getting stronger and fiercer hits).

I suppose if there is a late 20th Century echo with this next one it is of things like Cyberdog and psytrance and such. 

I don't get the sought-for "tingles" (apparently these clips are really meant to be experienced through headphones, which I've not tried). But I do get a borderline-unpleasant stoned feeling. Everything too sharp, too vivid, too close. 

It makes me think of psychological techniques - holding eye contact with someone too long, a certain cadence of speech, huge smiles, invading personal space - that have a hypnotic or attention-compelling effect, such that you can't break away. Analogous perhaps to Moonie lovebombing. 

                                                        "girl has zero boundaries"

And then precursor-wise, with this next one .... steampunk? Some Goth-glam descended Japanese subculture (visual kei?) we've never even heard of over here?  

This is the 67th episode in an ongoing series - the amount of work involved in worldbuilding each one is staggering.

Feel like Moon Wiring Club ought to move into this area.  

Like this History Channel ASMR

Bringing a whole new level of "in" to "intimacy"

With this next one, if there's a precursor, it's with musique concrete that uses vocal material - also extended voice technique composition .... where there's a welter of wispy sibilant sounds and syllable-particles flying around. 

Andrew Parker alerts me to this possible precedent: Micromontage, "the arrangement of sounds (known as microsounds) on an incredibly small time scale. These sounds usually last from 10 milliseconds to less than a tenth of a second. By arranging and manipulating these sounds digitally, complex patterns and compositions can be made in ways that aren't possible via solely acoustic means. Horacio Vaggione specializes in micromontage, evident in works like Octuor (1982), Thema (1985), and Schall (1995). In Octuor, Vaggione synthesized and segmented sound files into fragments, mixing them into polyphonic structures. Thema utilizes automated mixing with streams of microelements like saxophone bursts arranged in varied patterns. Schall features sampled piano sounds, granulated and transformed to create detailed sound textures of varying intensities." 

Also coming at it from the other direction - a rustlescape

And this one, it's like Glitch Unplugged, a manual / acoustic version of clicks 'n' cuts

Okay this one is a pretty disturbing concept 

Also potentially panic-attack inducing, for most people, but then again seemingly a minority kink appeal

And as a Q-tip-phobe this one disquiets - is there such a thing as an anti-tingle?

And it's not all pretty young women with huge eyes. 

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Kieran also has a fun column on the new mega-splat from  Playboi Carti, imagining how it could be boiled down to a better album - an expansion on the old rockcrit kiss-off when reviewing double albums,. "it could be a killer single album". Except in this case he shows you how to condense and improve it.

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Roland B has some thoughts that apply equally to AvantSRM and Playboi Carti's post-continuity rap

“Writing aloud is not expressive... it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art...   Writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema in asmr. In fact, it suffices that the cinema video camera capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

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Even more AvantSMR

For once someone with no make-up