linkage thinkage

Typical really - you declare your intention to revive the long-lapsed custom of inter-blog conviviality. Only to (almost) immediately lapse back again into unlinking entropy.

Here goes with another effort. Starting with an interesting piece on the pop hologram phenom by Owen Myers at The Guardian. Featuring a few quotes from me about the exploitation of dead stars. Here also is the full batch of thoughts I sent Owen a week or two ago.

Also quoted in the pop hologram piece is Professor Robin James, who's been on a little tear of posts recently at It's Her Factory. Here's an analysis of Panic! At The Disco's "High Hopes" (oh how I loathe that song) in terms of the financial logic of the derivative, and a related post about Panic! singer Brendon Urine's team-up with Taylor Swift for the even more putridly self-empowered "ME!" and its promo atrocity. (And to think I once hailed "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" as the "Party Fears Two" of emo). Robin also identifies a mini-trend for "Brexit Techno."

Carl the Impostume with a short sweet paean to the Cocteaus and Felt's Liz-powered "Primitive Painters".  I never got on with Treasure myself - too frou frou and frilly -but loved the Cocteaus on either side of that. Like Carl, I feel that, with Felt, "Primitive Painters" is the One - a pearly peal of  heroic inadequacy from the howling heart of those Years of Exile - although there are a few other high moments in the discography, amid much over-exquisite filigree. (How right somehow that the primary instrumentalist in the group should be called Maurice - not your run-of-the-mill British rock name).  Seems to be something Lawrentian in the air, what with this appreciation (Quinn Moreland on Forever Breathes the Lonely Word) that appeared only days ago in Pitchfork....

"and in the Eighties, there were wide-brim hats, there were...  lots of wide-brim hats, there were.... lots of large wide-brim hats - indie-wear, indie-wear - everywhere"

"When the Owls Cry in the Night" is the peculiar Belbury Poly-ish title  - never actually unpacked or even referenced during the piece itself, as I recall - of an interesting column by Rob Horning that recounts listening strategies he's developed in order to make music compelling in the face of the curiosity-killing overload.  Tasks he sets himself to reenchant, or renarrativize, the vast accumulated past (a past that nonetheless seems way more alluring than the vast sprawling present). Always enjoyed Horning's meditations at The New Inquiry on the effects of social media, the internet, smartphones, etc etc on life, culture, mentality, mood, etc etc. Now he and some of the same Inquiring minds  seem to be doing similar sort of  now-analysis at a new-ish location:  Real Life.




The idea of rationing one's exposure to music, keeping a distance from it, as a passion-protection strategy actually comes up over 35 years ago in this ancient radio interview with Sounds's Dave McCullough - a lost legend of the punk / postpunk / postpostpunk music press. He appears to have disappeared - nobody from that era seems to know for sure where he went after London or what he went on to do after quitting the rock press, most likely in a state of  savage disillusion. I have written on one of my  less-frequented blogs about how beguiling I find this unexpected discovery, this seemingly sole document of  McCullough in the audio flesh.

McCullough in the photo flesh, strolling through Leicester Sq with the Clash

Must have listened to the show about four times now, entranced by his spiky yet silver-tongued patter, by the brittle and impetuous movements of his mind, by the texture of a different age - 1983. Even grown fond of McCullough's odd and motley selection of favorite records from his collection, which include Hall & Oates, Dory Previn, and contemporaneous releases by the Pastels, Microdisney, Hurrah, Peter Hammill.



One thing McCullough said that struck me as true is that reviewers  - at least those with keen instincts and sharp sensibility - can tell by the first playing of the first track whether an album is any good or not. Which reminds me that I still haven't listened to Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride all the way through - and that's because the memory of the first few tracks as heard several weeks back left an indelibly unappetizing after-aroma. This review by Lucas Fagen at Hyperallergic has the ring of truth: earnest maturity and emotional "depth" has turned to stodge all that was spring-heeled sprightly sparkly in Vampire's blithe and ravishingly superficial soundspirit. But it could be that I "agree" in large part because that gives me permission to shirk the chore of listening to all four sides of it.

Talking of the postpunk era, here's an interview with David Wilkinson, the author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain. Which I confess - scared off by the academic publisher price - I have not actually read, but I've seen Wilkinson give a conference talk and he has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the era.

                                                       

Another book of note published relatively recently is Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience by Paul C. Jasen, who some in this parish will remember as the man behind this . With subsections bearing titles like "Spectral Catalysis", "Numinous Strategies", "Baroque Affect Engineering" and "Three Physio-Logics", it's some heady stuff ranging far beyond obvious compatibles like roots reggae and jungle and dubstep. More information and favorable appraisals can be checked out here.

Also notable are two books just out or imminent from old pals of mine, Erik "Techgnosis" Davis with High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (US release info here, UK release info here) and the legendary Vivien Goldman with Revenge of the She-Punks
A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot. 

Oh yes and I'm looking forward to reading the new book by Richard King,  The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape - which looks to be the holloway connecting the two Robs (Young's Electric Eden, Macfarlane's  Landmarks).

Oh yes, and erm,  - going back to the joint counter-entropy campaign -  I'm hatching a post about the Noughties for the collective (if as yet only potential) blog -  honest I am. Coming soon... ish

link think

I have fallen out of the habit of linking to things.

I guess we all have.

Which makes the "we" in that sentence even more tenuous.

But I'm thinking about mounting a counter-entropic tendency. Considering getting back into the habit of linking to things I've read and liked, or read and disagreed with. Quoting them - perhaps even commenting on them, if I can muster the energy.

And here's a good place to start. The Impostume - aka Carl Neville - musing about blog nostalgia:

"On some level I am bored of and by Internet 2.0 though I am not quite sure what that means. I don't think I am nostalgic for pre- or early internet days, though some of the reflections in Alex Niven's upcoming New Model Island, on the early days of blogging, has chimed in with a way my thoughts and feelings, possibly my needs and desires have been tending for a while. I think a return to blogging, precisely because it has fallen into desuetude, precisely because no-one now is really listening or reading, appeals. What was always nice about it was partly the a-sociallity, you wrote something and then had no idea who had read it, or what anyone thought and nor did you have to care particularly. It was/is both public and private but somehow it could command an intimacy, an invisible meeting of minds, lives, semi or totally anonymously. what you wrote was out there somehow working away in the world and you never knew how. You had connected but without any of the burdens of sociality, without the need for an exchange.

"It's that particular mode of non-exchange, the lack of reaction, the idea of something going quietly out there, the message in a bottle, a misdirected letter, sender unknown that I like. a certain distance is needed for people to really meet, a certain hiddenness needed before you can really speak."

Hmm, interesting thoughtage, as always, from Carl there - although personally I feel the opposite: I miss the sociality of blogging - the remote collectivity. As exemplified by the decades blogs that Carl set up: joint projects, people taking turns to do a post, but also a lot of stimulating chit-chat in the comments. Another example would be the inter-blog and guest-contributed  commentary on "themes" that I or others would host, on things like guitar riffs, or drummige, or solos, or bass bits. And many other forms of conversation-building and ideas-pooling that took place at shared-blogs or within blog-clusters, including those from opposed camps back in those days when there was ideological friction enough for sides to be taken.

Meanwhile, Carl is taking a break from finishing up his new novel Eminent Domain - the follow-up but not sequel to the splendid Resolution Way - in an unusual way. By starting another novel, The Fullfillment* Centre,  micro-excerpts of which are being previewed at the blog, starting here. I'm already gripped, it's like reading a serial.

In the course of one chapter, Carl, or his character/proxy, drops this nice thought:

"There’s an old quote about buying books: we think we are buying the time to read them, but having been a hoarder myself when I was younger I understand it differently, we were buying the selves we imagined we would become after we had read them, the great works, the great thoughts and each one bought was a new possible self, our own future greatness, claimed, set aside, each one sold on a small grief for that self’s loss, our future diminished. The dizziness in libraries or bookshops, the circling of souls, selves, worlds. It was easy to get trapped there, enchanted, enchained."

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Another online thought-bunker  I've come across recently is Modernism Unbound, which looks like a webzine but appears to be a one-man enterprise, the work of Jon Lindblom.  Here's an essay on the drug-tech interface and rave culture of the Nineties. And here's one on the drug-tech interface in more recent years, looking at anti-depression and anti-anxiety meds and late capitalist culture. There doesn't seem to be a musical angle to that essay, though, which I think misses a trick - or at least, the essay I am really waiting and wanting to read is about the sonic interface between trap / mumble rap production and drugs like Percoset, Xanax, etc. What kind of subjectivity is produced by the leisure abuse of prescription drugs like these -  and how has this manifested sonically, and in terms of vocal styling? I have yet to come across a piece that even describes from inside the specific high induced by improper, non-medicinal use of these drugs and their polydrug combination with various other substances, like cough syrup or the traditional illegal buzzes... let alone explore deeply the potentiating synergy with particular sound-textures, Auto-Tune, etc.

(This is my own contribution, but it lacks the er field research element that would really be required, if you get me).

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Also on rave and the drug-tech interface (well, kinda) is this essay about the Eurohardcore continuum and gabber, by Jeppe Ugelvig at NERO Editions, which I have annotated and commentated upon already at the other place.

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A nice tribute by Richard Williams at The Blue Moment to Peter Hammill, now 70 years old but  not about to stop any time soon. Indeed he has just released  In Amazonia, a collaboration with  Swedish group Isildurs Bane. Writes Williams:

"Listening to it the first time, my first thought was that this was how progressive rock should have turned out. The music is characterised by a sense of inquiry and a delight in exploring resources... while the lyrics strive for the effect of poetry.... It arrives at a place where European rock music seemed to be heading when it veered away from American influences 50 years ago."


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Odds and sods:

A piece by Rosie Spinks at Quartzy arguing that the age of the influencer is dead (or should be) and that it's high time for the return of the slacker

Always a pleasure to read Mike Powell on Vampire Weekend - love the description of Rostam as the band's "Swiss Army knife" - but just like with his write-up of their previous album, it really doesn't sound like an album I'd extract pleasure listening to. But I've had that reaction with every Father of the Bride review I've come across.

Finally here's a Resonance FM show about postpunk-era Australian experimental label M-Squared - the program is the work of Superfluid, a monthly radio show and events organisation based in London.