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 (and unpop offshoots) that makes it particularly susceptible to nostalgia for its own earlier phases of surging excitement, its virgin moments of emergence. You don’t get the same plangent yearning to time travel in other art forms or areas of entertainment.

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. 

*  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