"Tis no man - tis a remorseless writing machine" (1-3)

Mvuent, who blogs as Aloysius, returns - after a long silence - to his "audio animation" series Esoteric Experiences At Home and abruptly finishes it with a flurry of posts, topped by a "retrospective" on the entire series in the form of colloquy with fellow Dissensian Luke Davis. 

That conversation nods to the tradition of endings to books like More Brilliant Than The Sun and Neon Screams - instead of a conclusion, the author clarifies their thoughts via a more colloquial exchange with a sympathetic interlocutor (although it may actually be an imaginary exchange, a disguised auto-interview - Luke insists that he never spoke with Kit Mackintosh for their "dialogue"). 

Although the end of the blog series, this might actually be the best starting point: read the scintillating after-thoughts, then go back to the beginning and gird up thy brain for the epic series, which ranges across a vast span of music, from composers like Francois Bayle, Michel Redolfi and Laurie Spiegel to producers like Eon, Luke Slater, Trevor Horn, Sacred Tapestry, Autechre, and The Caretaker. 

It is a commitment, but one absolutely worth making - indeed it's essential reading for anyone interested in electronic music, synesthetic listening, and how to write about sound-shapes in motion rigorously, but without reduction or getting lost in technicalities. Hopefully a down payment on a book, it's a flashback to the golden age of  blog series and macro-essays by such as K-punk and Rouge's Foam. It teems with arresting images and suggestive concepts ("the sound character" -a quasi-living entity that inhabits a soundworld; "fog of war"; "a consilience of imagination").

Here are some tasters: I have separated the imagery from the pieces of music they evoke, so that you can enjoy them as pure language.  

"Passage through an area guarded by 'stone bees', whose undulating buzz reverberates eerily through the caverns"

"It's as though the bells have sunk beneath dark underground waters."

"Subtle fluctuations of volume heighten the euphoric feeling that you’re not just hearing but actually moving through them, like an airplane caressed by clouds"

"The central sound character cycles through all sorts of tactility transformations, melting, smoldering, and brightening at various stages of the journey. By the final minute, it’s charged to a triumphant energy apex."

"...  a parallel world in the uppermost frequency range. Sound characters heard in the main dimension can be faintly heard passing through the upper world. About halfway through, a rapture occurs. Every sound character shoots up one by one. After a moment of lower-world silence... the miracle is reversed: characters can be heard swooping down from the heavens." 

"It's as though the seas and birds have turned into gold"

"A kind of harpsichord machine gun is being fired off to adjust ozone conditions."

"The sounds of ballroom performance transform into gust front wind and a cacophony of unvoices"

"... reimagines its weathered materials so vividly that they're transfigured into poetic sound climates"

".... you finally set foot in this landscape of inner sublime"

For sure, there's an "ear of the beholder" aspect here, as there is with any verbal evocation of sound. But the balance of precision and poetic puts me in mind of Gaston Bachelard's inventories of  imagination and taxonomies of tropes  -  the same heightened attentiveness to movement, space, and light,  applied not to literature but to electronic mindscapes. 

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A playlist for the second half of the series (i.e. the April posts) - designed as a resource for readers rather than a continuous listen. 

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Another Dissensian - who may or not wish to be identified by the forum alias or  real-world name -  has launched a promising new blog: L.S. Trackhead

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Finally, truly a remorseless pitching machine, Kieran Press-Reynolds drops new pieces (with more to come in the weeks to come)

At the New York Times, a piece on the "influencer horror videogame" Content Warning

Talking about shitpostmodernism with Emilie Friedlander + Andrea Domanick at The Culture Journalist 

Bladee's Cold Visions as Pitchfork's Best New Music

A survey for The Face of internet rap's underground genre sprawl

A No Bells celebration of the return of Bushwick club Rash, which had been razed by an arsonist with probable hate-crime intent

Nia Archives debut album, appraised for Pitchfork. 

new shoots

The blogscene seems more dormant than it's ever been. Heartening, then, to see a burst of discursive energy over at Aloysius, breaking a long silence with a model display of  close listening. In this case, listening to "banging unintelligent techno" by The Advent and Joey Beltram (highlighting JB's "ear for choosing sounds with strong phonetic properties"), Model 500's Deep Space ("science fiction as it seemed when I was a kid: not cheesy and man-childish, but mysterious, vast, and wise"), Francois Bayle's Grande Polyphonie ("a series of sound-character studies....  a comprehensible chaos"), and Baby Ford & Ian B's "Dead Eye" ("submersion in complete darkness... awed apprehensiveness of moving forward through an unknown and dangerous-seeming environment").

Aloysius's post ends, incidentally, with one of the best "bloggaz 4 life" sign-offs ever. 

Over here, things have been quiet too - I have a heap of posts waiting to be written up, but been busy with various developments.  

Most substantial of recent postige is this Hardly Baked 2 megasplat on the nexus of late glam, prog and incipient New Wave, which started with me stumbling on a Split Enz promo which is mindblowingly godawful except for about 30 seconds in the middle when it's mindblowing, and then swelled into a sprawling video and jpeg-illustrated tour of similar cusp-straddling middle-Seventies monstrosities. Indeed, I keep adding new clips 'n' pix 'n' dollops of data.  

At Energy Flash, I also look into an unlikely source of the words "rave" and "raver" in the Brit Sixties.  

But here at the hub blog, it's mostly been a grim, endless procession of RIPs. Perhaps I should just go ahead and rename it Griefblog...

A couple of extracurricular activities:

In Taiwan last month I did an interview with Brian Hioe and Florence Yi-Hsun Huang for the webzine No Man Is An Island, which is connected to a publication called New Bloom - touching mostly on ideas related to Energy Flash and Retromania as well as the politics of music in general, my career to date, etc.

Just out now is a new installment of Sombrero Fallout, a podcast created by Ian Forth, an old college associate and early contributor to Margin, the zine that preceded Monitor.  This episode features me chatting with Ian about  a bunch of my favorite records, from Ian Dury and the Slits via  Jan Garbarek and World Domination Enterprises to Migos and June Tabor.  

bloggige

Underway at Aloysius, a thoughtful series of posts exploring the sorts of spaces and ^scape routes that electronic music opens up (electronic music taken as everything from Luc Ferrari and Francois Bayle to Aphex Twin and Psyche). The series starts with Creative Mode On,  establishes Music As Diegesis,  enters Zones Without People,  gets Super Hostile vs Super Docile , traces Palimpsestscapes, and today contemplates Vanishing Visions and Unknown Memories.  (And here, already is another episode: Transfigured States).

Opening statement lays out the terrain -  "the internet makes a sort of engagement with music possible that’s incredibly expansive in its reach yet utterly introverted in its nature" - and subsequent posts unravel the implications of this tendency toward sonic solipsism combined with infinite extension of the listening self, examining different modes of listener projection (embodied performance versus nonhuman expanses) and so on. As well as analysis and speculation, there's also some terrific synesthetic evocations, e.g.

"Right out the gate you’re assailed by an industrial-machine drone of suffocating pressure. Layers constantly fade in and out, but through these changes in color and intensity this force never dissipates; at times it disconcertingly resembles the human voice. At intervals it lets up for just long enough to allow various species of feral mechanical creatures to burst in, snapping and barking in their own dialects. You soon find that these chrome and gunmetal hell-creatures are capable of accelerating into near-unfollowable flashes of violent, unpredictable movement.... Through all the fluctuations that follow, you never get more than a few seconds to relax; even at its most subdued the piece bristles with tension and inhuman malevolence. On three occasions, descending swarms of nanobots envelope you then evaporate into trails of steam." 

More tasty bloggige - Woebot with an appreciation of Neil Young that takes issue with the widespread viewpoint that "his bruising, ragged, noisy rock music" in the Crazy Horse mode is the good stuff and the more tender, plaintive side is sappy and commercially pandering. There's fascinating stuff about Young's medical history and psychology I didn't know... as you'd expect Matt folds ol' Neil into his ongoing preoccupations with health, spirituality and the counterculture, acclaiming him as "the pre-eminent psychic and spiritual musician of our times". 

Because he's been in the news as a culture-warrior of late, I recently found myself playing Young for the first time in.... quite possibly a couple of decades actually. And I think I largely agree with Matt's take. The full-blast Neil w/ Crazy Horse live experience was one of the most purely powerful rock shows I've ever experienced. But I've never once returned to Arc-Weld after the first and only play. While excited to pick up Live Rust on vinyl cheapish back in the '90s, it never became a regular listen like Rust Never Sleeps itself. That said, probably my faves, the songs I would go back to over and over, combine the pained plaintiveness and the ragged rawness: "Powderfinger", "Cortez the Killer", "Southern Man". 

Return of Blogs

New blog of note #1 - The Priapean Logs. Started by Dissensus contributor Sadmanbarty, a young fellow with a bulging sackload of ideas about 21st Century music.  (And earlier music too - a drummer by trade, he knows the nuts-and-bolts intricacies of rhythm). Check out these posts on the Haze as an analogue-era production aesthetic now replaced by something sharper and frostier, and on Wu Tang Clan's Forever.

New(-ish) blog of note #2 - Aloysius. Started by Dissensus contributor Mvuent, from Minneapolis. Check out this post on "reaching the far lands as an aesthetic goal" for experimental music. Never having played Minecraft and only glimpsed it from a distance, the concept of "the far lands" goes over my head. But my son - who practically lived inside the game for a few years in his mid-teens - says it's spot on.