Reynoldso versus Reynaldo

Shawn Reynaldo is a music writer who's just published his debut book First Floor: Reflections on Electronic Dance Culture through Velocity Press, which has a growing catalogue of interesting tomes on dance music.   

The title comes from Shawn's Substack / newsletter First Floor. Check out his columns like this recent one on the rise of spectacle within dance culture.  

Recently Shawn and I had a really enjoyable, wide-ranging chat about club culture, nostalgia, futurity, music journalism, genre-naming, and more. For a day or two, the conversation is accessible to non-subscribers here.

I put it to Shawn that we are phonetic near-namesakes.  Strangely, he said this had never occurred to him! Perhaps when I was starting my writing career, I should have put an 'o' on the end of my byline - it has a dashing, swashbuckling air. 

family + friends reading

 Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with his latest piece for No Bells - looking at how Spotify's creation of a "Webcore" playlist lumps together a whole bunch of different online microgenres, collapsing their distinctness into meaningless mush, and what the consequences might be for those mushed. That reminded me of how "electronica" became a marketing term in late-90s America and similarly conflated UK + Euro sounds with discrete histories, vibes and functions. Kieran comes up with a bunch of parallels himself while continuing his cartography of the constantly mutating, subdividing, splintering and recombining genrescape of the 2020s. 

Over at his new-ish website, David Stubbs takes a delightful memory-lane trip through his earliest days as a music journalist - making the jump from Monitor to Melody Maker, via the briefest of interludes at Arthur Young.  The Wing Commander deftly weaves together the vivid immediacy of those halcyon days (so young, we were, and so full of ourselves) with the hindsight wisdom and uncertainties of age. 

I do not know Hari Kunzru well - I think we met just the once - but I've often thought that we seem to be on a similar wavelength, going by the kind of things he writes about in his novels. Still, I was startled when Melody Maker and The Young Gods popped up in his new piece  "Broken Links" for Harper's -  a meditation / taking-stock of the effects of the internet on culture, memory and desire, starting with the realisation that "I've now spent more of my life online than off". 

"21st Century Humor" aka "Interdimensional Memes"

 “What was once cringe has now become cool again."

Early 2000s nostalgia already... .Internetculture genreologist Kieran Press-Reynolds at Insider on the retro-absurdist meme collages currently infesting TikTok.

"Technologically impressive, hyper-digital spectacles that viewers admire purely because they are so unintelligible… Creators speed up, distort, saturate, stretch, or mutate these pieces of media to maximize the ludicrousness…"

Also contains a potted history of early stages of meme-faddery during the 21st Century so far, including Youtube poops and MLG montage parody.

A busy week for  Kieran Press-Reynolds. 

He makes his Pitchfork debut with a review of NYC rap crew Surf Gang's latest album SGV1, described as "a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures... husky whispers, slow-motion chirrups, reverb-laden echoes that flutter into nothingness" and with ensemble rapping that "feels like you’re watching the SoundCloud rap Avengers unite or some crossover episode between two hit TV shows". 

He also makes his Bandcamp debut with a profile of the netlabel dismiss yourself - the "nexus of hex" plus other freaky online microgenres, whose catalogue offers a trove of "glitchy burps", "alien jeers", "videogame ambient," "meme-havoc" and assorted bitcrushed beauty. 

And he's further been busy working at Insider, where he's done some fun pieces like this profile of  Vanessa Clark a.k.a. @glitchgirlmaster, the creator of TikTok's dance-craze of the summer.