Kidding around

Here's Our Kid with a piece for No Bells on corecore. "We're not kidding" the headline offers in a  proleptic parenthesis. Certainly, it does sound like a hoax, or a piss-take: one of those parodying-the-very-idea-of-genre entities that flicker up ephemerally on the internet. But apparently it is real, whatever that means in the increasingly derailed consensus hallucination that is life today:  a "deep internet video genre full of 'meme-poems' with cute cats and fried music choices... a meme equivalent of the many microgenres spawning across SoundCloud." And Kieran convincingly takes it seriously, along the way dropping some neat phrases like "an abyss of vibes."

More grounded in material realities - sweaty bodies rubbing against sweaty bodies,  reclaimed trashy urban spaces and shivery rooftops at dawn - here is Kieran's account of his favorite live shows and DJ experiences of 2022. Fifteen peaks picked out of three times as many expeditions across the nightlifescape of Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Sweet to read about Our Kid having so much fun in the clubs and micro-raves of the city that never sleeps. Glad to know that some of the time he is out there having adventures rather than inside chasing onscreen phantasms. 

Down with the Drain

In a new piece for No Bells, Kieran Press-Reynolds take a deep dive into the meme-mythos of Drain Gang and the collective's most prominent member Bladee.  Readers of this blog may well be unfamiliar with either but Kieran makes an intricately supported and vivid case for DG + B as the most influential and pervasive entity in the last decade's ever-more-chaotic genrescape of online sounds - a common denominator through-line cutting across an entropic field of endlessly splintering, recombining, and border-blurring micro-genres and nano-scenes. And it's more than just warped weirdo sounds, emo lyrics, and ultra-processed vocals - as K writes, "Drain culture" = "an abyss of in-jokes, slang, visuals, and fashion". The piece is a kind of archaeology of knowledge connecting the evanescent drifts of online fan energy and excitement. As K, writes "the way chatter is scattered across myriad forums, platforms, and private chats, and the inescapable fact that so many pivotal videos and memes and myth-building conversations get deleted or lost in the digital void—makes it almost impossible to fully delineate how a cultish fanbase forms online....  Underground internet musicians accrue fame and myth through the steady buildup of Instagram stories and lives, loosies, TikTok edits, micro-viral fan tweets that gain 1,000 or so likes and become an inside joke.. This kind of mercurial legend-construction can result in knowledge gaps when an artist rises up....  it has also bred more ghosts—artists who grow successful but whose musical past is dotted with elisions, breaks, erasures, mysteries. Luckily, by traveling back in time through ancient Reddit posts and panoramically viewing today’s music landscape, it’s possible to glimpse how this unit has grown." 

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". 

chasing the virus / chasing the divine

Over at No Bells blog, here's a piece in which genre epidemiologist Kieran Press-Reynolds tracks and traces the mutation and proliferation of new audio variants - nanogenres with names like sigilkore, slung, dariacore, murder metal, maplekore, hyperplugg. Even someone like myself - triple vaxxed with scepticism, ears shielded with N95-like taste-filters - finds his diagnosis compelling. 

In the '90s, folks liked to talk about the dub virus. Which never made sense to me - why compare something sacred and healing to little bitty entities that wreck your computer or make you feel like shit? Dub and roots makes you breathe better, it rebalances your system. Here's a luminous-numinous piece by Matthew Ingram about his lifelong love of dub and the music's connections to his latterday concerns with health and spirituality. There is also a Woebot in Dub mix, #3 of a series (here's 1 and 2).

One my favorites (a Woebot turn-on, in fact) and as a good a reason to believe in God as any I can think of. 

"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. 

Astral Squeaks - the new outer zones of alien rap vocals

And here's another fascinating Kieran Press-Reynolds piece: How Hyperspeed Squeals & Alien Whispers Became Rap's Final Frontier.  It's a deep-dive into the online realm of bedroom rappers who boldly go way out there, - beyond Playboi Carti's baby-voice, beyond even his fetus-voice - into      outermost zones of "rap-sing insanity" that sound more like "experimental ASMR or the national anthems of an alien civilization" than MC-ing as hitherto known. Artists like 645AR, lungskull, meat computer, Axxturel, sellasouls, islurwhenitalk, Jewelxxet et al are leaving behind words and even decipherable emotions for pure texture-play, breath-braiding and vocal-goo extrusion.

Here is Kieran's YouTube playlist for the artists and tracks mentioned in the piece.