A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:
1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary clipfarming, TrueAnon offers something unusual: carefully researched takes, delivered with humor and genuine empathy."
I was tickled to learn from the piece that one TrueAnon, Liz Franczak, used to read Blissblog and K-Punk back in the day.
At the unmentionable place, the winning witty comment: "The podcasters have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it"
2/ For his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed, K delves through the dankness ofMarxist brainrot - ultra-left teenage meme-makers battling the "alt-right slop all over TikTok", with a particular focus on the mythos of "Red Shambhala, the idea of a communist utopia from Tibetan Buddhist lore."
Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fondling some Astro-turf.
"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock": bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.
Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names...
Slackerdelia part 3?
Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc.
But what would part 2 be?
Chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, of course.
Not the sound of the groups he's writing about particularly, but some of K's evocations of them reminded me of my favorite guitar album of the past 15 years: Suburban Tours by Rangers.
Also the name of one of the bands, deer park, reminded me of the opening track "Deerfield Village".
I got into this record not long before we moved to LA and I think it somehow prepared me for suburban life in the land of perpetual summer. Drifting through, dazed by light, mood oddly suspended between anomie and bliss....
As I recall, the album is inspired by living in Texas and the newbuilt suburbs, which often have names inspired by the wilderness they've supplanted - hence track titles like "Bear Creek", "Deerfield Village," "Woodland Hills," "Glen Carin."
That integration of wilderness and built-up areas is very LA and something that continues to enchant and unsettle - just the other day heading off to an on-the-early-side dental appointment we saw a mangy looking coyote in someone's driveway. This in a neighbourhood completely built-up with suburban houses, no wilderness or even parks nearby.
An early attempt to connect hypnagogic pop and Southern California while freshly enchanted as a new arrival.
Then there's the Suburban Tours track "Out Past Curfew" - an allusion to the fact that some towns in America actually have legal curfews for teenagers. You're not allowed out after sundown.
Joe Knight has put out a bunch of excellent records since but here he tapped into something really magical-mystical - I bracket Suburban Tours with The Greatest Hit and Up On the Sun.
Supposedly he drew some sideways inspiration from this song by Rush - not musically but the mise en scene
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Another recent Rabbit Holed - K reports onSWAGGOTFEST, a 12-hour anarcho-pride parody of a music festival that transcended cringe and captured the sweetest, rawest aspects of the New York DIY scene
Kieran with a fascinating Rabbit Holed dive into avant-garde ASMR - "from hyperspecific period roleplays to videos so frantic they're physically painful to perform..... this audiovisual internet-folk tradition is still evolving".
Of all the young-person stuff Kieran's introduced me to over the years, this might be my favorite. Feels like a completely 21st Century artform. I can't really think of any precedents, whereas with most of the online music genres, as frazzled and overloaded and hyper-eclectic as they are, you can trace them back to late 20th Century constituents and starting-points, things like hip hop or jungle or electro or synthpop. Often they are supersaturated composites of all of those things and more (gabber etc).
The fact that AvantSMR borders on - or outright bumrushes - the Kitsch Zone just makes it more alluring. The "cheese ahoy" warning signals, the cringe reflex - this is your culturally-trained sensorium alerting you to the presence of the new. Push past the flinch.
The zoomed-in intimacy, the sibilant breathiness and crispy-wet micro-plosives that you normally only hear when you're millimeters from another human face - this creates a really peculiar atmosphere. I'm surprised people find it relaxing (but then this is the experimental vanguard, so maybe it's not for that soothing sleepy-making function, or it's for the hardcore addicts who need to keep upping the dose, getting stronger and fiercer hits).
I suppose if there is a late 20th Century echo with this next one it is of things like Cyberdog and psytrance and such.
I don't get the sought-for "tingles" (apparently these clips are really meant to be experienced through headphones, which I've not tried). But I do get a borderline-unpleasant stoned feeling. Everything too sharp, too vivid, too close.
It makes me think of psychological techniques - holding eye contact with someone too long, a certain cadence of speech, huge smiles, invading personal space - that have a hypnotic or attention-compelling effect, such that you can't break away. Analogous perhaps to Moonie lovebombing.
"girl has zero boundaries"
And then precursor-wise, with this next one .... steampunk? Some Goth-glam descended Japanese subculture (visual kei?) we've never even heard of over here?
This is the 67th episode in an ongoing series - the amount of work involved in worldbuilding each one is staggering.
Feel like Moon Wiring Club ought to move into this area.
Like this History Channel ASMR
Bringing a whole new level of "in" to "intimacy"
With this next one, if there's a precursor, it's with musique concrete that uses vocal material - also extended voice technique composition .... where there's a welter of wispy sibilant sounds and syllable-particles flying around.
Andrew Parker alerts me to this possible precedent: Micromontage, "the arrangement of sounds (known as microsounds) on an incredibly small time scale. These sounds usually last from 10 milliseconds to less than a tenth of a second. By arranging and manipulating these sounds digitally, complex patterns and compositions can be made in ways that aren't possible via solely acoustic means. Horacio Vaggione specializes in micromontage, evident in works like Octuor (1982), Thema (1985), and Schall (1995). In Octuor, Vaggione synthesized and segmented sound files into fragments, mixing them into polyphonic structures. Thema utilizes automated mixing with streams of microelements like saxophone bursts arranged in varied patterns. Schall features sampled piano sounds, granulated and transformed to create detailed sound textures of varying intensities."
Also coming at it from the other direction - a rustlescape
And this one, it's like Glitch Unplugged, a manual / acoustic version of clicks 'n' cuts
Okay this one is a pretty disturbing concept
Also potentially panic-attack inducing, for most people, but then again seemingly a minority kink appeal
And as a Q-tip-phobe this one disquiets - is there such a thing as an anti-tingle?
And it's not all pretty young women with huge eyes.
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Kieran also has a fun column on the new mega-splat from Playboi Carti, imagining how it could be boiled down to a better album - an expansion on the old rockcrit kiss-off when reviewing double albums,. "it could be a killer single album". Except in this case he shows you how to condense and improve it.
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Roland B has some thoughts that apply equally to AvantSRM and Playboi Carti's post-continuity rap
“Writing aloud is not expressive... it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art... Writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.
"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema in asmr. In fact, it suffices that the cinema video camera capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”
Kieran has a new weekly column atPitchfork called Rabbit Holed - exploring that world where music and meme synergize... online micro-genres and nano-genres, TikTok fads, fast-flickering vibes and evanescent energies. A filter for separating "shitpost genius from shitpassé lameness".
The latest episode is about the composers of Survivor's themes and incidental underscores and sound-FX - and the fanatics who painstakingly reconstruct pirated versions of these tunes for a cult following.
He also has a Spotify playlist for tunes currently catching his ear.
Rabbit Holed is part of a push by Pitchfork to have more personality-driven writing, with the launch of three regular columns (the others are by Meaghan Garvey and Alphonse Pierre).
A few other recent Kieran-Press Reynolds pieces:
for New York Times, a piece onStimulation Clicker, another of these torture-as-fun, Monopoly-as-overclocked-mental-collapse type videogame.
