dream a garden

I had a lot of fun with the researching- which among other things involved spending time in three different LA gardens - and writing of this survey-of-the-2010s feature on Ambient and New Age for Resident Advisor. It's part of a swathe of looking-back-at-the-past-decade coverage they're doing this week.

Big up to the interviewees: Spencer Doran (Visible Cloaks / Kankyō Ongaku), India Jordan (New Atlantis), Matthewdavid (Leaving Records), William Thomas (Sounds of the Dawn), and Droid (No Place Like Drone / Dissensus).



One thing I didn't get to explore is the ambient quality of certain genres that on the face of it would seem to be about as politically and philosophically distant from ambient / new age values as imaginable. Such as  trap. Lyrically it's all triumphalism and machismo - the opposite of ego-melting surrender and androgny. But the production drapes glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass. Wistful melody-riffs loop endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. 



In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio. Achieving its effects through accumulative sameness, trap - like UK drill - is designed for immersive and inattentive listening: it’s purpose-built to slip back into being background music, the soundtrack to driving or chilling. 

You could call it Ambien Music, after the sedative-hypnotic prescription drug, given the way that trap MCs so frequently reference pain-killing, anxiety-deadening drugs like Percocet and Xanax.  The result is the characteristic affect of this music: glazed, numb, insulated, oddly passive.  Auto-Tune etherializes rappers like Quavo, Rich the Kid, Playboi Carti (with his famous “baby” voice) and Young Thug to the point where they sometimes seem barely-there - angelic boy-men whose vocal texture contradicts the overt meaning of the text.  

So pretty, so hypnotic, so chill - the chiming glistening glide of the backing track to "Motorsport" sounds like nothing so much as systems-music. Except that it rolls out at a  calm steady pace, almost screwed tempo, rather than the typically highly-strung, frantic, fidgety feel of a Michael Nyman or Philip Glass movie score.  

Straight outta Atlanta… to Bratislava, Warszawa, Roma, and just about everywhere

About eighteen months ago I went on a trip that passed through a bunch of European countries. Along the way I met up with a series of old friends. The conversation would invariably turn to our kids and the music they were into - and the answer was invariably ​“Trap!”. During this trip I also gleaned that each country had its own local version of trap.

Since then I’ve been itching to write a piece on the internationalization of trap. The opportunity came with an invitation from The Face to contribute to their “looking back on the 2010s” coverage, with a piece on how the trap beat has dominated the decade - and traveled all across the globe.

Despite its seeming redundancy – it’s so very close to the Real Thing, of which there is no shortage in the first place – I was surprised by how enjoyable I found much of this Czech, Polish, Italian, Slovakian, French, Moroccan etc trap. Despite being unable to understand the lyrics at all. Which underlines one of the points in the piece: the relative downgrading of lyricism as a component of this music. Instead, it's all about the slippery glisten of the Auto-Tuned vocal, the becoming-melody of speech, the moans and the murmurs. Pure flow.  

As much as That Beat, it's this vocal mode midway between rapping and crooning - along with the peculiarly indefinite affect that its glazed texture embodies - that has struck a chord across the world, and that seems to have caught something of the not-so-secret sadness of our time. 

Big up to those who pointed me in the right direction: Miloš Hroch, Agus Tomaszewska, Jan Błaszczak, Damir Ivic, Sadmanbarty, Beatrice Finauro. Etienne Menu.

Futuremania

Here's a piece I wrote for Pitchfork about 20 years of Auto-Tune - and the whole related realm of pitch-correction and "vocal design" technologies. It spans from from Cher's "Believe" to  Migos's "Slippery," via Britney, Kanye, Ke$ha,  Keef, Flavour N'abania, Man like Nayvadius, and more. Detractors dispatched; digital existence dissected; defining sound of the 21st Century delineated.