Social Discipline / Exmachina

I had a really fun time chatting with Miguel Prado and Mattin for their podcast Social Discipline, in a wide-ranging conversation that took in depressive hedonism, the surprising longing of 25% of the American population for a king, analogue-era electronic music, streaming versus vinyl, CCRU, Dry Cleaning, Bowie, Rae Sremmurd, The Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, and... musique concrete composer / sandal-maker Roberta Settels.

Check out M+M's earlier Social Discipline conversations with the likes of  Mark Leckey, Claire Rousay, Mat Dryhurst, Alex Williams...

I really enjoyed reading Exmachina. Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → ∞, the new book by Valerio Mattioli, and then writing the foreword. The author previously of Superonda, a book about Italy's 1970s edge-of-rock vanguard (Battiato et al), Mattioli here considers the 1990s and U.K. electronica, using  the works of Richard D. James, Autechre, and Boards of Canada as a prism for writing about the future-now we currently inhabit.  Cocooned in a lockdown bubble, Mattioli plunged into a state of "ecstastic paranoia", a mode of hyper-interpretation and audio-intoxication (some other kinds of intoxication played a role too) that encouraged his mind to trace and chase the ideas and implications spiraling out of the sounds and follow them wherever they seemed to want to go. Exmachina works as both a flashback to the '90s mindset (ccru and other technosophers of that euphoric-dysphoric moment appear) and an anatomy of now, with Aphex, Autechre and BoC figuring as prophets of our present. 

The book is out now in Italy on Minimum Fax and I expect will come out in translation in English and other languages soon enough. It certainly deserves to propagate widely. 

You can read my foreword at Il Tascabile. 

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. 

How's things?

Matt Colqhoun a.k.a Xenogothic reminds us that it is five years since Mark Fisher left us.  

I don't have much to say apart from the fairly selfish thought that I'd love to know what Mark would have had to say about things. 

Things in the specific sense - cultural products. Like the Dry Cleaning album, or SOPHIE's music. Feted television series or films - which ones would have excited him or seemed indicative of a condensation of popular desire, a shift in consciousness,  an ideological glitch, worth taking the measure of? What things would have stirred his delicious scorn? And how would he have reacted to The Caretaker becoming a TikTok meme?

But I'd also love to know what Mark would have had to say about "things" in a general sense - where we are. This sense of paralysis and helpless sliding towards catastrophe on multiple levels. It would be  a chilling thrill to read Mark on the subject of the awful people who govern us, or, in America, the awful people trying to make government impossible. How would he have processed the pandemic and lockdown? 

It would have been exciting to see where Mark went next with his ideas, that ambitious system he was always renovating and adding extensions to.... to watch his outlook adapt under the pressure of the changes in his own self with the passage of time and the pressure of changing challenges out there.  Could he have come up with a whole new intellectual adventure for himself? 

The thought of Mark missing out on these five years of living - the good things and bad things that we've all gone through, the purely personal experiences he would have had with those closest to him -  is supremely sad. 

But I mourn also the thoughts Mark would have shared, and the thoughts he would have sparked in us.