spectral cinema

At Residual Noise, James Riley argues for A Field In England as a hauntological film

That makes two, then - with Berberian Sound Studio as the other. Not quite a movement, and one integer short of a trend according to the old journalistic rule. But significant.

The H-connection is clear because of Julian House's involvement in Berberian (doing the credit sequence to the film within the film, Il Vortice Equestre) and his making of an alternative trailer for A Field:

Riley points out where both Ben Wheatley's film and Julian's trailer overlap with a neo-psychedelic aesthetic but also how they differ and veer away into something darker and more unsettled:

"Here we have a similarly high contrast palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details. Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting results"

^^^^^^^
 
Haven't yet seen A Field In England, really keen to. Recently, finally watched Berberian, having had the DVD sit around for ages, and thought it brilliant.

these groundhog days

Another year approaches its end... and yet another Tiny Mix Tapes year-end-wrap-up essay trying to think its way through/past/around retromania (and Retromania)

This one's thesis - 2013 was the Year of Appropriation.

Just like 2012, 2011, and every other year in recent memory, then. Only more so.

Writer Simon Chandler takes an optimistic stance. But I dunno, man:  if the best I could claim for 2013 was that it saw the continuation and marginal exacerbation of moves made by Ferraro, Lopatin, and Hype Williams in 2010 (or earlier), I'd be quite glum.

Dean Blunt figures prominently as an exemplar. The pro argument more or less the same as my nutshell from a couple of  years ago:   "a music, seductive in its vaporousness, that seems to be a place where signifiers go to die, become insubstantialized."

I said "optimistic" but actually, at first the essay seems the opposite, speaking of the erosion of cultural synchrony, the failure of new micro-genres to have extra-musical repercussions....   But then there's a swerve and it's argued that wringing your hands over these developments is old-fashioned. Aesthetics are all that matter; other considerations, other expectations for music,  are "sociology".

But what if the severing of music from social energy, the incapacity of music to generate new forms of behaviour and community....  apart from being disappointing in themselves, actually had a pernicious effect on the music itself?  What if it was a two-way process, a vitiating circle?

I've talked before about the rise of "concept-music". And again we see here the withdrawal of underground music into a cordoned-off seclusion that oddly resembles the art world.   As underground albums increasingly barely exist as commercial entities, their appearance in the "world" become more and more like an exhibition.  The releases get written up in the appropriate journals and a tiny handful will buy them - when available at all - as pricey, exquisitely-packaged musical equivalents to the limited edition print. But most will check them out for free, out of a desire to stay informed or participate in the conversation. And that makes sense: as making a livelihood from music becomes an ever more remote scenario, the art-world model of prestige and "being taken seriously" has a compensatory attraction to musicians.  But it's a long way from the democratic and world-historical power that music has demonstrably exerted in the past.

reviving the already revived / real it so fake i am beyond real

 "It’s a strange business, 'reviving' something that’s been revived a few hundred times already"

Nitsuh Abebe on "What New Folkies Share With the Old Ones"

New folkies being "Mumfords, Avetts, Lumineers & Co", old being the Fifties collegiate types who made a cult of Leadbelly, "squeaky-clean crew-cut folksters in jug-band drag sing[ing] songs about railroads"

What they have in common, basically, is an obsession with authenticity that inevitably, even instantaneously, generates inauthenticity

Nitsuh traces the seed of this instant-ersatz, or one of its sources anyway, to this paradox:

"what we consider folk today [is] not a living tradition, really. It’s more like a snapshot of a tradition—American rural music as it existed at the precise moment that someone thought to make recordings of it. At some point in the twenties or thirties, once enough of those recordings had been made, the whole thing was trapped in amber: It became, officially, the oldest version of rural-American “folk” music that anyone could go back to consult and imitate using their own ears. It became, almost by technological accident, the wellspring and the touchstone, leaving every generation of revivalists looking like a bunch of people holding blurry Polaroids of Eden and arguing over how to resurrect it. It’s like a cargo cult in reverse: Instead of “primitive” people coming across a modern object and surrounding it with elaborate mystical explanations, we get modern people discovering something traditional and erecting intellectual fetishes around it."

The fake-folk, Abebe, argues, is basically arena rock with a small gestural component that harks back deceivingly to the very "organic" "communality" that rock/pop as a mass leisure industry has done so much to eradicate

 "If you want to talk about the diminishing returns of folk, this is the fascinating one: As soon as we started recording this stuff, it became awfully difficult for it to exist. So now our revivalists live in a world of authorship and property, documents and influences, and every once in a while they all shout “Hey” in unison, a faint echo of the proposition that music can also work differently."  

The invention of recording, then, makes a break in organic time, the temporality of barely perceptible but steady evolution in communities and traditions....    Recording makes preservation of the music past possible, but at the cost of proliferating embalmed traditions, time warp cults, xeroxes of xeroxes... It makes these traditions live forever, but in undead rather than truly vital form

sampling the dead

Lindsay Zoladz at Pitchfork on ghost MCs - i.e. hologram-based projections of deceased rap stars such as 2Pac, Ol Dirty Bastard, and Eazy E

creepy-

"Amidst the soft, productive chatter of clicks and keystrokes, he makes near-imperceptible tweaks to ODB's face. “It’s a constant process of getting the skin texture right, the pores, the lips. It’s something you can keep working on forever,” he tells me with an exasperated laugh. “How close can you get to what God was trying to do?”....

 creepier-

"A Swedish designer is developing a product called Global Chef, which would let companionless people prepare and eat meals with (yes, I swear) hologram projections of their loved ones"

except it's not really sampling the dead or digital reanimation but a complicated fakesimile...

".... While the projection’s digital assets are informed by photos and videos of the deceased artists, they are not, as some people think, archived footage of the performers, but instead original composites generated from motion-capture shoots. Eazy-E's shoot was overseen by his widow Tomica Wright, and his “hologram” is actually a composite of his three children (all of whom are rappers themselves): Eric Jr. (Lil Eazy-E) acted as the body double, Derrick (E3) provided the voice, and Erin—who bears a particularly striking resemblance to her father—lip synced Eazy’s lines to provide the facial capture. The audio and motion capture for ODB’s asset, on the other hand, was solely provided by his son Young Dirty Bastard—his dad’s spitting image in name and attitude. All of which means that these particular holograms were not so much the work of sorcery or Frankenstein-ian corpse reanimation (“To create a completely synthetic human being is the most complicated thing that can be done” is something a person actually had to clarify to the Wall Street Journal immediately after 2Pac’s performance) but more like the 21st-century version of Lisa Marie playing tribute to her dad by dressing up like an Elvis impersonator."

a fakesimile that isn't even playing that well with the punters....