Neu! versus Alt!

Met Michael Rother last week

Neu!'s children are legion, still





(that last one has a bit of Hawkwind in there, and "Transmission")


Entertaining tunes, but old Neu!s let's be honest

Is it unreasonable for me to not only prefer - but to be biased in favor of -  the neu when it was actually neu?



How come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?

The paradox of modernism innit - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time thanks to the 20th Century miracle of recording, recreates the original moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read). Is somehow eternally new, like fresh-picked fruit flash-frozen.*

Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year -  even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.

The context for meeting Rother was a Hamburg conference panel discussion in which we were both involved (along with Gudrun Gut, another German modernist albeit of a later vintage) and in which issues of lost futures etc were discussed. Mark Fisher's name came up.



* I also feel that the groups reactivating (if not quite reenacting) the breakthroughs made by other earliers, have evade all the hard work that went into actually breaking through into the new / Neu!. Their undoubted youthful energy masks an idleness - an Idles-ness, even

broken time / brain strain

an article about how the 2010s played havoc with our sense of temporality and strained our brains to breaking point, by Katherine Miller

"This long and wearying decade is coming to a close, though, even if there’s no sense of an ending. People are always saying stuff like: Time has melted; my brain has melted; Donald Trump has melted my brain; I can’t remember if that was two weeks ago or two months ago or two years ago; what a year this week has been. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again. Your Facebook feed won’t stop showing you a post from four days ago, about someone you haven’t seen in three years. The Office, six years after it ended, might be the most popular show in the United States. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again....

"The touch and taste of the 2010s was nonlinear acceleration: always moving, always faster, but torn this way and that way, pushed forward, and pulled back under.... 

"In the 20 months between Hillary Clinton’s campaign announcement and Trump’s inauguration, everything from Apple Music to HBO Now to Apple News launched or relaunched; the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Watch hit the full market; publishers established the current form and tone of the news push alerts that you receive; Facebook launched a livestreaming function and then deprioritized the function when people aired violence; Instagram launched the ephemeral, inexhaustive stories, so you can share — as they put it — “everything in between” the moments you care about; Twitter introduced the quote-tweet option, which formalized and democratized a function from the earlier days of Twitter, and transformed every Trump tweet into an opportunity for commentary.

"And, within a few months in 2016, both the primary catalog for millions of lives (Instagram) and the primary channel for news and culture (Twitter) switched from chronological to algorithmic timelines...."

As well as political churn, Miller also inspects popular culture:

"We’re living through an incredible boom of great shows. Often described, with a weary irony, as the era of Peak TV, this wealth of programming followed tech and traditional premium broadcasters finally figuring out how to commercialize streaming platforms in the 2010s. As a result, you the viewer can move in any sort of direction, watching in bulk something that aired last year, or on Sunday, or one scene again and again, freed from the now-or-never quality that TV once had. For decades, TV either made or ran parallel to the rhythms of American life: morning shows, daytime soaps, the 6 o’clock news, the playoffs, Johnny Carson. In between, the broadcast networks aired 22 half-hour episodes, weekly from September to May, at a fixed time, winding away in sequential order at a mass scale."

Yup, it's not so much that we've lost the monoculture, it's that we've lost monotemporality

Miller quotes Emily Nussbaum on how "time itself has been bent", with one factor being the pause button, which  “helped turn television from a flow into text, to be frozen and meditated upon.”

Certainly because it's  possible to stop the flow of televisual (or filmic) time, it becomes irresistible to do it at any and every excuse - watching a program or film becomes a stop-start experience with interruptions for urination, rehydration, snacks, unrelated conversational digressions, and then also rewinds to catch dialogue or plot nuances or repeat particularly enjoyable sequences.

Yet it's also likely to be subject to acceleration, with Netflix planning to introduce a 1.5 speed function (and YouTube already allows you to alter the speed of viewing) - which will make watching TV even more fitful and spasmodic.

Long before TV though, I noticed this disruption to the flow of experiential time when I got my first compact disc player in 1989 - with a remote control with pause and skip etc. Music became a frangible, interruptible thing.