retrotalk 2023 - the commemorative churn / retromAInia

From a little while ago, a piece at the Guardian by Shaad D'Souza that notes the shrinking of the turnaround time for commemoration - a trend for 5 year anniversary reissues and repackagings. 

"Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs.

It’s in keeping with a frantically shortening nostalgia cycle that’s seen frenzied media coverage of supposed emo and “indie sleaze” revivals and music publications churning out cheap anniversary content – although these repressings seemingly offer little to the consumer other than a coloured disc. But Hannah Carlen and Ali Murphy – marketing directors for heavy-hitting indie conglomerate Secretly Group, which released Bridgers’ album – insist that fifth anniversary pressings allow artists to “give new fans something, and say ‘you’re welcome here too – you don’t have to be a day one fan’,” says Carlen.".... 

"The timeline of a record has changed so drastically,” says Ali Murphy. “Twenty years used to be the span of time in which people were celebrating a record, and now it’s got so much shorter, not only due to the quickness of everything coming out.”

C.f. my earlier post that detected an intensification of the commemorative churn with odd-number anniversaries of significant releases or events, and the odd habit of wishing dead icons or cult figures a happy birthday.

Another Guardian piece from a little while back (by Rich Pelley) looks at how a band of wannabes got AI to concoct a simulacrum of Liam Gallagher's vocals to front their own Fauxasis tuneage. "We got bored waiting for Oasis to reform" the culprits say - so they created something even more boring and redundant than Oasis actually reforming. 

“We’ve brought a band back from the dead!” says one of the band. “And I think that’s something we’ll see a lot more of.”

This is the future - mind-blowing technology being used to do mundane / inane  things.

Another AI phenom - AI-assisted upmixing - a 2023 clarification of "Sister Ray"

The Science of Ghosts

 

Hantologie...

Two weeks ago I was in Taipei for a terrifically stimulating conference titled A Future Slowly Cancelled, mounted by the Taiwanese arts organisation C-LAB. Most of the papers touched upon Mark Fisher's work and notions like lost futures, hauntology, acid communism, etc (including my own keynote speech).

The night before the conference proper kicked off, there was a showing of a 1983 film that amazingly (I ought to have my Hauntological Association membership revoked!) I had never heard of: Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance.  And knock me down with a feather, who should pop up on screen, in a sort of acting role (playing himself), but ol' Jacques Derrida. It's 1983 but he's already talking the kind of ghost talk that would lead to Spectres of Marx, published a full decade later. 

Quick as a flash, I start taking phone pix of Derrida talking about ghosts -  the bright idea occurs to me that I can drop a few of these into the Google slide-show of my lecture just at the points where concepts like mal d'archive and hauntology feature. So it'll be the re-apparition of Derrida on the very same screen he'd appeared on the night before, mediated by the sort of tele-mediamatic technology of the digital era that JD alludes to  in Archive Fever (albeit glancingly so). Levels of image degradation  multiplied: faded made-for-TV video, shakily snapped on a mobile phone from a hasty distance, uploaded to Google, then reprojected in the lecture hall via my Chromebook. A ghost of a ghost of a ghost (of an actual ghost - a man no longer living). As academic wisecracks go, this ought to bring the house down.  (Well, in the event, not quite... )

Here's another scene with Derrida and the "heroine" in it (she's his student, but she... ) 

Jacques looks very debonair and dashing with his plume of fair hair. 

Now what is even more bizarre is that - although they don't share the screen at any moment - another major role in Ghost Dance is played by the young Robbie Coltrane.  Who could have dreamed it - Monsieur Archive Fever and the future-Hagrid, in the same Channel 4-funded art movie.

There's an odd sequence at the end where there's a kind of ghosting of images - the faces of Derrida and other characters appear on a seaside ridge of rock (ever so slightly redolent of the ending - or one of the endings, there are different versions, I'm talking about the TV version - of Videodrome).

Pascale Ogier - tragically soon to be a ghost (she died in 1984 aged only 26, of a heart attack)

 

Here's the whole film for the watching - a poignant flashback to the days when Channel 4 did adventurous and experimental programming. Lost futures, eh? 

There's some wanky overwrought bits, but many striking sequences and it's well worth a view, I'd say. Part of the slim corpus of hauntological cinema.