Piece in theNew Statesmanby Fergal Kinney on the stagnant and deja vu condition of British politics takes for its title "The Retromania Election" - and not only has a para on my book-of-the-same but also a para picking up on recent points I made in this interview with Shawn Reynaldo for his First Floor newsletter.
Talking about the way that British pols routinely reference distant predecessors and slogans from bygone electoral campaigns, Kinney asks, " Do British politicians and their advisers have any reference points beyond themselves? If these people are able to draw from history or finance or literature, they’re doing an excellent job of hiding this. British politics’ retromania is what happens when politics is drawn heavily from those who have studied politics – the line is blurred between practitioners and, well, fans. It creates a language that’s off limits to younger voters who might look for inspiration to figures in tech or in activism instead of cultivating a working knowledge of Labour’s grand old men."
Here's a good gag:
"That sense of every decade happening at once has recently
become part of British politics. “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a
crumbling public realm,” Starmer said in May this year, “that in 1964 it was to
modernise an economy overly dependent on the kindness of strangers, in 1945 to
build a new Britain, in a volatile world, out of the trauma of collective
sacrifice – in 2024, it will have to be all three.” Labour in government: the
deluxe Greatest Hits box set."
It's much the same in the USA, where looking-back and dynasticism (the longing for hereditary monarchy and regal succession that's buried not-deep in the American political consciousness) results in grotesquerie like RFK Jr.'s campaign and - out on the loopy-loo perimeter - the bizarre fantasy of an undead JFK Jr returning to form a double-ticket with Trump.
Yes, a new tome from the prolific Stephen Prince - A Year in the Country:Lost Transmissions: Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica
It follows swiftly on the heels of last year's A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands: The Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of Film and Television - and the threeA Year in the Country books that preceded that! With another two tomes not in the series, that makes seven in total.
I don't know how Stephen does it... I feel like a right slow-poke in comparison.
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Talking about prolific fellows,Lo Five has a very nice new record, Persistence of Love, recently released on Castles in Space. Inhabiting that muzzy grayscale sound that is all his own. Makes you feel as if there's a film across your ears - like looking at a landscape with reduced visibility caused by light rain. Suits these unseasonably overcast and damp days here in England.
Here's Neil's release rationale:
"This collection of tracks came about during a period of transition for me, from changing the way I wanted to make music to a method that was more intuitive and free-flowing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with sequencing and different bits of hardware I'd acquired. I was also playing around with an old four track cassette recorder, which was loads of fun. I think the end result feels a little broader in sound and composition as all but one of these tracks were the result of recording a live jam down to a stereo mix. I recorded dozens of these until I'd found 'the one'.
"That way of capturing a performance really excites me, it's like a crystallised moment in time when the planets have aligned. When you're really absorbed into the flow of it and there's something extra guiding you.
"Thematically, it all reflects this ongoing interest I have in consciousnesses, spiritual enlightenment, truth realisation, whatever you want to call it. At the time I'd been reading a lot about advaita, which is Sanskrit for 'not two', or what western spiritual teachers call non-duality, where it's seen there is no separation between anything, no individual self, no subject and object, just this infinite eternal consciousness. I read a few of the classic teachings from gurus such as Ramaana Maharishi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta Maharaj, which reflect modern accounts of contemporary teachers like Richard Rose, Jan, Frazier and Rupert Spira.
"There seems to be this slow reconciliation between ancient eastern spiritual teachings and western psychology and neuroscience. That really fascinates me and seems to filter through to whatever I'm working on."
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Unexpected silo seepage from a retiree of this parish! A trio of remixes by Baron Mordant of eMMplekz fan favorite, "Gloomy Leper Techno" - also on Castles in Space
Emission transmission:
The
collaborative eMMplekz project between Baron Mordant and Ekoplekz ran itself
ragged from 2012-2016 and yielded some of their most satisfying work for the
Mordant Music label - the Baron had finally found his
voice in a skip behind Poundland and let his fetid alphabet loose across
Ekoplekz’s mouldy electronic battlefield…lyrical Escher abstractions married to
Cy Twombly soundscapes at a time when maybe only the Sleaford Mods were
harrowing similar ground, albeit more commercially…the project bowed out on a
low high with the ‘Rook to TN34’ album and the “Cheers mate, bye” lyric pinging
off every surface…in 2022 with that still naggingly in mind the Baron set out
on reframing ‘Gloomy Leper Techno’ in some different shades and the resulting
‘MMongrel versions’ were picked up by Castles in Space for this 12” vinyl
release…njoi/endure…IBM,
Hastings 2023.
GLT scrawl:
“Cheers mate, bye
I see rooftops
in Staines, people as drains (cheers mate, bye)
The bee in the
bonnet humming Ashcroft’s ’Sonnet’ (cheers mate, bye)
Rhyming’s like
climbing, surmounting a fountain (cheers mate, bye)
Wanking the
walk, tanking the talk (cheers mate, bye)
A dismal day
in every way (cheers mate bye)
Bandcamp’s
digital damp (cheers mate bye)
I want you to
follow thru…why is it you let him in?
Cheers mate,
bye.”
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Finally, there's a new Belbury Poly album out on Ghost Box in a few days time - The Path.
It's unusual - a full-band sound, incorporating a spoken-word element. And the voice speaks in an American accent!
Much discussed on the socials, a piece by Mitch Therieau for The Drift that fingers Jack Antonoff - not so much an uber-producer as a ubi-producer, as in ubiquitous - as "pop music's blandest prophet".
People are picking away at it, as they will do, but I thought it was persuasive and full of great lines and sharp sonic analysis of Antonoff's twin modes of cinematic maximalism and quasi-intimate whispery minimalism
"It is like Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love on a histrionic sugar high — or like cutting into what you thought was Tunnel of Love, expecting to find a substantive work of pop craftsmanship and introspection, only to find cake. Unlike the Fun. records, Strange Desire deals in a strangely hollow maximalism. You might call it, as many critics have, “cinematic” pop. In other words: pop made to serve as a soundtrack. And at the center of the swirl of sound that often doesn’t register as music so much as undifferentiated yearning, there is an empty space for you, the main character. Appropriately enough, Antonoff’s fans often describe his music as a kind of catharsis machine; a soundtrack to which you can, in the words of one YouTube commenter, “drive and cry and vent and go trough every emotion humanly possible.” It is as if Antonoff discovered that the only way to keep pop-rock viable in conditions increasingly hostile to its survival was to reduce it down to a mechanism for delivering a concentrated shot of big feelings.....
"... a distinctive yet elusive sound whose hallmarks are less musical than emotional. Verses ratchet up sweatily to choruses rather than building organically or shading into them. Choruses are strenuous; the unbearable longing they often convey registers as nothing other than the indomitable drive to become a hit....
"... nearly collapsing under the sticky surplus of emotion.... "
On producers notorious for hostile and abusive work environments:
"... treating women artists in particular as interchangeable and disposable bearers of their hit-children"
Spinning off discussion of "Out of the Woods" (a Jack + Taylor song whose appeal and resonance beyond its author I find particularly mystifying):
"A Jack song always seems to take place in a sort of ambiently traumatic limbo where reconciliation is right around the corner, if not just out of reach..."
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I suppose the bit where the argument loses me a little is the idea that Antonoff's career has something to do with the diffusion of indie-pop aesthetics into the mainstream.
See, I can't really hear the indie-ness. At least it doesn't correspond to what I think of as "indie" (I know, there's multiple strands; it's evolved over time; indie in 2023 is different from indie in 2003 is different from indie in 1993 is different from 1983 etc etc). But if I think of indie from the perspective of one who saw it emerge - who can remember a rock world before indie even existed - indeed one who wrote about it during its emergence.... one of the defining things about indie is that it's not melodramatic. I associate it with the laconic, the low-key, the understated... small voices and non-singers... a sense of the ordinary transfigured
(I suppose there are exceptions... that line from Band of Holy Joy through to Tindersticks and Jack... Pulp too. The Scott Walker loving thread. Nick Cave, also, with his love of "entertainment music, though some might call it corn" . But are any of them really "indie"?)
For the most part indie = constitutively anti-theatrical, naturalistic, mumblecore.
Counter-view worth a view: Richard Brody in the New Yorker reviewing Asteroid City and arguing thatWes Anderson, contrary to appearances / conventional critiques (including my earlier Decline of the Westake), is a deeply emotional auteur and a political one too...
(Here's his similarly angled takes onThe French Dispatch and on Moonrise Kingdom)
Oh dear, he's very nearly convinced me that I'll have to see Asteroid ("will get fooled again").
Counter-view worth a view: a reading of Jacques Tati's Playtime by Charlie Bertsch, very different to my own in the aforementioned Decline of the Wes triptych but no doubt closer to how Tati intended the film to be taken. One point where our opposed readings converge is connecting the Tati reaction to modernity with the Situationist critique.
The stumbling block for me as a recent first-time viewer approaching it with no preconceptions or foreknowledge is that I simply did not find the look of Playtime to be grey, soulless, or even especially dehumanized (the technocratic spaces are after all teeming with humans bustling about and being bumblingly comic... not to mention that the spaces are built by humans and wouldn't exist without human design and human imagination). However Tati intended it to be received, to me the Paris of Playtime is shimmeringly attractive - as beautiful in its own way as the old city with its traditional Gallic charm and ancient buildings. But that may well be a trick effect of time's passage, the way that the Mid-Century Modern / New International aesthetic has a nostalgic allure now, its own period charm.
