three takes on hyperstasis, linearity, the escape from time, no future etc


Quietus's Ryan Alexander Diduck on "GIFwave" and Groundhog Day

Line of Best Fit's Josh Hall on the living death of indie
(dude doesn't seem to realise that what he calls New Retro is the same as what I call
 "atemporality" / hyperstasis  / "diversely derivative")


Pitchfork's Andrew Gareig on Narcissist II by Dean Blunt from Hype(rstasis) Williams , a release described as:

"A droopy-eyed, unromantic collage of synthesizers, movie dialogue, and baked vocals, The Narcissist II comments on the ephemerality of modern media consumption by being ephemeral itself.

In particular, The Narcissist II replicates a very specific type of listening: hunching over a laptop, dozens of Chrome tabs open, crawling down a Youtube rabbit hole. You know the drill: locate an obscure track, listen to half of it, click on something "related" in the right sidebar, pause it, tab over to a Soundcloud page... tab back. It is consumption via distraction: do this often enough and you'll encounter no end of noisy vinyl rips and shitty covers. This is the best metaphor for The Narcissist II: distant, half-heard clips; novel, obscure, and impossible. The samples blur into the original until The Narcissist II is the noisy rip, the shitty homage. This is why, during the course of The Narcissist II, at some point nearly everything will seem like a sample."

This review (graded a dismal 5.4)  prompts Tower of Sleep  to mount a defence: 


"The thing that constitutes Hype Williams’ “artiness”, though, is that their whole schtick is about destabilizing the normal criteria for judging quality. You have to look at them awry, anamorphically, since they only present themselves through a cracked monitor, a glass darkly: the difference between intent and accident, stoned noodling and inspired sample disappears in the disorienting haze. Gaerig notes that “Blunt’s delivery is flat, ugly, and devoid of braggadocio,” and decides that it sucks even if it’s deliberate, but I think his flattened affect has its own particular appeal. Gaerig compares Blunt (unfavorably) to Excepter and Ariel Pink, but I think Lil B would be equally apt: he’s performing a very contemporary form of subjectivity in a way that reframes the context of production. It’s not just another piece of music offered to the stream, it’s a portrait of the stream itself."

Yeah but if it's as boring, fragmentary, unsatisfying, shiftless, numbing etc as the experience, the digital phenomenology, that it allegedly critically reframing/commenting on ... without even faintly gesturing towards a way out, or an alternative.... then all it is doing, really is detaining the listener a little longer in a "very far from grace" place that is already grimly familiar

time has come today

"I've spent my entire life fearing the end of the world, researching all through my teens. The sign of the end of the world is when man is filled with too much information. You're going to have this younger generation who are so fucking tuned in, and their brains are so wired, that we're going to be obsolete. There will be no need for us. People are really foolish, they see Hollywood or read the Bible, and think it's literal, but the end may be happening now. That's just the way I live: the end is today, this is the end"--Dean Blunt, Hype Williams

this makes sense: their music has struck me before as a kind of inertial end-zone where signifiers go to die...  atemporality / hyperstasis as a perfect, fully achieved state...  out-blanking even Ferraro, where there's still the ghost of a wink, of irony a la Devo/Koons (irony relying as it does on a sense of the normative, of values-against-which)

c.f. Paul Morley's term the Aftermath:

"These days, in any given seven-day period, you can find plenty of examples of something that historians will one day describe as the key moment when rock, or pop, or whatever in the end you decide to call it, came to an end. The moment will be marked when the vinyl and CD era is truly finished, when there was an anxious retreat into the past, even as the future was taking over, and what I've taken to calling The Aftermath began, when the history of rock and a certain sort of pop culture stretching between Elvis and Lady Gaga had all but dissolved into the internet and turned into something else"

also developed, with a more cheerful, apocalypse-aint-so-bad-really gloss, here

"As pop music has spiralled back and forwards across its own time and space over the past 20 years, while simultaneously fragmenting into thousands of genres and sub-genres, and as sampling, MP3 culture and a fundamental collaging mentality has got carried away with modifying the past, some music, which seemed doomed to stay stuck in the past, has resurfaced in the present and sounds just about as fresh and pertinent as ever. We now live in The Aftermath, where all pop music is either actually from the past, freed from its imprisoned context by the internet, where everything recorded can happen at once, or is a mutant, intoxicating transformation of the past, randomly, attentively mixing up genres, eras, instruments, styles, beats, fashions. The Aftermath is where the past gets gossiped about; it's a series of colliding echoes about the past; it's a gathering of rumours about what happened to pop music up to and including and beyond the vinyl era."

now i think of it a real kinda-sorta prototype for Hype Williams is that record Tricky did with DJ Muggs and Dame Grease in 1999, Juxtapose