RetroTalk 2 - Kieran with a counter-vision to "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" gloom

 

Listen and watch here

Retrotalk: "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" versus "The Future Is Not Lost" versus "21st Century as Cultural Void?"

A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!"

Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago

It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static:

But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and tone. 

From this, Szatan extrapolates to a general pervasive feeling of being stuck on a 7 out of 10 plateau, anxiously wondering when the distinctive and defining sound of the 2020s will surface: 

No matter the soundtrack, the feeling echoed: this is good, not great. The lightning-in-a-bottle effect that animates club culture seems to be in hibernation and it's not just hampering nights out, either. As of late, electronic releases seem to exist on this same endless plateau. We have more music to enjoy than ever, but what's increasingly nagging at me is that this overfamiliarity is actually the problem....

Electronic culture finds itself in a strange double condition: hyper-fragmented in theory, yet consensus-driven in practice. What used to feel like solid land has given way to an archipelago of disparate scenes with little awareness of their neighbours and, broadly, only slight modifications to preexisting sounds...

It's worth asking ourselves what exactly the 2020s will be remembered for musically. If we're invested in breaking new ground, time's running out to get that in motion. The alternative is circling a familiar neighbourhood over and over, repackaging iterations of the same sensation until the culture ages out....

The problem isn't that electronic music has stopped producing quality. It's an issue of quantity. There's more than the culture can reasonably metabolise, and, at a time when many pockets of the underground are still rummaging through the crates of the past, this bottlenecks the potential for new movements to cut through. Without anything to act as both a galvanising force and, occasionally, an antagonist to challenge, a lot of cultural motion effectively peters out.... 

Five of the revitalised sounds you're liable to hear back in the hands of DJs at, say, Houghton right now — tech house, dub techno, dubstep, minimal and prog - lack a clear aesthetic identity and, you could argue, lack risk too...

2026 lineups heaves with talent, yet the presence of artists who released their most crowd-animating work 20 or 25 years ago pops out more than usual...

In reality, it's little more than a revolving carousel heading nowhere fast with diminishing returns.

Szatan references "retromania" not as a book but as a genre, or an artistic mode cutting across genres:

The '90s has been well turned over by now, so what can we learn from the previous decade? At least three substantial, unique movements were generated in the 2010s: EDM, hyperpop and retromania, all large and notable enough that dozens of variants fold into, and spin off, from them.

The slipperiest of the three is retromania, less a hard sound than a change in mindset as nostalgia ran rampant, and expanded archives pulled whole histories of sound into circulation. In the 2010s, a flood of reissues met a desire to gain a multipolar understanding of music history.

... multiple scenes, including drum & bass, are threatened by "homage [as] the new product," per dBridge...

Then back to the main theme: 

the fracture of universal experience means we may never see a coherent sound of the decade again—in this or any decade. Without that, culture risks becoming even more aleatory than usual....

Essentially, as the world gets more expensive and progression stalls, we get sucked into cultural stagflation.

...it feels evident that electronic music's oversupply and option paralysis is causing damage.

We may have arrived at a point where knowledge and adherence to form leave people unable to conjure visions beyond the old frame.

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These are just snippets from a much larger, in-depth exploratory piece that is well worth your attention (as is the companion piece, its part 2, "No Music On A Dead Internet", which explores  archiving and the impacts of AI). 

(Some of Szatan's observations chime with my own recent Instagram-as-window onto dance culture thoughts)

I think this was a brave piece to write as the editor of a magazine that is right in the thick of the dance industry - a downer overview rather than rah-rah-rah boosterism.

The sensations Szatan describes from going to festivals or working through new releases... bustling activity and superabundance combined with a sense of blockage and redundancy.... the creeping feeling that nothing is quite new enough... these are familiar sensations to me, from starting to feel them with some acuteness in the late 2000s.  (I don't feel them so acutely these days, but that may only be because I'm not tracking the now and putatively "new" with anything like the same obsessive intensity)

Those back-in-the-day frustrating sensations are what caused me to come up with the term "hyperstasis".

At the time I wondered if hyperstasis was a superstructure to substructure equivalent to this economic malaise of the 1970s called "stagflation", a term Szatan drops in his piece. Stagflation is an economic paradox, what really shouldn't happen: the combination of low growth and inflation (usually inflation is a sign of economic growth - like the economy is running a fever).

But I don't think it is really a sound parallel. Hyperstasis is more to do with the horizons of what's musically thinkable, a feeling that no one can get to the next level of the 'game' but is just scurrying around on a plateau. That said, stagflation is such an evocatively gross word, it is tempting to deploy it in this context. .

Even one as semi-detached as myself can think of at least a few candidates for the New Defining Dance Sound of the 2020s. There's amapiano and bruxaria. The former is one where I do have that  "ooh, this is different, this is new" reaction. While also finding the initial excitement will fade a bit as the DJ mix chunters on - it starts to feel plateau-y (part of its innovation I suppose - the diffusion of climax). Still, the basic template-structure is a new way of organizing a groove. Then bruxaria - well, that has aspects that feel like irritation-as-aesthetic - the extreme sidechaining, the nagging GIF-like vocal loops - and seem explicitly designed to drive away the elder ear. This is one way that the New has announced itself - a harshness, a rhythmic disruption of groove, that you have to recalibrate your hearing for. 

There is a follow-up feature, a third in the series, with Resident Advisor staff offering ideas on how to change things for the better. "Consider this our contribution to the discourse landfill", jokes Michael Lawson.*

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And so to the refutations ** of the "cultural stagnation" perspective...

Published last week, The Future Is Not Lost, by Matt Bluemink, grew out of online essays that sparred with Mark Fisher's thinking, starting with the unfurling of the concept of "anti-hauntology" as an alleged genre represented above all by SOPHIE, along with Arca and Iglooghost.  

Here is Bluemink (what an amazing name - can it be real?) at his Blue Labyrinths blog describing the scope and themes of The Future Is Not Lost. 

"The book is a collection of my essays focused around the idea of the future as it relates to music, technology, architecture, and philosophy. The book itself is split into 3 chapters on a variety of interconnected themes:

1. Anti-Hauntology: The first section explores the idea of ‘futuristic music’, including artists like SOPHIE, Arca, and Iglooghost, and provides a critique of the nascent pessimism in the work of Mark Fisher through the philosophy of Bernard Sitegler.

2. Spatial Imaginaries: The second section uses the ethos of solarpunk to criticise the dystopian aesthetic of cyberpunk that has become actualised, not just in films, literature, and games, but in architecture and urban design. It also provides a reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of foams, atmospheres, and desert islands to show how spatial philosophy can provide solutions to the climate crisis.

3. Individuation: The final section introduces the work of Gilbert Simondon and its influence on Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This section provides the theoretical underpinning of many of the previous chapters. It shows how individuation, conceived as an on ongoing metaphysical process, can lead to a fundamentally progressive form of understanding which allows for the creation of better futures.

And here's a bit on how hearing SOPHIE helped him formulate a counter-view to Mark's pessimism:

"From the very first moment I heard SOPHIE’s music I knew it was something different. It felt fresh. It felt new. Listening to Faceshopping was like being transported into an alternate reality that approached popular music from a radically novel perspective: a transgressive perspective. The old structures and forms were there, but shifted, changed, and morphed into something unrecognisable. Electronic music was finding a way forward, not only in some distant, abstract or academic sense, but in popular culture itself. Aspects of the experimental and avant-garde were being brought into popular consciousness in entirely new ways we couldn’t have expected. I had discovered the music of the future.”

Since Mark died a year before SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" came out, it's hard to know how he would have reacted to it. For what it's worth, I suspect that he would have been bowled over by the track and its video as a tour de force of audio-visual-conceptual provocation - as I was.  Especially as it is a song so bound up with his beloved glam - ideas of artifice, plasticity,  surface versus depth, theatricality etc. It is practically an audio-essay dramatizing the ideas of  Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but updated for the age of the influencer. InstaGlam. 

Whether "Faceshopping" would have been enough to spark Mark to a rethink of his fundamental ideas about retro-paralysis, lost futures, hauntology... it's hard to say.

But I think "anti-hauntology" is an odd way to frame this music, since I rather doubt it was motivated by a desire to refute hauntology. I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged as an aesthetic in almost complete unawareness of  the hauntology discourse - it has far more to do with long-running aesthetics of camp and plasticity, drawing on precursors like electroclash,  Fischerspooner, drag and vogueing and ballroom, New Romanticism and the Blitz scene, avant-garde fashion, Warhol and the Theatre of the Ridiculous.... . As well as many mainstream manifestations, from Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga. In some ways SOPHIE is Gaga but with music that actually lives up to the rhetoric. 

Talking of rhetoric... I think it would have made more sense for Bluemink to come up with a genre term that expresses the positive and substantive properties of this new sound-and-vision, rather than define it reactively against something that may not have impinged on its creators' consciousness. The term "anti-hauntology" creates the impression that SOPHIE, Arca et al exist primarily to be recruited to Bluemink's attempt to refute K-punkian pessimism. But they might have their own reasons for doing what they do, completely unconnected from the debate about retro and lost futures.

And if you'll forgive me tooting my own trumpet a bit...  the aesthetic of what Bluemink calls anti-hauntology is already strongly hinted at in my Digital Maximalism epic of December 2011 - using Rustie’s Glass Swords and various others I identify the hallmarks of a new sound - ultrabrite, shadowless, plasticized, denatured, 2D cartoony, “dry” i.e. reverb-less. An overloaded concatenation-agglomeration of every past idea of "future music" into a kind of ultrafuturepop. 

I'm writing here a couple of years before SOPHIE’s first releases and before PC Music get started.

 This emergent hyper-gloss maximalism is contrasted with the deep-and-dark minimalism dominant in 2000s dance, e.g. the dank and shadowy reverb-chambered sound of dubstep. I don't mention Burial but I could easily have done. 

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And then a few months back there was Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review asking "Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?" and taking issue with Mark Fisher and myself again but mainly with W. David Marx's Blank Space, his history of the C21 so far.

Wollen notes a paradox about  Marx's book that I also noticed:

 "Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred."

But then that is hyperstasis, isn't it? A roil of activity, but nothing that really surges into the unknown. 

Wollen picks up on the kind of swampy metaphors that I and others use (in the intro to Retromania, I describe Time becoming like a sluggish river that meanders and forms oxbow lakes)

"If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh."

Then she tries to repositivize this trope in terms of moist fecundity:

"Maybe we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.

Then there is the decelerationist argument, the zero growth / downshifting / permaculture polemic applied to culture itself as opposed to agriculture. 

"It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary, unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of the twentieth century. I can already feel the ground underneath my argument growing a bit soggy—I am, after all, a product of the cultural marshland of the 2000s. My perspective is history logged, mushy and inexact, my style is patchworked and gleaned, my analysis makes most sense mapped as doodled spirals. I find the declarative mode that is necessary for the construction of an avant-garde (or the loud lamenting of a lack thereof ) kind of cringe, to be honest, not because being born in the early 1990s made me allergic to earnestness, as is often presumed, but because of its absolutism, its unquestioned reverence for clarity and category"

And then a note of "OK boomer" condescension: 

I can empathize: it must have felt comforting to imagine there was a way to dress and a type of music to listen to and an art to make that situated oneself inside of history in a legible and linear way. But it was always an act of imagination (as evidenced by the various revolutions that once felt inevitable and around the corner, but never actually occurred), just as this whirlpool of stasis is a kind of imagining as well. The fact of the matter is that kitsch is now so overabundant that to not use or misuse it is to leave money on the table, so to speak — stacks of meaning-bucks, just sitting there. What’s difficult to accept, for those not from the marshes, is that subculture, and its glowing nimbus of futurity, has become a kitsch object as well. Not merely the specifics — the hedgehog prickles of a hairstyle, the fog of bass rolling in over a crowd—but the form itself.

The "kitsch" - meaning much the same as "cringe" - is a reference to Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay of 1939, which paved the way for his championing of Abstract Expressionism. In other words, exactly the kind of Movements that the likes of myself mourn, as we do Militant Undergrounds and Subcultures-as-Vanguards. The very idea of these are now considered corny.  

(An erudite letter writer to Melody Maker once accused me of becoming the Clement Greenberg of rock criticism, trapped in my own dogma - this at the height of my push for  the becoming-abstract of blissrock / shoegaze, Seefeel-as-Rothko). 

Finally, the essay deploys an obscure musical reference, a Los Angeles band called Purity who specialize in cover versions of songs from subcultural sounds like hardcore punk and postpunk: 

"A cover of “Dance This Mess Around” is a repetition of a repetition, a warping of the warp, a slow decay of the slow decay. The listener descends into the mulchy bog, wet and thick. But this mire unexpectedly greens into acute feeling: somehow, Purity turns the lyric “I’m not no limburger” into one of the most wretched, mournful lines of any music I’ve ever heard."...

I have to salute how deftly Wollen sustains the marshland / mire / boggy ground *** tropes throughout the essay... 

She concedes that Purity's strategies would not placate the declinists.

"[W. David] Marx would probably agree on a more Greenbergian line —yes, exactly, old cultural forms of radical possibility have been resurrected as half-hearted ghosts! Tragic! But what he misses, fundamentally, is the vice versa, the backward loop, that is also true: the kitsch object, the dancing shadow of a certain subgenre of rock and roll, is transformed through (re)restaging into a new, sprouting form of subculture, if that can be defined as what goes on underneath the opaque layer of mass commerce." 

An aside: Purity remind me slightly of another painfully knowing band, Bodega, who put out the album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life. - which if nothing else is a pretty funny album title.

^^^^^

It does amaze me sometimes that this debate is still going on - it will not go away. To use a Wollen-ism, we are bogged down in it.

I personally can't seem to get away from it - I regularly receive requests to talk on Retromania-ish topics. Often from newspaper journalists looking at specific revivals or retro fads. Sometimes PhD students or film makers. 

I do sometimes also wonder if, say, Mark or I had both been killed in freak accidents in 2005, i.e. before the retro/hauntology discourse kicked off in earnest and well before either of us had written our book length disquisitions on the subject... whether this debate would have emerged in quite such a pronounced way. 

But then I think, it obviously would have done. Partly because there were from the start other people making similar points - Momus, Adam Curtis - independently and in parallel with myself and Mark. Work based around ideas of lost futures, ghosts, reenactment, ruins, the archive, etc was already going on in the art world - Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Deller. We weren't pulling this stuff out of our arses, you know! 

The objective conditions of the culture would provoke such a critique (and then the inevitable counter-critique). It might have been differently inflected - figures like Burial and The Caretaker, who are currently having PhD's centered around them, as a knock-on of Mark's enormous and ever-growing influence, they might not have been so prominent in the debate. But the tropes that Wollen simultaneously parodies and attempts to reverse / re-positivize , these would have sprung up almost organically, like moss on peat.  

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FOOTNOTES

* The very first comment in the RA pt3, which advises deejays should play at least 50 percent new material per set, takes off from a Fred Again performance that brought out onstage legends Thomas Bangalter, Underworld and Mike Skinner and played all their golden oldies. Rachel Grace Almeida sez: "it felt a lot like hauntology playing out in real time, at scale. Have we stopped imagining new futures, and accepted nostalgia and retromania as cultural benchmarks forevermore?.... it's time to ban overreliance on the '90s in dance music!... Classics are classic for a reason, but all I'm asking for is 50 percent less ghosts haunting sets."

** Less recently - a few years ago now - there was a book-length refutation in the form of the Liam Inscoe-Jones Songs in the Key of MP3 which is explicitly framed as a younger's riposte to elders like Mark Fisher and myself, blinkered by our depressive perspective. Inscoe-Jones's overall angle and outlook is  "behold the plenty!", pointing to a panoply of pioneers from the late 2000s onwards such as Danny Brown and Oneohtrix Point Never (the latter actually prominent in Retromania of course).  

That's all fine. Still, I can't help wishing Songs in the Key of MP3 had engaged with my thinking subsequent to the 2011 publication of Retromania, e.g. the Auto-Tune epic, or the whole book’s worth of counter-evidence marshalled in Futuromania - my own partial auto-refutation.  (Still In A Dream also contains a chapter that dissents with Retromania, looking at how acute consciousness of history can be a basis for attempts to do new things - the chapter is titled "Revisionaries")

But that's how it works, of course - people selectively create a cruder, starker version of  their opponents (in this case, me) in order to have the arguments they want to have, the arguments they think they can win. I've done it many a time, with my own combatants!

The title Songs in the Key of MP3 rings out a bit oddly - the reference to MP3s feels already somewhat dated in the age of streaming. I still have a shitload in my computer, FLACs and WAVs too - but I should imagine most in the generation that Inscoe-Jones is writing to and for (in terms of elevating generational morale and pride-in-their-time) would not own music in either material or immaterial form, but be fully adapted to streaming modes of organizing their listening. (The concept of streaming doesn't appear in Retromania - Spotify existed but had not taken off at the time of writing, 2010).

*** This idea of rotting decomposed material as a source of cultural energy reminds me of Eno's analogies comparing art-making and composting - he likens culture to a compost heap, the accumulation of past forms fermenting new life through decay and incremental developments.  The eco-friendly slow-core trope of the compost heap contrasts with imagery of innovation that is accelerationist - an autobahn to tomorrow, missions into outer space, the artist-as-astronaut.  Burning up and blasting into the unknown. 

"cultural gridlock"

JC: "I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It’s like we’ve found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can’t do that. It's an overabundance of information. Ultimately, it must be quite tough to be confronted with that. If you wanted to be a creative person and you are confronted with the sum product of mankind's creativity up to this moment in history, that's pretty daunting, like, “Where can I fit my voice in amongst all that?”

Pitchfork: Yeah, the idea of making something new can seem pointless because you know it's going to be thrown on top of this endless pile of stuff.

JC: What people have to make sure of is that they're not replicating something that already exists. You really have to ask yourself: “Is there a point in me doing this? Has this already been said before? Is this moving things along or is this just adding to the giant pile of junk that's already there?” Social commentators give this kind of idea names like “cultural gridlock,” where things like music don’t seem to be developing so much. It's not like the music of 1994 is that different than the music of 2014—and that's 20 years worth.

".... People are learning that you've got to find some way of shutting things off in order to give your own mind a chance to produce something. It's interesting that most gadgets are called “iPhone” and “iPod,” with that "i" prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led—a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you're not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You've got to let the subconscious in—that's my main message to the world." 

(Jarvis Cocker interviewed by Ryan Dombal at Pitchfork) 

Comix dude Marc Singer of I Am NOT the Beastmaster blog on Retromania

Singer finds all kinds of parallels in the discourse around comics / graphic novels that parallel the disquiets and gripes of my book:

e.g. Dorian Wright on Steven Moffat's Doctor Who:

"...the people in charge of the show aren’t interested in people who are Doctor Who fans, they’re interested in people who are fans. Full stop. People who are, essentially fans of…being fans. Who just like to be into…things. Because it’s a thing, and God help you if you’re not into it. They want to please that mercurial, fickle, transitory audience that watches an episode and immediately floods the internet with animated gifs and posts on Twitter and Tumblr about their 'feels' about the show and who communicate with one another entirely in references to pop culture ephemera, like that really shitty Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, only with jokes about bronies and t-shirts mashing up Dexter and Game of Thrones."

e.g. Andrew Hickey, following up Wright's points:

"The thinking behind it is precisely the same thinking that is used in every shitty image macro you’ve ever seen, a sort of post-postmodernism for cretins. Take two symbols of “awesome” and bash them together, and generate something more “awesome”. It’s the postmodern technique of collaging signifiers divorced from their context, but with the difference that you must show absolutely no interest whatsoever in investigating any ideas that this juxtaposition might inspire.

[...] The logic of surrealism is not that far from the logic of the tumblr meme, after all — put two familiar things, like a lobster and a telephone, together and see what kind of interference pattern results in our mind. But the choices in this series are from what seems to be a pre-approved list of “awesome” stuff. Film noir detectives and time travel, dinosaurs and spaceships, cyborgs and cowboys, Daleks and ballerinas. The kind of combuination that only the most tediously unimaginative person could ever possibly think was original. No doubt next year we’ll have cats with lasers (inspiring jokes about how now it’s them with the laser pointer), monkeys riding unicorns, pirates eating bacon, and steampunk lesbian sumo wrestlers teaming up with Sherlock Holmes".

Singer himself identifies a parallel between "glutted and clotted"/hyperstasis and "Final Crisis" or indeed projects by "Morrison or Alan Moore or any other creator who's become captured by pop culture's bottomless past", then signs off with a quote plucked from a comic panel (the serial unknown to me, though clearly needing no introduction to the hardcore cognoscenti who read his blog):

"Perhaps, Agent Helligan, when a civilization reaches its peak, there comes a time of harvest, let’s say. After the ripening comes inevitable decay. With predictable and grim implications for your own civilization."

chairs growing / VW as hip hop

What do you mean by hybrid theories? In press for Badlands, a lot of people were asking me if I’d read this book called Retromania which is talking about how our generation of musicians is just kind of useless and all based on references and not really creating anything new. I was reading this other book called The Utopia of Sound, which kind of counters that theory. It’s talking about how eventually, because it’s referencing so much, music will just encompass everything. It will embody all music. The more hybrids that we create, the more consolidated it becomes. The hip-hop music sample brought classic rock, jazz and classical music into this weird new thing, and then people who grew up listening to hip-hop, like me, [use sampling] to make music that’s not hip-hop. Like this new album I made, even though it doesn’t have any samples, the way I did it is very much like a hip-hop record. I make a loop, I play the drum machines, drum pads, and then a bass line, loop it, then have keyboards–stacking stuff, like a grid. Every record I’ve made is kind of like that. I think eventually I’ll create something new. 

When you say you’re working on creating a new language, are you saying that appropriating sounds from the past can actually be a way of looking toward the future? Yeah, I think in all fairness, Retromania, that book, has a lot of strong points, because there are bands that are like, Oh I want to look like a ’70s post-punk band, and they only dress like that. Those kinds of bands, they’re not bringing anything new. There’s no hybridity to it; it’s just copying something, formula by formula. I think that book is describing those bands. But there’s a lot of interesting musicians in this generation, like Hype Williams and Dean Blunt. Andy Stott—what a great musician. This weird electronic producer called Todd Terje. People are kind of taking out the parts they don’t like in a genre and then combining it or replacing that with genres that they like. I don’t think anything is original, it’s always building off of something that existed in the past. And chairs, too, I think. Is having a chair retro? Chairs have existed for so long, and what have we done with it? We’re just making it better and better, like more comfortable or more stylistic. That’s it.

(from Emilie Friedlander's interview with Dirty Beaches 's Alex Zhang Hungtai for The Fader)

Well of course "transtemporal hybridity" is one of the more hopeful ideas in Retromania, a strategy that mostly ends up with frenetic hyperstasis (a/k/a diversely derivative-ness) but occasionally pointing to the unforeheard ("Diplomat's Son", Oneohtrix Point Never,Gang Gang Dance's  "it's everything time"). Also the idea of sampling-without-samples is mentioned in re. the hip hop influence on Vampire Weekend.

Chairs! This argument cropped up, out of my own mouth, in the early interviews for Retromania, i.e.  "maybe rock music has reached the situation of chair, the most effective and efficient design for it having been settled upon some while ago, with only minimal scope for improvements"

Indeed I aired this idea at the ICA event for Retromania in June 2011. And got the most surprising response. A woman in the audience, hostile to the premise of the book, mentioned, as a sort of warming-up aside to her main angle of attack, that she knew some people who were working on growing chairs  (so, implicit resort: even the field of chair-manufacture is roaring with innovation, you aged fuckwit, let alone music!). I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask for more information about this experimental outfit who were attempting to grow a chair.  Anybody out there who can help with more info? It still intrigues me, in a vaguely disquieting, triffid-like way.

Back to sampling-without-sampling and the hip hop influence on Vampire Weekend, here's an exhaustive breakdown of hip hop references, influences and parallels in re. the oeuvre of VW from MoMilli, editor of Rap Genius.  Fascinating, although it could easily be used as the case for the prosecution.

Listened a bunch of time to Modern Vampires on a long car journey, and still not really feeling it.  Lots of good bits (a mad flustered drum beat here, a winsome twirl of vocal there). But overall, musically,  it's  exquisitely crafted nothing.  Same applies to the lyrics, minus the exquisitely.  I recall that Lloyd Cole claimed as his own special innovation the adjectival use of the proper noun in rock lyrics (e.g. from Rattlesnakes, "you look like Eva Marie Saint / in On the Waterfront" etc.  On Modern Vampires, Koenig does whatever the opposite of innovation is - the terminal inverse of it, the final wringing out and exhaustion of a lyrical technique. 

I wonder if it's true, though, what Cole said? Didn't Costello do it first? (Or even Bryan Ferry?)

Reminds me that the most interesting bit of the Rap Genius piece riffs off of Koenig's contention that UK New Wave artists like Costello  and Squeeze had their own sorta rap-like flow (non-mention of Ian Dury is a bit of an ommision though) 

"Koenig, who is said to have written his Columbia admissions essay about Nick Drake, has likened British New Wave artists like Elvis Costello, Squeeze, and Nick Lowe to their own rap sub-genre. He seems to be referring to their dense internal rhyme about class scrappiness. Compare a verse Koenig once cited from Costello's "The Loved Ones" ("Don't get smart or sarcastic/He snaps back just like elastic/Spare us the theatrics and the verbal gymnastics/We break wise guys just like matchsticks") to "Check your handbook, it's no trick/Take the chapstick, put it on your lips/Crack a smile, adjust my tie" in "Oxford Comma," which otherwise recalls Costello's "This Year's Girl." He eschews popular Squeeze ("Tempted") for deeper cuts, but "Cool for Cats" is among their better known songs for the vibe he's talking about."

"I think eventually I’ll create something new."  I would say he's got a little way to go yet... the new album is laden with Suicide circa "Frankie Teardrop" pasticherie

This one is pointing in the right direction at least

"who are you, 2013?"

talking about retrodance, Martin Clark aka Blackdown takes Disclosure to task in an open letter

which picks up on a quote Howard from the group said:

“I could drop our song with Eliza Doolittle, "Neighbourhood" by Zed Bias and "Saved My Life" by Todd Edwards and no one could name what decade they’re from.” 

Martin's response:

If the fact that your sound is indistinguishable from music made over decade before doesn’t scare you shitless as an artist, I’m not sure we’re on the same page here.

He further proclaims:

We need to reject this kind of neutered brainwashed thinking and build something vital for this era. Something totally built by, owned by - and unique to - 2013.

Who are you, 2013?
 
Because this is sorta my issue with all the big “post”/“bass” guys, now playing housey tech mixed into techy house with additional retro anthem bashing, the guys who build up the DJ hierarchy which ends in Disclosure headlining your festival.
 
I keep thinking this…
 
In twenty years time, these DJs will be in their 40s and their kids will be old enough to ask them: “Dad, what did the music sound like when you were the biggest DJ?”

... Music should be essential and it should be unique: of its time, for its time, belonging to its time. You where there. “Were you there?” “Yes I was there.” “Where were you in ’92?” “I was there too.”

Great music is the cultural journal of record of its time, the soundtrack to generations.  ’66, ’77, ’88, ’93, ’99, ’03, ’06 – if you read this blog you should pretty much instantly be able to tell just from those numbers what movements blew up then. Depending when you were born you’ll go misty eye’d to “Strings of Life” or “Valley of the Shadows (31 Seconds)” or “Spirit of the Sun (Steve Gurley mix)” or “Midnight Request Line.” They define a time and a place.

I don't mind Disclosure, but of course I agree with Martin's thrust here – how could I not, it's basically the "atemporality" syndrome he's railing against

What is confounding for nuumheadz like he and me is that the younger generation just don’t judge or appraise or respond to music like this - in terms of a dialectic in which there's a series of advances that entail jettisoning previous styles that have been superceded.

Instead these are simply options available to us as listeners and as creators ...  styles that are fully present, in the present

(An aside: it's a bit too perfect that it's the El B remix of Disclosure that Martin would deign to play!).

 Martin's  "Dear Disclosure" has engendered a fierce, 45 comment debate in the comments box, making it the Dissensus/UK-bass world equivalent of the Peace / Barlow / Kulkarni flap and the Savages debate

Hauntologists taking the piss, or hauntologists having the piss taken out of them?

"Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. "Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay." For more information please reread."

Jolly well done, either way:
 

                                                   
 

 (via Our God Is Speed)


Ah, an interview with the creator Richard Littler indicates that in fact Scarfolk is in the sincerely-humorous spirit of imaginary towns like Ghost Box's Belbury or Moon Wiring Club's Clinksell, with  pedagogical/paternalistic imagery in the same vein as The Advisory Circle, D.D. Denham's electronic music for schools, etc

Still, as one commenter notes in the box at the bottom of that Creative Review interview, it's a wee bit disconcerting that neither Littler nor the interviewer acknowledges the precursors: "I  do very much enjoy Scarfolk, but I am surprised the questioning didn't ask how it related to earlier explorers of the same ideas (Look Around You, Ghost Box, Mordant Music's Disinformation remix of Public Information films for the BFI)...".  It is presented as if all this just occurred to Littler out of the blue.

But perhaps that's just a sign of our recursive / anterograde amnesia / Groundhog Day culture, that something that's already been around once or twice, can keep coming back again?

There is something appropriately undead about hauntology and its sister genre hypnagogic.

The dialectical march of music really ought to have superceded them by now (eight years on in the case of hauntology, even if we don't count precursors like Position Normal or Boards of Canada or Mount Vernon;  five or six years on in the case of hypnagogia). And yet they keep on coming: there's a new, excellent Focus Group album out next month;  vaporwave was hypnagogic 2.0;  Prince Rama's ghost modernism = hauntology merged with hypnagogic merged with stargaze...

The dialectic is precisely what has broken down in music, replaced by hyperstasis, or should that be hipsterstasis... 

Anyway, for now, feast your eyes....