metal at a standstill

Keith Kahn-Harris with a piece at Souciant that detects retromaniacal tendencies in metal

Caused by the same syndromes of glut, hyper-access, over-abundance etc as with other zones of music in the post-broadband era:


"... We’re witnessing a significant transformation in the nature of music. Scenes act as incubators for identifiable styles and genres, for distinctive ways of being. The slow pace at which they used to be ‘discovered’ by the outside world meant that they had time to develop with a relative degree of isolation. It’s no accident that some of the most distinctive metal styles were initially developed in tightly knit local scenes: Bay Area thrash, Tampa death metal, Norwegian black metal..."


"Today’s ‘always on’ digital world, in which the gap between action and reaction has closed almost to nothing, has radically altered our relationship to time. Narrative history has collapsed into an eternal present, in which we’re flooded by media, sensations and events. Ironically, one of the characteristics of this present is increasing nostalgia and obsession with the past.... 

"The half-life of cultural production extends indefinitely, as nothing goes truly out of style, and artists linger well past their sell-by date....

 
"It is not just that nostalgia has become prevalent – although we can certainly see that in the case of metal, for example, with the continuous stream of re-releases and reunions from even the most insignificant 1980s bands....   


"There are still forms of metal that are being developed primarily by and for young people, particularly emo, screamo and djent. But their context is crucially different. Teenage metal in 2013 may offer a new kind of assemblage of metal and non-metal elements. However, it does not provide substantially new sounds. The accumulated weight of over 40 years of metal history looms over new entrants to metal. As nothing in metal history is completely discredited, there is no sense that a new generation can displace the old "

[Djent ? !? ]

"One possibly ‘game-changing’ development in the evolution of metal is the gradual retirement of metal’s biggest-selling acts.... None of this would matter if new generations of bands were taking their place as metal legends and stadium-filling platinum-selling acts, but few bands from the 1990s onwards have the same status and reach.....  it may be that without the unifying effect of mythic acts, metal may dissipate and fragment further.

"Whatever the future holds, innovation is still possible in metal. Yet this innovation has been atomised among hundreds of different artists that do not cohere into an overwhelming new direction. We are unlikely to see in metal again the kind of ‘mass extinction event’ that occurred in the early 1990s, that rendered entire genres all but obsolete."

Not really surprising that these syndromes are music-culture-wide  - Keiths' atomisation of innovation is a really handy concept, sounds very applicable to a lot of bloggy-world musics....

Here's an earlier post at Blissblog on the subject of retro metal

 

spectral cinema

At Residual Noise, James Riley argues for A Field In England as a hauntological film

That makes two, then - with Berberian Sound Studio as the other. Not quite a movement, and one integer short of a trend according to the old journalistic rule. But significant.

The H-connection is clear because of Julian House's involvement in Berberian (doing the credit sequence to the film within the film, Il Vortice Equestre) and his making of an alternative trailer for A Field:

Riley points out where both Ben Wheatley's film and Julian's trailer overlap with a neo-psychedelic aesthetic but also how they differ and veer away into something darker and more unsettled:

"Here we have a similarly high contrast palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details. Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting results"

^^^^^^^
 
Haven't yet seen A Field In England, really keen to. Recently, finally watched Berberian, having had the DVD sit around for ages, and thought it brilliant.

these groundhog days

Another year approaches its end... and yet another Tiny Mix Tapes year-end-wrap-up essay trying to think its way through/past/around retromania (and Retromania)

This one's thesis - 2013 was the Year of Appropriation.

Just like 2012, 2011, and every other year in recent memory, then. Only more so.

Writer Simon Chandler takes an optimistic stance. But I dunno, man:  if the best I could claim for 2013 was that it saw the continuation and marginal exacerbation of moves made by Ferraro, Lopatin, and Hype Williams in 2010 (or earlier), I'd be quite glum.

Dean Blunt figures prominently as an exemplar. The pro argument more or less the same as my nutshell from a couple of  years ago:   "a music, seductive in its vaporousness, that seems to be a place where signifiers go to die, become insubstantialized."

I said "optimistic" but actually, at first the essay seems the opposite, speaking of the erosion of cultural synchrony, the failure of new micro-genres to have extra-musical repercussions....   But then there's a swerve and it's argued that wringing your hands over these developments is old-fashioned. Aesthetics are all that matter; other considerations, other expectations for music,  are "sociology".

But what if the severing of music from social energy, the incapacity of music to generate new forms of behaviour and community....  apart from being disappointing in themselves, actually had a pernicious effect on the music itself?  What if it was a two-way process, a vitiating circle?

I've talked before about the rise of "concept-music". And again we see here the withdrawal of underground music into a cordoned-off seclusion that oddly resembles the art world.   As underground albums increasingly barely exist as commercial entities, their appearance in the "world" become more and more like an exhibition.  The releases get written up in the appropriate journals and a tiny handful will buy them - when available at all - as pricey, exquisitely-packaged musical equivalents to the limited edition print. But most will check them out for free, out of a desire to stay informed or participate in the conversation. And that makes sense: as making a livelihood from music becomes an ever more remote scenario, the art-world model of prestige and "being taken seriously" has a compensatory attraction to musicians.  But it's a long way from the democratic and world-historical power that music has demonstrably exerted in the past.

reviving the already revived / real it so fake i am beyond real

 "It’s a strange business, 'reviving' something that’s been revived a few hundred times already"

Nitsuh Abebe on "What New Folkies Share With the Old Ones"

New folkies being "Mumfords, Avetts, Lumineers & Co", old being the Fifties collegiate types who made a cult of Leadbelly, "squeaky-clean crew-cut folksters in jug-band drag sing[ing] songs about railroads"

What they have in common, basically, is an obsession with authenticity that inevitably, even instantaneously, generates inauthenticity

Nitsuh traces the seed of this instant-ersatz, or one of its sources anyway, to this paradox:

"what we consider folk today [is] not a living tradition, really. It’s more like a snapshot of a tradition—American rural music as it existed at the precise moment that someone thought to make recordings of it. At some point in the twenties or thirties, once enough of those recordings had been made, the whole thing was trapped in amber: It became, officially, the oldest version of rural-American “folk” music that anyone could go back to consult and imitate using their own ears. It became, almost by technological accident, the wellspring and the touchstone, leaving every generation of revivalists looking like a bunch of people holding blurry Polaroids of Eden and arguing over how to resurrect it. It’s like a cargo cult in reverse: Instead of “primitive” people coming across a modern object and surrounding it with elaborate mystical explanations, we get modern people discovering something traditional and erecting intellectual fetishes around it."

The fake-folk, Abebe, argues, is basically arena rock with a small gestural component that harks back deceivingly to the very "organic" "communality" that rock/pop as a mass leisure industry has done so much to eradicate

 "If you want to talk about the diminishing returns of folk, this is the fascinating one: As soon as we started recording this stuff, it became awfully difficult for it to exist. So now our revivalists live in a world of authorship and property, documents and influences, and every once in a while they all shout “Hey” in unison, a faint echo of the proposition that music can also work differently."  

The invention of recording, then, makes a break in organic time, the temporality of barely perceptible but steady evolution in communities and traditions....    Recording makes preservation of the music past possible, but at the cost of proliferating embalmed traditions, time warp cults, xeroxes of xeroxes... It makes these traditions live forever, but in undead rather than truly vital form