broken time / brain strain

an article about how the 2010s played havoc with our sense of temporality and strained our brains to breaking point, by Katherine Miller

"This long and wearying decade is coming to a close, though, even if there’s no sense of an ending. People are always saying stuff like: Time has melted; my brain has melted; Donald Trump has melted my brain; I can’t remember if that was two weeks ago or two months ago or two years ago; what a year this week has been. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again. Your Facebook feed won’t stop showing you a post from four days ago, about someone you haven’t seen in three years. The Office, six years after it ended, might be the most popular show in the United States. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again....

"The touch and taste of the 2010s was nonlinear acceleration: always moving, always faster, but torn this way and that way, pushed forward, and pulled back under.... 

"In the 20 months between Hillary Clinton’s campaign announcement and Trump’s inauguration, everything from Apple Music to HBO Now to Apple News launched or relaunched; the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Watch hit the full market; publishers established the current form and tone of the news push alerts that you receive; Facebook launched a livestreaming function and then deprioritized the function when people aired violence; Instagram launched the ephemeral, inexhaustive stories, so you can share — as they put it — “everything in between” the moments you care about; Twitter introduced the quote-tweet option, which formalized and democratized a function from the earlier days of Twitter, and transformed every Trump tweet into an opportunity for commentary.

"And, within a few months in 2016, both the primary catalog for millions of lives (Instagram) and the primary channel for news and culture (Twitter) switched from chronological to algorithmic timelines...."

As well as political churn, Miller also inspects popular culture:

"We’re living through an incredible boom of great shows. Often described, with a weary irony, as the era of Peak TV, this wealth of programming followed tech and traditional premium broadcasters finally figuring out how to commercialize streaming platforms in the 2010s. As a result, you the viewer can move in any sort of direction, watching in bulk something that aired last year, or on Sunday, or one scene again and again, freed from the now-or-never quality that TV once had. For decades, TV either made or ran parallel to the rhythms of American life: morning shows, daytime soaps, the 6 o’clock news, the playoffs, Johnny Carson. In between, the broadcast networks aired 22 half-hour episodes, weekly from September to May, at a fixed time, winding away in sequential order at a mass scale."

Yup, it's not so much that we've lost the monoculture, it's that we've lost monotemporality

Miller quotes Emily Nussbaum on how "time itself has been bent", with one factor being the pause button, which  “helped turn television from a flow into text, to be frozen and meditated upon.”

Certainly because it's  possible to stop the flow of televisual (or filmic) time, it becomes irresistible to do it at any and every excuse - watching a program or film becomes a stop-start experience with interruptions for urination, rehydration, snacks, unrelated conversational digressions, and then also rewinds to catch dialogue or plot nuances or repeat particularly enjoyable sequences.

Yet it's also likely to be subject to acceleration, with Netflix planning to introduce a 1.5 speed function (and YouTube already allows you to alter the speed of viewing) - which will make watching TV even more fitful and spasmodic.

Long before TV though, I noticed this disruption to the flow of experiential time when I got my first compact disc player in 1989 - with a remote control with pause and skip etc. Music became a frangible, interruptible thing.

hauntologist chats up proto-hauntologist / Foxxy gentlemen / ghost writings / the umtimeliche

Jim Jupp of Ghost Box recently chatted with Mike Sandison of Boards of Canada for this French monthly magazine Magic, Revue Pop Moderne. The nature of Time came up as a topic, with Jupp reiterating GB's interest in what they've variously called "Eternalism" or "The All at Once".





GHOST BOX: As a group of artists we are often asked about nostalgia and memory, but for us BoC’s notion of “the past inside the present” has been a more important motivator than straightforward re-enactment of music from our childhood. To my mind, BoC’s music suggests a world where time has no existence at all and contemporary sounds and references seem no more or less important than ones from the past or future. It certainly gives your records lasting and timeless appeal far beyond simple nostalgia, but is this something you recognize in your work yourselves and how far is it part of a deliberate process?

BOARDS OF CANADA: Absolutely yes, I think you put it really well there, as it’s never been our aim to just accurately ape something from the past. I don’t think there would be much point in doing that. We’re trying to take something stylistically recognizable from the past as a starting point and then to envisage where that style would have gone if it had been allowed to develop further, if you imagine a parallel reality where music went down a different route. So I suppose you do hear anachronistic and contemporary things sitting side by side in our music.

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Anachronistic and contemporary side by side....  well, how's about this new Ghost Box EP Empty Avenues, a collaboration between John Foxx and the Belbury Circle (Jim Jupp + Jon Brooks) 

(Ruddy good, it is too -- especially the tunes "Almost There" and "Suit". Proper pop songs)

This invocation perfectly timed (in a time out of joint way) for the approaching publication of Mark 'Foxxy Gentleman' Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures on Zer0 Books. An extract from which collection, titled "The Slow Cancellation of the Future", can be checked out here at The Quietus.

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

vampires of time

Digital native and millenial-not-millenial Lindsay Zoladz writes about the phenomenology of online existence a/k/a atemporality as everyday experience in her Pitchfork column Ordinary Machines:

"This was the year, let's call it 2010, that I first felt my sense of time breaking down completely. It was, not coincidentally, the first year I had a desk job and thus the first year I spent eight-plus hours a day in front of a screen. The days lapsed in disorienting flickers in the bottom right hand of my screen: 9:51 a.m. turning to 12:33 p.m. and how did it get to be 5:36 p.m. in what seemed like a couple of blinks. But even when I looked up from my monitor, a shift seemed to be happening on a larger scale, too. For one thing, the nostalgia cycle was all out of whack. The 90s were back, but simultaneously so were the 80s, and the 70s, and the 60s-- and the 1890s. Mythic records and out-of-print cult movies I'd spent half my life searching for were now available in a single, anticlimactic click, and the Willy Wonka-brite buffet of the internet meant that everybody was gorging on the recent past, but perhaps at the expense of the now. The wheels of time started to resemble a jammed cassette: The past was coiling over on itself in such a tangle that it didn’t feel like there was much room for the present. And maybe that was part of the reason why I found the vague idea of “millennials” so difficult to identify with, to claim as my own."

Actually the column is mostly about Vampire Weekend's new record as an expression of “millennial unease”. 

That's VW who I held up in Retromania's conclusion as prime example of pop atemporality that works, that feels fresh and original.  

Must say, though, I don't care much for the new album - some nice twirls of melody and vocal bits, but overall feels like the sound they've developed has neither the spare freshness of the debut nor the thick NOW!ist gloss of Contra,  the subject matter isn't resonating with me (everyone quotes that lyric about "age is an honour but you'd trade it for youth"-- well yeah I recognise the feeling but the expression feels clunky), don't know why a Souls of Mischief reference is any sort of big whoop,   and, yeah, dunno...  not grabbed, basically. Will persevere, though, as everyone under the sun seems to think it's the towering achievement of their mature artistry, even people who didn't rate 'em much before.

But Zoladz does intrigue me into wanting to digging deeper, identifying in VW new songs not just the atemporality of musical and lyrical references they've always revelled in, but a new preoccupation with atemporality as an ontological condition.

"One particular thing that strikes me every time I listen is how often it references time. From the persistent second hand tick in “Don’t Lie” to the way the refrain “there’s a lifetime right in front of you” becomes, in a flicker as unceremoniously devastating as a lost afternoon lapsed on a digital clock, “there’s a headstone right in front of you.” There’s something strange, illogical, and uneasy about the way time passes on this record; you could definitely say it’s on some Benjamin Button shit."

Reference to that movie reminded me of an interesting-looking book I came across just recently: Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema, by Todd McGowan, published in 2011, and exploring "the emergence of a temporal aesthetic in cinema that arose in response to the digital era. Linking developments in cinema to current debates within philosophy, McGowan claims that films that change the viewer’s relation to time constitute a new cinematic mode: atemporal cinema. In atemporal cinema, formal distortions of time introduce spectators to an alternative way of experiencing existence in time—or, more exactly, a way of experiencing existence out of time. McGowan draws on contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly Jacques Lacan, to argue that atemporal cinema unfolds according to the logic of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive rather than that of desire, which has conventionally been the guiding concept of psychoanalytic film studies. Despite their thematic diversity, these films distort chronological time with a shared motivation: to reveal the logic of repetition. Like psychoanalysis, McGowan contends, the atemporal mode locates enjoyment in the embrace of repetition rather than in the search for the new and different."

Zoladz herself references another interesting looking book, This Is Running For Your Life by Michelle Orange, for the line "in a time that is no time and only time and all times, all the time.”   

So many interesting-looking books, so little time... 

"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

Welcome to... the Internet -  XLR8R magazine's  platform for monitoring "sounds emanating from a particular locale, even when that locale happens to be more virtual than geographical"

In this episode, Brandon Bussolini argues that the post-everything music of artists like  Nguzunguzu, Fatima Al Qadiri, Matrixxman, Physical Therapy, Brenmar, RL Grime. et al, and labels like Hippos In TAnks, etc is the next stage on from retromania, Because it is based around:

"a more radically decentered aesthetic, one that rejects references to analog culture in favor of the hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality of the internet itself. These artists refer to the past, but through the flattening viewfinder of the web; there's no longing to return to an earlier time or style because it's all here, right now—all equally valid and equally LOLworthy. The space away from media-conveying screens that "IRL" once described has collapsed rapidly, to the point where—philosophically at least—there's no lack, no difference between this and the real world. For many of these artists, the internet has gone from a mediating force—giving partial, finite access to the past or the present, but remaining fixated on another world out there, away from the screen—to a closed circuit actively opposed to linear time and hierarchical values. Despite what the design savvy we're surrounded with on the web may be suggesting, we're living in an achronological, carnivalesque present, both appalling in its smooth gaudiness and perfectly, reassuringly frictionless."

Well yeah, stage 2 from retromania is atemporality, where the sense of past-ness has gone, but so has the possiblity or conceivability of future-ness.

(See also post-Internet, "it's everything time", tumblr-pop, "Zones of Alteration", vaporwave etc)

But also relevant is that atemporal - or as Bussolini has it, "achronological" -- is half the story: atopological, ungeographical, that's the other half.  Atopological is to xenomania, what atemporality is to retromania. Which is to say that the sense of distance is almost abolished in the instantaneous access and absolute proximity of netspace. The gap created by  distance (temporal, spatial) is the gap in which desire, longing, projection, exoticism, etc takes place. This is what strikes me about the New Music, it feels desireless. It's hard to see what motivates it to exist, what motors it in terms of either individual psychological energy or social energy. 

These arrangements of incongruous but slickly annealed sounds, these chimerical agglomerations of disparate influences and far-flung sounds -- what are they here for? It's not just that there is no longer much in the way of utopian or progressive charge to all this border-crossing (as there was with early, analogue-era forms of fusion and hybridity -- "One World" music, etc). It's that you don't get much sense of  libidinal charge, of mechanisms like cathexis, sublimation, transference, etc, being in play.  Digital means that fusion is effortless, but also eros-less.  ("Frictionless", Bussolini's word choice, makes me think of netporn, and of responses to its bounty like the curated porn tumblr). Or it is a different kind of eros - diffuse, floating, easily distracted, ultra-tenuous, as happy to fasten on the simulated as the real...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I was sure Fatima Al Qadiri was a made-up person, a Ferraro-esque alter-ego for some bespectacled geek in a stained T-shirt. But there's a picture of her. Still a bit suspicious, though. Seems a bit too good too be true.

 


 

Seeds of Retromania, #1

from an interview I did in 2006 around Rip It Up and Start Again

"I had this experience recently in a bar in the East Village.  I go there a lot, it's a basement bar where hip people go to transcend the game of hip -- they play really rocking, All-American tunes there -   Aerosmith and James Gang and AC/DC.  Anyway, this song came on and I recognized it and it was driving me nuts, I couldn't place it. So I had to go ask the guy at the bar what it was. The barman didn't know and was too busy to look at that moment. But this twenty-five year old guy hanging at the bar, he wanted to help me out. And he suggested, "it might be The Fall, or possibly The Alarm, but I don't think it's The Fixx”.  Now, being a rock critic and having come of age as a rock fan during the Eighties, those three bands don't seem like they'd be capable of being confused with each other at all. But it was also very obviously, to my ears, a 70’s sounding song. You could tell by the production, the style of playing -- it was pre-punk.  Old Wave. That struck me, the fact that for this young person who clearly knew quite a bit about music -- he'd heard The Fall, at any rate - the history of rock could be jumbled up like that.

"Then the barman came back and he still didn't know but he'd managed to find out that it was from the soundtrack to Goodfellas . And then it clicked, it was the soundtrack to that exciting sequence of scenes when Liotta's character is coked-out and frantic  -- the paranoia and the pasta sauce and the helicopters overhead.  The song was the song that wasn't The Stones, "Monkey Man" -- it was the other song. But I still didn't know what it was. Later I found out it was Nilssen, 'Jump Into the Fire". So definitely pre-punk. 1971, in fact.

"In Rip It Up, there is a strong differentiation between music in ’78, ’79, ’80, '81. But I lived through that sequence, through the big changes that happened each year, the memory of that is still vivid to me, the distinctions very real.  I think young people now hear stuff from so many eras at once all jumbled up, those distinctions don't matter to them. All that is unrecoverable, the sense of historical sequence.

"Its fascinating to me.  It's actually something I’d like to write a book on – time, nostalgia, timelessness… "

James Parker at Tiny Mix Tapes on the new Emeralds (versus vaporwave)

Which is only "new" in the notional sense of  it's the latest Emeralds record (as in "yet another Emeralds record"). And in another sense it's very deliberately not-new, but the recapitulation of a style (Sky Records, late kosmische heading towards E2: E4) that in its own day signified an advance, or at least an evolution (Krautrockers engaging with the latest technology of guitar pedals, sequencers, synths etc), but more than thirty years later is, at very best, a strategic withdrawal from current possibilities. 

"Emeralds are doubly anachronistic. It’s not just that they’re retro. They aren’t even retro in a particularly contemporary way.... These weren’t exactly slavish recreations... [I dunno, my first thought on hearing Just To Feel Anything, was that it was like a Gottsching/Rother tribute band.. but enough interruptions, pray continue James!] ... It was as if Emeralds had simply decided to pick up and continue to explore a genre that had last touched base with the zeitgeist some 30 or so years previously..... The commitment is to the genre itself, to a catalogue of very particular sounds, effects, and techniques. It is these that provide the framework within which any further experimentation must be confined. The problem is that unless you’re already on board in this respect, unless you’re also a fanboy, equally committed to the rules of the game, equally happy to judge a record according to its micro-innovations, or in terms of its ability to successfully inhabit the genre, then it can all feel a little bit… well… pointless. So it turns out that there’s a little of the modernist in me yet. Not even vaporwave could put pay to it entirely. I’m more than happy with appropriation, it seems, a certain kind of totally overt relation with the past, but only so long as that relation feels new or refreshing somehow."

I'm a vaporwave agnostic myself...   a lot of it just sounds like bland music played at the wrong speed, to me, no more or less - vapidwave, more like!  From its textures and techniques to its rationalisation, it all feels like a coda to Ferraro/Onehotrix/Chuck Person...    the       Chapterhouse/Ride/Catherine Wheel to the former's MBV/AR Kane.  I don't quite see the conceptual leap beyond what was already proposed by Far Side Virtual/Eccojams that is being made here...  It feels less of a surprising extension than hipster house, for instance.  

I enjoy reading about it, very much, but when you get more pleasure and stimulation from the discourse around the music than the music itself, that's a warning sign...

A sign of what? Well, it's now approaching a half-decade of hypnagogic (Keenan's article was 2009, but the underground music currents he marshalled together under that conceptual rubric were in motion from 2008 onwards,  maybe earlier).  Five years is a long time in music (shoegaze, for instance, lasted about that long, 1988 to 1992: from the pioneer stage to the codifying exhaustion of the style, from "You Made Me Realise" to Going Blank Again). You would probably expect some kind of change-up at this point.

(Of course, hauntology has been going even longer (2005-6) than hypnagogic -  good things still seep out from the haunty zone, subtle twists and extensions... But the point perhaps is that, however good to listen to they may be, they cannot be the spur to new thoughts)

Then again, maybe the hallmark of an atemporal age (or not-age) is that genres never really die... the supercessive logic of linearity, of dialectical advances that entail the definitive abandonment of earlier styles and stages .... that doesn't apply anymore.

"Not wishing to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo, but underlying and unifying all the above, I sense a tendency towards entropy: indistinctness, inertia, ultimately indifference. Whether it's good (Since I Left You) or bad (most bootlegs), what we're witnessing is the kind of sonic grand bouffe only possible during a late era. Could it be that the age of retro-mania / file-sharing / sampladelia--where time has effectively been abolished--enables us to use the abundance of the past to obscure the failings and lacks of the present? Well, it's a thought..."

The germ of Retromania?  That was written in early 2002, for Unfaves of 2001 (it's in the section called "Lameness on the Horizon",  about mashups, or as they were called then, bootlegs / "bastard pop")

Well, it's one of the germs--these questions have been a back-of-the-mind preoccupation for ever, really, and sporadically a front-of-the-mind preoccupation for a really long time too.

In fact I discovered recently that the working title for a piece I wrote in the early Nineties (pegged to the launch of mags like Mojo and Vox, but also dealing with reissue-mania, reformations, etc) was actually "Retromania". But the Guardian went with something else as the headline.

^^^^^^^^^^^

I suppose I do sort of wish to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo

Or at least, I'd rather not unilaterally abandon the idea... I don't quite get the appeal of dancing on its grave with merry abandon, proclaiming good riddance to bad rubbish, and  it was only ever  a myth in the first place, and an oppressive myth that's "holding us back"

The talk I did in Central Europe was a kind of remix of the Slate piece on recreativity plus elements on the all-new chapter  I did for the Ventil Verlag edition of Retromania plus other stuff that occurred to me since. And one of the ironies I pointed out was that :

The old-fashioned ideology of innovation/originality/genius remains the best way of encouraging people to produce new-fashioned music

Whereas the (allegedly) new-fashioned notions of "everything's a remix/we use the old to make the new/"even the Beatles were derivative, were retro", these are a sure-fire route to fostering old-fashioned-music,  old-fashioned anything...  they are propaganda in favour of underachievement

(Actually, my further point was that these seemingly cool, latest-thing, trendy, hot-off-the-academic press ideas about appropriation/quotation/"unoriginal genius", etc are in fact rather aged themselves -- you could in fact just as easily talk about old-fashioned postmodernism as you could of old-fashioned modernism)

Which mindset gets the best results, that's the question, I think...

Choose your illusion, the most useful delusion...


^^^^^^^^^^^

Speaking of  "time has effectively been abolished"...

Here's an interesting interview Bruce Sterling did about atemporality with Renata Lemos-Morais

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