addendum to previous post on patternwork

here's the very thing I had made a mental note re. -- Phil's post from April last year on patternwork at the Nineties blog Up Close and Personal

which starts with this bloody big Spengler quote


"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.

So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures." 

- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

and goes into a panoramic riff-sweep across 20th Century culture before homing in to blast into smithereens both Britpop and Britart - the former described as "a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well" and the latter as "a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge".

Ecstatic Apophenia on Decadence and Dying Earth, part 1 and part 1.5

Part 1 looks at the  “dying earth” subgenre of science fiction, which "takes place in an unimaginably distant future in which the dying sun is but 'a coal-red decadent star, grown old beyond chronicle, beyond legend.'  Stories in this style often overflow the boundaries of both science fiction and fantasy, seeking a liminal space in which one can become the other.  In this pushing the boundaries of form, 'dying earth' ...  is the decadent style to science fiction’s classical style."

EA then quotes Gautier on decadent art: 

  "art arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded by the slanting suns of aged civilizations: an ingenious complicated style, full of shades and of research... borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colour from all palettes and notes from all keyboards…. rendering modern ideas and things in their infinite complexity and multiple colouration."

That sounds like it could have  lots of application to recent music, from digital maximalism, to what Woebot calls "audio trickle" (as heard in post-Ableton/DAW microhouse) to cutesy-poo (i.e. heavily arranged and orchestrally-tricked out "indie" in the post-Olivia Tremor/Magnetic Fields/et al sense) to...  you name it, really.

EA's contrast between “volume” and “density” -- "a classic style has volume, while a decadent style has density, so much so that it overflows its container" --  seems also to capture that epochal shift in the meaning of "minimal" in the last 20 years of techno. In the 90s, it meant stark, severe, emaciated, empty (early 20th Century modernist, basically). In the 2000s, minimal meant miniaturised, lots of tiny details (hence "micro"), a kind of imploded ornamentalism, an infinite subtilization ....

minimalism, in it first, modernist sense = music that is full of emptiness -- hence "volume"

minimal, in its current and misleading sense, since it is really a form of micro-maximalism = music that is emptied of open-ness... a congestion-zone -- hence "density"

as such it's in perfect homology with the tagliatelle-tangling unspace of the Internet

(as it should be since the same technology substrate underlines the machinery -- digital audio, archiving systems)

glutted/clotted, innit