"The cracked music archivist"

Kieran Press-Reynolds, in his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed, interviews "Music Place, the bonkers archivist fighting against the sterility of music rec hubs today, creating a cursed but beautiful 'breadcrumb trail' across scenes and languages" 

great moments in retrophobia

At The Ringer, a  whole feature about Pitchfork's Most Notorious Review. 

The year was 2006, the album was Jet's second effort Shine On, the writer was....  well, that's the mystery that Ringer's Nate Rogers sets out to solve. 

And the review? The review was wordless, consisting only of a brief video of a chimp peeing in its own mouth. 

Scott Plagenhoef, an editor at Pfork, recalls: 

We were talking about the central problem as we saw it with the record, how the Return to Rock trend that started with the Strokes, White Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and really rock in general—had curdled into a set of lazy signifiers and poses. When the point or driver of what you’re doing is reclamation it’s inherently limiting and resistant to new ideas. It’s a creative cul-de-sac. Progression—whether it was in hip-hop, pop, guitar music, electronic music—was important to us at the time. Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, became so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing.

This what things were like in the 2000s. A state of affairs that might lead someone to write a book called Retromania.

Mind you, a magazine doing an in-depth historical investigation into a single record review could be taken as an example of retro culture.

Or if not retro exactly, then a kind of chronically historical culture.

Only way to make it more archive-feverish would be if it had been an oral history of the Shine On review.

As it is this piece  - including a sidebar on Other Famous Pitchfork "Stunt" Reviews -  is nearly six thousand words long. 

Never listened to Shine On, or indeed any Jet album, but I confess I've always liked "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" - always turned it up when it came on the radio. It's an immaculate recreation, boosted with modern production.  

They get down pat the surly, rocket-in-my-jeans-front-pocket mannish-boy swagger of, I dunno, the Pretty Things. 

Perhaps justifying one's weakness for such a record would require resorting to the "time travel" metaphor, the futurist critic's self-respect-saving rhetorical maneuver.

Going back to the mid-to-late 2000s, when the retro-talk really started in earnest.... 

Momus amusingly castigated this sort of thing at that time -  reactivating Peter York's concept of Art Necro and talking about Retro Necro. 

One post in particular at his blog Click Opera I remember vividly, although possibly imprecisely: 

Momus is at an airport and what is clearly a rock band arrive at the same gate. The Groop come swaggering in, elegantly wasted, in the appropriate dress for a rock band sonically oriented towards the pre-punk Seventies. Suddenly Momus feels like he's looking at employees at one of those "living history" museums, whose job it is to wear Medieval garb and do traditional crafts all day long - , working in the blacksmithy, churn butter, that kind of thing . 

I suppose it's possible the band at the airport might actually have been Jet.

Not that there wouldn't have been many other contenders to trigger this epiphany - Kasabian. Probably most groups that appeared on the cover of NME during the 2000s. 

Yes, it was a chronic culture of revival and reenactment... which now feels stabilized, just part of how things are and will always be... 

But at the time it seemed inundating and alarming...  the escalation of  preexisting trends and their synchronized convergence, combined with new digital archiving platforms = Crisis. 

Particularly disorienting and dispiriting for post-punk veterans such as me and Momus and Mark. 

taking stock

LA Times piece on the trend for online-only publications* to rediscover print-and-paper formats

compare with

Alexis C. Madrigal's "2013: the Year 'the Stream' Crested" which among many interesting points, makes use of Robin Sloan's idea of "flow" versus "stock" -- 

"Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. 

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time."

-- to wonder what happens when the balance between flow and stock gets crazily out of wack, both in the culture and in any given individual's life (as content-producer and as content-consumer) 

Reversion to analogue formats (and, it's hoped, their modes of reading, their temporality) is an extreme strategy to reestablish "stock" and with it the idea not just of the long read but of cultural longevity....

* As it happens, in the debut issue of the Pitchfork Review - one of the digital-goes-analogue publications  discussed in Matt Pearce's LA Times piece - I have the lead essay "Worth Their Wait":  part misty-eyed reminiscence about the UK music weeklies I grew up on,  part a sober analysis of the difference between loyally reading a solid-form magazine that came out at regular intervals (i.e. then) and navigating the omnidirectional, "always-on" info-and-opinion bombardment (i.e. now)

However as it's only available in ink-and-paper form, and comes out tomorrow, you'll have to wait if you want to read it. And you'll have to go somewhere, most likely, to get a copy. Like that little feller in the illustration, which (I think) is supposed to be me hastening down to W.H. Smiths on a Wednesday. Sweet, although it looks more like Paris than Berkhamsted High Street.


                                        

sacre bleu ! / sacrilege?

Radiophonic Workshop to be reopened

"Yesterday it was announced the renamed New Radiophonic Workshop will compose fresh work as one of the highlights of The Space, a new freely-available digital arts service. Part of the London 2012 Festival, The Space will offer a platform for contemporary artists as well as historically important archive film, accessed on mobile and tablet devices and Freeview. The New Radiophonic Workshop (NRW) will be led by Matthew Herbert, the electronic composer who has collaborated with Björk and been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack work"

Matt H is great, but can this really be a good idea?

The Space are the outfit responsible for the archive-febrile idea of turning John Peel's home office and record collection into a virtual museum -- you can look but not listen to the records

(at Quietus David Stubbs reviews the discs under 'A' while  Everett True reviews the discs under 'C' )

(sweet that Peelie clung onto so many albums by Camel)

they also have some Peel shows, but not many


meanwhile at Pitchfork,  Eric Harvey has a think about what the Peel collection and Dilla's collection mean in this age of music as dematerialised data