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.

not-so-New Age

So many operatives in the Zones of Alteration have moved away from hypnagogic 1.0 to hynagogic 2.0, i.e.  high-definition / digital-NOW! aesthetics, otherwise known as vaporwave. Indeed they did so a while back, following Ferraro's lead, such that there's already a vaporwave-backlash! D Check  this, that, and this: one-star and half-star reviews from Tiny Mix Tapes, until recently the great champion of all things V-wave. (Not forgetting its other great champion, our foremost taxonomist).  Commencing the slide in its stock profile,  this earlier TMT review - a tour de force of conceptual-reviewing - damned the genre with faint praise and fainter abuse.

But I expect VW will chunter on for a good while, as genres seem to do these days. The mystery of subcultural persistence (drum'n'bass is still being made in 2013) is now joined by the puzzle of  micro-generic obstinacy: hauntology chunters on, even coughing up twilight-era gems against the odds, while in postdubstep, "neon", first identified /christened circa 2009, appears to have cycled around into  sudden renewed relevance, or so we are led to believe).   

Another example: hypnagogic 1.0 has not gotten away either.  Defying high-def, the blurry, lo-fi  Nu-New Age sound of 2009-2010, which fetishised analogue from its synths to its cassette-tape format,  is still percolating in certain  quarters. As documented by this blog. 

And then there's this:

 I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990 

Light In The Attic

October 29th

press release:

 "Forget everything you know, or think you know, about new age, a genre that has become one of the defining musical-archaeological explorations of the past decade.

I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990 is the first major anthology to survey the golden age of new age and reveal the unbelievable truth about the genre.

For new age, at its best, is a reverberation of psychedelic music, and great by any standard. This is analog, handmade music communicating soul and spirit, often done on limited means and without commercial potential, self-published and self-distributed. Before it became big business and devolved into the spaced out elevator music we know and loathe today, this was the real thing.

From mathematical musical algorithms to airport murder mysteries to Henry Mancini and Bugs Bunny, the connections to mainstream culture run in curious directions. (Did you know, for instance, that a track from the first modern private press new age album is featured on the Blade Runner soundtrack? It’s called “Pompeii, 76 A.D.”, and we’ve got it here.)

I Am The Center is a knowing, but never cynical overview that invites listeners at last to the mainspring of a misunderstood genre’s greatest lights. Many of the biggest names are present — Iasos, inter-dimentional channeler of “paradise music”; Laraaji, discovered by Brian Eno playing for spare change in Washington Square Park; and the recently famous JD Emmanuel, icon to a new generation of drone, ambient, noise musicians. Call it what you will — before it was anything else, it was new age.

Lovingly conceived and lavishly presented, I Am The Center features stunning paintings by the legendary visual artist Gilbert Williams, and liner notes by producer Douglas Mcgowan, who weaves the words and images of the wizards and sorceresses of new age into a prismatic portrait of music that can finally be recognized for what it is: great American folk art."

2xCD housed in deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket with 44-page book
3xLP housed in slip case w/ 3 tip-on jackets, download card and 20-page book
Both formats with notes by Douglas Mcgowan featuring interviews with artists and includes rare archive photos.
Artwork by Gilbert Williams and Janaia Donaldson.
2 unreleased tracks, 7 others previously only on cassette


postscript - how about some post-post-vaporwave?

At Tiny Mix Tapes, Rowan Savage argues for Bryan Ferry's new album of Twenties jazz-style remakes of his own songs -- an album on which he neither sings nor plays --  as a hauntological excercise:

"The Jazz Age both embodies Ferry’s political conservatism — a return to a nostalgic past, a valorization of what is now canonical — while also referring to an (or perhaps the) era of “cool.” The choice to record such an album in itself reflects this division: on the one hand, slavishly recreating the past is now precisely what pop music does; while on the other, the unusual particularity of the age and aesthetic chosen for reconstruction works against the typical paradigm — as does the holus-bolus reinterpretation of one’s own work, a kind of self-cannibalism (Ouroboros redux) but with a side of Baby Ruths and Wonder Bread... We have a literal reinvention of Ferry’s own material, but one embodied in the absolutely and unashamedly unoriginal, and in delving back ever closer to the zero point of popular music — which seems like a logical endpoint to the process.

"The project can easily be compared to other left-fieldly archaic interpretations and cratediggings — R. Crumb’s justifiably well-received compilation That’s What I Call Sweet Music, for example. I was consistently reminded of The Jolly Boys’ Great Expectation, a Mento (pre-ska Jamaican folk) interpretation of indie standards from Iggy Pop to Amy Winehouse. And there is a precedent within Ferry’s own oeuvre, in his long-held penchant for jazz standards — think of 1999’s As Time Goes By.
But in another sense, The Jazz Age is more fruitfully understood through the lens of acts like The Caretaker ... The distressed patina of age is not re-presented, but purposefully reconstructed — not so much shabby chic as swanky chic — the heartache without which no dream home is now complete."

Enjoyed also this bit at the start about the "bereft yet cornucopian" conditions of archival overload,  a snowdrift of precedents that impedes (your) progress and makes giant steps  so much harder

 "We live in an age in which a lack of destruction is itself the cause of destruction. As data pile up to unmanageable quantities, pop has no choice but to eat itself, Ouroboros-like, and grow fat in the process. Music lives (so the lament goes), but only as a monstrous revenant, capable of mimesis and mitosis, but not reproduction...."

                                                        Yes that's "The Bogus Man"!

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.

"The once futureshapers have become custodians of a heritage. Like the computer, techno may have lost its most revolutionary connotations, but traces of the old promise remain: one must still override the present, if not solely for the sake of the future".

A probing and wide-roving review of Polysick's Digital Native  by Reed Scott Reid over at Tiny Mix Tapes, touching on many facets of the futurepast utopianism of techno, from the launchpad of  Polysick's debt to Underground Resistance.

And along the way achieving a Wire-writers tetrafecta of referencing (Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Rob Young, yours truly) plus redeployment of theorems from  Vincent Mosco, Georg Simmel, and Robert Farris Thompson. 

But what, prithee, is "an acid-moiled jounce"?

(It's a good record actually...  and I like the title/concept of "digital natives")

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Some other ace TMT stuff from recently: James Parker's contributions to the debate about vaporwave, and Jonathan Dean's takedown of Gatekeeper

 must admit (talking of retrofutures) that my very soul did yawn when the 303s wibbled their way out of the mix on Exo .... other aspects of the sound made me flash on Front Line Assembly, seldom a good thing

shame as they are very interesting to think about / read about and one can only salute Adam Harper for using them as a canvas to genre-coin upon: "Distroid" – the muscular music of hi-DEF doom

of course as per the Concept-Music thesis, you could say their music is their own canvas... the Sounded Word c.f. the Painted Word