"I will always be there for you" - the ghost of rave / the ghost of socialism

Here's an essay I did for Pitchfork about Burial's Untrue ten years on. 

It's also effectively a tribute to Mark Fisher, who is a recurring presence in the piece. 

It's intentional that Burial's real name is never once mentioned in the piece - honoring his original allegiance to rave's radical facelessness and anonymous collectivity. 

Below is my favorite out of the post-Untrue Burial output - in some ways the missing chapter from that album.

There were two parallels and precursors for Burial's  ghost-of-rave (as ghost-of-socialism) aesthetic that I couldn't get into as it would have been too much of a digression.

The first: Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which I wrote about here. 




And the second:  "Weak Become Heroes" by The Streets.


 

What Burial related through samples and moody orchestrations, Mike Skinner conveyed with words,  describing the flashback of a former raver abruptly set adrift on blissed memories of love and unity on the dancefloor. “All the commotion becomes floating emotions...  They could settle wars with this...  Imagine the world's leaders on pills... All of Life's problems I just shake off.” Then he's snapped back to the dreary streets of a hostile and hopeless 21^st Century England: “gray concrete and deadbeats... no surprises no treats... My life's been up and down since I walked from that crowd.” “Weak,” in Skinner’s song, means not just personally frail, but politically powerless. The weak became heroes when they became a mass, uniting around the unwritten manifesto in the music: someday there’ll be a better way, but in the meantime let’s shelter for a while in this dreamspace.  What the critic Richard Smith (like dear Mark also “late” now – so many ghosts these days) called “the communism of the emotions” triggered by Ecstasy seemed to prefigure a social movement. But the collective energy never got beyond the level of a pre-political potential; the moment dissipated. 

“I love those hardcore and rave tunes because they sound deep, hopeful, for the times, and the people... It’s unbelievable, that glow in the tunes, it almost breaks your heart.” - Burial, someplace, sometime

"The tunes I loved the most…old jungle, rave and hardcore, sounded hopeful....  All those lost producers…I love them, but it’s not a retro thing… When I listen to an old tune it doesn’t make me think ‘I’m looking back, listening to another era.’ Some of those tunes are sad because they sounded like the future back then and no one noticed. They still sound future to me." - Burial, someplace, sometime  


In a way, it's a shame Burial stopped doing the interviews -  he was almost born to do them, even more than make music! He's better at describing his own music and motives than any of his critics, except Mark Fisher himself. I remember Mark telling me after he'd done the interview that he couldn't believe his own ears - the stuff that Burial was coming out with was so poetic and evocative, too good to be true almost. A dream of an interview. Anwen Crawford told me of a similar experience: as I recall it, it was like she was hypnotized, sent into a trance by his voice over the phone. But at same time he was completely real and genuine - somehow down to earth and an ethereal being floating out there at the same time.

"I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. So it's like an angel's spell to protect them against the unkind people, the dark times, and the self-doubts" - Burial on Rival Dealer EP / "Come Down With Us"

Actually there's a third parallel/precursor - The Death of Rave by V/Vm, a/k/a The Caretaker - another of Mark's favorites of course... 



This post is dedicated to Carl Neville. 

el futuro perdido latinoamericano

One of the highlights of my recent book tour of Argentina was a visit to an exhibition dedicated to the early days of electronica and la música concreta in that country.

               

Klang is showing at Centro Cultural Kirchner, or CCK - a vast building in Buenos Aires that was once Argentina's central post office, and later was where Eva Perón based her fundación. 

                           

Klang curator Laura Novoa kindly gave me a guided tour of the exhibition. And of the the building itself, among whose features is La Gran Lámpara - a glowing glass-sided construction seemingly suspended in the air - it's situated in this central voluminous shaft of space that goes from the roof to the ground floor - and inside of which are two exhibitions halls.

                           

Argentina was heavily involved in electronic and tape music experimentation from early on in the music's history. It had strong links with similarly minded composers throughout Latin America. Some, such as Peruvian composers César Bolaños and Edgar Valcárcel came to work in Argentina for a period.  

             

               

Conversely, Argentine pioneers like Edgardo Canton, Beatriz Ferreyra and Horacio Vaggione would move to France to continue their explorations at GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). 

 

Another important avant-garde emigre was Mauricio Kagel, who moved to Cologne, while the Argentina-born Mario Davidovsky went to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. 





The exhibition's span goes from the earliest forays into tape music and electronics made by Argentine composers like Francisco Kröpfl....

                           

... through the work done at of El Estudio de Fonologia Musical (founded by Kropfl) c/o Universidad de Buenos Aires

                           

... then onto the wonderfully 1960s-in-vibe sound design / graphic design developed by the advertising agency Agens, as part of an integrated corporate identity project for the manufacturers SIAM Di Tella

                      

   

                      

                           

... before winding up with CLAEM aka el Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, the most advanced electronic music laboratory in South America thanks largely to the innovations of fellow called Fernando von Reichenbach.

       

As well as the main room with its timeline and walk-in sound-booths with hyper-spatialized audio and often equally disorienting visuals, there is a separate room displaying a variety of  early synthesisers and sound-generating contraptions, scores, and documentary footage on loop.

                               

                                  

                               

                               

                             

                                

                                        

                            

                                                          

  
Muchas gracias to Laura for a fascinating time travel trip to el futuro perdido latinoamericano!

                               

For further information about Argentinan and Latin American electronic music, check out this essay by Ricardo Dal Farra. It comes with an enormous playlist of compositions which I have so far only managed to get about one-fifth of the way through - revelatory stuff. 








   

"Once electronic instruments suggested an exciting, uncharted future. Now they represent a longing for a nostalgic past that did never exist"

"The future of 2017: a cheaper, smaller, unified version of yesterday. The D-50 was awesome and still is, but if re-releasing a D-50 and adding a generic step sequencer represents the vision of contemporary electronic music creation, something very essential got lost on the way. Once electronic instruments suggested an exciting, uncharted future. Now they represent a longing for a nostalgic past that did never exist" - Robert Henke, recently

paging people who working with electronic music-making hardware / software - is this remark, made by one who seems like he ought to know what he's talking about,  true in your experience? 

ReFound Objects

Found Objects returns from the dead!

Retrotopia

Andrew Gallix in the Irish Times reviews Retrotopia, the final book by Zygmunt Bauman (RIP)

"The sociologist had long argued that a loss of faith in society’s perfectibility was one of the main distinctions between the “solid” and “liquid” phases of modernity, a theme that he reprises and expands on here. His argument hinges on the “emancipation of power from territory”, as a result of which nation states, with increasingly “porous” borders, are no longer able to fulfil their traditional functions. This political impotence, compounded by the stupefying pace of change, has redirected the utopian impulse towards the “space of collective memory”. We take refuge in the past because it can be “remodelled at will”, thus providing the “blissful omnipotence lost in the present”.

The future is now associated not with progress but with stasis or regression. At best it seems to offer more of the same; at worst it holds out the prospect of “social degradation” and “impending catastrophe”. Hence the privatisation of happiness, sought no longer through collective endeavours but through self-improvement and personal “wellness”

.... Social in name only, our online networks offer another ersatz brand of communality, acting as they do as filter bubbles, providing insulation from any views likely to challenge our easily bruised egos. Such comfort zones are “as close to the nirvana of the womb” as we can get. Indeed, a return to the safety of the womb is the logical conclusion of a series of reactionary trends taking us back to a world of “weakening human bonds”, tribalism and growing inequalities – a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

... Bauman suggests that retrotopianism is largely due to our failure to develop a cosmopolitan consciousness, despite living in a cosmopolitan world." 

I deployed Bauman's liqud modernity versus solid modernity dichotomy  in this piece on David Toop, for which I read two or three of ZB's books (he was incredibly  prolific). Found them really interesting but a little fixated - he was a bit like the Status Quo or ZZ Top of social theory.

Gallix's identifications of ZB's several flaws seems right on the money - the repetitiousness, windy language, generalisations.