pull out your Harraps French-English dictionaries, because

voila! - entrevue avec moi pour Les Inrocks, revue de musique Francais - http://www.lesinrocks.com/2012/04/04/musique/simon-reynolds-analyse-de-la-retromania-11244653/

the retrofuture-rush



wow, the entire run of Synapse, the 1970s electronic music magazine, digitized for our perusal, here

for more retrofuture titillation, check out fun blog RetroSynthAds

http://retrosynthads.blogspot.com/

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #34

"Appropriation art is informed by the decadence syndrome: the sense of the decline and impending death of art. This is expressed as a feeling of deja vu and a sense of art's loss of significant human purpose - its inability to afford an important perspective on the lifeworld - as well as on the wish for rejuvenation. This wish is expressed by envious exploitation and subordination - veritable colonization -- of avant-garde art that had been vitally alive and had startled the world with its revolutionary ambition, as though to suck the dregs of that faded vitality and ambition from it. But whatever the morbid nostalgia of appropriation art touches turns to stone."

--Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, 1993

Retromania gets the nod from chart-topping recording artiste Gotye!

"I was just reading this great book by Simon Reynolds where he talked about the ‘incredibly accessible permanent now’. The whole history of music is potentially accessible. There’s a multiplicity of options, and none of them are necessarily more authentic for me, so you feel inevitably compelled to keep it interesting for yourself by exploring as much as you can. On one level for me, it’s pure sound exploration – I just try to find sounds that I think are idiosyncratic or they warm the cockles of my heart for whatever whimsical reason that is. Whether it’s the Cotillion organ that I write the song ‘State Of The Art’ about – most of the sounds on that track are featured from there – or finding that fence in the Australian outback in winter and sampling that and turning it into a bassline [on 'Eyes Wide Open']. I like the story related to it, I like the experience, I like the fact that those sounds feel more personal to me than, say, sitting in my bedroom and buying virtual instruments from professional engineers.”

well it's a mutual admiration pact, mate, loving hearing this stream out the radio, breath of fresh air it is



and Making Mirrors's excellent too

on the topic of xenomania:

Angus Finlayson at FACT on Diplo as globe trotting privateer hunter-gathering booty-shake booty...

which makes him a perfect icon for connectivity: the same data-flows that join together the world financial system and enable the flightiness of capital also allow for the mobility of cultural capital from local scenes to global ubiquity... at the start of the Blackberry commercial, he speaks of traveling the world "collecting influences"



reminded me of what Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinsteinwrote in the early 90s (in Data Trash) about how digital music technology prefigured transformations to cultural economy under globalisation: sampling as "the harvesting of energy from the local and the bounded for the global and unbounded"; samples as "archived body parts... disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows"; samplers/deejays as "vivisectionists, vampiring organic flesh, and draining its fluids into cold streams of telemetry..."

"Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories"