"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"- HARRY SMITH
........................"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"-ROBERT HERRICK
Monday, May 14, 2012
the anechronosis *rush
heard this on the radio yesterday and simply could not tell if it was a record from the mid-
Sixties or a contemporary release
*“anechronosis” = anachronism + necrosis = my ungainly but necessary coinage, first unpacked properly in the Haunted Audio Wire piece, to pinpoint that curious “undead” quality
exuded by musical artifacts that seems neither fully modern nor properly
period-bound, but instead belongs to some ersatz limbo, a Zeit without a Geist.
Back in 2006 Jack White's works were prime inspiration for this neologism, along with Goldfrapp
"As
a concept in mass media, “future” is associated with whatever upcoming movement
or far-reaching cultural shift will inalterably change what things sound, look,
and feel like. But mass media don’t necessarily work that way anymore. We are
no longer moving together as a single culture in a straight line; we are
individuals zigzagging between different worlds with their own self-contained
ecosystems.... It has completely unmoored us from
our former sense of time. When people have the freedom to travel rapidly
between different eras in the space of a single iTunes playlist, time as a
descriptor of a musical aesthetic becomes irrelevant. Certain guitar or drum
sounds that might normally be described as “’60s-sounding” are as common today
as they were then. And they’re free to be combined with other sounds that older
listeners associate with bygone eras, while musicians see them simply as colors
on a generously expansive sonic palate that can be dipped into and slathered
together.... "-- AV Club's Steven Hyden, riffing off White Fence (aka Ty Segall and Tim Presley) and off of Retromania
“I only use sounds that I know and love. I can’t concern myself with trying to be ‘modern’ or
whatever that means. Electronic music? What is modern?” -- Tim Presley of White Fence
All this strikes me as a pretty notable and radical development - the end of cultural synchrony, the obsolescence of concepts like "modern" and "future"!
As it did Rem early in this, the 21st Century....
"When
did time stop moving forward... begin to spool in every direction, like a tape
spinning out of control? ... Change has been
divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on
LSD, culture wobbles endlessly sideways"--Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
"Hair is not “innovative” as the word is commonly defined."--Steve Hyden, on White Fence aka Ty Segall and Tim Presley
