digi-baroque

Reviewing Arca's Xen, Philip Sherburne identifies the New taking shape....

"...  it is becoming clear that something is cresting the horizon, and while it's too early to make out the particulars of its shape—this lumbering behemoth with the Teflon gleam and Transformer joints and image-mapping skin—it is getting closer.

"This new thing is not a genre, exactly; call it a style, a sensibility, a veneer. It has to do with computers and digital sound and digital imagery. It has to do with representation and malleability, the idea that sound and image can be stretched and twisted and copied ad nauseam. It revels in digital gloss and grit, in bent tones, in smeared and frozen reverb tails. Extreme compression, schizoid pith: rap vocals broken down to monosyllables, a single "Huh" as metonym for everything that's happened between the Sugarhill Gang and now. History reduced to a USB stick.

"It's not necessarily sci-fi in its themes—not, say, in the way that Detroit techno celebrated cybernetics and space travel—but there's still something inherently futuristic about its portrayal of technology as something tangible and even sensual, its suggestion that data has texture and heft. It spins code into a second skin... You can make out its traces in the work of people like Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Evian Christ, FKA twigs, Berlin's Janus crew, and even PC Music, and it feels like it's coming to a head on Arca's Xen. The next few years—his next few years—are going to be interesting."

Feels like this has been coming on for a while  -- like this is a sensuously noir branch of digital maximalism - neugothromanticism.  It overlaps with the Harperzone, the hinterland of IDM 3.0 (IDM now meaning Internet Dance Music), things like "Distroid" and the new Coldness/Darkness (confusingly coexisting with the New Cuteness/Brightness)

Is this the same sort of thing - imploded, overloaded sensations of future-now dysphoria and disequilibirum - that Kid Shirt is talking about here, in relation to music by Krakkkbot?

Interesting to meditate on how the stripped-down, lean, 16-step sequencer linearity of, say, DAF or Nitzer Ebb gave way over 30 years or so to...  electronic musicforms like this: fragmented / restless / self-interrupting / auto-sabotaging / deliberately 'broken' -- disruptive, rather than *errm* discoursive - music that reflects the jarring, multi-channelled. corporatised ADDH culture that demands our attention from every which way but forward at the same time. We sit daily at the centre of a sphere of influences / adverts / tugs on our times / pleas for attention / earworms / etc, one that also reaches back in time and across shared temporal geographies. Music technology played a part in this migration, obviously, but so did cultural fragmentation and the multiplication of media-streams.

Trying to work out why this latest iteration of "digital baroque" doesn't do much for me....

Well of course I didn't much care for this sort of quasi-organic infolding and slithery convolution, this lush plasticized foliage, when it was writhing triffid-like off of  Lifeforms by Future Sound of London...  the attendant rhetoric of digital-virtual mestiçagem does feel like the re-irruption of  90s Zeroes & One discourse.... where topiary and Toop merge...  

(and just as the omni(virous)sound has been coming on for a while, similarly that discourse has been re-irrupting since 2008, 2009 - remember wonky?)

the non-attraction has something to do with the reasons I prefer collage and analogue-era animation techniques (models, cel overlay, zerography etc) to morphing, Pixar, CGI etc

stop press: a review of Xen  that strikes me as spot-on, by Maya Kalev at FACT  - the gist is "remarkable – but ultimately insubstantial" , "unusual" but not "emotionally affecting", "self-consciously hypermodern" yet often oddly recalling Autechre, IDM, trip hop, illbient. And the word "baroque" also crops up, interestingly. 

The opening bit - referencing an interview where Arca says that "Xen" is "a genderless alter ego, a fictional entity that he describes as 'kind of repulsive and attractive at once, and so I imagine her under a spotlight, in this room full of people just staring, wide-eyed, openmouthed'" -  indicates what is new that's been added to the otherwise 90s digital-virtual hybridity rhetoric, which is queer theory

Ubu Moi

I did a Top Ten for archive of the avant-garde UbuWeb

in danger of getting lost in the virtual catacombs so decided to focus on Extremism of the Human Voice

and Furious Pig, which won't embed for some reason

the history of "new"

Some good bits from the Critical Margins interview with Michael North, author of Novelty: A History of the New

On the problems of thinking the concept of "new" and "novelty' in the English language.

"The main noun we have for the new, novelty, has got all sorts of pejorative connotations. In a number of fields, innovation is used for significant developments, and novelty is used for trivial, temporary ones, despite the fact that an innovation is etymologically just a change in something and not a completely new thing in itself. And the plural, novelties, is used for the most ephemeral kinds of trinkets and doo-dads..... The new.... is not something our language makes it very easy to discuss."

"One of the things that originally appealed to me about the topic of novelty was that it is used widely in all sorts of contexts. It’s one of those ordinary ideas that we don’t think about much, under the assumption that we know what we are talking about when we say that something is new. Like a lot of ordinary concepts, though, it almost completely gives way when you put any pressure on it, which is why there are so many arguments about whether some phenomenon is really, truly new or not. So I guess I think that everyone would be better off if we had a better notion of what is meant when the word new is used. We might be able to decide, for instance, if it makes sense to be as worried about the retro as we seem to be."

On the manifold ironies of Ezra Pound's slogan "make it new"

"The phrase is actually ancient, and Pound adapted it from a Confucian text. In the original it has nothing to do with art, but is an exhortation to rulers to keep their principles fresh and up-to-date. Pound didn’t translate the phrase until the late 1920s and it wasn’t picked up by anyone else until the 1950s. So the common notion that it was some sort of rallying-cry for modern artists and writers is wrong. My argument in the book is that it became influential only when modernism was on the wane, as critics and scholars faced the problem of what to do when the new becomes old. In fact, scholarly and critical use of the phrase has drastically simplified the actual ideas of modernist writers and artists about novelty, which are actually quite complicated and conflicted. The idea that “Make It New” designates some uncompromising devotion to artistic innovation is mocked by the simple fact that it is itself a very old slogan.

On his claim in the book  that “modernism, as a movement and as a collection of works, has turned out to be more durable than the postmodernism that was supposed to replace it.”

"What I meant is that there does still seem to be a great deal of interest in modernism, as a general concept and as a collection of works, while talk about postmodernism has pretty much died out.

The recent work of Fredric Jameson would be a case in point. The original ideas behind postmodernism, that there was a binary opposition between it and modernism, that there was a general historical break between the two, have been discredited. And there’s the problem that certain writers, such as David Foster Wallace, faced pretty squarely, of coming after postmodernism.

The general problem of “coming after,” of belatedness, is one that is obviously shared by modernism, postmodernism, and whatever comes after that, and it becomes more complicated and more acute with each turn of the screw. It’s the problem of newness, really. The syndrome of having exaggerated expectations of novelty, which are then exposed and debunked, is one that seems to go on and on. One of the things argued in the book is that this syndrome may be based on an unrealistic notion of what novelty means."

On why his book only takes the history of novelty up to 1970 or so (which just so happens to be the dawn of the postmodern era). 

"The book does stop with the neo-avant-garde in the 1970s.... There’s a certain inherent appeal in talking about the present, so it would have been interesting to take the analysis farther, but at the same time it’s harder to be confident about developments that are still going on. And I think, where the issue of novelty is concerned, we are still stuck with the same set of problems and questions that were defined in the polemics of the 1960s and 1970s. How do you keep on being new? How can you be new when newness itself seems passé? I think these are questions we are still stuck with."

not hugely invested in

Slate piece in the Future Tense series by Ari Ratner on how both dating and finance have been screwed by the internet:

"Just look at what online dating has done to the meet market. The speed and frequency of transactions has gone up. Volatility has spiked as relationship investment strategy has changed from building long-term value to quarterly—or nightly—profits. New investors have entered the market with greater ease, although all too often only to be taken advantage of by more sophisticated players. New avenues for fraud have opened up: Manti Te’o meet Bernie Madoff on Ashley Madison. Even inequality has risen. Some investors are rolling in it; others have just lost their shirts. How did the bedroom end up looking so much like the boardroom?"

On the rise of a sexual-romantic equivalent to high-frequency trading:

"Sites like Grindr, launched in 2009, or Tinder, launched in 2012, give a whole new meaning to what Michael Lewis has described as “flash boys” in the financial markets. We now swipe left or right so quickly that we can’t even fully process the transactions—in this case, people—flashing across our screens. Online daters are also mirroring the move away from vanilla investments to more exotic or niche offerings."

Lots of parallels in the piece that could be teased out, to do with music consumption, music fandom, transitory cathexis, an uncoupling of listening and identification / identity formation, the muzak-ization of everything...  

butt-positive retro

When I first heard this on the radio, I thought it was an old Amy Winehouse song

Like the triangulation of "Anaconda" and "Happy"