the horror, the horror

A piece at Loud and Quiet looking back on The Horrors's second album Primary Colours, ten years after the fact. 

Writes Fergal Kinney:  

"Of course, British bands have been referencing the electronic utopia of Krautrock since the late ’70s, but the internet afforded those records an ease of access which had always been absent – former collectors items are now just a click and an aux cable away. Simon Reynolds’ post-punk study Rip It Up and Start Again was read within the band too. “Just reading that book gives you ideas for ten different bands,” says Faris [Badwan]. “That book was really influential for me.”"

Well, I'm flattered, naturally - but talk about getting the wrong end of the stick! 

The point you should come away with, from reading Rip It Up, is obviously (or so I thought) "do something new!". That might mean "do something that's a warped and strange-making take on the new ideas bubbling out of your contemporaneous musical surroundings" (generally black music, so at that time, second half of the 2000s, grime, nu-R&B, dubstep). Or it might mean "do something that involves the latest technology" e.g. Auto-Tune, etc etc). 

The "instruction" to come away from reading that book would be "apply the methods and outlook and mentality and procedures that created the legendary music". Expressly not "reactivate the actual substance of the legendary music; repeat the exact same hybridizing formulas that led to it, or recreate the outcomes of those musical equations." 

Still, it's a good inadvertent illustration of the connection between Retromania and Rip It Up (and indeed between both those books and Energy Flash - the three forming an unintended triology, as my Faber editor Lee Brackstone once put it). It explains how doing Rip It Up led directly to Retromania (indeed Rip's afterword contains a section on the "rift of retro" that occurred in alternative / independent rock circa 1983-84, effectively ending the postpunk era.) 

Further, it demonstrates how the person who wrote Rip It Up, who had lived through and felt in their fibres the meaning of that era the first time around and then relived it as an immersed historian, could only respond to the 2000s (the first decade of the 21st bleedin' century) with the perspective that underpins Retromania. 

And the post-punk revival - although far from alone as evidence for prosecution - was exactly the kind of contradiction-in-terms that spurred the book into being.  

nostalgia for the future / militant modernism

                                        

Here's something I really enjoyed researching and writing - a feature for RBMA on Luigi Nono, the great "militant modernist" of post-WW2 avant-garde music. This article focuses on his electronic and tape works of the 1960s, his exploration of vocal extremes, his support for liberation movements around the world, and the surrounding context of Italian Communism in the post-war era.

The twin pegs for this piece are the fiftieth-anniversary vinyl reissue of Musica-Manifesto N. 1 by Die Schachtel and the publication of Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews by the University of California Press.

     Nono at work with his prime collaborator, the sound engineer 

  Marino Zuccheri, at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. 

ArchivFieber (extended mix)

Archive Fever
uncut version of column published in Der Tagesspiegel, March 2019 

by Simon Reynolds


Almost a quarter-century ago, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. I would be lying if I said I understood every bit of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and has stayed with me is the brilliance and beauty of Derrida’s title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever.   It sounds and looks even better in German, I should imagine, because of the way you guys smush words together: Archivfieber.  

Whether two words or a single word, Derrida’s coinage impacts me like a miniature poem: it’s a cogent and potent distillation of how so many of us live our lives these days. Since the launch of broadband internet and the invention of social media, a mania for cataloging, collecting, list-making, documentation  and commemoration has enveloped our culture. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines and wi-fi means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. If things like Spotify and Netflix weren’t sprawling enough,  open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs tend towards entropy: an infinitely recessive profusion and confusion. Somewhere between a library and a maze, you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.

“Retromania” and Archivfieber are almost interchangeable as concepts. One of the symptoms of the retro-virus is coming down with archivfieber.  Personally, the malady has made me a sickly, wilted being, whose memory is shot, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet’s spatialization of history. I get temporal whiplash as I oscillate between different pockets of the past.  In any given day, I visit many eras and sample many treasures, but like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve seen.  I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.

Archivfieber is a transitional affliction, to some extent: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. Embedded deep in the bones and the nerves of our listening selves is a matrix of consumer desire shaped by growing up with never being able to get hold of enough music. So we have poorly adjusted to an inside-out world where where’s too much.  People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things or otherwise sensibly organise their listening, but they feel no need to own the MP3s. They live in the certainty (and the confidence is not necessarily well-placed - things do disappear from the internet, get taken down) that these songs, mixes, and video-clips will always be out there should they want them.

People from my generation are still wired for a world of non-availability and inaccessibility. We grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes cost money too). We remember the sensation of boredom as emptiness and lack of choice, as opposed to the new forms of boredom that have emerged with distracted overload and surfeit of choices. So we cannot completely exit the psychology of accumulation and ownership. That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer simple greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth, let alone do justice to any of it through dedicated repeat immersion.

It’s not just music, of course: they are so many forms of cultural data and digitized entertainment out there to forage and hoard.  A recent obsession of mine that got a little out of hand is experimental animation of the pre-digital era, particularly from Eastern Europe: within a matter of weeks, I harvested 1200 short films from YouTube, Vimeo and  other online resources, out of which I have to date watched perhaps forty. The drive to seek and gather displaces the desire to experience. The buzz is the momentary thrill of acquisition as the file downloads into your computer, even as you are already searching for the next obscure discovery.

People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorders could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings or books. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the minuscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or even phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the soul.  But even if you keep it all in the cloud, or don’t “keep” it in any form beyond bookmarks in your browser, the internet’s sprawl has a way of invading your inner world. It clutters your mind and eats your time. Many are the days in which, as the end approaches, I look back on the hours of journeying across the internet and can barely remember where I “went”, what I read or watched or heard, nor indeed what I saved for later – a “later” that will never  come.

There is nothing necessarily unwholesome about an overdeveloped musical libido: rather than a debilitating disease, we might think of the “fieber” in Archivfieber as a fan’s enthusiasm or shared excitement (Saturday Night Fever) or even the erotic fire of Peggy Lee’s “you give me fever.”   Music-desire is a form of sensualism, it can involve a hungry curiosity about new sensations and stimulations, and in that sense belongs to the kingdom of Eros. Still, as mediated through the internet, music consumption habits can take on an automatized quality that Freud would classify under the sign of “the repetition-complex”, a regressive drive he linked to the  death instinct.  Archivfieber, in this dark light, would be a literally morbid impulse. In yet another sense, the archival drive is a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.

So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect, a refusal to let go.  What about, to coin a quasi-Freudian phrase,  the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload, to build and maintain discographic websites or unofficial archives like UbuWeb?  Is there not something slightly deranged about their manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers, from a complete stranger). Is there perhaps something suspect and even disturbing about the sheer amount of time and unstinting care that goes into these contributions to a commons of creativity (other people’s creativity -  expropriated, unrecompensed). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things in my unique possession – cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London that may be, I fondly imagine, the only document of this one particular show – or to add the public listening library things that no one has yet bothered to put on YouTube, like the 12-inch B-side instrumental by a  postpunk or Eighties ‘new pop’ group.  There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts. But there is also the neurosis of completism at work: you are rectifying sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record, for the benefit of the public or posterity.

How does the monstrous growth of music archiving affect music itself? There’s two areas: the listening experience of fans, and the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to busy ourselves with, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice -  unlimited listening both in the present and in terms of all prior recorded music– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. In effect, they now consume music much more like critics and deejays (back when they were the only people, apart from the very wealthy, who listened to such absurdly largely amounts of music, and to such a wide range of music -  simply because they were sent it for free). So, like critics and deejays, ordinary people make snap judgments, listening once and never returning (something you would almost certainly never do if you’d paid hard-earned money for the record). They listen while doing other things: the sort of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce. They listen thinly -  skimming and skating across the surface of sound at top speed. 

Jacques Attali in his famous book of 1977, Noise: A Political Economy of Music, wrote about the era of recordings and collecting as a terminal stage for music as meaningful activity:  the solipsistic stockpiling of sound in the home combined with a privatisation of the listening experience, separating it from the aspects of social ritual or spiritual function that used to surround music But Attali couldn’t have imagined a stage beyond this, where the collection became infinite, at once freed of  the exchange-economy's commodification and ownership, yet devalued even further to the point where patterned sounds literally stream into our lives like electricity or water: a mere utility.

Listeners respond to the overload by various tactics. I have seen bloggers set themselves tasks (or ordeals?) where they listen to just one album for a whole week and nothing else, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. While many allow Spotify’s algorithms to guide them on drifting meanders through sameness, others like myself use it in more purposeful ways that vainly strive to master the flux: building enormous playlists of genres or clustered artists that would take a day or two to listen through. These playlists are almost always - in my experience, anyway – promptly forgotten about and never returned to.  Like the downloading, they are residual spasms of the collector impulse, failed adaptions to a medium where music is free (well, apart from the annoying adverts). They are last-ditch stands against streaming's numbing logic of instilling in listeners a mind-state of barely-attentive disengagement,  in which all music becomes ambient (or even Ambien). 

You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks (album-sharing blogs, YouTube) and discovering things you never knew existed. Or you can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically parochial. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to  African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West, or – in an exoticism of time rather than space – you can push back through history to pre-WW2 gospel and blues, British music hall, and so forth. Retromania and xenomania merge as we hungry souls explore the heritage of other countries and continents. For me a whole new frontier of sickness – a way of recreating the thrills of digging through the crates in record stores – was when I realized you could strip the audio off YouTube and Vimeo clips. In animations and obscure experimental films, I found electronic and avant-garde sounds – sometimes synth scores made by unknown composers as a favour to the film-maker, sometimes electronic sound-effects and noises – that had never been released on vinyl in the first place. A new frontier for my Archivfieber to rampage across!

And how about the musicians,  stuffing their sonic stomachs with an overly rich and riskily varied audio diet? Inevitably they excrete a maximalist sort of music whose aesthetic I call “glutted and clotted”.  It reminds me of the Gang of Four song “At Home He Feels Like A Tourist” and in particular the lines “he fills himself with culture / he gives himself an ulcer.” In these conditions, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.

This kind of stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field.  The archival overload makes it irresistible to over-research. I am not exaggerating when I say that there have been times when I’ve embarked on a 500 word record review, having gathered together 50 pages of interviews and earlier reviews of the artist’s work. This is vastly different from when I started out in the late Eighties, when I might respond to a record critically knowing nothing about a band – perhaps a few scraps of data that lodged in my head from reading earlier pieces in music papers, but often not even that (since I barely looked at press releases then). Oblivious to the group’s actual intent or influences, I could project my own critical fancies upon the blank screen of the music, or recruit them to my own critical agenda. Reviewing became a creative act in its own wonderfully irresponsible right, as opposed to a dutiful sorting-through of factual circumstances and avowed rationales. You didn’t necessarily judge the music on its own terms; you invented the terms.  

To be historian or a writer of a non-fiction book in this day and age involves a sort of inverted version of Hercules and the Augean stables: the gathering in of shit that then has to be cleared almost entirely away.  Having amassed steaming mounds of data, the researcher must summon the will and the ruthlessness to cut through it, to consign details and incidents and characters to historical oblivion, to winnow down nearly everything that’s been laboriously accumulated and forcibly impose a shape on the material.  This self-created challenge is not a uniquely digital-era phenomenon: academics and journalists have often got “carried away” and then had to face the day of reckoning. But the limitless of the online archive incites over-research.

We see this need for narrativization in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al,   but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.

The ultra-forensic detail and rapid-fire turnover of real-time of news coverage means that important information and discoveries get evacuated from popular consciousness within weeks or even days. This archive of the no-longer-news but still highly germane and crucial languishes in a state of chaos – anyone who can construct a through-line is doing a valuable service.  Future historians will rely on this kind of pattern-recognition to help them navigate the monstrous excess of documentation and commentary.  They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future eyes and brains.  The dark side version of this will-to-order is the rise of conspiracy theories and secular demonologies, which piece together delusory links and connective lines through the data overload. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia can often express itself through a mania for the archives and grandiose system-building

Anxieties about data overload and a creeping cultural senescence related to the build-up of archives is not a new phenomenon.  Nietzsche’s 1874 polemic “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” rails against the antiquarian mentality, warning of that “blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a moldy smell…”. In Jorge Luis Borges's 1949 fable “The Aleph” one character imagines the connected man of the future: “I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins.” With his obsessions with libraries and labyrinths, Borges is often seen as a prophet of the internet - but even he might have felt disoriented at the god-like powers granted by things like search engines and the Cloud.

If we’re adapting badly, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. There were orally transmitted myths and legends, but practically speaking, the here-and-now was all there was. Then came a much shorter period, when rulers and the very wealthy and powerful institutions like the Church or the first universities had archives or private museums, but the vast majority of the population owned no books or images (least of all images of themselves) while music could only be heard in the presence of living musicians. It’s really only been a couple of centuries in which personal libraries have become commonplace and a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, film / video) have existed. In what feels like a vertiginous acceleration, communicational distance has been abolished, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, and the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise grown to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the eyes and ears, the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by millions of years of evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries grows every more tenuous, that anxiety and depression and narcissistic disorders proliferate?  

As we say in English, you can have too much of a good thing.

ArchivFieber (death by data)

Here's a piece I wrote -  for the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel - tagged to the Find the File symposium   that I participated in last week in Berlin. 

I boldly, even rashly, tried (using internet translation machines in the absence of any knowledge of the language) to come up with a bunch of German-wordplay headlines myself. Among them were "Delirium von Dateien" and "Dasein und Dateien" (yes I'm afraid that is an attempt at a Heidegger joke). The newspaper came up with their own headline and I'm sure that was the correct decision. 

There is a longer version - about three times as long - of this piece which I may well post here at some point.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

In 1975, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. It would be lying to say I understand all of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and stayed with me is the brilliance of the title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever.   I imagine it looks and sounds even better in German: ArchivFieber.  

The word impacts me like a miniature poem, distilling the essence of how many of us live our lives nowadays. Since the launch of broadband internet, a mania for cataloging, list-making, documentation  and commemoration has enveloped our culture – particularly affecting music fandom and consumption, but not limited to that region by any means. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. Open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs are somewhere between a library and a labyrinth: you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.

ArchivFieber and “retromania” are interchangeable concepts really: you might say that one of the main symptoms of catching the retro-virus is coming down with ArchivFieber.  And the malady has made me a sickly being, whose memory is tattered, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet. I get temporal whiplash oscillating between different pockets of the past.  Like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I can barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve visited.  I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out on anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.

Archivfieber is a transitional affliction: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era conditions of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things but they feel no need to own the MP3s. People from my generation grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could then afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes also cost money). That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth.

People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorder could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings, books, etc. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the miniscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the cluttered soul. 

For sure, rampant music-libido is a form of curiosity and pleasure-seeking, and in that sense belongs to the category of life-affirming Eros. But something about the internet’s effects on music consumption habits pushes into the morbid zone of repetitious and near-automatic behavior.  There is a neurotic aspect to archival drive: a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.

So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect.  What about the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload? In some ways, this is more mystifying, the motivation for these manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things– cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London, B-side 12 inch instrumentals that no one else has yet thought to upload to YouTube.  There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts of unofficial archiving. But also a neurotic completism: you are correcting sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record

How does the metastasis of online amateur archiving affect music itself? In two areas: the listening experience of fans, the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to do, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice -  unlimited listening both in terms of current music and the history of recorded sound– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. Nowadays, anybody with access to wi-fi is in the same position as only music critics and deejays - who were sent things for free – used to be. So they listen like critics and deejays: playing something once and never returning, making snap judgments after partial listens.  They give things partial attention: listening while doing the kind of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce.

As music streams into our lives like a mere utility such as electricity or water, people come up with tactics to “re-enchant the commodity” (which of course is no longer a commodity, but price-less and therefore increasingly value-less). Bloggers set themselves tasks where they listen to just one album for a whole week, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks and discovering things you never knew existed. You can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically remote. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to  African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West…

As for the musicians, stuffing their sonic guts with an overly rich and various audio diet, well, inevitably they excrete a maximalist music whose aesthetic I term “glutted and clotted”.  In these overloaded circumstances, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.

This stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field.  The archival overload makes over-research irresistible. To be a historian or a writer of a non-fiction book today involves an inverted version of Hercules versus the Augean stables: a gathering in of masses of shit which must then be cleared away almost entirely. Researchers  have to summon the ruthless will to consign details, incidents and characters to historical oblivion, forcibly imposing a shape on the material.  We see a version of this steely will to narrativize in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al,   but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.  They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future historians.  The dark side version of this drive to create narratives amid chaos is conspiracy theory, those secular demonologies of causation. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia has often expressed itself through a mania for archives, esoteric knowledge, and grandiose system-building. 

If we’re adapting poorly to the vast and immaterial info-world we’ve built, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. It’s really only been a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, cine-video, etc) have existed. In just a couple of decades, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, while the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise swelled to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries and memory grow blurry and tenuous, that personality disorders proliferate? 

As we say in England, you can have too much of a good thing.

talking ghosts and archive fever

I'm off on a brisk traipse across Europe -  to chat about hauntology and ArchivFieber in Barcelona and Berlin respectively. . 


BARCELONA - FRIDAY MARCH 22

Sons de la memòria, El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòri

18.30 hrs - Conversation about hauntology with Arnau Horta

More information about Sons de la memòria events, including a live performance by Philip Jeck and Janek Schaeffer on March 23. 

BERLIN - SATURDAY MARCH 23

Find the File, Haus der Kulturen der Welt 

16:30-18:00  "Piles of Files: The Infinite Archive" - panel discussion with Elodie A. Roy,  Pelle Snickars, and Florian Sievers

More information about Find the File events

Unrelated to retro-haunty themes, if you happen to be in Lisbon you could catch me talking about music criticism

LISBON - FRIDAY MARCH 29 

MIL - Lisbon International Music Network

10.00 am to 11.30 am - Masterclass: Music Journalism

Main Hall, Palacete do Marqueses de Pombal, Rua das Janelas Verdes, 37, Lisbon

information about the class and about MIL - and a preview interview 

empire of retro signs

Oriental Magnetic Yellow was a parody band of Yellow Magic Orchestra, formed by VGM composers. The members were:

* Shinji Hosoe as Haruomi Hosonoe (細野江晴臣), a parody of Haruomi Hosono
* Nobuyoshi Sano as Ryuichi Sanomoto (佐野本龍一), a parody of Ryuichi Sakamoto
* Takayuki Aihara as Takayukihiro Aihara (相原隆幸宏), a parody of Yukihiro Takahashi
* Hiroto Sasaki as Hideki Sasatake (佐々武秀樹), a parody of Hideki Masutake

the hoax of the new

"Pablo Casals said that 'the desire for innovation leads to greater aberrations in art than would acceptance of what's already there' and I think he's definitely got a point"

- Tom Verlaine, quote appearing under the sub-heading "THE HOAX OF THE NEW", in this Kristine McKenna interview from November 1981, in the New York Rocker. 

Odd sentiment to cosign there from Verlaine, who with Television is a supreme example of the way in which the new can manifest through the older form (gtr/bs/drms; psychedelic rock) over-writing it from within 

a paradox Barney Hoskyns captured when he hailed Television as - 

"the original post-rock rockists" 

that was said in a 1982 piece celebrating-defending Echo & The Bunnymen (very influenced by Television) from the charge of being a trad guitar rock group, an accusation mounted by some at the height of new pop

in the interview, Pete De Freitas makes a good point, on the subject of synth-pop, and how the superficial new can actually cloak the persistence of the old: 


"It's also that the stuff that's supposed to be experimental has just been blanding out more than anything else. It's not experimenting at all, it's just using synthesizers to play pretty ordinary songs a lot of the time."

where it started to go wrong for the Bunnymen - when they made their guitars sound like sitars, and therefore directly evoke the Sixties

whereas this

that bolshy lady again

yet another reuse of the Rodchenko female-revolutionary-hails-the-proletariat poster

for once, though actually an appropriate bit of recycling, not just pure graphic designer lameness


the original in the remote possibility you know not whereof i speak





bonus bits of modernist graphic genius from that man Alexander

superstructure > base

J.G. Ballard on the Sixties:

“Here it was an aesthetic revolution that made the changes. For 5 years the class system didn’t seem to exist--nobody ever used the word…. I remember about 1970, for the first time in something like five or six years, I heard someone who was being interviewed on the radio use the word ‘working class’. Which would have been unthinkable in say, 1967 or 1968. Unthinkable. I thought, ‘my God, that’s the death knell of change. It’s coming to an end.’ And it did, and now we’re back in the same closed, confined, class-conscious little society… I don’t think the radical change needed to transform this country can come from the political direction at all. I think it can only come from the area of the arts--some sort of seismic shift in aesthetic sensibility, of a kind that we saw in the mid-60s, when this country was improved for the better. There was no question about it--liberated, briefly….” 


quote from 1983

c.f. Mark Fisher on the importance of indirect action to expand our sense of what is possible, conceivable, desirable, doable.

"the intensification and proliferation of the capitalist technologies of reality management and libidinal engineering in the 1980s was not merely some happy coincidence for neoliberalism; neoliberalism’s success was inconceivable without these technologies. It is also the reason that direct action, while of course crucial, will never be sufficient: we also need to act indirectly, by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.

"... The reordering of images thoughts, affects, desires, beliefs and languages plainly cannot be achieved by “politics” alone – it is a matter for culture, in the widest sense.

... Popular culture’s incapacity to produce innovation is a persistent ambient signal that nothing can ever change." 

quote from 2015

the return of WANKLE (another dream of a different Nineties)

I saw an early version of the James Lavelle doc at a festival a few years ago and what amazed me, first and foremost, was how many UNKLE albums there'd been.




the first was bad enough - so i guess i'd assumed that that would have been it

but no, no, they persisted after Psyence Fiction (yuk wot a title) -  there's something like FIVE subsequent UNKLE albums!

and what's worse is that they get increasingly rocky, involving such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age

like Lavelle started buying into this really naff idea of rock rebellion and intensity and authenticity

like a less tastefully executed version of the Death in Vegas approach - a studio assembled simulacrum of rock, without the actual rhythmic engine of band-energy powering it

i guess it shows the odd lingering prestige of rock - and especially the punk strand within rock - as the ultimate stand-in for rebellion and individuality, which continues to exert its thrall over people who've come up through hip hop or dance music, and whose creative procedures are radically different

for some reason deep in their hearts their burning desire seems to be to collaborate with Noel Gallagher (as with Goldie circa Saturnz Returnz) or Pete Doherty or somebody like that, despite being light-years ahead sonically of those guys





the other thing I gleaned from the doc - and Lavelle's embrace of rockism - was that he'd managed to convince himself that  being a curator really is the same as being a creator -  that's there's really nothing to writing songs, creating a distinctive band-sound, a band-voice.

all you need is some famous pals, and some connections - and taste, and attitude

simply convening the ingredients would somehow generate vibe in itself, hey presto, through the magic of chutzpah

wrong!

hubris 101: not knowing your limits, the nature of what you are actually good at (in his case, arguably at any rate,  branding, packaging, spotting talent in others i.e. Shadow, Krush, building a buzz)





yet despite this, UNKLE is still going - there's a new album out at the end of March -  The Road: Part II/Lost Highway -  a "filmic" affair whose cast includes the  Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, and more

first single

press release:

“Once you have walked the road, everything becomes clear,” says Elliott Power on the Prologue to the sixth album from genre-bending pioneers UNKLE. ‘The Road: Part II / Lost Highway’ is the sound of an artist forever in transit on life’s journey of discovery.

“My work has always had an eclectic essence and soundtrack-influence in its structure,” says Lavelle. “If you go through the back catalogue, there’s a continuity between the motion and the ambition of the sound. Ideally, you’re constantly collaging and sampling elements of what’s relevant at the time to create something new.

“Now, there’s a lot more freedom. When I first started, the walls between genres in front of you were a lot greater to climb. We’re at a much more open-minded and eclectic place with music now.”

"I started doing a show on Soho Radio last year, which made me think about playing records in a different way,” says Lavelle of his life after ‘Part I’. “It wasn’t about trying to make people dance in a nightclub. It was a breath of fresh air, and about playing a more eclectic mix. ‘The Road Part 2’ was made in the same way – it’s a mixtape and a journey. You’re in your car, starting in the day and driving into the night. The language of it was for it to be the ultimate road trip.

He continues: “It’s the mid-part of a trilogy. The first record is like you’re leaving home; you’re naive and trying to discover. There are elements of my early days in there, as well as a bit of everything since. There’s an optimism and excitement to it, as there was with me having to direct this project alone for the first time.

“This record is the journey. You’re on the road, out there in the world. There are let downs, highs, lows, love, loss and experiences. The third record to come is basically about coming home; wherever that may be."

With the album split into two acts each with a beginning, a middle and end, the trips from light to dark, from brute force to tenderness make for both the full arc of the adventure and suites to be enjoyed separately. It’s a bold, assured and confident collection – from the Americana of ‘Long Gone’, to the Kanye West ‘Black Skinhead’ - inspired ‘Nothing To Give’, the alt-orchestral rush of ‘Only You’ to the guitar-heavy mantra of ‘Crucifixion/A Prophet’ and the electronic child’s lullaby of ‘Sun (The)’ – via covers of ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ made famous by Roberta Flack and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of the euphoric ‘Touch Me’ by Rui Da Silva. Helping to travel further down the myriad avenues of UNKLE’s sound are the full spectrum of collaborators and guests.

‘The Road: Part II/Lost Highway’ welcomes The Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  Philip Sheppard and artist John Isaac among others –  as well as spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox (who used to be Lavelle’s landlord) and Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiana, who leant her trust and voice to Lavelle following his acclaimed exhibition to the seminal director. The two names who crop up most throughout the record however are rising West London singer and producer Miink and experimental rapper Elliott Power.

“They’re just both so incredibly talented, and everything I love about London right now,” says Lavelle. “I’ve been playing a lot with going back to sampling and going back to certain aesthetics from when I was first buying records and DJing, then to mix that with something contemporary. They’ve helped me create this ‘Bladerunner meets London Soundsystem’ kind of vibe.”

But then, Lavelle has always been an artist as inspired by the past as he was racing towards the future.

“The way that things are now are what we were always doing with Mo’Wax,” says Lavelle. “The legacy was that we broke down barriers, took down everything culturally-lite and put it into something. Now street culture is the predominant visual culture of the world. It’s mad to think that Supreme is more popular and recognised than Louis Vuitton. Every major label and rapper is making sneakers and toys. At the time it was seen as vanity and gimmicky, but look at the way culture is now. That’s what we started.”

The striking artwork of the hooded knight that adorns the sleeve on 'Lost Highway' is by celebrated artist John Stark – renowned for drawing upon magical realism and using the more mystical elements of the past to reveal something profound about the present.

"It’s about the yin and yang, night and day, the rolling journey," says Lavelle of the artwork. "Here's a Ronin-like, lone warrior. It represents what it means for me to be going out into the world and finding myself."

"the emphasis was on new"

"The whole ethic of the band, though it was unwritten and rarely spoken, was to create new music, so if a piece had a similarity/reminded someone of another work it was generally rejected. The emphasis was on new... It was all about new sounds and new ways of writing a song.... Even now, making a new sound is still our first impulse, and that includes not repeating previous Pram recordings...To repeat ourselves or someone else would be boring and not really worth the effort.... My working life is ten times harder than it needs to be because I hate repeating what’s gone before“ 

- Matt Eaton,  Pram, 2011

words to live by

but what a terrible pressure to put yourself under, as an artist

to come up with something new, and then to do it again, and then to do it again - to never settle into a sound, a procedure...

hard enough to come up with something new in the first place, such that you'd almost forgive someone for stopping there, repeating it, milking it

such a burden of unrest  -  self-imposed, self-inflicted

heroic, really

collect your self

"Many collectors feel synonymous with the objects they collect and use them to derive or define a sense of self. Though they may not have any objective value, objects collected are seen as uniquely interesting or valuable to the individual collector. Thus as collectors accumulate large numbers of valuable items, they construct the sense that they, too, are valuable by association, i.e., 'The more of this great stuff I accumulate, the more I matter.... [Obsessive collecting] tends to arise out of one (or a combination) of the following three basic human needs: the need for a personal self- definition of worth, the need for a sense of life purpose (or meaning), and the desire for immortality."

- psychotherapist Gaelen Billingsley, quoted in this piece by music critic Dave Segal about the trauma of the loss of most of his record collection owing to dodgy removals company 

I have often wondered what would I would feel if by some calamity or other - fire, earthquake, etc - I lost all my records

I would be traumatized, but ultimately I think I would feel strangely liberated

the gift of existential weightlessness bestowed by chance

un-encumbered

because right now, all that cumbering lumber of vinyl - painstakingly accumulated, chased, 1000s of man-hours of pursuit invested and embedded in it, the sunk costs of time and libido and life-force pulsating dimly - it is all just sitting there, unused

it is hardly ever played (same goes for the similarly vast accrual of CDs, the cassette tapes also)

because if i want to hear something, it's so much vastly easier to go to Spotify, YouTube, a sharing blog (how often have I downloaded things I already own, simply because it's quicker than trying to find the bloody record or compact disc!), Bandcamp, Soundcloud, et al

so what is the point of keeping all this stuff?

(50 percent of which isn't even here, directly accessible, but in storage, in New York)

since i don't have the will, or the time, to part with it voluntarily - to convert it into useful cash, or even to just have it hauled off by some charity

an act of Fate would do the job, and perhaps do me a favor

not that i'm asking for it, not at all  -  i still am fatally attached to these things, to the delusion of ownership and the counter-factual delusion that "you can take it with you oh yes you can"

the lady therapist is right in implying that to collect and to hold on to things (which chronic obsessive downloading is still an extension of, and in which OCD patterns I'm still enmeshed, hunter-gathering, turning YouTube and Vimeo into audio files - a new frontier of exploration, new vistas of long out of print or never even properly issued in the first place - e.g. soundtracks to experimental films and animations) - to do that is a vote of confidence in the idea that you have enough time left in your life to listen to these things

to download - as I might well do in a particularly OCD day - more hours of listening than would actually fit into that day, in excess of 24 hours of listening  - is a reality-denying, finitude-refusing act of faith in an infinitely prolonged and expansive future for the listening self

as said much more pithily by Schopenhauer:

"We love to buy books because we think we’re buying the time to read them.”


Well that's another subject in itself -  the chronic collection of books. I have in excess of 200 that have come into my possession - bought, sent, found, got through my books-editor spouse - that i really seriously desire / intent to read, but are sitting them, in unruly stacks, in various places in the house, reproachfully staring back at me unread.

but the actual number of owned but unread books is probably much larger, distributed all over, on shelves, in boxes in the basement... things acquired during research binges for various books of mine own... things acquired in the Eighties and never read...

[sigh]

Another piece by Segal, on the theme of "I Collect, Therefore I Am"

the dream of the Nineties is alive in... Chelmsford?

well, a dream of a Nineties

from Jon Caramanica's New York Times profile of the Angloid emo-rapper Ratboy

"A couple of months ago, the 22-year-old musician who records as Rat Boy rented a huge empty warehouse a short walk to a lovely little stream and a slightly longer walk to a small black sign leaning against a decayed wall that reads FARM TOILET. Here, slowly, he, his father, and brother have been building out the raw space into a place — inspired by the Beastie Boys’ old G-Son Studios in Los Angeles — where he can work, and also play.

A few days before Christmas, it was mostly empty save for a roughly fashioned studio. On one wall was a Public Enemy “Fear of a Black Planet” poster. On a shelf was an autographed vinyl copy of the Beastie Boys’ “Hello Nasty.” On the center table, an old issue of the Beasties’ publication Grand Royal and some obscure graffiti magazines. Up against the wall, a small-scale screen printing rig and several of Cardy’s ghoulishly realistic illustrations. Sitting on a pallet under a blanket was an Amek Einstein console, the same kind that the Dust Brothers used to work on, that Cardy bought for about 6,000 pounds on the internet from Peru. It’s the most money he’s ever spent on anything, he said, but he still wasn’t sure it worked....

The 1990s are the leading touchstone for Cardy, who has studied the era with loving devotion and built a specific, refined aesthetic from it: “It’s a bunch of people that are around my age making something for themselves. I love the way stuff looks — making their own magazines, the music, being motivated to put stuff out,” he said, slumped in a chair wearing a Supreme bottle cap T-shirt, his hair pink and scraggly. “They did everything right, but did they know they were doing it right?”

“I kind of see Jordan as the nexus of what was happening in the ’90s when punk and hip-hop were blowing up,” said Brett Gurewitz, the founder and chief executive of Epitaph Records, which is releasing “Internationally Unknown” via its Hellcat imprint. “Rat Boy is the embodiment of that time.”

... When he became curious about music, YouTube was his university. “I used to watch thousands of videos,” he said.

Cardy’s natural artistic curiosity was buttressed by a creeping sense of outsiderness. “When I was in school when I was a kid, I did feel like there were not, like, people that were into the same stuff,” he said. “Everyone was into what was happening around here, and I’m just liking [expletive] that happened 20 years ago.”

...  One of the first people in the music business he met was Drew McConnell, who plays bass in the British band Babyshambles (which is fronted by Pete Doherty) and was introduced to Cardy’s music by an intern at his publishing company. Before long, McConnell was setting up management and label meetings for Cardy, who was sleeping on his sofa.

“He had obviously listened to a lot of records,” McConnell said. “The way he would sing would remind me of Elvis Costello, or Robert Smith from the Cure. But at the same time he’s a huge hip-hop fan.”


Wait a minute, I'm confused here - he's 90s-redux and 90s-obsessed, but he sounds like New Wave?

And elsewhere in the piece as Caramanica does his breakdown of constituent parts, it sounds even more atemporal and mish-mashed:

"This month Cardy will release the second Rat Boy album, “Internationally Unknown,” a high-energy collision of punk convulsion and hip-hop storytelling full of raucously fun, sharp-tongued songs about slackerdom, resistance and disorderly joy. It’s shaped by late 1970s punk with flickers of dub, nods to 1990s hip-hop (and also the early 2000s English rapper the Streets), and embraces the musical exuberance of 2000s pop-punk.

Which is to say, it is an extremely of-the-moment amalgam, refusing to draw distinctions between genres. It’s also part of a long continuum of British punk that looks for kinship in black music and part of a wider re-engagement with the 1990s as source material."

Further confusing me

"In person, Cardy is gentle and soft-edged. But on both his first and second records, his attitude is consistent: a permanently extended middle finger to authority, and a robust sense of working class agitation."

What working class kid in his very early twenties can afford to drop 6000 quid on a vintage studio console? Because it was used by the Dust Bros?

He's certainly obsessed with the Dust Bros, whose claim to fame eludes me (Pauls Boutique? that Urge Overkill album?)

"Cardy went to Los Angeles and spent six weeks working with Armstrong at the Boat, once the studio of the Dust Brothers. (John King of the Dust Brothers also worked on the new album.)" 

This stuff about his dad Brett also puzzles me - 

"Cardy recalled how Brett never pushed him to pursue things he didn’t feel strongly about, like schoolwork: “It’s always been, like, do what you want to do.” They spoke about Cardy’s music and the unlikeliness of his performance intensity, joked about living in close quarters and celebrated hating authority. Recalling when Cardy was first learning to race cars, Brett explained his hands-off parenting philosophy, which felt like the foundation for all of Cardy’s subsequent life choices. “Just let him crash,” Brett said. “He ain’t going to do it twice."

Is it rebellion / slackerdom / DIY if you learn it from your dad? Or am I being old fashioned here, myself?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

also on the topic of different kinds of Nineties, a Nineties you might have barely intersected with, and "is this even the Nineties we're talking about here"? -  just got this press release through the mail, for a Hip Hop Brunch thrown by an organisation called www.The90sBrunch.co.uk  -


Whether you’re the ultimate ’90s fan or you just really like gettin’ jiggy wit it, this affair isn’t to be missed. The 90s Brunch’s entertainment this weekend has been seasoned with the spiciest nostalgic flavourings in the cupboard. We're talking glitter, transfer tattoos, lip-sync battles, dance-offs, and a full soundtrack that pays homage to the best decade ever. Now how’s that for 90’s nostalgia?

And you can’t forget the best part – a lip smackin’ three-course meal and an hour (yes, an hour) of bottomless cocktails – that should really get you in the mood to dance (or roller skate) like it's 1990.

Held on Saturday, Jan 19th from 12-5pm at a secret London venue, this brunch is guaranteed to be the best day-party out there.