Wednesday, October 24, 2012

sun araw: the inner treaty (drag city)

 
He’s certainly not the only one, but Cameron Stallone really likes to fuck with time. Sonically, the woozy THC-addled reggae-psych underwater space jams1 he makes as Sun Araw never quite go anywhere. Then again, they never quite stay still either. The effect is one of transit without arrival. Ebb, flow, cycle, and return. Tracks have a tendency to merge into each other. On and on and on and on. Swelling bass lines, bubbling percussion, flabby synth stabs, languid guitars. And all of a sudden the record’s over, the silence startling after all that timeless fog.

Stallone is an artist for whom the term hypnagogia has always felt particularly appropriate. And I mean that in the strictest sense of the word. Sun Araw’s music is “presomnal.” It’s located precisely at that point between sleep and wakefulness when sensations get simultaneously drawn out and suspended.

Then there’s all the talk of the ancients, mythology, “neo-primitive vibes,” Stallone’s encrypted references to his musical idols. Not only does the music fuck with your sense of time as you experience it, it’s in constant and self-conscious conversation with its own history too. Even though this latest record, The Inner Treaty, has been released by Drag City, the long-standing association with Not Not Fun makes total sense in this respect. Sun Araw’s music always feels totally idiosyncratic to me. I couldn’t imagine ever mistaking it for anyone else. But it situates itself firmly in that interzone between then and now. Time out of joint.

It’s an attitude — an ethos actually — best exemplified on Stallone’s extraordinary collaboration Icon Give Thank with 70s reggae legends The Congos and fellow L.A. resident M Geddes Gengres from earlier this year. Honestly, my ears are still ringing with the utter blessedness of it. Sunshine. A ray of joyous reverberant light. The record brought together three very different perspectives on dub history, two from one end and one from the other, and the combined effect was magic. In 2012, not a helluva lot has sounded better. Testament to the fact that innovation does not always need to mean the unceremonious discarding of what has come before. Retrospection, not Retromania. A healthy kind of respect for the past without being beholden to it...
 

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

a vaporwave primer


Monday night was the fourth edition of a semi-regular music criticism segment I do with Nick Croggon on my radio show at Melbourne's PBS 106.7fm. The topic was Vaporwave. Our intention was to provide a bit of a primer of the nascent / already fading micro-genre. As we point out in our chat, it's a genre that seems to have a particularly intimate relationship with critique, almost needs or depends on it in fact. So it seemed liked a particularly suitable topic for the segment. You can stream the audio back here. The playlist is below. But I thought it might be worth including some other relevant links here too. 

DOWNLOADS / LISTENING:


CRITIQUE:

情報デスクVIRTUAL
Mediafired 
BEER ON THE RUG / YYU

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Software | Island Sunrise | Digital Dance (1988)

James Ferraro | Linden Dollars | Far Side Virtual
Oneohtrix Point Never | Nassau | Replica
Chuck Person | Eccojam A1 | Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol.1

Computer Dreams | track 2 | Silk Road
Laserdisc Visions | Malls | New Dreams Ltd.
new dreams ltd initiation tape | meditations save me o lord | part one
Laserdisc Visions | Information | New Dreams Ltd.
情報デスクVIRTUAL | XX ''RUBY DUSK ON A 2ND LIFE NUDE BEACH'' ☯ . . . の生活・・・「ロベルタ」 | 札幌コンテンポラリー

Mediafired | cinderellas-big-score | The Pathway Through Whatever
INTERNET CLUB | BY DESIGN | VANISHING VISION
ECCO UNLIMITED | WITHIN REACH | NHK REMINDS YOU TO BOOST YOUR SIGNAL

S L O W W E A T H E R J A M Z
Fatima Al Qadiri | Vatican Vibes | Genre-Specific Xperience
HD BOYZ | UNZIP

Macintosh Plus | 壊れた | Floral Shoppe (bonus edition)
INTERNET CLUB | WEB FANTASY (REAL ESTATE OUTSIDE OF EUCLIDEAN SPACE MIX)

Wakesleep |To Anyone | Unreleased
Bee Mask | Unripe Pears | When We Were Eating Unripe Pears
---
Kane Ikin | Rhea | Sublunar
Emanuele De Raymondi | BV1 | Buyukberber Variations

Emanuele De Raymondi | BV4 | Buyukberber Variations

Thursday, October 11, 2012

datavis + forgotten light: prism projector (hexagon)


This is both an obituary and a baptism.

Vaporwave will turn out to have been a blip: less a genre than a methodological and conceptual gesture pursued briefly but vigorously by a number of highly prolific artists inspired by Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro. Although it was already beginning to emerge from bedrooms/internet connections in 2011, vaporwave will have registered in the critical consciousness for only about six months, between mid 2012 and the start of 2013. And even then only in a few dark corners of the web. And then it will have vanished, its practitioners and theorists moved on to new projects, different gestures, unrelated sounds.

What’s more, there will be exceptionally little to show for it. Vaporwave will have yielded hardly any physical releases and will barely ever have been heard “live.” Apart from a bunch of MP3s, almost all of which will have been exchanged “for free” (that is, their interaction with the market will have been limited to the $$s vicariously donated to ISPs and Apple), vaporwave will have left very little mark on the world. Not just that. In 10 years’ time, virtually no one will still listen to it.

Nevertheless, vaporwave will have been important. And it will have been important because this sort of story will become ever increasingly familiar in the musical avant-garde as the decade continues. A method will be pursued, a “concept” interrogated, intensely and repeatedly, but no sooner has it been around for long enough to seem to coalesce into a genre than it will be discarded. Monikers will proliferate. Sometimes it will be possible to establish continuities between them. Often not. Lopatin and Ferraro will be gods. The only constancy according to this new model will be change. Which is not necessarily to say evolution. Evolution will have been for the Rockists. 
 
Prism Projector, a split cassette between Datavis and Forgotten Light, is not vaporwave, but it is crucial to understanding both how vaporwave’s practitioners work and what will become of them. Datavis is Will Burnett. Is INTERNET CLUB. Is ECCO UNLIMITED. Which is to say, one of vaporwave’s major exponents. And Forgotten Light is Leonce Nelson. Which is to say Geotherm. And La Mer. And, with Burnett, one half of Datavision Ltd. Together, the two (nine?) of them run Hexagon Recordings
 
What’s so interesting about this record, what makes it so pertinent in relation to my argument above, is the fact that it could hardly sound any less like vaporwave if it tried. It’s a pretty standard drone record actually...