What is critical about contemporary music criticism? On Knowing and Not Knowing in Nicholas Szczepanik, Owen Pallett, and PC Music (with Nick Croggon)

What was music criticism in 2014? Or, more precisely, what was “critical” about it? How exactly is offering a critique different from, say, regurgitating a press release or clicking “like” on Facebook? In other words, just how critical is contemporary music criticism, and why, in the end, does it matter?

Out of all the reviews, features, comments, blogposts, tweets, and discussion boards — all the endless, interminable text — that comprised the collective conversation about music in 2014, two moments stood out to us as especially symptomatic of where things currently stand on these questions. The first almost certainly passed you by, trivial, a non-issue in the vast data-sea of music discourse, but no less telling for it. The second you may have noticed, because for a few brief weeks in March, it was everywhere.

It’s with these two moments that we want to begin. From there, we’ll move on, in the final part of the essay, to consider how they might speak to one of 2014’s most talked about phenomenons: the dramatic rise of London-based label PC Music.

Read the whole piece here

Pop & Non-Pop After The Conceptual Turn: How pop’s appetite for itself has led to a taste for the sacred (with NIck Croggon)

This essay is the second in a semi-regular series of slightly longer pieces exploring some of the ideas and conceptual strategies we think are at the heart of music production and reception today. 

Our last piece, “The Trouble with Contemporary Music Criticism,” was about history. We argued that contemporary music writing often fails to think about history adequately because of its commitment to a mostly unacknowledged ideology of progress. This is particularly problematic, we said, when so much of the strongest music being made today seems to take history itself as its main point of orientation. Musicians keep presenting us with alternatives to this default idea of music as the endless progression of the new, and we keep missing it. The best in contemporary music is often much smarter than we think it is — and much more productive too. 

Contemporary music is often accused of a kind of passivity: of refusing to be sufficiently “political,” of failing to “innovate,” of capitulating to the stultifying forces of retro-culture, of being little more than a composite of historical references. But in order to think that way, you need to commit to a pretty narrow view of “politics” and “innovation”. It is, by contrast, perfectly possible to listen to contemporary music and hear something extremely active: music that, in its best instances, is right in the thick of both questioning and rethinking ideas and hegemonies (like history and progress) that underpin art, culture, and social life. For this reason, it is also robustly political. It really does matter.

But our last essay left a lot of key terms unaccounted for. What did we mean by “contemporary music criticism,” for instance? Or, for that matter, “contemporary music”? If the answers to these questions seem self-evident, or if the questions themselves seem redundant, they shouldn’t. The assumptions we make about each of these key terms are directly bound up with how we write and listen. 

We’ll look at the question of criticism next time. In this essay, we’d like to tackle the question “What is contemporary music?” The answer to this question will unfold in two parts. First, we’re going to argue that the key to this question is the relationship between pop and non-pop: a relationship that contemporary music, with increasing intensity, is actually already investigating itself. And second, we’re going to argue that it is this investigation that has laid the groundwork for some of the most inventive musical experiments in recent years. 

PART 1: POP AND NON-POP

Pop Eats Itself

If you asked yourself what sort of music you tend to listen to and read about on sites like Tiny Mix Tapes, what would you say? Underground music? Experimental music? Terms like these are always either too specific or too vague. Usually, the easiest method is to answer by putting the music we like into dialogue with what it is not — whatever I listen to, it’s predominantly not pop music. This pairing is the most common way that music in the 20th century has been defined — popular vs. serious music, pop vs. experimental, mainstream vs. underground. 

But by defining pop by what it is not, we often ignore the fact that pop music has always had a bit of a knack for defining itself.

In 1957, Chuck Berry released a song called “Rock and Roll Music.” It went, “Just let me hear some of that Rock And Roll Music/ Any old way you choose it/ It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it/ Any old time you use it/ It’s gotta be Rock And Roll Music/ If you want to dance with me/ If you want to dance with me.” The song peaked at #8 in the US charts and, in obvious tribute to an artist and a genre they loved, would go on to be covered by the likes of Bill Haley & The Comets, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys. All of them were making rock & roll about rock & roll.

Without listing endless examples, what we’re suggesting is that, from its very beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, the modern form of pop music has always had a certain self-reflexive quality. It drew its own boundaries to some extent, defined itself in the process of its own embodiment and production.

What’s most striking, however, is just how much pop seems to have upped the ante in this respect over the last 60 years. 

Let’s take three examples from last year. In September 2013, 14-year-old US pop star Madison Beer released “Melodies.” The video starts with Justin Bieber listening to the song on a set of purple Beats speakers. “You hear that, Ryan?” he asks. “That’s a smash.” He signs a set of matching purple headphones, puts them in a big red box, and we cut to Madison opening said box somewhere in middle America. She takes out her newly Bieber-pimped Beats, puts them on, and hears herself singing. “I hear melodies in my head, hear melodies in my head, hear melodies in my head… My heart is a beating drum, repeating my favorite song.” This, then, is an earworm about the fact that it’s an earworm. This is pop eating itself.

Read the whole piece here

The Trouble with Contemporary Music Criticism: Retromania, Retro-historicism, and History (with Nick Croggon)

1

Two hundred years before the release of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, people were losing their shit over a different sort of robot entirely. This one was known as the Mechanical Turk, and it was built at the end of the 18th century by a guy named Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Mechanical Turk comprised a puppet dressed in Turkish robes, sitting on top of a box containing an apparently complex set of mechanics. And it played chess. The Turk was so good at chess, in fact, that it toured the world for the best part of a century before it was finally destroyed in a fire in 1854. It played for Emperor Joseph II, Frederick the Great, Charles Carroll, and Edgar Allen Poe, and it actually beat Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, and Catherine the Great. On one tour of the UK, it won 45 out of 50 matches, and it played them all with a one-pawn handicap.

The amazing Mechanical Turk turned out to be an elaborate hoax of course. The machine’s interior was an ingenious system of smoke and mirrors, expertly designed by Von Kempelmen to conceal the chess master, a small hunchback nestled snugly inside.

2

In the realm of contemporary music criticism, there is an equivalent of Von Kempelen’s Turk, a criticism machine that is making the rounds of contemporary music circuits, amazing a largely unquestioning audience. 

The contemporary music critic machine plays its game by confronting and demystifying any and all contemporary music as nothing but a series of historical references — well-known dance outfits from the 1990s, not so well-known German synthesizer duos from the 1970s, and totally obscure British sound recordings from the 1960s. We read this criticism and are impressed at its apparent rigor and erudition — never realizing that, concealed within the box, something else is pulling the strings. 

3

In 2011, Simon Reynolds introduced the world of music criticism to the notion of “retromania.” The idea was that, more than ever before, contemporary music is concerned with being “retro,” with repeating its own very recent past. In justifying this central claim, Reynolds detailed numerous examples, both pop and experimental, that referred either explicitly or implicitly to music of bygone eras: the eternal return of 60s- and 70s-era garage rock, Amy Winehouse and Adele’s ludicrously successful neo-soul, the onslaught of 90s Eurodance recently unleashed by David Guetta et al. on the world’s charts. And in the global underground: chillwave, hypnagogic pop, hauntology, hipster house. In each case, Reynolds’ diagnosis was almost entirely negative. For Reynolds, retromania is a sickness, a form of cultural malaise. With each passing year, he worried, the pulse of the present is growing increasingly faint.

Reynolds’ book struck such a chord both with the public and in critical circles, because his account married perfectly with a way of thinking that has dominated critical discourse about music since at least the 1960s. This approach is premised on the twin ideas of “novelty,” on the one hand, and “historical progress,” on the other. 

In Retromania, as in so much of the music critical tradition, including Reynolds’ own previous work, music is at its best — indeed, achieves its core social function — when it confronts the listener with the shock of the “new”: the exhilaration of experiencing a soundworld totally unlike anything they have heard before: the thrill of having ‘been there’ at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, techno, or rave. Moreover, this shock, this experience of radical novelty, is not only a historical experience, but also an experience of history as such — albeit a specific type of history. In Reynolds’ terms, the excitement of new music is the experience of being on the very edge of the present as it hurtles into the future: it is the experience of the essential truth of human historical existence as constant progress and change. 

The retromania of contemporary music, characterized so astutely by Reynolds, fundamentally challenges this way of relating to music. Its contemporaneity consists precisely in its repudiation of progress, its refusal to create new sounds: in some cases by shamelessly or irreverently copying or reframing, and in other cases by carefully paying tribute to or unarchiving the music of the past. Either way, a denial of the inevitability or desirability of change. And this is why Reynolds condemns it.

4

In the wake of Retromania, the world of music criticism has undeniably become increasingly “retro-sensitive.” The contemporary music critic hears retro everywhere.

Of course, with the likes of YouTube, Wikipedia, Spotify, The Pirate Bay, Discogs, and a vast data-sea of blogs at their disposal, it is increasingly easy for them to do so. Struggling for a reference? Google it! Wondering which precise Ash Ra Tempel record the new Emeralds record sounds like? Spend just a few minutes surfing YouTube! 

The result is a now almost ubiquitous form of music criticism which we call “retro-historicism.” It can be found in the printed music press of The Wire, NME, and Rolling Stone, and most predominantly, of course, on the web. In essence, its critical project is the reduction of music criticism to a form a historical list-making: a mechanical exercise in influence fishing, the mere identification and cataloging of historical reference points before moving on to pass judgment, as if that were in any way sufficient. 

All this is not a tribute to or a continuance of Reynolds’ project, but a depressing performance of precisely the approach to music he condemned. Contemporary music criticism has become infected by its own version of retromania — in other words, its own obsession with the past. Although, rhetorically, such criticism’s appeal to history projects a certain kind of critical rigor, it is our belief that retro-historicism involves nothing less than the abandonment of the critical task. 

Read on at TMT

sky needle: end games (bruit direct disques)

Man, oh man, it’s been a great few weeks for videos. First came Oneohtrix Point Never’s amazing (and sadly temporarily non-existent) collaborative techno-erotic exploration with Jon Rafman. Next came Tim Hecker’s exquisitely warped and washed-out gothic video for “Black Refraction,” a track from his forthcoming album Virgins. Now, viewers are presented with this little bit of genius from Brisbane’s Sky Needle.

So simple and yet so totally intense and absolutely effective, like some sort of primitive psychedelia, build, build, building to its demented Dionysian climax.

ME AH BOY THE STAR OF THE HEAD BORN A STAR YOU THAT STYLE THE FLOOR FLAWED WE ARE VILE THE GASSED OF DOOR PLAN BORED IS BY THE WAR RYE KNOW EYE WE ARE BY THE GUEST OF THE HEAD BORE A PIE THE BOAR HIGH RISE HORSE BEER OR MILES THROUGH OUT THE N I G H T BUY BILE STARTS SKY ONE WHY WHALES BE BEE OUT SIDE WALK THE…

And what are these words now but squawks of sound and passion: phlegm, lungs, loud, wind, whine, throat, thrust?

(UNINTELLIGIBLE) WE ARE SO HOT SO SOLAR…

In promotion of their latest album, Debased Shapes (out NOW on Bruit Direct Disques), Sky Needle just finished a European tour alongside Melbourne skuzz-rock act Mad Nanna. If you dig Debased Shapes, make sure you check out 2012’s Rave Cave. It’s similarly fucked up, but in the best possible way, of course.

on tmt

gil michell: no friends (this thing)

I want to call this footwork. I mean, just check that percussion. But if this is footwork, it’s certainly not a strain we’ve heard before. This particular mutation — the latest offering from Melbourne label This Thing — is deep and mellow. Beats like this have never sounded so cool, so totally chill. Seriously, this is what it’d sound like if you gave Traxman’s “Footworkin on Air” a couch, a couple of brews, and a Valium.

“No Friends” is the first single to surface from a new collaborative project between This Thing stalwarts Galapagoose (Gil) and Wooshie (Michell). And it sees them trading in their wonky, disjointed hip-hop for a much more ambient, contemplative sound. For now, the vinyl’s only available to pre-order, but I’ve already copped a listen, and man it’s good: #forserious. New territory for both artists, no doubt about it. Or maybe even just straight up new territory. New ground being — oh so cooly — trod…

on TMT

friendships: i'm an impressionist, you're dumb: a compilation of bass tracks

friendships entered the room. [1:22 AM]
tmtcrew entered the room.
squirrell_nuts entered the room.

*Type /help for a list of commands.

Friend_ships: DAMN [1:22 AM]
M I S H A: LOL [1:22 AM]
CliffOrd //M//: Hi! [1:22 AM]
Friend_ships: waaaaaaaaaa? [1:22 AM]

M I S H A: I’m an impressionist [1:23 AM]
Friend_ships: You’re dumb [1:23 AM]
JP∆rk: Ur a Drag [1:23 AM]
JP∆rk: Drop that B A A S S S S [1:23 AM]
Skinimin: word [1:23 AM]

M R P: 1am (slow release) is tiiiiiight [1:23 AM]
CliffOrd //M//: mmdammmmmnnn [1:24 AM]
RaRakin: represent [1:24 PM]
Friend_ships: who the hell is squirrel_nuts!? [1:24 AM]

TMT

scissor lock - churn (self released)

Let’s begin with that cover. Because it’s not so much a cover as a framing device. A freeze frame actually. Taken from the exuberant video to JB’s “Beauty and the Beat” just as a drop of water partly blurs his face. 

What is captured here? A number of different things, I think. In stillness, movement. In intimacy, distance. In celebrity, a void. And in the familiarity and pleasure of pop, a strangeness: a distortion.

It’s the last of these pairs that seems to interest Marcus Whale. As one half of Collarbones, and in particular on the remarkable “Hypothermia” from their second full-length Die Young, he’s been responsible for some of the freshest sounding “pop” these ears have heard in a long while. Which is to say a kind of mutant strain of it: at once totally reverent of the mainstream and, at the same time, actively subversive of it. As if to say: yes, yes, I LOVE the Biebster’s “One Time,” I really do; I love its energy and its sincere enthusiasm, but wouldn’t it be better if it sounded like this? Wouldn’t it be better if experimentalism and pop hadn’t become so antithetical? You know, like back in the day when Aaliyah and Timbaland were kicking it? Or like some of Yasutaka Nakata’s recent production work for J-Pop sensations Perfume?

Churn (free download here) is Whale’s first solo release as Scissor Lock, following an excellent early-2012 collaboration with Thomas William. It’s less direct, less upbeat than his stuff with Collarbones, but it’s no less potent. Heavily processed voices drift over slippery synths and gently skittering beats on “Outer Space.” And the sparkling, metallic drones on “Churn” and “I guess” recall Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal. Except, with the distant and heavily treated vocals added in for good measure, perhaps this is closer to Laurel Halo’s phenomenal Quarantine (TMT Review), yet another experiment in the sonics of posthumanity, the experience of being always already mediated. Nowhere is this clearer than on the appropriately titled “None”: a near total effacement of self, the pop mainstream’s obsession with Auto-Tune taken to its logical conclusion. 

It’s as if with Collarbones Whale was trying to show how pop could be otherwise — more interesting, more experimental. And with Scissor Lock, he’s trying to re-imagine the experimental underground through the lens of pop. Which is to say we could read the cover image to Churn exactly the other way round. Not as a distorted take on pop. Rather, the focus here is precisely on the splash of water, the distortion. That’s where our attention is being directed. And what we’re being invited to see/hear is the pop that was always latent behind it, waiting to peak through.

Originally posted on TMT here

ECO VIRTUAL: VIRTUAL大気中分析 ( Advanced Climate Research & Analysis)

Vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave! What does it mean when a genre reaches its maximum saturation and influence to date long after its obituary has been written? Especially when that genre is so closely related to hauntology? And when its methods are so easily replicable? Or appear to be? At what point is a replica of a genre entirely premised on the logic of the replica (which is also to say its impossibility) no longer good enough? Which of vaporwave’s many afterlives will endure? And which will fade into the ether?

By pushing the genre’s techniques in new and interesting directions, Vektroid has already begun to answer some of these questions. With ECO VIRTUAL, things are less clear. On one level, this is total vwave boilerplate, a perfect clone. And yet there’s something really nice about the conceptual integrity here (the videos, courtesy of EcoVirtualTV work particularly well). Not so much innovative as a perfect realization of the genre’s already extant associations with weather: both its corporate soundtrack and the connotations of climate, ambiance, mood alteration, biomanagement, and perhaps even the stratospheric or transcendent.

naps - 7" (self-released)

A bit behind on the ball on this one. Sorry folks. I blame the holidays. But it’s too good to miss! Melbourne producer naps first caught my attention last year with a quality little EP called earthsea on This Thing. Watery, degraded, tropical, new age… and probably other words too; it was a genuinely intriguing proposition. Well, the follow-up is even better. The territory is similar sonically: still pretty chill, but with slightly more emphasis on the loping, disjointed beats. And there’s a definite weirdness here, something slightly uncanny about the lounge-y sample (is it even a sample? does it matter? maybe!) on “kids” and both the choice and treatment of the vocal on “squai.”

I’m struggling to think of comparisons actually. Daniel Lopatin by way of Dolphins into the Future maybe? Except that there’s a definite hip-hop element here too. I’d suggest you file it alongside TMT fave ahnnu, who (not coincidentally) turns up with a whacked-out remix here. Both artists are doing exciting things in what seems to be a particularly fertile backwater of the global beat-making community that has apparently made Soundcloud its home. It’s here evidently that, as 2012 becomes 2013, new territory is being carved. But you knew that already…

Played a killer set recently for BoilerRoomTV too. Was rad.

emeralds: just to feel anything (editions mego)

Emeralds are doubly anachronistic. It’s not just that they’re retro. They aren’t even retro in a particularly contemporary way. With vaporwave, 2012 saw the culmination of a logic that had partly begun in the mid noughties with hauntology and hypnagogic pop. Ariel Pink, Burial, Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Ghost Box, Not Not Fun. This sort of music always had a certain “aboutness” to it. Burial wasn’t reproducing rave; he was mourning it. Ariel Pink wasn’t just resurrecting the pop of yesteryear; he was remembering it. On “Artifact” from 2005’s tellingly entitled Worn Copy, he sings through a fog of hypnagogic fuzz “Never forget the Golden Age… This is an artifact of that.” Both lyrically and sonically, this was music about other music. And that was a large part of what made it interesting.

This was the logic that vaporwave took up this year and radicalized. In doing so, it introduced a different regime of art-practice to the musical avant-underground: the readymade. Unlike seapunk with which it was regularly and erroneously lumped, vaporwave was always more than just a “sound,” a shared archive or set of production techniques. At its most radical, what it did was interrupt the logic of modernism. By dramatically foregrounding the act of appropriation, precisely by refusing to be “original” in the conventional sense of the term, it made the listening experience all about that original; maybe even about the discourse of originality itself. Either way, it seemed to be adopting some sort of critical position. And the impossibility of ever determining once and for all whether this amounted to endorsement or disavowal was a crucial part of the intrigue.

In other words, vaporwave did for music what Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons had done before in visual art. But it also did something else, something more. Vaporwave wasn’t simply derivative of a familiar logic; it extended and deepened it. In its musicality, its sonority, vaporwave had a fleshiness, a sensuality to it that even the biggest, brightest Koons never managed. Vaporwave was always more than just a conceptual gesture, in other words, a mere staging of the undecidability of the critical task. It enfolded you in the experience of that undecidability, held you in it, really forced you to feel it: to notice your attention coming in and out of focus as the album unfolded, at turns indifferent, the sound just washing over you, genuinely compelled and occasionally, yes, disgusted.

Emeralds’ relationship with the past is of a different brand entirely. What’s more, after vaporwave, it feels outdated and, to these ears anyway, uninteresting. Having originally made a name for themselves as a drone outfit, Emeralds officially “crossed over” with 2010’s Does It Look Like I’m Here (TMT Review). For the first time, there were melodies, song structures, and a distinctly “pop” sensibility to add to the neo-kosmiche new age vibes. Mark McGuire’s guitar noodlings took a distinctly proggy turn, and it all started to sound a lot like mid-to late-70s Klaus Schulze and Manuel Göttsching. These weren’t exactly slavish recreations. It was as if Emeralds had simply decided to pick up and continue to explore a genre that had last touched base with the zeitgeist some 30 or so years previously.

Nothing has changed on their most recent outing.

Head here for the rest

ital: dream on (planet mu)

If you’d asked me a year ago which artists best exemplified the state of the contemporary avant-underground, I’d have said Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro, and left it that. No doubt about it. Today, I’d want to add Daniel Martin-McCormick to the list. 

While mainstream pop is busy converging on a single mutant mega-genre — euro-dance, feat. R&B, feat. hip-hop, feat. rock, feat. euro-dance, feat. R&B — elsewhere the name of the game is radical eclecticism and artistic self-difference. Multiple projects and personae. #keeponmoving @changenotevolution. N E V E R S E T T L E. And the attitude always seems very deliberate, studied. The musical sensibility I’m getting at here always seems to have an agenda. This is the era of the concept musician, the PhDJ and their necessary foil the academicritic.

Look how perfectly Daniel Martin-McCormick fits this bill. He first made a name for himself between 2001 and 2004, releasing two excellent records with the post-hardcore turned free-improv and general freakout five-piece Black Eyes. After that, his next project was Mi Ami. Initially Mi Ami did post-punk, though with more than a passing interest in dub. But by 2011’s Dolphins, the group had discarded the paraphernalia of rock entirely, trading in their guitars for “ancient drum machines, a sampler that runs on floppy disks, and the simplest keyboard presets imaginable” (TMT Review). The result was a kind of dystopic, ultra lo-fi electro-pop that, although it was clearly indebted to old-school house and disco, nevertheless wore its own lack of roots in the dance tradition firmly on its sleeve. And if this were true sonically, it was even more obvious visually. When Mi Ami made the shift to Not Not Fun offshoot 100% Silk for their most recent effort Decade, it made perfect sense.

In fact, Martin-McCormick’s association with Not Not Fun had already been established for some time as Sex Worker, probably his weirdest project to date (which is saying something). And when the Ital moniker emerged in 2011 on a series of EPs for 100% Silk, there were mumblings right from the very start that maybe this was an artist we’d heard from before. If it was hard to tell, that’s because this was the first time Martin-McCormick had abandoned his trademark squawk, hitherto the only continuity between the various projects. Moreover, this wasn’t just a surface level difference. It signaled that for the first time Martin-McCormick might be interested in making straight-ahead dance music rather than some sort of semi-ironic commentary on it. Not “hipster house,” just house. And by 2012, he had duly made the move to the estimable Brighton-based electronic label Planet Mu.

In another era, that’s probably where this brief synopsis would have ended. In 2012, it’d be wrong of me not to mention Martin-McCormick’s regular (and high-quality) output as a critic for Dusted magazine as well. Look at the records he’s reviewing. Look at his favorites of 2010 and 2011. This is a guy who’s not just listening to but theorizing exactly the same stuff we are. Which is to say E V E R Y T H I N G: noise, dubstep, techno, punk, footwork, hip-hop, African disco, reggae, Colin Stetson, Matthew Herbert, Cooly G, Laurel Halo, Hype Williams, and plenty of Oneohtrix Point Never. And it’s fascinating to notice, for instance, that Martin-McCormick reviewed Planet Mu’s superb original Bangs & Works compilation shortly before signing to the label and suddenly injecting a heavy dose of footwork into his own sound. The result, “Doesn’t Matter (If You Love Him)” from February’s formidable Hive Mind (TMT Review) is for my money one of the standout tracks of 2012. The fact that “Privacy Settings” follows only two tracks later is testament both to the depth of Martin-McCormick’s talent and to the breadth of his artistic vision. “Privacy Settings” offers four of the darkest, most unsettling minutes you’re ever likely to experience. Footwork this ain’t.

It’s this diversity that makes Martin-McCormick such a tantalizing proposition. You get the sense that anything goes with him; that’s he totally unalloyed to genre; that he could go anywhere or do anything next; that none of the rules apply except when he wants them to, except when he’s deliberately invoking and exploiting them; that having already tried his hand at punk, noise, and improv — and admirably so — on his next album he might simply abandon electronica entirely and move on again.

He didn’t. Not this time at least...

head here for the rest of the review.

and i did a bit of an artist focus on dmm on my radio show here if you fancy some high quality listening

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...

 

Full review here

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:

http://internetclubdotcom.angelfire.com/
http://newdreamsltd.tumblr.com/
http://beerontherug.bandcamp.com/
http://fatimaalqadiri.com/

representative playlist on youtube

CRITIQUE:

Macintosh Plus
Adam Harper's piece in Dummy Mag

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

INTERNET CLUB

Gatekeeper

Datavis / Forgotten Light
Vaporwave vs genre fanboyism

Muzak / Corporate Takeover

DIS Magazine

Rex Butler

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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
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Kane Ikin | Rhea | Sublunar
Emanuele De Raymondi | BV1 | Buyukberber Variations

Emanuele De Raymondi | BV4 | Buyukberber Variations

flying lotus: until the quiet comes (warp)

Listen again to the opening seconds of Cosmogramma. Now do the same with “All In,” the opening track of Until the Quiet Comes, Steven Ellison’s fourth record now as Flying Lotus. Everything you need to know about the difference between these two records is contained there, each album’s essence potently distilled. If you like what you hear in the latter case, well then good for you. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to reserve my right to be seriously disappointed.

Because Until the Quiet Comes is the negation of everything that made Cosmogramma great. It is relentlessly beige. It is “mature.” It is a chai latte. It is loungetronica. It is David Sanborn. It is Nora Jones. It is über proficient. It is no longer the sound of the future. In its obstinate blandness, it is a surprisingly arduous listen even though it only lasts 45 minutes. It is coming straight from Warp to a cocktail bar near you and, soon after that, a Starbucks. It is the sound of an artist in retreat from the shadow of his own success.

What’s more, Ellison knows all of this. Because that was exactly his intention. Here he is in an interview with Britt Brown in the most recent issue of The Wire: “I like the idea of pulling back,” he says. “I made this really grandiose kind of statement, now I wanted to make this quiet statement, trim all the fat and just get a small, tight story out of it, instead of trying to tell the story of the birth of the universe.”

...

Full review (smackdown) here

internet club: vanishing vision (hexagon)

Here’s what we know. Vaporwave is a form of appropriation art. Its major exponents — INTERNET CLUB, New Dreams Ltd., Computer Dreams, Lasership Stereo,VΞRACOM — all tend to work with glossy corporate mood music, dredged from the nether regions of the internet, which they then reframe (sometimes obviously looped, pitched, and screwed; sometimes not) in an intriguingly ambivalent gesture between endorsement and critique. Sometimes the effect is genuinely sublime. Often it remains vacant and grotesque. But in either case, the act of repetition and recontextualization produces an ontological shift: what started off sounding a hell of a lot like muzak turns out to be about it instead. The banal is imbued with a kind of ironic distance, and it is this distance that gives vaporwave its peculiar critical function: its “aboutness.”

That’s step one. In step two, vaporwave isn’t just “about” muzak or the acoustic experience of capital. It doesn’t just stage a moment of either approval or condemnation. In step two, what vaporwave is “about” is precisely the impossibility of the critical task itself. What it stages is the profound ambiguity of the music it takes as its source material: that moment when you catch yourself humming along to a pan-pipe cover of Billie Jean as you wait to be connected to the call center, and, to your horror, you notice your own pleasure. In one of the first pieces to attempt to theorize the genre, Adam Harper wondered whether vaporwave involved “a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?” His answer: “Both and neither.” Undecidable.

In this respect, vaporwave is doing nothing more than dramatizing a logic that we have already seen play out in reverse. It is the product of a culture, in other words, in which the music/muzak distinction has already collapsed. It was as long ago as 1984 that the Muzak corporation first started using original artists’ material to lubricate the exchange of capital. Since then, it hasn’t looked back. Today, it offers “multi-sensory branding solutions” for everything from retail outlets to restaurants, healthcare, and finance. Muzak’s website trumpets the fact that the corporation experienced “unprecedented growth in the first decade of the new millennium.” From a catalogue of nearly three million songs, “more than 100 million people hear Muzak programs each day.” The “indie electronic” playlist, for instance, offers a diverse daily diet of “electronic-based music drawing from house, techno, IDM, indie pop, downtempo and other styles from the club and lounge scene.” “Artists include: Fever Ray, Cut Copy, Junior Boys, Matthew Dear.” The Pop Underground hasn’t been underground for a long time now. Today, it’s simply the soundtrack to a different kind of shopping experience.

One way of thinking about vaporwave then is as a response to the death of canned music: an act of mourning as much as celebration, and a dramatic demonstration of the fact that the music/muzak distinction has always been unstable at a time when it’s less stable than ever before.

READ THE REST ON TMT

YYU: TIMETIMETIME&TIME (beer on the rug)

Beer on the Rug is one of the most interesting labels to have emerged in the last year or so. Early releases from the likes of World Series, The Arcade Junkies, Midnight Television, and (a little later) Boy Snacks were all in that Ariel Pink, James Ferraro circa Night Dolls With Hairspray region of ultra lo-fi hypnagogia. But the next wave of output, beginning with Laserdisc Visions’ New Dreams Ltd. in July 2011 and continuing on with albums from Napolian and Computer Dreams, Macintosh Plus, and, most recently, 情報デスクVIRTUAL took the label into different territory entirely. All of a sudden, there was less emphasis on grime and far more on gloss.

Where hypnagogic pop was concerned with hazy and degraded re-productions of and odes to vintage pop, this new breed of artists — while still looking to the past for their raw material — seemed to be far more interested in re-using and re-purposing: re-branding, to use an appropriately corporate term, the sonic lubricant of commerce for the purposes of the musical underground. An act of appropriation and recontextualization. Sometimes the raw material is looped, restructured, pitch- and/or tempo-shifted. But sometimes it can be virtually impossible to detect the presence of the artist at all. And the effect is an intriguingly ambivalent gesture somewhere between valorization and critique.

The term being bandied around for this stuff is vaporwave. It’s by no means limited to Beer on the Rug, but the label is certainly a major hub for it. It’s these artists, most of all, who have brought the label attention. And as a result, I really wasn’t expecting their latest release, TIMETIMETIME&TIME by Californian artist Ben Straus a.k.a. YYU to sound like this.

FULL REVIEW, wherein I pontificate further on vaporwave and the logic of repetition

various artists: new weird australia / fallopian tunes: gloss & moss (nwa)

Ours is a curator culture. That’s pretty clear by this point. Everyone’s doing it: not just galleries, festivals, labels, and websites like this one but, most of all, you, your sis, and the guy/gal behind this little doozy: on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Spotify, Pinterest, and all their myriad siblings and offshoots. Confronted by the information ocean, taste is the hottest commodity around. Presumably that’s why the activity of curation is increasingly being outsourced to mathematics too? Algorithms mean $$, people! YouTube and Amazon are the paradigms here. It’s all about getting ‘relevant content’ into that sidebar. Hells yeah I like catz! And I think I’ll have that new Sound Studies Reader while I’m at it.

Not everyone’s comfortable about such developments, of course. This recent piece on Pinterest and the curatorial manufacture of desire (I’m paraphrasing!) includes the following little screed from Choire Sicha, co-editor of The Awl: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot,” he writes, “I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it…” Ironic really, given The Awl’s own mission statement: “We believe that there is a great big Internet out there on which we all live, and that too often the curios and oddities of that Internet are ignored in favor of the most obvious and easy stories. We believe that there is an audience of intelligent readers who are poorly served by being delivered those same stories in numbing repetition to the detriment of their reading diet.”

Sicha can put the curator on a pedestal all he likes, enforcing this supposed distinction between “actual curators, of like, actual art and whatnot” and the rest, but the fact remains: The difference between such activities will always be one of degree rather than type. Etymologically, the word ‘curator’ derives from the Latin curare, meaning to ‘oversee’ or ‘care for.’ Curation is fundamentally an act of gathering, on the one hand, and of love, on the other — whatever the scale, whatever the format.
But curation is always also creation. It’s just that what’s being created here isn’t ‘content’ so much as connections. Connections matter. A compilation like this one, for instance — jointly curated by Matthew Spisbah of Melbourne label and collective Fallopian Tunes as well as the band Yolke, and Stuart Buchanan, one of the founding members of Sydney’s independent radio-station FBi 94.5 and now of the increasingly formidable New Weird Australia — is the product of a whole series of prior curatorial and connective acts...

Read the rest on TMT

galapagoose: commitments (magical properties / two bright lakes)

 

First the beat was dequantized: unsnapped from the tyranny of the grid. Then it was obliterated: broken down and denatured almost until the point of unrecognizability. In the former case, I’m thinking of course of UK dubstep, wonky et al. In the latter, mainly footwork and a recently emergent branch of “instrumental” hip-hop that, for the time being at least, remains nameless.

On second thought, perhaps that “instrumental” doesn’t belong in scare quotes after all. Because it’s not just the lack of vocals that characterizes this kind of music, but the use of the Monome, Roland SP-404, and other similarly tactile MIDI controllers and digital samplers. What these instruments do is allow for the reintroduction of a certain kind of mutant organicism into the production/performance process.

Not everyone’s interested, of course. For a lot of people, electronica still means precision. That’s true even of an MPC magician like AraabMuzik, I think. When I saw him play live recently, the music was so relentless, so utterly mind-and-body numbing in its regularity, that I found myself retreating into a side-room after only about 20 minutes: that was all I could take. But look at this. Or this. Artists like Melbourne’s Galapagoose, L.A.’s aaronmaxwell, and Brighton’s Warm Thighs have taken the sampler and used it to extricate hip-hop from the groove — or at least to drastically modify our relationship with it anyway. 

Read the full review here

will guthrie: sticks, stones and broken bones (antboy)

I’m in awe of this record and in awe of the guy who made it. It dropped into my inbox one day a few months back with a view to giving it a spin on this radio show I do, and I was immediately impressed. The musicianship, the sheer muscular intelligence of Will Guthrie’s technique, the raw immediacy of 40 minutes spent engrossed with nothing but a man and his drums. It’s not just that the record’s good (and it is); the values it seemed to embody felt really unfamiliar and exciting to me as a result of the kind of soundworld I’ve been inhabiting recently.

Don’t get me wrong. I won’t be arguing the now infamous Julia Holter line that aesthetic merit is somehow commensurate with or proportional to artistic labour. We all know the virtues of the aleatoric, the ‘unskilled,’ the rough-around-the-edges. But I will say this: there is and always will be something impressive about technique — the beauty of chops hard-won, a body rigorously disciplined and spectacularly in tune with an obviously sharp mind. Give me a run-of-the-mill post-bop gig — keys, fingers, and sticks flailing, performers’ bodies lost to the propulsive groove, heavy breathing — any day of the week over its drone, minimalist or chillwave equivalent. Or at least for the time being anyway. A couple of months back, Sticks, Stones and Breaking Bones was exactly the record I needed...

Full review here.

And I'm excited to report that Will will be in the studio next week on my radio show on Melbourne's PBS 106.7fm spinning some of these tracks, along with a bunch of other current faves and influences.

metric: synthetica (mom and pop/MMI)

I feel like I need to justify even listening to this record, let alone spending enough time with it to venture a review. That’s interesting I think. It says something about me at the very least, but also, I suspect, about this website and the kind of listener it aspires to, their (your!) politics and prejudices.

My sense is that things would be different if Synthetica were a ‘purer’ kind of pop. Rowan Savage’s recent review of Saint Etienne’s latest record is a good example. Here is an album that is all about the deep pleasures of a certain kind of popular jouissance, whereby it’s precisely the sharing of the musical experience that matters most. Words and Music finds Saint Etienne both reflecting on and luxuriating in the power of pop. And we’re cool with that.

Metric? Less so. Because Metric — their sound, their look, their product endorsements — seem to embody so perfectly the twisted double-logic of the New Indie Rock: the adoption of an outsider’s perspective from safely within the inside; rebellion as the necessary gesture of a certain kind of totally sanitized rock conservatism. You know what I mean. It looks, sounds, and blogs a lot like Urban Outfitters… with over 400 retail locations worldwide and counting. Not only do Metric embody this logic, Synthetica is actually about it...

Full review here