AND YET MORE THOUGHTS ON POST-DIGITAL ABSTRACTION IN MUSIC

One more addendum to the idea of post-digital abstraction I was thinking about last night: this excellent interview with Ship Canal over at Zone Styx Travelcard. The description of Ship Canal's music is exactly what I had in mind:

the sound of youtube's algorithm getting rewritten, or overwritten, or getting into a fight with, the neural pathways of the human brain: strange splashes of found tonal colour, edges left frayed, collaged and accelerated into a blur, until the colours run and meld into a kind of deep, stewed (mushroom) tea brown.

These kinds of musical signifiers--and I guess since I've been using it, I'm stuck calling them post-digital abstraction--are related to, but distinct from, the kind of maximalist music that someone like Rustie or Justice trades in, I think. Whereas digital maximalism is "flat/bright/busy" and "has no interest in 'atmosphere'--it's about dazzle so fierce it chases away all the shadows . . . preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome: not so much striking a balance between sublime and ridiculous as merging them until they're indistinguishable," post-digital abstraction works similar territory, exploring the atmosphere that both produces flat/bright/busy and that allows it to flourish as an aesthetic, but doesn't have to do so as a way to a kind of sugar and caffeine rush of sound. The same signifiers might be deployed in digital maximalism, but they are not, in and of themselves, inherently maximalist in the vein that Rustie and others are.

In his article on digital maximalism, Simon Reynolds traces the term's slightly different provenance outside of music, in William Powers' take on modern life's emphasis on maximum connectivity as a lifestyle that "max[es] out your nervous system, leaving you in a brittle state of hectic numbness, overwhelmed by options, increasingly incapable of focused concentration or fully-immersed enjoyment." Digital maximalism takes those moments of partially-immersed enjoyment and microsecond-length, fragmented bursts of concentration as building blocks, as tools rather than problems--if I can't focus on just one thing, why not focus on everything all at once?--and uses them to craft hymns to a digitally maximalized body and mind via a sound that is delirious and fevered, not worried about cohering because its chaotic and scattered nature is its essence. Post-digital abstraction, I think, is the sound of those microseconds of concentration before they get processed into the roil and jumble of digital maximalism--it remembers historicity, even if it no longer finds it feasible to operate within that framework. There's a scene in Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man in which the titular character, while suffering from one of the violent blackouts for which he's undergone surgery, opens his mouth and makes a noise like static. A computer programmer, he's obsessed with the idea that computers are taking over society. Post-digital abstraction seems to me to be related to the noise coming out of his mouth.

SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON EVIAN CHRIST, PRE- AND POST-DIGITAL ABSTRACTION, ETC.

A few idle thoughts that spilled over from my review of Evian Christ's "Duga-Three" as I listened to that track again this morning. This is just me thinking out loud, but I'd be interested in seeing if anyone thinks this stuff has traction.

1) Part of what seems quaint/dated about it are its "abstract qualities"--the delayed and overlapping voices sourced from television and radio broadcasts, while a perfectly standard tool in this kind of music, feel like a sound from another era. Radio and television are obviously still a thing in today's world, but it doesn't seem like the kind of polyphonic/chaotic stream of voices and languages pouring into our consciousness primarily comes from television (and not at all from radio). From the graininess of the voices to the very conceit, the piece feels profoundly pre-digital in a way. The echoes of Boards of Canada's aesthetic in the first section are another example--that sound was meant to recall a specific material reality of the pre-digital world, the warping of tape and video by time.

2) The ascent of Glitch in the early parts of last decade (via compilations like the Clicks and Cuts series on Milles Plateaux) seems like a moment of transition into some new conception of abstraction in a digital age, one that has perhaps blossomed fully in the last few years via things like Oneohtrix Point Never's music and the New Aesthetic (and that had already started to come into existence several years before the millennium via time-stretching in jungle and drum'n'bass). 

3) Another sign of this transition might be Brian Eno's albums for Warp, Small Craft on a Milk Sea and Drums Between the Bells, which work in much the same way as his work in a certain kind of pre-digital abstraction (Discreet Music, the albums with Fripp, Bowie, and Cluster, the Ambient Series, Apollo, the Windows 95 theme, etc., etc.), but do so in a showy and frustratingly obvious digital way--each glitch feels designed to call attention to itself as a glitch, as if just to show that Eno has in fact listened to electronic music produced in the past two decades (needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of either of those albums). This also plagued his most recent album with Fripp, though not quite to the same extent (and at times actually wasn't a plague, but made for some quite lovely music).

4) Perhaps another example: the difference between the lines drawn in this list by Mark Richardson and this list by David Bevan about the manipulation of the human voice in music. That Burial and Four Tet are the common denominators seems possibly interesting (a sign of the apparently diminishing-in-value quality of "importance" in their respective musics?).

5) As a related thought on abstract qualities/pre- and (post-)digital abstractions/etc., Ghost Outfit wrote recently, in a piece on Richard Taruskin's The Danger of Music and the necessity of music having an explicit connection to human issues in order to avoid "formalist sterility:"

I still think [Tim] Hecker's music is great but its beauty exists entirely for and of itself. It isn't concerned with the human and, despite all its shimmering construction, suffers from an emotional blankness--a tabula rasa whose sound is gorgeous and unearthly but doesn't relate with the world outside it.

To an extent, I understand where such a reading of Hecker's music is coming from--its emotional content is often ambiguous at best and his catalogue's studied abstraction coupled with this seemingly emotionally distant/reserved nature has led some to call his music academic (read: formalist and sterile)--but I disagree. While I doubt anyone is finding his or her tales of personal tragedy/redemption echoed in Hecker's music the way that he/she might in the music of Xiu Xiu, Momus, or Wild Beasts (to pick the artists Ghost Outfit contrasts with Hecker), I think Hecker's own comments about his music suggest an equally real connection that his music has to the human, to the world outside of itself. His repeated invocations of secular church music is perhaps the big clue to how he conceives of this interaction, but I think his music also connects in its digital/(post-)digital abstract nature. Hecker's music in some ways reflects and in some ways reshapes a digital consciousness--this is attention as snow and static, lost and damaged transmission, corrupted files, bad data (it makes sense he would be obsessed with what he calls "digital garbage"). It's the beauty of those aspects, the way that their drone and thrum form not just a background of our lives, but a significant aesthetic component of them that can be equal parts beautiful and terrifying. 

6) Like the Jameson essay I referenced in my review of Evian Christ points out, though, the present, this (post-)digital realm, is unavailable to us. We cannot experience it directly. What makes "Duga-Three" so affecting, then, is not just the emotional pull of its elegiac tone, but the way that its reminder of another kind of consciousness, another form of abstraction (and I think the formal elements are key here), also allows the present to be set off in relief and experienced. Similarly, in his rendering of those elements that make up the backdrop of the digital world/consciousness into reflections on the very process that turns them into works of often profound power, Hecker's music also makes the present available to us. I understand the moment in which I am situated--and the way sounds function in the spaces of that moment--better because of Hecker's music. I find it "vital, confounding, and powerful" (to use Ghost Outfit's criteria) in equal measure to almost anything I can think of with lyrics.

7) All of the above points in 5) and 6) about why I find Hecker's music and "Duga-Three" so powerful seem related to the shifting sense and experience of time enforced by late capitalism, as outlined by Mark Fisher here.

REVIEW: EVIAN CHRIST - "DUGA-THREE"

"Do you think things are going to get better before they get worse?" 

"No way. Things are going to get worse and keep on getting worse. . ."

"What do you think this country's going to look like in 2003?" 

"You know, I'll tell you the truth. Nothing against you guys, but I don't want to answer that question because I haven't even got a mind that's that inhumane." 

"Are you ready for what's coming?" 

"Ready as I'll ever be."

I've only purchased one piece of vinyl in my life, Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP, which remains--even thirteen years on (and ten years on since I picked it up)--a stunning release. It was an exciting thing to have, despite the inconvenience of not having my own record player and pretty much only getting to listen to it when I could convince my dad to put it on his record player (given that he favours mostly rock and roll from the 1950s and 1960s, this was never an easy proposition).* What made it a doubly exciting thing to have, though, was not just the sense of danger and strangeness--there was plenty of that, to be sure, given that its back artwork features a diagram of how to make a molotov cocktail, and its cover (see above) is a series of Hebrew letters from the Book of Jeremiah that seem ancient, terrible, and unknowable--but also the catalogue that came with it of recent and upcoming releases on Constellation Records, things like Fly Pan Am, Exhaust, A Silver Mt. Zion (before they became A Silver Mt. Zion etc. etc.), Hangedup, Re:, 1-Speed Bike that came with descriptions that made them sound like the music of dreams and the music of nightmares in equal proportion.** 

Those capsule descriptions were alluring because they both matched what I was hearing on Slow Riot--the simultaneously bleak and chiming music behind "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" seemed to be, without having heard any of these other artists, what the writer meant by "electro-acoustic"--and hinted at worlds beyond that were darker, denser, more challenging, more violent. I remained (and to an extent remain) fascinated by the feel of this stuff as much as by the sound, the weird accruals of emotion that show up in the collision of drones, field recordings, noise, strings, and electronics that Constellation, Kranky, Alien8, and a bunch of other labels peddled in the mid-to-late 1990s and into the early 2000s. 

While it's easy to see now how the space for such music is limited and how it could easily become over-saturated with bands, projects, and solo musicians all working off the same template, that didn't always seem the case. Nevertheless, the whole "Montreal scene" around Godspeed felt exhausting to consider long before Red Sparrowes started releasing stuff that seemed like a parody of Set Fire to Flames (who might have benefited from being parodied, to be honest) or Valley of the Giants put out a concept album about Westworld (though that album is frequently quite beautiful). I've remained fascinated by this style of music--one of the innumerable branches of post-rock--partly because it never quite felt exhausted so much as stagnant, full of good ideas that no one quite knew how to marshal into the next step forward. Those interstitial moments on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven--like the infamous "Welcome to Arco AM/PM Mini-Market" recording (one of the great joys of my life while I was living in Oregon was to finally go to an Arco AM/PM, though I never got to hear any PA broadcasts while I was there, unfortunately)--were so good at carrying emotion and conceptual meaning, at making the connections between the politics of the band and the album's liner notes, the grainy films behind the band's performances, and the music, but nothing ever really got beyond them (and by Yanqui UXO the band had abandoned them). 

This strand of post-rock was already (perhaps always already), in a certain sense, a pretty hauntological genre, but I've often thought that it would be thrilling to hear a band or musician revisit those generic elements and to take that next step with them. In his essay "Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?,"*** Fredric Jameson discusses the function of science fiction as a genre via its narrative structures and their complex temporal work. Under late capitalism, Jameson claims that the problem facing "historical fictions" is not only that the genre is dated, but also:

It is the relationship to the past which is at issue, and the feeling that any other moment of the past [than that depicted in the particular work] would have done just as well. The sense that this determinate moment of history is, of organic necessity, precursor to the present has vanished into the pluralism of the Imaginary Museum, the wealth and endless variety of culturally or temporally distinct forms, all of which are now rigorously equivalent. . . . In its (post-) contemporary form, this replacement of the historical by the nostalgic, this volatilization of what was once a national past, in the moment of emergence of the nation-states and of nationalism itself is of course at one with the disappearance of historicity from consumer society today, with its rapid media exhaustion of yesterday's events and of the day-before-yesterday's star players (who was Hitler anyway? who was Kennedy? who, finally, was Nixon?).

In contrast to historical fictions, then, Jameson argues that SF works according to a different temporal relationship that restores historicity to a certain extent. As a genre it does not, he suggests, relate to the future(s) it depicts in the sense of acclimating its readers (and society at large) to potential "future shocks" as its:

visions are themselves now historical and dated--streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals--while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past.

Given the distance between these dated visions of the future (often now set in our present) and our own lives, and given the impossibility of living to see the realisation of the distant futures predicted, Jameson locates the function of SF not in "images of the future," but in an experience of the present. These narratives "defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and . . . do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization." This is a valuable function, and works to restore an experience of historicity to daily life, because:

the present--in this society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human subjects who inhabit it--is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to "experience," for some first and real time, this "present," which is after all all we have.

For me, post-rock served a similar function (and given the steady diet of SF I consumed growing up, maybe the two were cross-pollinating), its "shock of the new" shocking precisely because it seemed so richly and intensely of the present moment. I do not think it is (or that it is not only), then, a retromaniacal impulse that leads me to dream and wish for a resurgence of this music that seems like it could so precisely and effectively locate me and society in our present.

As a politicized aesthetic statement, the possibilities seem vast, especially the way it might enable a reimagining of the elements of daily life under late capitalism, a transformation of the sonic detritus that surrounds us, into critique, into vision, into a different world. In terms of lost or misplaced futures, the one in which post-rock didn't exhaust itself and its listeners by hardening into a set of rigid dynamics and instrumental tics is the one I feel the absence of most personally. I wasn't old enough, nor was I born in the right country, to experience rave and jungle, to enjoy that shock of the new with its cultural and political vibrancy. For me, post-rock was my avant-garde, "I've never heard anything like this" moment growing up. I'd caught it past its peak, to an extent, and within a few years of discovering it, it was gone (or at least its key players were either on hiatus or lacking in vitality), but post-rock, even in its much derided genre name, seemed to point to something, to a future that was beyond the limits of the present (and at the same time, to highlight and outline just what the limits of that present were). It may not have been as apocalyptic as the vision quoted above, but there was a sense of something coming, some fundamental change driven by monumental forces. Pre-millennial tension and post-millennial anxiety and good, old-fashioned conspiracy theories and complaints about the government combining in various forms of despair, discontent, outrage, and, underneath it all, hope. That future, the one post-rock offered, never came, obviously, and I'm left with old Constellation catalogues and under-listened to pieces of vinyl (now I have mp3s of Slow Riot I can listen to whenever I please) and my memories of what I thought could be.

***

In the past month and a half, the release that I've listened to most frequently is probably Evian Christ's mix for Dummy, "Duga-Three."**** While he's coming from a different place than those post-rock musicians I loved growing up, in sound and execution, to say nothing of inspiration, "Duga-Three" feels like it should have come out on Constellation or Kranky in about 1999. The drones, the field recordings, the disembodied voices from television and radio broadcasts, it's all there. Joshua Leary (who produces music under his nom de plume [nom d'ordinateur?], Evian Christ) mentions early Tim Hecker as an influence--and that influence is pretty obvious here, especially in the way the melody works in the first section--but the extreme pitch-damaged tones, and the air of half-remembered dreams also calls to mind Boards of Canada, Ghost Box Records, and all the hauntological all-stars of the past decade.***** Given those sounds, it's fitting that Leary offers the following inspiration for the release:

Duga-three is a four-part piece of music I wrote after reading about a Soviet signal transmitter of the same name. It was characterised by the repetitive tapping sound it broadcast, which was sufficiently powerful enough to intercept transitions [sic--I think he means "transmissions"] across the world. After 28 years of transmission, the Duga-3 array was abandoned as mysteriously and unexpectedly as it had appeared. 

*** 

I have weird little pockets of mainly useless knowledge about random things and for a little while I was reading about over-the-horizon radar systems, which were used by governments in the mid-late 20th century to detect targets at really long ranges. Because the Duga-3 array was unclaimed during its period of use there was a lot of speculation about what it was actually there to do, and together with the sheer scale of the construction...I dunno I can imagine it really intimidating and I guess I just found that interesting. Visually it is just incredible, there are some amazing photographs of it on the internet. Just kind of gets your imagination going a bit.

Based on the above, you'd be forgiven for assuming this is just another exercise in ostalgie, nothing but Cold War daydreams and Soviet kitsch. It's really quite a remarkable listen, though, and if it doesn't quite do what I hoped some post-rock band would do in 2003, it doesn't feel a million miles away from that. Over the nineteen and a half minutes of "Duga-Three" you are transported: it creates an atmosphere, a coldness and a ghostliness, a haunt(ing), and takes over the space in which you listen to it. I find it endlessly entrancing and fascinating, especially the tapping (it almost sounds like a motor softly turning over) that runs throughout the second half, the most overt nod to Duga-3. 

I also find "Duga-Three" curiously dated and quaint--not just as a result of its inspiration and subject matter--but in the way that it really does feel out of time, like a lost release from another era. This isn't exactly the kind of thing you hear so much of these days--for whatever reason--though ten or fifteen years ago I imagine people would be all about it, as it taps into the same kind of emotional space and resonance as something like William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops or The Conet Project. I was happy to read Leary's answer to the question of how he sees this release fitting into his more rap/bass music oriented work; for Leary the only distinction is the lack of drums. Maybe there's a spark of what caught my eye and fired my imagination (long before it ever caught my ear) about post-rock rumbling in the increasingly polyglot world of bass music, ready to re-emerge and transform itself. If not, though, there's still "Duga-Three," a perfectly elegiac reminder of one of the lost futures of my youth and all its promises.

________________________

*I will always be thankful for my parents letting me put things like Loveless and Spiderland and Ege Bamyasi and all sorts of stuff that I was finding out about from the internet on during car rides (mostly) without complaint.

**Thinking about my own relationship with my copy of Slow Riot, I understand the cult of vinyl that exists (and I certainly loved the physical object of the CD--artwork and liner notes at once a great fixation and a source of disappointment by never revealing enough and, at the same time, never deepening the mystery enough). Perhaps if I had more time, money, and space, I would become a collector of vinyl (there's a pretty big second-hand record shop down the street from where I live), have a high-fi, and throw record listening parties.
***A shockingly prescient essay, given that it appeared in 1982.

****That Evian Christ releases music on Tri-Angle makes a lot of sense--while I don't love everything the label puts out, I definitely find their catalogue and aesthetic intriguing, just as I did with Constellation et al. when I was younger.

*****One artist he doesn't mention as an influence but whose work I've found pairs quite well with "Duga-Three" is Fever Ray, whose album remains one of my favourite releases of the past five years.

REVIEW: COM TRUISE - IN DECAY

Com Truise - In Decay
Ghostly International, 2012

Pre-fame (or at least pre-first major release) odds'n'sods collections are often revealing for the wrong reasons: they tend to show up that a band or artist hadn't quite figured it out yet, either still on the way to the sound that would garner attention or overtly in debt to others. Something like the Verve's Wigan Demos, for example, showcase a band that isn't fully in command of the hypnotic repetition that they would exploit to such mindbending effect on A Storm in Heaven. My Bloody Valentine's Ecstasy and Wine, on the other hand, is a fine release that hints at the leap the band would make a year later with "You Made Me Realise" and Isn't Anything. Some artists, though, have made a splash through careful selection of early works into mature statements, like Aphex Twin's seminal Selected Ambient Works 85-92, or Boards of Canada's Twoism and Hi Scores EPs. The latter group is a particular touchstone for the kind of music that Com Truise (the best celebrity-derived band name since Jackie-O Motherfucker, and a notch ahead of Joy Orbison) makes--both in his primary guise and under his earlier Sarin Sunday moniker--and it's not surprising that In Decay suggests a kind of reservoir of this music that Com Truise can dip in and out of as needed. If this collection is not quite the equal of Boards of Canada's early releases, it's a worthy followup to last year's pretty good Galactic Melt and 2010's Cyanide Sisters EP.

For the majority of songs here, this is Com Truise as usual: hard-edged synth lines and glistening arpeggios perfect for driving in your Testarossa through some neon lit 80s cityscape. It's gleaming and hard, but stylishly so, and there's no doubt that Truise is a master of tone and shading (this is perhaps nowhere as evident as on "Data Kiss," the high point of the collection to these ears). I mentioned in my write-up about Galactic Melt that the album was at its best when the songs were left to spin their wheels and head out into space, usually in the form of an extended coda to the song proper which puts the focus on the prettier and more evocative sides of Truise's sound. The same trick is in effect several times on In Decay, and again it results in the most arresting moments. First track "Open," for example, spends its final moment in the kind of dreamy, warbling music that has the right to children. "Stop" ends in a similar way, trading in one of the album's hardest and best grooves--sparser and more aggressive than some of the other tracks--for another tour through those time-faded tones as they drift in and out of tune. The references to Boards of Canada don't stop with the codas, though, as the title of "'84 Dreaming" calls to mind "'84 Pontiac Dream" from The Campfire Headphase (the songs themselves don't share too much of a resemblance). Other influences are hinted at on In Decay, with perhaps none so clear as the Peter Hook-esque bass that opens "Dreambender" like a deliberate nod to "Transmission," though the remainder of the track is much more New Order than Joy Division.

Beyond the traces of influences, though, there are surprises on this record that hint at previously unforeseen affinities between what Truise does and other genres and new directions in which his sound could grow. In the former category, "Colorvision" opens with a groove that's almost reggae, and it is surprisingly less of a misstep than one might think. "Yxes," after its laugh/groan inducing sample, starts out like a moodier, goth-ier take on Com Truise--all industrial-nodding bassline and haunting theme--before ending up in a hard-driving drum machine-driven coda. "Smily Cyclops," meanwhile, splits the difference in its opening section between Truise's usual electro and arena rock, threatening to turn into "Jukebox Hero" at any minute. The latter category is perhaps best heard in "Klymaxx," which rides a massive bassline and some house-y arpeggios to a nice mid-song breakdown, but it's the glitchy percussion and vocal samples that are its most effective element. Similarly, "Video Arkade," though largely undistinguished in its first half, opens up in its midsection with the advent of some of contrail-like synths high above the bassline which manage to the make the melancholy implicit in its bed of pitch-damaged drones real. 

As on almost any roundup of non-album cuts, a few of the songs here aren't particularly memorable or just aren't as effective as other songs by the artist. This is most often the case in the first half, which feels much more like a return to familiar ground or a dry run for Galactic Melt (large stretches of the run from "Dreambender" to "Alfa Beach" blur together, though Haley is too strong a craftsman to leave the songs entirely without distinguishing features). Worryingly, this ends up making Truise's sound seem more limited than I necessarily think it is, as the more appealing second half can at times fall prey to what Simon Reynolds calls "hyper-stasis . . . the restless roil of micro-genres that keep emerging but never quite take-off." I'll wait to hear Com Truise's next official step forward, though, rather than condemning the project based on a clearing out the cupboards release.

In the past, I'd compared Com Truise to Neon Indian, but if there's any connection between the music that Seth Haley makes as Com Truise and that made by Alan Palomo, I think it's with the latter's Vega project more than with Neon Indian. Both guises allow synth obsessives room to run wild, though they retain their pop smarts while doing so. Given, as Reynolds claims, that the 80s serve as some sort of inexhaustible well of cultural material to draw from in the current generation's eyes, Truise's music feels timely as much as it feels retro or nostalgic. His dogged faithfulness to analogue synths, big, gated snares, and electro is allowing him to carve out his own niche in what was an already over-saturated scene a few years ago. As the chillwave class of 2009 sees its members disappear into mediocrity or move away from chillwave, In Decay feels like something of a retrenchment, a reminder of the core aspects of that sound that were (and are) effective and valuable rather than just gimmicky.

It's interesting to think of this music as a kind of cultural time capsule, an encapsulation of a certain sense of connectedness with a particular era in the past. When New Wave, Darkwave, Coldwave, and early industrial are replaced by another set of hip touchstones, what will the results of these influences have told us about this decade? With the benefit of hindsight, will this be revealed as simple revivalism, or will it be pinpointed as a moment of birth (or pre-birth) of something new? Neither In Decay specifically, nor Com Truise's music more generally, can answer these questions, but I can't help wondering if chillwave had a chance to move beyond Reynold's hyper-stasis, and if that chance still exists.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON TEACHING PROMPTED BY READING JOURNALS

It's getting toward the end of the semester and I've just collected my students' reading journals in order to have a look at what they've been writing throughout the second half of the semester. They were supposed to make an entry into the journal every day they had a reading assignment (from a quick scan, it looks like less than half of them managed to do this), and their entry was to identify problems they were having, ideas they came up with while reading, general reactions to the text, etc. It's a fairly standard practice with some fairly standard goals: to ensure that they read, to help them think about material before coming into class so they have points to contribute to discussion, and to give them a chance to develop paper ideas/topics in an informal, low stakes way.

The most frequent comment I've seen so far in my students' reading journals--it's at the top of every entry, it seems, repeated like a mantra--is "This story was confusing." Sometimes there are slight variations--"This story makes no sense," "I'm so lost"--but mostly, the recurring theme is confusion. I was surprised that the frequency of these comments didn't drop as the semester went on; I'd structured the reading assignments to go from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (the most difficult, in my mind) to John Cheever's "The Swimmer" (the easiest), with the idea that the frustration and difficulty they encountered in reading Kafka would spur them to develop (aided by class discussion and writing) the tools to read difficult material. Thus, by the time they came to the final reading assignment of the semester, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which we just finished, any confusion or frustration they encountered would immediately suggest to them strategies for reading and engaging with the material that would quickly move them beyond confusion as their sole reaction to the text.

Unfortunately, their reading journals don't reflect this. Even when the students were able to quite effectively produce interpretations and begin to make claims out of their confusion, they still circled back to that as their dominant (to the point of exclusivity) reaction. That the development I anticipated hasn't taken place is obviously a point on which I need to think further--what more can I do to help them get over this hump and start developing their reading skills?--but also seems like it might be related to other larger cultural factors.

A few passages from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? seem pertinent here:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many--and these are A-level students mind you--will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be "boring." What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate "New Flesh" that is "too wired to concentrate" and the confining, concentrated logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp--and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension--that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. (23-24)

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). . . . Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (25-26)

While I think Fisher's take on this is perhaps slightly exaggerated at this point--although perhaps in the UK system in which he works he is in fact totally on the mark--I do feel that the process of educating students and the relationship between students, teachers, and material is trending ever more in this direction. The "indigestibility" he discusses seems related to my students' confusion. They want story without the process, the content without the form, because the act of reading, of deciphering, of making the story appear in a difficult text--which is a necessary and inseparable part of the text--runs against the grain of their mode of consuming and interpreting data. Thus, even when my students succeed in overcoming this confusion, it is the confusion they have no choice but to focus on rather than what that confusion allows/offers them.

A possibly related--though at this point wholly unsubstantiated--speculation on my part is that the breakdown in the disciplinary regime that Fisher discusses, taken together with its usurpation by Deleuze's societies of control--has something to do with my students' confusion with the material they've been reading because the stories have tended to talk about time in a way that my students no longer experience/think about time. Disciplinary society's discrete units of time, in which events are asynchronous from each other (8:00-10:00 is a block of work; 10:00-10:15 is a break that allows for socialization; 10:15-12:00 is another block of work) without any sort of overlap or simultaneity, are part of what the stories we have been reading have been playing with: the boundaries between formerly asynchronous events are breached, time becomes fluid. "The Swimmer" relies on time passing in several ways at once: the passing of an afternoon is linked to the process of aging from virility into senescence and to the cycle of seasons. Pedro Páramo cuts between events happening years apart, with effects often discussed before causes are established, and confuses chronology even further through the presence of an active population of ghosts who continue to live in the town of Comala long after their deaths.

For my students, though, time is already fluid. The seventy five minutes that delineates our class time no longer designates a time solely dedicated to learning about writing and argumentation via literature; as long as students are connected, via their cell phones (as much as I try to ban them, inevitably at some point at least one will make an appearance), they can continually escape this attempt to create a discrete block of time. The same thing applies, as Fisher notes, to the presence of food in class--students will attempt to bring whole meals into class, once again resisting the attempt to separate periods for consuming food/media/entertainment from class time. Bringing materials from other classes (ones deemed more important than a class devoted to writing and literature) to work on during our class is another form of this. The "New Flesh" Fisher mentions, constantly "wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," does not have the sense of time as a series of discrete events against which simultaneity can be a flashpoint. Thus, attempts by these texts to use and play with time in this way is confusing to students because it is alien to their sense of the world and to how time operates within it.

Alongside this phenomenon of confusion, though, lurks the ever-present spectre of "value." What value does my class have for a student? What are they getting out of it? I would venture a guess that our thoughts on this (mine and my students') are not the same. I was pointed to why do we have to learn recently. A quick scan of the entries reveals the usual suspects--literature, philosophy, history, geography--but also a surprising number of entries dedicated to the sciences and math. There seem to be two basic arguments that students are putting forth in the tweets collated on this site:

1) Why do I have to learn about [x] when there is [computer program/hardware device that approximates one aspect of that discipline]? Example: "What's the point of learning about maps and stuff when we have GPS and Navigation systems."

2) What's the point of learning about [x] when I'm not going to be [occupation that would make use of that subject] when I grow up? Example: "Why do we learn physics? I'm not going to be an electrician when I grow up anyway o_o"

This is obviously not a new development, though it does point to a disturbing commodification of education by evaluating the process and content along the lines one would use while shopping. Here, education becomes positioned as an unnecessary frippery/luxury item: why buy this when I don't need what it does? Of course, the fact that students often misunderstand or misinterpret the "what it does" part when it comes to education makes this mindset even more damaging. I sometimes think of a shopper dismissing a bucket of water as a luxury item while his/her home is on fire when I consider this, though the premise of this attitude toward education still seems wrong.

For one thing, this attitude is a fairly obvious (though silent) way in which austerity rhetoric creeps into arguments about the structure and purpose of higher education. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that we decouple personified metaphors about balancing budgets in households from issues like national budgets and debts, as here the "we're all in this together" and "we all need to tighten our belts" kind of sentiments become the logic of the students' critique of the value of their education. As an unnecessary luxury--in their eyes--in the current economic climate, philosophy (or literature, history, etc.) is something that students must tighten their belts against, rather than something that can offer an alternative to "the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" and its attendant logic of students being reducible to their consumer habits and occupation. Also, the "common sense" retort to this that so often seems to be promoted--encourage the students to understand the value of a degree in philosophy, literature, etc. in terms of potential career opportunities--serves only to further solidify the logic of the students' critique, as it progresses from the assumption that this critique (and the ideology that encourages students to launch this critique) is correct.

One final passage from Fisher on this topic:

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists--get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at sixteen. . . (26)

Combating this logic requires not a concession to its soundness, but rather a commitment to overturning the economic and social conditions that engender it. Taking the "indigestibility" of Nietzsche that Fisher mentions and using it as the counter to students' questions of "value," of "utility," as the way to engage students in a discussion of how the question they are asking/the critique they are attempting to voice is formed and whose interests that question/critique serves is important, but it's only one part of the fight. Based on the above, those who worry about the value of the humanities in the current age would do well to focus on student debt, on economic reform, on the struggles that movements like Occupy have brought to national attention, as that is the organizational battleground out of which the ideologies that must be opposed can be most effectively fought.  

REMEMBERING FIRST LISTENS

Well, I'd hoped to do a post a day during this break, but I didn't quite manage that. Oh well, nothing to do but press onward.

It's pretty rare now because of the way I listen to and consume music, but the first moment of listening to something new used to be quite the experience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I start to consider what might be on an end of year list for me music-wise. I've heard so much this year (I can see arguments against both of them, but for me, 2010 and 2011 have been great years for music), but I can't specifically remember hearing it all for the first time. When I was in high school we'd just got the internet, and I spent hours on Allmusic, Pitchfork, and other websites reading, researching, and imagining what things sounded like (I even spent some time in music chat rooms on Yahoo!--speaking of which, I'm very intrigued about what relationship could be drawn between chat rooms and social networking as it exists in 2011). Pre-YouTube and high speed internet, it was still really difficult to hear any of the music that I was finding out about (krautrock, post-rock, IDM, basically all the references someone with "good" taste should get), and I had to make guesses as to what something could sound like when based on reviews and descriptions. After all the reading and guessing, then, to hear the actual music was an enlightening moment. Was I ever disappointed? Oh yes, all the time. Most of the time, though, I was able to come to love what I heard, even if it was only years later. Sometimes, I'll come across a song or band now that sounds like what I expected some of those genres to sound like before I'd ever heard them. For example, Mouse on Mars' "Tamagnocchi" sounds like what I expected Neu! to sound like, and what I've always kind of resented Neu! for not sounding like.

Anyway, there are a couple first listens that I can remember with particular intensity. I first heard Loveless, for example, late in the afternoon on a weekend (I have a feeling it was a Sunday, but that could be a projection based on other things). I remember the colour of the light and the way that even though it was right about the time on a weekend afternoon when I tend to get the kind of ennui that Douglas Adams' called the long, dark tea-time of the soul, Loveless was strange enough, different enough, new enough to cut through all of that. It's hard not to pay attention after the first five seconds of "Only Shallow."

The first listen that I remember above all others, though, is my first encounter with Verve's (pre-The) A Storm in Heaven. I'd read about it for weeks (months?): "the group's 1993 full-length debut, A Storm in Heaven, was based on buoyant, extended psychedelic passages. Looking back today, it was an interesting and original musical direction, since at the time, angst-ridden Seattle bands (and their many copycats) were all the rage." That was the sum total of my knowledge prior to hearing the music. I knew "Bittersweet Symphony" and "Lucky Man" obviously, but those were, I was told by the review, a different animal altogether from A Storm in Heaven and the early singles. And those singles! Oh, the mythology that was built up in my mind around them based on their reviews was immense:

"One Way to Go" and "Man Called Sun," however, show off their tendency to groove, building moody songs out of repetitive phrases that are the perfect backdrop for Richard Ashcroft's acid-tinged lyrics. With its minimalistic, echo-laden guitar, droning bass and heavy backbeat, "Man Called Sun" is the first Verve classic."

The band truly comes into its own -- Richard Aschcroft sings like a man possessed and Nick McCabe's guitar is positively oceanic, producing tidal waves of drone which crash and break over the hypnotically liquid rhythms of SImon Jones and Peter Salisbury. . . . [A] dreamlike beauty, tapping into an energy just outisde the realm of consciousness -- it's music which transcends space and time, with a purity unmatched by anything else in the Verve catalog.

"Gravity Grave" finds Verve augmenting their echo-drenched, fuzzed-out guitars with harmonica and flute. Underpinned by a pulsing bassline and heavy backbeat, the end result is euphoric, mind-blowing psychedelia.

It didn't hurt that the covers of their singles and albums--designed by Brian Cannon and Microdot--were amazing pieces of work. They had just the right mixture of surreality and menace to appeal to a teenage me. There's an NME feature with cannon talking about many of these images alongside his other work with Oasis, Suede, et al. Reading through his descriptions of the Oasis sleeves, you really get a sense of how they were the nostalgia mode. Everything is based on rehashing a rock and roll myth that had already become cliche. That one of their members was named "Bonehead" and suggested many of the ideas seems only too fitting.

A Storm In Heaven, front, back, and interior

"She's a Superstar"

"Gravity Grave"

"Slide Away"

Incidentally, it took many years--until YouTube appeared--for me to actually hear the full version of "Gravity Grave," despite the fact that for a number of years, if pushed, I would've said it was my favourite song (Now? Who knows? My stock answer for was Bark Psychosis' "Eyes and Smiles," but I don't know if I'd still say that). Knowing there was more to it that I hadn't heard actually helped its cause, really. The fadeout made me want more, made me need to know what was missing, and preserved the mystery of something that I already found inscrutable--what does "To me you're like a setting sun / You rise and you're gone" mean? I listened to "Gravity Grave" for the first time in a few years the other day and was taken away again. It was glorious. If there's one thing that I really long for from music it's transcendence, and early Verve delivers that in spades for me.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about my first encounter with A Storm in Heaven, so I guess I should talk about that. Sitting on the floor, staring at my stereo and flipping through the booklet (Ashcroft looking not quite of this world in his photo--you can really see how he sort of got away with his faux-messianic thing to start with; shame it all went to shit), as "Star Sail" begins. That first chord, like "Only Shallow," is immediately captivating.* But rather than the violence that follows "Only Shallow," a fade back out, an opening of immense spaces, and finally "Hello, it's me..." That guitar solo (it's like some god's vacuum cleaner in the best possible sense). The feeling that you really are hearing a transmission from somewhere out in space. I was changed. I've been looking for anything that sounds feels like "Star Sail" since that moment, and never really found it ("Gravity Grave," in my opinion, is even more captivating, but not in the way that "Star Sail" is). There are other high points: "Already There" and its alarm clock feedback in the chorus, "The Sun The Sea" and its wonderful horns (courtesy of the Kick Horns, whose contributions to Radiohead's "The National Anthem" had already blown my mind), "Butterfly" and its barely-keeping-it-together vibe. The real gem of the album, though, after "Star Sail" is "Virtual World." Again, that sense of unending space, of Ashcroft coming to you from somewhere else, and a return to the flutes that helped out "Gravity Grave."

It's no so much that I'm nostalgic for that kind of experience (or rather, I am, but it's not only that), but I do think something is lost in sitting in front of my computer, browsing online while an album plays. Much of this is on me, obviously, and I recognize that fact. Nevertheless, how can I remember the first time? How can I change my listening habits and adapt to this new mode of listening? How can the current listen have meaning without a memory of the first listen, even if that memory is a myth? Perhaps it needs to be a myth,  a personalized fiction of listening, in order to develop personal significance, personal resonance? This seems, somehow, related to music and atemporality. I need to think about this some more.


*This is something of an anachronistic reflection. When I heard "Star Sail," hearing "Only Shallow" was still a year, if not two years, away. They're two of the most striking album-opening chords I'm aware of though, so I tend to group them together.

BUTTERFLIES ON CORKBOARD: SUPERHYBRIDS, ATEMPORALITY, HAUNTOLOGY

Simon Reynolds' latest (and last) guest blog over at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond on the atemporality of the omnivorous listening generation's music (an omnivorousness that is a product of not only the increased access/availability of more music on the internet, but the consequent decrease in any sense of limitation/closed horizons to a musician's output) is a good one. One of Reynold's big points--via a piece by Justin Davidson in NY Mag--is that "with the musical past's archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress;" he goes on to note that the music of a band like Battles comes across as closer in spirit (and in sound) to jazz-fusion or 70s prog rock than any kind of futuristic, forward-thinking, new millennium music, or, as he puts it: "both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion."

The problem with this echoing is the sense of atemporality that inevitably seems to accompany it. In the words of Reynolds: "The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or 'superhybrid' styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced 'retro' air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever." Whereas the jazz fusion or prog rock bands of the 70s were exploring and incorporating contemporary influences, "What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band's make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives." So instead of prog rock picking up on folk or classical or contemporary black music, as Reynolds points out, or jazz fusion's engagement "with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song," as Jess Harvell mentions in re: Thundercat's new album, we have bands in 2011 engaging with moments in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc. and producing music that is not, in an distinguishable way, beyond that earlier era (Reynolds has written about this extensively [and I gather Retromania, his new book, explores this idea in some depth], and Mark Fisher has also discussed this on his blog).* This seems different than hauntological music, obviously, because whereas that features, according to Fisher, "cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present," and whose purpose is to "preserv[e] . . . demands [for the radically new] in conditions where--for the moment at least--they cannot be met,"** this atemporal, omnivorous music is purely archival or curatorial: it highlights a dead style without advancing it, or by simply adding it alongside other dead styles, without the production of any kind of real cultural affect--it's the musical equivalent of the Ark of the Arts in Children of Men. In contrast with the superhybrid, the hauntological foregrounds the unanswered questions, the unexplored possibilities; it captures what is still alive in the "dead" genre but has been repressed, the ghost of the past-future and its potentially utopic energies.

The inevitable product of these "superhybrids," though, can only ever be pastiche, in Jameson's sense:

the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. . .

Those blind eyeballs are unable to see unresolved questions or contradictions in the genres that are hybridized. What's more, they don't want to see them, don't want to have speak with a live tongue, because of the work and effort that goes into actually having and sustaining the necessary "ulterior motives," convictions, or beliefs. Nigel's answer to Theo's questioning of the purpose of the Ark of the Arts in a dying world--"I just don't think about it"--is the answer of the pastiche maker: there is nothing behind the mask of the art, no belief it can reference, so no viewers are even necessary. In this environment, the cleverest recombinations or resurrections of past genres wins. And those that are deemed cleverest are those whose chosen genres have been archived, or curated, for the present audience by the most prestigious curators/archivers (cf. Soul Jazz's Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound compilation, or the Ethiopiques series, or the granddaddy of the them all in some senses, Nuggets--and this is not to denigrate the music found on those compilations: most of the songs on Tropicalia are fantastic, and I own and enjoy several volumes from Ethiopiques).*** Who revives these genres becomes more important than why the particular genre is revived, or its resonance with the current cultural moment. Consequently, the wrong advocate, the wrong curator, can sink a genre's chance for successful revivification (in the sense of restoring to activity, but not to life or vigour--this is rarely revitalization).

For Reynolds, this "looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued." The consequences, he notes, are rather dire:

the principles and practices of 'flux and mutability' have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, 'flux' and 'mutability' are actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of 'flexible' work patterns. 

This music works as an ideal soundtrack for the ascendance of non-places and non-time in the modern working world, or what Fisher calls "Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality," which has been characterized by a "reflexive impotence in the face of a neoliberal ideological program which sought to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives of business." The reissue and compilation cycle work in tandem with the atemporal, omniverous musician: he or she creates a "superhybrid," and in explaining its roots in [insert various genres/locales/time periods here], sets in motion (if the musician is successful) the machine that gives us back those genres, locales, and time periods, like so many butterflies on a corkboard. New superhybrids arrive, along with their new butterflies to display, etc., etc. Isn't this just the music of the Last Man who lives at the mythical End of History? The man for whom everything is a museum piece?

It seems to me that, in some ways, the worst offender in this whole phenomenon has been krautrock and its champions. While Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Amon Duul, Ash Ra Tempel et al. could be incredibly forward-thinking (they could also be stultifying in being totally of their moment), the idea in certain circles seems to have become that German music of the 1970s is the endpoint for experimental leanings and tendencies. How do we know that a band is getting more "serious" and making more "challenging" music? They play a rigid 4/4 beat and say the word "motorik" a lot in interviews. What are recycled analog synth washes and occasional bits of string or flute in the hands of such bands? Attempts at channeling the same "kosmische" music that poured out of Germany three and four decades ago. The annoyance I felt at the sort of reflexive praise automatically heaped on any band with even a whiff of krautrock coming off their music (and again, I'm not blind to my hypocrisy here: there's a footnote praising Stereolab in this very post!) came to a head for me following Portishead's album Third. I should note that I'm a huge fan of Third: it's a great record, and it might be the record I've listened to most over the past three years. Indeed, going by the metric Nick Southall suggested recently for determining a favourite album--"how often you've listened to a record through choice"--you'd have to call Third one of my favourite albums (interestingly, if I sat down to write a list, I'm fairly certain Third would struggle to make the top ten, and maybe even the top twenty).

Perhaps, then, it's just a matter of overexposure, but when Portishead debuted "Chase the Tear," with an accompanying video that could've been made at any time since the 1970s it looked like, I'd had enough. This was good music by most reasonable standards--it sounds good, it's got a catchy melody, it's well-played and produced, you can even dance to it if you want--but it's not "new" in any sense other than the song was written in 2009. It's not likely to lead to "new" music, either. "Chase the Tear" is pointed firmly backwards, but it exists now--it is the mask, the dead language, that characterizes pastiche. Nevertheless, a lot of the language in reviews of the track suggested that this is music that is going forward. And I just couldn't be excited by it. I still can't. This is the same band who largely abandoned the samples that made up its first album (or sampled instrumentals played by the members) by the time they got to album number two for fear of repeating themselves. Now, it's not hard to say that a lot of Portishead's aesthetic was always looking backward, but it was never felt to me as much of an open plagiarism of the past, a copy and paste job of dead genres and styles, as it does on "Chase the Tear" (even when they were literally copying and pasting bits of the past to make new music!).

The problem, in a nutshell:

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.
But most artists aren't strong enough to withstand such an influx.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with musicians having a set of influences from the past (it would be hard to say that the Thundercat album I just gave a fairly positive review of doesn't have a few influences from the 1970s and 1980s, say), but there is something "wrong"--and I think Reynolds does a great job identifying just what that is--with the automatic assumption that omnivorous listening habits and infinitely extendable spheres of influence automatically lead to new music. The facts seem to be pointing to the conclusion that they don't, or at least that they don't often enough. What we're left with the rest of the time is pastiche, a poorly reproduced simulacrum of the past that won't leave us alone, and which denies even the possibility of nostalgia for that past or an investigation of the promised-futures trapped within it, the desires that capitalism (and neoliberalism in particular) "captur[ed] . . . [but] which it could not satisfy." To close with Fisher's words--a few sentences that underscore, I think, the continued importance in considering the hauntological, even if its internet vogue might be long gone--"A genuinely new Left must be shaped by those desires, and not lulled, once again, by the logics of failed revolts." If there's to be any kind of post-capitalist society, it seems to me, its art won't sound (and look) like it's ensconced in the accompanying lulling cultural logic, either.


*I should say that technology also seems to be an interesting factor here: not that technology has stopped expanding and developing w/r/t music and production, but wrestling with technology and its possibilities doesn't seem as public and exciting as it has in the past, probably because outside of autotune--which very people are actually "experimenting" with in any meaningful way, to say nothing of its age: it's hardly contemporary technology, given the speed of technological advancement these days--there is little public grappling with technology when it comes to music. The technology that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s, synthesizers (particularly analog ones), are not quaint retro touches, the domain of middle aged men able to drop ridiculous amounts of money on Moogs and ARPs and Oberheims, etc., etc. It is, as Adrian Utley from Portishead agreed in an interview a few years back, a hobby like owning a caravan (or a set of golf clubs). Circuit-bending and software that allows user-written programs might be the closest thing to this, but they hardly seem like public interactions of music and technology (was Radiohead's "Go to Sleep," featuring Greenwood's guitar solo passed through Cycling74's Max/MSP the most public example of this? That was back in 2003. . .).  But then again, is it really that different than his guitar solo on "Paranoid Android?" And that was running through even older technology. . .
**That post I've linked to on Fisher's blog, thanks to the series of abstracts it contains, is one of the easiest and best summaries of hauntology and capitalist realism available on the web. A great resource, there.
***I'm also not necessarily denigrating bands who do this: Stereolab are one of my favourite bands ever, and they essentially functioned as highly selective and successful curators for a large part of their career. Ditto Portishead (but I'll talk about them more in the body of this). And of course there is a difference between genealogical exploration of a genrescape (I love that term!) and an investigation of its constituent parts and simple curatorial presentation; two very different kinds of critical apparatus are involved in these acts.