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.

RIP "THIS MONTH IN GRIME/DUBSTEP": OR, WHY IT MATTERS WHEN PEOPLE STOP WRITING ABOUT MUSIC (EVEN IF IT'S JUST ON THE INTERNET)

I just noticed this post on Blackdown last night, so I'm a few days behind here. I was pretty disappointed to read that "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" would be no more. It's even more distressing to read Martin Clark's narrative of events:

Before we get into any light messenger shooting, the column is being retired, I did not choose to stop writing it. I've been invited to pitch to other sections on Pitchfork but my grime/dubstep column doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy. I'll be honest and say this isn't something I really understand but naturally recognise their authority to make this call.

While Clark goes on to point out that in some ways the end of the column comes at a very opportune personal moment, something about the phrase "doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy" bothers me. Does this herald, not too far down the line, the end of "Show No Mercy," also (Pitchfork's metal column for those unfamiliar)? What about something like "The Out Door" (a column focused on outre/experimental music)? Is that destined to fall afoul of the "new editorial strategy?" I understand the desire to move away from a single genre/scene focused column--if that is what this new editorial strategy entails--but surely first grime, then dubstep, and now UK bass music more generally have demonstrated over the past seven years (the length of the column's lifespan) their vitality, vibrancy, and importance to contemporary electronic music. If nothing else, Clark's voice has been an energetic, excited (and exciting), and informative one. He closes his sign off with "If you took the time to read [a "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" column] in the last seven years and came across someone you'd not noticed, well then bigup: my work here is done." Trust me, Martin: your work here is definitely done.

I feel as if I've written about this a dozen times on this blog--I'm too lazy to check and see--but when I first got on the internet, my exposure to new music came primarily via reviews, interviews, and, had they existed (or I been smart enough to find those that did exist), columns exactly like "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." Sites like Pitchfork and Allmusic (and later Stylus) were incredibly important to me because they gave me access to new music even if I could only read about it. Up until just before I went away to school, getting music that I heard about online was an incredibly time consuming and expensive proposition, usually limited to a CD as a Christmas gift or a trickle of music found on bad P2P networks, music that was difficult to access given the speed of dial-up modems. Reading about music, then, and imagining what it sounded like, piecing it together slowly through networks of references, was what I spent most of my time doing. I didn't get to listen to a lot of this stuff for a long time, but in some weird way I knew it backwards and forwards.

In high school, probably as a result of the amount of time I spent reading about music on the internet, I decided I was going to be a music journalist when I grew up. What could be better than writing about music for a living? Not only would I still be able to read and talk about it, but, I gathered, as an actual journalist, I would get to hear it. I'd sort of vaguely had ambitions about being a writer before this, but puberty led me to the distressing realisation that reading, writing, and talking about science fiction weren't activities that were likely to impress girls (plus I was, and am still, pretty rubbish at writing SF). Obviously, I was not in any way farsighted enough to see that the idea of becoming a print music journalist was not the smartest career ambition for any number of reasons. That didn't stop me, though; I even remember asking my grandfather, with whom I don't particularly get along, about being a journalist (he was one--a financial columnist, I believe). He told me he didn't think that music journalists made good money on the scale of journalists' salaries. I ignored this.

This desire to be a journalist continued on and off throughout undergrad, and to a certain extent it shaped how I listened to music (and what music I sought out). I spent a lot of those four years catching up on all the music I'd only read about before. It was a little like doing my homework. I listened to (almost) all the things I'd seen referenced and tried to get myself familiar with them. I discovered a lot of the music that I now love and consider central to my concept of myself as a music listener by doing this. Equally important, I discovered a number of music writers whose work I found to be both inspired and inspiring as I sought out information on the bands, genres, and movements I felt I needed to become an expert on. I was taken with Stylus' "Soulseeking" column, especially those by Nick Southall, many of which seemed unutterably elegant and eloquent. Pitchfork's features like Tom Ewing's "Poptimist" and Mark Richardson's "Resonant Frequency" were also playing an important role in shaping how I was thinking (and how I wanted to write and talk) about music. Nitsuh Abebe's article for Pitchfork on early British and American post-rock was then and remains now one of the best pieces I've ever read: dense with information, but accessible, full of obvious affection for its subject matter and welcoming for those less familiar. It also introduced me to the work of Simon Reynolds, the man who coined--for all practical purposes--the term "post rock," and whose Energy Flash and Rip it Up and Start Again! proved essential reading (again, part of that idea of "doing my homework"--I'm still waiting to get a chance to read Retromania).

The upshot of all this was that from high school to the end of undergrad, I started and abandoned (usually pretty quickly) a number of music blogs designed to emulate what I was reading. I was not successful about this, largely because the people I mentioned above are all quite good writers. In my final year of undergrad, I wrote a (pretty terrible if I'm honest) thesis on music, memory, and the interaction between the two for both musician and listener.* It was my last attempt at doing what I saw the people I admired doing. I did not find it an enriching experience, and I gave up the dream of becoming a music journalist, or even of writing about music. Clearly, I couldn't do it--at least not as well as the writers I admired could--and if I wasn't up to their quality, there was no point in writing. I still read and talked about music all the time, but I wasn't going to make that the central goal of my life. I was starting grad school and the idea of being a writer of any kind, but especially a music writer, sort of faded away.

Concurrent with all of that, I started listening to more and more new music. It's not that I ever stopped doing that, but now it was the primary focus. Starting about four years ago, I began to try to keep up to date and current with what was happening in the genres and styles I liked, rather than catching up on what had been going on five, ten, or twenty years before. This coincided with a move away from rockism toward more catholic listening practices (a move that had begun during my undergrad years but that has intensified over the past few years). I started to listen to (and, more importantly, to enjoy) things that I never would have considered in high school (electronic/dance music and electroacoustic/noise stuff) at the same time that I grew tired of some of the enthusiams of my teenage self (namely prog rock and krautrock, both of which sound pretty tired to me now, by and large, though perhaps I just need a break. I listened to a lot of that stuff). The fall of 2009 was a time of pretty significant changes for me, and my relationship to music--what I listened to, how I thought about it/talked about it, what I used to listen to it--was not immune to those changes. In a lot of ways, it was the point of maturation of the developments of the previous two to three years, and what led to me writing these words today.**

To bring this back to where I started, "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" was an important part of helping to shift and develop my tastes in that period. I would dip in and out of it, but at some point over the past few years I started reading each installment. I saw Burial's name pop up on a number of year end lists in 2007, so I picked up Untrue.*** I'm by no means an expert in grime, dubstep, or UK bass music, but they've been a healthy interest of mine ever since. I've found other sources since to discover more of this music--Fact, Resident Advisor, The Quietus, Boomkat's product reviews--but I've always looked forward to Clark's columns. They were expertly curated, and guaranteed to turn up something interesting even when talking about things I otherwise didn't enjoy. I know there are Rinse FM podcasts and a simple search will turn up loads of people talking about this stuff, but that monthly digest was handy. It helped me feel like I was at least somewhat keeping up with what was going on half a world away.

So, RIP "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." You will be missed. I'm glad to hear that Clark plans to continue writing over at Blackdown. All I can say at this point, I guess, is bigup, Martin. You've done a fine job these past seven years. Thanks for all the music.



*This is obviously why hauntology so grabbed me. It was like a more interesting, less regressive version of everything I wanted to talk about in that thesis.
**I started this blog (in its first form, before I moved it to blogger) in the summer of 2010. I didn't know then that it was a blog--it was mostly just a bunch of stuff in a long word document--but I decided to formally make it one in the early parts of 2011. A couple months (and a few posts) later, it ended up here. Actually, the first thing in that word document was an anecdote about listening to "Hyph Mngo" (which I discovered via "This Month in Grime/Dubstep") with some friends while in the middle of the Redwoods.
***It feels very appropriate that I'm listening to Burial's Kindred--which I'm enjoying even more this time around--as I write this.

REVIEW: PORCELAIN RAFT - STRANGE WEEKEND

Porcelain Raft - Strange Weekend
Secretly Canadian, 2012

I remember a couple years ago, when Porcelain Raft's music started making the rounds on mp3 blogs, thinking that the music he made was very pretty. That, above all other adjectives, was the key: pretty. There were other words that could be used, and most of his songs had interesting things going on beneath the surface, either structurally or melodically, but they were all pretty. I even marked one particular song of his as being quite good, one that I legitimately enjoyed and would gladly listen to on a fairly regular basis. I could never remember, though, which of his songs that was: this twinkling, sighing song with the big acoustic strums powering it? That other wistful, swooning song with different echo-y drums? There weren't that many of his songs out there, but zeroing in on the one I liked proved surprisingly difficult.

It wasn't so much that his songs all sounded the same; rather, the method of delivery rendered songs that were quite different in a homogeneous style that failed to allow differences to register beneath the gloss of prettiness. The kind of sighing, wistful melodies favoured by dream pop (and by Porcelain Raft in his dream pop) don't take much persuading to slide over into anodyne, anonymous pleasantries, and Porcelain Raft's melodies seemed to have taken that as their starting point. Blame nostalgia and thick coats of reverb over everything, blame computer speakers and low fidelity sound files, blame the burden of good and tasteful influences, but Porcelain Raft could never really make an impression on me. His music was pretty, the analogous adjective to describing a person as "nice."

Fast-forward a few years to January of this year and Porcelain Raft's first album (after a number of EPs), Strange Weekend, comes out. Curious to see if an artist who seemed to have some real potential--if he could ever get over the hump of "prettiness"--had capitalized on that potential, I decided to give Mauro Remiddi's music another chance. At ten songs in thirty four minutes, Strange Weekend is not a taxing listen. As with previous Porcelain Raft releases, there are some genuinely striking moments, though, worryingly, things haven't got any less "pretty." The loop that underpins "Is It Too Deep For You?" nods toward hip-hop and witch house before the song opens out into a windswept vista in the bridge, one of the few overtly pretty moments that doesn't feel forced. "Unless You Speak From the Heart" is a classic pop song seemingly made for lazy summer days that shows off Remiddi's strengths as an arranger, every sound placed for maximum impact. Strongest of all is opener "Drifting In and Out." Probably the best song I've heard from him, its forceful drums and zipping synth lines provide a propulsive thrust behind Remiddi's featherlight, androgynous falsetto. The guitar line that comes in at the end of the song is a particularly nice touch, shifting the entire song through a relatively small addition.

Unfortunately, that guitar line is also the first hint of what for me becomes a disappointing trend. Though Porcelain Raft presents all the signifiers of dream pop, spiced up with some bedroom pop and chillwave flourishes that place him firmly within contemporary indie, the omnipresent prettiness (seriously, would a sharp edge in a song kill him?) and its attendant anonymity connect much of Strange Weekend in my mind to second tier Britpop and alternative bands of the late nineties who exchanged personality for generic, swirling production flourishes. The beats, acoustic strums, vague electronic adornments, and whispering falsetto vocals formula--one that is supposed to signal intimacy, sincerity, and emotional immediacy--was already cliche before Porcelain Raft existed as a project, and here there's a very real sense of a cliche being deployed in an extremely literal-minded way. All of this is amplified on Remiddi's ballads, which predominate. Much of the middle section of Strange Weekend is devoted to power ballads, essentially ("Backwords" and "The End of Silence" being the worst offenders), and "Pictures," while impressive in one sense as it approaches a kind of platonic ideal of a dreamy ballad, is not a song I can ever imagine wanting to listen to: nothing is out of place, everything sounds perfect, and the whole song ends up going by without making any impact on me whatsoever.

I've vilified this idea of "pretty" music throughout this review, but I'm not opposed to pretty sounds. Indeed, there is quite a lot of music I enjoy that would best be described as pretty. The problem I have with the prettiness of Porcelain Raft is that it's a cheap, unearned prettiness, a conscious decision to employ a certain musical language that has very obvious signifiers in place of building more personal, idiosyncratic expressions of the emotions that those signifiers have come to represent. If Remiddi's music in some way transcended the kind of rote dream pop moves out of which it is built--or circumvented the expectations that his sound sets up within the context of those sounds--he would be treading on quite fertile ground. As it is, I can't help thinking that his recreation of what 4AD and Creation were pumping out in the eighties and early nineties might be a source of endless inspiration for him--as Simon Reynolds has claimed, for today's musicians, the 1980s seems to be the equivalent of the 1960s for musicians of earlier generations--but it makes for a fairly dull listening experience for me. The bands that Porcelain Raft's music references were never pretty for the sake of pretty, but that seems to be the end goal on Strange Weekend. Nitsuh Abebe talked about this in one of his "Why We Fight" columns, the idea that "Beauty can--and should--be something you create, not default to." He expands on this idea, claiming:

[W]e listen to raw visceral noise when we want to, and swoony pleasantries two hours later, when the mood has changed. But vitality and new ideas can fit into either one of them. And those are things worth demanding even from our "comfortable" listening. It's not like being challenging is incompatible with being beautiful--as far as I can tell, the two tend to go hand in hand.

There's a strong EP buried in Strange Weekend--take the four or five best songs and I'd say Remiddi is on the verge of really having something when he finally releases a full-length. For such a short album, though, too much of it is forgettable to allow it to have any chance of making an impact. Remiddi is clearly comfortable with a certain style and approach to music--and he may yet end up with something quite interesting by sticking with that approach and becoming ever more himself--but I can't imagine why you would reach for this over Remiddi's influences, or even over his contemporaries (Atlas Sound's Logos does much of what Strange Weekend wants to do, but with better songs and results, in my opinion). For Remiddi, I'd say it's time for a mood change, time for some vitality and new ideas. In an ever-rising tide of pleasant, pretty music, Porcelain Raft is drowning in its own anonymity.

MORE STRUGGLING IN THE GENERAL DIRECTION OF YEAR-END THOUGHTS

Eventually, I will have time to write here on a regular basis again. I keep telling myself that in the hopes that it will magically be true. So far, it has not worked. Ah well, one final push through to the end of the semester and it may very well be true.

It's mostly been a week of irritations, highlighted by a spectacularly pointless meeting on Friday in which I had to endure someone claiming a) that an organization with less than 25% of its members participating (and probably a smaller percentage of its members voicing their opinions and voting) is an example of a democratic organization and b) that charging dues is, in and of itself, a threat to a democratic organization. Sadly, those were not the most ludicrous statements made in that meeting. It would be comical, but these are supposed to be intelligent people, so it's just sad instead. Had I any political ambitions (I don't), they would have died a slow and painful death in that conference room on Friday afternoon. More uplifting was receiving word that a panel I'd submitted with some colleagues to the Louisville Conference has been accepted. I got that email at the start of the week. Would that I could have switched Friday with Monday this week.

I'm starting to whittle down my list of albums of 2011. Initially I'd thought that this year would have less of an obvious pick at the top of the heap compared to last year. Nothing seemed quite as earthshaking as Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma. However, it turns out that there have actually been several such albums this year, they've just been more subtle about it. In fact, the problem now is distinguishing between a good album and a very good album. 2011 has been a surprisingly top heavy year: the albums that are good are very, very good, but there are a lot that seem pleasant and enjoyable now but that I can't see myself listening to next year (some of them haven't even managed to make it to the end of the 2011 without sounding a little tired to my ears). A few might yet have a resurgence, but, by and large, the best before date on some of what I thought were my favourite albums of the year turned out to be much sooner than anticipated. 

The other surprising thing for me has been the dominance of electronic albums in my preliminary lists. I'm by no means a rockist (or I at least stopped being one a few years ago), and I can say that there's been a general trend towards more electronic music in my listening over the past five or six years. I can easily see this year's list not containing a single "rock" album per se, though, which would be a first. I can't say that I'm any kind of connoisseur or that I have stellar taste--I've poked around a little bit on YouTube to listen to the "brostep" that Reynolds talks about here, here, and here: it sounds largely anonymous to me, like everything I tuned out every time I tried to get into electronic music earlier in life; certainly I don't quite understand the cause for celebration of one (often irritating) feature of the music, though this post is an enlightening read--but I'm definitely on board with the things I like.

Speaking of things I like, this is an old favourite (and I'm surprised I got into this as early as I did--I think that I mostly assumed it was of a piece with "Djed" and accepted it on those terms) that I've been listening to on repeat lately (in between a lot of Tim Hecker--I've got a post on him that I'm trying to finish up) as I read and write. Talk about holographic music! It sounds like a malfunctioning computer's idea of music for a tropical vacation.

Oval - "Do While" (1/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

 Oval - "Do While" (2/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

Oval - "Do While" (3/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

RETROMANIA IN ACTION? FAVOURITE MOVIES, GREATEST MOVIES

A week on and people are still stopping me when they see me to say they enjoyed my talk. I guess it must have gone well.

An interesting moment today in class: while discussing evaluative criteria and the difference between personal and more universal criteria, I had my students list their favourite movies and why they liked them. Then, I asked them to come up with candidates for the greatest movie of all time. Looking at the list, I was amazed at the time period it covered. For all you could tell from my students' lists, movies came into being somewhere around 1994. One student offered Back to the Future (1985) as his favourite movie, but that was the only movie older than Happy Gilmore (1996) and Pulp Fiction (1994) on either list until I put on my own favourite movie, The Shining (1980), and suggested that we consider some movies from before the 1990s on our greatest movie of all time list. We eventually added Star Wars (1977) and Rocky (1976), both franchises that had installments come out in the 1990s or 2000s, with Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rocky Balboa (2006) respectively. With some prompting, I managed to get someone to suggest The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972). Thinking back, I'm fairly certain the same thing happened last year when I did this activity--one student finally spoke up and said something about greatest movie of all time meaning "classics" like The Sound of Music, etc.

I'm tempted to chalk this up simply to their age--if my students turned 18 this year, they were born in 1993 (!!!). However, it seems like my peer group in school had a much broader sense of the past than this group. What they do seem to know--movies like Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Rocky, for example--are among the most frequent subjects of pastiche/parody in the culture (although a straight pastiche of any of those films would seem pretty dated at this point). Is that what makes them known for my students, I wonder? There is no embarrassment in discovering bits of culture this way--long before I'd ever seen Citizen Kane, I'd picked up the basics from the numerous parodies, homages, and appropriations of that film that showed up in the first few seasons of The Simpsons.

What strikes me as really odd, though, is the hard cut off somewhere in the 1980s for pop culture references that students make and/or appreciate in my experience (even the 1980s are pushing it--the number of students who have never seen Jurassic Park [1993] is mindblowing). Generally, my students seem to react to bits of culture that come from before the 1980s as being separate somehow, belonging to a group of cultural objects they neither consume nor judge, that have no impact on them at all, really (actually, anything from before their birth seems to flummox them--they are baffled by clips from early seasons of The Simpsons, in my experience). I'm not certain, but I'd bet that most of my students reject the idea of the greatest movie of all time coming from any period other than their own lifetime (some of their suggestions: Titanic [1997], Remember the Titans [2000], and Avatar [2009]). I wonder if it's just the result of living through a much more baby boomer saturated culture and a wave of 1970s revivalism that gives me that sense, though.

Is this some kind of response to postmodernism? Are my students--who have no knowledge of anything other than a postmodern culture (I'm not sure that I do, to be honest. I was born during high postmodernism and grew up with irony as the only appropriate response to any event)--unable to process cultural materials that are not themselves clearly postmodern? Do they require cultural materials that are not obviously postmodern to be (re)presented in pastiche in order to acknowledge them and to pass judgement on them?

These questions are probably just the result of extrapolating wildly from a very tiny dataset, but it would make sense in some ways. The endless return to the 1980s (and even the Back to the Future answer feels very "now" more than a recognition of the quality of a cultural object from the past--the kind of retro-future chic of that movie is a prominent [if not dominant] cultural discourse these days) doesn't appear to be slowing down even as the 1990s revivals ramp up to full speed. The time between emergence and revival of cultural materials is shrinking. Already my students seem to regard the time before widespread internet access (and high speed internet access, at that) as something of a fairy tale. How soon before they start to ignore it entirely?

This is not a plea for cultural conservatism or the preservation of the past or anything like that. I'm just curious about how my students actually perceive and experience the cultural landscape. If anything, I would be interested in my students focusing even more on the future and even less on the past--ideally, it would be the yet-to-come that grabs and fires their imagination. Maybe in such a situation, the past will become more available and the immediate past will become more forgettable. A new futuremania (futurama?) to cure retromania, and a futuremania free of irony, kitsch, and ultimately retro underpinnings. My students have a chance to write about just this topic for their next essay, so I will be anxiously awaiting their responses.

DROPPED PIANOS AND STRETCHED VOICES: TIM HECKER AND JAMES BLAKE

Up at Altered Zones you can stream Tim Hecker's forthcoming Dropped Pianos, his collection of piano sketches recorded during the same sessions that produced this year's Ravedeath, 1972. I strongly recommend checking out the stream: it's just absolutely gorgeous music from someone who, when he decides to make pretty music, is extremely good at it. The music itself is very evocative, and while not settled enough to be ambient music (has anything he's released ever really been ambient--I think his "power ambient" term might be closer to the truth...), it does a fantastic job of building a new environment for you out of its sound.

I was complaining about this on Twitter, but I guess I'm not through with this topic yet: I don't understand the fawning adoration that James Blake receives from so many critics. I think that his music, for all its supposed forward-looking trappings, is oftentimes boring piano music with some gimmicky electronic flourishes. The vocals that have been pulled and stretched are a neat trick the first time, and are interesting the second, but are tired by the third listen, for me at any rate (this is precisely why, no matter how hard I try, I find Burial's "vocal" tracks much less affecting than the tracks on which he buries those disembodied, androgynous moans like wraiths in the depths).

I know that cross-genre comparisons can be tricky, and I know that this isn't some teenage pissing contest (my favourite band could beat up your favourite band or whatever), but I find Hecker's music infinitely more interesting than Blake's releases so far. I'll acknowledge that I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country, but it's still a work that excites on a visceral, emotional level and also inspires me to ask "How'd he do that?!" Even knowing that the bulk of this album came from improvisations on an old organ in a church in Reykjavik does not always reveal how a sound is coming into being. Hecker's pushed the suites he's constructed on his albums since Harmony in Ultraviolet to impressive levels here: "Hatred of Music I" and "Hatred of Music II" really do seem to use their drones to suffocate the melancholy pianos underneath; "In the Air I-III" is twelve of the most engrossing minutes of music to emerge this year; and if neither suite (or the opening trio of "In the Fog I-III") quite matches the heights of "Harmony in Blue I-IV," they also cover more ground and expand Hecker's sound in often thrilling ways.

With Blake, I'm only ever inspired to wonder how he accomplished something--for all the supposed "soul" imbued in his music, I find it largely mechanical and stilted. That trope, too, Blake's soulful vocals, is disturbing: as Mark Pytlik pointed out in his interview with Blake earlier this year, "when people say 'soulful,' it feels like they're saying, 'Oh, it's a white person who can sing like they're black.'" The fact that Blake is an attractive, articulate, young white male seems to be of great comfort to a lot of critics. I don't think that Geoff Barrow's question--"Will this decade be remembered as the Dubstep meets pub singer years?"--is necessarily "a defense of dubstep--the gesture . . . [of] a purist, an elitist, or both;" I think it's a valid aesthetic question. Of course, Blake himself seems like something of a purist and elitist: speaking of contemporary artists gaining mainstream recognition for their take on dubstep he said "Those melodic basslines are insultingly simple and aggressive and annoying. That is now a valid genre, but it certainly isn't dubstep. It's turned into something else. That's cool, I'm happy about it. . . . It's just something different now." Blake is clearly interested in patrolling and defending the borders of dubstep at least as much as Barrow.

If, as Simon Reynolds recently suggested, "generalizing a bit wildly, black music seems to be what pushes the major structural aspects of music forward," does the mating of the largely white coffeehouse singer-songwriter tradition and dubstep really represent a move forward for either genre? Or is this a retreat, dubstep brought within safe critical parameters for which aesthetic criteria are already firmly established? Is it a coincidence that Blake's noteworthy covers--of Feist and Joni Mitchell--are of artists working very much in that singer-songwriter tradition, and that his biggest collaboration to date is with another singer-songwriter, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon? For all the talk of Darkstar's North being a sideways move for a genre that's been known as particularly restless and forward-looking, Blake's entire output feels equally sideways (if not retrograde). Now, I'm not suggesting that Hecker's Dropped Pianos is the future of music (it isn't), nor am I suggesting that his body of work is so singular that it represents some kind of vanguard (it's well situated within any number of genres and artists, like Fennesz for a start, and Eno to a certain extent), but it certainly feels more exciting to me than James Blake, and I'd have to agree with Altered Zones that Hecker is "truly one of the greats."


Incidentally, given Reynolds' recent comment that "the eighties is proving to be to this-time (i.e. 2000s + 2010/2011) what the sixties was to the actual eighties, i.e. near-inexhaustible resource" and the spectre of nineties revivalism looming ever larger, I was surprised to hear during my first listen to Bjork's new album, Biophilia, an explosion of drum programming that wouldn't have sounded out of place on something like Black Secret Technology and several beats that seemed to have been copied/pasted in from Homogenic ("All Neon Like" and "5 Years" seeming to be particular touchstones). I'm not sure how I feel about these things yet, but I will say that Biophilia is the first album she's released since Vespertine (back in 2001!!!) that I've actually enjoyed without having to force myself to like it because it's Bjork.

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.

ENDLESS DEADBEAT SUMMERS, REDUX

This is not the long-promised post on chillwave and hauntology (which at this point looks like it's never going to happen, let's be honest). It is a start, though.

I'm a latecomer to the hauntology party (indeed, at this point it's almost passe--although, Simon Reynolds doesn't think so: "There are those who say that hauntology’s moment has passed… that a good five or six years after the genre-not-genre coalesced, its set of reference points and sonic tropes has been worn threadbare."), but it seemed to fit in really well with something I'd been thinking about for awhile w/r/t chillwave: namely, that its callback to the past (in this case, the 1980s) was not simply an attempt to "redo" or "reclaim" those sounds, but to wrestle with the future projected by that era (the Reagan years).

As Mark Fisher points out, hauntology is, in many respects, the flipside of capitalist realism. That is, if capitalist realism works to foreclose our imaginative possibilities, to describe capitalism as our absolute, untranscendable mental horizon, to make any other system of economic, political, and social organization literally unthinkable, hauntology appears as what is already part of our imaginations: the future as described by the past. All those (not) forgotten ideas and visions and dreams about what the future will be; ghosts that haunt our present moment, shadowing everything, visible out of the corner of the eye, audible in silences and bursts of noise that cloak and mask our daily lives. It's not surprising that many of those past-futures that haunt us are fairly utopian in scope: jet cars, hoverboards, fins on everything, crystal cities, colonies on the moon, extrasystem space exploration, etc., etc. All the things we were promised, all the things that unbeatable optimism in the continued growth and improvement of our lives under capitalism made seem palpably real, tangible, but just beyond our grasp for the moment.

In his short story "The Gernsback Continuum," from the seminal Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, William Gibson's narrator suddenly sees that past-future in the present. It becomes his reality. As his conspiracy theorist friend Merv Kihn tells him in an attempt to reassure him that he's not crazy, he's haunted by

"semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own . . . you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane [the narrator has seen a ghostly luxury airliner that was planned but never developed in the 1930s] was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow."

After his conversation with Kihn, the narrator has a second, more intense vision of the past-future:

I looked behind me and saw the city.
The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters. . .

Where before the past-future could be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye (those Mongo gas stations with pumps shaped like "raygun emplacements" and "superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that . . . made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm" and which, even in the story, are disappearing) now it takes over the landscape, replacing the California of the late 1970s/early 1980s, the built up American boomtown of the post-WWII era. There's something quaint in the narrator's vision (what we would now call a certain sense of retrofuturism), a childlike quality in its spires and silver beads that's miles away from Oedpia Maas' circuit board waiting to be plugged into. What's more, the narrator encounters the inhabitants of this past-future city:

They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were the Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American.* Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, of foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.

In the end, the narrator manages to escape the past-future--the Dream that claims our world as its own and which we can only ever be haunted by, never participate in--by watching television, forcing the past-future to become, once again, "peripheral." Of course, this is no accident: in the early '80s, with the rise of networks like MTV, the US was busy exporting a new dream of the future to its citizens, the Reaganaut vision of the US as the sole hegemonic force in the world, the (hopefully) triumphant destroyer of the "evil empire," the force working to enact, not just locally but globally [an ironic "think global, act local" before its time?], capitalist realism.

The connection with television is vital here. For many chillwave bands, old television shows, old videotapes, and old video games are cited as influences as often as any musicians (in this, the coining of the term "chillwave" as a generic tag, Carles of Hipster Runoff lists one of the genre's defining criteria as "sound[ing] like something that was playing in the background of 'an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late 80s/early 90s'"). Those old media artifacts often surpass supplementing memories of the era; they are the memories of the era. If your memory of your childhood is a memory of the pieces of culture that exported the dream future America was going to enjoy (and that you, luck you, were someday going to live in), there are some pretty powerful semiotic phantoms that are going to shadow everyday life.

Mining these old cultural artifacts for inspiration and glimpse into lost futures is hardly new, though. Boards of Canada tipped off a major source of inspiration in their name, and artists on the Ghost Box record label like Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle, and The Focus Group have cited old films and television shows as influences (particularly the work of BBC Radiophonics Workshop in soundtracking many of those shows and films). Nitsuh Abebe, in an excellent article for Pitchfork earlier this year, pointed out that the core elements of "chillwave" have essentially been about in indie music for almost two decades at this point. Indeed, that article has an excellent companion piece, so to speak, in a largely forgotten and underappreciated (it seems to me at any rate) article that Abebe wrote about the rise of post-rock in the UK in the 1990s, "The Lost Generation: How UK Post-Rock Fell in Love With the Moon (And a Bunch of Bands Nobody Listened to Defined the 1990s)".** Many of Abebe's description of the sound of the Lost Generation bands describes chillwave bands fairly well. Seeing Neon Indian live, My Bloody Valentine seemed like their biggest influence. Stereolab is perhaps too polished and refined for chillwave, their retrofuturism pointed to the 1950s and early 1960s, but they don't sound too far off at times. And speaking of My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields seemed to have the chillwave sound figured out back in 2003 (one of my favourite pieces of music in the world, right there).

So, the real questions, then: what makes chillwave different? Why now? What's its connection to hauntology (which seems to be a British thing, by and large)? To make a stab at answering them in reverse order: I think chillwave is a specifically (or, perhaps more appropriately uniquely) American form of hauntology, one that reflects the country's different relationship to capitalism and capitalist realism. It's happening now because a generation raised on a particular dream-future promised to it by capitalism/capitalist realism has come of age and seen that future entirely fail to come about (a failure confirmed by the 2008 financial crisis). In response, the summer, the golden California boom and its utopian vision, can only be endlessly gestured toward. Steps in this direction had already been taken by other artists (esp. Christian Fennesz on his 2001 album, Endless Summer), a point made by Mark Richardson here, but it's crystallized now because the music works well "for being alone in a room with only a computer to keep you company." Indeed, Fennesz might have been ahead of the cultural landscape of indie rock when he released that album. The past two years have seen an explosion of music about and dedicated to the idea of an endless summer. Bands like Girls, Wavves, and Best Coast have exported a new version of California sun-drenched pop. Chillwave bands have extolled the virtues of being chill, bro, and taking in those endless summer days. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be singing about summer, about the beach, about long days and long nights and the pleasure of it all.

As for the final question, what makes chillwave different? Well, a lot I think. Much of the hauntological music that people like Fisher and Reynolds triumph (the releases on the Ghost Box record label, for example, or the music of Boards of Canada) are rural, arcadian-sounding releases. The lost futures exist “In a Beautiful Place Out In the Country” (when the artists take an urban term, like Burial, for example, it is a decaying, destroyed urban landscape inhabited by those very ghosts that live in the past-future). For chillwave, though, as an American expression, the landscape is the beach, the endless summer that takes place at the edge of the American Dream. In his article on "Hauntology, spectres and phantoms," Colin Davis refers to the work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, who were:

interested in transgenerational communication, particularly the way in which the undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes. What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light. One crucial consequence of this is that the phantom does not, as it does in some versions of the ghost story, return from the dead in order to reveal something hidden or forgotten, to right a wrong or to deliver a message that might otherwise have gone unheeded. On the contrary, the phantom is a liar; its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret remains shrouded in mystery.

In this case, that lying phantom is the golden capitalist dream of the 80s, its secret and traumatic shame being its impossibility. Indeed, so much of chillwave, lyrically, deals with loss, with missed opportunities, with longings that can't quite be realized, and projects a kind of empty hedonism or pleasure seeking in an attempt to fill the void caused by those unrealized longings. And, in a kind of existential dread that seems almost absent from British hauntology (or at least, hauntology seems to encounter different types of existential dread), the reclaimed dream, the relived past-future in chillwave is not comforting or melancholy, but threatening. Even as the endless summer beckons, though, it ends. What’s left is always receding from our grasp. Or at least it should. With the proliferation of chillwave bands, summer doesn't seem to be ending. As Ian Cohen jokingly pointed out earlier this year, "I never realized that the idea of an 'endless summer' could actually be something of a sinister threat rather than a dream scenario." What happens when the dream takes over, as in "The Gernsback Continuum?" Do we look to TV for a new dream to disappear into? Or is this one of the points that Mark Fisher made in Capitalist Realism: "Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort." When our dream of endless summer turns into a nightmare summer that won't end, that won't offer any relief, is that the moment in which we can start to dream about escaping?

Alright, so like I said, it's a start. If you've stuck with me this long, I'd really appreciate some feedback on this: I really think this needs to be pushed in a number of different directions. If anyone is interested in a link dump/source sharing, I'll post up all my bookmarks on hauntology and chillwave.


*I'd be interested to know what people think of their curious Aryan-ism. Why is that the necessary link to their American identity?
**There's reference in that article to the fact that Simon Reynolds, one of the early adopters of the concept of hauntology and its applicability to a certain type of contemporary music, was also the coiner of the term "post-rock." That guy does get around, doesn't he?

MUSIC CRITICISM, CRITICAL THEORY, AND SUMMER PLANS

This is just a quick post. I came across this article that Simon Reynolds wrote for Frieze on music criticism, critical theory, and the relationship between the two (as seen through the lens of British music criticism over the past three or four decades). I have a lot that I'd like to say in response, but for now I'll just highlight my favourite passage from the article:

[T]he appeal of theory is precisely its power to intoxicate.  Far from being born of a cold-blooded drive to dissect and demystify, the attraction of critical theory (especially the French kind) was that it set your brain on fire. . . . There was sheer delight in finding (in my case) a passage of Georges Bataille or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari or Paul Virilio that seemed to uncannily fit the Butthole Surfers or Can or the emerging pirate radio sound of jungle.  Theory seemed to provide genuine illumination into qualities and powers possessed by the music. But beyond that the combination of the ideas and the music had a potentiation effect, to use the pharmacological term for when two drugs synergize to create a fiercer buzz. 

I am in complete agreement with Reynolds here. Beyond the fact that the image of a brain on fire is so astonishingly apt in relation to the act of reading critical theory, I find theory intoxicating for precisely the reasons he mentions: that feeling of having your brain set on fire is like a high, and it can be doubly so in conjunction with discussions about music. I've often thought of the work required to "get into" difficult albums is essentially the same kind of work required to understand a lot of theory. What's more, I've found the rewards to be very similar, if not identical, in the two situations. I'll (hopefully) write more on this later, so for now go read Reynolds' article.

I came across Reynolds' article as I did a search for articles on chillwave/glo-fi/hypnagogic pop. I'm hoping to revisit, revise, and expan a piece on chillwave and politics from my blog's former home sometime this summer, and it'll be helpful to see what others have said about the genre.