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Sunday, February 3, 2013

scissor lock - churn (self released)

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

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

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

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

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

Originally posted on TMT here

Friday, January 25, 2013

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

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

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

naps - 7" (self-released)

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

emeralds: just to feel anything (editions mego)

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

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

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

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

Nothing has changed on their most recent outing.

Head here for the rest

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

ital: dream on (planet mu)

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t. Not this time at least...

head here for the rest of the review. and i did a bit of an artist focus on dmm on my radio show here if you fancy some high quality listening

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

sun araw: the inner treaty (drag city)

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

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

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

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

Full review here

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

a vaporwave primer

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

DOWNLOADS / LISTENING:

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

representative playlist on youtube

CRITIQUE:

Macintosh Plus
Adam Harper's piece in Dummy Mag

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

INTERNET CLUB

Gatekeeper

Datavis / Forgotten Light
Vaporwave vs genre fanboyism

Muzak / Corporate Takeover

DIS Magazine

Rex Butler

Thursday, October 11, 2012

datavis + forgotten light: prism projector (hexagon)

This is both an obituary and a baptism.

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

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

Nevertheless, vaporwave will have been important. And it will have been important because this sort of story will become ever increasingly familiar in the musical avant-garde as the decade continues. A method will be pursued, a “concept” interrogated, intensely and repeatedly, but no sooner has it been around for long enough to seem to coalesce into a genre than it will be discarded. Monikers will proliferate. Sometimes it will be possible to establish continuities between them. Often not. Lopatin and Ferraro will be gods. The only constancy according to this new model will be change. Which is not necessarily to say evolution. Evolution will have been for the Rockists.

Prism Projector, a split cassette between Datavis and Forgotten Light, is not vaporwave, but it is crucial to understanding both how vaporwave’s practitioners work and what will become of them. Datavis is Will Burnett. Is INTERNET CLUB. Is ECCO UNLIMITED. Which is to say, one of vaporwave’s major exponents. And Forgotten Light is Leonce Nelson. Which is to say Geotherm. And La Mer. And, with Burnett, one half of Datavision Ltd. Together, the two (nine?) of them run Hexagon Recordings.

What’s so interesting about this record, what makes it so pertinent in relation to my argument above, is the fact that it could hardly sound any less like vaporwave if it tried. It’s a pretty standard drone record actually...

Head here for the rest of the review...

Sunday, September 30, 2012

flying lotus: until the quiet comes (warp)

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

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

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

...

Full review (smackdown) here

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

internet club: vanishing vision (hexagon)

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

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

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

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

READ THE REST ON TMT