Sunday 21 March 2010

Out of the Mould, the New

25 comments:

  1. "I'll be going into a lot more detail on this sort of thing in my Zer0 book Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-making."

    Damn yeah. Tentative date?

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  2. they look like polaroid lift-offs to me. A very simple act of quickly transferring the freshly peeled polaroid onto preferrably a heavy grain watercolur paper thats been soaked in water with a bit of detergent. As it dries the polaroid sticks to the paper and leaves itself stuck to its textural ways. Very simple, first year photo 101 stuff. As well as another method where you immerse the polaroid in warm detergent water and the image lifts off floating to the surface where you then catch/scoop it up with another piece of card/paper. The more texture the better. It makes it look "Hauntological"! :)

    >strunkdts<

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  3. 'Metalheadz generation of critics'... I think you're at least several years off here considering Metalheadz reached their peak in 95/96 around the same time junglists were crossing over to garage en masse.

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  4. Ryan: end of the year... tentatively.

    droid: by 'Metalheadz generation' I mean the people who were there for the rise of Metalheadz and loved it, however old they were. Many of these people then went on to love garage.

    I should say that I don't dislike or resent jungle at all. It's just that I find its consistency from track to track a little excessive, relative to today's music. Love the sound, but an hour of it and it gets quite samey for me.

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  5. Thanks for the clarification Adam. Though I'm not too sure I can agree with that. What drew me into jungle was the huge variety of styles and production techniques. Listen to Gerald, 4 Hero, Remarc, Hype, Omin Trio, Bay B Kane, Crystl, Basement cru, D'Cruze etc... side by side and the sheer range of interpretations of the basic formula is staggering and often widely divergent.

    Relative to todays music I think it does pretty well - in fact, it exceeds in terms of diversity - perhaps because the gene pool was wider and the 'made in two minutes' 'ardcore approach was still in effect.

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  6. A "Metalheadz generation" guy here as well, and totally agree with droid (not a critic since 1999 though, i've stop writing about music at the turn of the century).

    This is a great manifesto for the current bass hybridism which, quite frankly, has given me the same tremendous excitement at the level of the hardcore explosion back in 91-94. Great post Rouge.

    For me, this is not a parallel or ethereal dimension of 'nuum. It is as if the 'nuum has suffered from a fractal escherian cut and paste, and rearranged itself on a whole new homeomorfism perspective. In less mathematical words, this new fragmented melange is quite amazing and opens a whole new field for UK bass music.


    jasl

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  7. droid: I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with a slightly narrower aesthetics of stylicity / genre-icity, just that they're a little broader today is all.

    anyway, I didn't realise that you were one of the people who does blog to the oldskool! you'll certainly know a lot more about the older genres involved here than I do. cheers for the recommendations, I'm familiar with many of those but I'll definitely carry on persisting with jungle and oldskool hardcore.

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  8. Reynolds' "hyperstasis" reminds me of

    "New mutations and combinations emerge and are destroyed; seen fro the outside, the movement possesses a nervous vitality – the magnificent zeal of artists to project, for themselves and an increasingly distracted public, pictures of a world that no longer asks what they think or believe. [...] By and large, however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible and, as I said, the movement is intense, almost feverish; it resembles, it seems to me, a snakeskin full of ants. The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life."

    it's the sombre-as-usual Ingmar Bergman on the state of art in his 1965 essay.

    and even more off-topic the use of a neutral word like 'innovation' has come to disgust me as a consequence of its association with the reigning form of blind capitalist thinking

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  9. great quote Nzo, definitely appropriate. one thing it shows I guess is that people have been saying this sort of thing ("yeah, technically there's loads of new art and all, but it doesn't really count in the specific ways I believe it should") throughout art history.

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  10. I may well be kicking in an open door here, but are you aware of Bill Morrison's Decasia?

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  11. I wasn't, but I am now! Looks amazing, can't believe I'd never picked up on it before.

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  12. Yeah; it's basically one of the most 'hauntological' things ever, assuming we're using the term to mean 'creative decay'. I have written about it before - http://tinyurl.com/yfol8nv - I suggest that it's better than similar decay-fetish because of the vitalism of the subject matter. The music is another thing though - Michael Gordon's score is pretty interesting, but really ought to be the Caretaker.
    It's interesting that if we compare the images you've found here to the ones from Decasia, then your choices are colourful, even psychedelic. I take that to be significant as you're tying 'creative decay' into the 'purple / wonky' world, whereas I tend to see 'hauntology' as only really appropriate as a term when it has the late-derridean overtones of ash and cinders and so on...

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  13. Good read, thank you!

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  14. Great post.

    Interesting your hunt for a visual equivalent to Hauntology. I've always found Dryden Goodwin's work is a visual manifestation of Burial's work - http://www.drydengoodwin.com/ - in particular his Cast collection. This is partly due to its ties to a rain-soaked London, hazy and cinematic, but also in its reduction of humans to mere cameos in the drift of time.

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  15. Great to see Doug's slides getting some exposure and that William Basinksi and Bill Morrison also get a heads up.
    Time and nature are our greatest collaborators.

    If anyone would like to see or read more about these images, Doug wrote about them in Strange Attractor Journal 2. I'm hoping to assemble of book of the slides at some point in the near future.

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  16. great read dope dope dope

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  17. Dieter Roth made works with decaying food stuff from the sixties onwards. Not very 'hauntological' perhaps...

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  18. Definitely more 'hauntologoical' than Dieter Roth, someone has usefully uploaded Malcolm le Grice's 'Berlin Horse' to Youtube. Soundtrack by someone soon to be famous...

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  19. unquantized sounds better than wonky, no?

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  20. Some more visualized hauntological effusions; and the more furious the 'datamosh' the more I keep think of 'wonky'!

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  21. totally agree with everything you're saying here... it's as if certain critics have forgotten that innovation can happen at levels other than that of the most basic definition/outline of the genre (for instance, jazz's polymorphous, open-source evolution)

    I almost think the genre obsession is a perspective distinct to non-musicians

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  22. also, related to that, i think there are a lot of similarities between the way jazz, and other improvisational styles (particularly psychedelia) evolve, and the wonky process.... that experimentation and playfulness with the form/texture/melody/rhythm, as opposed to keeping the form simple and straight forward until it's used up - which is then replaced by a whole new, reactionary form (perhaps that latter model is easier to tie political narratives to, for those so inclined)

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  23. Is book out yet?

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  24. Is book of Moldy slides by Douglas Harvey out yet?

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  25. DOUG HARVEY - "Found Moldy Slides"
    March 15 - April 12, 2014

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    961 CHUNG KING ROAD
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    TEL 213 625-2522
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    www.jancargallery.com

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