Essay: Sci-Fi, Hi-Tech, Future?

Another essay for Dummy, on the overlap and mismatch between sci-fi, hi-tech and ideas about the future, and how that pertains to some recent underground pop acts (click here to read). Featuring:  Ford & Lopatin, Zoology Records, The-Drum, many others, and the influence of films, Joe Meek, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode etc.

Sci-fi, hi-tech and hi-def certainly provide a welcome alternative to the yellowing, musty retro that’s been all over culture in the past decade, and this change is being felt significantly in the new music underground. But does it actually have anything to do with looking towards the future itself?... where does sci-fi end and the future begin?...

It was Kraftwerk who brought the association of hi-tech music with robots into pop music, and alongside them, acts like Tangerine Dream brought in the association of hi-tech music with the cosmos. These associations have in turn given rise to an association between the future and a certain way of writing synthesiser music: basic, stilted, metronomic and repetitive like robots were seen to be – not just more than human but also a lot less than human. This association that persists to this day, even as artists such as Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Broadcast and Daft Punk frame it as historicised, problematic or kitschy...Th idea formed that future music can’t just simply be new – in order to be future it has to be hi-tech and fast in particular ways, much like a sci-fi party will celebrate particular tropes such as robots and aliens that look and sound a particular way...

This late-twentieth-century Kraftwerkian paradigm of future music is beginning to disintegrate and mutate. But with the decline of retro and lo-fi (the two have been practically synonymous) within the tastes of the new music underground comes the rise of hi-tech and of interest in the future...

‘Sense Net’ is an extraordinarily detailed, restless journey through hi-tech and alien spaces bristling with a weird and overwhelming allure. The crazy-rich /BZE is in constant flux, its polygon corridors rotating as you move in anti-grav from module to module with a machine voice repeatedly advising you to ‘stay calm’. The gorgeous ‘/SYS’ is an alien courtly dance in shivering reverb, elegantly counter-posing slices of your human pop music...

For me at least, a genuinely futuristic music should go further than revisiting a series of recognisable, familiar and stable tropes, like those traditionally associated with sci-fi... I think something more futuristic has to be a little more abstract...the music that feels most beguilingly futuristic to me doesn’t wear pre-established concepts on its sleeves, doesn’t simply dress up as something we already thought was futuristic – Arca, Nguzunguzu, Lōtic, I AM WATER, Ikonika, Karmelloz, 18+, Mykki Blanco, Clams Casino. Are these artists astronauts, robots or aliens? Only in the very broadest sense – really they’re something else entirely...

Pattern Recognition: The Evolving Architecture of the Underground

The second instalment of my new monthly column for Electronic Beats, Pattern Recognition, is on the changed and changing nature of 'the new music underground', along with how and why to keep up with it (click here to read).

"Understanding new music as it arrives every month, delivered straight from the most inventive, passionate, and least commercially-motivated musicians out there, is a profound form of stimulation and exercise for the ear, mind, intellect, and emotions. Following—and participating in—new music culture has been appreciated by its supporters as everything from a hobby to a professional concern to something approaching the meaning of life... It takes work and imagination to engage with fresh and different sounds at their very source like this, but the reward is in learning new methods of listening and thinking...

"The new music underground is an ongoing debate about the possibilities of music, typically conducted at some remove from big commerce. Ideally, it represents an infinite space of possibilities and developments with a coherent, roaming, collective focus acting upon it, like a democratically organized nomadic tribe made up of artists, scientists, and philosophers constantly wandering the universe with disaffected and infinitely open minds, always learning but never settling or capitalizing. In reality, the new music underground is a messy semi-anarchy of interests that make up the rules as they go along, don’t communicate with great efficiency, or move as one...

"In the late 20th century, following new underground music (more often called ‘indie’, ‘alternative’, or ‘non-commercial’ back then) was a more-or-less simple case of subscribing to magazine X, listening to radio show Y, and hanging out in record shop or venue Z. Today’s world is much more fluid, a continuum of ‘undergroundness’ that can be entered at any level. You can imagine this continuum having three main layers...

"With the frontline of new underground music (and the subcultures) potentially shifting onto places like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, some magazines are getting left behind by their near-total reliance on older industry structures such as press releases and PR contacts ...

"A particular focus of anxiety about the new forms of music distribution is how good listening practice is possible in the face of the online and computerized world. The worry goes that there’s too much stuff out there, it’s too easily accessible, and your choice and attention is stretched past breaking point, leaving you floundering in a meaningless chaos of ones and zeroes. It’s mostly unfounded, I think...

Essay: Have You Heard of Eugene Chadbourne?

Illustration by Louis Labron-Johnson

Latest Dummy essay is a look at an almost forgotten star of late 80s indie, Eugene Chadbourne, and why he (almost) might not have made it into the 90s and the history books (click here to read). Involves a bit on canon formation and a comparison of indie aesthetics past and present.

"It’s curious that so few have come across avant-garde-country guitarist Dr Eugene Chadbourne, and that his name doesn’t come up a lot more often both today and in histories of independent pop music. Curious because Eugene Chadbourne was – or seems to have been – one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed stars of the independent scene during its nascent phase in the 1980s... Chadbourne was described as America’s “only anarcho-paramilitary-electro-folkie-troubadelic-matador”, his music as “gonzo audio journalism” that “pushes traditional music to its edge and makes it jump”. At the height of his fame between 1986 and 1988, you almost couldn’t pick up an underground pop magazine without reading a review, article or news item featuring him, and he never needed an introduction... 

"Chadbourne... was swiftly disappearing, crowded out by the consequences of all the new money and attention for the scene. Magazines were becoming glossier and glossier, the bands in them bigger and bigger, and even though lo-fi was very fashionable, the leading artists (Pavement, Beck, Guided By Voices etc) were predominantly released on widely distributed vinyl and CD rather than the mail order of the previous decade. Besides, their music was usually significantly less challenging and unconventional than Chadbourne’s and the avant-gardists within Cassette Culture. Most importantly though, Chadbourne’s whole aesthetic, to the extent that it ever was in fashion, was quickly falling out of it. Alternative rock in the 90s was cool, and Eugene Chadbourne was not cool...

"I’m not saying... that the zaniness was somehow regrettably “mistaken” at the time. My point is that it has been scrubbed from the indie aesthetic agenda so hard that it’s difficult to imagine it as a viable creative possibility today. As early as 1989, one music critic referred in a live review to “Chadbourne’s stale fruitcake routine”. The bands that came to define alternative rock were about as far from zany as they could get. Mainly reacting against the excesses of corporate hair rock, they also set themselves and their behaviour against the underground’s previous generations. Neither clowns nor hippies nor hardcore punks, their demeanour was frank, sincere, understated, streetwise, minimal, a cool passivity, whether it was Beat Happening, R.E.M., grunge, or the notoriously subdued shoegazers...