Rouge's Foam

Misc.

2011-12-08T18:42:00.035Z

a lot to get through...

Wire #335

How about that cover design uh?
The 2011 Rewind issue of The Wire is out. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual is its Number One Release of the Year. I'd voted for Julia Holter's Tragedy as number one and put Far Side Virtual in second place. Agonised over that for a while but in the end I couldn't give the top spot to a pastiche, albeit an incredibly clever, timely and accomplished one. Not over Tragedy, which I can't recommend enough - I'm finding new depths with each listen. Very few of my top choices made it into the chart, possibly a testament to some social fragmentation of listening this year, but perhaps it was also because artists like Mark Fell, Maria Minerva and Andy Stott had multiple releases this year, all with a similar level of quality, and it felt wrong to pick more than one from each of them. Maybe one day the chart will rate Musical Objects of the Year, allowing votes for musicians, instruments, genres, riffs, performances, lyrics, cover art and everything else as well as releases of all shapes and sizes...

The issue also has an Electronica chart I helped compile, personal reflections from all writers, reviews of Yves de Mey, Land Equivalents and a Harold Budd & The Necks gig from me, and an Epiphany in which I contemplate the graphic score of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. On Jan 12th next year I'll be discussing Infinite Music at a Wire salon with Nightwave and Mira Calix, of which more here (link includes the YouTube playlist I did for it).

Online Music Criticism

I've reviewed the Kuedo album Severant over at Dummy (click here). From Jamie of Vex'd, it's yet another clever twist on 80s retroism and compulsive listening, but shouldn't be confused with futuristic music (or should it?). The architecture it brings to my mind is exemplified by the Broadgate estate on the Eastern edge of the city of London, specifically 135, 155 and 175 Bishopsgate, my pomo architecture guilty pleasure whose intestine I recently discovered you can walk through, taking you past Liverpool Street station:
Sounds just like Kuedo
Fascinating writing continues to pour out of Tiny Mix Tapes , including this manneristically written but well-aimed review of Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica (click here) and a brilliant response to the Retromania hypothesis from Jonathan Dean (click here). And in case you missed it, Simon Reynolds identified maximalism as a major trend in contemporary pop at Pitchfork (click here).

Politics

As the anniversery of the vote to triple the cap on University tuition fees approaches, I feel disappointed that I wasn't able this year to find more time or words to address the subsequent tripling of what can only be known as The Crisis, and the response to it. As far as historic events go (inside and outside of the UK), 2011 has undoudtedly been one of the most historic, disturbing and, at times, inspiring years I've lived through. I've been glued to Al Jazeera. I marched on #march26, #nov9 and #nov30. Being abroad during the phone-hacking scandal and then the riots gave me a certain perspective on how troubled this country has become. The student occupations of last year have become civic occupations all over the world. It seems pretty clear that next year will be even more intense - I hope 2012 will see everything we should fight against revealed to everyone even further, and more and more people getting off the fence and getting heard.

Two things that have recently shown the modern situation painfully clearly have been Dan Hancox's post on the #nov30 police cordon, the state of exception and Olympic security (click here already) and the first episode of Charlie Brooker's new TV programme Black Mirror, which I'm having bizarre trouble dissociating from all the disturbingly media-framed events that actually happened this year.

Regarding the ongoing marketisation of education, Howard Hotson's article and the subsequent exchange in the LRB really recharged my batteries this year.

Following our small joint Zer0 launch in Oxford, I'm reading Alex Niven's Folk Opposition, a beautifully concise and timely polemical essay on the uses and abuses of folk and class representations in contemporary Britain. Highly recommended as yet another key example of this crucial new wave of socio-political critique.

Radio

I've been trying my hand at radio, courtesy of the very exciting new web-based radio station NTS, broadcasting from Dalston, London. NTS recorded and broadcasted the launch of my Maus book and the Critical Beats seminars, and have given me the music slot in an arts magazine show Kiss My Arts (KMA) on Saturdays at 1pm, which comes around every 5 weeks or so. You can listen to my latest show here. It's far from perfection - please bear in mind that I'm still getting used to the studio and speaking on air, but I'll hopefully be posting audio and tracklistings up here when I'm in the swing of things. Do listen to the other shows too, catering for Literature, Film, Fine Art and Theatre each. I was there at the recording of the first Theatre show: chaotic, interesting and very fun.

Infinite Music Salon

2011-12-08T18:13:00.015Z

THE WIRE SALON: INFINITE MUSIC: IMAGINING THE NEXT MILLENNIUM OF HUMAN MUSIC-MAKING

Thursday 12th January 2012

at Café OTO
18 - 22 Ashwin street
Dalston
London
E8 3DL

Door Times : 8pm
£4 on the door

Café OTO event page here

In this Wire Salon event in the new year I'll be discussing the ideas in Infinite Music, followed by music and a panel discussion with electronic musicians Mira Calix and Nightwave as well as you the audience. Come along!

As background to the event, I made a YouTube playlist about the book (click here to see it complete with page references and comments, embedded here:

The Wire Salon is a monthly series of events, hosted by The Wire magazine, dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The events consist of talks, panel discussions, film screenings and DJ sets.

Infinite Music

2011-10-19T13:09:00.009+01:00

‘In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. They stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which any sounds imaginable can be synthesised and pieced together into radical new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? How could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we?

Bringing the ideas of twentieth-century avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage to their ultimate conclusion, Infinite Music proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process. By detailing not just how music is composed but crucially how it's perceived, Infinite Music maps the future of music and the many paths towards it.’

Infinite Music is a super clear, open-ended philosophy of sound and music for the post-rave generation. Essential reading for sonic modernists everywhere. - Cristian Vogel

A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures. - Steve Goodman, author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

My book Infinite Music will be released on November 25th by Zer0 Books. It’s now available for pre-order (click here to do so via the Zer0 website).

Lengthy Blogposts Now More Digestible as Audio

2011-10-07T12:33:00.009+01:00

I'm often told that my more substantial blogposts are a strain on the eyes, on the spare time and on the scrolling finger. People are always promising me that they'll get around to reading my latest tract properly at some point, but I can see the panic in their eyes.

So I've recorded three of my longest blogposts as spoken word audio together with excerpts from the music under discussion and other musical examples. They're uploaded to Soundcloud and embedded in the original blogposts, which also allows you to download them as high-quality mp3s to listen to away from the computer screen. Not only does this make them a little easier to take in, it also enables me to demonstrate exactly what I'm taking about with an appropriate auditory example, rather than relying on people scrolling through an unreliable YouTube video. I'm hoping to do the same for each future blogpost of this kind as they arrive.

The recordings are a little homemade and imperfect (I'm no BBC narrator) but are hopefully fit for purpose. Now you can hear me going on about hauntological harmony, Burial's cadences or gliding square-wave synths on the way to or from work, about the house, on long walks or car journeys, or gathered together with the whole family in rigidly enforced silence.

Find them embedded below. Click the arrow to download - hope they interest.

Rouge's Foam - Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present

Rouge's Foam - The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator

Rouge's Foam - Always Read the Label: Night Slugs

Beat and Digital Music Discussions at UEL

2011-10-07T11:30:00.009+01:00

The University of East London, already major site for the discussion of pop music and politics, have teamed up with Wire magazine for an epic series of panel discussions and mini-conferences, running well into next year, that looks very exciting indeed. They divide into a 'Music, Politics and Agency in the Digital Age' series and a 'Critical Beats' series, named after the dance column in The Wire. I'm participating in one of each, but they'll all be of interest to readers of this blog - see the schedule below.

Critical Beats: Sound, Technology, Microgenre, Rhythm
Date: 3 November 2011, Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, 19:30-21:30, general public £3, students £1.
Participants: Lisa Blanning (chair), Adam Harper, Matthew Ingram/Woebot, Mike Paradinas

Music, Politics and Agency in the Digital Age: East London
Date: 16 November 2011, 13:00-17:00, UEL, Stratford Campus, room AE.1.01, free.
Participants: Jeremy Gilbert (chair), Andrew Blake, Richard Bramwell, Steve Goodman (in conversation with Jeremy Gilbert), Derek Walmsley

Critical Beats: Place, Locality and Globalisation
Date: 8 December 2011, Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, 19:30-21:30 free.
Participants: Derek Walmsley (chair), Martin Clark, George Mahood, plus one other

Critical Beats: Innovation and the Past
Date: 23 February 2012, Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, 19:30-21:30, general public £3, students £1.

Music, Politics and Agency in the Digital Age: Gender, Sexuality and Sound
Date: 7 March 2012, 11:00-18:00, UEL, Stratford Campus, room UH.2.69, free.
Participants: Jeremy Gilbert (chair), Bipasha Ahmed, Lisa Blanning, Freya Jarman-Ivens, Tim Lawrence, Helen Reddington

Critical Beats: Sound Systems
Date: 19 April 2012, Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, 19:30-21:30, general public £3, students £1.

Music, Politics and Agency in the Digital Age: Sonic Radicalism
Date: 23 May 2012, 11:00-17:00, UEL, Docklands campus, room EB.1.03, free.
Participants: Jeremy Gilbert (chair) Dhanveer Brar, Adam Harper, Matthew Prichard, Barry Shank, Jason Toynbee

Critical Beats: Dancing and Dance Culture Scenes
Date: 14 June 2012, Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, 19:30-21:30, general public £3, students £1.

Music, Politics and Agency in the Digital Age: Capitalism, Creativity and Music
Date: 27 June 2012, 11:00-17:00, UEL Docklands campus, room EB.G.06, free.
Participants: Tim Lawrence (chair) Mark Fisher, Jeremy Gilbert, Dave Hesmondhalgh, Timothy Taylor

Borne into the 90s

2011-09-15T16:20:00.002+01:00

John Maus is Back: New Album, Book Launch, Retro as Language

2011-07-11T13:34:00.033+01:00

A revised version of my 2009 post on home-recorded popster and truth-sayer John Maus - updated to take in his recent album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves - is being published in book form this month by Precinct together with a new interview. It'll be launched on Wednesday 27th of July, 7pm at X Marks the Bökship, London (details on the flyer above and here), where I'll be talking for a bit. Do come along, music will be on the decks and on sale too. The book will be available subsequently via http://www.precinct.cc/.

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (click here to listen on Soundcloud) is as tuneful, surprising and provocative as we've come to expect from one of the most unique lo-fi artists in recent memory (don't write him off as just another one of Ariel Pink's 'godchildren'...), so give it a go. In its wake there's been a healthy crop of commentary and interviews: of particular note are Joseph Stannard's piece in The Wire #329, the Altered Zones piece and an interview for The Quietus. These two videos are pretty essential too:

Asked about the 1980s nostalgia and retroism in his music, some of Maus's responses have been quite illuminating as alternative takes on the Retromania hypothesis. From the Wire interview:

"I don't see this as a returning, I see this as a palette that we have to work with. These sounds are part of the vernacular. I resist this idea that we somehow move on to 'better' sounds. It's not about nostalgia or some kind of remembering, at least not consciously for me; it's what the work necessitates. It's part of this language and so we can explore the expressive possibilities afforded by these so-called nostalgic or retro sounds. They're just the best suited to the end of the work, you know?

... I think it's supremely contemporary to use these so called 'nostalgic' effects, in the sense of the contemporary being out of joint with the moment in some way. There are certain types of harmonic ideas that you heard a lot in the 80s that I suspect warrant exploration right now, here, today. We can keep exploring these ideas, so it's not a question of nostalgically reminiscing about these times, it's a question of beginning from where it was left and pushing it further.

And for The Quietus:

I kind of resisted this idea that is has to do with fashion, or it has to do with nostalgia, even though I'm sure it does, in many ways I don't tend to think of it that way, I think of it just as a convention of the language, that is always there, it's always available to deploy. It's always available for mobilisation... it's not a matter of making us think of whatever was 30 years ago or whatever, it's right now, those sounds are available to us, and the work can include all kinds of different things, and that's the one I'm wagering is most appropriate, the one that the work demands, you know?

The ability to speak a meaningful language through music is contingent upon some familiar, semi-stable language having been established in the past and surviving - in a necessarily changed form - into the present. Retro music is always meaningful, and meaningful music is always, to some extent, retro.

Retromania

2011-06-05T17:22:00.012+01:00

I've done a (rather edited) review of Simon Reynolds's new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past for Oxonian Review (click here to see it). It's well worth reading for its interesting and detailed history of pop revivals, which almost constitutes a history of pop music itself (ironically, it sort of undermines Reynolds's own ethics of pop's essence as being necessarily 'in the moment'). But Retromania is also valuable for the thoughts provoked by its deeply tendentious assessment of how pop music is created and consumed today. This is not to necessarily agree with the book, whose subjectivity and lack of balance is not concealed or mitigated (but then nor is it announced), making that a bit difficult. Actually I think I didn't manage to get across in the review how much you can't really argue, on a general level, with the fact that things have been getting a bit more retro lately. But then diagnosing what feels like everyone who is creating popular culture with retromania, or being 'glutted', is a generalising label that becomes a damaging assumption, affecting how (and whether) we listen to new music - reductio ad retromania. (Or Retro Man Ear, if you want to kill the vogue for pomo puns in music criticism forever.) In new music, some information will always be old and repeated while some information will always be new, in various ratios.

But like Reynolds I'm more into modernism than retroism, and arguing that there's always some degree of novelty and difference in a new musical offering that can in principle be detected (or, on the other side of the same coin, that past music can't be exactly repeated) is a bit not seeing the wood for the trees. One of the ideas that sometimes goes with twentieth-century modernist attitudes to art and music is that it doesn't mean anything, that it doesn't reference anything 'outside itself'. This is intriguingly reflected in Reynolds's odd-when-you-think-about-it statement that 'Instead of being about itself, the noughties has been about every other previous decade, happening again all at once.' You wonder how a decade can be 'about itself' - presumably by not making any significant reference to any other decades at all. But isn't this a tall order? Where do you draw the lines? Which repetitions of prior musical information count as references and which don't? Can we say absolutely? I don't think so, but then I'm a monstrous relativist and I'm coming for everything you hold dear.

I've never bought the meaninglessness theory of modernist art. Art always comes to reference something for us simply because we experience it in the context of our past experience of what you could call a 'language' of music built on some degree of repeated (i.e. familiar) information. Some artworks have more references and make them more clearly than others by repeating more of the familiar than differing it into something new, but there's always something that has come from the past, even if it's just a timbre. Is the use of a electric guitar in 2011 a reference to pop's past? You could say that, though you might also say it depends on what the guitar's playing. What about synths? Is every sounding of a basic sawtooth waveform on a synthesiser an eighties revival? If there are exceptions, where and why are they? And does it count as a revival if you never heard the original, or are you somehow being cheated in this case? Not only is every musical offering different, but every listener is different too.

On his blog The Fantastic Hope, Alex Niven has written a response to my review, mentioning 'the whiggish view of history', i.e. the optimistic historiography that progress towards utopia is always being made, whether at faster or slower speeds. It's a naive grand narrative. But it's not inherently an optimistic thinking error to observe that musical novelty and its flipside, musical repetition, are always there and always relative and changing in proportion. This is the more even-handed and imaginative attitude to musical development that would have made the anger over lack of novelty in Retromania so much more powerful and meaningful. Instead, it's haunted slightly by some of the clichés of the reactionary music critic, such as how the music of the present is insufficiently respectful, or is in a number of senses excessive, and how the music of one's formative years happened to have things right. We've heard all of that before.

But I'm glad of the 'call to arms' that it's possible to read into Retromania. To borrow a distinction from Mark Fisher, hopefully music-makers and listeners will respond not to its capacity for pessimism, but to its negativity. Even if we're perhaps yet to discover what will count as significantly new, negativity without pessimism demands a new world.

Sonic Boom

2011-02-23T13:05:00.004Z

Another public appearance coming up, this time discussing technology and the future of music with Matthew Herbert (who recently recomposed Mahler, see mini documentary below) and Subeena (if you haven't heard her Neurotic yet, what are you doing) at Future Human's 'Sonic Boom' event (click here for details and booking). 7pm on Wednesday 9th of March at the Book Club, Leonard Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH.

From the website's blurb:

At Sonic Boom, March's Future Human Live event, we will explore how new instruments and musical tools are helping contemporary musicians produce unprecented sounds, and challenge the very nature of musical composition and consumption.

Technology, digital or otherwise, has broken down traditional ideas of notated music over the years, and invented new timbres and pitches. But how are producers and songwriters incorporating these innovations into their work? And how will this change the way the rest of us experience music?

Intuitive apps like Bloom are putting music-making in the hands of the layman and the sonification of data and other inputs is becoming more sophisticated: generative music programs, which allow computer algorithms to compose music with a minimum of human interference, are practically giving music its own agency.

Meanwhile, modern music software mashes these tools with a range of other pioneering techniques. These include: replicating any previous digitally or organically produced sound with easy-to-use computer synthesisers, and manipulating samples; software that helps amateurs compose music using interactive visual elements; and futuristic physical instruments such us Yamaha's Tenori-on.

With all of these developments, we're starting to see a rich musical language emerge, in which an almost infinitely varied pool of potential timbres, pitches, rhythms and tempos are at our fingertips. Furthermore, the democratic distribution of these tools is leading to the greatest explosion of musical innovations since man carved a flute from mammoth bone 45,000 years ago.

The results be heard everywhere, from Christian Fennesz's clouds of distortion, to the delirious melodies and scattering rhythms of the Night Slugs crew and the rich, glossy fantasies of Kanye West. So join us at Sonic Boom, where, with a panel of music producers, writers and thinkers, and live audience musical improvisation, we'll explore how modern musicians are opening up entirely new worlds of sound.

Appearing on our panel debate will be:

Matthew Herbert – Matthew is one of the UK’s most forward-thinking musicians and producers, making everything from big-band tunes to dancefloor tracks, and a series of records made from unexpected sound sources. Bodily Functions was composed from the sounds made from the human body, inside and out; Plat Du Jour from food and drink; his recent One Club and forthcoming One Pig albums are made from sounds collated from Berlin’s Robert Johnson nightclub and pig butchery respectively. He also runs Accidental Records, and has produced records by Roisin Murphy, Micachu and The Shapes, and the Mercury-nominated debut from The Invisible.

Adam Harper – Adam is the author of the forthcoming Infinite Music, which aims to reclassify the concept of modernism for an age of boundary-pushing electronic music; he argues that producers like Burial, Hudson Mohawke and Actress, by deploying new instruments and new technologies, are opening up previously untapped worlds of sound. He is currently studying a PhD in Musicology at Oxford University, and writes for The Wire magazine and his own blog, Rouge’s Foam.

Subeena – Sabina Plamenova (aka Subeena) is an Italian producer living and working in London, creating tracks using only a laptop and microphone; her music occupies the (thankfully as yet unlabelled) space between techno, dubstep and UK garage that is currently proving so fertile for dance producers. She has trained at the Red Bull Music Academy where she collaborated with Jamie Woon and Sa-Ra, has seen her work released by Planet Mu and remixed by Egyptrixx, and runs her own label, Opit Recordings.

Also joining us will be Nu Desine, a sound engineering team from Bristol, who will be showcasing their brand new instrument, AlphaSphere. A glowing blue orb punctuated by a series of circles, music is made in a tactile and hugely affecting way by programming and manipulating sound via the touch-sensitive circular pads. A huge variety of pitches, volumes and timbres are literally at your fingertips, and the Nu Desine team will be showing how to compose music on this beautiful and innovative creation.

Fight Back! Free E-Book and Seminar

2011-02-16T19:22:00.006Z

Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest, an e-book edited by Dan Hancox, has just been released and is free to download (click here). Inside is a chapter by myself on aesthetic issues in the recent protests as well as chapters by commentators potentially known to readers of this blog such as Jesse Darling, Jeremy Gilbert, Dan Hancox, Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Paul Sagar and Daniel Trilling, and a very useful set of appendices. It'll be out in print on the 24th of March. Don't miss.

To mark the launch of Fight Back! there'll be a seminar held at the University of East London entitled 'The Art of Protest' at which I'll be talking alongside Jesse Darling and Dan Hancox, with Steve 'Kode9' Goodman and Andrew Blake responding:

The Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, presents:

The Art of Protest

A seminar to mark the launch of Fight Back! A reader on the winter of protest

March 2nd 2011, 14:00-17:00

Papers:

Dan Hancox: Pow! in Parliament Square: Riot music and the kettled generation

Dan Hancox is a freelance journalist writing on music and politics for The Guardian, New Statesman and others, and the editor of Fight Back! A reader on the winter of protest.

Jesse Darling: [Protest] Signs and the Signified: handmade propaganda in the age of the branded demographic.

Jesse Darling is a journeyman auto-ethnographer and artist of many media working in /dasein/ by design and the performance of everyday life. JD lives on the fringes of London and wherever.

Adam Harper: The Art and Reality of Protest

Adam Harper blogs on aesthetics and criticism in music, art and life at Rouge's Foam. He has written for The Guardian and Wire magazine and is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making, forthcoming for Zer0 books.

Respondents:
Steve Goodman
Steve Goodman is author of Sonic Warfare: sound, affect & the ecology of fear, MIT Press, 2010. He also runs the record label Hyperdub, and DJs/produces under the name Kode9.

Andrew Blake
Andrew Blake is currently Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London, and a saxophonist and
composer. His books on music include The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (1997), the edited collection Living through Pop (1999), and most recently Popular Music: the Age of Multimedia (2007). He contributed to the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music and the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music.He is also the author of books on sport, consumer culture, and fiction,including The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, which has been translated into six languages.

Chair: Jeremy Gilbert
author of Anticapitalism and Culture (Berg 2008)

For more information and for a full audio recording of recent events in the centre see http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/

Location: UEL Docklands Campus
Transport: Cyprus DLR station is located right next to the campus (just follow signs out of the station)

Room EB.1.07
(First Floor, East Building, which is to the left on entering the main square from Cyprus station
Upon entering the building from the main square, take the first staircase on the right, to the first floor, and follow signs to Eb.1.07)

All Welcome - no booking required
For further info: J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk

Always Read the Label: Night Slugs

2011-01-17T12:19:00.069Z

Rouge's Foam - Always Read the Label: Night Slugs. Here you can listen to this blogpost as spoken word and together with the musical examples. Download this as a high-quality mp3 and listen elsewhere by clicking the arrow on the right of the player.

This’ll be first in an intermittent series of posts in a new format going by the hilarious title ‘Always Read the Label’, with each focussing on a certain record label du jour and going through their catalogues and artwork, or at least picking highlights.

Why labels? It’s as good a category as any other in a context where the ways in which music is and can be grouped – artists, genres, scenes, releases now in all shapes and sizes, etc – are less and less clear-cut. Artists in themselves are less likely to remain as consistent between albums or tracks as they once were. Genres (or as I prefer to call them, styles) have shifted in size, scope and consistency; indeed, the conventional late twentieth-century models and expectations of stylicity in popular music no longer apply. That’s not to say that the cohering effect of stylicity, its repetition, its recurring specifics, no longer applies, they just apply at different levels and along different paths. But the extinction of that term which attempted to invoke a new form of stylicity as a ‘transversal’ theme (w… w… what did we call it?) proved too offensive and its scope too strange to catch on, and ever since then huge quantities of electronic dance music has, especially, resisted being, well, ‘labelled’. The old categories and structures through which music was portioned out and packaged have melted away. This point has been made many times before, but it bears repeating that whatever bubbles up in this more fluid milieu shouldn’t really be judged using (or against) those old categories and structures. As Blackdown put it, ‘the problem is this new, delocalised structure doesn’t fit with previous patterns of tight, focused scenes. So if you went looking for that and that only, you probably didn’t find it [in 2010].’

Today, the musical grouping created underneath the umbrella of a record label can be seen as pretty arbitrary relative to the selectiveness involved in grouping a style. Conventionally speaking, a label is not the same a style, but the items in a label’s catalogue usually show some degree of family resemblance, however that manifests and however faint it may be, and can be taken to represent a locus of musical variability, like the inside of a circle drawn with a compass. Moreover, a record label can shift or widen its locus of variability (i.e. change its style) without causing a crisis of identification, unlike a style, because the label remains the same. Taking record labels as subjects of online music criticism can also go some way to mitigate its problem of selectively feeding on positivity. If you just blog in praise of what you’ve enjoyed then music is never negatively criticised, leading to the cheerleading effect of ‘it’s all good’. With a record label you get a mixed bag in its entirety. Finally and perhaps most importantly, a small underground record label is (hopefully) a community of people working with a common interest. Focussing on cohesive communities as subjects rather than individual artists and their works makes a relatively minor but welcome change from the commodity-oriented consumption of music through self-contained, specially chosen works by specially chosen individuals.

Night Slugs was founded by L-Vis 1990 (left) and Bok Bok (right) initially as a club night in South London. The two announced the beginnings of their sound as producers on a split Night Slugs EP for Dress 2 Sweat in October 2009.
First up, then, is an obvious choice. Night Slugs dominated hardcore dance in London and many people’s listening in 2010. The label’s rise fits snugly between the beginning and the end of the year – January saw the release of their first EP, Mosca’s ‘Square One’, and eight EPs later in December their reputation had grown hugely, having released one of the pretty much consensus tunes of the year (Girl Unit’s ‘Wut’) and a first compilation of prior successes, remixes and original material (‘Night Slugs Allstars’). With their first artist albums to be released this year the label will soon reach the next level, making this a great time to take stock.

Despite having become a bit of a poster child for the supposedly all too nebulous stylistic pluralism in UK dance music today, I would say that the characteristics of a Night Slugs release have so far been pretty distinct. Part of the reason that defining the scene’s characteristics seems difficult is because doing so requires a broader method for identifying and classifying genres than by the type of beat they have, for example, which had hitherto been predominantly the norm. Stylistic groupings in electronic dance music aren’t always defined merely by their recurring beat structures, or even their bpm or degree of bass weight beyond that. Looking for stylistic coherence in Night Slugs (or Hyperdub or Numbers) simply on those terms will fail because the nature of their beats is relatively inconsistent in comparison to, say, jungle or 2-step. The beats on a Night Slugs track are typically somewhere between house and [UK] funky [house], both of which have pretty broad range of drumloop variability, with the latter often incorporating several different and non-UK-standard percussive samples (bongos etc) into the groove. Occasionally there’s a hint of dubstep given by some relation between bass and a halfstep alternation between kick drum and snare at an appropriate bpm. More specifically, you could say that Night Slugs has a bit of a penchant for syncopation (click here if you’re not completely certain what this term means, I’ll be referring to it a lot), which sometimes includes triple rhythms, without straying too far from a 4/4 pulse given by mostly even kick drum. In this it’s just like funky and its antecedents soca, calypso and various other Caribbean styles from which it borrows its beats. So even that’s not exactly a unique stylistic hallmark.

‘The floor’s gone all swervy’: gliding synths

One of the main elements characterising Night Slugs’s style is not its beats as much as its synthesisers and the way they’re being used. The Night Slugs style can be differentiated from the core of UK funky in that it usually replaces the latter’s longer, untreated, poppy R&B vocals or MCing with electro-flavoured drops, hooks and stabs. UK funky tracks are usually a lot closer to being ‘songs’ than Night Slugs’s are, and this brings the label closer to the historical tendencies of hardcore dance: sampled and edited divas rather than singalong melodies. The use of these more basic waveform synths can conceivably be traced back to the impact of Hyperdub’s new direction in 2008 (Zomby, Ikonika etc), which in turn had a lot to do with grime’s brutal synths (Wiley’s eski strain especially), which seems to have been an influence on Night Slugs artists too.

One of the most distinctive things about these synths and how they’re being used, and something relatively new as a recurring stylistic feature, is how they ‘glide’, also known as to ‘slide’ or to ‘pitchbend’, creating portamentos across often quite wide pitch ranges. This means that instead of pitch moving upwards or downwards in steps as on a piano, it slides in a single unbroken motion. Often the glide is also divided or differentiated into notes separated by silence or distinguishable against lower volumes or filtrations respectively. Taken in isolation, these notes can cheekily be described as microtonal. (In these cases the notes may be divided into steps, but the pitch glide itself is still in an unbroken trajectory). To put it more technically, gliding makes pitch a continuous variable rather than a discrete variable, as it is on a piano. Glide is often used in small ways to add character to melodies, in which case it’s usually called ‘pitchbending’. But recently the gliding effect has regularly been a very prominent aspect, and a great appeal, of a main drop. Some particularly pronounced examples of synth gliding just outside of the Night Slugs camp would be Benga and Coki’s ‘Night’, Scratcha DVA’s immense ‘New World Order’ (below) and in a more subtle way, the little popping loop in Ramadanman’s ‘Glut’ and ‘Work Them’. Two more great examples coming from Night Slugs’s co-founder Bok Bok but not released on the label are ‘Say Stupid Things’ and the goofy and criminally overlooked ‘Citizens Dub’ (below, which features the pretty relevant statement ‘the floor’s gone all swervy n shit’).

This spectrogram shows the main hook in Scratcha DVA’s ‘New World Order’, zoom x 4. A spectrogram visualises music as its frequency spectrum (i.e. its pitch, put simply) in hertz on the vertical axis over time on the horizontal axis together with volume, suggested by the intensity of colouration. Percussion hits tend to appear as unbroken vertical lines, and are useful as markers for orientating what you see in time. The reason many pitches appear to be repeated several times across the frequency spectrum is because most timbres are actually made up of a number of overtones of several pitches. This can make reading a spectrogram difficult (the lower areas of the spectrogram with the most intense colouration represent most of what you hear), but one of the main reasons I’m using them here is because they show gliding pitches so well.

While notes of a steady pitch are rendered on the spectrogram as horizontal lines, gliding pitches can clearly been seen swooping up and down. Note that the frequency axis isn’t logarithmic, meaning the distances between pitches in hertz get greater as the scale gets higher, so steady increases in pitch can appear to have a curve of acceleration when in fact they glide at a fixed rate. The steeper the slope of pitch change in time, the more curved the line appears on the spectrogram.

In this spectrogram you can clearly see the downward-gliding synth of ‘New World Order’ and how it’s divided into separate notes.

Bok Bok’s ‘Citizen’s Dub’ makes a spectacular spectrogram. The track features upward- and downward-gliding synths of many timbres, gliding in all sorts of ways across a wide spectrum of pitches. In this clip, the pitch is raised as a continuous (if not always entirely smooth) movement, but lowered in discrete steps: the perfect visualisation of pitch as a continuous or discrete variable.
The term for turning a discrete variable into a continuous variable is dequantisation. Note that this term was often applied to rhythm and timing in the w***y hip hop, dubstep and electronica of yesteryear, when notes were placed outside of a conventionally subdivided rhythmic grid. This time however it’s the variable of pitch that has been dequantised rather than time. In fact in the Night Slugs milieu time usually remains quantised, regular and metronomic (syncopation aside). And you could definitely say that Night Slugs and their allies are part of a broader trend of ‘dequantised dance music’ that includes the music formerly called by the w word. This process of dequantisation needn’t just refer to single variables either, but to structures of multiple variables (together with limits on their values) and musical styles themselves, representing the way that many different styles have blended together into a continuous whole in which much more variety becomes imaginable and possible as producers discover the zones ‘between’ the previously more discrete structures of grouped, established styles.

The thing is, this gliding characteristic in all these drops doesn’t really seem to have made it into the music-critical vocabulary, despite the fact that they’re clearly a stylistic focal point. Track after track is released with these gliding synths in them, a huge number of variations on it as a structural element are demonstrated, and you rarely see commentators referring to anything more specific than something like ‘neon / dayglo synths’. More likely there’ll be references to the pleasures or pains of a reified genre hybridism centred on the beats as the behaviour of a kick drum or the snap of a hi-hat brings on multiple flashbacks, resonating almost inevitably with something in the archives. But there is something more specific going on there in the synths and in the treble range generally. In true transversal fashion, these gliding synth drops have appeared over beats potentially attributable to funky, dubstep, house, grime and more – they cut across styles on those terms and define a new one in the process, becoming a hallmark of it. Now of course gliding synths aren’t exemplified in every track to come out of Night Slugs, much less the ‘interzone’ meta-scene as a whole, but they are a common and overlooked feature of it. Once again, if the theory and perception of UK underground dance music is that it has defining characteristics A, B and C, and it then goes on to have the characteristics C, D and E, the theory and perception will be blinkered, insufficient and confused.

Night Slugs tracks so far are also characterised by their relative lack of small-cell repetitiousness. They’re no more repetitious than a typical UK funky track, and you couldn’t call them ‘minimal’. Some of them are long, sure, but individual loops are rarely repeated for long. The word ‘minimal’ in electronic dance music also refers to the number of elements in a track, and in this sense Night Slugs tracks aren’t very minimal either.

Something else that characterises a Night Slugs track is its production. I know this is a vague thing to say, but in this case it’s to do with the overall effect of the synthesisers, drum machines, samples and mixing. When they’re not sampling acoustic instruments, the beats are often from drum machines or samples of them, often the TR-808 or something similar and like the synths they’re not particularly retro, just less complex. Use of filtration, compression and equalisation in the finish sounds little more than basic, or is well concealed. Night Slugs has a brash, artificial sound, not lo-fi but not hi-tech – painstakingly sculpted studio techno or beat / vocal ‘science’ this isn’t. This isn’t a bad thing at all, the sound is visceral, real and exciting, though it’ll inevitably be youthfully crude and tacky to those with different tastes. Were the tracks to smarten up with posh synthesisers and smoothed frequencies, they would lose what for many fans is a key bit of je ne sais quoi.

Visuals

The unusual and striking artwork surrounding Night Slugs – the logo, the club night posters, the covers – is done by Alex ‘Bok Bok’ Sushon. The logo is an isometric projection, with the lettering made out of blocks coming in two kinds of 3D shape and joined at right angles (except for in the N), which appears in a number of different colour palettes. It’s an interesting formalist game that represents the music’s stridently synthetic qualities and the brutalist structures of its drop material.

The covers of the EPs are the most interesting. They have a specific format: white insert at the top with the title (put in quotation marks, as if through excessive fastidiousness, that become almost ironic) and track-listing in thick sans serif italics, and underneath are the images, rendered in shades of a particular colour matching the Night Slugs logo in the top right corner. The repetition of this recognisable format is akin to the recurring formats of publishers like Penguin, but unlike much of the unified cover design revival of recent years, it’s not a pastiche of anything that appeared in the past (that I know of), nor does it particularly resemble cover designs of the past (in the way that Sacred Bones Records covers somewhat resemble cover designs from the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, for example). Each image is a bizarre architectural fantasy rendered not realistically but in a manner reminiscent of computer-aided design as it might look on much more basic technology. Fittingly, the perspective is basic: NS002 and NS006 are isometrically projected like the Night Slugs logo, while NS001, NS004 and NS007-9 squarely face the front. It all creates the sense that Night Slugs exists in its own world, a virtual space. Each EP is given its own impressive monument shining in the dark, be it an elaborate temple, a space station or an obscenely domineering tower. The design finds a way to be meaningful without really referencing anything in particular and without giving up abstraction, without dialling down an interest in purely formal concerns.

The design surrounding Night Slugs has been likened to that of nineteen-eighties video gaming and the film Tron. But Sushon’s use of basic, anti-realist computer graphics and projections is not necessarily merely a retro thing, a backward-looking, ironic or infantile cult reference. Its formalism, use of colour and mysterious anti-realism has a lot to do with modernism. Had those video game graphics appeared in the nineteen-tens and not in the artistically postmodern eighties, those pixel grids, crude perspectives and limited colour palettes necessitated by the technology might have influenced modernist artists. But in any case, David Bomberg didn’t need to have played Q*bert to have painted this isometric, anti-realist picture (compare with the Night Slugs logo and cover art).

David Bomberg’s ‘The Vision of Ezekiel’, 1912, shows skeletons rising as in the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s vision: ‘There was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together.’
If grids, non-realist perspectives and limited colour palettes (or their equivalent in music, timbre palettes i.e. those basic synths and drum machines) reappear today, why do they have to be put down as postmodern reference rather than modernist / formalist experimentation? Sorry if I keep making this point over and over, but the perception that the latest wave of UK hardcore dance is glutted on references, when it might rather be imagination and invention if viewed differently, is still alive and well. (By the way, I am aware that such a position was weakened by all the video gaming references in Ikonika’s debut album and Joker’s single in homage to Tron, but this still doesn’t invalidate the inherent formalist potential of the basic technology).

As I’ve touched upon above, the imagery of Night Slugs fits well with its music. It’d be interesting to do a study of how music’s packaging influences any mental visualisation of it during or away from listening. In my experience it does, especially when the cover has prominent colours or a degree of abstraction. Sushon’s single-coloured lines and blocks against a black background match the relatively non-complex synth timbres standing out dryly against the surrounding silence in his label’s music. But the effect isn’t so much synaesthetic as what you could call ‘co-aesthetic’ – it informs the visualisation of music through association rather than through much of a positivistic correlation between visual and sonic stimuli, especially when it comes to specific colours.

NS001: Mosca – “Square One” EP

Night Slug’s first release was Mosca’s debut. It’s not difficult to see why a mix by Mosca was picked as a casualty of ‘hyperstasis’, Simon Reynolds’s term for the alleged impasse in UK dance music. His music is just like his mixes: rich, omnivorous, maximalist, not at all economical with musical material compared with other producers in the same scene (like Girl Unit or Lil Silva, for example). This is the supposed problem of hyperstasis – too much somehow becomes not enough. Some kind of maximum listening capacity level (which is naturally subjective) is exceeded and the music suffers as a result. Mosca’s relative attention deficit does seem to hinder his ability to produce great hooks and carefully control their repetition through the course of the track in such a way that they become familiar, thus building a huge dancefloor tune (and again, Girl Unit clearly excels at this). But surely this isn’t the only acceptable way to deploy musical material – how boring and cynical would it be if that was the only way producers used their material? Mosca has a different appeal.

Of course, a diagnosis of hyperstasis only works if you impose certain aesthetics limits on what kinds and degrees of change and repetition in the music's elements are perceived or valid, and what kinds aren’t valid or are excessive. These limits can and will be transcended. Whether you feel music is hyperstatic or not depends on what musical elements you’re taking on board and what context they’re put in as you listen. If you’re constantly comparing what you hear with other musical genres you know, then the degree of variety in Mosca's music means that that search will return a lot of hits. In ‘Square One’, for example, the opening syncopated timbale drum suggests Cuban percussion, the subsequent synth horns might suggest dancehall, the beat suggests funky, the monophonic triplets suggests rave in its timbre and Zomby in its triple feel and subdivisive metric shifts, the bass suggests garage evolving into dubstep, vocal samples suggest R&B and a long sample in the middle seems to be of a Jamaican MC. There seems to be a bit of everything, and there’s probably even more in there too.

But can’t there be more to the music than its aggregation of potential stylistic references? Can’t it have a simply formal appeal too, stemming its shapes, colours, effects, variation, the building and release of tension? So don’t listen to the stylistic resonances so much – listen to the music. And it works – despite the fact that you can spot references to almost anything, nothing really feels like it was put there arbitrarily or inappropriately. The track is an exploration of funky’s capacity for syncopation and rhythmic change. The hoover sound-like synth lead begins in a sluggish crotchet triplet that seems to belie the momentum set up by the synth horns before it. Some time after the bass drops, the synth returns much more actively in even quavers, becoming triplet quavers in the final iteration, through which it reaches a higher pitch. The bass is also subjected to rhythmic variation – the first time it drops it has a fairly conventional syncopation, but when it drops the second time at 3:27 the overall contour of the bass remains broadly the same but the rhythm is de-syncopated and the whole structure is moved forward a quaver onto an offbeat, which in a way re-syncopates as a relatively gawky imitation of the funky groove it was previously.

In the earlier days, Night Slugs EPs were filled out with remixes, and this one tacked on no less than five remixes of the title track. ‘Square One’ is a perfectly nice track, but I’m not sure it deserves all that attention – it certainly makes listening to the EP all the way through a little tedious (but doing so is probably not really the point). The remixes generally manage to marshal the restlessness of the original into numbers more appropriate for the dancefloor, but often lose the disorientation and excitement of the original in the process. Roska’s remix seems to respond to the feel of the track rather than its individual elements, reconstructing the syncopated bass using a touch of glide. Julio Bashmore cleverly turns the synth horns into a chromatic figure and sits it on a great funky beat. Greena’s effort is full-on and strange, lacquered in digital noise and squashed inside a thick, compressed mix – not much of the original remains in the drop. L-Vis 1990 uses the synth horns for a housey drop, and apparently noticing the Caribbean feel of the original’s percussion, augments it with a whistle and a pair of congas. Bok Bok provides one of the most interesting remixes, focusing mostly on the synth lead, turning it first into a nervous tic above a decidedly un-funky beat, then letting it panic away in its entirety. One thing nearly all of the remixers seem interested in is the downward-gliding chord at the track’s opening. Downward-gliding – specifically downward directions are the most common, interestingly – drops and motifs have been popular in the scene of which Night Slugs is a part. Weirdly, however, L-Vis 1990 uses it at a steady, unchanging pitch, and from its slight wavering quality it sounds like he’s time-stretched the original to do this.

In the next track, ‘Nike’, Mosca’s restless, maximalist tendencies go further. The ten-minute epic starts of with a square-wave synth over a dubby beat complete with delays. It glides a little as it goes, swaggering and staggering forward and spitting like a robot rapper over a relaxed G-funk groove, in one of the label’s few moments of truly dequantised rhythm. As it continues we briefly hear a jungle break (1:35), before the kick drum wakes up bit by bit, slowly becoming the 4/4 backbone of some kind of dub house at 2:56. At 3:56 a discreet bass kicks in, while barely intelligible vocal samples duke it out over more Jamaican horns. In the sixth minute the horns and synths expand to create a rolling harmony before the breakdown in the middle of the seventh minute. The track is not so much a tight dancefloor gem as a journey through a number of different structures, each smoothly transitioning into the next. The club edit removes the prologue but still stretches to eight minutes and is probably useful to DJs who’d want to go straight to the more housey material.

The best word I can think of to describe Mosca’s music is ‘rhapsodic’. The term ‘rhapsody’ originally referred to epic poetry and describes a long piece of music that visits many different kinds of musical material in a semi-improvisatory manner, with little or no long-term repetition. Famous examples include Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies (used to set the tone of Ken Russell’s mad Liszt biopic Lisztomania, in which Liszt was played by lead singer of The Who Roger Daltry) and (gulp) Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. That connection to the epic maximalism of prog rock is not inappropriate. The word also implies a certain degree of extravagance and emotionality that Mosca doesn’t really aim for, though in a purely formal sense at least the rhapsody format might go some way to understanding Mosca’s exploratory method.

NS002: Egyptrixx – “The Only Way Up” EP

Along with Jam City, Egyptrixx is one of Night Slugs’s more avant-garde producers. Despite hailing from Toronto, Canada, he sounds like a London producer who’s a few steps ahead. His release in March was the moment the label really started baring its teeth. Having played in punk bands before getting into house and techno, perhaps, like Ikonika, his freer, unconventional take has something to do with his coming from a rock background. The jump from rock to pure dance traverses a lot of stylistic territory, and once such a jump is made there’s a greater view of music’s variability and possibilities, like how you see just how much Planet Earth there is out of the window of a plane going from one place to another.

Egyptrixx seems to feel confident about stepping outside of the 4/4 flow of most house and techno. At the beginning of his EP’s title track almost every hit we hear is syncopated, with no regular pulse to refer them back to. Dissonant synth up-beats lead nowhere while murky syncopated synth triads with rhythmically unhelpful delays on them growl beneath. Eventually some further percussion is added and the synth triads move into the treble create a more stable environment, though the triads soon slip back and a noise like air escaping signals an approaching drop. We still haven’t heard anything sounding like a traditional kick drum, let alone one in a steady 4/4. Then the main character enters – a bar-long series of chords ending in an upward glide and reverting back to normal chords every fourth bar.

This spectrogram shows the main hook in ‘The Only Way Up’, its four bars highlighted in the wave form at the bottom, zoom x 4. The upward glide in the last two beats of the first three bars is preceded by a less obvious smaller downward glide. The general increase in higher frequencies from left to right on the spectrogram is caused by low-pass filters slowly opening, a typical structural device in house and one of the few clichés in Egyptrixx’s sound.
The bass drops at 1:36, taking on the rhythm of the treble chords. Even though it’s a tuned synth, its static pitch helps it fill the role of the kick drum (which never arrives), setting up an oddly orchestrated funky groove.

The next track, ‘Everybody Bleeding’, is weirder still. Starting with abrasive electronic barks and a 4/4 kick with snare that quickly becomes a full house beat, Egyptrixx seems once again to be introducing a main hook of syncopated synth chords by slowly opening up low-pass filters. But the kick drops out and the sense of anticipation increases exponentially, egged on by a metallic housefly gliding upwards in pitch. A halfstep beat enters, its relative rhythmic slowness dragging us towards the drop inch by inch until it finally arrives at 1:29.

This shows the sixteen-bar run-up to 'Everybody Bleeding's' drop and two bars of the drop in zoom x 1, from where the upward-gliding metallic housefly sound (represented by the giant rectangles, note how it fires on all frequencies) begins. Click for a closer look. See how it suddenly glides back down again prior to the drop
Like the main hook of ‘The Only Way Up’ its bars fall into two halves, but this time the two halves are radically different. To begin with in the first two beats there’s nothing, not even percussion, except for a single harsh tone that obliterates everything else in the mix like a giant foot coming down. In the second two beats it’s countered by a syncopated consequent phrase with glide on it, as if staggering around dazed after being struck by the harsh tone, which battles with that tone throughout the track.

The main hook of ‘Everybody Bleeding’ drops, its four bars highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 4. See how the straight, horizontal pitches of the harsh tone in the first two beats of each bar contrast with the gliding and rhythmic complexity of the second beats of each bar. In the last bar the synth chords glide continuously through two different speeds (changing from one to the other where the curve suddenly becomes less steep).
After a while the harsh tone steps out for a bit, leaving the gliding synths in the spotlight.

The gliding chords after the harsh tone exits, with four bars highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 8. See how the chords glide in two directions. The wiggly line in the fourth bar is the vocal sample.
Ikonika’s remix of ‘The Only Way Up’ is typical of her more recent, funky-oriented 4/4 style. Layers of synth pads and melodic interjections hark back to ‘Yoshimitsu’ from her album, last year’s ‘Contact, Love, Want, Have’, and fit nicely with a new digital beat and the syncopated elements of the original. Remixing the same, Cubic Zirconia (a three piece band from NYC) brings in a tropical percussion palette and an extensive vocal track, which is left out on an instrumental version. Kingdom really makes ‘Everybody Bleeding’ his own in his remix, adding in a downward-gliding bass and his customary soulful fragments held together by punchy production and a tight grip on structure.

Egyptrixx is building a distinctive sound characterised by synths with carefully and adventurously programmed envelopes and glides. His bold approach to alien forms could prove valuable this year as he prepares to release a debut album. This track, which I think I heard will be on that album, in some ways does for late eighties piano house what Salem & Co. do for Southern US rap – slow it down till it becomes dark, monumental and supernatural. Note the tails on the piano notes, pitchbent / gliding in two directions as in ‘Everybody Bleeding’ – we may be hearing a lot more of that technique this year.

NS003: Girl Unit – “I.R.L.” EP

The title track of Girl Unit’s debut was Night Slugs’s first real hit, and became one of the dance tunes of the year. Apparently it was heard in the Whitehall kettle on Day X of the student protests. A reminder that musical adventurousness needn’t come at the expense of dancefloor popularity, I.R.L is both menacing, shrill and mysterious and upfront, simple and danceable. Its main hook contrasts a deep, powerful, borderline-kitsch exclamation on synth cellos as from a film noir or old B-movie soundtrack with a downward-gliding sawtooth screech like blood dripping from the ceiling and down the walls. The track launches straight in with the fake cellos, which are joined by the screeches in a drop a mere sixteen bars later.

Spectrogram of the main hook in ‘I.R.L.’, with a length of two bars highlighted in the waveform beneath. See how the sawtooth synths (the columns of wavy lines) not only glide downwards overall but oscillate upwards and downwards in pitch as they go. It does so in stereo, i.e. in a different way in the right and left channels, adding to the disorientation.
On the spectrogram you can clearly see how each time they appear, the continuous downward movement of the synths is sliced into separate chunks. Girl Unit seems to have used a compression effect to do this, which has squeezed the synths away from the intensity of the kick drum and the on-beat percussion hits generally. More specifically, the synths begin on-beat with the kick drum, but are allowed to reach their loudest volume on the offbeat, making them both regular (in that they begin on-beat) and syncopated (in that they’re accented on the offbeat), or halfway between the two.

A passage of secondary material begins at 0:57, a more shadowy area where the percussion steps forward as swathes of filtered noise fly past. These two sets of material alternate with minor variation for five more minutes. It makes the track a little longer than might be necessary for a listener, but naturally it doesn’t have this problem within a DJ set. As I’ve said, Girl Unit is very economical with his material, wringing a lot out of a few choice bars through careful use of repetition and variation, and is the antithesis of Mosca in this respect.

‘Shade on’ begins with a synth harp in a rapid Alberti pattern. Here, rather than a single note or chord gliding, all the separate notes in the broken chord glide up and down as one.

The beginning of ‘Shade On’, zoom x 4. The synth glides upwards at the beginning of the phrase, jumps down an octave, and is then pitched downwards before repeating.
It’s soon joined by an upward gliding drum machine tom-tom. The upward glide of the opening phrase is then echoed by a much thicker set of timbres, showing that that upward-gliding structure is in itself a focus of the track, and not just an ancillary decoration. Almost everything in the track glides upwards in pitch in its own way, most powerfully after the 1:18 drop.

Stairway to heaven: the run up to the drop (without percussion) and the drop (with percussion, i.e. the light yellow dots at the bottom), with four bars highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 4. This spectrogram has a lower sample rate than the others in this post, so it shows a greater length of time. See how the synths briefly glide upwards and then stay at a constant pitch, while the tom-tom (the little upward-curving light yellow dots) glides upwards over the course of two bars – two different kinds of gliding at the same time, in the same direction.
‘Temple Keys’ is a weird, plasticky house number with pinched timbres with strange envelopes and the triplets that Night Slugs is partial to. It sounds like L-Vis 1990 and Egyptrixx had a hand in producing it. Scratcha DVA’s remix of ‘I.R.L’ almost suffocates underneath a combination of syncopated kick and snare(?), but does rhythmically repurpose the screeching synths in an interesting way. The French Fries remix brings the screeching synths to the beginning of the bar and glides them upwards instead of downwards, inverting the original.

The drop of the French Fries remix of ‘I.R.L’, with four bars highlighted in the waveform below, zoom x 8. The synths now glide upwards. This is a great remixing idea, and demonstrates these producers’ focus on gliding once again.

NS004: Lil Silva – “Night Skanker” EP

Lil Silva is the closest Night Slugs gets to pure UK funky, but like the other artists on the label he abandons the style’s slightly more typical long vocal tracks in favour of a close and diligent attention to complex percussion tracks. The prominence of synths, meanwhile, brings him into the Night Slugs camp and their usage often looks towards grime. His music is not often what you’d call experimental, but Lil Silva is a confident producer with a distinctive sound, more than comfortable with a drum machine full of uncommon percussion and capable of building an effortless groove many times over.

The percussion is always first in. The regular electric kick of the title track is joined by wood blocks, congas and an agogo, all syncopated, before a more melodic element, whose notes seemed to be composed of electronically manipulated wood or temple blocks hit with a wooden stick, drives us to the drop. In ‘Perfussion’, detailed hi-hat play is suddenly swamped by syncopated cowbell, kick drum, timbales and wooden drumsticks struck against each other. ‘Against Yaself’ starts with a full snare drum pattern, while ‘Seasons’ does the same with timbales. The snares are back for ‘Pulse vs Flex’, and are joined by an open hi-hat and the echoing sounds of sirens and glass smashing. Lil Silva’s percussion palette is broad, and he uses it to build intricate structures riddled with syncopation that won’t compromise on groove.

But Lil Silva is an electronic musician too, bringing in specially rough synth timbres to get the most out of his brash hooks. He also regularly uses a low-frequency-oscillating flange effect as an unusual but highly effective way of giving his samples a longer-term structure and a cold, processed feel. It can be heard particularly clearly at the start of ‘Golds to Get’. And just when you think Lil Silva was going to be the first Night Slugger not to use some glide on their EP, he brings it in spectacular fashion on the final track. ‘Pulse vs. Flex’ combines Musical Mob’s ‘Pulse X’, a classic of early instrumental grime, with ‘Funky Flex’, an early Lil Silva tune. With its deep, brazen synth noises – both bass and kick drum, or neither – striking at the heart of garage, ‘Pulse X’ (along with early Wiley and Dizzee Rascal) signalled the alien beginnings of grime in 2003: fat, weird synths in stark contrast to the modest and sophisticated sine-wave hiccups of garage. The rapid downward glides in ‘Funky Flex’ arguably owe their existence to that downward-gliding pitch and low-pass filter on ‘Pulse X’s’ big drum, but being at a higher pitch they make a perfect cherry on top of it.

The hook of Musical Mob’s ‘Pulse X’ (by Youngstar), with the length of a bar highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 4. The big drum-come-bass hits are represented by the triangular shapes. Note that they have a downward-gliding pitch at the start as well as a downward-gliding low-pass filter, which successively cuts down higher frequencies over time, making an ‘ow’ sound.
Compare with Lil Silva’s refix:

The main drop material of Lil Silva’s ‘Pulse vs. Flex’, with the length of a bar highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 4. Talk about alien, this looks like it’s a section of an HR Giger painting. Lil Silva has added the longer, steeper curves above Pulse X’s big drum, consisting of two voices an octave apart.
Despite being by far his most alien tune, ‘Pulse vs. Flex’ is one of Lil Silva’s most popular. It rewinds back to the brave new world of early grime synths, before they were sidelined lest they endanger (conservative assumptions about) chart success, and quite literally builds on that foundation.

NS005: L-Vis 1990 – Forever You

Night Slugs cofounder and formidable DJ L-Vis 1990 had released quite a few tunes before this EP (for some reason the only one whose title isn’t in quotation marks) appeared in July. With its regular 4/4 kick drum, usually relatively mild hooks, linear structures and controlled, balanced production, his sound is closer to conventional synth-based house music than the label’s other artists.

Even if L-Vis 1990 seems to prefer the cool more often than the freaky (the label exists between these two aesthetic goalposts) Forever You’s title track certainly grabs the listener’s attention as well as any other Night Slugs track. Its drop features prominent triplets soaring over the solid ground of the house beat. The hook is four bars long, and in the third bar the synth is very subtly raised in pitch, imbuing the hook with a microtonal frisson, a relative weightlessness of pitch to go with the relative weightlessness of rhythm, like the way you feel yourself being gently pulled upwards as a lift goes downwards. As the hook finishes in its fourth bar, it quickly glides upwards as if to provide an upbeat before looping back.

The main hook of ‘Forever You’, with the length of four bars highlighted in the waveform below, zoom x 16. The arrow marks the slight pitch increase, the microtonal frisson, pointed out by the arrow.
The next track, ‘Into the Stars’, features a slowly downward-gliding synth, soaked in reverb and passing from the left channel to the right, throughout. With only three kicks in a bar, the house beat has one of its teeth missing and compensates by giving the third one the syncopated twist of funky. Low-pass filters slowly open and close over synths arranged in little isorhythmic structures. Then things get even more housey. ‘Do you Remember’ would approach a full-blown nineteen-eighties house pastiche if it weren’t for the eery synths lurking in the reverb making you look over your shoulder. I guess I’m not in love with classic house enough to find this track appealing – with lots of current producers trying their hands at classic styles like oldskool rave, jungle and even garage, a house nostalgia doesn’t even present much of a technical challenge. As those distinctive acid house TB-303 synth squelches appear, their filters opening up over several bars as per usual, I wonder how necessary this exercise in recreating the past really is when Night Slugs is usually so up for reaching into the future and establishing a sound for the present day.

Forever You is one of the few EPs to feature long, relatively unprocessed vocal tracks, which have pivotal roles in both ‘Forever You’ (vocals provided by Shadz) and ‘Do you Remember’. In the latter, a cornily sexy voice reminisces about the pleasures of house music. Such commentaries – again, talking about the appeals house music and dancing itself – were a common in classic house. So house’s referencing of itself in the past is itself a reference to self-referencing (…not particularly fresh).

NS006: Kingdom – “That Mystic” EP

Having already remixed Egyptrixx for the label, New York’s Kingdom became Night Slugs’s second North American artist with That Mystic in July. It continued in more or less the same vein as his single ‘Mind Reader’ / ‘You’ – lucid, energetic, uptempo house, made monumental with crisp reverb, revolving around R&B samples and melodically driven structures. Without dipping into overt reference or pastiche, the EP really shows the influence of a holistic London sound, as if from Kingdom’s relatively distant NYC vantage point the city’s trinity of UK funky, grime and dubstep appear as a single undifferentiated entity. Kingdom’s knack for crafting a tight, clever dancefloor essential incredibly successfully is rarely surpassed by his labelmates, and made That Mystic one of the releases I listened to most last year.

Kingdom doesn’t seem content to lay all his cards on the table through a conventional drop within the first two minutes of the track, as most others do. His carefully controlled structures are gradually deployed and built up throughout the track. ‘That Mystic’ begins with a human voice pitched down beyond the point of sounding human which is later joined by another voice, this time pitched up to the ‘chipmunk’ level. The pair outline a bare octave, with both voices stepping up to the octave from a streetwise minor seventh (the higher voice more rhythmically active in doing so as if in correspondence to its pitch). (If your head is full of harmonic baggage like mine is, this flattened seventh note might suggest that we’re really in the dominant of a minor home key, awaiting a perfect cadence to ride back home – it never comes, and the anticipation remains throughout). A rapidly trembling synth and vocal flourish ushers in a slim square-wave synth at 0:28, posturing with all the dangerous modality of grime, joined by slow claps, one in each bar. Kingdom is raising the temperature very high, very quickly with all this, and given that a big, insistent kick is already in place we don’t know what sort of drop to expect. It turns out to be an extravagant breakdown with new rhythms and timbres, in which all frequencies are spectacularly swept away.

A portentous comet: the breakdown of ‘That Mystic’, zoom x 2, with a slower sample rate. Note the weird pitch-gliding synth drums in the bottom left.
But nothing is dropped – the track is merely rebooted to the more fundamental level of a solo kick, and everything starts up again, but more quickly this time. A fuller drumloop debuts at 2:09, with rapid little runs on hi-hats. 2:25 sees another breakdown, foregrounding vocal samples and bringing in a dubstep-like beat. But soon we’re back on the march, and then everything slowly drops out, leaving us alone with that mystical low voice. The track uses an unconventional structure to build anticipation over a length of five whole minutes, and is the perfect way to start the EP.

‘Bust Broke’ does the same, but unlike ‘That Mystic’ it does have a clear payoff moment, which is left right until the end. The track has a highly syncopated feel throughout, stemming from the kick and elaborated on by combo of a conga hit on the rim and a snare drum. This groove seems to be mostly percussion, with reverby rave synths marking time every four bars. Then we get the most amazing breakdown, which, as in ‘That Mystic’, feels a bit like a pre-drop structure. Against a buzzing drone that glides downwards every four bars (like a vestige of the previous synths), R&B vocal samples creeping slowly out of a low-pass filter become a soulful chorus – humanity steps into the harsh, percussive, syncopated world, offering warm timbres and regular rhythms.

The ‘Bust Broke’ breakdown, zoom x 2, with a slower sample rate. Possibly Night Slugs’s prettiest spectrogram (click it for a better look), what with the messy waves of the voice contrasting with the grid of the sawtooth synth drone and finally overtaking it. It has a visual appeal independent of the music, but there is definitely an aesthetic structure shared by the two.
After a hilariously lo-fi gunshot sound effect extinguishes this soulful interlude, the rave synths return and have developed into a killer hook at 2:54, after nearly three minutes of intense anticipation.

‘Fogs’ returns to the dubstep-beat feel visited in ‘That Mystic’, and uses a Wiley-esque synth pattern intimately woven into the percussion to harmonise what turns out much like a song without words. Again, Kingdom goes for the rawness of open intervals – the tuned drums go up and down an octave, while the vocal sample is based on fifths and fourths and another one of those flattened sevenths. It’s the Wiley-esque pattern that so sweetly flutters down to the minor third via fifths, fourths, a minor seventh and a minor sixth (in that order), moving successively from harsh, bare intervals along a continuum to the more tender intervals. And these intervals really are powerful and robust, like a castle, with the first fifth catapulted in on a glissando. The vocal section is then harmonised by a synth creeping upwards, note by note. Later, the pace is increased when the kick leaves the lumbering dubstep beat and goes four to the floor, which you don't see every day.

‘Pang’ is something a bit weirder. It starts with an eery melody that sounds like it was created from the sound of someone hitting a playground climbing frame with a stick over an uneven beat, which with its one kick and syncopated conga, makes it feel like you’re trying to walk with one leg much longer than the other. A gliding synth moan joins in, and soon some funky percussion brings in a drop. For all its beguiling surrealism, the track never reaches the excitement of the previous tracks because it never uses a 4/4 kick drum (or much kick at all, really), and it’s difficult to make funky percussion work without it.

‘Pang’s’ sibling ‘Seven Chirp’ is a little more relatable, mostly because its latin-like acoustic guitar squashed up against R&B samples is reminiscent of mid to late nineteen-nineties pop. Accordingly, the beat is a little bit more garagy, but the heavy reverb on the background synths jars with the dryness of the guitar and samples in the wrong sort of way, and the vocal samples are too atomised and arrhythmic to get anything dancy going. The slightly more experimental, introspective side of Kingdom revealed on these last two tracks is intriguing, but feels a bit odd sat next to his dancefloor bangers – perhaps this sound will be differentiated into its own strain of his style with more confidence in 2011.

NS007: Velour – “The Velvet Collection”

After the force with which most of Night Slugs’s prior releases had hit, it took a little longer for the sweet, summery vibes of The Velvet Collection to grown on me. Originally incognito, Velour turned out to be a tag team of synth-funky pinup Julio Bashmore and intriguing dubstep innovator Hyetal. The combination is a really good one. Bashmore’s artisan funky euphoria, with its bracing synth-pad vistas, certainly complements the synth arrangements Hyetal favours, especially since the latter tends to reject bass weight for intricate crystals of treble pixelation, having apparently brought the innovations of Hyperdub 2008 towards a slicker, more rank-and-file dubstep context.

Like Forever You, The Velvet Collection is more cool than freaky, and ‘Booty Slammer’ is full of character. The lazy little spread chords, each note a pixel, roll into the groove like hundreds and thousands sprinkled into a rich bowl of maple syrup in slow motion (nom). Later a wobbly, gliding sawtooth synth solo staggers in and says something just right. After the pounding of Kingdom’s kick drums, the discretion of Velour’s kicks are refreshing; after Kingdom’s tense melodies eked out phrase by phrase in the booming silence, Velour’s lingering, slightly delayed synths are relaxing.

The slightly sleazy ‘The Scent of Romance’ follows with more of a 4/4 house feel and some mildly disturbing samples of a deep voice describing his love for James Bond and ‘dancing girls’. Little triangle-wave interjections take the place of hi-hats, while syncopated sawtooth minor triads (cf Zomby's One Foot Ahead of the Other) drive things forward. At 3:00 a breakdown unveils some synths climbing upward, each foothold wavering queasily in pitch.

The harp-like glissandos and soaring ninth-reaching hooks in ‘Kick it Till it Breaks’ make it a hidden gem, as do the blue G-funk squeal and upstanding bass interjections. ‘She Wore Velour’s’ cosmic synths are brought down to earth by the mumbly almost-walking bass and treats us to a final couple of those delectable synth solos (they're great, I wonder whether it was Bashmore or Hyetal who did them). Easily overlooked next to the indomitable power of Kingdom, the funky rudeness of Lil Silva, the bizarreness of Egyptrixx or the magnetic extroversion of Girl Unit, Velour’s cruising, big sunglass-wearing grooves nonetheless did a good job of rounding out Night Slugs’s character as a label.

NS008: Girl Unit – “Wut”

With his second EP for the label, Girl Unit changed direction. Wut traded I.R.L's gliding hooks and fear for richly orchestrated harmonies and emotional grandeur. The combination of power and soul proved very successful, with the title track here was perhaps Night Slugs’s biggest hit so far. If I had to place it stylistically it seems to have a bit to do with Guido, the semi-forgotten Bristol producer who added the lavish melodic outpourings of a synth orchestra to the dubstep formula, forming part of the ‘Purple’ strain of melodically aware electro dubstep along with Joker and Gemmy. While Guido managed to unfurl spine-tingling harmonic narratives over long periods, Wut does little more than cram a huge show of feeling into small, looping units, which then repeat over and over again. In true Girl Unit style, ‘Wut’ is at least two minutes longer than it probably needed to be, but this isn’t a problem in a DJ set – in fact it doesn’t even need to be rewound, it effectively does that itself.

This is not to say that these units aren’t very cleverly composed and very effective. ‘Wut’s’ appeal lies in the minor harmonies, dominated by the most anguished of triad inversions, the second, constantly creeping upwards towards the minor third of the home key, with a minor sixth mournfully sliding down to the fifth on the percussively emphasised downbeat. The high-pitched vocal samples that enact this are highly effective in themselves, shifting in timbre and fusing with the high starlight synths, their only truly intelligible symbol being the outraged cry of ‘what?’. Had the harmony been major rather than minor, the string-like sawtooth power chords would have been a little more reminiscent of epic nineteen-eighties synth pop, which is why the track bears a passing resemblance to Nicki Minaj’s ‘Blazin’, which pitches up a sample of the minor intro to ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ until it reaches ‘Wut’s’ shrill register.

The next two tracks are the most Guido-like, with strings, triangles, timpani and brass (or is that a big church organ) in ‘Every Time’, though no especially prominent bass. The main drop rests on a minor sixth inverted pedal in the home key, a note that isn’t in the home triad and actually clashes with the fifth across a semitone, so it sounds a bit dissonant. This little bit of pain is really hammered home in the fifth bar when it’s split into insistent quavers, suggesting that the relative dissonance was somewhat deliberate, yet it still doesn’t feel as clear and enticing a freakshow as the horrors of ‘I.R.L.’. With its mix of orchestral hits, spinning synths and harmonic habits, ‘Showstoppa’ could almost have been produced by Guido himself. It would sound at home in a set of strong and sophisticated grime, next to the likes of Terror Danjah.

Wut may turn out to be one of the last hurrahs for dubstep’s halfstep beat. Neither the title track nor the others would’ve felt nearly so monumental without its rhythmically slower gait, but it’s feeling less and less exciting these days in comparison to 4/4, or indeed anything more rhythmically active. While I clearly can see its appeals, I don’t think I can go all the way with the hype that’s surrounded the EP (if I was inclined to blog a long countdown of ‘bests’ in 2010, I wouldn’t put Wut or its title track very near the top, as many have). Its attempt to engineer some big bad anthems feels a bit obvious, maybe even a bit overdriven, and the fact that Night Slugs had built up huge momentum by the time of the EP’s prominence and release may have lead us to trust its quality a bit more than it deserved. Having said this, it is indeed a huge dancefloor tune in the right hands. I was there when this video was filmed, and that moment was every bit as amazing as it looks, a real highlight (just proves you should go and hear all this in clubs rather than an armchair, really).

NS009: Jam City – “Magic Drops”

Jam City was behind the clever uptempo refix of the band Endgames’s 1984 slow funk jam ‘Ecstasy’, which was put out on white label 12” vinyl in August by Night Slugs. It was joined by a couple of other worthy tunes, a refix of DJ Deeon’s ‘Let Me Bang’ which added warm gliding sawtooth drones, and some funky raw square bass in ‘Shut the Lights Off (Devil Refix)’. Hopefully these tracks will be on the upcoming Jam City album, because that white label sold out pretty quickly and it’s not on mp3 (I missed out). The Magic Drops EP arrived in December, and like most Night Slugs artists he switched to explore the possibilities of a new style. The shift was dramatic – from raw punky refix mechanic to mayor of surrealist hip-hop wonderland – but the innovation and ingenuity, particularly when it comes to percussion, remained and will hopefully continue to remain into 2011.

The clue to the world of Magic Drops is in the name. ‘Magic’, of course, and ‘drops’, as in ‘drops acid’, which put together sound like some kind of candy or drug lingo. The cover depicts a load of water slides, whose funtime connotations are spookily undermined by those cold, minty colours and apparent night-time setting (as on all Night Slugs covers). The first thing we hear in the title track is a downward glissando on a harp-like e-piano, as if we’d been magicked there with the wave of a wand. Then we notice an odd halfstep beat constructed out of the clunky noises of hydraulic machinery, like the chassis of a pimped-out muscle car bouncing up and down. Little synth pixies mark time as we approach the magic drop. Then a robot butterfly launches into the air. Then someone clears their throat.

The main hook at the drop is a teasingly slow upward glide (yet another hook strongly characterised by a gliding synth, but it’s not like there’s a focused aesthetic direction in UK dance music or anything, right? ;-), which begins practically in semitones before crawling upwards in microtones over two bars and then sliding back down in the last two beats. Its volume swells with each crotchet beat. As if to assert its dominance, it appears in different octaves.

The main hook of ‘Magic Drops’, with the length of four bars highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 4. Here you can clearly see how the rate of pitch-increase over time is changed at the beginning of every new bar – another innovative way to glide.
The worm has turned: the main hook of ‘Magic Drops’, with the length of four bars highlighted in the waveform beneath, zoom x 16. It wouldn’t be the first time a groovy monophonic hook was called a ‘worm’.
The second half of the track fills out the world harmonically with blissful e-pianos and a synth made to sound like a sunny nineteen-eighties US rock electric guitar.

‘Scene Girl’ begins in a similar manner, with machinic beats and onbeat interjections, but turns into something else. The sound of pornography takes us to the drop – despite this moment of explicitness, the whole EP has a weirdly, vaguely pornographic feel, not in terms of content so much as its fantasy slow-dance halfstep gaze at sleazy synths (I’d like to say that this mood was satirical and subversive rather than celebratory, but it’s a bit close to call). The buzzing bass that follows moves on-beat but reaches maximum volume just after the beat, making it feel beautifully languid. When the treble elements are added, the four-bar loop sounds like a bizarre take on the kind of backing you get in a slower, more sentimental track on a mainstream rap album of recent years.

‘2 Hot’ has a similar but slightly different flavour. The percussion is slightly more conventional (but still not what you’d actually call ‘conventional’), and the ever-resolving bass is both harmonically and timbrally relaxing, even when it’s joined by borderline dissonant pitch-wavering synths hanging down like alien tentacles. Magic Drops finished Night Slugs’s year as its least dancy EP, but the worlds it conjures are detailed, beguiling and lurid – often excessively so, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

NSAS001: Night Slugs Allstars Volume 1

Night Slugs’s first CD arrived at the end of the year, and is something of a manifesto for the label. It contained some of the best tracks from the EPs, as well as some remixes and new material. Unbelievably, it begins with yet another version of Mosca’s ‘Square One’, a VIP, which manages to push the track into a tighter structure and adds new elements but offers relatively little. Bok Bok’s remix of ‘I.R.L’ is characteristically bold and strange, incorporating pregnant pauses filled only with the reverberation of a strange upward-gliding miniature cymbal into its drop, and craftily redeploying the elements of the original. L-Vis 1990 and T Williams’s ‘Stand Up’ has a punchy syncopated kick and a bizarre, evolving drop whose timbre changes create rhythm and incorporates a downward-gliding motif halfway through. Bok Bok joins Cubic Zirconia for a dub version of ‘Reclash’ (which the label had earlier released on vinyl), a very complex, constantly developing track with a swiftly gliding bass. Optimum’s unique penchant for broken, blink-and-you-miss-them synth patterns is out in force on ‘Broken Embrace’ (his ‘Crash Riddim’ has graced many Night Slugs DJ sets and mixes with its irresistible parallel semiquavers). Jacques Greene, another newcomer, supplies an accomplished but relatively bland house number that fails to resist the temptation to straight-up pastiche acid house’s squelchy synths for a second time on the label.

Encouragingly since there’ll be albums from them this year, it’s Jam City and Egyptrixx who provide the most interesting material here. Jam City’s ‘Arp Jam’ is dancier than Magic Drops and more 4/4 than the 'Ecstasy' white label, with a funky rhythm arranged onto his typically outré percussion collection. At the lovely drop, the ironclad treble synth twang (like someone rapidly plucking low piano strings) branches out into the bass, and tambourines double the rhythmic pulse. On the fourth beat of every other bar, there’s a little percussive glissando upward, while at the beginning of every other bar there’s a pow (yeah, much of Jam City’s percussion escapes any established technical language) – it’s like a catapult is pulled back and fired in the course of two beats.

Egyptrixx’s ‘Liberation Front’ is a largely characteristic outing for the glide-obsessed Toronto producer, though slightly more minimal, linear and driven than usual. The hook is a single enveloped square-wave pitch, bent downwards as it fades away, which goes through different degrees of overdriving modulation while queasy synth stabs glide downward behind it. Pitch-wavering treble lines soon engage in a ground-to air shootout with the pitch, and after a breakdown and a new drop, the square-wave pitch finds itself with a different gliding structure:

The second drop of ‘Liberation Front’ zoom x 4, its new glide structure clearly visible.
It usually takes a lot for an album to surpass the promise of early singles and EPs in UK underground dance. With Jam City and Egyptrixx albums on the way from Night Slugs following the label’s rise to fame, the stage looks set for the label to become complacent and subside into mediocrity after all that much hype. I hope this won’t happen, and I don’t think it will. Their rise will only continue upward if they cherish and develop what makes their music unusual and unique rather than derivative or retrograde. But it’s difficult to predict what the label will look like a year from now, what Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 will sound like. It’d be great to see a solo Bok Bok EP as tight and stylistically focused as Wut, The Velvet Collection or Magic Drops, I’m surprised there hasn’t been one already. It’d also be great, not to mention timely, to see a lot more female talent on a label where the number of blokes runs into double figures and women are only represented by the occasional remix or collaboration.

Much of what the Night Slugs artists have done has been to consolidate some of the various new directions emerging in UK dance in the last three years, salvaging the fallout of the 2008-9 impact especially, situate them in a relatively more relatable context, and in the process continue the reaction against the increasingly stale smell of dubstep. But Night Slugs do have something new and interesting to offer with their gliding synths, funky groove explorations and new frontiers in the spirit of dequantisation, and it is something focused and stylistic.

The prominent presence of gliding synths over many different kinds of beat and bpms may not sound like a normal way of building a style. It might sound like I’m misunderstanding how styles work in electronic dance music to say that all these (superficially) different sounding tracks can belong to the same style simply because they have gliding synths, but I would assert that the rules for what kinds of musical elements go towards cohering aesthetic scenes are changing (in fact, they were never really fixed to begin with). To see the unity of a musical style is to see a certain pattern of change and repetition between musical events, whatever musical elements change and whatever musical elements do or don’t repeat.

The Night Slugs artists and their allies immediately outside the label do have an aesthetic focus and do have a characteristic style. It’s not about hybridism, sampling, nostalgia or making references, at least not primarily. It’s about deliberately exploring the sensuous qualities of synth pitch, synth timbre and synth texture at close quarters, especially in the treble range, at the same time as exploring all the kinds of groove that can come out of edgy, syncopated percussion. Formalistically as well as metaphorically, it’s about using the vast and still uncharted potential of the synthesiser and the drum machine to draw new lines and new shapes in musical space.

Big up JE, who alerted me early on to the existence of more of the tracks covered up here, on and off the Night Slugs label, than I can count.

Misc.

2011-01-17T11:52:00.006Z

Before Christmas I wrote a piece for The Guardian's Comment is Free on a similar theme to my post 'Images of Reality and Student Surrealism', looking at the role of art in the protests. Speaking of which, I found an amazing image of surreal reality that I hadn't seen before, students inside the Tate Modern gallery on Day X3:

Also found this one of the Book Bloc raring to go (find out more about them here):

And I was interviewed for this pretty spot-on little film about the music criticism and the internet.

RIP Trish Keenan

2011-01-17T11:25:00.008Z

Last week we heard the sad news of Trish Keenan's untimely death, which comes as a huge blow to British experimental music. She was the lead singer in Broadcast, a band I've been a fan of ever since someone at my school, having heard I was getting into unusual pop, lent me the excellent Tender Buttons. I don't need to argue that without Keenan and her band the music and art of hauntology so many of us appreciate today would not just be much the poorer, but probably wouldn't exist. The band was more than part of a movement, however - it was a movement of its own that elegantly took in the past, the present and a future, both cultural and personal. Tributes have been written by Joe Muggs (which includes a mixtape by Keenan), Richard King and Pete Paphides.

Images of Reality and Student Surrealism

2010-12-12T16:04:00.012Z

Screenshot of the BBC News Website on Day X3.
The student protest movement that rose to sudden visibility a month ago with a 50,000-strong march through central London, culminating in an occupation of the buildings on Millbank housing the Conservative Party HQ, has not only persisted but dramatically diversified. The next major day of action, ‘Day X’, took place across the country on the 24th of November and saw dozens of university occupations as well as the first example of large-scale police response, with police containing or kettling protestors (whose ranks now included thousands of teenagers) in freezing conditions on London’s Whitehall for over nine hours, forced to remain within police lines without knowing when crossing them will be possible. Day X2 was on the 30th of November, and this time protestors largely managed to avoid being kettled by splitting into groups and moving at high speed through London in the snow, getting as far east as Bank and as far west as Hyde Park Corner. Thursday’s Day X3 was in many ways a climax of the movement, coinciding with a vote in parliament on tripling the cap on tuition fees and ending with kettling and new heights of violence from both police and protestors. The vote was won by a relatively slim majority, but with further cuts to higher education and to the public sector in general to follow in the coming months the groups and networks that swiftly emerged in the past month have vowed to continue the fight.
Horses charge the crowd of protestors trying to esape the kettle. The obvious artistic reference would be this.
I was out demonstrating on each of these occasions, and on Day X3 I was caught in a police kettle that enclosed 2-3000 protestors in London's Parliament Square. Upon attempting to leave at around 3pm, I was caught in a crowd that was battling against police lines and subsequently charged by police on horseback. At this point Alfie Meadows, a 20-year-old philosophy student, was struck in the head by a police baton, causing bleeding in his brain that required emergency brain surgery that evening. When this struggle died down, we waited in Parliament Square for five hours, with no more food or water than we’d thought to bring, and no more warmth than from the dodgy smoke of makeshift fires. After sunset many protestors, their anger exacerbated by being kettled, turned on the surrounding government buildings, causing riot police to further enclose us and using batons to do so once more. Just after Big Ben struck 9pm, the police surged forward with a roar, shepherding us onto Westminster Bridge. We assumed – and police officers had implied – that we were finally walking to our freedom, but instead we were kettled once again right there on the bridge for ninety minutes, this time packed together and with very little room to move. I regained my liberty at 11pm.
Protestors are kettled on Westminster Bridge at 10:30pm
The internet has enabled the proliferation of pictures and video from the protests to an unprecedented extent. A great, representative compilation of Day X3 pictures and video can be found here. Some of these images have reached the press and attained iconic status, such as the photo of a masked youth high-kicking the ground floor windows of the Millbank buildings highlighted in my last post. The most recent example of this is the photo of Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, a Duchess of Cornwall, panicking behind car windows as protestors who’d moved to Regent Street attacked their Rolls Royce. Dom Fox has written about this picture, which appeared on the front of most of yesterday’s national newspapers. Naturally it distracted the media from the rioting elsewhere – not to mention the cause of the protestors, which is apparently expunged at the slightest hint of criminal or irreverent activity – but it did give the day’s events a surprisingly old-school revolutionary flavour.
I can’t help but reiterate my slight nervousness about doing aesthetics – aestheticising – during a time like this. But this time, more than an exercise in getting our priorities right and speaking out or demonstrating rather than getting lost in analysis of the latest mp3s, it’s also a little erroneous to be aestheticising the events themselves beyond what is necessary. Aestheticising can publicise and galvanise a cause, but wallowing in pathos and rhetoric becomes complacent and inflammatory, colouring a representation leads to misrepresentation, and celebrating the thrill of conflict is outright dangerous. Yes, everything is aestheticised, life – that is, ‘real’ life – may be continuous with art and inseparable from it, but it isn’t a nineteenth-century Romantic painting, however the fors or againsts portray it.

A key problem for the relationship between aesthetics and political struggle, then, is that of realism. Realism and ‘reality’ are relative, selective and ideologically constituted. Tied to the necessity of social action (be it financial cuts or demonstration), reality is the political battleground, and ideas or images of it form horizons beyond which imagination of alternatives becomes difficult and discouraged. Few have articulated this better than Mark ‘K-Punk’ Fisher, whose recent book Capitalist Realism has described the rise of eponymous capitalist construction of reality and its attendant social and institutional imperatives in recent decades, which become unquestionable because they are ‘realistic’. The concept has become a valuable tool in challenging the similarly ‘realistic’ (i.e. ideologically motivated) necessities of cuts to institutions such as universities.
For me, the photograph above sharply stands out from the rest of the images to come out of Day X3 not just for its brutal presentation of evidence for violence, for police brutality (the word brutal often connotes ‘unadorned’, ‘naïve’, ‘raw’ - red raw), but for its equality brutal presentation of this problem of realism in political struggle itself. It was taken in the Jeremy Bentham Room at University College London (whose occupation by students since Day X had become one of the most successful and famous of the student occupations) and uploaded to Twitter by New Statesman columnist and student protest reporter Laurie Penny. It shows a student who’d managed to escape the police kettle with several bruises on her/his back and arms, but several extra dimensions of meaning are added to the image by the presence of that day’s copy of London’s free newspaper, the Evening Standard. Perhaps it’s there to attest to the date the photo was taken, as if the subject had been kidnapped, but it’s the headline that launches the image’s commentary on realism. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the (formerly popular with students) Liberal Democrat party, the junior partner in the coalition government, is a particular focus of student anger, as he’d promised (signed a pledge, in fact) prior to the election not to raise the cap on tuition fees. Now on the day of the vote, he announces that those opposing raising the cap are ‘dreamers’, living not in the real world, but in a dream world. In the article, which can be read here, Clegg backs the plans because he’s dealing with ‘the way the world is’. Obviously, this begs the question as to what world, what reality he thought he was living in earlier this year. Clegg’s partnership with the Conservative Party has evidently ‘woken’ him from this ‘dream’.

The paper’s headline opposes capitalist realism with a student surrealism. But of course, what could be more brutally real than the naked body marked by signs of material rupture, the painful physical embodiment of struggle. The body is the first fact of human reality. The image is differentiated into the paper on the right – a world of relative abstraction, discourse, ideology, language, symbolism, thought, opinion, representation – and the flesh on the left – a world of relative corporeality, of bodily reality. Then our understanding of the political context tells a story. The students are struck because they’re in a dream world, punished for their bad, defective education, and forcefully woken by Clegg’s establishment, brought back to reality by the discouraging pain of the police batons. But at the same time it’s the student who attacks Clegg by revealing her/his wounds, saying ‘no, I live in a world of brutally real physical injury committed to my body, look, here it is, this is its most basic sign’. We can no longer tell which side is dreaming.

The ‘realist’ coalition’s projection of student surrealism has been playfully adopted and subverted by the student movement. One famous slogan from a Day X3 placard was the surely Situationist-inspired ‘Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible’, which I later saw scrawled on a wall in Parliament Square. This easily misunderstood sentence simply suggests that the borders of ruling class-sponsored ‘reality’ shouldn’t be considered absolute and final. One group of students carried thick polystyrene shields covered in cardboard and painted up to look like famous, over-sized books of philosophy, sociology and literature. The image below, which could have been a Neo Rauch painting, will appeal to fans of hauntology:
Also out in force were such thuggish texts as Negative Dialectics, Brave New World, Down and Out in Paris and London, Society of the Spectacle, One-dimensional Man, Phenomenology of Spirit, Being and Event and Just William.
The battle is for reality and for a new reality. Aesthetics must necessarily be a weapon in that battle, but like violence itself it is a dangerous weapon – readily abused. And most frighteningly in this case, nothing prepares people for seeing that tension between aesthetics and reality like higher education itself.
Sixth-form students occupy The Mound in Oxford on Day X2.
Lots of music criticism coming up here very soon. In the meantime, do look at Dan Hancox’s post on music in the Parliament Square kettle including a playlist, and Blackdown’s brilliant Grime / Dubstep / Funky end of year piece for Pitchfork.

Being Heard

2010-11-15T14:30:00.026Z

The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. - Emmeline Pankhurst via Laurie Penny
Lately I’ve been thinking harder and harder about the justifications for using my energy (and that of others) on musical aesthetics in times like these. Writing thousands of words explaining the exotic appeals of underground pop’s next best thing doesn’t come out as an obvious priority when vigorous collective opposition to the government’s horrifying attacks on social equality is urgently needed. Even expansive commentary on the politics of musical creativity and the musical imagination seems a little too much like an indulgence next to the tasks of raising awareness, organisation and action. As I gesticulate in front of people, ‘no, no, music really is an important part of our political lives,’ I suspect that I’m appearing a bit naïve at best.
All the photos in this post were taken by Bradley L. Garrett
While there’s a certain immediate practical truth to this concern, it’s also the case that to divide political action and art / aesthetics into wheat and chaff respectively is very close to the sort of reasoning currently being employed to eviscerate higher education in this country. The splitting of art from life in general is an arrangement that has suited capitalism’s commodification of the former very well. In this arrangement Art is that glorious winged escape from life into the meaningless heavens of emotion, fantasy and madness, a journey that can become the property of every sanctified individual for only 79p at the iTunes store. Or art can have ‘political themes’: messages preferably conveyed through a set of easily denotive elements (such as lyrics or images) while the mode of production remains essentially the same. In other words, Art may address and enhance life, but as a luxury or specialist commodity it stays at a remove from its practical concerns and present meanings.
This is exactly the ideology behind the government’s proposed destruction of arts and humanities in higher education, of course. Now not just art itself, but even learning about art – thought itself – becomes a luxury or else a pre-2008-crisis-style investment in a future career. It’s certainly not a natural entitlement any more. Individuals benefit, so individuals must pay for it. And when it’s all reduced to monetary value, an arts or humanities degree emerges as a relatively poor investment compared to engineering, economics or business studies, or even no degree at all. But hey, at least these people will eventually acquire the disposable income to buy whatever it is that the iTunes store recommends and listen to it after work. And in the meagre instances where artistic meaning gets a look in at universities, it may well resemble something like this.In turn the elite professionalisation of music-making (and the musical disempowering of the majority that goes along with it) will grow even worse as all forms of instrumental tuition come to be seen as a career investment, especially after secondary school. This won’t just apply to classical musicians, but in the coming decades it could have a powerful effect on the growing disciplines of music technology and popular music performance.
My own field, however, is music as a humanity. This often goes by the name ‘musicology’, but this term is often held to describe just one of a number of related discourses. I’ve just started a course of PhD research on the so-called ‘lo-fi’ aesthetics of popular music’s outsiders – those who swim against the prevailing current of musical professionalisation and the music industry – and my ability to do this is entirely reliant on funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who may be looking at cuts of well over 50%. My research is unlikely to be decisively threatened by the cuts, but the future of research like mine is in severe peril. Having become aware of the value of my education and the opportunity of my research in a way that future generations of students may never be makes me all the more determined to protest.
It’s not just research itself that’s threatened, of course, but the benefits of learning that further education brings to individuals, society and social discourse as a whole. Take the idea that there is more to the meaning of music than its marginalised role in Western capitalist society, for example. When musicology was still a young discipline, many musicologists unconsciously towed the Western capitalist line that music had little to do with life, that it was meaningless but luxurious. Since then, the discipline has gotten wise and taken a more critical turn, becoming conscious of a deeply political sociology in music-making. It is just this sort of insight, this consciousness, this ability of future generations of students to imagine a subversion of the dominant social ideology and step outside of it to view society and humanity with a more critical eye that is so threatened by the rise in tuition fees and the cuts to higher education. Without it, society cannot improve, but can only suffer ever greater injustices ever more gladly.
This is why I took part in the demonstration in central London last Wednesday. With the minor damaging and occupation of the Millbank buildings housing the Conservative Party headquarters, it became a very significant, even historical event. There has been a huge wave of responses on the internet, among them:

Nina Power in the Guardian - 'Student Protest: We Are All In This Together'

Laurie Penny in New Statesmen - 'Inside the Millbank Tower Riots'

Laurie Penny in New Statesmen - 'The Power of the Broken Pane'

University of London Union Clare Solomon's high-octane debate with Tory MP Roger Gale on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show

Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb - 'Just the Beginning'

Neil Roberts in Londonist - 'Student Fees Protest: A View From the Front'

Paul Sagar at Bad Conscience - 'In Praise of Riots'

... and its follow-up - 'Seconds Out, Round Two'

Liberal Conspiracy - 'The Occupation of Millbank: What the Press Missed'

London Evening Standard Editorial: 'Expect More Rage if the Rich and Poor Divide Gets Bigger'

History is Made at Night - 'The Battle of Millbank' (includes footage)

A must-read in a more satirical vein - Trifling Offence - 'National Day of Mourning for Windows of Millbank Tower'

... its follow-up - 'We Are All Windows Now'

... and the Facebook group - 'Become a Window'

And the next outing - Guardian: 'Student Protests Planned on a National Scale on 24 November'

That day music stepped out of the record collection paradigm and played a role in raising morale, coordinating chants, and most importantly cohering and drawing attention to ourselves as an organised collective. Just south of Trafalgar Square as the march was starting I was near the back and still stationary, tightly packed in and shivering with hundreds of strangers from dozens of different universities. Eventually a sound system started up and boomed out Cee Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’, a powerfully catchy, upbeat song and a perfect choice at that moment.

Press play and turn the volume up nice and high...
Recognising the sentiment we all turned, smiled, and started dancing and singing along, our eyes meeting with a strong and implicit sense of mutual understanding and agreement. There were performers on instruments too. The music of drummers and samba bands contributed to the sense of a shared mood. Outside the Houses of Parliament a student brass band were playing a characteristically old-fashioned and very English sort of music, and yet it only enhanced the atmosphere of diverse voices contributing in every unique way to one cause. By the time I arrived at the Millbank buildings, sound-systems were playing techno, dub, and if I’m not mistaken, Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’. Together with our reasons for being there, the sense of collectivity that music instilled that day was ten times as strong as that whipped up at the very best of raves, and I’ll never forget it.
But of course it wasn’t the disrespectful, insubordinate swearing of our singing ‘Fuck You’ or the sonic warfare of Aphex Twin that outraged most of the mainstream media. It was the ‘Battle of Millbank’, encapsulated in that one image of someone kickboxing a window on the ground floor of the Conservative Party headquarters. The photograph has swiftly reached iconic status. Shame to say it, but over 50,000 young people standing together in central London are relatively easy for the public and the powerful to ignore, especially in an ideological climate stoked by the propaganda of taking the bitter pill. But some broken windows, some graffiti and thousands of young voters chanting ‘Nick Clegg, shame on you for turning blue’ and ‘Tory scum’ and all the clear symbolism that goes with it cannot be so easily ignored. So the protest had to become something else in order for it to be ignored. It had to cross a threshold of excess in which it becomes different in kind. The moment windows were broken, a valid protest was transmuted, ‘highjacked’ into ‘mindless violence’, perpetrated by (take your pick) criminal anarchist yobs or arrogant, selfish kids as threathened commentators attempt to claw back the power to ignore and blot out the protest.
But every aspect of the protest – both the acceptable banner-waving at the march and the anger on Millbank – were continuous within the same historical moment and cannot be divided. Just as music and aesthetics isn’t outside of life, the literal and symbolic destruction of government property was not outside of the protest. The apparently unbearable truth is that it is only a tiny and natural step from giving anger a voice and giving it more material consequences. The two are not different in kind. The only difference is that this ‘violence’ is bolder and less readily ignored. The real anxiety underneath the outraged reaction to the Battle of Millbank isn’t the rationalizing lie of ‘shame on this mindless, invalidating violence’ but ‘how dare you take the step of trying to stop us from ignoring you’.
As so many have already pointed out, the destruction of a sumptuous lobby is nothing compared to the infinitely more serious violence about to be inflicted on society’s ability to think and imagine. Music can be a part of that fight, a way of cohering and celebrating it with a single passionate voice. If you are angry, make music using whatever you have, music strange and unique to this historical moment. Plug it into an amplifier. And be heard.

Just don’t randomly throw fire extinguishers.

on returning

2010-11-03T10:37:00.008Z

No relation.
Well hello. I've finally finished the first draft of my book Infinite Music - I'm pretty pleased with it and its first readers have made noises of approval. No release date as yet, but it won't be before Christmas. In the meantime I'll be swatting away the cobwebs and cranking this old blog back into life, hopefully returning to its former levels of activity and longwindedness. I'm aiming to have a Rouge-classic size post up in the next few weeks.

Until then there's a few things to be pointed out. Firstly I've updated the links on the right-hand side of this page after untold months of neglect. There's a load of great sites in there now, many of them should by rights have been up there at least a year ago. Have a gander.

While up to my neck in infinite music I took an afternoon off to visit London's Handel House museum with John Maus and chat to him on a bench for Upset the Rhythm TV. The resulting video touches on harmony and melody in song-writing, film music and the role of music in society, and contains excerpts from that evening's jaw-dropping show. Try to ignore my habit of incessantly pinching the end of my nose, of which I was shamefully ignorant until seeing the video. Having admitted I have a problem I'm now taking steps.

Paul Morley did several pieces on Dubstep (and the genre formerly known as) a month ago. His video interview with Ikonika is particularly worth your while.

Over at her blog Popular Demand, Anwyn Crawford has asked some very pertinent questions about today's pop.

This amazing little documentary follows Terror Danjah around his ends and includes footage of 'the godfather of grime' working on beats.

2010-07-06T22:36:00.015+01:00

It's probably got to the point where I should make the customary apology for lack of blogging: sorry about that. I've been busy with a number of things, but it's mainly been researching and writing Infinite Music that's kept me away. Got a few chapters down now and I'm really pleased with it so far. Once it's finished it'll be back to normal here, but in the mean time, I have a few morsels to offer.

Firstly, the picture above. It's by William Daniels, part of the new Saatchi exhibition which I haven't been to see yet. Sort of interesting isn't it. Apparently Daniels made a paper effigy of that portrait of William Blake and painted it in oils. This summer, upright 'Street Pianos' have been left in public places in London and last week I had loads of fun playing one of them in Bunhill Fields, northeast of the City, where Blake's grave is. After this pic and my A flat ninth chords, he's probably having even more of a spin in it this year than usual.

Secondly, Juke music from Chicago is making waves in London. I had a go at the footwork dance that goes with it and I fell over. But these guys don't, they really, really don't:

Thirdly, if you haven't read the first two parts of Blackdown's 'Greatest Rhythms of Dubstep' series yet (first one: Exemen, 'Far East', second one: Mala's incredible 'Learn'), then do. Great insight, and an important reminder that great dubstep can never be reduced to bass.

Finally, as much as it pains me not to have the time to write thousands of words on these, here are some of the highlights of my listening over the last few months (some of them aren't so new, many of them aren't very surprising, but they're all worth a good look):

Actress: Splazsh
American Men: Cool World
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Before Today
Bugskull: Communication
Charles Trees: The Dream EP
Downliners Sekt: Hello Lonely Hold the Nation EP
Dubbel Dutch: Throwback EP
Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma
Girl Unit: I.R.L. EP
Jneiro Jarel (Dr. Who Dat?): Beyond 2morrow
Lil Silva: Night Skanker EP
Lone: Ecstacy and Friends
Lukid: Onandon
Matrix Metals: Flamingo Breeze
Mount Kimbie: Crooks and Lovers and the two remix EPs on Hot Flush
Mowgli: 93
Onra: Long Distance
Oscar McClure: Compost EP
Oval: Oh EP (and) O
Ramadanman: Glut / Tempest
Rangers: Suburban Tours
'Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music from South Africa'
Shlohmo: Shlomoshun Deluxe (and) Camping EP
Wiley: Avalanche Music
Woebot: Moanad

Out of the Mould, the New

2010-03-21T16:19:00.020Z

‘You wanna see what I see.’ - The Spaceape, ‘Time Patrol’.
One of the most exciting things about hauntology, I think, is that it’s possibly one of the first aesthetic movements in quite a while to see some very specific equivalence in technique between sonic and visual art. I’d been looking long and hard for a visual counterpart to the music of The Caretaker, William Basinski and lately Indignant Senility – I knew one definitely existed, it was just a matter of finding it – when I suddenly found a postcard of an image from one Doug Harvey yesterday.

The Caretaker, Basinski and Indignant Senility (call them the ‘playback hauntologists’) create new pieces of music from ancient tape and vinyl recordings that are treated or weathered down in various ways until they become an ironic, emotionally-laden dark ambient noise. Generally their work is not what you’d call collage – the recordings they use are chopped into long extracts, looped or even left to play in their entirety, but significantly they don’t combine samples (as The Focus Group does) or mix in more contemporary elements (as Boards of Canada and Mordant Music do). In this way the outlines of the original source object are faintly intact, but it’s heavily ‘decayed’ or ‘decaying’.

The rotted celluloid paintings of Peter Doig, which I described in my big ol’ treatise on and survey of hauntology, seemed a bit analogical to this process, but since they were paintings, the original image (even if based on a photograph as it usually was) was always ultimately contrived. To make the equivalence closer, the original source object would have to be an image that was recorded in a similar way as sound is recorded on tape or vinyl. Such a recorded image would of course be generated through photography.

The images in this post are slides found by Doug Harvey in the growing pile of waste kipple outside the Los Angeles home of a serial hoarder, following some kind of intervention or change of heart. Untouched for years, the slides had fallen prey to damp and mould, a process which dramatically transformed the colours and forms within them. Harvey exhibits these extraordinary images as Rhizomatic Transmission, a slide show accompanied by a soundtrack of recorded improv music. Links here, here and here.
Even without the original figuration of the photographs being clear, these images are of course amenable to all the usual basic themes: as metaphors for the tragedy of passing time, memory, death, just as the playback hauntology music is. Yet the sense – always to some extent concomitant with this process of decay whether sonic or visual – of a transition towards a new formal and colouristic abstraction is particularly pronounced here. Each image resides at some point on a bizarre continuum between family photographs and abstract paintings by Fiona Rae, Morris Louis or Jackson Pollock. Out of the molten ruins of the old, the new.

I’ve hinted before, as has Alex Williams, that hauntology and ‘wonky’ are aesthetic siblings. Both are processes that create something new using a wide range of creative methods for treating something ‘old’, or what could be described as old. Williams suggests:

Rather than a pick and mix approach to generic materials, wonky is strategically applied to pre-existent genres, not as an adhesive but as a liquefying agent... [cf perhaps Negarestani's rotting objects?]... a making strange... not in the sense of hauntology's unheimlich-home, but in the deliquescent informational fluidity and interoperability of late capital, the strangeness of a blooming iridescent corpse, (not a spectre) a sonic embodiment of its distributive ground. (emphasis is mine).

Harvey’s slides, with their psychedelic fungal blooms, are certainly an example of such an iridescent corpse. They’re a ‘missing link’ between hauntology and a visual ‘wonky’.

(I should say at this point that I’m even less keen on the label ‘wonky’ than I was last summer, though I still have to admit that a certain count-for-one is useful, maybe even important. The best alternative epithet I’ve come up with is ‘hypergroove’ to refer specifically to the unquantised element, and in a broader sense, just ‘hyper’ – a nod to Hyperdub, hype, hyperstasis if you agree with it, maybe even hyperreality if you wanted to maintain a cynical distance).
While hauntological art is clearly a post-modernist art, the relative formal abstractions in the rhythms, textures and harmonies of ‘wonky’ (that is, its certain distance from reliance on signs, whether that’s post-structural or via postmodern pastiche) prompted me to risk calling it ‘modernist’. However I’m sure Owen Hatherley’s term ‘pseudomodernism’, used to describe the seemingly modernist geometries of the recent ‘building as sign’ architectural style nurtured by Norman Foster, applies to a notable degree here, and that deserves further study. But ‘wonky’ as a movement surely has more ‘new’ in it than hauntology – now whether or not this ‘new’ has any significance or validity is very much moot.

Another reason that ‘wonky’ is a bit ‘newer’ than hauntology is that the supposedly ‘old’ sources it ‘treats’ are far less clear cut than those of hauntology. This brings me neatly into the ongoing debate on the status of old and new in the new music, which flared up again recently due to a post by Simon Reynolds and a subsequent Twitter discussion, all prompted by the imminent release of Ikonika’s debut album. Reynolds suggested that I write about this album, and I’d actually already reviewed it for the current issue of Wire magazine. Further thoughts on it may appear up here in due course.

Firstly, I’d strongly disagree that much of this new music can be described as pastiche – Belbury Poly and the early Advisory Circle do pastiche, not Zomby, Ikonika, Joker et al. I can’t imagine what it would be that their music pastiches. To say that they pastiche video game music, almost solely on the basis that they use basic waveform synths, would be shallow and depressingly unimaginative, like seeing no difference between the piano idioms of Beethoven and Debussy because they use the same instrument (actually I think there’s a real sense in which the exponentially varying timbres of pop music in the last fifty years, while being a very good thing, have caused such an impatient, superficial selective deafness in listeners, causing them to meet a musical surface composed of timbre – classical refuseniks, I’m looking at you). There is a fairly weak pastiche of video game music in one layer of the penultimate track on Ikonika’s album ‘Look (Final Boss Stage)’ (take that word ‘weak’ as a value-judgement if you like, it’s not necessarily a bad thing), but anyone familiar with the internet-catalysed 8bit hobbyist boom of the mid-noughties knows what 80s video game music pastiche sounds like, and this is not it.
(In fact there’s a significant degree to which employing basic waveform synths is a classically modernist technique, akin to using only primary colours in painting, or only bare concrete or glass in architecture. The bareness of these timbres draws attention to the exotic melodic, rhythmic, textural and formal concerns in the music. Leave it crudely at just drawing attention to video games, and you’re missing out. Modernist music demands modernist listening: listen with fresh ears, don’t just assume the promiscuity of postmodern signification).

There’s a tricky but important difference between a music that’s historically established (‘old’) and music in which certain constituent elements are simply echoed elsewhere in time and space. (By ‘element’ I mean any sort of musical structure or process, any flexible but coherent configuration of sonic variables that recurs, from notions of melody to a specific 808 kick drum.) Pastiche, then, is not as well-used in this particular old/new debate as notions of ‘recombination’.

Now to oppose creation of a ‘new’ with a process of ‘recombination’ of potentially familiar elements is false. As usual, Charles Ives is a brilliant example (click here for great music - hauntology from the 1910s - and a pretty good video too), though his references are now a little difficult to detect in being buried, squashed together with his originality under the layers of an intervening century’s musical idioms. And you can’t say that jungle, repeatedly held up as some paragon of modernism in popular music, was not a product of recombination, even if it did find a distinctive technological space at the time. Musical styles, even hyper-modernist ones, never emerge from nowhere.
In basic terms, even the most loyal of pastiches or the most conscientious of recombinations is a production of something original on some sonic level. This is a stupid point but it is worth noting that original music is still appearing in this way, as opposed to composers calling it quits and settling down with a swollen iTunes library. However, we’re concerned here with more significant instances of newness. Reynolds calls ‘hyperstasis’ the scenario in which a range of original music is energetically produced using a wide range of sources and influences, but the parameters of its originality never reach a point that he feels he can acknowledge as original, hence ‘stasis’. Hyperstasis is a closed loop or space in which sonic elements or musical signs are constantly recycled – closed because it is ‘struggling to find exit routes to a beyond, to terra incognita’, or as Owen put it on Twitter, ‘it’s trying to break out of something but can’t’.

I don’t think I can ultimately believe in the notion of a closed system of musical styles, certainly not in practice, but particularly as it pertains to the richly varied milieu of this new music. To be sure, in this case I strongly disagree that this new music hasn’t found stylistic terra incognita. Actually the ‘terra’ it finds is so ‘incognita’, that many people don’t seem to have noticed or appreciated it. An aesthetic system or discourse such as the hardcore continuum concept naturally has certain blind spots, blinkers that conceal certain elements, largely because only certain featured elements were being aimed at in the first place. Systems like these have certain aesthetic priorities, with only certain specific elements being considered ‘on the table’ or ‘in the game’. Judgements of recombination and hyperstasis are predicated upon a finite picture of musical resources and priorities such as this.

The instruments of this new music may be familiar, or to put it more broadly, the easily-spotted and practically unavoidable signifiers of certain pre-existing genres may be familiar, but what they’re doing and having done to them formally in other dimensions of sonic production (rhythm, harmony, texture) is often strikingly innovative. It’s like the direction of musical innovation has taken a right-angle turn into a new dimension instead of proceeding along a familiar or predictable trajectory. Perhaps this is why the theoretical dynamics of the hardcore continuum concept as a certain specific frame of aesthetic possibilities / imperatives (i.e. what is ‘in the game’ and how it is appreciated) either needs to be expanded or is simply too limited to be able find any value in this new music. Because it’s looking at the new music with the wrong dimensionality, flatly. Maybe this accounts for Reynolds’s ‘vague sense of dissatisfaction’. A Rodin sculpture is much less striking if all you can see is a certain two-dimensional cross-section, and this new music is much less striking, or seems much less innovative, if your aesthetic priorities are slick timbres, aging definitions of ‘beat science’ etc, and not exotic grooves, broken textures and innovative melodies.
Reynolds’s complaint that the music ‘never settles into genre-icity’ seems to assume a specific and potentially outmoded idea of the size, shape and orientation of a style (for various reasons I prefer the word ‘style’, which I think is synonymous with Reynolds’s ‘genre’ here). ‘Wonky’, for one, is a style that cuts across older conceptions of styles as if it were orientated perpendicularly, across a new dimension in stylistic space, as is hauntology. These two movements have been called ‘themes’ in an attempt to differentiate them from more conventional ontologies of style. This new music ‘settles’ – though I’m not sure that’s the appropriate word – into an alternative kind of genre-icity, one that plays out across different levels of sonic variability. (Reynolds says that this music nonetheless remains ‘a long way short of being limitless’ and that ‘there are areas that are off limits to it’ – but surely these are the very definitions of musical style?).

Taken as a whole, Ikonika’s music presents this ‘alternative kind of genre-icity’, but along with this, she has created a number of coherent sub-styles within her growing oeuvre. I’d argue that ‘Millie’, ‘Idiot’ and ‘R.E.S.O.L.’ are all in much the same style, while ‘Yoshimitsu’ and ‘They Are All Losing The War’ are in a different (not the same) style, but they’re all subsets within Ikonika’s broader metastyle. Personally, I have no problem with a lack of genre-icity in the new music. For me, the internal similarities in different areas of it suit the natural predilection a listener has for ‘genre-icity’, or what I’ve previously called ‘the recurring specifics of style’, just fine. Some commentators characterise this music and its listeners as ‘glutted’ with stylistic resources, but evidently its adherents have bigger (healthier?) appetites and stomachs than they do.

Show me jungle as an example of a ‘better’ type of genre-icity, a more traditional conception of style, and I will tell you that what you find to be appropriately coherent, consistent and internally conscientious, I find to be boring, almost maddeningly boring. It’s nice that there’s a lot of it, I guess, but I much prefer a broader variety within a DJ set or a rave, even if that variety comes from the incorporation of ‘familiar’ musical signs. But then (sarcasm here) what I do I know, I’m of the Hyperdub generation, not the Metalheadz generation, I was reared by the Internet, so my aesthetic sensibilities have been spoiled, haven’t they. It’s a rhetorical question, I know there were different, less maximalist aesthetics at the time (those old habits die hard), it was listening on a different level, good luck to that – but how did you people listen to the exact same breaks, the same tired clichés over and over again, night after night after night after night? Lack of originality, you say?
For me, one of the most exciting areas of innovation in Ikonika’s music specifically is in the rhythmic qualities of her melodies, rather than in the instruments she uses (I use that word ‘instruments’ in a very broad sense, even incorporating notions of pre-existing style). Like the rest, Ikonika brings a new take on melody to ‘the game’ / ‘the table’, and everything that comes with it – emotionality for one, which is a welcome contrast to the coldness of most jungle, garage and old dubstep (and I’m not, of course, doing the woman-as-emotion thing, you’ll find similar, sometimes greater emotionality in Starkey, Joker, Hudson Mohawke, Zomby’s Digital Flora and particularly Darkstar).

Yet for the Metalheadz generation of critics, who only ever seem to talk about genre-icity and recombination, these melodic elements don’t seem to register: a musical element like this isn’t supposed to be ‘in the game’ – this is why Woebot was confused by their presence, saying they were ‘jammed on top’ (no link, sorry, he deleted his review). Those who demand innovation don’t notice it because they got a lot more than they ever wanted. The new artists like Ikonika don’t just innovate along the same old trajectories, they innovate in the process of innovation itself. Innovation squared. Along with many others, Ikonika does indeed escape from a hypothetical closed system of hyperstasis, by escaping into a different musical dimension that more traditional aesthetic systems cannot detect.

And that really is breaking the mould (lol).

Some of the conceptual background of this post is outlined in my essay on The Twenty-First-Century Modern Composer. 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.

The Musical Revolution Will Not Be Released On CD: Towards a Utopian Music (Talk at the Oxford Radical Forum 2010)

2010-03-17T14:47:00.031Z

Claude Lorrain, Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helion (Parnassus), 1680.
This is the talk I gave at the Oxford Radical Forum last week, having been asked to say something about Utopian possibilities in music. Don't take the pompous title too seriously, it's pretty informal, broad strokes, shorthands, a conversational style - it's a very basic introduction to the work of Christopher Small and some musics that could be considered a bit Utopian (obviously this is something a really thick book could be written about). It goes into a bit more detail on some of the background ideas that were hinted at in my Fear of Music review and critique of contemporary classic, taking them to their conclusion. Though it's at times overtly political, the subject of Utopia - taken here simply as quite a vague aspiration - is of course at quite a remove from the detail of contemporary political issues.

What has music got to do with radical Utopian politics? I think you’d be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to the task of imagining, planning and working to build freer or more egalitarian societies, music would come out as a peripheral issue. After all, music, we are led to believe, is an art form, just a kind of entertainment. Its role in our lives, no matter how intensely we may enjoy it, is decorative. At the most music seems useful as a form of propaganda, a vehicle for progressive or even revolutionary ideas, generally as expressed through words set to melody and harmony. It can give ‘a voice’ to a cause or a people. But surely the most important task facing progressive activists is that of finding new ways of living and working, new forms of social organisation, not to mention that of questioning and changing the current status quo. It would seem realistic to say that we should establish these societies first, and only then worry about what tunes to put on.

Well music, in any and all of its forms – and actually particularly in its most general sense – has so much more political resonance than most people realise. You might even go as far as saying that mainstream Western society has been conditioned, over the last two centuries, to believe that music is largely apolitical. It’s a form of false consciousness, perhaps, that would have you believe that music doesn’t really matter to our lives – that it’s a semi-autonomous art form that sits next to painting, sculpture, film, theatre, fashion, possibly also cuisine and perfume (if we’re being honest) in the historicised museums of Western cultural achievement. You might love it, it might even be the source of your professional career, but if you were to make the claim that music was highly meaningful as a core mechanism of society and even itself a method for planning new forms of society – you’d probably be thought of as a bit over-enthusiastic, a bit radical. Actually, I’d like to make such a claim today.

Let’s try to go back to square one, then, and ask ourselves what I think is one of the most fascinating and important questions in contemporary cultural studies: what is music? This is a question that philosophers, cultural theorists and, lately, musicologists have been asking ever since such forms of thought began, and it’s still quite a burning issue today, and it will be, I’m sure, for many years to come. It’s one that constantly haunts the discipline of ethnomusicology, in particular. Because in actual fact the question ‘what is music’ bases itself on one crucial assumption – that music is a thing.

You see, there are many languages throughout the world that don’t actually have a word for music. This is usually because a culture has no concept of music as an abstract noun that needs to be signified. These aren’t the languages of societies and civilisations that don’t have any practices we in the West might interpret as musical – such activities are found in varying forms throughout the world’s populations – far from it. For centuries, Westerners have grown up with the idea that music is an abstract thing. This handling of musical activity gives rise to the belief that music is separate from, and floats above, everyday life - at best reflecting it, reminding us of it, rather than residing in the real world and embodying it. This abstraction has led to claims that untexted music is a pure art form that does not communicate or express meanings, to claim that music is essentially meaningless. Nothing could be further from the truth, but more of that later.

Let’s run with the assumption that music is a thing, for a moment. What do we do with this thing, music? That’s a question that tends to have different answers at different periods in Western history. Today, if I were to ask some randomly selected person what it is that you do with music, they’d almost certainly say that you ‘listen to it’. This seems obvious and natural to most people. You might also hear the answer ‘you play’ or ‘perform it’. Go back in history to a time before recording technology to nineteenth-century Europe, and you’d probably find that a higher percentage of people telling you that music is something you play, and as you go further back in time you’d probably hear more and more people saying that music is something you sing. Today in Western culture, the belief that music presents a passive experience is stronger than ever before, and this seems to be in direct proportion to the increasing tendency to regard music as a thing. Recording technology plays an important part in this epistemic shift, of course, because with recording technology music becomes something that you can hold in your hands and manipulate in various ways, the most important being the ability to turn it on and off according to your own personal whim. Related to this is the musical score – musical notation developed as a set of relatively vague instructions back in the Dark Ages, and became more and more precise in its demands and control over the performer until in the late nineteenth and twentieth century it started to be treated as an object that embodied the essence of something people regarded as ‘the music itself’.

What is music, then, if it’s more than a thing? Let’s discard the Western reifications and say that music is a word that refers to a range of activities. This brings me to the most important thing I’d like to impress upon you today: music can be, indeed, music is, so much more than something you listen to. Music is more than sound. Music is something you do. Music is an activity that you participate in. And if your knee-jerk response to those statements is, ‘but I don’t participate, I listen’, or ‘but I'm more of a listener than a participator’ then that is exactly what is troubling, unequal, and crippling about the cultural assumptions surrounding music and its power of social organisation, and social motivation, in Western society today.

Musicking
At this point I’d like to introduce everyone to the work of the radical musicologist Christopher Small. Small’s career has been dedicated to exposing and challenging the restrictive and oppressive ideologies of Western musical culture and aesthetics, particularly in relation to non-Western and non-classical musical traditions. I’d recommend his books to anyone interested in reading a politicised anthropology of music-in-its-broadest-senses, whatever musical or musicological education you may or may not have.

Small was so convinced that the reification of music as a commodifiable art form that is held to be largely detached from human social interaction was crippling not just our understanding of music, but also foreclosing in ‘listeners’ an awareness of the systems through which musical activity is ideologically controlled by elite classes and by capitalism, that he reinvented music as a verb. Audaciously stating that there was no such thing as music, he called his third book, published in 1998, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. This is how Small defines musicking:

To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing… To pay attention in any way to a musical performance, including a recorded performance, even to Muzak in an elevator, is to music… It covers all participation in a musical performance, whether it takes place actively or passively, whether we like the way it happens or whether we do not, whether we consider it interesting or boring, constructive or destructive, sympathetic or antipathetic.

In this way, Small turned the limited concept of music, the abstract noun, into a broad social activity, provocatively revealing a huge amount about the cultural role of music in the process. If one person is performing music and another is listening or dancing to the sounds, music is a divided and fragmentary activity, amenable to alienating reifications. The genius of musicking is in completing the picture of human musical activity: one person is playing, the other is listening, but both are engaged in the mutual activity of musicking. Throughout the book, Small focuses his analysis on the event of the symphony concert as performed by a professional international orchestra in a metropolitan concert hall – the whole event amounting to a rich example of musicking. Musicking is so much more than the abstract sounds made by the instruments, he noted, it’s also in the architecture of the concert hall, the lights in the auditorium and the uniforms of the performers. Small put the audience, the community and the social occasion back into the musical picture, where before they had been ignored, divided and rendered epistemically invisible before the Spectacular object that is Music – or in other words, distorted by the ideological value system of Western industrial capitalism.

Musicking, as an activity that occurs in thousands of different forms, is a vantage point that reveals a lot more about the social relationships involved than the abstract noun music, which is easily detachable from life, does. Small introduces such observations thus:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. The[se relationships] are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.

Small finds that musicking is none other than good old anthropological ritual, and that this is the case whether we’re listening to the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, dancing with friends in a club, listening to an iPod or communicating with our dead ancestors in Sub-Saharan Africa. They’re not at all that different. Referencing the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Small puts it this way:

Ritual is a form of organised behaviour in which humans use the language of gesture, or paralanguage, to affirm, to explore and to celebrate their ideas of how the relationships of the cosmos (or a part of it), operate, and thus of how they themselves should relate to it and to one another. Through their gestures, those taking part in the ritual act articulate relationships among themselves that model the relationships of their world as they imagine them to be and as they think (or feel) that they ought to be… when we take part in a ritual act “the lived-in order merges with the dreamed-of order”…[rituals] are patterns of gesture by means of which people articulate their concepts of how the relationships of their world are structured, and thus of how humans ought to relate to one another. Such ideas held in common about how people ought to relate to one another, of course, define a community, so rituals are used both as an act of affirmation of community (“This is who we are”), as an act of exploration (to try on identities to see who we think we are), and as an act of celebration (to rejoice in the knowledge of an identity not only possessed but also shared by others).’ He later sums it up with ‘ritual can be thought of as metaphor in action.

The idea of musicking as a metaphorical socialising process that affirms, explores and celebrates a set of idealised social relationships, a way of saying ‘This is who we are’, is the refrain of Small’s book, and it’s one that directly appeals to our own experiences with music, even in the passive West. No matter how much we may try to rationalise music as an intellectual exercise, as a pure, abstract, largely meaningless art form, as a technical craft, it’s still ultimately a mechanism of social affirmation, both on a personal level and on a communal level. It works in different ways and through different structures, but it’s always a badge of social identity, for middle-aged, middle class people at an avant-garde classical concert just as much as for teenagers using small speakers on public transport. As such, musicking, is a highly important process, crucial even, in society. That it’s been reduced to a peripheral, semi-autonomous pastime in Western society actually conceals and denies the political importance of musical activity.

Because of course, if musicking is a way of affirming, exploring and celebrating social relationships between people, then it’s an activity with a huge degree of political resonance. It’s a lived-in metaphor for politics. Small observes:

Since a social order is a matter of relationships between human beings, the performance of this or any other ritual act together is a powerful means of ensuring social cohesion and stability. That being so, we need not be surprised to find that it is commonly used, often deliberately and sometimes even cynically, by those who rule to maintain the acquiescence of those over who they rule. It is obviously appropriate that the rituals used for this purpose should appear ancient, even timeless, for in this way it can be made to seem as if the present social order is legitimated by generations of ancestors, independently of political economic or social forces and of any trace of historical contingency.

By zooming out from music-the-art-object and so coming to see musicking-the-ritual (which involves everyone that’s feeding off the musical activity, especially the audience), Small is able to make a devastating critique of the wildly uneven power distribution that is affirmed, explored and celebrated in the musicking of the Western Classical symphony concert tradition. What does it say about Western industrial, capitalist society, bourgeois society if you like, if one of its most highly prized social rituals (or certainly the most highly prized in the field of music) involves an elite group of highly trained professionals dressed – let’s face it – as servants, at a social and spatial remove from an audience who have paid to attend, and are compelled to sit silently and only participate at the end with their applause? Even the grand (you could almost say religiously grand) interior architecture of the concert hall enforces this relationship – seats at one end, the music-generating machine at the other end. Performers and audience come in through separate entrances, and are generally not expected to meet and socialise. Small concludes:

A ritual in which the majority watch and listen in stillness and silence, unable to influence the course of the event, while a minority acts can be a vivid representation of certain types of political relationship; many of the rituals of the modern nation state are of this kind. Guy Debord coined the phrase “the society of the spectacle” for such a state and pointed out that in such rituals or spectacles, “one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it”; such rituals emphasise the separation and powerlessness of isolated individuals rather than their unity as an active community.

According to today’s aesthetic ideologies of Western classical music, and any other music that’s generally considered ‘artistic’, one’s attention is intended to be focused solely on the sensually pure sounds of the music, and not its reality as a ritual composed of an assemblage of different sense experiences. You still find that people who claim to be serious about music will tell you that the best way to ‘appreciate’ the music is to shut one’s eyes and concentrate, effectively removing music from the real world it comes from. This is actually quite an unnatural mode of listening, and it runs counter to the normal channels of human psychology. It’s generally pretty unique to industrialised societies, and it’s a quite recent development, even in Western classical music. For centuries, classical music was a background decoration for aristocratic or bourgeois social events, events where people would talk quite openly throughout, and vocally show their appreciation during the performance. In the late eighteenth century, as the paradigm shift towards this passive mode of listening was under way, Mozart wrote excitedly to his dad that during one of his concerts people actually shut up and listened to his composition. Even operas were full of people chatting away right up until the nineteenth century.
This painting of Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens in London, 1754, by Canaletto demonstrates a slightly different form of musicking, before the silent, passive listening enforced in the nineteenth century. Visitors walk around talking to each other, not even facing the ensemble.
The effects of this can be disturbing – several years ago I was at a Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall, where the BBC Symphony Orchestra were playing Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite. That’s quite a famous piece of music, and I was sat across from a guy with Downs syndrome who was probably familiar with the music and was quite vocally showing his appreciation throughout the performance. This continued for a while, but eventually, he was forcefully removed from the concert by two black-suited security guards, he was literally dragged out of the concert hall kicking and screaming. He was excluded from the social ritual of the concert because his behaviour was breaking the sacred concentration and appreciation of the passive listeners. Most people there, including myself at the time, probably thought that this was simply a shame, that it was one of those ‘difficult situations’, even perhaps that it really had been necessary to remove the guy. But this was only because the idea that we were all there to listen and appreciate specifically chosen sounds in silence was so unquestionable to us. Had I been aware at the time of what was really going on as that guy was being dragged away, socially and politically, in that concert hall, outside of the ‘abstract music’ that was distracting us, I think that I would have starting making some noise myself.

While he stops short of mentioning Marx, Small’s observations on the social relationships in Western musicking have close parallels to theories of commodity fetishism. If music can be reduced from a social ritual to a thing, an object, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. To achieve this, music-making had to be professionalised, and this too, is a state of affairs that isn’t questioned enough. Small writes,

For the modern musical profession to emerge and with it the institution of the modern concert, several ideas had to come together. All these ideas are taken for granted today, but none of them is in fact an essential or universal element of musical performance. The first is the idea that music is for listening rather than performing, and linked with that is the second idea, that public music making is the sphere of professionals. Amateurs may perform in the home and in certain other limited fields – for example, choirs – but in the public domain the dominance of professionals is virtually complete. The third idea is that of a formal and independent setting where people come together solely for the purpose of performing and listening to music, and the fourth is that of each individual listener’s paying admission to the place where the performance is taking place, with the ticket of admission as the sign of having paid.

This brings Small to one of the most revolutionary ideas in his book: that musical participation, even musical performance is something that everyone, all human beings, can and should do. The generally accepted idea, which seems so natural in the industrial West, is that performing music is the preserve of a talented few. This is especially true when it comes to singing – the majority of Westerners claim that they ‘can’t sing’, and have very little confidence when it comes to singing. People have systematically been taught that they cannot and must not sing unless they have some remarkable and singular talent. TV shows like X Factor reinforce this notion. The same is often true of dancing, many people, particularly men (and this also has a lot to do with dance being seen as a female sexual performance), are under the impression that they cannot and must not dance, even though it’s an active form of musicking. Most pernicious is the myth of ‘tone-deafness’, being an affliction whereby its victims cannot distinguish or recreate musical pitches and melodies. If you were genuinely tone-deaf in this way, you would not actually be able to understand speech, both because in speech, pitch has a crucial expressive function, and because vowel sounds are identified by the subtle characters of their frequency spectrums, what are called formants.

This idea, that everyone has the ability to take part in active musicking, doesn’t mean that everyone is secretly a virtuoso performer. Here’s what Small says:

...if musicking is indeed a facet of the great unitary performance art we call ritual, and is thus an aspect of the language of biological communication that every living thing, as a condition of survival, has to be able to understand and to use, then it must follow that all human beings are born with the gift of musicking, no less than they are born with the gift of speaking and understanding speech. Both gifts, of course, have to be cultivated; while in the West today we take for granted the informal learning and practice in speech that all but the most desperately deprived young children receive within their families and peer groups long before the formal process of schooling begins, there are, alas, few parallel opportunities for such informal and continuous cultivation in musicking. True, many parents encourage their children to perform, on occasion, and in the early years of schooling, at least, musicking plays a part; but what no longer exists in industrial societies is that broader social context in which performance… is constantly taught and musicking is encouraged as an important social activity for every single member of the society. Many people are taught to play, but very few are encouraged to perform… Individuals are assumed to be unmusical unless they show evidence to the contrary. This assumption, which is widely disseminated through the media of socialisation and of information, places the stars, whether of popular or classical music, in a world or glamour and privilege from which everyday people are excluded’ Small contrasts this with traditional African societies where the ‘social and conceptual world is not divided into the few “talented who play and sing and the many “untalented” to whom they perform but resembles more a spectrum that ranges from little musical ability to much, but with every single individual capable of making some contribution to the communal activity of musicking.

You may have been lead to believe otherwise, but everyone in this room has the power of active musicking and can develop it, a power which permits us to affirm, to explore and celebrate social relationships in metaphorical form.

Musicking pointed towards Utopia
So finally I reach the main subject of this talk. Small’s theory of musicking has shown us the political stakes involved in ritual musical activity, its politically resonant, society-building function. The ritual of musicking can be thought of as a mutual signing of a social contract. Perhaps, then, we can find a mode of musicking that serves as a metaphor for, and a rehearsal of, the set of social relationships we expect from a better, freer, more egalitarian society. This is the use that music has for politically progressive activism.

Note that in Small’s theory musicking affirms, explores and celebrates an ideal or idealised set of social relationships, a set of social relationships that the community taking part in the ritual aspires to. This is why I am using the word ‘Utopian’ here, to refer to music or musicking that is radically progressive in its social agenda. Utopia is the goal, the hypothesis, the theoretical endpoint of progressive politics. The word actually means ‘no place’, it’s forever fictional, theoretical, hypothetical only. It’s only come to mean ‘good place’ through a misunderstanding – the Greek homophonous prefix eu means 'good', 'pleasant' as in 'euphemism' and 'eulogy', but Utopia is an idealised place, it doesn’t, perhaps couldn’t, really exist. I’m using it here in its most well-known capacity as ‘good place’ however, as it is toward such a good place that progressive politics aims.

So is there, or could there be, a musicking that points towards Utopia, that enacts the social relationships that we would like to see, ideally, in our concepts of Utopia? A Utopian music? I hope so. I don’t think I would describe myself as a full-blown Anarchist when it comes to the usual channels of political thought, but I do think that it’s important for progressivists to investigate and create forms of musicking that enact metaphors for radical political systems such as anarchism, communism or anarcho-syndicalism. Musicking provides a generally safe rehearsal environment for testing, and perhaps most importantly, learning, practicing and teaching such systems of social relationships.

Slightly more important than the sonic specifics of Utopian music, then, would be the matter of how the musickers are arranged in the act of musicking. It’s indicative of the ideological primacy of music as an object, rather than as a social ritual, that progressive musicians have focused on sonic concerns rather than the social relationships involved in the musicking they instigate. You might think atonality (that is, the freeing up of melody and harmony) or free rhythm (that is, freedom from a pulse) are fantastic metaphors for freedom or subversion, but it counts for nothing if the other musickers have been rendered unable to participate actively. The emancipation of sounds, as composers such as Arnold Schoenberg put it, is all very well, but it has quite a limited revolutionary capacity unless it emancipates people in the act of doing the musicking

So what could the characteristics of a Utopian music be? Firstly and simply, all participants would be on an equal footing in terms of their interrelationships, there’d be no top-down hierarchies involved. Ideally, all the musickers would be actively involved, performing the music together. Different musickers may well be doing different things within the musicking, but theoretically power would be shared laterally. There wouldn't be any passive listeners, no servile or elite performers. Anyone could take part, it would be easy to learn and the activity would have no cost of any kind. It wouldn’t require the purchase, ownership or manufacture of musical instruments – in any case a mixture of voice, dance and noises like clapping and stamping more than suffices for a rich, involving and enjoyable musical experience. If the latter were to apply, then it could be set up instantaneously, in any sort of space at all, and would not require artificial energy sources. The sonic and ritual content of musicking would arise spontaneously as improvisation, created by the participants themselves, and develop along particular channels that have been collectively generated and agreed upon. The instructions involved in achieving this would be simple, certainly nothing as complex or potentially authoritarian as sheet music. It would be an activity that could involve just one person or tens of thousands of people gathered together.

Hypothetically, if such a form of musicking were to become popular and widespread, it could be revolutionary. For the people with whom this Utopian musicking became the dominant form of musicking, it would mean that collecting CDs and mp3s or aspiring to unlikely stardom no longer held the same ideological attraction. Such people would have no need for a music industry because they’d see recording or objectifying their music as a fixed and specific pattern of sounds to be pointless, a pointless misunderstanding. Their musicking would be free in the broadest, deepest sense of the word.

(The controversial conclusion of this line of thought, of course, is a Utopia in which there are no musical workers paid to carry out the actual musicking itself, no matter how skilled they may have become. Personally, I’m still ambivalent about such a scenario, as I’m sure many of you would be. It depends on your beliefs and other details of the Utopian society in question. It’s possible to imagine though, if you wanted your Utopia to include a wage system, that someone could be paid to teach this kind of musicking while still participating. The fact is, it’s thanks partly to feudalism and mostly to capitalism that musicking was turned into an industry in the first place).

It’s both surprising and ultimately unsurprising that this Utopian mode of musicking doesn’t really exist in the West. In any case if it did, mainstream capitalist ideology would deem it to be worthless (this is part of the point, surely). You might argue that singing, perhaps when you’re drunk or watching football, without any recordings or instruments involved amounts to what I’ve described, but it’s still an activity that’s strictly controlled and delineated. Such singers are recreating the highly specific song, not aiming to perform a creative cover version of it, and in any case, the song is very likely to be one that none of the singers have created themselves, certainly not on the spot and with any structural diligence.

One important concern here is that the arrangement of the musickers might be Utopian, but the content of their music might be far from it, as political progressives might think it. Some group of people might achieve what I’ve outlined above and be having a whale of a time singing, dancing and making noise all equally and without a carbon footprint, but it would defeat the purpose, of course, if they were using the ritual to affirm, explore and celebrate racism, imperialism, sexism, or intimidate other people. This is a concern I will return to later on.

Another thing I should emphasise is that I’m not naïve enough to suppose that such Utopian musical activity will lead straight to a more Utopian society without complication. Communal musical activity might show and teach us better ways of relating to one another, but I would be surprised indeed if a musicking could be developed that would show and teach us how, for example, to feed, clothe and house people in a free or radically equal society, or what to do in instances of harmful or coercive activity. This doesn’t mean that musicking couldn’t have a crucial and crucially underrated role to play in preparing people for a more Utopian society, however.

One of the most challenging consequences of the dilettante nature of this Utopian music, apart from the lack of payment, is that we must radically change our aesthetics of music, that is, what music or musicking we consider to be valuably enjoyable. To put it crudely, Utopian music wouldn’t be ‘good music’ in the sense that we currently understand it. Small indicates that if we were taught to use our innate musical skills more, and we had more practice at them, we would on average be far more accomplished musicians than we are today, but it would also be unlikely, I’d say (thought some don’t), that every session of musicking was a complex and nuanced masterpiece of the kind we have been led to expect from the heavily ideological canons of Western classical music, pop music and jazz etc. We’d have to get used to what today we might take to be a slightly rougher standard of ‘musical quality’. There are three responses to this: firstly musical quality was never objective in the first place, even though capitalist Big Other ideology tends towards to the contrary. We would have to move from what we conventional think of as ‘good music’ to an aesthetic of ‘ritually satisfying music’, whatever that consisted of. These aesthetic standards could even be applied today, actually – you see them in people who don’t really care, relatively speaking, what specific sounds they’re dancing to, as long as they can make a good night of the musicking ritual that is ‘going dancing’. Secondly, ultra-high quality music is precisely the ruse of the market capitalist Spectacle we should hope to avoid, and thirdly, the fact that you yourself are now participating in this music on an everyday level surely makes up for this slip in ‘standards’.

Before I continue on to look at some examples of what might be the Utopian music I describe, I’d like to look at one more issue. I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the subtleties in the content of the musical objects we all know and love don’t matter. We need not discard the idea of the musical object, and with it our favourite tracks and our ways of appreciating them for what might be starting to look like (to put it cynically) a sweaty amateur song-and-dnace that prioritises mucking in over outmoded ideas of art with a capital A. I for one have built my blogging and writing career on lavishing verbose praise on specific musical objects. Now, an iPod can be thought of as a box that carries all your treasured musical objects, and because of this it’s a way of arranging musicking that very useful to capitalism. Perhaps the Utopians would consider these musical objects and our love of them to be dangerously ‘bourgeois’.

I don’t think musical objects are too dangerous, however, as long as we can ‘zoom out’ and see them as a part of the broader and vital ritual of musicking. If the Utopian musicking I’ve described were socially endemic, entirely displacing the popular basis for a music industry and making musical recording irrelevant, iPods and record collections would also be aesthetically irrelevant. We wouldn’t have a stash of favourite tracks, but perhaps that was always too much like commodity fetishism anyway. Perhaps a different Utopia and/or a different theory of musicking would find a way to incorporate such musical objects without the adverse effects they can have on the communality of music-making.

Utopian musics today: Punk
Look, punks.
So, what forms of musicking existing today approach the Utopian, in contrast to the Western Classical concert tradition and commercial pop? One of the first to come to mind is punk. In the late seventies, punk was a minor revolution in music, as a popular movement embodying a do-it-yourself ethic, that developed into a major subculture. Punk can be seen as a reaction to the mannerism of hard and prog rock, as well as to the kitsch that tended to fill the charts at the time. Conventional musicianship didn’t come into it for punk bands – notoriously, many of them could only play a handful of chords, and as long as you had the instruments and the spirit, you could form a band. This was a message that spread throughout the Western world, encouraging people to have a go at performing their own music. It’s because of punk that many middle class teenagers these days, usually male, have a go at starting a rock band, almost as a rite of passage. It would be rare, though, to find one of these bands, however much they lacked diligence, that played their music purely for the enjoyment of themselves and their communities, who harboured no trace of the widespread fantasy of stardom and commercial success that hovers over every ‘unsigned’ band. Even the increasing popular currency of the phrase ‘unsigned bands’ is a reflection of this teleological, commercial fantasy of music-making.

Because ultimately, punk was very easy to commercialise. Much punk, however, and particularly today, shuns such commercialisation. Its continuing popularity in radical political circles is probably something to do with the fact that it can still be the voice of protest, difference and radical alternatives. Punk was not just empowering, active musicking (and the liveliness of its audiences was maybe unprecedented in the West), it was also fiercely iconoclastic in its messages – the Sex Pistols sang ‘God save the queen, the fascist regime, they made you a moron’. The cover of their album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’, their swearing on the Bill Grundy show, it was all part of the music, that is to say, all part of the musicking. You could even say that punk was and still is social iconoclasm as ritual.

It’s because of this that although punk may be radical, even progressive, it isn’t typically Utopian – surely in a Utopia, there would be no need for the iconoclastic figure of the punk? And besides, though they’re a lot closer together in terms of community, punk’s performers and audience are still apart. Gigs are still usually held in specific venues intended to house music, you still usually have to pay to see it (though there are some punk bands who don’t follow these patterns) and you’d probably have to pay for (or at the least acquire) the instruments and plug them in.

Rave
Union Rave, a photo by Andreas Gursky, 1995.
A slightly more recent musical movement that’s similar to punk and also has a certain Utopian appeal would be rave. Also popular in radical political circles, rave is an intensive and often drug-induced collective dancing experience. That the initial explosion of raving in the UK in 1988 and 1989 was called ‘the second summer of love’ is indicative of its almost classically countercultural presence. Rave alleged to be a Utopian music in as much as it wasn’t racist or sexist, and emphasised positivity and collectiveness. Indeed, in its early years rave was arguably an upbeat melting pot of all races, sexes and classes.

One of the most interesting things about rave from a musical point of view is that it guides listeners through its temporal structure quite explicitly, through controlled build-ups and releases of tension using volume, texture and frequency filtration, through regular time signatures and bar structures divisible by two, four and eight and through certain recurring structural formulas. This puts the dancers very close to the music (as opposed to alienated from it), even to the point where it’s easy to dance to and feel a strong sense of musical anticipation in tracks you’ve never heard before. As anyone who’s been raving will tell you, anticipating the arrival of the full force of the tune, a beatless segment, or the return or amplification of certain parts, can be a very appealing and intimate collective experience indeed.

I’m going to play you excerpts from two tracks to demonstrate this effect from two different substyles of recent rave music, where these structural procedures are particularly pronounced. The first is ‘Disko Rekah’ by Loefah, a classic dubstep track released in early 2007 with an almost unusually formulaic opening structure. It starts with a relatively simple drum pattern which suggests dancers move quite slowly on the first and third beats of the bar. This goes on for a very regular sixteen bars, which can be subdivided into four iterations of a four bar drum pattern. The drums in the sixteenth bar cut out, signalling that something else is about to come in. Right on cue, it arrives, it’s a four bar vocal sample which, in a traditional manner related to Jamaican MCing, assures us that ‘we’ are going to ‘wreck the discothèque’. The echoes, or delays, put on this sample set up a quaver pulse, allowing dancers to move a bit quicker if they so wish. This goes on for a further sixteen bars, with a break in the drums at the midway point. In the last two bars of this sequence the drums cut out entirely, which is a major signal of the approach of the track’s main material. Then we get the money shot (and as someone who’s growing tired of the monosyllabic and grimly teleological aesthetic priorities of recent ‘dubstep’ and its new dude-based audience, I do very much intend the innuendo of that phrase): the bass drop, or the arrival of the bass riff that tends to be the aesthetic focus of dubstep music. When everyone hears this, the dancing begins proper and its arrival, however you feel about it, is an intense collective experience. See what you reckon.

The next track I’ll play you I’ve chosen largely because it was a hugely popular and much-hyped track from last summer. It’s Joy Orbison’s ‘Hyph Mngo’. It has a different character, and it sort of became emblematic of the current move away from the dark bass of dubstep towards a more euphoric or at least a far less bass-oriented sound, in many ways it’s the opposite of dubstep. ‘Hyph Mngo’ is actually a very simple track, but it is very effective. At the beginning you can hear low-pass frequency filters being opened up, creating that sense of anticipation. Its main synthesiser riff then enters, it’s just a pair of harmonically inconclusive chords floating weightlessly without percussion. Here the ‘drop’ doesn’t deliver a bassline – this track’s modest bassline is just on the threshold of audibility – but rather a short percussion loop. What the track manages to do, though, because of its unresolved harmony, is make the sense of anticipation last throughout the entire track. The guiding structures are there, but there is no ‘arrival’ as final and conclusive (boring?) as your typical dubstep bass drop.

These sorts of structures are common in forms of dance music that you might not conventionally call rave – house music, for example, Daft Punk are a prime example. But rave, I’d argue, has a particularly strong sense of community that transcends the sonic dimension. Ravers are primarily focused on and dedicated to energetic, collective participation in the music.

Sadly, while the form of the musicking in rave is more pointed toward the Utopian than many Western musics, the matter of its content does leave the door open for things that we may not consider Utopian at all. Occasionally there have been links between rave and organised crime, and as with punk, the subversively violent energy of hardcore dance has been useful to various fascists looking for a way to affirm, explore and celebrate their values. One of the most widespread inequalities affecting rave music, however, occurs along gendered lines. It occurs in two senses.

Firstly, there’s more to this than pointing out that there are far more men at dubstep and drum n bass raves than there are women, and there are lamentably few women producers in rave as a whole, though this is of course an issue. It deserves further investigation, and the links between sound, gesture and meaning are far from fully understood in musicology, but there seems to be something about the darker forms of rave centring on a powerful bass that threatening male behaviour responds to. I say this not to foster stereotypes – there are male bassheads who are some of the most Utopian people you could imagine – but because I recently encountered a 12 inch record by a rising star of dubstep who calls himself Borgore. Side B featured a track called ‘Act like a Ho’. Like the Loefah track I played you it built up to a bass drop, but this time it featured some shockingly misogynistic rapping over the top, concerning the separate ways women should behave in bed and in public. When it arrived the bass was monstrously loud and complex, far more so than the Loefah bass, and in the moments before it was dropped, Borgore orders his ‘ho’ to ‘do the dishes’. I decided not to play this track for you today. I find it difficult to believe that whoever appreciates this music, and probably Borgore himself, doesn’t realise that such announcements are unacceptable. It’s the wrong sort of iconoclasm, but perhaps there’s even supposed to be some irony in there. This of course is no excuse – even if you dance to it, finding it nice but naughty, a bit risqué, you’re still deriving a kind of enjoyment from a threatening picture of deeply unequal relations between the sexes. Lunatic though he may be, Borgore is not on the fringe – his single can be bought on the popular online music store Boomkat, and last week he appeared at the top of the bill for a night at one of London’s major rave venues, Corsica Studios.

Secondly, even without a text, rave very often falls victim to a more subtle kind of sexualised male gaze. Samples of ‘rave divas’, that is, quite erotically-charged female vocals often taken from soul and R&B, electronically cut up and manipulated and put into a new track, are commonplace in many areas of dance and rave. You heard some in the second track I played, and they’ve been in rave for about two decades. Male ‘rave divas’ are comparatively rare – where male voices do appear they’re MCs, and are often mildly, sometimes overtly threatening. In a lot of rave, men stand for the world, industry and competition, while women represent emotion and sensuality. The largely male-led practice of sampling, appropriating and manipulating women’s voices, usually without their consent, can fragment and objectify women’s bodies to the point of fetishism.

If this makes you uncomfortable, consider this. In an essay on the role of women in dance music called ‘Sampling Sexuality’, the feminist and musical anthropologist Barbara Bradby examined the case of Black Box’s 1989 house dance hit ‘Ride on Time’, which got to No. 1 in the UK and was indeed the UK’s best-selling single that year (I don't think many people would say this is a rave track, but still). ‘Ride on Time’ sampled a 1980 soul disco song by Loleatta Holloway, manipulating her vocal in such a way that only a machine could have delivered it. Not only did the male-led Black Box never intend it to be public knowledge who the original singer was, but they employed a young Afro-Caribbean model to lip-sync the older and larger Holloway’s vocal on stage and in the official video (below), as if she were the singer. After a court case, Holloway eventually received a percentage of the song’s profits. Though Bradby did see in this the possibility for a certain kind of empowerment along the lines of the subversively fragmented cyborg in Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, it must be said that this was something done to women by the male producers of the music, without their consent.
Some producers sidestep the problem of female vocal fetishism – the producer Burial pitch-bends his sampled vocals to the point where traditional genders no longer apply, creating something that’s very amenable to queer theory. The female producer Ikonika still expressively manipulates R&B melodies through machines, but she doesn’t use samples, she translates the melodies onto a synthesiser.

Free Improv
Now let’s look at a more unusual form of musicking: free improvisation, or free improv. Similar to but distinct from free jazz, which has a more African-American basis, it developed partly from avant-garde classical music in the late nineteen-fifties in Europe. As you might have guessed from its name, it’s a musical context in which anything can happen sonically. There are no musical structures like scales, harmonies or formal architectures through which to channel the improvisation, that is, the spontaneously generated sound. Depending on how it occurs, improvisation is a technique that subverts recording and notions of a stable musical object. If you were to own a recording of an improvised performance, you would only repeatedly hear one single outcome of a variable context. The radical left-wing composer Cornelius Cardew said that a musical work that incorporated improvisation is like a city. You can either visit the city and appreciate its life and movement, or you can simply see photographs of it in certain places, at certain times of the day and year. Improvisation discourages the purchase of recordings in this way, it’s music beyond recording.

Free Improv band AMM
Normally free improv is played by a group of performers on generally conventional Western instruments, although voice is not particularly common. Free improv’s adherents and practitioners claim that there is a strong element of collectiveness in its performance, that the performers carefully listen and respond to one another, but as the sounds are theoretically free, this is a difficult process to follow or verify. Crucially, Free Improv is open to anyone to perform, although the community and discourse surrounding this music does hold certain standards of skill to be important. Again, if the sounds made in the music is theoretically free, quite what the parameters of that skill would be is unclear – either there would be no hierarchy of value in ability, or it would not be completely free.

But then again, Anarchist society is not, and can never be, a simple matter of everyone being absolutely free to do whatever they want. If there were just one rule, it would be co-operation without coercion, and then there are rules of human existence. And it would be difficult indeed to imagine a Utopia in which individual skill was not valued by the collective.

Many of Free Improv’s adherents claim that it enacts metaphors for a free society through sound. Fredric Rzewski, another radical left-wing composer put it this way:

…the difficulty of living in the present moment is somehow related to the difficult of creating an egalitarian society. Both of these things are perceived as ideals, only partially attainable, if at all, in reality. Improvised music has something to do with both of them. Certainly it has to do with being present. It also has to do with democratic forms and equality, at least in a group situation. It can function as a kind of abstract laboratory in which experimental forms of communication can be tried without risk of damage to persons. The great improvised music of the twentieth century may be remembered by future generations as an early abstract model in which new social forms were first dimly conceived. Improvisation tells us: Anything is possible – anything can be changed – now.

Let’s listen to some of this. This is a track by a Free Improv band called AMM that they’ve called ‘Ailantus Glandulosa’

Using a conventional way of listening, it can seem pretty alienating can’t it? This is not to say that you can’t learn to listen and appreciate the sonic intrigue going on there, but for most people at the moment this music would feel inaccessible.

Actually, one of the things I find lacking in Free Improv, and I think one of the reasons that it didn’t catch on with a wider audience, is that Free Improv is not a style of music. It is the radical absence of musical style. You see a style implies a specific set of rules or parameters for how the music could be, and maybe that’s not free, but in order for the ritual of musicking to really mean something, there has to be a certain level of stylistic stability, something to hold on to, a specific language to learn. The avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton said this about improvisation and rules:

If you look back at the last twenty years, what has freedom meant? For a great many people, so-called freedom music is more limiting than bebop, because in bebop you can play a ballad or change the tempo or key. So-called freedom has not helped us as a family, as a collective, to understand responsibility better… So the notion of freedom that was being perpetrated in the sixties might not have been the healthiest notion… I’m not opposed to the state of freedom… But fixed and open variables, with the fixed variables functioning from fundamental value systems – that’s what freedom means to me.

One of the things Braxton is saying here is that there are more opportunities to be free in the infinite number of musical structures that allow flexibility than in the blank slate of free improv – his examples of such structures are tempo and key. A totally ‘free’ music would never have built those structures in the first place.

Now this is where different visions of Utopia and of anarchism will come into conflict. Paradoxically, in an utterly free society you would have the freedom to capture and own slaves. I know that’s not how Anarchism works, but perhaps this is why bands like AMM never use a priori musical structures, and instead make a beeline for atonality, free rhythm and unconventional playing techniques. They don’t ‘backtrack’ to any form of music in which rules play a part.

Free improv may be free sonically, but this freedom rarely branches out into the wider social ritual. There are still passive listeners. I can think of at least one band, however, that does cross this line. Lucky Dragons, otherwise known as Luke Fishbeck and Sarah Rara from Los Angeles, combine experimental indie-pop and free improv, and at their concerts they hand out instruments to the audience. In a review of one of their gigs, Nick Richardson wrote,

After ten minutes of loose laptop beats and gnomic chanting, the Californian art/music duo handed out a bunch of CD-Rs and switched on an overhead projector. The crowd grabbed and dangled them in the beams of light, casting fractal rainbows onto blank screens overhead. Then came woolly snakes: blanket-clad cables with metal contacts on the end, that audience members could play by holding hands and creating a circuit with anyone else who held one. When activated they triggered clustered tones that grew more hectic the longer you stayed connected. Slowly, the crowd worked out how to play and control the new instruments, and the number of people holding hands increased, their learning curve dictating the dynamics of the performance. It was fun. And Lucky Dragons turned listeners into sound producers, making electronic music communal and tactile.

Note that the refracting rainbows made by the CD-Rs had nothing to do with sound (in a literal sense at least). This is an example of the non-sonic element of musicking, the music beyond the sound. But what a revolutionary act – handing instruments to the audience. That’s what I’d call free improv, free improv for all the musickers present, and it’s free improv where the presence of a priori musical structures – in this case the ‘woolly snakes’ – had a satisfying and bonding effect. Perhaps the way they do it is infantilising, even patronising, but all the same – holding hands is not something that would be an integral part of an AMM gig.

This is a video montage by Wire Magazine of a Lucky Dragons gig in Peckham last weekend (I was there) and the collective drawing workshop ('Sumi Ink Club') that took place before it.
Central African Polyphony
Men from the Babenzele tribe.
Now we come to what I’m tempted to call the most Utopian music that I know of. It’s the ancient musical tradition of tribes of ‘pygmy’ hunter-gatherers who live in the rainforests of Central Africa (pygmy is a derogatory word I use here for identification only). Their music has been celebrated as the musical equivalent of a world heritage site ever since the middle of the twentieth century. As you might expect given the Western tendency to reify music that I’ve described, talking about their ‘music’ isn’t quite as correct as talking about their musicking.

Musicking for these tribes is a part of everyday life. The entire tribe is involved in the musicking, and different forms of musicking correspond to different activities within the life of the tribe: funerals, coming back from a hunt, sending off the soul of a dead elephant, children’s games, the birth of twins and plain entertainment. Some groups believe in general that music is a process of awakening and pleasing the forest environment. The music involved is basically improvisational, and there is no notation involved, but it’s a highly complex polyphony of densely, closely interlocking constituent parts with structures that reach a complexity and specificity that rivals that of the most challenging examples of Western classical and avant-garde music. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull said this of the Mbuti tribe from the Congo region:

An examination of Mbuti song form not only reveals areas of concern to the Mbuti, such as their food-getting activities, life and death, but it also reveals the concern of the Mbuti for cooperative activity. Each type of song requires a group of people to sing it, and if there is a solo it is sung over a chorus, and the solo is passed around from one individual to another. This is similar to the Mbuti rejection of individual authority and their concern for dispersing leadership as widely as possible. There are certain parts of certain songs that are sung by youths, hunters or elders, strictly according to age, and song form thus reinforces Mbuti concern for the age differential as an important element of their social structure. The songs are most frequently in round, or canon, form, and the hunting songs, in order to heighten the need for the closest possible cooperation (the same need that is demanded by the hunt itself), are sometimes sung in hoquet.

The Mbuti.
Hoquet, there, referring to rapid musical question and answer phrases on the offbeat. And the Grove Dictionary of Music describes their music in this way:

The texture is built up from continuously varied repetition of a short cyclical pattern, with different voices entering informally and filling out the texture with parallel melodies, variation and ostinati… In many other styles of African music there is often a clear division of the melody between a leader and a chorus; however, in Pygmy singing this division is usually absent or obscured by the high degree of overlap between parts, by the passing around of central melodic figures from one person to another, and by a considerable freedom to improvise solo within the metrical and harmonic constraints of the pattern. Some observers see in this improvised yet structured song style a model for democratic, non-hierarchical social values.

So let’s hear some of this amazing music. This is a song of joy after a hunt, sung by the Babenzele tribe. Listen out for the closely interlocking parts of the flute and voice at the opening. And for anyone who’s worried that Utopian music would amount to bad amateur music-making, listen to the level of skill involved in the musicking of these non-professionals.

This song is from the Aka tribe, it’s for entertainment and social cohesion, it’s called Dikobo Damu da Sombe, which has been translated, bizarrely, as ‘The hair of my pubes is dense’ – fertility being a major theme in Aka song and philosophy. Here it’s being sung by the entire village.

Aka women doing the Ndambo hunting dance
And here are two recordings of the song sung by just two people, so in some ways the song is divided into some of its constituent parts. Notice again the close interlocking textures.

Here’s a rendition of song by two shy young girls. Listen to the complex structure of their improvisation and interaction.

This singing involves the whole community and maximises social cohesion. No money is exchanged in order to make it happen. There are no professionals or elites performing or controlling the music. Everyone has striking talent because everyone practices often and from an early age. There is considerable freedom of movement within the music but there is an a priori structural framework. And musicking is inseparable from the world and from everyday life.

It’s been very easy for anthropologists and musicians to over-romanticise Central African polyphony and the societies in which it’s based as an Eden-like Utopia, and anyone who’s seen the film Avatar will know what I mean. They’re seen as noble savages, primordial others, the true face of humanity, etc etc. They’ve been attractive to New Age movements, they’ve been sampled and turned into saccharine chillout and house music.
A medley of tracks from Deep Forest's first album - mmm, lovely.
Perhaps their musicking fulfils some people’s criteria for the Utopian, but I think there is at least one flaw here, and it’s gender again. There are roles within the music that women cannot adopt, and there are instruments and songs that only women are allowed to play and sing. Of course, this is because there is such a gender divide in the life of the tribe – you guessed it, it’s the men who do the hunting, and the women who stay at home and rear children (although women do have a song that calls the men back from the hunt). While I don't believe there's a systematic violence toward or oppression of women in the tribes, this is a deal breaker for me. I’m not so keen on the idea of hunting and killing wild animals such as elephants either, there's no reason why a Utopia should entail such a 'return to Nature', but that depends on your Utopia. Another problem is that the music could almost be seen as too complex – it would take years of frustration to teach Westerners how to do it up to a suitable standard.

New Utopian Music
So perhaps there isn’t a suitably Utopian form of musicking that exists at the moment. However, we have seen the importance of musicking for practicing social relationships, and we have seen some forms of musicking that have a certain Utopian appeal - let’s set ourselves the task of designing one. This is a project I’m casually working on, and I invite everyone here to consider doing the same.

I’m far from finished designing a Utopian style of music, but I will share with you some of my ideas. I’m aiming for all the qualities I outlined earlier in the talk to come together in something that would be, to put it crudely, a cross between rave, free improv, central African polyphony and experimental music. Firstly, no instruments would be involved and all the musickers would be arranged in a horseshoe or incomplete ring shape. This is so that they can see each other clearly but also leave a space for newcomers to join in. A horseshoe shape would also be difficult to film or put on stage, so as to be made into a spectacle for outsiders.

The musicking would resemble a game far more than it would a conventional musical performance. I’m thinking of a more complex, sonic version of a game like hac-e-sac, in which a sack of sand is thrown around a circle. It would be an intuitive game – ideally, you could learn the rules slowly by joining in, without conversation – and it would be based on a handful of basic but well-calibrated rules. It would be somewhere between a game of football and a game of chess in complexity. It would be a very physical game involving dance, so it would be a good form of exercise. You could imagine healthy controversy among commentators as to whether it was a musical performance or indeed a just a game.

One thing that could help with this is that the music would have little to do with specific pitches. There are many reasons for this. Matching pitches is something that does require some skill. Physiologically speaking, everyone has different vocal chords and pitch ranges, and this introduces inequality into the musicking. Crucially, vocal pitch is something that can tend to create a dividing line between women and men. I’m not saying that vocally generated sound would play no part, though alternative sounds like clapping or stamping can provide a rich sonic palette, and dancing is also a major part of musicking, but singing as we know it wouldn’t be involved. Another reason is that without a conventional approach to pitch, which has arguably been the most important sonic variable in Western music to date, the music would sound unusual indeed, it’s be a taste of something completely alien and alternative.

Ultimately this form of musicking must be approachable and above all fun. I hope that it’d make people smile, laugh and bond in a way that sitting in a room with a free improv group like AMM rarely can. It needs to be something that people would want to do over and over again as a pastime, like free-running or impromptu games of amateur football. I imagine people doing it for fun in their homes and in public spaces. It could even be used in protest.

Audience participation
Well, before I finish, I should say that it hasn’t escaped my attention that I’m up here performing, while you’re all here passively listening in just the mode of the musical oppression I’ve been going on about. Sometimes events like the Oxford Radical Forum can be accused of preaching to the choir, that’s not fair I don’t think, but in any case I want to hilariously make that metaphor a reality and turn you all into one big choir. Like Lucky Dragons I’m going to hand over my power to the collective and we’ll finish the talk by joining together as equals in a simple singing piece that has a certain Utopian quality.

Don’t worry, I’m not here to coerce anyone, I’m not going to force anyone to sing, that wouldn’t be Utopian at all. But if you’ve understood my message today, you’ll appreciate that a lack of confidence in public singing is the symptom of a culture that has made musicking a peripheral and often highly unequal social activity. It is your right and your power to sing and be an equal musical performer within your society. Don’t feel persuaded otherwise.

I’d like us to have a go at a simplified version of a composition by the aforementioned Cornelius Cardew, ‘Paragraph 7’ from his experimental, improvisatory work The Great Learning. The original text is from Confucius, but I’ve derived the text here from the three functions Christopher Small sees in the ritual of musicking.

There are three phrases of text:

1. Affirm
2. Explore
3. Celebrate

At the signal to begin, start singing the first word, softly and slowly, stretching it out for the entire length of a breath, and stop when you run out of breath.

When you run out of breath, inhale, then start singing the next phrase in the same way, but choose a new note which matches a note that you can hear someone else singing.

When you run out breath again, repeat the process, moving on to sing the next phrase.

When you reach the end of the third phrase, i.e. your third breath, go back to the first phrase, but still choosing, as before, a new note which matches a note that you can hear someone else singing as you do so.

Repeat indefinitely.

It’s a bit like a game isn’t it? As you can see, the piece has an element of mutuality to it in that you are performing and listening to each other at the same time. Don’t worry too much about being exactly precise in matching other people’s pitches – that takes a certain skill, and in fact creative mistakes are what keeps the music in this piece fresh. Anyway, the main point is that you’re involved. Listen closely to the notes that those around you are singing, but also listen to the rich harmonies and textures that the piece generates as we all fall out of sync and swap notes.

Here's the original version of Paragraph 7, performed by the Scratch Orchestra

Kode9 at the Red Bull Music Academy

2010-03-16T12:47:00.004Z

Last Wednesday I was invited down to the London Red Bull Music Academy to have a peep behind the scenes and attend a lecture given by Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman before it all drew to a close at the end of the week. The whole experience had a fantastical edge to it – imagine Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but instead of chocolate there were rivers of underground dance music, and instead of oompa-loompas there were big name producers strolling about. While I was waiting in the academy’s reception-come-café-come-bar (yeah), Flying Lotus and Daedalus sauntered in and sat down on the next table, chatting. Minutes later, Hudson Mohawke popped by and joined in. Thank God I was wearing my least worst trainers.
An RBMA participant makes use of the facilities

Hearing the words ‘Red Bull Music Academy’, you’d probably be forgiven for imagining little more than a grating pop festival sponsored by an energy drink, broadcast non-stop on some digital TV channel, built around a many-into-one competition for a grand prize (a record deal, surely – What All Musicians Want). Well, if the RBMA was a five week long advert for Red Bull, then it was a very expensive and artistically conscientious one. True, every room I saw had its own miniature glass fridge stacked full of cans of the stuff, but everyone within the academy did seem to have an interest in fostering creativity and nurturing new talent that wasn’t just deeply sincere, but musically specific too, the activities of the RBMA being largely centred on underground dance and electronic music. A direct appeal to the hearts, minds and wallets of the pop mainstream’s public this was not.The RBMA is an international yearly event held in a different major city each year. Thirty participants (the word ‘student’ is discouraged as unequal) are selected from all over the world, and they attend lectures given by respected musical figures and courses on music-making, while producing music with the help of established artists, resident or visiting, and all the hardware and software they might need to do it. Flying Lotus had been a participant in the Melbourne RBMA a few years back – while there he wrote ‘Tea Leaf Dancers’ and met Kode9, and this year he was on site to lend a hand to the next generation. The whole thing was only semi-public – gigs and raves were held in various places around London featuring the artists involved, and a free paper, Daily Note, was handed out daily on the Underground, but the focus was on participants. The academy occupied and redecorated the London offices of Red Bull near City Hall, turning them into a place where participants, already housed in flats down the road, could eat three fantastic meals a day (I could smell a stunning curry as I left in the evening), make use of a free café and bar and produce tracks in several purpose-built studios, some of which will remain there permanently for the use of the public – and all this paid for, apparently, by Red Bull. I really hope the participants understood how lucky they were.
On the condition that I would leave the question-asking to the participants, I parked myself in a low, comfy and decidedly trendy chair at the back of the lecture room to see Kode9 play tunes and speak to DJ and radio presenter Benji B for an hour and a half about DJing, producing and Hyperdub. You can watch the lecture by clicking here, it includes some of Kode9’s latest work in progress and a preview of the astounding B side of Kyle Hall’s upcoming 12” on Hyperdub, ‘Kaychunk / You Know What I Feel’.
They weren’t yet sure where the next RBMA will be held, but I’d encourage anyone reading this who considers themselves serious about music-making to watch out for news of it think about applying to participate next year. http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/

The Wire Salon: Revenant Forms: The Meaning of Hauntology

2010-03-10T13:53:00.006Z

1963, Mark Weaver.
On April 1st I'll be making another appearance in the realm of the living, this time at Cafe OTO, London (directions here) to discuss Hauntology alongside Mark Fisher (k-punk). Short films by Julian House (The Focus Group) will be screened, and there'll be music courtesy of Moon Wiring Club and Mordant Music too.

THURSDAY 1st April 2010
Times: 8pm
Tickets: £4 Ticket on the door Only

A new series of monthly salon-type events, hosted by The Wire magazine at Cafe Oto in East London, and dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The evenings, which will take place on the first Thursday of each month, will consist of readings, discussions, panel debates, film screenings, DJ sets and even the occasional live performance.

For the first event in the series, Revenant Forms: The Meaning of Hauntology, Mark Fisher (K-Punk) and Adam Harper (Rouge's Foam) will head a panel debating the essence of the spectral, uncanny qualities of much contemporary audio, from dubstep to hypnagogic pop and beyond. The night will also include screenings of a number of short films by Julian House (Ghost Box, The Focus Group), which feature soundtracks by Broadcast, Belbury Poly and others; a live set by Moon Wiring Club; and eldritch vinyl interludes courtesy of Mordant Music.

http://www.thewire.co.uk
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org
http://www.ghostbox.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/moonwiringclub
http://www.mordantmusic.com

Oxford Radical Forum 2010

2010-03-02T14:48:00.003Z

Wadham College's Holywell Quadrangle, also known as Ho Chi Minh Quad, backs onto arguably the oldest purpose-built concert hall in Europe.
I will be stepping out of the blogosphere and into the Real World to talk about 'Utopian Organisation in Music' (improv, rave, Cornelius Cardew, central African polyphony) for this year's Oxford Radical Forum, held at Wadham College. I'm up on Sunday afternoon, followed by Owen Hatherley and Nina Power, who'll be familiar to many as Zer0 book authors and the writers of the Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy and Infinite Thought blogs respectively.

OXFORD RADICAL FORUM :: 6-7 March (this weekend!)

We are proud and excited to present to you the THIRD Oxford Radical Forum, taking place this Friday - Sunday, 6 - 7 March.

For those who don't know, the Oxford Radical Forum is a three-day event bringing together activists, speakers and academics to discuss and debate key issues for the left and critical political thought, from climate-change to women's liberation, culture, race and resistance.

::Please note that all sessions take place in Wadham College and some sessions run simultaneously.

FRIDAY

--
2:30 – 3:45

:: DIRECT ACTION WORKSHOP
Seeds For Change

Seeds For Change Network is a non-profit training and support co-op helping people organise for action and positive social change. Currently based in Oxford and Lancaster, all members of the network have a background in grassroots social and environmental justice campaigning, on issues such as peace, roads, and GM, and they have been involved in setting up and running various community resource centres.http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

--
4:30 – 6:00

:: ENGLAND’S POST-IMPERIAL MELANCHOLIA
Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the author of several critically-acclaimed and influential books including The Black Atlantic, After Empire and the seminal There Aint No Black in the Union Jack. Gilroy’s work has been characterised by a sustained engagement with issues of race, empire, cultural identity and the relationship between these in society, as a conscious contribution to the struggle against racism and imperialism.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

--
6:45 – 8:15

:: THE BLACK AND THE RED: MARXISM & ANARCHISM TODAY
Paul Blackledge and Ruth Kinna

Paul Blackledge sits on the boards of the Historical Materialism and International Socialism journal and is Reader in political theory at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History and co-editor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Essays and Articles and also written and published widely on issues from ethics to historiography, from anarchism to the working class and Rugby.

Ruth Kinna is Senior Lecturer in politics at Loughborough University and the editor of Anarchist Studies. Her publications include William Morris: The Art of Socialism and Anarchism: A Beginners’ Guide. She works both on recovering traditions from late nineteenth-century socialism as well as on contemporary anarchism and on art and utopianism.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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8:30-…

:: FORUM DINNER

All Forum attendees welcome…

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

SATURDAY

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11:00 – 12:15

:: COMMONWEALTH AND CONVIVIALITY: ANTI-CAPITALISM AND THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
Kate Soper and Jeremy Gilbert

Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University, is the author of The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently.

Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London, is the author of Anti-capitalism and Culture.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

--
1:15 – 2:30

:: AGAINST THE COLONIAL PRESENT
Patricia Daley and Priyamvada Gopal

Patricia Daley is a lecturer in Human Geography at Oxford University. She is the author of Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region. Another of her projects examines the condition of new African diaspora communities in Great Britain. Her charitable work includes acting as a member of the advisory panel of the Windle Trust, a non-governmental organization that provides scholarships to African Refugees.

Priya Gopal teaches English at Cambridge University. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence, a study of writers on the Indian subcontinent whose work was engaged with questions of political and social transformation. She writes occasionally for newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom and India on topics such as empire and multiculturalism.http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/priyamvadagopal

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

--

3:00 – 4:15

:: FIGHTING FASCISM, RACISM AND IMMIGRATION CONTROLS IN BRITAIN TODAY

Teresa Hayter and

Speaker from Unite Against Fascism

Teresa Hayter is a long-standing and renowned activist against racism and immigration controls, and has been centrally involved in the ‘Campaign to Close Campfield’ detention-centre. She is the author of Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls (Pluto) and previously wrote, among many others, the influential book, Aid as Imperialism. She is also a visiting lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

Simultaneous with:

:: BODY POLITIC DRAMA WORKSHOP>>
Caitlin McLeod and Cara Verkerk (Warwick University, Theatre Studies Finalists)

"Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female." This will be an informal, playful workshop/discussion with the intention of opening up dialogue between young women. We will focus on the disjunction between the reality of our bodies and the destructive and powerful 'Beauty Myth' that is imposed on us every day.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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4:45 – 6:00

:: DISASTER POLITICS IN HAITI: AID, EXPLOITATION AND THE ARMY
Peter Hallward and Richard Seymour

Peter Hallward is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (Verso), is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University and is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. As well as being an expert on Haiti and continental philosophy and theory, Hallward is engaged in an ambitious project to develop a notion of collective, self-determining political will - ‘The Will of the People’.

Richard Seymour is most well-known for the highly-popular blog Lenin’s Tomb. He is also a political activist and author of the praised book The Liberal Defence of Murder, a critique of humanitarian and liberal justifications for war and imperialism. Currently Seymour is working on a book on David Cameron, which promises to do for the Conservative leader something similar to what Alain Badiou achieved with his recent book on Sarkozy.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

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7:00 – 8:30

:: ONE MILLION CLIMATE JOBS – NOW!
Jonathan Neale and
former Vestas worker and occupier (TBC)

Jonathan Neale is a leading activist on climate issues and is the International Secretary of the Campaign against Climate Change. He is the author of Stop Global Warming: Change the World, as well as many, many others, on subjects as diverse as mutineers and the Sherpa climbers of the Himalayas, as well as fiction and theatre for children. Neale played the role of Karl Marx for the European premiere of Howard Zinn’s play, Marx in Soho.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

--
9:00 p.m. – 3:00 (a.m.!)

PERFORMANCE // SPOKEN WORD // GIG // DJs
@ “THE CELLAR”
Featuring Babygravy and others

An eclectic mixture of live music, spoken word and comedy, arts-performance, and – after midnight – serious dance music until late.

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SUNDAY

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1:15 – 2:30

:: UTOPIAN ORGANIZATION IN MUSIC
Adam Harper

Adam Harper is the writer behind Rouge’s Foam, a blog of forward-thinking essays on the aesthetics of contemporary music. Topics he’s written about include recent trends of political nostalgia in art and experimental pop, new rhythmic techniques in dance music and the ideological restrictions of modern classical music. He is currently adapting some of this writing into a book for Zer0, to be called ‘Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-making’. Having studied musicology at Oxford and Goldsmiths College, he now lives in Peckham, London, producing music for film and theatre and writing for the modern music magazine Wire.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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3:00 – 4:15

:: MILITANT MODERNISM AND THE RUINS OF BRITISH UTOPIA
Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley is an architect and wrote the recent manifesto, Militant Modernism, a work dedicated to the architecture department at Southampton City Council. He is currently working on a book for Verso which seeks to excavate utopian elements in ‘the ruins’ of twentieth-century, British modernism. He also blogs at The Measures Taken and Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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4:45 – 6:00

:: WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Nina Power and Laurie Penny

Nina Power is author of the book, One-Dimensional Woman, and the popular blog Infinite Thought: http://cinestatic.com/infinitethought/. A Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, she is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's On Beckett and his Political Writings. Nina has published widely on topics including Iran, humanism, vintage pornography and Marxism; she also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers' Magazine.

Laurie Penny is a feminist activist and keeps the popular blog http://pennyred.blogspot.com/ She is staff writer at One In Four magazine, and also contributes to Red Pepper and Liberal Conspiracy. She was a parliamentary researcher for the Labour party. A socialist, deviant, reprobate, queer, aspiring author, she lives with toast-eating pagans in a little house somewhere in London, smoking and drinking and plotting to subtly re-arrange the world to suit her ideals.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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7:00 – 8:30

:: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN FRANCE AND THE NOUVEAU PARTI ANTICAPITALISTE
Stathis Kouvelakis

Stathis Kouvelakis is a lecturer at King’s College London (KCL) and an activist in the French Nouveau Parti Capitaliste (NPA) and in the KCL University and College Union. Intellectually, his two main projects are a thorough critique of the chief concepts and assumptions of liberal political thought and the study of Karl Marx’s early philosophical formation, in the context of revolution; his Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (Verso) was translated into English with a preface by Fredric Jameson.

OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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8:45 – …

DRINKS AND FAREWELLS

Beats in Space

2010-03-02T13:30:00.007Z

Art by Konx-Om-Pax, who’s done sleeve art for Hudson Mohawke.
How’s this for new musical variables? Choice between a left and a right speaker isn’t normally thought of as integral to a musical composition in the same way that choice of pitch or duration is. In fact few musics even see the orientation of a sound within a space as something that can or should be specified. Make things a little more complex, however, and a whole new world opens up:

The history of electronic and concrete music is one of isolated shows of technological novelty slowly becoming richly detailed musical traditions. The sounds that were academic and avant-garde in one decade become TV music in the next, and in the following decade become a central characteristic of styles like acid house, techno or hiphop. Likewise, the spatial acoustic experiments of Stockhausen et al, via the 3D soundsystem demonstrated above, could one day become a new way to dance, where specific styles of music would be celebrated for their signature three-dimensional textures.

Imagine musical styles where the sounds used could vary quite widely but the spatial form they each occupied was generally the same - florid synthesised leads descending slowly from above while percussion circled the dancefloor perimiter for the length of a four-bar loop, for example, or riffs that bounce up and down as they travel through a space marked out by a deep kick drum positioned low and winged hi-hats swooping above you. Today one crowd of ravers focuses on bass music and the other mid-range melody, but tomorrow dancefloors (and internet forums) could be divided into those who like their percussion positioned high and those who like it low.

This 3D gig was part of the astonishing Red Bull Music Academy 2010, which has been putting on music events throughout London and handing out FREE copies of Daily Note, an amazing music paper that has seen feature articles by the likes of Dan Hancox and Melissa Bradshaw. Skream, Untold and Hudson Mohawke will be making appearances soon as part of the RBMA schedule (can you imagine a 3D version of Hudson Mohawke’s album Butter? Terrifying).

#savepublicmusic

2010-02-28T18:30:00.009Z

It’s been a troubling week for music as a collective activity, open to the general public. On Monday, news rapidly spread that legendary Shoreditch club Plastic People is under threat of closure by Hackney Council under the advice of the police, prompting an extraordinary ‘Save Plastic People’ campaign. The club has spent a decade housing and incubating the best and freshest of UK dance musics. Days later, we learnt that the unique BBC digital radio stations 6 Music and The Asian Network could well be shut down as part of a belt-tightening exercise that apparently pre-empts an oncoming Conservative government.

Plastic People, BBC 6 Music and The Asian Network all share a faith in music that’s outside of – even ahead of – the mainstream, and they exist to bring that music to a wider audience. Institutions like these are of course vital to the health of musical creativity and innovation in this country and worldwide. Moreover, the threat of their demise is a symptom of the trend that sees music slowly transforming from a collective activity that builds and benefits societies, stoking the imaginations of those who participate in it, into an economically viable product made for personally selected, individual consumption – or at the most, a fashionable, elite but ultimately inoffensive decoration for the solipsistic cycles of sex, money-making and waiting around that our lives are increasingly held to amount to.

Tellingly, one of the reasons given for the ‘application to review’ Plastic People’s licence was ‘Prevention of Public Nuisance’. Which public? Whose public? Here, PP’s promotion of public activity becomes the nuisance caused by a public, which evidently needs to be prevented. Music is being shifted from a publicly shared activity to the peaceful security of private consumption from within our own little kingdoms – from a collective, participatory act of open-minded creativity and imagination to an easy, quality-controlled and stultifying familiarity.
Let’s not have that. Get involved. Help save public music. These are the first things you can do:

You can sign the petition against the closure of Plastic People by following this link.

You can sign the petition against the closure of BBC 6 Music and The Asian Network by following this link.
But don’t let it end there. Keep watching and protesting, because there may well be more of this sort of thing to come.

Idées Fixes

2010-02-10T14:15:00.010Z

The cover of dEbruit’s new Spatio Temporel EP. It’s in the mould of the Let’s Post Funk cover, but this time depicts a woman in traditional West African dress, and similarly comes with 3D glasses for achieving the full effect.
On Twitter yesterday, beats producer dEbruit exclaimed ‘WONKY YOURSELF! MERDE QUOI! IF MY MUSIC WAS WONKY I WOULD FIX IT IN A SEC! RINGO STARR IS WONKY! NOT ME!’ Nowadays it seems that railing against the epithet ‘wonky’ is itself the hallmark the musical culture some people call ‘wonky’. Of course, as everyone should know, the ‘wonky’ he refers to isn’t really to be taken as a style or genre of music but as a ‘theme’, a feeling, an aesthetic, a mode of appreciation (and I use the word ‘mode’ in both its English and French senses). Tracks that fit the ‘wonky’ theme can come from any genre: hip hop, post-dubstep, funk, electronic, whatever – and besides, the word is not meant as a pejorative characterisation of ‘incorrect’ or ‘deformed’ music, but a fond shorthand describing the unconventional rhythmic, metrical and textural elements that have deservedly become so popular in recent years. As with terms like ‘punk’ and ‘queer’, ‘wonky’ is a word that could even be turned from an insult into a badge of difference, subversion, innovation and free-thinking creativity.

Still, this is a very fine point, and names that can come to categorise musics will certainly have a homogenising, maybe even damaging effect on any creative milieu that bubbles over with innovation. It’s never long before a mode of appreciation becomes the mode of appreciation, before what was once fluid coagulates and becomes fixed, and composers and listeners stop using their imaginations. (By the way, if you’re reading this because you googled ‘making wonky beats’, then you oughta be ashamed of yourself – go home, turn your ears and brain back on and listen, improvise, create.)

One of my favourites - ‘Look 22’ from the earlier Clé de Bras EP.
Well, there’s certainly nothing about dEbruit’s music that needs fixing. Despite his ‘glitchy’ use of samples and a punk-like moniker which combines the French words for ‘debris’ and ‘[unwanted] noise’, every beat, pitch and sample is masterfully put in exactly its right place, down to the tiniest, almost imperceptible fraction of a split second. Unquantised music is not simply a matter of leaving beats outside the metronomic grid, positioning them slightly away from their conventional places or forcefully warping or shattering the beat into a state of rhythmic-metrical anarchy. As I’ve said before, when it’s at its best it’s a delicate balance between strict rhythm and free rhythm that only a master craftsman can achieve. Push the notes too far away or let rhythmic-metrical coherency go slack, and you’re lost. Be too conservative with your positioning and you’re not having as much fun as you could be. Like tightrope walking, it’s finding a place to stand on a thin line, midway between earth and Heaven, and the higher up you are, the greater the thrill.

dEbruit consistently pushes his beats to the very edge of disorder, residing in a zone where we’re a demisemiquaver away from chaos, where a tiny extra note or a few more milliseconds’ delay would cause the entire groove to capsize. It remains, or rather becomes, exceptionally danceable, and yes, it’s thrilling. If this is ‘wonky’, don’t fix it.

‘Gros’, also from the Clé de Bras EP, but the cover depicted here is that of Let’s Post Funk.
My obsession with dEbruit began back in July, shortly after Let’s Post Funk was released. Since then I’ve heard nine new tracks and if anything, Frenchman and recently-turned Londoner Xavier Thomas has got even better at what he does, which is actually far more than master the art of complex unquantised beats. Armed with a handful of succulent synth presets, a hard-working oldskool drum machine, an amazing ear for inventive harmony and melody, an unusual but viable approach to large-scale form and a library of dance and folk music samples from every corner of the globe all bouncing around a four-track with a squeaky clean production that hides nothing up its sleeve, dEbruit creates a style that’s both attractively coherent and broad in its achievements. So simple and yet so complex.

On Monday, his Heart Beats 4 Haiti was released, an EP drawing on samples of Haitian music like Zook and Kom-pa for which the proceeds go to UNICEF’s Haiti appeal. You can get the mp3 or FLAC release here and please do – great beats, great cause, simply no excuse. It opens with the jubilant ‘Changement’, a typical hand-clapping dEbruit party interspersed with passages of excitable delay. Listen out for how dEbruit subtly changes the length of his samples as the track continues, creating the sense of forward momentum that’s become one of his specialities. ‘Battement’, where cut-up Haitian folk guitar meets a full-bodied horn section complete with squealing trumpet, is yet another contender for best dEbruit track so far. Its resonant, long-decaying TR-808 kick drum and hissing hats are reminiscent of this Jerk craze, but it’s joined by conga-like drums in your left and right ears to create something even friendlier.

In ‘It’s Bigger Than Kom-Pa’, dEbruit’s trademark trumpet-like synth belts out another jaw-droppingly rapid fire bassline while barely recognisable samples scratch out a ecstatic melody in the upper frequencies. ‘Souvenir’ has a slightly melancholy tone, and uses some unusually full-textured samples. A particular highlight sees a thick saw-wave bass pick up the melody implied by the guitar in the previous sample collage. Heart Beats 4 Haiti is some of dEbruit’s most complex and adventurous material, but it doesn’t sacrifice the sweet groove or the hands-in-the-air melody he always delivers. Again, not only is this release thoroughly worthwhile, but you'd be helping Haiti, so just get it. (By the way, anyone in or near London interested in the debate surrounding what sorts of help Haiti needs might want to go to this meeting tonight.)

dEbruit’s Spatio Temporel EP came out a week before and it’s also among his greatest releases. This time the samples come from all over the world, but Sub-Saharan Africa is a particular focus. ‘KO Debout’ creates melody and harmonic accompaniment from samples of individual notes from an African ‘thumb piano’, a centuries-old family of instruments that go by many different names throughout Africa and are used both in large ensembles and by lonely shepherds to pass the time. It’s joined by cheering crowds, a duet of warm processed vocals and a busy wah-wah bass. ‘Persian Funk’ has been pretty popular, appearing on loads of mixes including Pipedown’s Favourites of 2009. Perhaps it’s the slow sense of additive momentum permeating the whole track instead of just the opening thirty seconds, perhaps it’s the upward climb of the oscillating vocals, perhaps it’s the strangely decorated swung bassline, or perhaps it’s the deep electro God voice that stops everything to say ‘yo’, it’s a great package.

‘149 Dalston Airline’ surrounds a complex bass part, rich parallel synth-trumpet harmonies and Yoruba vocals with a perfect storm of agogo, rapid drumming and handclaps, while the uptempo finale ‘Nigeria What?’ draws on the florid African guitar styles that more and more people are coming to love.

Finally, dEbruit’s outstanding remix of R&B singer Ginuwine’s 1996 single ‘Pony’ has also been kicking around. Here it is apparently in some sort of Rusko context, with the beginning of Spatio Temporel’s ‘K O Debout’ coming in at the end:

Maybe the greatest thing about dEbruit’s sound is the overflowing warmth and vivacity riding alongside the technical innovation and achievement. This is cool without cynicism or darkness, without abstraction from worldly culture, a welcoming, extroverted cool that holds nothing back, wearing a smile on its face that’s knowing but not ironic. What with UK Funky, Joy Orbison, the resurgence of melody represented by the ‘Purple’ of Joker and Guido and all the interest in non-European dance styles, I think (I hope) that this is a turn UK dance music is taking.

The Twenty-First-Century Modern Composer

2010-01-01T16:49:00.029Z

A model for composition, or else another manifesto.

Tor-Magnus Lundeby, The Electrifier.

‘To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.’ – inscription on the Voyager Golden Record.

We are entering an era of near limitless sonic possibility. A time when any sound imaginable (and supposedly also some that are currently unimaginable) could be created by technological means was predicted by John Cage, and that time is now. Technological development has enabled the range of choice in controlling sounds and their interrelationships to grow exponentially in the past few decades, and the capability to produce any and every conceivable form of continuous sound with ease, from basic structures to the most richly complex styles, will soon be at everyone’s fingertips. We are rapidly heading deeper and deeper into a creative environment in which any music will, at the sonic level, be possible.

This situation is the precondition for the actualisation of music, that is, the process by which the sonic, aesthetic and cultural potential of music as a whole reaches its fullest possible application – but it’s a precondition only. How could the composition of sound, and more broadly still, the practice of music, be made to reveal and embody this actualisation? How could the music of the twenty-first century be organised so as to take full advantage of its unprecedented sonic possibilities to broaden and satisfy the human imagination to the utmost degree?
Julie Mehretu, Suprematist Evasion (excerpt)

Twenty-first-century modern music

The concept of the ‘twenty-first-century modern composer’ is not tautological. Not all music created in the present is ‘modern’ by default. Despite its current potential, much contemporary music largely continues or imitates older musics, even when the technology used to do this is richly advanced in what it can achieve, and so it can’t truly be called modern music. It would be ‘modern/ist’ to make comprehensive use of the technological possibilities currently on offer to create bold new musics that were previously unheard of.

The drive to create ‘new music’ is nothing new. The modern music movement of the twentieth century is probably the most widespread, thorough and currently relevant instance of it, and it too aimed to create bold new musics, using modern methods, to reflect modern times. The twentieth century saw a quick circumnavigation of musical possibility, presenting us with an approximate map of its outer limits not unlike the sketchy first maps of the coastlines surrounding the New World that were drawn in the sixteenth century. The polar everything-and-nothing of Cage’s 4’ 33” and similar works has been reached, but there are still vast ‘inland’ areas left to explore with the help of new technologies.
Daniel Richter, Untitled.
Rather than seeking inspiration, like the twentieth-century modern composer, in the historical teleology of progressively dismantling musical convention, the twenty-first-century modern composer looks to the broad but comparatively limited diversity that has already been achieved in music throughout time and, especially, the world – not to continue or imitate them but as reminders of the extents to which one can plumb the depths of the musically possible. Cage’s music, along with Papua New Guinean house-building song, Japanese Gagaku music, Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Senegalese percussion, Australian aboriginal song, North American blues, Stravinsky’s ballets, central African pygmy song, Hindustani classical music and Bulgarian singing, not to mention the myriad styles of electronic music created over the last quarter century – these are just some of the musical galaxies, making up tiny dots in the enormous night sky, that have already been peered at through telescopes. Many more musics await discovery, and better telescopes are being built all the time.

The specifics of style

Now of course, creating music that is possible is not always enough to create effective music for inspiring people’s imaginations, and possibility alone doesn’t constitute the actualisation of music. For that, musical innovation and exploration needs to function inward as well as outward, on the level of fine detail as well as on the level of re-inventing the wheel. This can be achieved by grounding new musics in the recurring specifics of style.

A musical style is a certain loosely recurring configuration of sonic variables controlled within defined limits of flexibility. Style is like a game with rules – every time the game is played the details are different but the rules are familiar and generally the same. To return to the astronomical analogy: just as a galaxy is composed of millions of stars, so a style can give rise to a practically infinite variety of similar but different musical examples (i.e. tracks, works, pieces, performances, events etc). The local-level possibilities of new and specific musical styles should be explored just as conscientiously as the gigantic space excavated for music as a whole.
Franz Ackermann, Helicopter XVIII (Reality Check).
The future of music no longer lies in the breaking of rules or the perpetual veneration of a creative condition without rules (though this may ultimately be the case as after the twentieth century there are no fixed rules left to break, for the Western world at least – as such you could call this music ‘post-experimental’), but in the localised invention of new and detailed rules for the playing of new games. Personal, social and cultural appreciation of music thrives on a flexible relationship with established and familiar rules; this certain level of stability is what allows a scene (the socio-cultural anchor of musical style) and a tradition to develop. Style and, where it has potential, scene are the pretexts for detailed and sophisticated explorations of new musical formulae.

Stylistic rules should be relatively flexible, not set in stone. Music that does little else than obey stylistic rules can be just as impoverished as music that only amounts to free-form, utterly anarchic chaos. The skill of the twenty-first-century modern composer is in achieving some viable balance between rules (both her/his own and those of others) and innovation, both in a single musical instance and across her/his career. Such a balance, however it is achieved, has always been the hallmark of great music.
Beatriz Milhazes, title unknown.
The twenty-first-century modern composer, as an individual with a stable listenership, most embodies the actualisation of music by inventing new styles, exploring their local-level possibilities for a while, and then moving on to something completely different. Ideally, the world of twenty-first century music would be characterised by a vast array of diverse stylistic forms, each explored along divergent paths, that rise, fall and perhaps rise again over time, driven by the convection currents of culture like chunks in a boiling, infinite soup. This soup doesn’t just facilitate the coming and going of loosely self-contained styles, but is also especially conducive to ‘transversal’ styles or ‘themes’, where some particular common ground causes multiple musics from different styles and eras to resonate in sympathy. ‘Hauntology’ (post-Utopian deconstruction) and ‘wonky’ (unquantised psychedelia) are two such themes that have already been celebrated in the past decade.

(The pluralistic multi-stylism I describe here may sound like that notorious feature of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century postmodernism, but it’s crucially distinct from it. Postmodern pluralism, as opposed to modernist innovation, is characterised by its drawing on and recycling of pre-existing musics (with or without irony), whereas the twenty-first-century modern composer embodying the actualisation of music deliberately seeks to create an array of new styles that have little or no basis in the current history of music. It could almost be described as a postmodernism without the collapse of history or the irony that surrounds it.)
Matthew Ritchie, Self-portrait in 2064.

The constituents of music and genetic complexity trees

In order to compose music, one must have an awareness of what any given music is composed of and how it is composed. I have already used the noun ‘variable’ above (‘A musical style is a certain loosely recurring configuration of sonic variables controlled within defined limits of flexibility’) to refer to a changeable quantitative or qualitative value that can pertain to sound(s). The smallest unit of musical composition is not the note but, even more fundamentally, the indivisible variable. A pattern of variables, some of which are largely fixed while others may vary in value to allow built-in flexibility, forms the genetic code of any stylistic group of musical life-forms.

Some basic variables that can apply to a single sound include pitch, volume, timbre, duration and, more broadly, where the sound is produced, who or what produces it, when it’s produced, how it’s produced and why it is produced (remember, music is not just a sound object, it’s an event, an activity). There are also countless less basic variables that can pertain to a sound, many of which are the preserve of electronic manipulation. Some of these variables include (and I’m speaking broadly) amount of reverb, length of reverb, amount and frequency of pitch variation over time, frequency and type of filtration, amount and nature of distortion, various further qualitative specifics of timbre, and so on to even finer levels of detail. Such variables cannot be divided into smaller categories and could be called ‘first order variables’. Anyone who’s used contemporary digital audio software and seen the rows of dials they offer to make musical choices with will be able to appreciate just how many thousands of variables can be brought to bear on a single sound.
Haluk Akakçe, The Magician.
Let’s go back to basics, though, and take a single sound at random from a pre-existing musical style as an example: say, any note from a sixteenth-century sacred motet performed in its usual, original context. Some variables applied to that note are fixed and some allow variety. The variable of timbre is largely fixed, it’s predominantly going to be set to the timbre of the human voice. As to the ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘when’, it’ll probably be sung by a choir as part of a specific church service. The variables of pitch and duration will vary more widely than that of timbre, but only within the bounds of certain rhythmic and modal/harmonic prescriptions. Volume is generally unspecified in the score of a motet, it’s left to implied practical traditions which wouldn’t have allowed extreme volumes such as screaming or whispering. In other musics, the flexibility built into the variable of volume can vary enormously. Classical music is slightly more precise, using a handful of symbols marked into the score (forte, piano, etc) while contemporary electronic music can choose to specify volume to the hundredth of a decibel.

When more than one sound is to be produced, either simultaneously or in succession, the number of possible configurations of variables in the music multiplies enormously. On top of the inevitable ‘mix ‘n’ match’ combinations of different sounds, some variables (call them ‘second order variables’) control the relationships between sounds – examples include tempo, interval size, texture, certain timbre adjustments over time, the size and nature of the instrumental ensemble, tuning system used, amount and nature of ‘swing’ etc.
Fabian Marcaccio, Paintant.
It gets even more complex. First and second order variables and the interrelationships between them can accumulate together to form specific musical procedures and structures or ‘objects’ that can exist within the bounds of style. They can in turn act as ‘third order’ variables and, as sounds themselves, can have first or second order variables applied to them. In basic terms, the variables of ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’ are two stylistic procedures that control the interrelationships of sounds, in fact they’re very broad categories that include stylistic objects as subtypes, such as the various swung jazz rhythms or Wagnerian harmony. Other ‘sub-stylistic’ musical objects made up of specific configurations of sonic variables include the nineteen-eighties rock kick drum (specific timbre, specific reverb), the Viennese classical perfect cadence (specific control of pitch interrelationships), ‘staccato’ method (specific durations), the low-pass filter break in recent French house music (specific temporal structure, specific frequency filtration), the notated score (specific performance practice), the Hatakambari rāgam (specific pitching system) and so on ad infinitum. It must be noted that the boundaries of such recurring objects are not fixed and absolute, but base their unstable ontology on ‘family resemblance’. These objects, many of which do not (yet) have names, most of which have yet to be invented, come together to form the larger, more complex configurations that are handled as musical styles.
Joanne Greenbaum, Prom Queen.
Thus the complexity of musics and their constituent variables can be traced upwards and outwards from basic forms (such as a few simple sounds with a handful of rudimentary variable settings and procedures), through intermediate forms to a diverse range of richly complex forms. This process is very similar to the development of biological diversity as shown on maps like the phylogenetic ‘tree of life’ (see a comprehensive diagram here). A musical style’s constituent pattern of thousands of variables can be compared to the genome of a species, and just like music, all the species on the planet can be arranged into a hierarchy of categories that branch out as their genetic material becomes increasingly complex and specified, from domains to kingdoms, then to phylums, to subphylums, to classes, to orders, to families, to subfamilies, to genuses and finally to species. A biological object as relatively basic and primordial as a mouth travels upwards and outwards to the complex specifics of the set of teeth belonging to the Gemsbok (Oryx gazelle), or, on a different branch, the complex specifics of the human mouth, engineered for speech and song. A relatively basic musical object like a harmonically grounding bassline is perhaps analogous to the appearance of biological objects like the spine in vertebrate life-forms (from Myllokunmingia fengjiaoa all the way to Huayangosaurus taibaii), and similarly, can travel upwards and outwards from the simple fact of a bassline to the complex specifics of, for example, the intricate timbre adjustments in the bass parts of contemporary electronic bass-dominated music. (Note that this complexity tree is similar to but distinct from a literal evolutionary model of musical development across history – technically speaking, the tree I’m discussing is a ‘cladogram’, as in ‘cladistics’, of all possible variations in music, rather than a ‘chronogram’. Note also that unlike most known biological life-forms, musical styles can be fragmented and combined to form new styles).
Rosemarie Fiore, title unknown.
Given the practically infinite variety of possible configurations of musical variables I’ve started to demonstrate, it becomes clear that vast swathes of music’s own complexity tree of possibility have yet to be discovered, and contemporary technology affords both a greater expanse of control and a finer control of sonic variables than ever before for achieving this. The twenty-first-century modern composer is able to ‘genetically engineer’ strange new and detailed musical life-forms, even from scratch. But again, the most successful way to explore this space is by grounding exploration in the relative coherency afforded by the recurring specifics of style.

(One route to the specificity that musical creativity thrives on is in the use of instruments. Conventional instruments, like musical styles, impose certain limits on the variables in the music they produce. A piano can play a relatively wide range of pitches and volumes within the limits of its particular tuning system, but has little scope for controlling the variable of timbre compared to a modern synthesiser. Contemporary digital audio workstations, also instruments, offer enormous control over sonic variables, but this panorama of possibility often frightens users into conservativeness. I hope that the twenty-first century will see the return of instrument-building, especially the invention of electronic instruments (software or hardware), that are creatively limited in the number of variables they control, as these limitations, like the rules of style, offer ways into the music for both the composer and the listener. In a very real sense, inventing these instruments is composing itself.)
Sarah Morris, Endeavor (Los Angeles).

The political resonance of the twenty-first-century modern composer

The twenty-first-century modern composer innovates at every level (or branch) of musical complexity, inventing new styles as well as new sub-stylistic musical objects and new but fundamental musical structures. The closer s/he gets to the inventing branches near the ‘root’ of the tree of musical complexity, the more radical s/he becomes (radical literally means ‘going to the root or origin’). The radically modern twenty-first century composer endeavours to create musical styles that make enormous departures from pre-existing musics and seem utterly alien in every element.

Where the amount and complexity of the variables involved in such styles is equal to that of richly developed pre-existing musics (Western classical musics, for example, or Top 40 pop musics), that radical, ‘alien’ music truly constitutes an ‘alternative’ pattern of music-making. As many scholars and theorists have shown, the musical-aesthetic and the political are always closely related and often amount to the same thing: once the aesthetics of such radical alternative styles become collective knowledge, it potentially becomes a tool for challenging and even breaking up musical, aesthetic and (symbolically) political hegemony.
Jane Callister, Red Spring.
Even before this music takes on cultural meaning and becomes aestheticised, though, the alien sounds of such music can serve to jolt listeners out of a musical-aesthetic environment in which meaning is stable and readily accessible (that is to say, able to be controlled for political purposes). This has not happened in recent years as often as it has done during periods of the twentieth century, perhaps, but be sure that it can happen again. Looking at music as a practically infinite variety of possible configurations of variables shows that there is still plenty of scope for musics that will have first-time listeners asking themselves ‘how do I listen to this sound?’.

Alien sounds can be swiftly co-opted and tamed in an atmosphere of late capitalism, but the twenty-first-century modern composer perpetually moves on to new styles, and besides, there is plenty of room on the tree of musical complexity for musics that cannot truly be bought or sold, either as an object or an experience. This is an area that deserves investigation, but participatory, live-improvised music seems a particularly fruitful direction in which to explore, as it flies in the face of the professionalisation of music as an elite activity requiring ‘special talent’ (arguably a deeply ingrained Western cultural myth).
Inka Essenhigh, Supergod.

Do it yourself

So perhaps the most exciting aspect of the technology-enabled actualisation of music in the twenty-first century is that it’s practically in the hands of the general public, and will be even more so in the approaching decades. All anyone needs to create twenty-first-century modern music nowadays is a computer (one day they could be free to anyone in education) and an internet connection (free wi-fi is increasingly ubiquitous) with which to download some music software for free (legally or illegally). Composers like Burial are the earliest examples of this paradigm in action. Even now, a certain degree of technical expertise is required to operate music software, but such programs are becoming more and more user-friendly and intuitive. In ten or twenty years, practically anybody could be creating the radical musics I describe here using advanced mobile phones or portable touchscreen ‘tablets’. Given the range of musical control this technology does and will offer inexpensively, this is surely a musical revolution many times greater in scope and significance than the punk DIY revolution of the nineteen-seventies.

Maybe we will all be composers – perhaps not for the sake of fame or fortune, but for the satisfaction of ourselves and our societies. But of course individual composers, in the conventional sense of the term, cannot themselves truly effect the actualisation of musical production. Music created by a single individual is just another branch on the tree of musical complexity, and not its entirety. Music can be created as a group effort, with equal agency for all members of the group, for example. For this reason the ‘twenty-first-century modern composer’ I refer to here is not necessarily an individual per se, but a metaphorical concept that represents the general creation of music, however that is achieved.
Federico Herrero, Untitled.
This has been a sketch of a theoretical model for twenty-first-century modern musical composition. The analogies I use aren’t watertight (they’re only analogies after all) and there are many questions still to be answered and concepts to fine-tune, but I’d argue that what I write about here has, to a small extent, already started to happen. Tiny steps out into the actualisation of music have already been taken – but entire worlds await.

Happy New Year, happy new decade and a happy and prosperous ninety percent of the twenty-first century to everyone.

This is the final part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:

1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
2. ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’.
3. ‘What is a [Classical] Composer?’.

What is a [classical] Composer?

2009-12-17T12:47:00.060Z

Paul Morley (above) and Goldie (below) in photographs associated with the How To Be A Composer and Classic Goldie documentaries respectively.
It’s been an embarrassingly long time since The Impostume suggested that my motivation for footnoting a certain frustration with Woebot’s FACT review of One Foot Ahead of the Other was paranoia over one of Woebot’s blogposts having been about me, that the contempt of classical music, notational scores and roles for musicology in music journalism he’d expressed had been something to do with my own critical approach (having transcribed and done a detailed commentary of Zomby’s Kaliko, likened it to Ligeti etc.). Well firstly, it clearly wasn’t, and secondly it hadn’t crossed my mind as I’d hoped that ‘Loving Wonky’ wasn’t seen as erroneously peering through the lens of a stuffy, classically-minded musicology at the nobly savage sounds of da kids – after all, that’s a dichotomy I think has had its day and an objection I’d anticipated. Classically-minded or not, I can understand why people consider this blog to be musicological work, but I don’t see it that way. Does a discussion of music somehow surpass criticism and start being ‘musicology’ or ‘analysis’, terms most people associate with studious academic exercises in objective interpretation, if crotchets, quavers, tonics and dominants start coming into it? I think that’d be a shame. On this blog it’s always been my intention to aestheticise, to write aesthetic propaganda, rather than to analyse, explain or interpret with an academic objectivity, but I’ll grudgingly accept that since what I argue draws on detailed musical description it resembles musicology relative to most criticism in magazines or online. Anyway, many of The Impostume’s occasionally presumptuous but appealingly cynical observations were not undeserved.

To say the least, Woebot had expressed unease with contemporary classical music and its discourse (represented in part by the influence of critic Alex Ross), and particularly the idea of any of that contaminating (popular) music journalism. A similar antipathy regularly crops up in general discussion of music both historical and contemporary. Woebot’s thoughts were prompted by music critic Paul Morley evaluating his experiences of learning composition at the Royal Academy of Music, which were edited down for How To Be a Composer (click the link to watch it on Youtube), one of two remarkably similar recent BBC documentaries (the other being the more family-friendly Classic Goldie) that saw proficient but notation-illiterate figures known for their relationship with popular music ‘faced with the challenge’ of having to ‘compose classical music’, resulting in, it’s supposed, a struggle notable enough for two hours of TV. To a certain extent, these two programmes demonstrated that even though the words ‘composer’ and ‘composition’ are actually very broad, basic and flexible terms, they do nonetheless conjure up very narrowly specific sorts of musical practice in the popular imagination – typically involving stories of long dead white male geniuses in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century getup scratching away with quills, up to their powdered wigs in the complex deliberation apparently involved in designing a masterpiece. The musical style such words evoke is just as limited – the word ‘composer’, though it could and perhaps should refer to anyone who creates music of any sort, invariably implies the restricting prefix ‘classical’ and all the cultural baggage that goes with it. Like many others, Woebot seems to agree with Morley’s defining characteristics of classical music, that it’s essentially ‘of the past’ and predicated upon the notated score. This pairing is what causes Woebot to exclaim, ‘And the whole thing about scoring music is this anachronism writ in 20 foot tall neon writing. Who the hell would attempt to do something as inane as scoring music? In the 21st Century it’s an utterly nonsensical exercise.’
Goldie handles his score during the filming of Classic Goldie.
Illustrative listening scores aside, it’s easy to sympathise with this reaction, what with concrete music (I use this as a broader term than ‘musique concrète’, referring to all music whose sole or primary intended mode of existence and consumption is as a completed recording) and its superior levels of sonic-textual possibility and control now being the dominant musical format of the developed world – and that’s no longer an optimistic, progressivist appeal to ‘relevancy’, it’s a statement of fact. But it’d be a shame to relegate notated music to anachronism, and not just for the sake of the re-performance of historical music or the currently receded ‘contemporary classical’ arena where Morley and Goldie’s challenges took place. Music performed from a pre-established, possibly aging text is just as much a lasting aesthetic possibility as live theatre is, for example, and though film (which could be thought of as a kind of ‘concrete theatre’) is the more powerful format, a smaller but important theatre-going audience still appreciates the unique experience of seeing plays (re-)performed. Part of the appeal of text-based formats is, or should be, in the obligatory reconstruction and reinterpretation of works posing an alternative to the degree of prescribed inflexibility in concrete forms. They allow the act of reading the text to occur at the level of performance as well as listening, so that the two activities begin to merge.

This is a rich and currently pretty esoteric area of aesthetic possibility, with few listeners appreciating music in this way. Deliberately collecting multiple recordings of the same work so as to chart their different interpretations, for example, is seen by the majority of listeners as a bit on the fussy side. It’s also disappointing that this re-interpretive performance of scores is rarely very liberal or adventurous today (as it can be in contemporary theatre), and on a broader level it’s disappointing that alternative musical text-based formats are so uncommon, their detailed possibilities as manifested in a handful twentieth-century experimental musics remaining marginal (Cornelius Cardew’s elaborate graphic score Treatise is a great example of an alternative text-based format, being a fascinating meditation on the assorted aesthetic (im)possibilities of scores, suggesting among other things a music whose final aesthetic existence lies in its visualised potentiality, its ultimate inability to become singularly realised: a tragically quiet, imaginary music – it’s pretty stunning and you can go and have a look at it in the Barbican Music Library). Such formats could offer radical new ways of consuming art and ‘musicking’ beyond the limited, unchanging contours of concrete forms. Such radical new consumptions could come to enact metaphors for new social relationships, for more interactive, participatory social activity and organisation, providing politically resonant alternatives to art-forms in which freedom is limited to the subject position of the mute reader-listener or the ontologically distinct ‘cover versions’ of other creators (more on this over the coming months, hopefully).

One must be Educated in the Proper Ways

But of course, the setback inherent in any kind of musical notation is that it has to be read, and sadly the general perception is that if you want to be involved in ‘proper’ music, you’d better learn how to obey the strict rules governing musical reading and performance. This sense of obligation is the basis of Morley and Goldie’s TV challenges and the source of much anxiety over the perceived elitism and hermeticism of classical music past and present. Along with its often unnecessary political and historical connotations, this knowledge gap has led both to an unfortunate distrust of classical music (‘we’ve been getting along just fine without your elitist, aristocratic/bourgeois crotchets and quavers, thank you very much’) and an equally unfortunate submissive, humbled deference of the uninitiated toward the assuredly glorious, please-do-not-touch Classical Tradition, with Morley and, gratifyingly to a much lesser extent, Goldie falling very much for the latter, constantly surrounded by the High Priests of the Classical Church as they were. Given the latent social and cultural divisions between the classical establishment and its guests in the programmes, it was dispiriting to see the two independently accomplished musickers apparently capitulating to what is ultimately only the aesthetic power of those classical priests (i.e. the composers, teachers, musicians and conductors).

Fear of classical music, whether it manifests as distrust or humility, is often the fear of doing things ‘improperly’ – unnecessary, you’d hope. Regrettably, Morley and Goldie accepted it when they were told that they were improperly educated in music, in fact their ‘uneducated’ state is precisely what their TV challenges were predicated upon. This scenario seemed to make them look and even act like children: note that Goldie (whose refreshingly unbuttoned demeanour shouldn’t, of course, be taken as infantilism) was described by others and later himself as a kid in a candy store. One of Morley’s teachers, Hannah Riddell, seemed to behave as if she were teaching a Dickensian street urchin about polite society when going over the notational basics with him – I’m not sure if it’s editing, but you can imagine that her mildly primary-school tone was the result of her inexperience with an adult who couldn’t read western classical notation. Elsewhere, seeing Goldie’s playful energy and the fondness of both composers-in-training for greeting and celebrating with great big hugs (again, not infantile traits) catching the classical types off guard was amusingly instructive. Good for them for retaining and acting out that aspect of their personalities in a situation that could have dampened it.

This PR photo for Classic Goldie, including Ivor Setterfield, does a pretty good job of infantilising Goldie.
However, in an especially crushing scene towards the end of Classic Goldie’s first episode, Goldie was practically forced by conductor Ivor Setterfield (his chaperone, who seemed to muscle in at every step of the creative process) to harmonise his melody, a task that was clearly very frustrating for Goldie and, one could argue, quite unnecessary. Why should harmonisation be an unquestionable compositional must for an orchestral main melody? Though the matter wasn’t ultimately resolved onscreen, Goldie did seem to give in, but we can be grateful that he didn’t finish out the show brainwashed, his spirits broken and a glazed look in his eyes, answering Setterfield’s sinister questions on the Rules of Harmony with exactly what the Party member had demanded to hear, while the orchestra rehearsed for Classic Goldie’s soulless Bach chorale pastiche in the background. I for one would have been right behind the drum and bass producer if he’d reacted with ‘who are you to say this has to be harmonised? D’you know who I am?’. Instead, he got agitated and threatened to ‘kick the piano in’. Actually an enraged Goldie violently and noisily destroying a concert grand out of frustration on stage at the Proms could have been a far more radical and meaningful gesture than the attractive and deserving but fairly predictable Mahler-Holst-Gorecki puppet tone-poem that was eventually performed (if unduly critical and defeatist perhaps, putting the nippers off ever approaching classical music were it seen as a gesture of finality).

Unfortunately though, if there’s another defining characteristic of classical music other than its historicity and its use of a score, it’s that classical music is a studiously harmonised music. The Story of Classical Music usually begins with the earliest forms of sacred polyphony, associated with the Notre Dame school once upon a time in the twelfth century, and continues through the various subsequent codifications of harmonic theory and practice by the likes of Zarlino (le Istitutioni Harmoniche, 1558), Rameau (Treatise on Harmony, 1722) and Schoenberg (Harmonielehre, 1910). Without having to observe the most basic conventions of textural harmonisation central to classical music, Classic Goldie would have been ‘Orchestral Goldie’, and How To Be a Composer would have been ‘How To Get Groups of Twentieth-Century Western Instruments to Produce Ordered Sound’. Neither of these would have given the documentary-makers or their mainstream audience the black-cop-meets-white-cop, culture-clashing, we-all-learned-something-today journey of discovery they were probably hoping for.
This TV-friendly culture clash fed off a popularly imagined construction in which a certain set of particular instruments, design conventions and rituals are bundled together into a socially and aesthetically delineated and constrained ‘classical music’, such that fresh, new avenues of musical exploration making use of the multifarious resources contained therein are foreclosed, unimagined. We can see this bundling-together at work in the interview with Goldie about the whole affair conducted by Morley: Goldie himself claims that orchestral composition is ‘by default’ classical composition (again, why should it be?), which is one more example of the many normative aesthetic conventions imposed implicitly on this sort of music today that deserve to be illuminated and have their dominance challenged because of the role they play in closing off areas of the aesthetic imagination for both composers and listeners (and of course this is a debate separate from the simpler issue of whether classical music past or present ‘is good’ or ‘is bad’). In fact, contemporary classical music seems more aesthetically specified today compared with the history of classical music taken as a whole, despite the overtures of compositional emancipation made by twentieth-century musical theorists now having supposedly reached a point of naturalisation.

Fixed Canon

I was sorry to see the postulant Morley lapping up the religious mythology that often surrounds the Holy, Mystical and Profound Secrets of Classical Music in its most intense, innovation-strangling forms, even though he seemed to acknowledge such an atmosphere. Perhaps this is the combination of his veneration of canonical pop heroes with the apparent (and widespread) belief that classical music is a nobler, more sophisticated art than pop music: we see him describing classical music’s shadowy, ancient hermeticism, calling it ‘proper’ and ‘serious’. It’s almost as if Morley has become a monk – having entered the monastery and been purged of his natural sinfully unclean and ignorant state he wanders the cloisters with his head bowed, genuflecting before icons of the musical saints, wishing he were a fraction as wonderful as they were (icons are tendentiously limited symbolic representations, remember, not real people). Though it’s an interesting and touching article, his hymn of praise to canonical Genius Composers for the Observer demonstrates a classical music completely drenched in Romantic aesthetics. The music that comes out of Morley’s faithful worship might be inspired and accomplished – and fair play to that, his string quartet is a fantastic achievement and will hopefully turn people on to classical music – but he’ll find it difficult to produce anything particularly groundbreaking until he can balance such canonical figures within a broader and more flexible musical-aesthetic perspective, and that goes for any novice musicker, really. It’s the continuing persistence of a particularly canon-entrenched aesthetics of Classical Music that catalysed that tradition’s becoming eclipsed as the West’s leading musical form by more popular (as in both origin and destination) alternatives in the twentieth century.
Early Medieval composer, German Benedictine Abbess and all-rounder Hildegard of Bingen has difficulty getting included in Western classical music canons, both because she lived in a time when music was (as some still have it) crude or undeveloped and because she was a woman. This icon-like drawing shows her receiving divine inspiration in the form of sinister tentacles descending from the ceiling to grip her brain.
As it happens though, this inspiring but ultimately limited way of looking at classical music actually didn’t seem entirely reflected by composers, teachers, musicians and conductors surrounding Morley and Goldie (not the open-minded, John Williams-loving Christopher Austin, not the down-to-earth Anna Meredith), but a headlock of this reverent romanticism, an austere and hackneyed ‘modernism’ (hm) and its only visible alternative, cheesy postmodernism, is definitely a major feature of what I hesitate to have to call ‘contemporary classical’ music (i.e. orchestral music distinct from the re-performance of historical classics), a term which you’d hope would be paradoxical.

Dressing music up

Not that clothing is necessarily an outward manifestation of inner attitudes (or anything to berate someone about, at the end of the day), but I do feel drawn to the idea that the way contemporary classical composers present themselves or are presented visually tells us a lot about what people think classical music is, as if something outside of the supposedly absolute, pure, abstract, non-visual Music they seem to believe in is anarchically, ironically leaking in to the experience, demanding to be heard. Despite the fact that awkward press photographs of contemporary classical composers (in which they’re invariably alone) can always be found, their appearance almost always seems to speak of a deeply serious person and his deeply serious music, a person with little care for the frivolities of outward appearance – the idea, being, you see, that we note in their dishevelled or minimalist appearance their unswerving dedication to profound abstraction, in the mould of the Great Beethoven’s darkly expressive, not-of-this-world disrepair. The undergraduates and the general public are supposed to whisper at the back of the hall, ‘I can see why he looks like that, what with his brilliant mind constantly striving towards Higher Things and maths and that’.
Philip Glass. To decorate this piece from this point on I'm using photographs of a relatively wide range contemporary classical composers (pop classical, academic classical, para-classical) I recently collected through a quick Google Images search. There were lots of images on offer but I only picked out examples of the particular stereotype I describe here, which, as you'll see, turned out to be remarkably well represented. My indictment of these photographs is not of course an indictment of the music (which in many cases is very worthwhile), the person or the personality associated with the picture. But if not proof, these images are certainly a glaring metaphor for the narrow aesthetics and weirdly specific degree of conformity in contemporary classical music.
I’m being cynical and presumptuous, but the rules for a contemporary classical composer’s clothing do seem oddly specific: a little too smart, almost certainly largely black in colour, either shabby or a subtle, minimalist chic (more usually a mix of the two) but none of this in an everyday way – the suits, roll-necks and weird collars could almost come from a specialist shop with a clothing line intended for the contemporary classical composer. In photographs they very rarely smile or when they do it’s not particularly warm, their hands frequently grasp their cheeks or chins in contemplation (I really dislike the term, but in many cases they’re literally ‘chin-stroking’) and the time-honoured cliché of symbolising the occupation and dedication of the great composer by picturing him (cos it’s still a lot more likely to be a him isn’t it) next to a score or a classical instrument is alive and shockingly well. Like the composers they must obey the typical contemporary classical music ensemble also performs in black or smart minimalism – like kabuki stage hands, we’re not supposed to see the workers, everything magically happens. Such images tell us a lot about the sort of tiredly purist, exclusive, austere (ascetic – monks again) aesthetic and socio-cultural goals contemporary classical music is supposed to have: the pictures scream out to us ‘this is what a composer is, this is what composing is’. Thankfully the number of exceptions seems to be on the increase, but Morley seemed to conform to these stereotypes with a hilarious precision (see photo at the top). He wore black almost exclusively, was often seen in a huge, shapeless duffel coat of the exact sort Harrison Birtwistle used to wear (its large hood making him seem even more like a monk), and facially, with his short hair and greying, all-over stubble he was the spitting image of Mark-Anthony Turnage as he appeared in Classic Goldie. Oh for a classical composer wearing jeans, a T-shirt, sportswear, colourful glad rags, an orchestra performing in non-uniform: music as inclusive, down to earth, multifarious, even fashionable… but ultimately, accessible.
Here I put two completely seperate composer photographs (of Michael Nyman and James MacMillan) side by side to illustrate the alarming prevalence of lower-face-clutching among contemporary classical composers.

Speaking through the score

I’ve already touched on one area in which musical possibility is foreclosed – the uses and meanings of the score. One of Morley’s younger colleagues at the Academy discussed this as the ‘fetishisation’ of the score in classical music. Both Morley and Goldie seemed on the whole to proceed with the assumption that the score was a direct, transparent window onto the music that was intended to arise out of it, as if it were like a CD to be inserted into a machine rather than the starting point of a process of inevitable change and difference mediated by performers and their interpretations (Morley speaks of scores ‘transmitting’ meaning), and this is an assumption that does persist in contemporary classical music. It often seems as if composers are trying to write concrete music in a non-concrete medium, not only failing to achieve that task but missing out on the many possibilities of non-concrete music. This is typical of an atmosphere in which the performance of classical music is generally ruled by The Composer’s Intention, whether s/he’s alive or dead. Especially if s/he’s alive and on the same continent, though, all agency is turned over to her/him if possible, a constant dialogue is maintained and the absurd reifications of ‘what s/he was trying to do or say’, or the ‘sounds in her/his head’ have to be fully ‘realised’, especially concerning a premiere, and this was an assumption that Goldie very clearly took on. Undergraduate composers are constantly nagged to saturate their scores with the dynamics and slurring ‘that they intend’, to leave no room for ambiguity or the musician-machine’s disastrous programme-error doubt in what seems like an orgy of positivistic notation-worship. Even historical classical music wasn’t always like this. Besides, a single composer imposing concrete-music-style totalitarian control over a submissive musical workforce seems a bit like a grossly unequal society, don’t you think?
Oliver Knussen goes for the Birtwistle look.
One way out of the constraints imposed on performers is the use of improvisatory techniques, but in so many cases this too is an act ruled over by the composer, something that is permitted rather than a performer’s natural right. Living contemporary classical composers are constantly required to explain and, preferably, lecture about their ‘intentions’, and many of them accept this ritual eagerly. One evening I was listening to the unsmiling, hush-please self-contemplations of one composer (I forget his name, but he was dressed completely in black) whose style was characterised by controlled improvisatory techniques and whose regularly invoked patron saint was Derek Bailey. Outside of the lecture hall, some younger students had gathered who were laughing and joking around quite audibly but not very intrusively. After a while the Master of Sounds stopped, and, eyes downcast, addressed the subservient convener of the event, artfully intoning, ‘can you make them stop that… it’s really… quite… annoying.’ I’m not saying someone having their say ought to suffer all disturbances, but it was a fitting metaphor for the irony of much contemporary music – the adventurer in spontaneous sonics proved remarkably unsympathetic to sounds that were beyond his general control.
Michael Nyman, mid-lecture.
John Cage, a leading figure in non-jazz improvisation, chance procedures and compositional philosophy, said ‘everything we do is music’, and his career represented that. Also liberating would be the related notion that anything we do is music, but many contemporary classical composers don’t yet seem ready to embrace such an emancipation – for them music, and by that they specifically mean Composition, remains an activity constrained by a number of naturalised aesthetic assumptions.
Michael Torke. Presumably the photographer went for colour so as not to be clichéd.

The Rational Science of Abstract Music

In the Middle Ages, music based in academies and universities was considered a science, but as time wore on, music as a whole was seen far more as a humanist art. Today’s contemporary classical music, a large proportion of which is based in and reliant on academies, often seems to turn back to the medieval view of music as a science. This is might be because academic surroundings imply that study should be rational, complex, objective, a scientific endeavour distinct from everyday thought and existence – rather than messily human, the sort of thing that you’d find on the other end of a anthropo-musicological study. You’ll notice that some of Morley’s comments have this flavour, indeed, like his new mentor Peter Maxwell Davies he was drawn to the math-like procedures of medieval isorhythm, and Goldie notes the famous phrase ‘music is math’. The idea of composition as high science does result in interesting music, for sure, but it’s usually a heavily controlled music that requiring detailed explanation far beyond the scope of the average listening guide, often necessitating an instructive lecture with annotated examples and a full copy of the score to listen with (so if you don’t have at least an A level in music, forget about it).
Gavin Bryars. The horror, the horror.
When I first listened to Peter Maxwell Davies’s series of Naxos Quartets I didn’t notice that passages in one of the quartets were constructed using to mathematical magic squares, but then again I wasn’t constructed by IBM and I couldn’t touch Garry Kasparov at chess. After reading the liner notes and reading with interest about the magic squares and how they worked I listened again, and didn’t quite hear it. At that point I could have gotten hold of the score (very difficult and costly, probably), and attempted to analyse those complex compositional computations myself in order to appreciate them (most probably I would have failed despite my above average musical education), or I could have written to a musical analyst or the composer himself. Needless to say, I left these celebrated magic squares be, a little disappointed that they didn’t offer a less remote aesthetic experience, even if the sounds the quartets made as a whole were, relatively superficially, appealing enough to my ears.
Thomas Adès. Cheer up mate, you’ve got so much to live for.
I’m not going to suggest that music appreciated in these most complex, scientific sorts of ways is ‘wrong’ and deserves extinction, of course it doesn’t (though the issue of its funding could become part of a debate) – if you like that sort of thing and you’ve got the mind and patience for it or you enjoy composing it, good luck to you. But of course music can be so many, many things other than math, ‘rationality’, formalism and the arguably impossible dream of pure abstraction. I’ve seen undergraduate composers assume this prevalent poetics of composition unknowingly and unquestioningly, only to find their passion for music in a cul-de-sac. I’ve seen parties of schoolchildren at concerts, probably brought there by a teacher eager to feed them a bit of a different (hopefully it wasn’t ‘high’) culture, fidgeting and sulking through performances of this sort of music, even though the composer had treated them to a highly technical twenty-minute lecture on the structural procedures involved (what more could you ask for?).
I thoroughly recommend Howard Skempton’s delicately beguiling piano pieces, but this photo kind of creeps me out.
Another widespread notion that results from the musical-composition-as-high-science paradigm has it that composition is problem-solving, again something that Morley and Goldie seem to go along with. That’s a weird one if you think about it – surely there are a dizzying number of criteria by which musical ‘problems’ can be invented and solved? And who says problems need to be solved? Some of my favourite music can be seen as creating irresolvable problems. Problem music is fascinating. Morley talks of having to solve the ‘conundrum’ of a small ensemble featuring a tuba and a harp – couldn’t the disjunction between the two instruments be just as interesting as one particular solution? And why put such an obscure problem on the table in the first place?
Classic FM loves minimalist-with-a-heart Karl Jenkins, but after performing the oboe part in his The Armed Man it was months before I could talk or taste food again.

That classical sound

This brings me to another largely unchallenged status quo in contemporary classical music: its instruments and timbres. In an age in which practically any sound can be generated through electronic synthesis, it seems absurd to me that contemporary classical composers habitually remain with the classical orchestra, regularly achieving their ostensible goal of finding interesting new ways of doing things by manipulating those same old instruments in different ways. The innovation quota (a now-meaningless vestige of modernism which corresponds to the marking criteria of composition portfolios in many degrees) is apparently fulfilled by writing for unusual combinations of instruments and getting musicians to bang on the lids of pianos, knock on the sides of violins, turn bows upside down, hold down unconventional but mildly fortuitous combinations of keys, blow soundlessly and so on, and we saw Setterfield showing this sort of thing to Goldie. Now of course, any sound is valid in music, and in the pre-electronic world of Henry Cowell and John Cage, the playing of instruments in new and unintended ways was a sonic and symbolic revolution. Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Piano call for various objects to be inserted into the piano strings to alter the instrument’s timbre, and in this instance the piano was elegantly and very carefully re-engineered. But now that a whole universe of sound is at composers’ feet, why turn, if the goals are to be modernist, to the sounds that instruments simply happen to make when manipulated in ways and combinations that were unintended when their design was finalised a century ago? Imagine how amazing intended sounds could be if such composers were inclined to work at finding and using them with the same loyalty, patience and dedication they show to wood, brass and vibrating wire. Like its canon and the attitude towards its score, the traditional instruments of classical music have become a fetishised permanence, a fossilised faith, and a limitation.
Ludovico Einaudi is very much a pop classical composer. His imprisonment within this claustrophobic interior and his longing for the light demonstrates that it’s not just the more ‘serious’ composers that appear this Romantic way. Pop classical composers such as Einaudi tend to go for emotional sensitivity rather than formal rationality in their music, but the Composer myth remains the same.
Admittedly it’s not as easy to invent new sounds as it is to write for existing instruments, but it’s nevertheless a shame that the invention of new instruments has slowed and stopped (though Messiaen put them in the orchestra, the theremin and ondes martenot never got a foothold). Perhaps this is down to a belief that the orchestra cannot be improved, but it’s also likely to have a lot to do the professional specialisation of musicians today. It would be a problem for professional musicians who played a single instrument (not to mention costly and demanding for composers) if new musical compositions came complete with entirely new instruments, but only if you believe that the only acceptable musical performances come from musicians who have dedicated their lives to perfecting the performance of a single instrument. Would it be so heretical for musicians to perform new music on a new instrument they’d only been using for a few months (which does happen occasionally)? In previous centuries it was thought that the more instruments you could play, the better you were at music in general. In fact because modern-day percussionists already play a range of instruments, that area of the traditional orchestra has actually seen a certain amount of new equipment. Composer Harry Partch invented an entirely new ensemble that offered not just new timbres but a new division of the octave, taught musicians to play the instruments, and did all that before technology could have given him a major shortcut. Relative to that ear-opening achievement and the even greater prospects on offer today, where’s the inventive musical richness in patting a cello on its backside?
‘James MacMillan takes us on another spooky tour of magic, illusion, ancient rites and the psychic zone in “Guess what’s upstairs”, tonight at 8 - on Five’.

‘Orchestral music’

However, if we’re to retain the orchestra as a musical tool, it’s because of the generally compulsory association of that certain group of instruments with the social and aesthetic parameters I’ve described above that I feel we should replace the loaded term ‘contemporary classical music’ with the broader ‘orchestral music’ (in the same way that you sometimes hear the term ‘guitar music’ instead of the more limited and culturally loaded ‘rock’), which would describe not only music involving an entire orchestra but also any music written to be performed on instruments associated with the twentieth-century Western orchestra. Such a re-branding would allow contemporary music-makers to use the twentieth-century Western orchestra (a highly-developed musical tool that may deserve to be stepping aside but doesn’t deserve the dustbin of history) without feeling yoked together with the prescriptive canons, conventions and expectations of the Western Classical Music Tradition. Of course there would be a tradition of orchestral music that included classical music as a sub-category alongside other sub-categories like film music, jazz and some instrumental folk musics for composers to draw inspiration from, but ‘classical music’ and its parameters would amount to a specific meta-style of music associated with a certain tradition that needn’t necessarily be privileged when it comes to the production of new music. There are already many examples of ‘orchestral music’ that could not easily be called ‘classical’ music (or even ‘jazz’ or ‘film music’ either), and there are more examples every year. The music of bands like Rachel’s, for instance, uses orchestral instruments without also taking on any strictly classical stylistic conventions along with them. Classical Music, ‘Orchestral Music’ and sometimes even notated music too are often thought of as being more or less the same thing, but classical music and its constituent genres can be thought of as just smaller categories contained within much broader and mostly unexplored categories of musical possibility.
That hint of a smile on Nigel Hess’s face is what reminds you he wrote the theme tune for Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
What is a composer? I hope it’s becoming clear that according to its most prevalent definition, a ‘composer’ – and remember that invariably implies a ‘classical’ composer – is limited by the creative and aesthetic constraints imposed on classical music. Why should they be? Nowadays there are many terms for the people who make music either by themselves or as the figurehead of a collective enterprise: composer, artist, producer, singer-songwriter, sound artist, music-maker, recording artist, front man, instrumentalist, and so on. There seems to be an assumption that these are all distinct occupations, and they needn’t be – they’re all composers of sonic events, they can all be thought of as composers. Allowing the word ‘composer’ to mean something broader and more inclusive than its classicalised definition would even out the cultural playing field, bringing the canonical composers of the past down from their dusty pedestals and out of their tiny icons (so we can get a better look at them) and bring musical artists who are considered culturally second-class to enjoy a chance at the levels of respect and prestige previously reserved only for their ancient counterparts. ‘Composer’ should be the name given to anyone heading up a musical project, and in this all composers are equal, all subject to an aesthetic, social and cultural playing field that ought to be as large as the human imagination will allow.

Classical composers, general composers and composers in between

Whatever name they’re called by, many different sorts of composers work in and around this meta-style everyone calls ‘classical’. In Morley’s opinion, it seems, and in that of many others, the king of British contemporary classical music (and possibly all contemporary classical music) is Peter Maxwell Davies. Known as ‘Max’ to the courtiers, Maxwell Davies is the Master of the Queen’s Music and represents an aging generation of post-war British composers that succeeded Britten, Walton and Tippett. Much of Maxwell Davies’s music is highly worthwhile – in the sixties, along with Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr, he brought fire and imagination to a classical music scene that had been running on sentimental nationalism and comparatively conservative harmonic idioms for a number of decades. Like the generation they succeeded, however, the aesthetic outlook of Maxwell Davies’s generation can now also seem limited and conservative, and Morley’s interview with the Master Composer inadvertently brought this into the glaring light.
Peter Maxwell Davies’s mildly unnatural hands-on-hips pose makes him look a bit like a medieval jester in the midst of some jaunty dance for the entertainment of the king. Which is exactly what, as Master of the Queen’s music, his eight-hundred-year-old counterpart in the age that so interests him would have been doing.
When asked about his opinions of pop music, Maxwell Davies makes the typical hollow concession to musical relativism by noting the abilities of pop musicians ‘from Gershwin, to John Lennon, to McCartney’. Wow, all that way? I’ve seen composition teachers use Lennon and McCartney in this way, always presented as little other than skilled scientists of musical structure – not cultural iconoclasts, not stylistic pioneers, not figureheads of a youth movement and certainly not pop stars. And it’s never The Beatles, either, but Lennon and McCartney: canonical, surname-basis composing individuals. The other thing of course is that if you’ve heard of pop music you’ve heard of The Beatles. They’re by far the most visible pop band in history and it would have been astonishing to live through the sixties in the developed world and not have heard of them. Composers of Maxwell Davies’s type rarely mention slightly more recent or less well-known pop acts, not even Bowie or Eno let alone your Scritti Polittis, your Aphex Twins, your Burials or anything from black non-jazz pop traditions.

The saddest aspect of Maxwell Davies’s attitude to popular music is one that is typical of veteran musickers of his generation – that contemporary pop music is distastefully loud. Firstly, Maxwell Davies believes that he should listen to pop music at its supposed original ‘loud’ volume (like many of his generation he sees live performance as the only true musical format) so as to appreciate it As The Composer Intended, except he doesn’t because he fears for his delicate, finely-tuned composer’s ears. Secondly, what he refers to as the loudness of the music, to the extent that it even actually applies, is a surface characteristic so basic and superficial as to be practically absent to fans – Maxwell Davies’s complaint is in the same bigoted mode in which many people resist music they say ‘sounds classical’, ‘sounds weird’, ‘sounds council estate’ (as someone actually told me once) or ‘sounds ethnic’ because of basic surface features. Maxwell Davies then sneers at ‘all the hype’ that surrounds some of these newfangled pop stars. He himself owes an awful lot to hype, both back in the day and in his music currently being fed to students as part of their education. And again, this sneer at hype reveals the assumption that music should be abstract, pure, ‘only about the sounds’ rather than what it is: something that is appreciated in a human socio-cultural context, anchored in real life. To a greater or lesser extent the hype, the image, the mythology, the context, the extra-musical socio-cultural meaning, whatever it is – the human ritual – is always a part of the overall aesthetic package of musicking. There is no music without it, only sounds.
Max’s co-star Harry, or Harrison Birtwistle.
So these, I’m sorry to say, are the attitudes of the Master of the Queen’s Music. Not the Master of the Queen’s Classical Music, not the Master of the Queen’s Orchestral Music, not the Master of the Queen’s (horrible words) Serious or Art Music (whatever that would mean, note too that the epithet ‘Queen’s’ is going to narrow the field considerably) – again we encounter the assumption that music, and here the most valuable, nationally sanctioned music, is always already classical music. It makes you wonder whether a load of ravers should crash a concert at Windsor Castle. Well, relative to the diverse aesthetic achievements and possibilities of music as a whole, Maxwell Davies’s patch is very, very tiny.

Happily, a much younger generation of composers is beginning to inch away from the stagnant aesthetic prescriptions that dominate the upper echelons of contemporary classical music. Among them is Anna Meredith, the stereotype-smashing orchestral composer who appeared on camera helping Goldie with his composition. I first heard her work at a South Bank concert a few years ago that ended with her flak, a gripping torrent of sound incorporating electric guitars and an array of tom-toms performed amid strings of orange flashing fairy lights. Meredith’s sound isn’t always startlingly new, it often recalls the pointillist-minimalist textures of seventies/eighties John Adams and the violent, irregular modernity of some inter-war European classical music, but there’s a lot more of her career to come. Overall, Meredith’s work offers an earthier, more visceral experience of the senses rather than a specialist science of composition, and that’s a very timely breath of fresh air. One listener tellingly ***commented, ‘Meredith’s music sounds like bang smash crunch – but she doesn’t demand you treat it as the pronouncements of a guru. It’s only sounds – enjoy it!’, an opinion reflecting the more liberated aesthetics of John Cage, and about time too.
Anna Meredith in a much more encouraging composer photograph.
It’s nice to see that Meredith has a myspace page you’d imagine she maintains herself: top friends include Björk and The Postal Service, and some examples of a dabbling in electronic music can be heard there. It’s difficult to get as enthusiastic about these pieces as with her orchestral music, especially if you’re acquainted with the kinds of complex, inventive energy more popular electronic music styles have offered, leading one to wonder if a reciprocation of Classic Goldie is in order, seeing Meredith ‘faced with the challenge’ of producing material she’d have to mix into an hour-long DJ set, with a little help from Goldie along the way. Actually you feel it wouldn’t be all that tough for her, but if Goldie’s ‘mentor’ Ivor Setterfield were put in that position, well, that would be an interesting turning of the tables (BBC, if you’re reading…).

In 2003 Meredith and a few like-minded colleagues also born in the late seventies / early eighties, Emily Hall, Charlie Piper, Mark Bowden and Chris Mayo (who was also helping Classic Goldie out), founded the Camberwell Composers Collective, which, in a departure from the usual structures of classical performance, ran a night at the Crypt jazz club in Camberwell. Recalling the New Music Manchester group that included Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, the move does have a fresh sense of camaraderie in a context where composers only ever seem to come one at a time. Like Meredith’s website, the collective’s myspace page and camberwellcomposerscollective dot com is decorated by Anna’s sister Eleanor Meredith, and makes a U-turn away from the slick, funereal austerity and tediously predictable use of notational iconography that invariably forms the visual language of New [Classical] Music flyers and websites (as if music, as Stravinsky and Eduard Hanslick blinkeredly argued, connotes nothing but itself, its own textual specifics), even if the collective’s musical style itself doesn’t make such a U-turn, or not nearly as a dramatically.
The Camberwell Composers Collective: something to smile about?
Meredith and the Camberwell Composers Collective ought to discourage the growing sense among young composers that anyone who wants to get somewhere interesting should jump the apparently sinking ship of the British contemporary classical music establishment and put their hopes into jazz or record labels and their networks (John Zorn’s Tzadik label is a great place to find alternative composers, for example). One could argue that the change they represent within the establishment doesn’t go far enough, that it’s too subtle compared to the radical rethinking that’s necessary, but hopefully a new generations of composers will be inspired by their work enough to bring its relatively broader outlook with them to the academic study of composition.

If we discard the notion that Classic Goldie cynically tested the drum and bass producer against the artistic legitimation of ‘high culture’ (and tentatively I think that in the end we can), then one of the most provocative ideas to have come out of the documentary was that orchestral music was just another tool in Goldie’s – or anyone’s – musical cabinet. It’s clear that Goldie himself likes to see it that way, but when Morley mentions Goldie’s conducting and asks him whether he’d like to be seen as ‘a classical musician’, he responded that he’d like to be remembered as ‘a man of our times… a renaissance man’. Though he was probably looking for a word that would encompass his painting as well as his music, he wouldn’t say ‘composer’, because that word customarily excludes ‘drum and bass producer’ – like most people he probably doesn’t truly see ‘producers’ as part of a connecting, unifying continuum (however broad) with the composers of traditional orchestral music, which was what Setterfield was constantly suggesting in his mildly patronising but well-meaning manner.
Hands down my favourite composer photograph. Composers (plural, at last) playfully participating in real life (they’re at a bus stop and there ’s even, gasp, a member of the public involved). Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman and The Spaceape are multi-talented musickers. The former’s recently released book ‘Sonic Warfare’ further underlines his status as a modern-day musical Renaissance man. He lives in Camberwell I believe, but the Camberwell Composers Collective doesn’t (yet) seem broad enough in its definition of the word ‘composer’ to accomodate his abilities.

Goldie was a composer before Classic Goldie. What’s developed is that he now works with a broader range of music. By exploring both orchestral music and drum and bass, Goldie begins to demonstrate the intriguing potential in the broadest, most inclusive definition of the word ‘composer’, and despite his first orchestral outing regurgitating certain well-established classical formulae (the epic narrative, the orchestra-as-universe, Latin language) I have a lot of time and respect for Goldie the composer. Even more inspiring are the ideas he describes to Morley about bringing classical music to a wider audience, about relaxing the rules of appreciation and consumption that have grown up around classical music: ‘have a few beers, have a listen to that, see what you think about that’, ‘if we’re gonna do it now, we need to change it now… I wanna hear those new composers’, and holding concerts with several different conductors performing different works. Goldie recognises that some of those aesthetic and performative regulations are fossilising (i.e. slowly replacing organic tissue with stone) the works of the past, putting them on ‘such a fucking pedestal’. As a composer and as an all-round musicker, he represents an exciting step towards a broader musical freedom.

Segue Finale

To pick up from my foamy review of Fear of Music and come to terms with this blog’s habit of trolling: musical composition, listening and appreciation shouldn’t be regulated and constrained with implicit prescriptions, assumptions, prejudices, reductions, but rather should be expanded and emancipated toward the inner and outer limits of possibility and beyond. This detrimental fantasy of a state of what is sometimes called ‘ignorance’ or ‘incorrectness’ regarding any music shouldn’t push listeners into either hate-filled antipathy or cap-doffing humility (as with many, Stubbs’s Manichean project was paranoia over the former fuelled by seeing things through the lens of the latter, thus he enforced the marginalising musical-aesthetic dichotomy whose very injustice he sought to portray). Such one-dimensional, fear-motivated religious faith-acts of unconditional disrespect or unconditional respect stand in the way of flexible, imaginative engagement with music new or old, in any and all of its forms.

How can it be shown that music is a rich and diverse but accessible mystery?

I wrote this back in September, but a recent post by Simon Reynolds anticipated the issues in my opening paragraph. I agree with him on the place of close musical commentary in writing on music not necessarily holding any more weight as proof than other critical approaches, and I never mean them to. Blow by blow musical commentaries can make for horrible prose, but they do form one possible avenue of evidence-based argument in any discourse on music. Postgrad music students I know confess to skimming such passages and taking the concluding sentence on faith unless it's absolutely necessary.

This is the third part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:

1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
2. ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’.
4. ‘The Twenty-First-Centry Modern Composer’.