Beat and Digital Music Discussions at UEL

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

Thought I'd try writing something for Dummy on certain echoes of the 90s in underground pop in the past year, looking at Autre Ne Veut, d'Eon, How to Dress Well, Inc., Washed Out, LA Vampires goes Ital and James Ferraro (as well as what chillwave and hypnagogic pop are up to) and mulling over whether it all constitutes a revival or not. Click below to read:

Borne into the 90s: Part 1
Borne into the 90s: Part 2

More news and material up here very soon...

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

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

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

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

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