Dematerialisation.

Also for the record I've purchased a ton of Zeni Geva and I'm a huge GISM fan so like, I'm not necessarily saying this to be like "LOOK AT THESE LOSERS" as if I'm completely disregarding the thing you have enthusiasm for. I'm just mocking the nature of the experience and how society has angled how we proceed to form taste in a way that suits this system.

CrowleyHead said:

But no I'm absolutely being cheeky and fatalistic here, for the record. Sorry if it comes across like I'm making slanderous remarks that I wouldn't throw at myself.

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fair play, no worries my man. I'll just delete that last post.

I'm happy to cop to fetishization when it's true - obscure Velvet Underground bootlegs, Wiley ca. 2007 - but this hxc kind was just never my kick.

I certainly know those people. hardcore punk is such a weird dead end of idol-worship that there is a lengthy history of Finnish bands literally singing in Portugese, Japanese bands in Finnish, and so on, to emulate those sounds to the nth level. a particular subset of punk scenesters in ragged black stretch jeans, bullet belts and studded black denim vests with perfectly placed perfectly obscurely cool band patches in basically tribute bands named after Gai songs or whatever. it's largely harmless but there is sometimes a creepy sublimated impulse especially in the collector end of things. collectors are kind of inherently fetishists, which isn't necessarily even bad tho.

CrowleyHead said:

specificity of desire

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I never crossed deep enough into that specificity. always found it bewildering when encountered in its true form.

otoh I have definitely been guilty of that outsider appraising secret cool inside material power trip. it's a particularly sad one.

I think as I've gotten older I've shifted almost entirely from that kind of knowledge power trip to the endless search for the next unknown sonic kick

doesn't always have to be new or radical, just the next tune or record or band that you want to listen to 100 times on repeat when you hear it

ofc it's much easier to do that with a relatively large + specifically eclectic backlog of music nerd social capital

still I think it's another one of those outgrowing youth tribalism bits, just care less about hoarding that knowledge, its importance just recedes. plus it's functionally useless 99% of the time.

ain't never any shame in GISM either. that LP really is one of those truly unique one of a kind magically strange records.

I've noticed that a lot of the music that explicitly deals with what luka's talking about tends to be terrible and the ideas behind it don't really come through, you just know it's about that stuff because it often comes with an overwritten press release which references social media, 'fake news', 'information overload' and the rest.

brostep is interesting actually. i don't like it but texturally it is interesting. will expound later need to sleep now.

version said:

I've noticed that a lot of the music that explicitly deals with what luka's talking about tends to be terrible and the ideas behind it don't really come through, you just know it's about that stuff because it often comes with an overwritten press release which references social media, 'fake news', 'information overload' and the rest.

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that chino amobi record from last year. like trying to combine 10 genres in 1. I prefer artists that cultivate an aesthetic where the kinda genre referencing is there but in its own oblique form.
i was like if this is thi was like if this is the face of diaspora experimentalism in 2017 then count me out. I like Elysia Crampton though.

padraig (u.s.) said:

it's largely harmless but there is sometimes a creepy sublimated impulse especially in the collector end of things. collectors are kind of inherently fetishists, which isn't necessarily even bad tho.

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Yeah that's more or less what I meant to play with here, the idea that you (imperical you, not you yourself padraig) can be sort of degenerative or corrosive but harmless in one's adaptation to this sort of dematerial, but what happens when the material struggles to keep up?

The pornography thing is essentially one of those weird spirals because supposedly the consumer is in fact by themselves, not doing any harm and when you get into the fantastic element of anime porn there's already a natural sort of inability to regard it as serious because it's so obviously not real. In that automatic immateriality, people tend to project excessively lurid fantasies of their subconscious but also actively base their desires and infatuations based on the sort of concepts you have to subliminally absorb from the culture of that fetishism. For a lot of people it can go into content that is harmful but you can mentally section it off with "Well one wouldn't do that in real life obviously".

Drag that off into music and you think of the easy escapism of Black Metal culture that led to the Norwegian Scene's weird moments. Or you think of how the internet expedites violence/gang culture for extroversion in a scene like UK Drill. The suspension of belief that leads to one projecting Sonic Personas that you have to uphold (because the Gospel Drill or the "Renting" tune exceptions aside, there are expectations of what you HAVE TO DO to make a solid drill record). There was apparently an interview now where the US rapper 6ix9ine claims he actually used to 'Roleplay' on the internet pretending to be a gangbanger (which is incredibly plausible even if its also a convenient excuse) so while reality argues that you obviously wouldn't do that shit, there's that tenuous suspension of disbelief with the dematerial.

Granted luka's gonna be bored that I can never escape music analogies.

thirdform said:

that chino amobi record from last year. like trying to combine 10 genres in 1. I prefer artists that cultivate an aesthetic where the kinda genre referencing is there but in its own oblique form.
i was like if this is thi was like if this is the face of diaspora experimentalism in 2017 then count me out. I like Elysia Crampton though.

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I got burnt out on the whole 'deconstructed club' thing, it became formulaic and stale. You could tell how every record was going to sound just from the Boomkat review.

boomkat have moved away from it these days though tbh. I subscribe to their mailing list as they usually have something interesting like some early electronic shit or whatever. you can never get enough of pre-1980s electronic music imo.

I just hated how poptimist it all was, like I like pop music but sonically, the pop philosophy sucks.

lotic making a deal about clubbers not being able to accept pop. fair enough the point is well taken but why should clubbers have to?

I like the stripped back stuff like Mark Fell and Gabor Lazar, but all the stuff that sounds like Jam City's first album with the smashing glass, pummeling kicks, splashy snares and mechanical sounds has been done to death.

thirdform said:

lotic making a deal about clubbers not being able to accept pop. fair enough the point is well taken but why should clubbers have to?

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as if jungle, garage etc didn't 'deconstruct' those pop forms anyway, and with much more of a cultural aesthetic.

version said:

I like the stripped back stuff like Mark Fell and Gabor Lazar, but all the stuff that sounds like Jam City's first album with the smashing glass, pummeling kicks, splashy snares and mechanical sounds has been done to death.

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the mark fell and gabar lazar stuff i generally just view as computer music influenced by dance styles as opposed to deconstructed club. same with Renick Bell, Sote etc. academic nerds getting down with the rudeboys. i feel that.

as for the deconstructed club - that sound could go into pan sonic territory but then it would alienate its white narcissistic university selfie waving contingent. really odd about how some people are invested in identity politics in that scene even though they are railing against their own privilege. strange stuff.

i think i could live even without that first jam city album tbh.

i dunno.

this is the kinda direction...

Dematerialisation

...it's definitely a "thing" and it's very uch a 2010s phenomenon - very closely linked to the smartphone "revolution" (the reactionary that I am, I am not a big fan of it). And it has certain effects on the world respectively the aspects I care about, for example music. I grew up with PCs, Laptops, the internet - but up until the late 2000s this was a different experience, you had to sit down to a computer, log in, reserve extra time for your online activities. For roughly a decade now, or at least from 2010 onwards, ubiquitous internet connection via smartphones are the norm, with all its consequences. Especially younger people spend lots of time "on their screens", outsourcing their lives a bit to those devices. You have less and less younger people in life audiences - concerts and festivals - also clubs - get older (audience wise) and rarer. Please, don't consider this as lamenting, I am just describing how it is today.

As for the instant-web on your smartphone: I consider it a bad trade off - former information-brimming websites get trimmed down for mobile usage, and often their big archives get trimmed or axed alltogether. Which is not surprising, bc this "life on your smartphone screen" seems so centered around the present - as is social media.

The smartphone is the ultimate expression of capitalist atomisation of the individual, a path directly into the psyche, nullifying community impulses whilst presenting the illusion of connection. Bernays' wet dream. And it has come at the worst possible time. We've seen the studies that show air pollution knocks down IQ, that excessive heat destroys our ability to think rationally...

The corpse of liberal capitalism, belching it's fraudulent emissions; the false doctrine of the individual, consumerism as the manifestation of choice and freedom - these must be dispersed, cleansed if there's to be any hope of survival. The truth is that we are already networked entities, we are linked indelibly with our kin, our neighbours, our communities, our co-workers, our friends and most intimately with our environment - with nature and the natural systems which sustain our existence. We must renew these connections.

Cognitive dematerialisation will lead only to physical destruction. You cannot ascend to a higher plane as the ladder crumbles beneath your feet. We are nodes in the rhizome, first and foremost.