Retrocholia

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Not freed by culture but trapped by it, buried under it

you guys are reading too much into this. yes there is that feel. but it's like mans protesting club closures as gentrification. it's like clubbing existing in this weird social vacuum where the real gentirification and the inflation of the property market can be just ignored to justify milquetoast liberalism. clubs participating in that gentrification process doesn't appear on their radar.

We're insulated and scenes are going into their internal purisms because that's just a reflection of how things are. people are keeping to themselves. so many of my queer and PoC mates are going out much less, if at all. there's no social dynamic to push something genuinely weird like doctor p sweetshop to get played on radio 1 in the daytime.

until the elitist brexiteers etc don't monopolise this countrys public sphere dynamic and write out misfit voices then all ur gonna get is road rap, which, despite some quite interesting innovations a) doesn't really have much to do with grime and B) won't escape the hip hop mc format. if anything more grime instrumentals are being made today. whether thats goldsmiths or not is another story but that's just the way it is really.

It's of course quite hippy to say 'it's all music, maaaan' but the way i look at it is that i just chase the sonic combinations and thrills that are new to me in that specific spatiotemperal instance. I'm not really bothered if they are future or retrofuture so long as they can make mush out of my brain. of course this doesn't mean abandoning the politics but in this current domination of hard 1930s conservativism i don't think it's even right to expect radical culture to penetrate the mainstream. everyone's gonna be mavrics because of the way the social relationships and production relations are organised.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the problem is most of youse Eden, Droid and (possibly) padraig excluded let their listening be dominated by 'proper music bollox.' Hence the rnb as opposed to funk or dub fetish. that is definitely part of my listening of course but I prefer sound and rhythm and texture combinations. the domination proper music aesthetic only leads down two roads really, either classicism in classical and jazz or its surrogate brother austerity, or you become a stoner soulquarian. of course there is nothing wrong with these positions inherently but they are not necessarily *electronic* positions.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i excluded blissblogger cos i think it would be fair to say he's mostly given up on discovering new music (maybe there are still things he is discovering that are new to him, i don't know.) which is fair enough. his job depends on it really. that's something else. if i was a music journalist i'd hit burn out really quickly as well. one of my old friends told me she thought it would be a good idea. i don't think she quite understood how gruelling that work could be, especially as music saves me from a lot of destructive behaviour, falling in with the wrong lot etc. i can't always keep the crit theory glasses on really. im not sure if this is resignation or not but it is what it is.
 
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Numbers

Well-known member
Maybe the term was later used in cybernetics as you say but wouldn't that have been after Pynchon wrote V? Interesting that they would re-use the term to mean something that is sorta related (in that it deals with operations and constants) but also quite different in that it is the final, constant result, rather than the change itself. In your example the e-value would be 1, is that right?

Heinz von Foerster wrote rather extensively about them throughout his career. I should verify but it wouldn't surprise me that much of it is contemporary to V (late fifties, early sixties). I got the square root example from him:

if you recursively take the square root of any random initial value (most calculators have a square root button), then you will very soon arrive at the stable value 1.0000. . . . No wonder, for the root of 1 is 1. The mathematicians at the turn of the century called these values the “Eigen values” of the corresponding functions. To the operation of taking roots belong the Eigen values 1 and also 0, since any root of 0 is 0. The essential difference between these two Eigen values is that for every deviation from 1, recursion leads the system back to 1, while at the least deviation from 0 the system leaves null and wanders to the stable Eigen value “one.” About 20 years ago there was an explosion of renewed interest in these recursive operations, as one discovered that many functions develop not only stable values but also a stable dynamic. (Understanding understanding. Essays on cybernetics and cognition)

That is how I understood eigen values: as the (paradox) of a stable dynamic -- something which you see easily at work in Ashby's work on ultra-stability as well.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
does anyone else find this sense of there being no future and even no PRESENT in the contemporary world?

A feeling of being trapped in a closed loop
at the risk of sounding sophomoric, this strikes me as a postmodern (postpostmodern? very Now, anyway) iteration of existential self-awareness and resulting angst

i.e. eternal recurrence, or maybe and/or its inverse (its a concept I'm still trying to really grasp)

that is, to create or to contemplate a creation is always to risk contemplating the impermanence of things (mono no aware, or what have you), and so one's own impermanence

I used to think about and be existentially disquieted by this all the time - this thing I like is from x years ago, the people who made it are dead or old, eventually I'll be dead

I assume it gets more acute for most people as we age and become more likely to confront our own mortality/the meaninglessness of existence

the current ever-impressing pace (itself existentially disquieting) of cultural turnover makes it more acute as well, but its omnipresent in the human condition, I'd think

what else is "Ozymandias" about? and it's real-life predecessors, the armies of Alexander stumbling across the ruins of old Assyria. all glory is fleeting.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the Cardigans or whatever are just a pointed reminder (dumb pop really does capture it, for some reason - reflects meaninglessness, maybe?) that there is no future

which is overwhelming, hugely depressing - melancholia - until you come to some kind of terms with it

I basically agree (I think) with third - no future matters if you're invested in future, as opposed to a succession of moments you're trying to wring the most out of.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
dumb pop really does capture it, for some reason - reflects meaninglessness, maybe?
I assume we all know each other well enough, but this isn't a criticism

if anything it's praise. meaninglessness is very difficult to achieve. meaning is a burden.

I don't like the Cardigans specifically but that's for subjective aesthetic and sonic taste reasons.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the Cardigans or whatever are just a pointed reminder (dumb pop really does capture it, for some reason - reflects meaninglessness, maybe?) that there is no future

which is overwhelming, hugely depressing - melancholia - until you come to some kind of terms with it

I basically agree (I think) with third - no future matters if you're invested in future, as opposed to a succession of moments you're trying to wring the most out of.

Well the future is going to be bloody which ever way you slice it. tech bro non-utopia, or perhaps the remnants of socialism and a workers movement arising out of a prelonged conflict. that's why it's important not to let the politics take over really. cos the classical national economy building projects are over really (just look at the mess of brexit.) hence the ruling class are actually ruling over a void. the classical social contract has already broken down, but that doesn't mean people won't try and have attempts of trying to enforce it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
V. was published in '63, cybernetics had been around for a while by that time - Wiener coined the term in '48.
Yeah but he specifically said "second wave cybernetics" - I'm not aware of what the distinction means and had never heard that term to be honest but internet tells me that started '68.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Well the future is going to be bloody which ever way you slice it
distinguish between "the future" and an individual's future

the former, sure, as we've talked about many times, plus the climate change sword of Damocles

however I took OP to be about the latter, if in relation to the former - experiencing art is, to me, about one's own impermanence

not that exercise of power and creation of culture aren't intertwined, but we're talking about feelings

it's a different thing to say "wow, the world is garbage" than to say "nothing, including me, has a future", with different resulting feelings
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
having no future being to me the ultimate affirmation of life. acceptance without resignation, live while you're alive.

it's different from things in the world that can be struggled against with hope of success, be it Trump, Brexit, social injustice, whatever. there the challenge is more resisting cynicism.

it's possible I'm misreading Corpsey's OP, or framing it in my own way.

thx for putting me in august co of Eden + Droid btw. I am quite anti-"proper music bollix". If anything I'm guilty of being too anti-proper music bollix. I wish I knew less than the little proper stuff I do.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
distinguish between "the future" and an individual's future

the former, sure, as we've talked about many times, plus the climate change sword of Damocles

however I took OP to be about the latter, if in relation to the former - experiencing art is, to me, about one's own impermanence

not that exercise of power and creation of culture aren't intertwined, but we're talking about feelings

it's a different thing to say "wow, the world is garbage" than to say "nothing, including me, has a future", with different resulting feelings


well i think that's super relative now. a regis downwards thing, if u played it to someone and didn't tell them it was 96, they might say it's future.

I agree with you in that we're basically living the future. we've got all the technology. we're hearing normal sounds, these sounds are not radically new. maybe the last radically *new* thing was wiley's beats. that was still the tail end of internet 1.0 times for most of us.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
what else is "Ozymandias" about? and it's real-life predecessors, the armies of Alexander stumbling across the ruins of old Assyria. all glory is fleeting.

I suppose what I felt in that cafe was something like the opposite of the Ozymandias effect, actually - not the impermanence of the past but the suffocating permanence.

Which is fairly absurd, in light of the sort of ancient history evoked in that poem, when we're talking about a song that's only about 20 years old.

Not that I don't feel the existential dread you're talking about of course - I've noticed lately how OLD some of the celebrities from my youth are beginning to look.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Not that I don't feel the existential dread you're talking about of course - I've noticed lately how OLD some of the celebrities from my youth are beginning to look.
That one is a powerful reminder of mortality. I feel very sad every time I seem some ruined heartthrob from my youth. Pathetic really cos everyone else through history has faced this or something like, but - as with everything obviously - now it's happening to me it feels so much more real and personal.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I suppose what I felt in that cafe was something like the opposite of the Ozymandias effect, actually - not the impermanence of the past but the suffocating permanence.
it's one of those philosophical things where - if you pursue it enough - opposites become/are actually the same thing, I think (maybe it's a dialectic? I've never read Hegel)

i.e. awareness of each individual thing's impermanence contains within it also awareness of suffocating permanence of that thing's non-being, and so one's own non-being

and/or the collective weight of impermanence of things, or the idea of their impermanence, is a suffocating, inescapable weight, if it weighs on one

this sounds literally crazy, but I used to get existentially nauseous thinking about things like: no human could hope to learn even a small fraction of the totality of human knowledge

I think perhaps retrocholia is a shallower (not in a bad way) reflection of that deeper dread?
 

Leo

Well-known member
perhaps it could be a matter of a) it's easier for artists to find inspiration in the past than to try and be new/original, and b) the internet allows immediate access to all aspects of the past from which to work from.

some artists (particularly those looking for commercial success) probably feel they have a greater chance of success if they riff off something their fans already know and like from the past than if they try something new.

also, with age comes the natural sense of having seen/heard it all before (usually done better!).
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
hey corpsey, came across this bit in Camus that made me think of retrocholia

"Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories. For anyone who feels bound up with this world's fate, the clash of civilizations has something agonizing about it. I have made that anguish mine at the same time I wanted to join in. Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me?"

(should be obv but just in case nb that "clash of civilizations" here has nothing to do with the post-Cold War Huntington conception except in the most indirect sense)
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I know you all are in full-on Brexit meltdown rn, and rightly so

but don't forget to take a break from the crushing uncertainty of political and economic existential dread to experience the crushing uncertainty of individual existential dread

and remember, you could be dead! so by that standard things are going pretty well. -a friendly life-affirming reminder from your intermittent internet acquaintance
 

droid

Well-known member
and remember, you could be dead! so by that standard things are going pretty well. -a friendly life-affirming reminder from your intermittent internet acquaintance

Or going pretty badly, depending on how existential you want to get. ❌
 
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