thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm all about the free dispersion of knowledge. naturally this has forced me to be a bit quiet around some people.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
There have been actually, huge waves of migration, but the nuum was really about the West Indies. There was a relationship there with Jamacian music. Since then you've had, to name a few
Somalian, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Romanian, Lithuanian, Portugese, Columbian, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Albanian, and of course Nigerian and Ghanian (not to mention Gambian, Cameroonian, Angolans) It's a vastly more multicultural London than it was in 1993. Far more complex.

how that might pan out in music is not obvious. It's clearly ridiculous to posit some future amalgamation of all ethnic, cultural influences. It never works that way. (Some bagpipes over some daburka, with a nose flute and some reggae bass) you may get what Barty wants, which is localised scenes demarcated by ethnic/cultural/national origin, some of which could cross over to a larger audience. That doesn't seem inconceivable. Polish donk, Turkish reggaeton etc. Afrobeats was/is this to some degree. Asian garage was this is the late '90s.

i remember wandering in East London some time in the mid-2000s (probably when i doing a story on grime for Spin now i think of it) and i really noticed that almost every other voice on the street seemed to be Polish or Balkan - did make me wonder if at some point in the nearish-future there would be a critical mass reached where the Sound of the Pirates had this discernible Eastern European influence, through mixing together of the youth

but it doesn't necessarily work like that - - some musics, some ethnicities, have more cool and allure about them than others - the cultural traffic runs very nearly one-way, black adopted by white

plus i'm not even sure what a contemporary Polish etc sound would have been that could merge with pirate tradition sounds

in Poland right now, trap is huge - they have their own rappers rapping about their particular social realities over there - probably they are hatching their own Warsaw equivalent to Tulse Hill drill
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
turks don't have any cultural cachet here. that's why we haven't been able to hatch anything, just a few scattershot producers here and there, bay b kane...
 

luka

Well-known member
Chronik made friends with a Polish rapper/mma fighter a few years back and did some stuff with him. The Guardian were getting excited about the Albanian drill coming out the Gascoyne estate in Barking.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
funnily or not so funnily enough my mum really likes art blakey. she likes kool and the gang summer madness. she likes that sort of old afro american soul vibe. I've been looking for stuff from my personal continuum (bukem excluded) that i can show her. garage is just too twitchy. but i was looking at nightmares on wax and detroit electro and it's such an initiates sound. well, N.O.W is a bit flat in an electronic music context. I guess the jazz man synth was always a tendancy that was born out of all sorts of cheesy proportions. really though what I want is something more like the first black dog album. only thing that I can think of. that one they did in 1992 was basically perfect, almost a middle eastern elegance in the beat but also jazzed out.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
the original dude who coined the term AfroFuturism was another Mark - Mark Dery

and then there was a third honky - John Corbett who wrote an essay about brothers from other planets - the cluster of Sun Ra, George Clinton, Lee Perry

but Greg Tate was sort of leaning that way in his own writing before the word came along

and obviously it's all there already in the music itself - explicitly and implicitly

Hendrix too
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thing with turkish reggaeton is everyone hates it apart from kids in oakland. one of the worst genres ever. could here it in every night club and street corner in the 00s. just a cut above turkish hip hop. horrible.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
the age of plastic (slight return)

brief additional on the plastic = futurity idea

chanced upon a film on TV this morning, Things To Come, from 1936, based on the HG Wells book - and the look of tomorrow is all white glossy plastic, and chrome

so these associations were established way way back - and that would be when you had all those World Fairs with their showcases of wipe-clean kitchens of the future etc etc

also the aesthetic of Art Deco with all the silvery sleek metal is not unrelated - surge into the modern - also Corbusier's dream of the White World emerging from the Brown World (no racial connotations - he mean order and clarity out of muddy chaos of cities)

the difference from plasticity then and plasticity now is that back then it was more geometric and clear lines and uncluttered - now synthetic aesthetics are more fluid, promiscuity, baroque, overloaded, spongiform

from Kraftwerk to Arca

(best thing in Things To Come is that instead of a rocket blasting into space, they have a giant gun that fires a bullet-spaceship into the sky)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
funnily or not so funnily enough my mum really likes art blakey. she likes kool and the gang summer madness. she likes that sort of old afro american soul vibe. I've been looking for stuff from my personal continuum (bukem excluded) that i can show her. garage is just too twitchy. but i was looking at nightmares on wax and detroit electro and it's such an initiates sound. well, N.O.W is a bit flat in an electronic music context. I guess the jazz man synth was always a tendancy that was born out of all sorts of cheesy proportions. really though what I want is something more like the first black dog album. only thing that I can think of. that one they did in 1992 was basically perfect, almost a middle eastern elegance in the beat but also jazzed out.

I mean times like this I wish I was barty just so I could ask my paramour about smooth things, assuming she was that type of feminist. but i can't even remember the last time i had a wank. maybe 2012... 2011? never felt the need for it really. porn is old hat and my anti-depressants kill all kind of sexual feeling.
 

luka

Well-known member
now synthetic aesthetics are more fluid, promiscuity, baroque, overloaded, spongiform

Do you just mean in terms of music? Architecture and product design are still pretty clean and minimal for the most part. Apple in particular as Barty mentioned I think.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
re Afrofuturism as exhausted set of concepts

i had a blog thing i was writing up for Christmas that i never finished, but it included a riff contrasting Migos versus Janelle Monae (both being based in Atlanta)

Janelle Monae, total critic's fave, Dirty Computer topped some magazine polls, c.f. Culture II which was not mentioned in any (except for an Atlanta based webzine which put it in their Top 40 of Atlanta artist releases of 2018 - at number forty!!!!!)

Monae = jouissance-free zone, get nothing from it, not a tingle, versus Migos whose music drips and splashes with jouissance

But the main point was that Monae's music is an essay about Afrofuturism, makes all this references and allusions and outright replicas of earlier sounds - whereas Migos (and their ilk - all the things Crowley said G. Tate should be aware) is actually afrofuturist in a completely fresh, non-referential and non-reverential way and without needing to make any kind of rhetorical song and dance about being afrofuturistic - it's just out there in the world (or at least it was, until they killed their sound by over-exposure and three dull solo records in quick succession)
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Do you just mean in terms of music? Architecture and product design are still pretty clean and minimal for the most part. Apple in particular as Barty mentioned I think.

i think architecture is getting more fluid and bendy and spatially-warped isn't it? partly because architects can design all the strange spaces using digital technology, they can map out things that were hard to do once, and i should imagine there's all kinds of innovations with materials that allow them to be less strict.

it's not like a new baroque, it's not bringing back ornaments and fold upon folds, but i get the impression that it's becoming more fluid -

but yeah mostly i meant music - electronic music on the whole is super detailed and maximalist, because it can be, the software affords that level of finicking. To do something stark and emaciated and empty is a retro statement, like Perc's techno tracks with a Test Dept feel

the space of the internet itself is not clean or logical - it's cluttered, you jump around, there's no linearity

there is an amazing essay by Rem Koolhaas called Junkspace - it's not really about the internet, it's actually about the promiscuous mix of styles in public spaces like shopping malls and airports and so on, it's very scathing and vividly poetically written - but there are passages in it that really sound like he could be describing the space of the internet, also the kind of internal squalor and clutter that one's consciousness develops through living the digital life.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Yeah agreed bliss though me and Migos stop around 2014. Don't here anything new in Culture.

Future sound of London was basically the most self-conscious form of that essay on the future you spoke of re monae right? listening to their essential mix now, think it's all i have left of them after 92. strange. almost too. um. well 60s style psychedelic, i guess.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
age of plastic (sonic slight return)

one further thought about synthetic = futurity as having this long history behind it

a sonic example of that would be with Auto Tune, which most definitely has allowed for a bunch of distinctively 21st Century sounds and effects (and become an expressive field of action for artists - future, migos, et al - but even some indie types like Bon Iver and most recently Steve Malkmus and the chap in that Americana band Lambchop have cottoned on to it)

yet when it first came along most people -including myself - thought it was just a vocoder, which had a couple of decades of history in pop music behind it at that point (i.e. 1998)

it actually doesn't sound the same as vocoder, and it would prove to have its own idiomatic potentials, things that were only possible through using / abusing it etc

but it sounded near-enough that at first it seemed to be an extension of this longstanding gimmicky robot-voice tradition going back to Giorgio Moroder's solo records, Telex, Kraftwerk, or various funk and soul artists

that sense of it being already slightly retro-future or at least corny was helped by the fact that around the time of Cher's "Believe" and other early AutoTune hits, you had Daft Punk doing the vocoder we-are-robots type shtick in an arch, ironic way
 

luka

Well-known member
Thinking of the experience of the internet is interesting. The internet as a space. A geography. Good one.

Traditionally the city has been a big part of future visions. And modernity. We were talking about bebop earlier. I'm falling asleep I think so I'll probably leave it for tomorrow.
 

catalog

Well-known member
The rounded off shake and rubbery texture of iPhone app icons. The apple logo itself.

I was reading 'Prometheus rising' by Robert Anton Wilson this morning on the train and he's got a couple of pages where he's talking about 'oral imprinting' and the importance of the breast...

here's a selection:

"As Charles Darwin noted:

'In our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to us which bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom...we feel a general glow of delight which seems to
influence all of our senses...'

The ancients pictured the great mother goddess Diana of Ephesus with literally dozens of breasts and St. Paul reports hearing her worshippers chanting rapturously "Great is Diana!"

There is virtually no great artist who has not left us a portrait, or many portraits, of the nude female form, especially the breasts; and even in non-human scenes, curves are introduced wherever possible. Architects break the Euclidean straight line to introduce such curves at the
slightest pretext—arches, Moorish domes, etc. The curves of the suspension bridge are necessitated by Newton's laws ("Gravity's rainbow," in Pynchon's phrase) but, still, these double catenary curves are esthetically pleasing for the reasons Darwin suggests. As for music—where did we first hear it, who sang or hummed to us, and against what part of her body were we held? Mountain climbers are reduced, like Mallory, to saying "Because it's there," when trying to explain their compulsion to ascend those conic peaks. Our eating utensils (oral gratification tools) tend to be rounded or curved. Square plates or saucers look "campy" or strange. UFOs come in a variety of shapes, but the most popular are the oval and conic."

Thought I'd throw that in.

Also, I can't remember where I read it, but I remember someone saying something about the big Apple innovation being that they changed the colour from black to white ie electronic products had always been housed in black casing, as were the headphones. Apple made the future white??
 

luka

Well-known member
There's always been a vision of the future which is non-physical. Part of this presumably stems from dualism, not necessarily Cartesian, but also religious, always the division into corporeal and non corporeal. On the one hand the body on the other; mind, soul, spirit.

Eshun makes the point in more brilliant than the sun that the future always used to be represented in sound as diaphanous, floaty, weightless, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, until dance music, acid house, techno, jungle. I don't know if that is entirely true actually. It's a shaky point, but you certainly have the two competing visions.

As I keep saying the switch to the post-industrial and into the Information Age is what seems to be the crucial thing here. We are not the robots any more. Not Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. We are synced to non human rhythms more than ever before perhaps, but not to the factory.

good point well made.
 

luka

Well-known member
dissensus was quite dysfunctional at this time. power struggle between third and barty etc but some great work by me. i give myself a top mark for my work here.
 
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