pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Daaamnnnn a lil Saturday savagery goin down on the 'sus!
ContraceptronicaAnyone else think 'Conceptitronica' would be a better word for this?
'Conceptronica' feels like its missing a syllable.
in retrospect its obvious that trying to discern some kind of "dialogue" with my recent hobbyhorse electroacoustic was the wrong angle of approach. as corpsey said this music has way more to do with pop--and even with movie fx and IDM. if I/we find a way to appreciate it its going to be through those associations.
I must say that the sound design (as someone upthread referred to it) on some of this stuff sounds about as modern as music possibly can to my ears. The tunes tend to be musically less interesting, though - less than the sum of their parts. That's why I think the best stuff from this world has been serving vocalists (Charlie XCX, Kelela, FKA, Bjork...), because that tends to mean there's a necessity for a strong melody/structure.
As others have said, perhaps there's also something distasteful about just how polished and perfect it all sounds. (I think this was actually what people were saying about Special Request's jungle tunes.) There's always this sense of cavernous space - cavernous but also almost like shrink wrapping around the sounds. Again, this makes it modern - an evocation of modern technology.
Think of how wild and unruly 'Mr Bean' sounds. I wonder if it would sound less so if it didn't also sound a bit shoddily mixed and mastered?
Is this hyperreal sound design the path forward, or a dead-end?
I think there's something to be said about the technological reproducibility of art and the trend of trying to fix extramusical ideas onto the aesthetic project as a response. There's an idea that art has two values: a ritual value and a exhibition value.
The past couple of hundred years in western culture has seen ritual or cult value diminish and exhibition value thrive with the invention of recorded music, the photograph etc. Art has become distributed, widely accessible instead of locally situated within a spatial and geographical context. The ultimate example of ritual value being religious statues or ornamentation or cave paintings. It's important that the piece is there, somewhere.
Now it's everywhere, all at once, which also means that it's really nowhere.
Embedding music into a museum-like context is a reach for that ritual value of old. An escape from reproducibility.
Does make me feel like an old man when I learn that people find Jam City somehow world shattering.
would not say world shattering, but i'm listening to 'classical curves' right now and quite enjoying it. i dunno what you'd call this, just very good production?
don't you miss skullstep? I know corpsey does!
simon reynolds is old and cannot read
The music is Lee Gamble's best yet. But does the concept get in the way?
I have an admission to make. I'm hesitant to talk about the concept behind Lee Gamble's new EP. I'm not jazzed about this fact. Gamble is, quite rightly, considered a key artist in what Simon Reynolds recently called "conceptronica," a loosely connected wave of experimental electronic music that responds to politics, society and culture, and finds its largest audiences at mixed-medium festivals in Europe and North America. He's released a string of fantastic albums—exploratory works that look at rave and post-rave thrills through an educated lens but never lose an innate sense of emotion or immediacy. The music on Exhaust, the second of an EP trilogy for Hyperdub, is frequently excellent, Gamble's highest-energy refraction of club music tropes so far, which follows a more melodically driven first part. This time, though, the words have come to seem like an impediment, something standing between me and the music.
Exhaust is part of a wider series named Flush Real Pharynx, a "sonic documentary" that explores the "semioblizt," a term coined by the late writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher that refers to "the aggressive onslaught of visual & sonic stimuli of contemporary cities & virtual spaces," to use the release text's phrasing. For me, things start to seem questionable later in the text with mention of the "psychedelic high street" and the idea that the record engages with a world that is "well and truly with us right now."
If claims are being made on a collective experience of contemporary capitalism, they're essentially being made on a collective experience of urbanite Westerners. Is there anything in these slick, hyperkinectic dance beats that reflects the lived reality of being in a UK city in 2019? Or most people's daily navigation of digital spaces? Some artistic license should of course be granted. But I'd argue that, outside of Gamble's narrow subjective perspective, no, there isn't much. With the utmost respect to, well, virtually everyone who lives in UK cities, the truth of being out there in the world feels far, far more ordinary than this project makes it seem. (Which is to say nothing of the sad, slow decline of many urban areas and their attendant communities due to, among many other factors, long-term economic policies.)
The engagement with advertising here is also a bit unfortunate. The record opens with shattering glass, a stirring string line and a sample of a man with an English accent asking us to "look around; we sell cosmetics for one pound." Later, on "Naja," a robotised woman promises "energy, clear-mindedness, composure and confidence" via whatever she's hawking. A delicate, ASMR-style voice on "Shards" is "so excited to help you pick out your next luxury vehicle." These kinds of critiques centred on the dull inhumanity of consumerism are a very, very well-worn theme found in many forms of art and entertainment that were done to death a few years ago within vaporwave and its related scenes. Given Gamble's credentials, some more original thinking could have been expected, particularly when the release text later references "a high rise overlooking the Ballardian motion-sculpture of a collapsing motorway system," a slightly tired and nonsensical dystopian allusion.
For Gamble, the semioblizt means rapid movement, explosive directional changes and hostile (but thrilling) grabs for attention. "Envenom," "Naja" "Switches" and "Shards" have plenty of this, and I'd count them among the very best music he's written. "Envenom" is a colossal soundscape, followed by a tricky broken-beat mutation, followed by an IDM freakout, followed by techno rage-a-thon. An entire track based on any of these sections would still have been killer. "Shards" is similarly episodic, hitting an apex with a sped-up ragga MC and a barrage of kick drums that would tear up the dance floor at a festival like Unsound. The EP closes borderline blissfully with "Saccades," where the affecting chords Gamble writes so effortlessly meet the jungle snares that seem embedded in his artistic DNA.
Given the strength of most the record, an understandable response to all of this might be, "C'mon mate, why'd you get so caught up in the text?" I totally get that. The thing is, Gamble has himself called for the electronic music community to engage on a level beyond straight pleasure-seeking, to politically connect and, essentially, seek truth. It's that last part I'm unsure about. The ideas underpinning Exhaust seem like an artistically convenient distortion of everyday reality.
I don't mind it, though -
As long as the music's good.