Dematerialisation.

[sadmanbarty]

up at 4 in the morning on a weeknight wanking and intermittently watching isis beheading videos

 

[luka]

very good point. the screen-induced insomnia and the related perceptual, affective and cognitive distortion/change that goes alongside that. (cf bruno's late night aesthetic thread)

 

[Leo]

help me out here...is this track actually anything special? not a genre I'm heavily into so maybe I just don't get the nuance but this sounds exactly like about 9,000 other tracks (or most of the stuff in the "choon" thread!). I'm a blockhead, please school me.

 

[pattycakes_]

very good point. the screen-induced insomnia and the related perceptual, affective and cognitive distortion/change that goes alongside that. (cf bruno's late night aesthetic thread)

Add to that all the drugs. The scatterbrained rapid fire fragments, mumble rap, triplets all sound so unashamedly high.

 

[thirdform]

nah. Tinashe is post-Aaliyyah if that makes sense, which isn't all that common in modern rnb.

I'm sure Crowley's going to ridicule that opinion though.

 

[thirdform]

one thing i will say tho is modern pop sounds so much better cranked through a compressor on the radio at low fidelity. i almost felt like i was losing something when i listened to Jeffery in high fidelity flac. it's not that digital sounds better than analogue per se but that people outsource their need for music. hence spotify.

 

[thirdform]

the radio serves less as gateways into a new world or what could be but to perpetuate ephemerality. we can give you this song, if you want, but really you want us to provide that service for you. It is no longer the vinyl crackle of discovering something beaten up.

 

[sadmanbarty]

help me out here...is this track actually anything special? not a genre I'm heavily into so maybe I just don't get the nuance but this sounds exactly like about 9,000 other tracks (or most of the stuff in the "choon" thread!). I'm a blockhead, please school me.

as one youtube commenter put it:

"the beat sound like you're at a circus and the shit just goes left, everything turns evil and you can't get out."

the overarching aesthetic is a fevered, delirious nausea and the song deploys every tonal, rhythmic and timbral weapon in it’s arsenal to achieve it. the detuned synths, the ethereal muezzin sounds in the background that sound like the music from the shining, the breathy vocals, the interplay between the strait time and triplets on the high hat (the contraction and speeding of time before the snare drums), the slow attack, the kick drum tripping over itself, etc. murky, clouded thoughts occurring briefly in the foreground before evaporating. unable to focus. to hold on to a coherent idea. martin sheen in a saigon hotel.

i haven’t heard too much like it. closest i can think of are the carousel-from-a-nightmare aesthetic of this:


to a lesser extent this:

 

[Leo]

thanks, Barty. I realize I asked a dickish-sounding question but was genuinely curious, so appreciate it. while I think you could be reading a bit into what you'd like it to sound like, I hadn't picked up on some of those elements. will give it another listen.

 

[thirdform]

theres a tendancy to view pop and rnb through the prism of literature, or surrogate literature which is kinda what @blissblogger was getting at when he exalted Mantronix as a counter-acting tendancy.

The problem for me is i belong to a previous production cycle where listening is maximised through good product. To truly understand the reconfiguration of spatiotemperality in modern pop music i would need to listen on the smartphone, through the smart phone speaker, the radio etc for an extended period of time. no headphone pre-amps, no custome dacs, no 24bit flacs, no vinyl, etc etc.

If you look at modern pop music as club music, it doesn't rly have that void that you have in house and jungle. sure travi$ scott is like ambient idm folded into rnb, i'll post the song im thinking about. but that lack has to be created through an artificial boosting of certain frequencies. the product is configured and reconfigured over and over again.

 

[thirdform]

 

[thirdform]

but then you have stuff like


Which seems to be aiming for an old school analogue homely aesthetic, but not quite getting there.

 

[blissblogger]

which music sounds like having 18 tabs open at once?

flying lotus 'cosmogramma'

 

[thirdform]

then there is the electrocrunk descended sound of the 2010s which i call the digital dred void. the bassline does not function as sheer pressure as a counteraction to the other components. In jungle the bassline serves a rhythmelodic function. here it doesn't. it just hammers. It doesn't even boom in the trad electro sense.

 

[thirdform]

flying lotus 'cosmogramma'

agreed. horrible album though. actually i wanna hear something like that cos i generally have 600 tabs open at once. maybe i should give glass swords another wirl.

 

[luka]

im really looking forward to listening to all this but please remember 'i like it' or 'i dont like it' is neither here nor there. you only have to fold it into the conceptual framework. that's the game.

thank you everybody for your cooperation.

 

[mistersloane]

consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.

Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information that the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.

The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)

Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.

The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).

When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)

One interesting thing to note here is that while this is primarily conceived of as a process of becoming-inorganic (the organic being characterised as textured, grained, warm, irregular) digital tends not to take on the forms of solids but to emulate the liquid, or the emulsion or molten. This future was inaugurated by The Abyss (1989) and more importantly and definitively, by Terminator 2 (1991) You move from the heavy-metal, solid-state Terminator 1, (Arnold Schwarzenegger, the embodiment of strength and rigidity) to the quicksilver, protean T2, able to adopt any form at all, able to pass through solid walls or to let a bullet travel straight through the body without damage (and played by the relatively slight Robert Patrick)

The process of dematerialisation is also a process of becoming weightless which is why we move from the solid to liquid. Think of the curves of 30 St. Mary Axe ('The Gherkin') and the new buildings clustered around it. Think too of the 'blobs' Simon Reynolds talks about in his piece on autotune.

"The program captures the characteristics of a vocal or instrumental performance and displays them graphically, with each note appearing as what Celemony calls a “blob.” Sound becomes Play-Doh to be sculpted or tinted by a huge range of effects. The blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor."

Think of the move away from rapping in blocks (bars), as heard in its most sophisticated and developed form with Young Thug, where both the line becomes fluid (overrunning or falling short of the bar-limits), and the individual word is made fluid, also able to be stretched and squished, morphing in pitch, volume and duration.

We are no longer confined to grids and boxes and straight-lines. If we think back to grime, and 8-bar in particular, it is all grids and boxes and cubes, reflecting the visual interface of the software programs. Now these rigid, structural supports and dividing walls begin to melt away (albeit still implicit and implied.) .

Or, finally, consider another quality, the quality of speed. Not straight line speed which can only ever end in the unbroken note, or drone, but as event-density. As information feed - and this is where (one reason) hardcore and jungle are so prophetic, arriving from the future- the BPM is not the important measure of speed, it is the amount of information within the bar, (and this is why the return to linearity post 95 was so regressive) different timbres and textures, sheer amount and variety of individual sounds. There is just a little too much information to track and keep hold of, which, as rap pundit sadmanbarty has noted, is homomorphic with a platform like twitter or any other rapid-fire information delivery service, and, furthermore, as he points out, the rapid-fire, staccato triplets are also homomorphic with the same.

The Health Goth people were all about this : clean lines; immersion in water; pissing; bad music; clean lines; immersion; adidas; nike; fetishism; sniff it then wash it; kinda buddhist; architecture; pissing; justifying your desire to be justified; not having dogs cos they ruin the clean; event- density as desire/distance to not be involved with the tech and just comment/purchase upon it.

 

[blissblogger]

To truly understand the reconfiguration of spatiotemperality in modern pop music i would need to listen on the smartphone, through the smart phone speaker, the radio etc for an extended period of time. no headphone pre-amps, no custome dacs, no 24bit flacs, no vinyl, etc etc.

that's a good point: the reason why a lot of trap'n'B sound ambient / IDM-ish, is because its listeners are listening to it ambiently, on earbuds or tiny little speakers. lots of intricate mids, lots of stereo separation cos it sounds good on phones. there's a feedback loop i'm sure where what does well encourages producers to amp up those aspects.

truly serious audiophiles don't think you should listen on headphones, cos that's not how sound works in real life, real auditory space.

 

[luka]

The Health Goth people were all about this : clean lines; immersion in water; pissing; bad music; clean lines; immersion; adidas; nike; fetishism; sniff it then wash it; kinda buddhist; architecture; pissing; justifying your desire to be justified; not having dogs cos they ruin the clean; event- density as desire/distance to not be involved with the tech and just comment/purchase upon it.

lol is that what young people call 'throwing shade'? i dont understand it but thank you.

 

[luka]

how does this song reflect your experience with computers, phones, the internet?

just starting to listen to barty's examples, which im grateful for, and i am reminded that there is a sense in which the pop mainstream is still filtering through and absorbing the ideas of the '90s avant-garde, which is a time lag ive referred to before

ther's always this foreshadowing you get, where we get teasers and previews to the futures we will come to inhabit. as in the terminator 2 example.