there's a pitchfork piece doing the rounds about conceptronica which i like, am fine with, but i think the easy coinage does a serious disservice to both the dance music that precedes our current moment, and the specific ways that politics gets sifted out of culture
obviously electronic music 'about a thing', with the intention of specifically constructing a novel, conceptually rich lexicon for itself isn't new.
https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2018-against-worldbuilding … by nick scavo is a really great history of the notion of 'world building', from stockhausten to OPN
the problem i'm sensing is that the implicit image of older dance music is vastly limited. the historical contextualisation that the piece does is to 90s IDM, and the writer basically handwaves that away with 'they were just being cheeky experimenters, no politics there'
i have no idea how someone could try to think about liberation and conceptual thinking in dance music and not take the natural antecedent to our present moment as detroit techno, rather than idm.
there's an oblique reference to underground resistance in the way the writer juxtaposes chino amobi and being "embattled" with holly herndon's utopian visions which somehow correspond to chicago house. it's so utterly shallow and belies a really weak understanding of UR i thnk
there's also a deeply racialised aspect - really consistently the dystopian aspects get attributed to black artists and utopian thinking is the reserve of white artists. of course holly herndon and jam city and sophie are looking elsewhere, but in what way are amobi, or UR, not?
techno has been an absolutely central pillar in the exposition of afrofuturism, and i feel like the ability to think of the conceptual imagination of dance music without starting at afrofuturism is reliant on such a meaningless understanding of 'conceptual' as to be pointless
going all the way back to disco and the NY loft party scene, dance music has been not only inevitably political, but attached to a set of commitments about the emancipatory power of not just the music, but the communal act of partying, and organising a space and community
'pre-conceptual' partying, whether rave or disco, is just as subject to the constraints and realities of rent and spacial management, of labour, of marketing, of racist and queer violence. i can't think about NY's disco and early house without thinking about AIDS ffs
to me, i think it strikes at a failure in figuring out how 'conceptual' gets thrown around as both a way of distancing things from stuff that 'material', both in the sense of dealing with the real in the world politics, or an unfussy dismissal of politics to deal in Just Sound
and the exact people being interviewed sorta smash that boundary to bits. my first meaningful encounter with holly herndon and jam city's 'conceptualisation' was her putting on a conference featuring guy standing and paul mason talking about ubi and left movements in europe
the 'conceptual' work that @matdryhurst has done is at its core about labour, and how to deal with the very present reality of its collapse of the bounds between what can and can't be exploited in a market of attention.
i'm scare quoting 'conceptual' because i hate how it gets used as a word to buttress against the imperative and inevitability of being stuck in the world. it suggests that when we think conceptually we're neither tethered or responsible to those we're using as subject matter.
'conceptual' music might have a new set of concerns, taken from funky philosophy books, but it is no less in the world than rave, because the rave was always conceptually laden and the philosophy books were always talking about the world as well
so yeah. i'll listen to arca and jam city in my headphones and the club too. the line at the end about not feeling free when you listen to conceptronica is probably the most telling. maybe it's just for someone else now.