Por si llueve

What has gone - and what young people can't understand - is the idea of adversarial energy in pop culture. The idea that being into punk meant rejecting progressive rock and Steely Dan sophisto-rock - it doesn't compute for them, these kind of schisms and divides. Streaming culture and the internet culture has eroded this idea. You can be into anything, you don't have to take sides. People still have things by which identity formation takes place, but music is not really part of that process. You can be into punk and alternative type rock, but also into rap, but also into dance music - all at the same time. . It's all there for the feasting on.

Working for hours and hours on electronic music becomes a way of diving deeper into a kind of formal unconscious, losing one’s self on the grid in a trance of creation, labour, adjustment, loops playing and replaying and shifting and playing and replaying, and yet even in the depths of that enactment of self-annihilation, that flowstate becomes a kind of oceanic holding environment for the self-soothing psyche.  How am I supposed to do that against a backdrop in which I am relentlessly made aware that my tax dollars funded the extermination of Gaza and the military expansion of ICE to a budget that dwarfs the standing armies of entire developed nations? How am I supposed to proceed as if this is acceptable? Living as usual, business as usual, becomes a grotesque act of dog-paddling from appointment to shopping trip to meal eating to streaming to social media to bed in which the disparity between bourgeois comfort and the reality of the camps induces a queasy, uncanny feeling of permanent fracture, a phantom limb tingling, the nagging sense that your comfort is umbilically connected to someone else’s misery. Adorno’s shorthand in Minima Moralia that “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” returns with a vengeance.   This produces problems of scale and problems of intent: what can one person who likes to make records possibly think they can accomplish in the face of an ongoing slide into state murder and authoritarian politics?

Murió Achim Szepanski y una búsqueda en google trae como resultados solo uno o dos obituarios en alemán hechos medio a las apuradas a partir de un tweet (lo mismo pasa con Luis Mattini: asumamos buena fe y pensemos que están esperando confirmar la noticia). Me fascina el hecho de que a Szepanski la movida dance lo agarró ya de grande y así y todo se metió de cabeza: fundó 20 sellos, editó mil cosas, prácticamente inventó un género y tuvo un peso enorme en la electrónica en general a lo largo de dos décadas. Después se dedicó a escribir sin dejar de estar, de una forma u otra, conectado al mundo de la música. Me hizo acordar a algo que había escrito caro hace un montón en justamente otro obituario, el de Tony Wilson: que nunca había tenido tiempo para que le hagan un monumento porque siempre estaba ocupado haciendo cosas.

From a wide angle it all adds up to a modern R&B version of “record collection rock”—in which the meticulous reproduction of vintage attributes becomes self-congratulatory catnip for the nerdiest listeners, and/or fans who remember it from the first time round. (...) Like the superhero’s cape, costumes are powerful and pretend at the same time. Still imparts a similarly paradoxical thought. For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment.

It’s why Lycanthropy hit me so hard when I first encountered it, why I would go and watch Patrick Wolf play live whenever I could, in London and beyond, always anonymous and alone within a crowd of people who seemed to be passing through a similar questing time of life. We weren’t quite as bold as him, of course, worked in offices and had sensible clothes, but that’s the thing about the pop stars who mean the most – they possess that piece of you that’s so familiar, but take it somewhere just out of reach, often at such cost to themselves.

At some point you say you think back to art and you’re happy once again. Well you’re confusing your emotions, I suppose you’re just deposing a great weight off your shoulder, you’re leaving the finite embracing the infinite. I like that you say you feel happy, but let me put it this way: you are feeling, and that’s more than enough, that’s everything. We’re talking in a real Leopardian way right now, and to be honest it feels perfectly in tune. The Art, the not-knowing, the illusion, the hope, the infinite are all part of a world able to receive the artist and the spectator from a form-and-law based world, and you feel happy with it.

If your definitions of “great” and “art” don’t broaden as you get older, even as you clear out your personal canon of the less vital museum pieces you convinced yourself deserved respect when you were younger, you’re not maturing, you’re running in place

"- Why do you keep writing and thinking about music?" Chris Bohn (aka Biba Kopf): "- The same need to understand the music that drove me to start writing about it 45 years ago. I’d ask myself why Throbbing Gristle would release something appalling like the song ‘We Hate You (Little Girls)’. What is it doing to me? Why didn’t I go and listen to something more cheerful by The Beatles instead? Music, as well as film, can examine the most terrifying aspects of human nature. It’s moving in our minds – I want to understand that. Music doesn’t have to be only about pleasure. It can immerse you in emotions and thoughts as difficult and deep as those dealt with in cinema or literature. This might come out of popular music but it’s not exactly popular music– and you have to find ways to write about it without being pretentious. Explain it without being dull as a writer, without reverting to stereotype. Take the West Berlin scene in the 1980s. So nihilistic and exciting – visually and in terms of industrial ugly machine sounds some bands used, it was incredibly compelling to watch and listen to. Not because those jackhammer or shearing metal sounds are beautiful, but of course, they can become beautiful in your mind. Why? Asking that question writing about such music and happenings helped me explain these processes – not only for others but mainly for myself. By the way, I like The Beatles too.

The Singles Jukebox made me discover a new way of listening. It taught me that writing and scoring music isn’t about being a judge, but about telling what happens to yourself when you listen to a song: the memories that appear in your mind, the physical changes in your body and the emotions that suddenly emerge. Every day I’m more convinced that writing about music isn’t maybe about music itself, but it’s about language and being able to put into words what those sounds cause in you.

At one point, he ironically quips that “the non-digital world is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space.” The line is meant to sound ridiculous…until you realize that for a lot of us, it’s also kind of true.

When I did Pretty Hate Machine, I didn’t think anybody was going to hear it. Then suddenly it was, “Hey, X amount of people bought your record and it’s time to write a new one.” And you’re thinking, I wonder what they liked about that other record I made? What if I want to take a detour into free jazz? How is that going to go over? When you’re not thinking about the audience, you can make more pure art.

This is very much how fandoms misbehave online, operating under the extreme assumption that anything less than total performative devotion to their particular fave amounts to beef and treason.

el "tin drum" de Japan como ejercicio de "maostalgia": con una china en proceso de liberalización económica (mas no política), Sylvian se construye una china ideal (e idealista), romántica, plebeya y movilizada "el ejército rojo te llama, es la llamada del pueblo, el ejército rojo te necesita"

hay algo de lo que dice amadeo en su nota que me hace acordar a lo que decia barthes sobre el discurso amoroso: las músicas plebeyas (incluyendo o sobre todo las de baile) son habladas por miles pero ninguneadas por saberes e instituciones. no es igual que necesiten discurso crítico que las legitime o apuntale (pitchfork tiene cero influencia en las vistas de "tusa", digamos), pero no deja de ser un dato siempre presente