In this month's antidote to the algorithm, Kamyar Salavati explores the evolution of Iran's experimental electronic music scene
Siavash Amini by Ashkan Norouzkhani
I regret not being there, but fellow music critics still remember the shock of buying a ticket for a small concert in central Tehran, only to discover that the artist doing visuals for the electronic musician Sote was none other than Radiohead collaborator Tarik Barr. His Wikipedia photo is from that trip, framed by a detail of the iconic Azadi Tower in the background. This surprising presence was a sign of how the Iranian electronic music scene had gained some remarkable international visibility despite the country's isolation - a musical equivalent to the international prestige and critical success of Iranian...
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The Avalanches
No Bad Memories
Avalanches weave a satire on branding and tech enshittification complete with skits by Mike Patton and Haley Joel Osment
On arrival, Australian plunderphonics crew The Avalanches only had eyes for record racks, bringing in armfuls of half-forgotten vinyl to harvest for the stunning sampledelic patchwork of 2000 debut album Since I Left You. Then they disappeared for 16 years. In the meantime, they apparently made more friends than music, finally coming back with the collaborator-heavy Wildflower (2016) and the even more convivial We Will Always Love You (2020). They never lost their skill with a sample, but now contributions were equally organic.
No Bad Memories maintains that balance, stacking up guests and intriguing sonic finds alike. Returners from the...
The post The Avalanches - No Bad Memories appeared first on The Quietus.
So let me tell you how I came to write this piece: the only profile of ccru - Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - written during the group's lifetime.
In the 1990s, there was this cool American magazine called Lingua Franca that covered academia - rising figures, trends in theory, institutional politics, intellectual fashions. It wasn't a scholarly journal, though - it was far more readable and widely read, something you could pick up in trendy bookstores or the gift shop at an art museum.When emanations from ccru and its allies reached my eyes, I pitched Lingua Franca on the idea of a story about what I called "renegade academia". Not only did they agree, they flew me to England (this was late 1998, by which time I'd been living in New York for several years) and put me up in a hotel. The full-blown, fully-expensed, serious reporter deal.
So I went about it like a serious reporter: journeying to Leamington Spa to spend a day with ccru, meeting the unit's former founder Sadie Plant in Birmingham, interviewing fellow travelers like O[rphan] D[rift], Matthew Fuller, and Howard Slater in London. Secondary quotes too: I spoke with key figures in the story, got "background" from people who preferred to remain anonymous, even brought in an opposing view from a British academic who abhorred ccru's ideas.
But after I sent through my properly sourced, thoroughly researched article, Lingua Franca told me that they had decided not to run the piece: they felt uncertain about whether the ccru's outlandish activities constituted legitimate scholarship. They paid the fee, reimbursed the expenses, and eventually a much, much shorter version ran in the Austrian art magazine Springerin.
Still, you can imagine how pissed off I felt about the full-length in-depth piece never reaching the wide readership for which it was written.
But then, slowly but surely, came the balm of total vindication.
Mark Fisher, one of the prominent figures in the piece, became the most widely-read and influential Left-wing thinker of the last quarter-century. His debut book Capitalist Realism is an international best-seller: translated into a dozen languages, it is said to have sold a quarter of a million copies worldwide at this point. It has no doubt been read by many more through borrowing or unofficially circulated forms. And the book's ideas have disseminated even more widely as memes and slogans on social media.
Fisher's legend and inspirational force continues to grow with each year following his tragic early death in 2017. Documentaries like We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (soon to become a biography) and books about - or jousting with - his work proliferate. A thousand PhD's and dissertations bloom...
Meanwhile, another key figure in this story, ccru co-founder Nick Land, has gone on to become a world-historical figure too, albeit in a troubling and deeply pernicious way.
ccru and its extensions have generated an array of scholarly and creative careers, each with substantial bodies of work to their name. Perhaps most spectacular has been Steve Goodman, a.k.a. the deejay and producer Kode9. While simultaneously pursuing his own academic career as a professor and author, Goodman founded Hyperdub: one of the most adventurous post-rave electronic music labels of the 21st Century, home to Burial, Zomby, Darkstar, and many other celebrated producers.
Finally, no less than three significant radical publishers - Urbanomic, Zer0, and the latter's breakawaysuccessor Repeater -- have been either directly born from ccru or from the network that gatheredaround Fisher and his blog K-punk in the immediate post-ccru years.
As for Lingua Franca… it went out of business in 2001.
RENEGADE ACADEMIA: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999; short remix appeared in Springerin, 2000
by Simon Reynolds
Smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less picturesque Bath--genteel, sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece Theater sort of way. But the town has darker undercurrents: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious entity called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Now in its third year of existence, CCRU's institutional status is, to say the least, disputed. Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office on The Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the Philosophy Department of Warwick University a few miles away, as was the case the last academic year.
Since my knowledge of CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output--the journal Abstract Culture--plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea what I'll encounter after pressing the button marked 'Central Computer'. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I find three women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look reassuringly normal. The walls, though, are covered with peculiar diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and bizareness of the unit's research.
But before I can enquire further, I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghetto blasters. CCRU have prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their Virotechnics conference in October 1997. The first cassette-player issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an incantation or spell. From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a female American voice--not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full of imagery of "swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The third ghetto blaster emits what could either be Stockhausen-style electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of the insect world. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been synthetically processed, with all the vowels removed to leave just consonants and fricatives.
Even without the back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the piece is an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming for--an ultra-vivid amalgam of text, sound, and visuals designed to "libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. CCRU try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Their "theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms, delirious with dystopian cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of ideas per sentence. Bearing the same distillate relation to its sources (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio,William Gibson) that crack does to cocaine, CCRU-text offers an almighty theory-rush.
What CCRU are striving to achieve is a kind of nomadic thought that--to use the Deleuzian term-- "deterritorializes" itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism). It's a project of monstrous ambition. And that's before you take into account the the most daring deterritorialisation of all--crossing the thin line between reason and unreason. But as they say, later for that.
Founded in the 1960s, Warwick rapidly became the epitome of a modern university.
Through the early to mid Seventies, the university was rife with militancy--not just student unrest, but discontent amongst the staff (70 percent of whom at one point gave a vote of no confidence in the Vice Chancellor). Socialist historian E.P. Thompson was a "thorn in the side of the adminstiration", recalls one Warwick veteran, and eventually left because he wasn't given the Labour History Unit he was promised. At the same time, Warwick was ahead of its time in terms of seeking corporate funding, such that by the mid-Eighties Margaret Thatcher could describe it as her favourite university. "Warwick University Inc." (as E.P. Thompson titled a book) is financially buoyant compared with other British universities, and well prepared for any future withdrawal of government funding that may be up the current Labour administration's sleeve.
Warwick also has a very modern Philosophy Department. It is Britain's largest graduate school in philosophy outside Oxford, with about 120 postgraduate and masters students, and a similar number of undergraduates. The majority are lured by the department's reputation as the country's leading center for Continental Philosophy. Events like the October 1997 "DeleuzeGuattari and Matter" seminar and "Going Australian", a February 1988 conference devoted to the new school of Australian feminist philosophy, indicate the kind of work going on at Warwick. It is to this cutting edge Philosophy Department to which CCRU was linked in a fatally ambigous fashion.
In a typically gnomic e-mail, CCRU outlined its history. "Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. ...Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +.... At degree-O Ccru is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy Department. Here it is now officially said that Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist'. " CCRU sees itself as the academic equivalent of Kurtz, the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results than the tradition-bound US military. CCRU claim that its frenzied interdisciplinary activity embarrassed the Philosphy Dept, resulting in the termination of the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared "up river" into the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their operational base above the Body Shop.
"There is no conspiracy, it's so pedestrian," insists Professor Andrew Benjamin, Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick's Philosophy Department. Benjamin is a well-respected post-structuralist scholar with numerous books to his name. As editor of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy (the best-selling Continental Philosophy series in the English language), he's responsible for anthologies like The Difference Engineer: Deleuze & Philosophy Audibly beaming with pride, the Australia-born Benjamin talks up Warwick as "an incredibly fabulous philosphy dept where Deleuzians lie down with Derrideans, and even lie down with analytic philosphers. Basically, there isn't any postmodern crap done here, it's quite rigorous stuff."
According to Benjamin, CCRU was originally set up for Dr Sadie Plant, freshly recruited from Birmingham University to be a Research Fellow attached to Warwick's Faculty of Social Science. But the unit--organised around her interests in cyber-theory and involving a number of postgraduate students she'd brought over from Birmingham--was initially tied to the Philosophy Department, owing to Plant's particular interests, like Deleuze & Guattari. The plan was for the unit to become an independent, freestanding entity, with the postgrads registered as CCRU rather than philosophy students. But Dr Plant unexpectedly quit her job March 1997, before the paperwork was completed. The university decided to wind CCRU down, with Plant's main ally at Warwick, Nick Land, taking over her role as Director for the unit's final year of official existence.
But when Benjamin elaborates on the procedural intricacies, it's easy to empathise with CCRU's paranoia. "See, there isn't such a thing as the CCRU," he insists. "Within the university system you can set up a thing called a center for research, then you take the planned center to various committees and put it through this system in whose terms that center would be legitimised, have an external committee overseeing standards, et cetera. Because Sadie left early, that procedure didn't happen. Officially, you would then have to say that CCRU didn't ever exist. There is, however, an office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with CCRU on the door, there's a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it it is a thriving entity. Informally, it did exist, still does, lots of things go on under its aegis. But that office will disappear at the end of the year. A number of students thought there was a conspiracy, there's a lot of gossip and carry-on, but the fact is--had Sadie decided to pursue an academic career, CCRU would have been a viable, ongoing entity."
Thin as rake in her brown leather jacket, dragging on a Camel Light, Sadie Plant looks every bit the cyberpunkette. Currently, she's the most famous "media academic" in Britain--writing for quality newspapers, pontificating on the famous BBC Radio programme "Start The Week" (a sort of highbrow Howard Stern) alongside Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. Plant's elevation to intellectual celebrity status began well before the late 1997 publication of her acclaimed Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. Although she's far from happy with the marketing of Zeros as a Nineties cyberfeminist equivalent to The Female Eunuch, there are striking parallels between Plant and Germaine Greer (who taught at Warwick's English department before quitting to write Eunuch). "When I went to see the Vice Chancellor about leaving, he said 'I don't believe it, Germaine Greer pulled this on us as well'", says Plant, flashing her buck-toothed smile.
We're in a cafe in Birmingham, the industrial Midlands metroplis where Plant grew up and where she returned after quitting Warwick.The way Sadie tells it, she never really wanted to be an academic in the first place, but just fell into a university career. After transforming her Manchester University philosophy PhD on Situationism into The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International In A Postmodern Age, Plant accepted a Lecturer's position at Birmingham University's Department of Cultural Studies. Back in the Seventies, when it was called Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies, the department was a vibrant place, home of the "resistance through rituals" school of neo-Gramscian subcultural theory (Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, et al). But the CCCS spirit was long gone by the time Plant arrived. The only redeeming aspect was the undergraduate and graduate students, who shared Plant's enthusiasm for rave culture and digital technology.
Plant was on the verge of quitting academia for good, when the opportunity of a Research Fellowship at Warwick presented itself in 1995. Warwick was already a cyber-theory hotbed, what with its 1994 and '95 Virtual Futures conferences. There were strong alliances between like-minds at Birmingham and Warwick: the VF events had involved some of Plant's Birmingham proteges (who appeared at VF95 in their proto-CCRU incarnation Switch), while Plant and Nick Land had actually been creative-and-sexual partners for a couple of years and remained close. With the promise of her very own research center dangled before her, Plant decided to give academia one last shot, and brought many of her Birmingham students with her to form CCRU.
For the first year of its existence, 1995/1996, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was characterised by "a frantic atmosphere" of interdisciplinary excitement, involving reading groups, lectures series, research-sharing sessions, seminars like 1996's Afro-Futures, and the confrontational journal ****Collapse. There was an exhilirating sense of being at the heart of something new. This first phase of the unit's life climaxed with Virtual Futures 96: Datableed, which was wholly organised by the CCRU (the first two VF's had been put together by postgraduates attached to Professor Benjamin's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature). Advertised as "an antidisciplinary event" aiming "to explore the smearing of previously discrete cultural spheres", VF96 alternated DJ sessions with sound-and-vision enhanced talks by a diverse range of guests--theorist Manuel De Landa, journalists Steve Beard and Mark Sinker, SF writer Pat Cadigan, and cyberfeminist Linda Dement, to name just a handful.
By the second year of its existence, tensions emerged between the CCRU-virus and its host, the Philosophy Department. Warwick had expected something closer to traditional notions of cyberculture: Internet studies, basically. But what actually took shape reflected Plant and Land's interest in hooking up cybernetics in the original Norbert Wiener sense (information flows, dissolving the difference between living and non-living systems) to compatible elements of Deleuze & Guattari (schizo-analysis, machinic desire, the biomechanical continuum of material reality), plus chaos, complexity and connection theory. "Cyber", as CCRU conceived it, also connoted "cyberpunk": the theory-fiction goal of academic writing that rivalled the hallucinatory rush you got from Neuromancer and Blade Runner.
Warwick clearly got more than it bargained for. Benjamin admits to having "mixed feelings about what Sadie and Nick do", professes to be mystified by "the meaningless term" that is cyber-theory, and keenly stresses the fact that CCRU and the Philosophy Department "are quite separate things". One of Benjamin's administrative colleagues notes drily that "very little" CCRU work "was published in philosophy journals." For her part, Sadie Plant emphasises the practical problems caused by the CCRU students' interdisciplinary approach, like "the need for external examiners.... It would have suited us to be able to just sweep all that away, but it's not so easy."
CCRU are less diplomatic, railing against "disciplinary templates" that obstruct "real research". "You're not allowed to follow these things where they want to go," says Mark Fisher, a cleancut young man who speaks with an evangelical urgency and agitated hand gestures. "You're not allowed to find anything out.... Because who would mark it?!". He cites the example of the PhD work of CCRU's Suzanne Livingston, which was challenged by one Philosophy Department member on the grounds--"what's neurology got to do with capitalism?".
After Plant left, CCRU embarked upon a second phase of trying "to occupy the university" and create a "non-disciplinary" atmosphere by forging links with postgraduates in the Mathematics and Science departments. But this petered out "with no real engagement". The final breaking point came with the Fall '97 Virotechnics conference, which CCRU decided to hold off campus at a media conference center in Wolverhampton, 35 miles from Warwick. According to CCRU, Nick Land effectively had to resign his lecturer's job in order to attend Virotechnics. "Nick had to cancel a simultaneously scheduled seminar at the university, hastily set up as an opportunity for him to explain the increasingly perplexing direction of CCRU's research", explains CCRU's Steve Goodman. Every couple of years, the staff of university departments make an assessment of the publications the department has produced. Since the kind of work Land and his proteges were producing was not considered philosophy, and therefore not counted in any departmental assessment, Land felt obliged to resign, effective the end of the academic year.
Virotechnics was the culmination of the unit's second-phase attempt "to rigorise a kind of diagrammatic study programme in the university," says Land, referring to CCRU's alloy of science and philosphy. "That was really not acceptable, it's fair to say, to the Philosophy Department. So the third phase is take that programme outside the university." While CCRU members continue to finish their PhD's and teach, they regard these activities as " lower-order intensity"; the real action takes place at the Leamington HQ. "There's nothing more unproductive than engaging in this lifelong struggle to get intensity into the academy," says an exasperated Fisher. "It's hopeless and thankless." He maintains that the Philosophy Dept's attitude to CCRU ranges from "outright hostile" to "embarassment", but the general strategy "is to wait for it to die rather than to actively kill it."
Nick Land is the kind of "vortical machine" (to use a fave CCRU trope) around which swirl all manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories. Didya hear about the phase Nick went through only talking in numbers? Or the time he was taken over by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no deying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr Land has been a "strange attractor" luring students to Warwick purely through his personal reputation. A colleague who sat in on Land classes in the early Nineties remembers both his "impressive pedagogic commitment" and his charisma. "Despite his diffident, tentative way of suggesting things, Nick had a real presence.... It was conspicuous that his gang of groupies did fall apart during his sabbatical term."
The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's sole book-length publication to date, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille's thought (if taken seriously, comparable to "syphilis of the mind"). Prefiguring CCRU's struggles with university bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust. Philosophy itself is castigated as "the excruciation of libido". Thirst For Annihilation's polymathically perverse range of learning (thermodynamics, cyclone formation, the Menger sponge), and phrases like "vortex of vulvo-cosmic dissolution" that blend scientific language with darkside mysticism, anticipate the CCRU's work.
In the early Nineties, Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial engineering", recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious phase in which he offered millenial prophecies for the next global meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."
As much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly versed in the gamult of occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT). Much of CCRU's thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science and superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)
After reading Thirst For Annihilation's valedictory salute to "the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed,", and his self-description in ***Collapse as "a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism", I expected Land to be an emaciated and eldritch figure. Stick insect thin, he is. But Land's gentle voice and impishly twinkling eyes make him closer to a playgroup leader than a dark magus. He and the CCRU crew ply me with endless cups of tea while explaining the curious diagrams on the walls.
There's a chart that synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related to a magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or invoking, you're setting up a magical event that will be cut across from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will happen," explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of "deep time" as outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned World--depicts a cross section of the human spine, with different vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a chart that divides human history into a series of periods--"the primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" --culminating in a post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity or polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.
The most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the occult numerological techniques of digital reduction and triangular numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that descends from 9 to one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its implications to me at considerable length (something to do with allowing them to understand "concepts as number systems) it becomes clear they sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of the universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the end-product of CCRU's determination to abandon "the fuzziness of discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a much crisper, more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp and rigorous" is one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it puts on his weak 'R').
The diagram was a gift from "Professor Barker". Inspired by Professor Challenger--the Conan-Doyle anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in "The Geology of Morals" section of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia--Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who hips the CCRU to various cosmic secrets. "But we'd be a bit reluctant to say 'imaginary' now, wouldn't we?," cautions Land with a mischievous glint in his eye. "We've learned as much--well, vastly more from Professor Barker --than supposedly 'real' pedagogues!". As CCRU's "avatar", Barker has revealed the "Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma". Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture is analysed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From the chemistry of metals to the non-linear dynamics of the ocean, from the cycles of capitalism to the hyper-syncopated breakbeat rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an "unfolding traumascape" governed by self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every scale.
Libidinising "flows" and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power,
Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A Thousand Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call "Gothic Materialism" ("ferro-vampiric" cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the "flatline" between life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about how "the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood contains iron", about how the goal is to "hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs". Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialised energy; Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as "an ethical injunction", a supreme goal.
^^^^^^^^^^^
O[rphan] D[frift>] also talk about "metal in the body" and seeking the B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at VF96 and are staging an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented around "schizoid thinking", pre-linguistic autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994, OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: "experimentation with drugs and techno", and a 1993 encounter with Nick Land.
"Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a while," says Roberts. "We fed him image experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful about having a man you could ring up and ask: 'what's radiation?', 'what's a black hole?'".
OD's collective debut was a multimedia installation at London's Cabinet Gallery. What began as a catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant's Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings that aren't attributed in the text. But where Plant offers footnotes; OD merely list the "asked" and "un-asked" contributors at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe, placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist theorists. "We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist," says Nick Land, "At the same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is obviously a science fiction writer." For her part, Sadie Plant regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as "more reliable witnesses", precisely because, unlike theorists, "they don't have an axe to grind".
The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing and Roberts's and Mukherjee's evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. "I used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious," recalls Roberts. "Tracing what's happening in all the different sound channels and what they're doing spatially and physically to you". The language veers from masochistic mortification of the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the meat is learning to know loss") to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession ("white darkness", "the fog of absolute proximity", "psyclone", "beautiful fear"). "It's trying to process the dissassembling of the self," says Roberts. "Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting. The violence of the sounds in techno, it's like you're being turned inside out, smeared, penetrated."
Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out, aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if she's privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter--as though some unutterably alien zone of posthuman consciousness hasn't quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot further. Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they sem to believe that humanity will soon abandon the "meat" of incarnate existence and become pure spirit. Throughout Cyberpositive there's the recurrent exhortation "we must change for the machines"; while the book ends with the declaration--"human viewpoint redundant."
Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several cages of snakes--proof of their determination to get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by Gibson's Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches--daintily quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. "Too radical for me", I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"Cyberpositive" was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, "Cyberpositive" was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term "cyberpositive" was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of "negative feedback" (homeostasis), and "positive feedback" (runaway tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized "negative feedback", Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback--specifically,: the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilise control structures.
"It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere," says Plant. "If there was going to be scope for any kind of....not 'resistance', but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else." That elsewhere was certain passages in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze & Guattari suggest that, in Plant's words, "you don't try and slow things down, you encourage them to go fast as possible. Which was interestingly connected to Marx's ideas about capitalism sweeping away the past. So we got into this stance of 'oh well, let it sweep away! Maybe it should sweep away faster'." Other crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of "capitalism as the system of antimarkets", and, says Plant, historian-of-everyday-life Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism as "an amalgam of would-be free market forces and state/ corporate/centralised control functions. So there isn't really any such thing called 'capitalism', it's just a coincidence of those two really extreme and opposed tendencies."
Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organising activity: street markets, "the frontier zones of capitalism", what De Landa calls "meshwork", as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way they describe it now--a bustling bazaar culture of trade and "cutting deals". But "Cyberpositive" actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the "cyberpathology of markets", celebrating capitalism as "a viral contagion" and declaring "everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind". In Nick Land solo essays like "Machinic Desire" and "Meltdown", the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital and technology, as it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities". In "Meltdown", Land declares: "Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag".
This gloating delight in capital's deterritorialising virulence is the CCRU's reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought; a sort of rubbing salt in the wounds (as when Land jibes at the "senile spectre" of Socialism, an allusion to The Communist Manifesto). "There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely schleroticised, institutionalised thought," says Mark Fisher. "Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!". Exulting in capitalism's permanent "crisis mode", CCRU believe in the strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos. The real struggle, says Fisher in fluent Deleuzian, is within capitalism and between "homogenisation processes and nomadic distribution.".
What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but "the future coming together". Where Land gives this idea a millenial spin (he's described capitalism as "an invasion from the future", a virus retrochronically triggered by some kind of artificial intelligence to create the conditions for its own assembling--an idea that reads like it was spawned by watching Terminator on acid), Plant's attitude is more humanely ambivalent. In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported the Coal Miner's strike, a revolt against Thatcherite modernising policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture. Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and anti-welfare policies pursued by the Conservative goverment in the 1980s really did constitute "a revolution". She talks approvingly of the end of "the dependency culture", arguing that this helped catalyse the Nineties upsurge of British pop culture, fashion and art.
"Obviously it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the scrapheap of history", Plant says, looking appropriately pained. "But I've got a far more evolutionary view of history these days. Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures". In the face of this "reality", she argues, the British Left is comparable with the Church of England: "Every so often it comes out and makes some moral statement about how terrible things are, but what's it going to do about it? Nothing."
Many Left-wing theorists would retaliate by arguing that the Plant/Land/CCRU pro-market stance is merely an intellectual accomodation to "realities" imposed by top-down corporate forces; that by mapping techniques appropriate for natural phenonema (chaos theory, non-linear dynamics) onto capitalism, they've effectively naturalized the free market, resulting in a kind of post-Deleuzian version of Social Darwinism. Judith Williamson--Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University, and writer for the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian--accuses the CCRU of "inevitabilism".
"All these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one from morality," she says. "Most of capitalism's flows are deeply pernicious." The trouble with inevitablism is that it removes human agency from the picture, complains Williamson. "But human will is not nothing -- there have been these huge acts of courage and altruism throughout history." As neo-Deleuzians devoutly committed to impersonality, agency is precisely what Plant and the CCRU demote. "Nothing takes the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," argues Plant in Zeros + Ones. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or hold them back".
Williamson is an old sparring partner with Plant, Land and CCRU, having had
several public fights with them at various academic events. The author of Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, Williamson belongs to an earlier, Marx-influenced phase of British cultural theory, so the the clash between her and CCRU is partly generational. Recalling a famous spat in the bar of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she recalls finding it "spooky that Nick Land and all these people spoke as one. You could not get 20 of my postgrad students in a room and have them agree with me. I find that scary--that messianic quality, like they've got the message"...A lot of what they say reminds me of tripping experiences, where you have that feeling that everything coheres and makes sense."
Another Williamson accusation--that CCRU lift ideas from chaos and complexity that describe material process but "apply them in a metaphorical way... as if using a concrete thing for a metaphor makes it not be a metaphor"--would especiallly infuriate CCRU. Metaphor, figurative language, the whole realm of representation and ideology: these are the enemy, as far as CCRU are concerned. "Our analysis is materialist, rather than ideological," says Goodman, "Whether the scale is geological, oceanic, socio-cultural, there are parallels going on at every scale". Despite drawing a lot from post-structuralism's assault upon the sovereign ego, CCRU detest deconstruction, precisely because of its treatment of the text as a cosmology and everything as metaphor. "The only thing that's powerful about books--their ability to plug into other machines outside themselves-- is completely destroyed by treating them as this macro-interiority that spreads over everything," spits Fisher, co-author of the hilarious and coruscating Abstract Culture rant "Pomophobia".
Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce postmodernism's wan fatalism (the idea that we're at the end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left (Fisher talks, cyborg-style, about the relief of having "the false memory-chip of Socialist authenticity" removed from his brain). In the process, they've jettisoned the concept of "alienation" in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of "surplus value", sublimation and commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where "Cyberpositive" noted how how runaway capitalism had accessed "inconceivable alienations", CCRU's collective essay "Swarmachines" goes further and climaxes with the boast: "alienated and loving it".
The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner--"the proletariat as this synthetic class, of a revolution that's on the side of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of 'alienation' depends on the notion that there's some authentic essence lost through the development of capitalism. But according to Barker's Geo-Cosmic theory of trauma, everything's already synthetic." If reality really is a bio-mechanical continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism's escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the creation of artificial desires.
Williamson condes that "if there's one thing that's quite endearing about CCRU, it's the search for a kind of optimism.... Today it's very hard to have those sort of Sixties feelings of 'oh God, things are exciting, things can get better, new things can happen'". The mania of CCRU's texts--a mood-blend of euphoric anticipatioin and dystopian dread that Mark Dery called "dysphoria"--is certainly contagious. "A lot of things are exciting, but is it true?," cautions Williamson. "Music is a good parallel--you don't think 'this music explains the universe' just because you finds it charges you up". Again, the CCRU would fervently disagree. "The musical model is really key to us," says Land. "It's absurd to say that music doesn't represent the real and therefore it's an empty metaphor. Every theorist who hasn't a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia."
Not only do the CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music--specifically, the British rave genre of jungle a/k/a drum & bass--but popular culture is where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture's motor has been anarcho-capitalist and entrepreneurial: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses and fields, to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge comes from the grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio.
Sadie Plant attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of dependency culture, forcing people "to get real and find some ways of surviving" but also to invent "new forms of collectivity" (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).
As a postgraduate in Manchester, Plant was swept up in that city's legendary 1988-90 rave scene. Currently, she's co-running a jungle club in Birmingham called Kleptomania, for which she creates back-projections involving "video feedback", an "orgasmically beautiful" effect that makes "everything looks like it's come from another world". Plant is also writing about book about the interface between drugs and technology. CCRU has a musical sub-component, Ko-Labs, engaged in making jungle tracks. The unit's latest recruit is Jessica Edwards, a researcher who has no affiliation with Warwick University whatsoever, but who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate thesis entitled "Mapping the Liminal- Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum & Bass".
Despite being rave theorists and "sub-bass materialists", CCRU are surprisingly cagey when the topic of drugs is introduced. Acknowledging the cyborgizing, viral usefulness of drugs--as anorganic elements that enter the nervous system and engineer precise changes in consciousness--Land nonetheless resists the "relapse into a biographical narrative". Anna Greenspan talks of the negative "crash-and-burn" syndrome caused by drug abuse, and says the CCRU are more interested in building sustained plateaus of intensity. One outcrop of this is Suzanne Livingston's research into "long term rewiring of perception"--techniques of flash and flicker that restructure the brain, as already used by advertising, MTV, and rave promoters (lights, lazers and strobes).
As well as being galvanised by music, the CCRU are also influenced by the theory-driven leading edge of music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to magazines like iD and The Wire and author of the forthcoming More Brilliant Than The Sun, a study of "sonic fiction" in black music from Sun Ra to jungle. He was guest of honour at CCRU's Afro-Futures seminar and gave a talk at VF96. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as "concept-engineers", as opposed to thinkers. Critique, he argues, is a rhetorical mode that puts the heavy burden of History on your shoulders, whereas the concept-engineer is into speculation. "Most theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer uses theory to excite and ignite," Eshun proclaims. Where "thinker" evokes an effete and impotent ivory-tower detachment, "engineer" suggests someone who gets down-and-dirty with the material word (in Deleuzian terms, someone who operates and maintains desiring machines). Like a DJ or jungle producer, the concept-engineer is "a sample-finder": s/he's free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory and simply use the bits that work, in the spirit of Deleuze & Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit rather than gospel.
^^^^^^^^^^^
"Concept-engineer" is a good tag for the outerzone of "independent researchers" and amateur autodidacts to which CCRU is connected. Renegade theorists like Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine Break/Flow brilliantly analyses rave music in terms of "nonconceptual thought" and "impulsional exchanges", and celebrates the techno underground as a rhizomatic, insubordinate, post-media economy. And like Matthew Fuller, a media theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links to the hacker underground. Fuller's CV of cultural dissidence includes flypostering, pirate radio, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of anarcho-seminars like "Seizing The Media" dedicated to the theory and praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's "Cyberpositive" and an essay by CCRU member Steve Metcalf.
Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling traditional "modes of political address" and developing a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true concept-engineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. "Publishers like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce material that you don't have to be an academic to get into, so it circulates outside those milieux. When I give presentations at academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a more powerful position than the academics--I can steal all the advantages of their discipline, plus do something else with it that fucks it up totally."
Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being institutionalised into "the most dreary, saintly area of discourse", Fuller says he's dedicated to "cracking open those texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader, so to speak. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory." Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose work-in-progress, Writing On Drugs, includes a fictional component. Plant says she hopes that subsequent books will become "pure fiction".
^^^^^^^^^^^^
"The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang -- PhD students with attitude!," says Eshun. Loathing the "necrotic side of philosphy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers' entrails", and bored limp by the "delibidinising" atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic events, claims Eshun, expressly "in order to disrupt, undermine and ridicule.... They'd get into pitched battles with Derrideans!". Enhancing this picture of intra-academic gang-warfare, two of CCRU's allies from another university once turned up to an event sporting "colors": they'd printed up T-Shirts that mimicked the logo of Dolce & Gabbana, but stood for Deleuze & Guattari!
Weary of such sports, Plant, Land and CCRU have all enthusiastically embraced the idea of escaping "institutional lockdown" by going freelance. In addition to her drugs book, Plant is working on a film screenplay and says she can't imagine ever returning to academia. The CCRU hope to become a kind of independent think-tank, selling "commodities" on the intellectual free market--like their strikingly designed Abstact Culture (each "swarm" consists of five separate monographs bundled together) and, in the future, CD's, CD-ROM's and books. "The whole saga of the first phase of the CCRU was to do with negotiating bureaucratic space," says Fisher. "But we quickly realised that the institution didn't depend on university space itself , but on the collectivity."
It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she couldn't really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself "in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used to!". CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented her premature departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent emphasis on collectivity stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to this harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired and who they decided to devote three, four years of their lives around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with being a guru figure.
"Nick's hermetic, he wants acolytes", says Eshun. "Whereas Sadie's this total communicator. Zeros + Ones is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can't think of any other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think she'll get it. " CCRU, meanwhile, are toying with the idea of relocating wholesale to India.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
twinned in perpetuity
talking with others about Mark's impact on us and the world
my fully-grown-up disagreements with Mark, traits that were continuations of ccru
In March last year, we shared news of the Dartington Hall Trust's intention to end the lease of The Agroforestry Research Trust's groundbreaking 2 acre food forest project — housed on the Dartington Estate for the last 31 years. The garden has brought over 50,000 visitors to the estate, hosted important scientific research on carbon storage, and become what is often described as the best example of a food forest (or forest garden) in the temperate world.
Excitingly, ART now has the opportunity to purchase the forest garden, which will safeguard it in perpetuity!
ART has already raised some of the funds, but are looking to raise £100,000 towards the total needed to cover the sale price and legal fees. Whatever you can afford, it will all help and you will know that you have contributed to securing the forest garden for future generations. If you are a UK taxpayer then ART can also claim Gift Aid on your donation.
Forest gardens (also known as food forests) are long term sustainable integrated growing systems including trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and fungi. They produce food or other crops while being highly resilient to pests, diseases and weather extremes; and at the same time storing a large amount of carbon. In the light of the climate crisis leading to a rapid increase in extreme weather events, the need for forest gardens has never been greater.
Almost half the money has currently been raised, with donations closing at the end of the month.
You can find out more about the project and donate here.
The duo have also announced an extensive UK and European tour for spring 2027
Photo by Manja Williams
Orbital have shared details of a new album, titled Other.
Following on from 2023's Optical Delusion, the new record is preceded by lead cut 'Mother, Maiden & Crone'. The song, which you can listen to below, draws on influences from witchcraft and folklore, according to a press release, and features vocals from Maxine Peake.
Other is Orbital's 11th studio album, and explores themes of otherness, as the title suggests. It draws on punk, ambient music, drum & bass and the duo's traditional electronic music origins.
They will support the album with an extensive tour of the UK and Europe through April and into May, playing shows...
The post Orbital Detail New Album, 'Other' appeared first on The Quietus.
Towards A Cosmic Music - Noise Minimalism, Norway, 1991-2001 features tracks by Deathprod, Lasse Marhaug and more
Deathprod
Smalltown Supersound will explore Norway's 90s minimal noise scene on a new compilation, Towards A Cosmic Music - Noise Minimalism, Norway, 1991-2001.
Comprised of 10 tracks, the release features music by Deathprod, Lasse Marhaug, Supersilent, Elektro Nova and more. It will be released digitally and in a 2xLP vinyl edition.
In a statement, Smalltown Supersound founder Joakim Haugland said: "In many ways this compilation represents the start of the label Smalltown Supersound that I run and started in 1993 while in high school. I was in the middle of this scene when it happened and I released a lot of the music of the artists on...
The post Smalltown Supersound to Explore Norway's 90s Minimal Noise Scene on New Compilation appeared first on The Quietus.
Both albums have been remastered for their new vinyl pressings
Photo by Kirk R. Tuck
Butthole Surfers' albums Piouhgd and Humpty Dumpty LSD are being reissued on vinyl.
Both have been remastered especially for their updated release, with the audio now available on streaming platforms and vinyl editions set to follow in December. It marks the third set of reissues of the band's material - the two previous ones came in 2024.
Originally released in 1991, Piouhgd was Butthole Surfers' fifth album, and was originally released on Rough Trade. Humpty Dumpty LSD, meanwhile, was first released in 2002, and compiled loose ends from the group's mid-80s archival material. Album cut 'Sherman (Backass Alt.)' - later re-worked for Hairway To Steven - has been made...
The post Butthole Surfers' 'Piouhgd' and 'Humpty Dumpty LSD' to be Reissued appeared first on The Quietus.
The third album to feature Valentina Magaletti in as many weeks finds the tireless rhythmic innovator teaming up with sculptor and gong-maker João Pais Filipe plus producer Leon Marks for an album of clattering polyrhythms and subtle synth washes
Prolific musical collaborator and tireless rhythm generator Valentina Magaletti rarely seems to rest. But, even for her, this has been a particularly busy month. No doubt as much due to the logistical necessities of release schedules as the movement of the stars or artistic intention, October has already seen new albums from two of Magaletti's other projects: Vanishing Twin (Archives) and Holy Tongue (Basilikum). So I hope she can make a little time to put her feet up and receive her flowers....
The post Cities in Motion: Parallel Commutator by CZN appeared first on The Quietus.
Ween are about to release a 15-hour-long 14xCD boxset of live albums, so we thought, 'Who shall we make listen to the whole damn thing in one sitting?' Words & Pics: JR Moores
As a wise person once put it, each person delights in the work that suits them best. Some are proficient plasterers, while others practise law. There are sculptors, plumbers, barbers, nurses, mechanics, teachers, chefs and astronauts, all thriving in their vocations. The butcher. The baker. The blockbuster-maker, whose films make a killing at the box office yet leave some viewers feeling colder than Matt Damon's goolies on the set of Interstellar. The soldier, too, fearlessly travelling to foreign lands where they can apply their aptitude for killing to...
The post Boognish Provides: A Ween Odyssey appeared first on The Quietus.
Big Flowers x Shemar
I Love Nature!
The rapper-producer duo's abrasive new record serves as a necessary soundtrack for end times
i love nature! by Big Flowers x shemar
On their new collaborative album, Buffalo-based rapper Big Flowers and NYC producer Shemar offer an unflinching and unfiltered gaze into the chaos of modern life. Equal parts eulogy and battle cry, the record holds a mirror up to a planet heading towards a point of no return.
While his previous collaborative record Save The Bees aimed to make sense of the chaotic nature of the world, Big Flowers describes I Love Nature! as "a resistance to our environmental abandonment" referring to the present moment as the "Wall-E grade apocalypse." Along with a slew of collaborators, including...
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Marco Bailey continues a 2026 schedule that has seen appearances on Laurent Garnier's COD3 QR and Regal's Backspin Records, releasing a new studio album with a return to his own Materia imprint. The project delivers 14 tracks in total, covering different corners of techno and club music, we host a premiere for 'After The Fog', […]
Daryl Worthington returns to Latvia's Skaņu Mežs, where sets from Cities Aviv, KMRU, Sophia Djebel Rose and more provide a much-needed sonic salve
Sofi, photo by Artūrs Pavlovs
It's deep into the closing night of Skaņu Mežs 2026 and Cities Aviv, aka Wilbert Gavin Mays, is on the edge of the stage pointing insistently through the darkness at the speakers and urging the sound technicians to turn them up. They comply, lifting his beats even louder so that, from my point close to the stage in the cavernous main hall of Riga's Hanzas Perons, his chopped and screwed tracks coagulate into an all-consuming ripple of sound, seeping through my ears, into my brain, and on to vibrating in overlapping waves through my...
The post Long Nights in the Sound Forest: Highlights from Skaņu Mežs 2026 appeared first on The Quietus.
Ludwig Göransson's scores for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) and Tenet (2020) trade on diegetic and instrumental ambiguities that intentionally disorient audiences in time and space, writes Philip Brophy in his latest Secret History of Film Music column
Bernard Herrmann's score for Don Chaffey's Jason And The Argonauts (1963) is an archly theatrical extravaganza that musically routes transatlantic pop culture to the Italian peplum genre explosion from the late 1950s. Though this wave of grand gladiatorial epics, produced in Italy and often featuring American beefcake performers as titular heroes, was waning by 1963, Herrmann's triumphant entrance horns, cymbal clashing, galley kettle-drum pounding and multiple cascading harps sound more pompous and less foreboding than his more well known orchestrations. Yet this score captures the plastic veneer across peplum's exaltation of classical architecture and ancient vistas.
Peplum movies constitute one cinematic wave entranced by Roman Imperial glories. From early silent movies like The Last Days Of Pompeii (1908), to the postwar peplum onslaught, battles in massive colosseums, grand edifices, museographic weaponry and period costumery were fetishised as nationalist markers. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) fetishises the abstract notion of heroicism embodied by those peplum men of action. Jason And The Argonauts was based on the third century BCE epic Argonautica. Nolan's The Odyssey is based on Homer's epic poem written in the eighth century BCE, but set four centuries earlier. With so many lines of reference, pulling across centuries of mythmaking, a film maker should be able to make a historical drama without much concern for historical veracity. Nolan's film arguably attempts the opposite, catering more to the fantasy of authenticity. But what about Ludwig Göransson's score?
Like Herrmann's Jason And The Argonauts, Göransson's The Odyssey looks to Ottorino Respighi's I Pini Di Roma (1924), which employed Roman military horns to flavour its sonics with an Italianate aura. (This tone poem sounds remarkably like a contemporary film score.) As such, Herrmann and Göransson each in their own way have incorporated unusual instrumentation and recording techniques to expand the sonic dimension of the orchestra.
This approach yields The Odyssey's best moments: the glowering gongs and tectonic sheets of "Zeus' Law" with its hissing ambience and subliminal psychoacoustics; the enhanced breathiness and distant bowl-ringing of "Penelope" and its deliberate merger with warm synth pads; the liquefied vocality of microtonal choirs and sampled growls in "Agamemnon"; and the atonal miasma of unidentifiable textures combined with synthetic grumbles and screeches in "Cyclops". Audited as a soundtrack release away from the pummelling percussion of the film's innumerable 70 mm battle sequences, Göransson's score is a meld of Fourth World and dark ambient, refreshingly acoustic and absent of hollow orchestral stucco.
The Odyssey's score is built from themes articulated by folk instrumentation: the Greek aulos, a double-pipe operated by a single performer, resulting in harmonised lines; and kithara lyres, with mellow string resonance accentuated by textural plectrum scrapes. Buffeting and buoying their tones are bronze gongs, metal bowls, steel covers, iron balustrades, all struck, hammered, raked and swiped. Research into the philological grammar of Greek melodies was undertaken for the film, but the aural world captured in the studio sessions mostly conveys The Odyssey's musicality.
Worth noting here is the legacy of Italian movies which undertook bipartisan approaches to radical sonics and cultural traditions. Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969) is based on Petronius's first century satirical novel, but wildly mixes delicate themes by Nino Rota with sourced electroacoustic pieces by Tod Dockstader, Andrew Rudin and İlhan Mimaroğlu - often layering multiple tracks together. Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967) is based on Sophocles's Athenian tragedy from the fifth century BCE, and collages a wide array of Folkways LP tracks of indigenous music from around the globe. Both films steadfastly rejected the musical artifice and the pretensions of peplum productions. Experienced today, these two films still excite with powerful audiovisual charge - something The Odyssey's score inherits.
The Odyssey is Göransson's third score for Nolan, following Oppenheimer (2023) and Tenet (2020). His first Nolan commission most resembles The Odyssey, possibly due to both films trading heavily in the unworldly terror of spatio-temporal dislocation, which drives its heroic characters forward on impossible missions. In The Odyssey, the shifting tempo pulses, clickety-clack framework percussion, rising choral jabbering and militaristic skin pounding of "Troy" encapsulate the Trojan Horse tactic of trickery by highlighting the embodied sensation of biding time within its cramped interior, ready to burst out on cue. Its scenography replays numerous moments in Tenet where the audience is left pondering whether they are inside or outside of the spatio-temporal situations depicted on screen.
The most distinctive features of Tenet's score are its arrangement and production. Matching Tenet's dimensionally warping world of inverted entropy, Göransson's melange of symphonia, electronica and studiophonics signpost how, by the 2010s, anything could be aurally massaged into a film score - and that even Hollywood soundtrack paradigms were being transformed. "Rainy Night In Tallinn" opens with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up. Its aural wall looms large until it is silenced by a low-slung fuzz bass thumbing a single note with a fret trail-off. Cryptic militaristic claps and toms herald a ritual as synths, amped guitar distortion and teeth-grating synth pulsations build in density.
This becomes a main theme in the film. It evokes an industrial band covering a mid-1990s trance anthem like Lunatic Asylum's "The Meltdown" (1993). Similar trance-like rupturing is brought to the fore in "Meeting Neil" where the whole track is laced with FM synthesis grit and forced to endure some noisy tremolo stabbing, as if the score has been chopped into nano-thin slices. A device used in the film at its most rupturing points, it's a sonic equivalent of a projector burning and melting a celluloid frame in the cinema.
Like The Odyssey, the soundtrack for Tenet has been released as a double CD: each movie is long, carrying a numbing bounty of cues, many of which are mini-suites in their own right. In an earlier era of crossover composition for film, Peter Gabriel's Moroccan fusion experiments for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988) were released as two CDs, one of sources alone. Such accreditation is rare in film scoring, as it is an artform predicated on musical derivation. But isn't that what myths are? While ancient plays and classical poems have inspired the story arcs realised in movies low and high, the role of musical accompaniment and narration affords great potential to musicalise a centuries-old soundworld through contemporary idioms and their technological realisation. The twisty forward-backward looping of Tenet complements the essentialist aim to bring The Odyssey forward to a contemporary audience: this is precisely what Göransson has been tasked to deliver.
Nolan's projects have allowed Göransson to extend himself into multiple genres and styles, drawing on his background in various pop idioms (most notably through co-writing and producing five studio albums for Childish Gambino). The subtle adoption of trance and dubstep in Tenet might be modish, but it feels technologically apt. Trance music is but one musical genre of many that luxuriates in a dated soundworld and a never arriving futuristic realm. Maybe that's why Lunatic Asylum's "The Meltdown" constructs its spiralling melody loop from the pompous synth grandeur of Israeli-American Shuki Levy's score to the French-Japanese co-production anime Ulysses 31 - set in the 31st century. Such is the musical entropy inherent in musicalising mythology.
Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 18 of The Wire 513.
Heroína
Heroína
Someone has pissed these lads off, and we're all the richer for it
Heroína by Heroína
'Corre' means run. On this opener, Heroína do. No count-in, no settling, Vasco Galvão's blast beats already at full pelt by the time you've registered it's started and Martim Fernandes flying halfway up the neck. It lasts sixty-four seconds. The other twenty-two minutes are more of the same, which I mean as highest praise.
'Escarro' at least has a theme, a tumbling three-note figure that could've fallen off a Polvo record or a Don Caballero one (newly reunited, mercifully), before the whole show capsizes into bayou-thick Eyehategod sludge and Dillinger Escape Plan's jackknifing chord shapes. Francisco Jarda rides the lot like David Yow three weeks into a...
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From early modern Renaissance compositions, through 20th century minimalism, all the way to grunge, Kali Malone treats Claire Biddles to a centuries-spanning Baker's Dozen
Photo by Kingsley Ifill
Kali Malone has always kept a home in several musical worlds at once. When she was 18, studying at the Royal College Of Music in Stockholm, she would make regular visits to her hometown of Denver, Colorado, diving back into the metal scene in which she was embedded as a teenager. "I was basically living part-time in Sweden, part-time in a metal house in Denver," she recalls from her present-day Paris apartment. "I was studying electroacoustic composition, but I also wanted to engage with the metal scene, so I was finding ways to combine...
The post Combined Worlds: Kali Malone's Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.
