New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.
Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.
1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.
But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out - similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" .
Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.
As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...
Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al.
A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)
Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...
I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged...
I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....
Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight
Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time
I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal
Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.
The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere.
I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s).
It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music. Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk...
So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms.
4 Hero as early as 1995
(but not as early as 1993)
And again in 1997
Bukem waxing poetic on CTI....
Gerald, in '96, so when he'd gone off the boil
I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on.
Am I right or am I right!
I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see
Probably rather a lot of broken beats.
Mo' Wack, natch
SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.
There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design).
Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair. Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters.
^^^^^^^^^
Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.
Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates... a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach
Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself
But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues.... what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music."
It always rubs me up the wrong way. For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well. They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side. They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.
Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early '90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it.
Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.
Our coverage of dance music wasn't shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can't say that about Sounds or NME.
All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.
New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.
Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.
1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.
But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out - similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" .
Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.
As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...
Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al.
A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)
Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...
I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged...
I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....
Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight
Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time
I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal
Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.
The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere.
I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s).
It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music. Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk...
So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms.
4 Hero as early as 1995
(but not as early as 1993)
And again in 1997
Bukem waxing poetic on CTI....
Gerald, in '96, so when he'd gone off the boil
I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on.
Am I right or am I right!
I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see
Probably rather a lot of broken beats.
Mo' Wack, natch
SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.
There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design).
Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair. Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters.
^^^^^^^^^
Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.
Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates... a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach
Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself
But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues - where what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music." It always rubs me up the wrong way. For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well. They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side. They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.
Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early '90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it. Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.
Our coverage of dance music wasn't shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can't say that about Sounds or NME.
All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.
August is the deadest month.
And somehow, even though you've been here so many times before, you're never prepared for the way that each week feels deader than the one before.
Until finally it's the last week of August and it's like Time's clock has stopped.
. . .
Hang on a minute
I have a powerful sensation of deja vu.
A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words last year.
Or was it the year before?
Well, I suppose that only goes to prove my point, in a way.
But this August... this August has felt deader than ever, no-thanks to the unrelenting stifling heat, discouraging people from doing anything but sit indoors and sweat.
As our sexton Susan said plaintively the other day, mopping perspiration from her brow as she stepped into the rectory: "has the sky forgotten how to rain?".
The footpaths are cracked and dusty. The grass in the meadows is crisp and brown. The trees have that beat-down sun-struck feeling about them. The birds are silent. Blackberries, ripened prematurely, are already at that bloated, fly-blown stage, too sickly to tempt the rare soul on a stroll across the fields.
Indeed there was some debate about whether this newsletter should be called the Harvest Edition on account of the abnormally early harvest.
"We need rain. On parched soil and souls" - so says Evangelical Focus.
It all brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976 and the unforgettable events of that season.
I'm talking of course about the village fête - the dispute about the whittling contest, the dead-of-night vandalization of the exhibits display, that shocking brawl on the Castle grounds between Ralph Knapp and Patrick Hearn, culminating in the burly pair tumbling into the moat (thankfully almost completely dried out because of the drought).
Memories of another long-ago era waft pungently from the first of this season's offerings (dead it might be in the streets and the fields, but musicians and other creative sorts have been busy).
Memories of the early '80s and local musicians like Dramatis and Pride of Passion - late-arriving prog rockers who adapted with surprising agility to the synthpop era (if not in these cases actually making the charts like other musicians who followed a similar arc, such as Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones).
I speak of the new album by The Belbury Poly - Sorcerer, released on the Ghost Box sister-imprint Belbury Music to indicate its divergence from the label's primary soundstream.
Release irrationale:
At the outset of the project, Jim Jupp assembled a palette of instruments and sounds which evoke a moment in musical history when digital studio technology just started to take over from analogue.
Eschewing Belbury Poly's earlier mid 70s obsessions, to focus on that period around 1983, when artists who could afford it started to experiment with samplers. It was a musical moment dominated by the sounds of Prophet 5, DX7 & PPG synthesizers, Fairlight & Synclavier music computers, TR808 drum machine & Simmons Drums (those ubiquitous hexagonal drum pads) and of course the much-maligned fretless bass.
It's also an era that's now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, comics, book, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was often fuelled by a post punk reaction to Thatcher's regime).
In Jupp's memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent's new age library albums and even Clannad's Robin of Sherwood score.
Sorcerer is due for late September release
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Also flashing back to the Eighties is the latest release from Fil OK, the final instalment of his "ecclesiastical electronica" trilogy, released under the alter-ego We're in the Water. It's titled The Dome.
No tasters available as yet but to whet your appetite for the kooky chorale of tracks like "Being Eaten" and the final title track, you can check out the previous installments of this 36 song-cycle: The Belltower and The Steeple
Release irrationale:
2026's three ambitious works have each interpreted the lyrics and music of his new songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation. Across the past twelve months this musical trilogy has variously explored different facets of the human experience, and The Dome sees Fil delve deep into the universe of spirituality and what lies within its mysterious realms.
Whereas February's The Steeple explored the mind - how we think, question, imagine and make sense of the world around us - with June's second long-player The Belltower turning to the body - the reality of living through relationships, joy, struggle and experience - this autumn's concluding part The Dome completes the trilogy via an exploration of what nourishes the spirit. It's a record all about connection, hope, resilience, compassion, love, and our capacity to keep growing.
The new album's journey begins with Fresh Air (featuring Carolyn), an invitation to pause, breathe and begin again. From there, Jugglin' and Tightrope address finding balance in the realities of everyday life, while Desert Island Bed and Permanent Frown explore the idea of facing ourselves honestly and recognising the fears and habits that can leave us feeling disconnected.
The perspective widens with Forty Years On (featuring classical singer Will Eaves) with a string quartet reflecting on what truly matters when we look back on our lives, while the eponymously-titled We're in the Water (featuring We're in the Water!) celebrates our shared humanity and the wonderfully strange experience of simply being alive. Bankrupt reminds us that compassion also needs wisdom, exploring the importance of discernment and healthy boundaries. Being Eaten embraces the idea that becoming someone new often means letting go of who we've been, while standout track Closer Than My Wife (featuring legendary Vicious Pink / Soft Cell vocalist Josephine Warden) and the epic More Love explore the beauty, complexity and mystery of human connection in its many forms.
But it's left to the album's title track to finally bring everything together. The Dome is the place we return to when life feels overwhelming - somewhere to plug into, a well to drink from, a place of renewal, perspective and quiet strength. Not somewhere to escape the world, but somewhere that reminds us who we are before we step back into life with hope, kindness and a renewed sense of purpose.
As Fil reflects, "One of the things that fascinates me most is how strange it is to be alive. Human existence is messy, beautiful, confusing, ridiculous and extraordinary, often all at the same time. None of us has it figured out, yet somehow we're all making our way through it together. That shared journey is, to me, one of the most spiritual things there is."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
More squarely in the main soundstream of parish activity, a couple of new publications and a podcast series dedicated to all things spectral.
From Reaktion Books, here's the latest in a series of tomes taking the measure of this thing they call hauntology: Jamie Sexton's The Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology by Jamie Sexton (that's the second appearance of that word in this newsletter, and kind of an eerily apt name for a scholar of hauntology to have, since a sexton's responsibilities include funerals, digging graves and keeping cemeteries tidy).
Release irrationale:
Musical hauntology conjures sounds of futures that never arrived: music that reflects on memory and the recent past, drawing on analogue instrumentation, sampling and digital processing to capture how time feels twisted in an age of endless reproduction. The Sounds of Lost Futures offers the first sustained overview of this influential British mode, tracing its emergence, cognate genres and wide constellation of media influences. It also unpacks the conceptual forces that shape it - from nostalgia and retro culture to fractured temporal experience - while covering key artists and labels such as Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Mordant Music. With a dedicated focus on audiovisual hauntology, this book provides new clarity on a musical form attuned to the strange echoes of modern life.
Unconvinced by that "the first sustained overview" claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books .... Not forgetting some jottings by yours truly and the Reverend Fisher. So I would say the soil is well tilled at this point.
Also, "cognate genres"!
A slightly stale air also clings to this non-nonfiction publication: the anthology Brutalist Ghost Stories.
You simultaneously think "why did no one think of this before?" and "surely someone already did this?"
From Confingo Publishing, a release irrationale:
'We live among ruins, surrounded by places built for a future that never arrived.'
Brutalist Ghost Stories is an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by Britain's brutalist buildings and landscapes.
From grand libraries and university buildings to service stations and closed down car parks, this collection explores the concrete structures which have in their own way shaped Britain and imagines what dwells in them.
Traversing Scotland through to the south coast of England, these stories explore haunting, memory, folklore, loss and the uncanny.
Familiar landmarks become sites of mystery, overlooked corners of our nation's built environment reveal hidden histories and strange encounters abound.
Why no story about our local carbuncle, Tonwell Tower?
Clearly this whole field remains a growth area. Viz, the launch up at the Institute of a special unit:.Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group
Ghost stories are in fact one of the group's subjects of interest:
We can glimpse the gleanings of these researchers through their regular Hauntology Podcast, as amiable and indoor-voice intimate as you'd expect from such a gathering of scholarly kith. It's available via Rephonic, Apple, and other places you might expect, with transcripts offered as well as the audio. Three episodes in, topics include "Spectral Tourism" and "Haunted Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and the Moors Murderers".
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Returning to recent musical emanations...
Well, what a pleasant surprise - a new late-summer release from Moon Wiring Club, an artist I generally associate with the cold, damp weeks leading up to Christmas.
Almost Alive At Morgans Lane is one of Ian Hodgson's irregular delves into auto-archaeology, with a twist: these are not unreleased tracks and alternate takes but live performances, or residues thereof, that have been assembled into a kind of phantasmagoric "live album" that never quite was.
The album is out in a few days time and although a download-only release, it can be acquired in a special package: a "bespoke chunky presentation envelope" containing sundry goodies such as an A6 kineograph "overlaid with fragmented 1985 Microcomputer Soft Command Hallucinations" (yes your guess is as good mine), 8 exclusive postcards, and 4 (out of a range of 40) Curious Quartet Artcards. There are also some other related and semi-related goodies separately available - an Almost Alive Sticker Selection, issue #3 of Catmask , feline greetment cards - but also buyable as a bundle.
Release irrationale:
ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE (GEpH020DLX) is quite possibly the cumulative meisterwerk of MWCs ongoing audio reclamation mission / divine calling to conjure up and deftly assemble as much esoteric ODDNUSS inside the most closely packed, yet luxuriously stacked envelope as possible.
Many moons ago, MWC were coaxed from their ephemeral Northern compound by a variety of elegant individuals and highly professional organisations to lucratively perform aLIVE undertaking within a fascinating variety of fashionably showbiz, yet simultaneously clandestine locations throughout the country.
Naturally these MWC performances were instantly and uniformly proclaimed a MASSIVE SUCCESS and soon became the highly sort-after ticket of the season, spoken of with whispered awe and a wide-eyed reverence.
Who amongst us can ever forget the amusing MWC catchphrase quotations 'In the Phonebook Under Gas' or 'On the Never Never' that artfully proliferated as a welcome secret fever throughout the en vogue vocabulary of the contemporaneous socialite elite.
Now YOU, who understandably were :
denied entrance
unable to locate the supposed venue
not yet sentient
choosing instead to rewatch repeats of Lovejoy
erroneously duped by pernicious rumours viciously perpetrated by the stealth agents of our envious rivals into avoidance
flamboyantly overdosed on Opium derivatives during the proceedings
Can rectify this catastrophic oversight + finally fully submit to Hexperience MWC ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE with this highly stylish and unique bespoke chunky presentation envelope ~ jam-packed with HAND-ASSEMBLED interactive mnemonic articles all adeptly infused with occult significance potentiality.
8 tracks of unreleased MWC Musick(e) have been assiduously exhumed and thoughtfully re-spliced from an arcane assimilation-jumble transfer of aLIVE locationals, sound-bored recordings, reassembled rehearsal footage, in situ bootlegs, digital camera memory cards + patented MWC test recovery CDR Disc Rot Technique.
An undeniable RUFFness alongside an omnipresent atmosphere of uncanny malevolence eerily permeate these recordings, which feature aLIVE baked-in beat loopery elaborately juggled with copious quantities of unmoored vocal exclamations, percolated with corroded roomtone reverberations and myriad splintering aberrative atmospheric fluctuations.
Familiar MWC favourites such as Doll Hill House & Tudorbethan Jobbernowl now feature mutating situation deformities, alongside never repeated MWC obscurities such as the distorted machinations of Black Pudding Jacking Zone and the sublime Seance Psychedelia offering Sherry at the Ritz ~ all considerately rescued from the Vault ov 'Orror by dedicated + discerning MWC archivists for the eternal delectation of future generations.
The resulting 55 minute opus provides a definitive aural totality of what undeniably conceivably occurred when MWC manifested one last time and performed their infamous Psychotopographical Swansong
And it's another splendid splodge of oozy-woozy oddnuss... simultaneously disintegrative and driving (the show must go on even if chunks of flesh are flaking off the performers)..... schmears of scrambled sound veer out of the foggy mix like a drunkenly jeering stranger... melody-riffs and refrains naggingly familiar from the MWC songbook return in distended form like hall-of-mirrors reflections of friend-faces... Top tune: the tauntingly jaunty "Tudorbethan Jobbernowl (Ergotoxicosis Mix)".
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Sunday school director Dave Howell informs me that the new record by Lawrence English, who hails from our Australian twin town Woolloongabba, is definitely on the vibe: sonically "somewhere between Vangelis and The Caretaker" and carrying a polemic about "the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures." English's release irrationale refers to a term he's coined, "Acid Nostalgia... a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times... a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail."
The album's title is certainly bang on theme: The Rest Is My Ghost.
Mr. Howell incidentally directs us also to a new release by Ukrainian exchange student Regina Collage that if not exactly haunty does waft off halcyon echoes of A.R. Kane - "It Should Be Something".
Gorgeous stuff, definite "Up!" vibrations.... From the album Horizont. It's on Jabu's label do you have peace?
(Jabu themselves return shortly with a wonderfully atmospheric and spacey-sounding new EP, Severn Flood Plain / Where You Run To on Mr. Howell's label Six of Swords)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Hauntology is all over the current issue of The Wire.
It pops up in the cover story on Space Afrika, whose new album Quiet Storm is out at the end of September.
And it pops up again in the lead review for an artist unfamiliar to me: Conflux Coldwell. The album is called Echolalia and it explores the connections between hauntology and autism.
Release irrationale:
"There is a spectre haunting Conflux Coldwell, the spectre of autism."
Bulletdodge is proud to announce the release of Echolalia a striking new electronica album from Conflux Coldwell. Arriving digitally this June, with a vinyl edition to follow in early September, the album Echolalia explores the notion of internal "ghosts" — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter's autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister's AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology.
Also lead reviewed in that same issue of The Wire is a record that truly can only be described as bringing-up-the-rear when it come to its subject: the spookiness of children's TV of the British 1960s and 1970s: Luke Haines's Izzy Wizzy Let's Get Busy.
"By the 1960s and 70s magick was all over children's television in the UK..."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Not precisely hauntological but hailing from our Canadian twin town of Port Moody, Realm of Dusk - the new-ish alias of Sam Macklin - have recently released a third album of spacey glitchscapes. It's titled, logically enough, III and comes via the evocatively named imprint Blasted Gorse.
If a title like "Astral Vomit" suggest a secret and hitherto unexpected arsequake influence, other titles like "Bill Evans" and "Solitude Seekers" probably convey the atmosphere more closely. Indeed Matthew Ingram, reviewing at Woebot, uses words like "pensive" and "sidereal" and "funereal". Which last does sound a wee bit haunty.
Another elder of the parish swings by with news of an Extended Play.
Kollidaskope is a hot slab of Ekoplekz homing - or honing - in with laser-precise focus on the exact set of sounds that tickle his audio-erogenous zones. Sensibility refinement as a lifetime's project.
So the opening title track is Rastakraut fastskank, like a dried-up Monolake. Dank 'n' bouncy, "Refrakzion" is like "dub techno" if it meant something completely different. "Dubnauzium" finds the sour spot between "Silent Command" and "The Gospel Comes to New Guinea". "Autoekpression" is Bandalu chasing "Bitches Brew" down a long dark tunnel.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Overtaken by meteorological events! In between starting the Newsletter last weekend and finishing up this morning, well, the sky remembered how to rain. Susan, the sexton, popped by the rectory on her way back from the shops - her face streaming with moisture, only this time precipitation not perspiration. Drenched to the skin she was and shivering, thanks to the sudden cataclysmic downpour and temperature drop. Dripping all over the newly waxed parquet flooring.
Answering the prayers of farmers and gardeners alike, the heavens have finally opened up.
Perhaps a little too much...
In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his attempt to perpetuate 1967... Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia) in the early-mid Eighties.... Television Personalities... The Cleaners from Venus, The Monochrome Set...
Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was.
Focused on the UK Eighties uptake of the UK Sixties vibe, what follows is not even the complete inventory...
First line of this references Rita Tushingham... Second verse references David Hemmings and David Bailey... the title nods to one of the Men From UNKLE. The entire lyric is a phantasmagoric montage of Sixties references
Patrick Macnee and Twiggy on the cover, not a collage but apparently a shot taken at a fashion shoot dedicated to the Avengers style...
This song by Billy Childish's early band the Pop Rivits might actually just precede the Eighties but I include as a nod to that whole Milkshakes et al scene
"I know you'll say I'm living in the past / But those Beatle boots were made to last"
An Englishy Beatles (psych-era) flavour crept into XTC's albums from Black Sea onwards and then eructated in Dukes of Stratosphear , a side project that was pure Rutles really.
Then there was the neo-psych DIY loner Nick Nicely.
From the 1982 album Psychotropia, "Hilly Fields" is the tune that has cult love
Vocal's a bit Buggly for me...
"Nick Nicely" sounds like the title of one of those character-sketch songs that were rife in UK pop circa 66-67. Or something off the shit McCartneyfied side 2 of Abbey Road.
Nicely popped up again in the "nice one, top one, get sorted" era, as part of the breakbeat house outfit Psychotropic who did the classic rave track "Hypnosis" .
Another Nick doing neo-psych in the early-mid 80s was Nick Haeffner who if memory serves I met at a party - a very quiet fellow, who shyly spoke of his music... and who then materialized a few years later with an elpee on Bam Caruso. Paul Oldfield gave it a generous hearing.
The Great Indoors is a good title - indeed I might have nicked that phrase for something or other, now I think of it
Paul mentions Julian Cope in the review and he would indeed have been the great example of a laughing-madcap-wannabe of the English Eighties.
As Copey put it in an interview I did with him in the '90s, his thinking circa Teardrops / early solo elpees was "the accumulation of all of my heroes would be one hell of god to be" - the heroes being Barrett, Roky Erikson, Skip Spence, et al, whose heroic intake he tried to match in pursuit of druggy divinity.
Julian did better enthusing about the original punkadelia than trying to bring it back (the solo LPs sound awfully 80s).
Liverpool really was the first of the several New Psychedelias of the decade: Echo and the Bunnymen and then all the other non-starter groups with daft names like A Shallow Madness. Even Liverpool groups who weren't psychedelic had psychedelic sounding names - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
On the less Cope-ious intake committed to journeying up the road of excess end of things, there was the whole Mood Six / Doctor and the Medics scene around the club Alice In Wonderland. Clothes horses and London scene-fabricators rather than real rainbow-chasers.
Soft as runny shite
More of a loner, there was The Bevis Frond - leaning towards acid rock rather than paisley psychedelia, heavy at times
The Legendary Pink Dots - who I rather liked. Edward Ka-Spel had a more expansive conception, informed by Krautrock and experimental music and possibly Hammill and Supersister, as much as by the Barrett side of psych. The track below is from the 1985 album Asylum - as Paul Oldfield, a Dots supporter, pointed out, an ambiguous word, suggestive of sanctuary but also a place of confinement for the mentally disturbed. Madness as visionary state but also estrangement and exile.
On the mainstream tip and far more superficial - a fleeting fancy - there was Prince with Around The World. Lamentably there was also "Sowing the Seeds of Love" by Tears For Fears.
Veering away from the flower power moment to something a little hairier and heavier, there was the Cult, conjuring up Steppenwolf and early Led Zeppelin and such like... much more cock in this rock than the psych boy-men. But they were bandying around words like "Love" and "Revolution" and even the cult-of-Native-Americans ("Spiritwalker" etc) is rather late Sixties, Jim Morrison's souls of dead Indians jumping into his child's "fragile eggshell mind" etc etc.
I did quite like this, more for the tingly filigreed intro than the pumping main groove-drive
I was quite won over by the "boogie 'til you blow chunks" of the next album Electric (1987), when Rick Rubin got them to strip the sound right down.
Astbury has lungs like bellows and the guitarist can screech, but the swing and smoky thickness of sound that Steppenwolf had is completely flattened out -
Groups like Walkingseeds were referencing Blue Cheer (the title of a song on their 1987 album Skull Fuck... more prosaically they also had a number titled "St. Albans").
But I've veered into the American Sixties...
While this was going on you had the label Bam Caruso and the related magazine Strange Things (Are Happening) doing the heavy work of historical excavation: digging (for) freakbeat on the Rubble comp series, John's Children anthologies etc.
And that reminds me of Richard Norris, who was Bam Caruso's label manager, and who then teamed up with Genesis P-Orridge - Psychic TV already on this tip with their Hyperdelia concept: the Brian Jones tribute "Godstar", the cover of "Good Vibrations" - and together Gen and Richard did Jack the Tab, which was sort of but not really acid house.
The Shamen also plunged into the techno-house sound, with better results than either Jack the Tab or The Grid. But back in the Eighties - when I saw them about four times, always as the support or middle of the line-up group - they were total psychedelic revivalists, always performing with Op Art projections.
"Young 'Till Yesterday" - hark at the 67-reference there.
The guitar are quite nicely overloaded and frazzled - Electric Prunesy, White Noise-y - but the songs and the singing are faint and feeble.
This next one is transitional, when they are starting to get into beats and samples, but it's more industrial in feel than it is house-groovy. The title "Christopher Mayhew Says" is about the Liberal MP who took mescaline as part of a Panorama experiment for the BBC.
It was their pre-existing interest in hallucinogens that drew The Shamen to the new dance-drug culture.
And it was at one of the Shamen's Progeny events - them plus Orbital playing live but also loads of deejays - that I had my rave conversion experience in the autumn of 1991.
Good Lord, from "Pictures on My Wall" and "Sleeping Gas" through to the Second Summer of Love (1988) and the Second Second Summer of Love (1989 - getting our heads untogether in the country), the Eighties really was Sixties flashbacks all decade long, from start to finish...
Even the words "rave" and "raver" are Sixties words
(And then, crikey, it carried on into the early '90s with baggy and Inspiral Carpets with their pudding bowl haircuts and sub-Seeds keybs.... Candy Flip covering "Strawberry Fields Forever")
Still, I suppose, bringing it back to where this all started- conceivably this makes Robyn Hitchcock a pioneer of sorts, the earliest of adopters - with the Soft Boys, the first to go back to this particular moment.
If I recall right, the advert for the debut Soft Boys single - released as New Wave was in full swing - bore the proudly untimely slogan: Psychedelic Music.
The second single's title is flying the phreak flag quite fervently.
But perhaps they weren't the first "acid-punks" after all.
Wire's Chairs Missing got criticized in some quarters for having gone in the space of a year from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd - not just for the whimsied picture-lyrics, but for the glassy, heavily effected guitars (using delay and flange, which is just a frostier version of 1960s phasing) and - the horror - for using keyboards.
The Stranglers were all Doorsy with the rippling grandiose organ solos and weird FX on the vocals ("Peasants in the Big Shitty"). In interviews they gruffly stated "we're into acid".
The Fall were "pickled" (Martin Bramah's word) in shrooms and LSD as well as amphetamines. Indeed Mark E. Smith's vision-thing was a catalytic influence on Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch. For a time they followed the Fall around from gig to gig.
And then out of The Fall sprouted The Blue Orchids, the truly great and genuinely psychedelic band of the Eighties.
(Them and Meat Puppets. But we won't go into the all the American acid-punk contenders - Chrome et al)
But I have now thought of something else...
The psychedelic revival was started not by New Wavers after all - but by a handful of Old Wavers who had lived through it the first time round as participants.
Todd Rundgren
That's 1975
1976 - wholly pointless recreation of the original!
And closer to the English source...
Steve Hillage (who didn't so much return to psychedelia as he simply stuck with it)
That's 1977 and it's produced by Todd Rundgren
Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, with the short lived 801, covering "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1976
Goodness, that's awful....
Meanwhile...
Eno was one of the first, circa his early solo albums, to talk of the enduring influence of psychedelia on him. So (as per Hillage) it's not so much a revival or a return, it's a continuation. Much of the pre-punk scene is post-psychedelic....
Still, doing the cover versions is a retro move.
Blimey, ahead of the pack in going back, you of course have David Bowie with Pinups.... That is 1973, harking back to less than a decade earlier, to 65-66.
"Shapes" - or "shipes" as Bowie ridiculously pronounces it - "shapes" not of things to come, but of things that have been and gone.
Twiggy on the cover too, almost a decade before Television Personalities.
And Roxy, pastiching and parodying everything under the pop sun, also did a psych-era style "false ending" on "In Every Dream Home a Heartache". With a swirl storm of phased drumming and phased guitar like "Itchycoo Park" and Todd's own Nazz track "Open Your Eyes". That's from For Your Pleasure, 1973.
This experience of "retro" receding deeper into the past is familiar to me from researching Retromania ... as soon as I thought I'd established a hinge point, "the rift of retro", I would realize there was an earlier one.
In rock I managed to trace it (i.e. rock referring back to itself, its own history - not some other earlier sound like music hall) definitively to the Beatles doing the Chuck Berry soundalike "Back in the USSR" and to a 1967 Move B-side that pastiched the Beatles themselves circa "Daytripper" i.e. two years earlier. That was the ground zero point of retro and meta in pop music.
Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.
But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...
In a recent Guardian interview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says:
"Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically....
"I didn't invent this field of music, but I've perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I'm the opposite. I'm sweeping up after them. It's like, 'Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.'"
That's admirably clear-eyed, isn't it?
About his Eighties success in America:
"It's funny when people think of me as an 80s artist because I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that's a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I've avoided both success and failure. It's fantastic. And it's always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I'm Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I've signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice."
I can feel myself relenting... actually considering listening to the solo albums.... perhaps even "Brenda's Iron Sledge" will get its second chance!
I will say, Hitchcock did record, with The Soft Boys, at least one stone classic. And it doesn't actually sound that 1967, it feels very much of whatever the year it was it came out.
Talking about wanting to destroy someone... over at Pantheon I discuss the mystery of a missing Soft Boys song, "The Lonesome Death of Ian Penman".
Going back to this idea of being an epigone, the honesty and even honour of accepting that you are secondary artist, tilling terrain opened up by pioneers....
An intriguing thing that emerged in another recent Hitchcock interview, with Mojo, is that although he is an overtly psychedelic artist, he was relatively inexperienced with psychedelics:
"I hardly took any acid at all. I don't think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one."
That adds another dimension to the idea of being a "secondary artist". You skip a stage in the process...
Instead of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" - the mission statement and modus operandi of Spacemen 3 - you absorb it via the sonic encoding of hallucinatory experience in select Sixties recordings. The music is the drug.
In a piece on Rock and Self-Destruction in the new issue of Vice, I wonder the extent to which this was widely the case with the Still In A Dream groups...
A phrase I use in the book for the era is "a second psychedelia". But in quite a few cases, I imagine it was also a second-hand psychedelia.
Some of the groups were doing acid. For a few, harder drugs. Spacemen 3 energetically explored the whole pharmacopeia (Sonic Boom even experimented with chloroform!). But I'm guessing that a possibly surprising number were getting it indirect, vicariously, via the records and the records alone.
Prompted by the way the music was going, I got into using Sixties lingo in my writing - mind-blowing, kiss the sky, blissed out, far out, tripped out - for quite some time before I could answer Jimi's question in the affirmative...
People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher.
Only a slight exaggeration.
It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no.
But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't.
Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not want not, as me old mum says....
1. Fisher seems to have a lot of impact on younger audiences, even among those outside academia. Why do you think his work resonates so much with a generation that were still quite young when he passed away?
I think it's the way Mark used his personal experience - depression, dealing with bureaucracy in the workplace, etc - as a basis from which to write outwards, as it were, towards larger principles and a systemic and structural analysis. It is very relatable and accessible, it helps readers understand abstract ideas. He was also a stylish, yet crystal clear, writer - it is entertaining as well as illuminating.
He writes about depressing things but the effect is not depressing - even just apprehending things clearly is energizing. And usually there is some kind of hopeful aspect.
The idea that your depression and anxiety is not the fault of personal insufficiency but caused by systemic tendencies is a liberating message.
Another thing that makes it relatable to young people is the way Mark used music and popular culture (mainstream films like The Hunger Games) to make ideology and political structures legible.
Another factor is that Capitalist Realism is very short - it's only about 80 pages long. You can read it in an afternoon.
2. Since Mark's passing, pop music has taken on new paths -- including new chaotic and fragmented genres like hyperpop, rage, etc. Do you think these new genres and cultural phenomenons still have echoes of "hauntology" and "retromania" that was discussed by both of you in the 2000s and 2010s, or do they mark a departure from these frameworks?
Well, retromania and hauntology are not music genres - they are culture-wide formations, manifesting in quite disparate areas - music but also fashion, TV, film, visual art, literature, videogames etc.
At the same time, neither retromania nor hauntology apply to the entirety of popular culture, or explain everything that is going on in the culture or society. They are tendencies or currents - structures of feeling that can seem dominant at certain points and then prominent but not dominant at other phases.
I would say peak retromania was from around 2005 to 2013 - I see Daft Punk's Random Access Memories as the absolute zenith but in some way the swan song of retromania.
But even during this very retromanic time (conditioned by the emergence of YouTube, then streaming, among many other things) there were things going on in music and the culture that are not retro or that are even anti- retro. A genre like footwork would be one example. ASMR videos is another new cultural form that has nothing retro about it.
Around 2011 there was also a trend for what I called digital maximalism - ultra-bright, crisp, slick, glossy sounds (very different from the sound aesthetic of hauntology which is foggy, soaked in reverb, faded-sounding). Artists like Rustie and Skrillex. Hyperpop is an extension of that glossy, dry (no reverb) aesthetic but combined with a Baudrillardian simulation politique that parodies consumerism, glow-up glamour, and influencer culture (InstaGlam, someone called it).
I would say the Auto-Tune trap of late 2010s - Future, Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott - is another formation that has nothing to do with retro. But unlike hyperpop, trap is minimalist and hypnotic. A new kind of woozy psychedelic ambient music with post-verbal vocals chirruping ecstatically.
3. There's been a lot of discussion about how music criticism has "softened" over the last couple of years. Fisher could be a very rigorous and, sometimes, unforgiving music critic (I remember, as an example, a specific article he wrote for k-punk on Glastonbury). How do you think his writings fit into this new music criticism landscape?
One of Mark's most potent concepts was nihilation - the idea that music culture is driven by dialectical energy and that critics - but also musicians (who are in a sense active critics) - operate by opposing the things they don't believe in or respect, and that their goal is to discredit their ideological foes. He didn't believe that that everything was equally valid and everybody should get along nicely. He didn't believe in that "each to their own" idea - he wasn't into tolerance or acceptance. So yes he was "unforgiving" to things he thought were mediocre or a waste of time or actively pernicious. Like many of us who grew up on the UK music press, he had a bi-polar relationship with music - he thought some things were great, heroic, inspiring, and other things shit, lame, depressing. And he thought there were ups and downs in culture, not a steady state of quality. Exhilarating phases alternated with down periods - crashes that follow the manic collective high.
4. The way Fisher mixed cultural criticism, political analysis, and personal writings about his own mental health was distinctive. What do you think made him such an interesting and compelling writer?
I think I already answered that in the first reply and then throughout.
But a few other thoughts.
Penetrating clarity of intellect combined with style and a certain savage humour. His stuff is entertaining to read, it doesn't feel like hard work.
He had an ability to come up with snappy catchphrases - slogans, memes, aphoristic sentences. "The secret sadness of the 21st Century" is a good example and it sounds beautiful in English - all the 's' sounds, the sibilants.
He could write very well about the details and particularities of a work of art or an auteur's oeuvre, but his superpower was to extend that to larger abstract principles. You sensed that he was always taking things to a higher level, building towards a total understanding of culture / politics / existence. The scale of the ambition was thrilling.
I'm a meme, or at least I'm riding shotgun in a Mark-meme.
I forgot to click on the full caption and so I don't know what exactly contemporary art "keeps" doing...
Retrotalk: "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" versus "The Future Is Not Lost" versus "21st Century as Cultural Void" [ 28-Jun-26 2:03am ]A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!"
Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago
It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static:
But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and tone.
From this, Szatan extrapolates to a general pervasive feeling of being stuck on a 7 out of 10 plateau, anxiously wondering when the distinctive and defining sound of the 2020s will surface:
No matter the soundtrack, the feeling echoed: this is good, not great. The lightning-in-a-bottle effect that animates club culture seems to be in hibernation and it's not just hampering nights out, either. As of late, electronic releases seem to exist on this same endless plateau. We have more music to enjoy than ever, but what's increasingly nagging at me is that this overfamiliarity is actually the problem....
Electronic culture finds itself in a strange double condition: hyper-fragmented in theory, yet consensus-driven in practice. What used to feel like solid land has given way to an archipelago of disparate scenes with little awareness of their neighbours and, broadly, only slight modifications to preexisting sounds...
It's worth asking ourselves what exactly the 2020s will be remembered for musically. If we're invested in breaking new ground, time's running out to get that in motion. The alternative is circling a familiar neighbourhood over and over, repackaging iterations of the same sensation until the culture ages out....
The problem isn't that electronic music has stopped producing quality. It's an issue of quantity. There's more than the culture can reasonably metabolise, and, at a time when many pockets of the underground are still rummaging through the crates of the past, this bottlenecks the potential for new movements to cut through. Without anything to act as both a galvanising force and, occasionally, an antagonist to challenge, a lot of cultural motion effectively peters out....
Five of the revitalised sounds you're liable to hear back in the hands of DJs at, say, Houghton right now — tech house, dub techno, dubstep, minimal and prog - lack a clear aesthetic identity and, you could argue, lack risk too...
2026 lineups heaves with talent, yet the presence of artists who released their most crowd-animating work 20 or 25 years ago pops out more than usual...
In reality, it's little more than a revolving carousel heading nowhere fast with diminishing returns.
Szatan references "retromania" not as a book but as a genre, or an artistic mode cutting across genres:
The '90s has been well turned over by now, so what can we learn from the previous decade? At least three substantial, unique movements were generated in the 2010s: EDM, hyperpop and retromania, all large and notable enough that dozens of variants fold into, and spin off, from them.
The slipperiest of the three is retromania, less a hard sound than a change in mindset as nostalgia ran rampant, and expanded archives pulled whole histories of sound into circulation. In the 2010s, a flood of reissues met a desire to gain a multipolar understanding of music history.
... multiple scenes, including drum & bass, are threatened by "homage [as] the new product," per dBridge...
Then back to the main theme:
the fracture of universal experience means we may never see a coherent sound of the decade again—in this or any decade. Without that, culture risks becoming even more aleatory than usual....
Essentially, as the world gets more expensive and progression stalls, we get sucked into cultural stagflation.
...it feels evident that electronic music's oversupply and option paralysis is causing damage.
We may have arrived at a point where knowledge and adherence to form leave people unable to conjure visions beyond the old frame.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
These snippets are just a fraction from a much larger, in-depth exploratory piece that is well worth your attention (as is the companion piece, its part 2, "No Music On A Dead Internet", which explores archiving and the impacts of AI).
(Some of Szatan's observations chime with my own recent Instagram-as-window onto dance culture thoughts)
I think this was a brave piece to write as the editor of a magazine that is right in the thick of the dance industry - a downer overview rather than rah-rah-rah boosterism.
The sensations Szatan describes from going to festivals or working through new releases... bustling activity and superabundance combined with a sense of blockage and redundancy.... the creeping feeling that nothing is quite new enough... these are familiar sensations to me, from starting to feel them with some acuteness in the late 2000s. (I don't feel them so acutelythese days, but that may only be because I'm not tracking the now and putatively "new" with anything like the same obsessive intensity)
Those back-in-the-day frustrating sensations are what caused me to come up with the term "hyperstasis".
At the time I wondered if hyperstasis was a superstructure to substructure equivalent to this economic malaise of the 1970s called "stagflation", a term Szatan drops in his piece. Stagflation is an economic paradox, what really shouldn't happen: the combination of low growth and inflation (usually inflation is a sign of economic growth - like the economy is running a fever).
But I don't think it is really a sound parallel. Hyperstasis is more to do with the horizons of what's musically thinkable, a feeling that no one can get to the next level of the 'game' but is just scurrying around on a plateau. That said, it is such stagflation is such an evocatively gross word, it is tempting to deploy it in this context. .
Even one as semi-detached as myself can think of at least a few candidates for the New Defining Dance Sound of the 2020s. There's amapiano and bruxeria. The former is one where I do have that "ooh, this is different, this is new" reaction. While also finding the initial excitement will fade a bit as the DJ mix chunters on - it starts to feel plateau-y (part of its innovation I suppose - the diffusion of climax). Still, the basic template-structure is a new way of ts organizing a groove. Then bruxeria - well, that has aspects that feel like irritation-as-aesthetic - the extreme sidechaining, the nagging GIF-like vocal loops - and seem explicitly designed to drive away the elder ear. This is one way that the New has announced itself - a harshness, a rhythmic disruption of groove, that you have to recalibrate your hearing for.
^^^^^^^^^^^
And so to the refutations, both of this specific Resident Advisor piece and the overall "cultural stagnation" perspective.
We need not concern ourselves here with ripostes from the perpetually and chronically optimistic (don't they ever get exhausted with being themselves, these behold-the-plenty types? I find the sunny-side stance as unconvincing as folks who draw up lists of their 350 faves of any given year - c'mon, pull the other one, mate!).
Smacking a little of "behold the plenty" but more reasoned out, there was the Liam Inscoe-Jones book Songs in the Key of MP3 from a year or two ago. This was explicitly framed as a younger's riposte to elders like Mark Fisher and myself. Which is fine, although I wish the book had engaged with my thinking subsequent to the 2011 publication of Retromania, e.g. the Auto-Tune epic, or the whole book's worth of counter-evidence marshalled in Futuromania - my own partial auto-refutation. (Still In A Dream also contains a chapter that dissents with Retromania, looking at how acute consciousness of history can be a basis for attempts to do new things - the chapter is titled "Revisionaries").
But that's fine, people selectively create a cruder, starker version of their opponents (in this case, me) in order to have the arguments they want to have, the arguments they think they can win. I've done it many a time, with my own combatants!
And here comes another book, published last week in fact: The Future Is Not Lost, by Matt Bluemink. This grew out of articles that similarly sparred with Mark Fisher's thinking, starting with the unfurling of the concept of "anti-hauntology" as an alleged genre represented above all by SOPHIE, along with Arca and Iglooghost.
Here is Bluemink (what an amazing name - can it be real?) at his Blue Labyrinths blog describing the scope and themes of The Future Is Not Lost.
"The book is a collection of my essays focused around the idea of the future as it relates to music, technology, architecture, and philosophy. The book itself is split into 3 chapters on a variety of interconnected themes:
1. Anti-Hauntology: The first section explores the idea of 'futuristic music', including artists like SOPHIE, Arca, and Iglooghost, and provides a critique of the nascent pessimism in the work of Mark Fisher through the philosophy of Bernard Sitegler.
2. Spatial Imaginaries: The second section uses the ethos of solarpunk to criticise the dystopian aesthetic of cyberpunk that has become actualised, not just in films, literature, and games, but in architecture and urban design. It also provides a reading of Peter Sloterdijk's theory of foams, atmospheres, and desert islands to show how spatial philosophy can provide solutions to the climate crisis.
3. Individuation: The final section introduces the work of Gilbert Simondon and its influence on Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This section provides the theoretical underpinning of many of the previous chapters. It shows how individuation, conceived as an on ongoing metaphysical process, can lead to a fundamentally progressive form of understanding which allows for the creation of better futures.
And here's a bit on how hearing SOPHIE helped him formulate a counter-view to Mark's pessimism:
"From the very first moment I heard SOPHIE's music I knew it was something different. It felt fresh. It felt new. Listening to Faceshopping was like being transported into an alternate reality that approached popular music from a radically novel perspective: a transgressive perspective. The old structures and forms were there, but shifted, changed, and morphed into something unrecognisable. Electronic music was finding a way forward, not only in some distant, abstract or academic sense, but in popular culture itself. Aspects of the experimental and avant-garde were being brought into popular consciousness in entirely new ways we couldn't have expected. I had discovered the music of the future."
Since Mark died a year before SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" came out, it's hard to know how he would have reacted to it. For what it's worth, I suspect that he would have been bowled over by it as a tour de force of sonics and conceptual provocation - as I was. Especially as it is a song so bound up with his beloved glam - ideas of artifice, plasticity, surface versus depth, theatricality etc. It is practically an audio-essay dramatizing the ideas of Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but updated for the age of the influencer. InstaGlam.
Whether "Faceshopping" would have been enough to spark Mark to a rethink of his fundamental ideas about retro-paralysis, lost futures, hauntology... it's hard to say.
But I think "anti-hauntology" is an odd way to frame this music, since I rather doubt it was motivated by a desire to refute hauntology. I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged as an aesthetic in almost complete unawareness of the hauntology discourse - it has far more to do with long-running aesthetics of camp and plasticity, drawing on precursors like electroclash, Fischerspooner, drag and vogueing and ballroom, New Romanticism and the Blitz scene, avant-garde fashion, Warhol and the Theatre of the Ridiculous.... . As well as many mainstream manifestations, from Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga. In some ways SOPHIE is Gaga but with music that actually lives up to the rhetoric.
Talking of rhetoric... I think it would made more sense for Bluemink to come up with a genre term that expresses the positive and substantive properties of this new sound-and-vision, rather than define it reactively against something that may not have impinged on its creators's consciousness. The term "anti-hauntology" creates the impression that SOPHIE, Arca et al exist primarily to be recruited to Bluemink's attempt to refute K-punkian pessimism. But they might have their own reasons for doing what they do, completely unconnected from the debate about retro and lost futures.
(And if you'll forgive me tooting my own trumpet a bit... the aesthetic of what Bluemink calls anti-hauntology is already strongly hinted at in my Digital Maximalism epic of December 2011 - using Rustie's Glass Swords and various others I identify the hallmarks of a new sound - ultrabrite, shadowless, plasticized, denatured, 2D cartoony, "dry" i.e. reverb-less. I'm writing a couple of years before SOPHIE's first releases and before PC Music get started. This emergent ultra-gloss maximalism is contrasted with the deep-and-dark minimalism dominant in 2000s dance, e.g. the dank and shadowy reverb-chambered sound of dubstep. I don't mention Burial but I could easily have done).
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And then a few months back there was Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review asking "Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?" and taking issue with Mark Fisher and myself again but mainly with W. David Marx's Blank Space, his history of the C21 so far.
Wollen notes a paradox about Marx's book that I also noticed:
"Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred."
But then that is hyperstasis, isn't it? A roil of activity, but nothing that really surges into the unknown.Wollen picks up on the kind of swampy metaphors that I and other use (in the intro to Retromania, I describe Time becoming like a sluggish river that meanders and forms oxbox lakes)
"If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh."
Then she tries to repositive this trope in terms of moist fecundity:
"Maybe
we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.
Then there is the decelerationist argument, the zero growth / downshifting / permaculture polemic applied to culture itself as opposed to agriculture.
"It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary,
unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything "new" to a stretch of
history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What
about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward
the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds
to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already
arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a
form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to
produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of
the twentieth century. I can already feel the ground
underneath my argument growing a bit soggy—I am, after all, a product of the
cultural marshland of the 2000s. My perspective is history logged, mushy and
inexact, my style is patchworked and gleaned, my analysis makes most sense
mapped as doodled spirals. I find the declarative mode that is necessary for
the construction of an avant-garde (or the loud lamenting of a lack thereof )
kind of cringe, to be honest, not because being born in the early 1990s made me
allergic to earnestness, as is often presumed, but because of its absolutism,
its unquestioned reverence for clarity and category"
And then a note of "OK boomer" condescension:
I can empathize: it must have felt comforting to imagine there was a way to
dress and a type of music to listen to and an art to make that situated oneself
inside of history in a legible and linear way. But it was always an act of
imagination (as evidenced by the various revolutions that once felt inevitable
and around the corner, but never actually occurred), just as this whirlpool of
stasis is a kind of imagining as well. The fact of the matter is that kitsch is
now so overabundant that to not use or misuse it is to leave money on the
table, so to speak — stacks of meaning-bucks, just sitting there. What's
difficult to accept, for those not from the marshes, is that subculture, and
its glowing nimbus of futurity, has become a kitsch object as well. Not merely
the specifics — the hedgehog prickles of a hairstyle, the fog of bass rolling in
over a crowd—but the form itself.
The "kitsch" - meaning much the same as "cringe" - is a reference to Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay of 1939, which paved the way for his championing of abstract art. In other words, the kind of Movements that the likes of myself mourn, as we do Subcultures as Vanguards.
Finally the essay deploys an obscure musical reference, a Los Angeles band called Purity who specialize in cover versions of songs from subcultural sounds like hardcore punk and postpunk:
"A cover of "Dance This Mess
Around" is a repetition of a repetition, a warping of the warp, a slow decay of
the slow decay. The listener descends into the mulchy bog, wet and thick. But
this mire unexpectedly greens into acute feeling: somehow, Purity turns the
lyric "I'm not no limburger" into one of the most wretched, mournful lines of
any music I've ever heard."...
I have to salute how deftly Wollen sustains the marshland / mire / boggy ground tropes throughout the essay...
She concedes that these strategies would not placate the declinists.
"[W. David] Marx would probably agree on a more Greenbergian line —yes, exactly, old
cultural forms of radical possibility have been resurrected as half-hearted
ghosts! Tragic! But what he misses, fundamentally, is the vice versa, the
backward loop, that is also true: the kitsch object, the dancing shadow of a
certain subgenre of rock and roll, is transformed through (re)restaging into a
new, sprouting form of subculture, if that can be defined as what goes on
underneath the opaque layer of mass commerce."
An aside: Purity remind me slightly of another painfully knowing band, Bodega, who put out the (pretty funny title) album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life.
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It does amaze me sometimes that this debate is still going on - it will not go away.
I regularly get requests to talk on Retromania-ish topics - often from newspaper journalists looking at specific revivals or retro fads. Sometimes pHD students or film makers.
I do sometimes also wonder if, say, Mark or I had both been killed in freak accidents in 2005, ie. before the retro/hauntology discourse kicked off in earnest and well before either of us had written our book length disquisitions on the subject.. whether this debate would have emerged in quite as a pronounced way.
But then I think, it obviously would have done. Partly because there were from the start other people making similar points - Momus, Adam Curtis - independently and in parallel with myself and Mark. But mainly because... well, the objective conditions of the culture would provoke such a critique. It would be differently inflected - figures like Burial who are currently having PhD's centered around them might not have been so prominent in the debate. But the tropes that Wollen simultaneously mocks, parodies, and attempts to reverse and re-positive would have sprung up almost organically, like moss on peat.
I have been worried that the brothers's new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves. So to boost its profile a bit, here is a little something I prepared earlier (actually for their label, local indie imprint Warp Records).
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We live in an age of over-exposure. Too many artists actively strip away their mystique, promoting a public persona first and the music a distant second. Going against the grain of our time, Boards of Canada remain an enigma. Rarely photographed, seldom interviewed, performing live just a handful of times over the last thirty years, Boards of Canada let the music speak for itself.
Where some of their peers in left-field electronica cultivate a quirkily charismatic public profile, Boards of Canada earned their cult love through the records alone - the beautiful, eerie music and the beautiful, eerie artwork wrapped around it. They don't have an image, instead their sounds have an unique power to conjure images in your head. As developed on the landmark album Music Has The Right to Children (1998) - which was featured in Pitchfork magazine's list of the greatest albums of the 1990s - Boards of Canada's trademark style of detuned synths and blurry textures have the elegiac quality of faded family photographs, blotchy Super-8 films, worn-out tapes and beloved vinyl spun so often the playback is pocked with scratches and surface noise. It's an aesthetic that's been hugely influential, spawning numerous outright imitators, shaping an entire genre known as hauntology, and affecting mainstream artists as influential in their own right as Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke credits Boards of Canada as a major inspiration during their experimental Kid A / Amnesiac era.
The Boards of Canada sound palette has even crept into pop music, via widely used audio software like Reason and Logic, which contains kits that digitally simulate the analogue-sourced, wavering off-pitch sounds they pioneered, sometimes titling them after specific Boards of Canada tunes like "Roygbiv." Their songs have also been directly sampled by cloud rap and trap artists such as $uicideboy$, Lil B, Travis Scott, Clams Casino, Yung Lean and Lil Peep, and by the ambient R&B singer Solange. Indirectly and directly, Boards of Canada have contributed to making the sound of chartpop and rap radio weirder and spookier.
But although Boards of Canada are innovators, their music never loses touch with the timeless qualities that make for lasting music: beauty and emotion. They are contemporary electronic music's preeminent melodists. From "Roygbiv" through "1969" and "Oscar See Through Red Eye" to the new album's "You Retreat In Time and Space", their records overflow with gorgeous tunes - elongated melody lines that ripple across many bars (a rare thing in electronic music, which tends to work with vamps and riffs). The duo - Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, brothers despite the different surnames - have spoken about how they are not primarily concerned with making dance music, but instead see rhythms as "just a vehicle for carrying strange and beautiful melodies. As far as we're concerned the important thing is that you can whistle our tunes".
Although often positioned alongside Warp labelmates like Aphex Twin and Autechre as one of the three giants of electronica, the group have more in common with esoteric postpunk and industrial outfits like Devo, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, and Nurse With Wound, or with shoegaze pioneers like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. Boards of Canada records are exercises in world-building: Sandison and Eoin are dreamscape gardeners who dissolve the boundary between musician and magician. The brothers have talked about their belief that music involves "powers… that are almost supernatural… You actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do." Fans and critics alike testify to their music's uncanny capacity for triggering buried memories. As unsettling as it is therapeutic, their music seems to reach back into your personal prehistory and part the mists of time.
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Parting those mists to trace back to the group's own beginnings… we find ourselves in the early 1980s, when the brothers started experimenting with tape editing as children. "We used to chop up shortwave radio recordings on an ancient portable recorder, and make tunes out of them by punching-in and layering tracks in a crude way," they told an early interviewer. By the end of the 1980s, they had evolved into something closer to a band, with a line-up that included guitar, bass, and live drums (as opposed to the programmed beats and looped breakbeats of their later work). There was even, occasionally, a sung vocal, rather than the artfully deployed samples and soundbites they would become famous for. Boards of Canada's models then were "experimental atmospheric rock groups" like My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins. Something of that dreampop vibe lingered on into their later famous work: a tonally warped blurriness, a misty-minded mood on the threshold between dreaming and wide-awake. "Like when you glaze over when you're listening to something, but you're still there at the same time."
Gradually Sandison and Eoin homed in on a distinctive set of sonic procedures that no one had yet thought to work with (although many would follow in their wake). They became fascinated with the fragility and fallibility of recording mediums, their specific rate of decay, and how this degradation of the material husk of memory added an extra layer of elegiac poignancy to the memories captured in a photograph or a cassette recording. So Boards of Canada started to apply "a process of corruption" to elements within their music, always preferring analogue effects to digital methods. They might run some parts of a track through a defective tape recorder. In one case, they took a whistle melody and "bounced it back and forward between the internal mics of two tape-decks until the sound started disappearing into hell. Like when you look at an image reflected within two mirrors forever, in the distance it gets darker and greener and murkier." By this point, Sandison and Eoin were working in their own studio as members of the Hexagon Sun artists collective, based in an area of rugged beauty to the south of Edinburgh called the Pentland Hills.
Apart from some early tapes heard only by friends and family, Boards of Canada's public life as recording artists started in do-it-yourself / release-it-yourself fashion with the 1995 album Twoismissued via their own imprint Music70, and followed the next year by a very limited-edition cassette, Boc Maxima. That same year, 1996, they formed an alliance with Skam, a rising young electronic label based in Manchester, through which they put out the EP Hi Scores. Although Boards of Canadaslotted in comfortably alongside the Autechre-style crunchy beats and askew melodies of their label mates, you could already detect a unique sweet sorrowfulness to their tunes and tones.
Skam itself allied with the Sheffield electronic music bastion Warp Records to co-release Music Has the Right To Children, the group's classic 1998 album. Limned with a set of intertwined obsessions expressed through the track titles and the samples used - leitmotifs such as the unspoiled beauty and timeless grandeur of Nature, the grounded yet spiritual folkways of Native American tribes, the innocence and the strangeness of childhood, psychedelic and paranormal states of consciousness - Music Has A Right announced a new and different direction for electronic music. Its smudgy textures and wavering off-pitch tones stood out against a late '90s backdrop of digitally crisp music full of fidgety beats and ultra-finessed production. Amid this wide-awake club of sterile sound and banging beats, Boards of Canada showed that music could still be the stuff of dreams.
Many of the sampled soundbites on Music Has A Right came from pre-teen voices captured from children's television - kids giggling, sounding out phrases like "I love you" or chirping "yeah, that's right!". Others were calm and kind voices of authority, redolent of a doctor or a teacher, or suggestive of the voice-over on a nature documentary. The group's name originally came from the educational programs, wildlife docs, and animations produced by Canada's National Film Board, a culturally innovative institution whose work had a nostalgic allure for the brothers, who had lived in the state of Alberta for a few years when their father worked there.
This Arcadian imagery carried through to their next release, the 2000 EP In A Beautiful Place Out in the Country, albeit with a softly sinister undertone. On the title track, a vocoderized speaker invites the listener to "join a religious community and live in a beautiful place out in the country" - and it takes you a while to realize that this is an offer of membership in a cult sect. Geogaddi, the duo's much anticipated 2002 full-length sequel to Music Has A Right To Children, pushed further into the foreboding with tracks like the ominously glowing "The Devil Is In the Details". But there's also something close to a Boards of Canada mission statement in "Music Is Math", whose recurring soundbite about "the past inside the present" defines the group's obsession with the threads of history woven into the fabric of now. At a time when most electronic music, from drum & bass to trance to minimal techno, was fixated on increasingly kitschy ideas of the Future, Boards of Canada were more in tune with the truths understood by poets and novelists: Proust and his obsession with "lost time"; Faulkner, who said "the past is never dead. It's not even past"; and Nabokov, who dismissed science fiction with the comment "the present is only the top of the past and the future does not exist" while in his memoir Speak Memory salvaged as much of his own halcyon childhood as he could mentally retrieve.
The Campfire Headphase, released in 2005, harked back to a phase of the group's own prehistory, with shoegazey electric guitars joining the customary arsenal of vintage analog synths and carefully corroded samples. Rippling with melody, tunes like "84 Pontiac Dream" and "Satellite Anthem Icarus" were classic iterations of the group's established style, while "Dayvan Cowboy", the second single off the album (as the lead tune of the six-track Trans Canada Highway EP), broke out for new terrain with stirring strings and an intricate battery of crashing cymbal rolls like drum sticks splashing into a pool of mercury.
After a long, fan-frustrating gap, Tomorrow's Harvest arrived in 2013. From track titles like "Sick Times," "Cold Earth", and "Come To Dust through to the ambiguous album title Tomorrow's Harvest itself, the record is shadowed with ecological unease and survivalist undercurrents. Sonically it is steeped in the influence of horror and science fiction film scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter, and draws deliberately on the soundtrack vocabulary of the "video-nasty" era of 1980s straight-to-VHS exploitation movies. Tomorrow's Harvest was the group's first record to break into the UK Top 10 albums chart. Even more amazingly it cracked the Billboard pop chart too - peaking at #13 - a testament to how their fanbase has grown and expanded to new generations of listeners.
Now, after their longest hiatus ever - thirteen years of silence broken only by their celebrated NTS mix Societas X Tape, created for the 30th Anniversary of Warp Records in 2019 - Sandison and Eoin return with a startling new album. Inferno substantially reinvents their sound, drawing on some of the esoteric influences audible in Societas X Tape, while building on the darker atmospheres of Tomorrow's Harvest.
Where once the beats rolled out calm and steady, inducing a head-nodding, heavy-lidded trance, there's new rhythmic tension and density, a crisp intricacy of layered percussion and mid-toned bass as taut as an elastic band. Adding to Inferno's atmosphere of unrest and disquiet is an expanded role for speech soundbites, which in some cases run continuously through an entire song, or are multiply meshed and overlaid to create a feeling of babble - like voices inside your head whispering sinister insinuations. Some of these vocals exude the blank-eyed sincerity of the cult believer; others resemble the kind of admonitory or soothing voices of authority piped out of the public address system in a dystopian movie like THX 1138. Nearly all American voices and often creepily processed, the speech elements woven through Inferno sometimes recall the sampled preachers and talk radio presenters on Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. At other points, the album feels like a soundtrack for an imaginary giallo, that Italian genre of psychological horror movie known for lurid, saturated colors, disorienting camera work, and tempestuously dramatic scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and Goblin.
Inferno is a departure in other ways too: having hitherto largely avoided the topical and concentrated on conjuring up their own dreamworld alternative to reality, Inferno is unmistakably a record attuned to the dark forces and evil actors currently at work across the planet, a response to a world consumed by delusion, untruth, and digitally-updated forms of demonology. It's probably as close to a political statement as these mystery men will ever approach.
For Boards of Canada have always avoided anything explicit or crystal clear; they traffic in the evocative and the elusive. Everything about their music - the artwork, the track titles, the vocal samples used - is pregnant with meaning. But unlike the blabbermouth self-curators of modern music, Sandison and Eoin prefer not to spell things out, for fear of breaking the spell. "If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings... it would ruin them for a lot of people. It's more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and that's the beauty of it."
- Simon Reynolds
One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality"
So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in a f motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an echo itself of that famous McLuhan book with all the pix, The Medium is the Massage).
Ha, ha - the twist at the end where he reveals that he nicked these pearls himself, from Jim Jarmusch.
Clever-ish.
But as is pointed out in my Recreativity piece, the key bit of the Godard quote that Jarmusch and now Arden brandish is "it's where you take them to".
That, right there, is the aperture, the window, through which creep back the very properties of originality / genius / innovation that the recreativity mavens are trying so hard to exorcise and eliminate.
Seeing that reminded of how desperately uninspiring I found the David Shields book Reality Hunger. The one that's almost entirely composed of meant-to-be-inspiring quotes from others (he wanted them to be unidentified, but the publisher forced him to run attributions at the end of the book) (in pique he added some text urging the reader to cut out and throw away the attribution pages).
Like, did Shields intend to write a proper book and then just gave up and decided to present his research, in this barely organised fashion?
One of that select company of books I started and just gave up on well before the end. Usually I am a dogged, tenacious, teeth-gritted, gotta-get-to-the-finish-line reader.
My favorite feat of overcome-by-apathy though is getting to within 20 pages of the end of On the Road and then just pulling over and giving up.
Talking of books...
There is a super-expanded remix of the Slate article on recreativity which is about 18 thousand words long and was published as a stand-alone mini-book to accompany... the French version of Retromania? Or was it the German? I can't remember! The marshalling of all my thoughts on innovation / originality / nature of creativity, and proof that the best time to write a book is a couple of years after the book comes out, if you get me (i.e. it's sharpened immeasurably by all the arguments you've had with people)
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Another bit from the Arden book, and here he's got the McLaren story badly wrong, both in particulars and in his sense of what it meant
Nostalgia of Mud was started in the early '80s.
(The "beginnings of the 1970s" boutique was Let It Rock and it was at the far end of the King's Road, not just off Oxford Street).
And those Nostalgia of Mud-era clothes were neither unwearable or unbuyable. They were very much for sale. And became fashionable very quickly. Instantly in fact, so hot was Westwood by this point.
But the same thing happened with the shocking punk era get-up - the shop, by then renamed Sex and then Seditionaries (or was it the other way round - I can't remember) and its owners got covered rather rapidly in the glossy fashion mags.
At absolute most, the punk look was a couple of years ahead of its time, not thirty.
What's also odd about this page is a/ the fact that he is talking about originality as a value (whereas the Jarmusch steal is saying the opposite)
And b/ this wholly un-punk illustration on the facing page
did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later)
I don't know if it's as psychologically complex as fetishism, it's more simple greed - you've consumed the major works by the artist you love, and maybe all the stuff released in their lifetime, and you think, I want to keep consuming. I want to keep eating this good stuff, and maybe even the less good stuff will still have some flavour, some nutritious value. So you convince yourself that all these unreleased tracks - the alternate takes, the demos, the live versions, the tracks that the artist didn't consider good enough to release at the time - that these are worth listening to. And there is a psychology of consumerism where it is enjoyable to spend money - so these repackagings are excuses to get the credit card out.
There is a great English expression, a sort of maxim: "Enough is as good as a feast". It's the kind of thing my mum would say, basic common sense wisdom. What it means is that once your belly is full - there is little further to be gained from eating anymore. The satiation point should be your stopping point, regardless of all the tasty looking things arrayed on the table. It doesn't quite apply to music, because it's not a physiological appetite. But if you think about in those terms, you might decide "actually the Beatles put out in their lifetime all these great albums, and non-album singles with awesome B-sides like "Rain" and "I'm Down" and so forth. That really ought to be enough for anyone. Why not stick at that - however many hours of consummate brilliance that all adds up to? Why feel like you need to hear the alternate versions of tracks whose definitive form was achieved and released? All the prototypes for "Strawberry Fields Forever"." In other artforms, only scholars have interested in the draft versions that authors wrote of novels, or all the things they cut out and discarded. Only a very few cineaste fiends want to see the Director's Cut of movies, or the out-takes and bonus bits on the second disc of the DVD or Blue-Ray. In music, though, there seems to be a larger appetite for all this extraneous material.
- The sixties still cast a spell over our present, especially music-wise, why? Because of the baby-boomers who have money to spend - or because the music was better at the time?
I think there is a romance of the early days of something - when it is emerging. The Sixties was a tremendous surge of innovation in songwriting, lyrics, guitar playing, what could be done in the recording studio, even what could be achieved in terms of live performance and amplification. There's was incredibly rapid evolution, and a lot of people trying things for the first time - like the Beatles and Byrds with their Indian music experiments. But mostly the music revolution seemed to be in synch with a larger revolution. People talked about the Movement, or the Underground, or simply the Revolution - and music was right in the centre of things but so were a bunch of other things. It was like a pan-cultural surge of innovation and transgression and emancipation. It matters to the baby boomers who can remember it, but it also has a powerful pull on the imagination of subsequent generations. Even as I was into punk and postpunk, I was fascinated by the Sixties and read books about it and listened to the records. I am technically a babyboomer by age - born 1963, the last year before the cut-off point. But really my generation is the next one, Generation X. And the 1960s seemed to me not a discredited thing but really the previous great revolutionary phase that punk and rave and shoegaze all had some kind of relationship with.
- „We will never agree as we agreed on Elvis", Lester Bangs famously wrote in his obituary of the king. Don't you feel as a writer about music that the fragmentation of the genre in the age of YouTube will make the narrative more difficult, even obsolete?
It makes it more difficult but also more urgent and essential. You can enjoy music from the past without any sense of history, but if you want to understand it, you need a sense of chronology and of context.
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.
Dear Simon Reynolds,
My name is ___________________ and I work with the programming team at BBC Radio 4, a nationally recognized Hot Adult Contemporary station reaching more than 1.39 million weekly listeners across the UK, with additional global reach through online streaming.
We recently came across your book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, and were immediately drawn to its sharp and thought-provoking exploration of nostalgia and repetition in modern culture.
What stands out is your argument that contemporary pop culture is increasingly recycling its own history revivals, remakes, and retrospectives rather than pushing forward into new creative territory. Your analysis of how digital access to the past has reshaped cultural production offers a compelling lens on music, media, and creativity in the modern age.
The way you connect cultural trends with technological shifts and audience behavior gives the book both intellectual depth and wide relevance, especially in a time where nostalgia seems more dominant than ever.
Your work would strongly resonate with our audience, particularly listeners interested in music, media, cultural criticism, and the evolution of creativity in the digital era.
We would be delighted to feature you in a live on-air author interview, offering you the opportunity to discuss the forces driving this cultural "retromania," explore whether originality is being redefined, and connect with a wide and engaged audience.
What This Feature Includes
• A professionally hosted live radio interview (via phone or Zoom)
• A dedicated on-air spotlight highlighting your book and its key ideas
• National UK broadcast coverage along with global online streaming
• A targeted promotional campaign supporting your book
• One full month of on-air advertising promoting your title
• Strategic media positioning to strengthen your author brand
Coordination & Promotion
To ensure a smooth and fully supported feature, we apply a one-time production fee of $149, which covers:
• Media promotion and campaign coordination
• Radio segment preparation and priority scheduling
• Technical arrangements for the live broadcast
• Advertising placement and campaign management
If this opportunity sounds appealing, I would be happy to share available interview slots and guide you through the next steps to secure your feature.
Warm regards,
______________
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This scam-spam was probably generated by AI but I would really like to believe a human was clueless enough to describe Radio 4 to me, a British born person, as "a Hot Adult Contemporary station"
Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.
The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.
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What did the poet say?
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil
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Dancersend was incandescent last week.
And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see.
A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before.
This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day - doesn't nearly do it justice.
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And of course the bluebell woods - again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.
But I've gushed about this time of year in England before.
So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.
From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:
Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.
The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.
But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.
You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history, a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.
Release irrationale:
In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast's Allotment.
In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children's book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny 'Ding Dong' Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children's book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney's early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.
The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World's Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.
Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast's Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast's Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her 'Mayday Dew' series of compositions.
The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney's, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity - The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in '76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast's Allotment.
At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast's Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of '85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.
Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast's Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast's Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.
In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast's Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder - Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing 'all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.'
Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.'s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.
Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast's Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to 'herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.'
Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,
Neil P. Quigley
April '26
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The Kilkenny release has understandably and deservedly overshadowed everything else going at the moment.
But I do want to shine a spotlight on some other parish activities that may have escaped your notice.
For instance, those secretive brothers behind Boards of Canada have been shyly, slyly, hinting at a forthcoming release, their first in an absolute age.
It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits.
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Talking of things getting overlooked... I fear that I missed the Keith Seatman album, owing to the long gap since the last newsletter - Counting To Ten Then Back Again came out in February and now there is a remix of a track off the LP, "Clip Clop", done by Simon Heartfield.
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Conversely, I am a little early in drawing your attention to a new album by Fil OK, titled The Belltower, and out in June.
Well, not really early, actually - as it is part 2 of a trilogy of LPs released this year, with The Steeple already out and hearable here, and the final installment, The Dome, due in the autumn.
The trilogy is under Fil's alter-ego We're in the Water and it's sweetly spooky electro-pop in the vicinity of John Foxx and the Belbury Circle
Naturally, I'm all in favor of ecclesiastical electronica.
Although going by the release-rationale, this second installment of the trilogy is less about the ethereal and spiritual and more about the corporeal:
"The concept of the album is how our bodies constantly guide us: through instinct and movement we are attracted to pleasure, beauty, nourishment, relief, connection and survival, and intuitively away from pain, discomfort, danger, excess and the grotesque. These impulses can be gentle or relentless, welcome or intrusive. We call them needs, instincts, desires - but, at their core, they are simply the language of the organism itself. To live is to inhabit this system: to navigate and direct a restless, vivid machine of nerves and muscles as it carries us forward through life.... Where The Steeple leaned into cerebral electronic textures, The Belltower brings guitars and beats into sharper focus, emphasizing the resonance and vibration of bells and twanging guitar refrains on tracks like "Nothing Is Certain But Death", "The Headaches" and "Not Sleepy", as well as rhythm and distortion on "Not Quite Naked" and "Storm Before The Calm" - the latter a dark electro murder ballad inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lyrically, the new album explores a range of bodily states and experiences - waking, breathing, seeing, identifying, enjoying, suffering, escaping, fornicating, violating, dying and the peculiar theatre of cohabiting...
"The three new works planned for this year each interpret the lyrics and music of the songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation.
"Whereas The Steeple imagined the mind as a place of elevation and introspection, The Belltower represents the body - vibrating in visceral resonance - tunes and rhythms designed to make the blood flow and the body move."
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Talking of "sweetly spooky" - not really hauntology, and not a new release, but newly nailed to my brain - is year-abroad student Naomi Elizabeth, currently studying Instagrammatology at Pendley Manor Arts Institute, but I for one think she should go back to making tunes like these...
Wet Leg goes hyperpop
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The supernaturally prolific Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country has yet another book out (how does he do it?! Surely he is now in double figures? My refractory period for a new all-new tome seems to be a decade!).
Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995
Full information about its scope and contents, and how to buy it, is at the A Year in the Country blog.
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A Year in the Country brings us back to where we started - the English countryside, succulently ablaze this month, a vernal inferno
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz
"Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States' Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us.
For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street.... Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children's entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than "Geometry of Circles" (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison's hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic."
"... The atmosphere of PBS's 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy's contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin"
If the concept of "PBS Unconscious" doesn't clue you in then maybe these pix will
"And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. "This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy," said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy."
Borges to death [ 29-Mar-26 12:02am ]Reading Charlie Warzel's piece at The Atlantic about "monitoring the situation" - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions - I thought of two prophetic bits of writing:
Baudrillard, in "The Ecstasy of Communication", 1982, on how the modern domestic space is effectively a kind of orbital satellite plugged into telematic streams of data:
Bravo, and Jean B probably could have - should have? - retired after writing this essay, everything that later came is just embellishment.
But even more amazingly prophetic is this short story by Borges from 1949, "The Aleph"
"I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins… This twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain--mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad"
"The Aleph" culminates in the character's access to an experience of absolute data-saturation and overwhelming omniscience, what another initiate describes as "the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending."
Today's plugged-in consciousness seems to be trending towards a paradoxical state that fuses total anxiety and total boredom - instability and inertia..
You might wonder, as Warzel does in his own very-well-worth reading piece, if it is deliberately designed to paralyse - the besieged attention just gives up... the phrase he uses is "attentional death".
Indeed it's a kind of saturation bombing in itself.
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The Warzel piece is titled: One Situation After Another
The dek goes as follows: Doomscrolling is over. Now, everyone is "monitoring the situation."
The piece starts:
"From the comfort of my desk, I can see it all. A series of webcam feeds show me the sun setting over Tel Aviv and southern Lebanon. A map of the world, flecked with red dots, indicates that most of Europe and the Middle East are on "high alert." I toggle a button on the map's control panel, and the globe is instantly latticed with the locations of undersea fiber-optic cables. Below the map, a live feed of Bloomberg TV is running with the chyron Oil Extends Rout on Stockpile Talks. I scroll down and am greeted by walls of headlines, grouped into categories such as "World News" and "Intel Feed." A "country instability" meter clocks Iran at 100 percent, while a different widget informs me that the world's "strategic risk overview" remains "stable" at 50, whatever that means.
"I am looking at World Monitor, a website that turns any browser into a makeshift situation room, and I love it. Built to look like a cross between a Bloomberg terminal and a big screen at U.S. Strategic Command, the site aims to display as much information about world events as possible in an assortment of real-time feeds. This is information overload presented as intelligence.
"World Monitor was built over a single weekend in January by Elie Habib, an engineer based in the United Arab Emirates whose day job is as CEO of Anghami, one of the Middle East's largest music-streaming services. "I wanted to extract the signal from the noise," he told me recently. But what he really built, by his own admission, is a noise machine. Right now, the site pulls in more than 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, prediction markets, satellite movements, weather alerts, major-airport flight data, fire outbreaks, and the operational status of cloud services such as Cloudflare and AWS. The information is all real, but what exactly a person ought to do with it is unclear."
Warzel writes about the swarm of memes about World Monitor and the phrase "monitoring the situation":
"Ours is a culture that has developed an insatiable need for instant information on all things at all times. Of course, we all live in saturated information environments, powered by constant connectivity and on-demand-answer services—Google, Wikipedia, chatbots. But I've also come to see all of this as a defense mechanism in an era of real chaos, when overlapping crises and technologies make the world feel unknowable and hyperreal.
"The abiding feeling of 2026 is that too many consequential things are happening too fast for most people to follow, let alone understand.... Monitoring is a reasonable response to all of this: It seems to offer a sense of agency....
Paradoxically, though -
"The effect is not necessarily that you feel more informed; if you're anything like me, you probably feel alienated, if not worse. Those who have chosen to try to keep up with the news cycle in 2026 are awareing themselves to death, as the writer Geoff George put it.
"The situation brings to mind yet another grotesque online phenomenon: "gooning." For the blessedly unaware, gooning is when maladjusted young men consume immense, overstimulating amounts of pornography and masturbate for hours on end to reach some kind of transcendent release....
The pay-off
"Total bombardment is partly a surrender to the internet and its logic and algorithms—a kind of attentional death in which a person is no longer overwhelmed because they have given up. You could also see it as an attempt to hold their footing as the zone floods with shit. Because everything is happening too much, too fast. More.
There is a cost to all of this—a flattening of every event, feeling, and piece of art, commerce, joy, and suffering into the same atomic unit of attention, all of them easily replaced by what comes next. The worst, most shameless people in the world already understand this and use that cold logic to their advantage. You do not need to justify a war if you believe that, ultimately, people will lose interest in it and move on to the next outrage.
I have suggested in the past that our information ecosystem is broken. But I now suspect that's wrong: This is how it is meant to work. These online products sustain themselves by making us dependent on the content that makes us feel powerless and miserable. Where does this all lead? To further exploitation? To some kind of informational oblivion? Or will there be a breaking point, a moment when the addled masses reject the logic and speed of our information environment? I can't say—but I'm monitoring the situation."
Or as Baudrillard himself climaxes:
In Baudrillard's schema, the stage (scene of drama, passion, selfhood) is opposed to the screen (which is ob-scene, a cold space of infinite loss, infinite contamination)
Perhaps then the metaphors that I track at the other place, obsessively, to do with political theater.... our punditocracy's endless tropes of anti-theatricality (showbiz, spectacle, TV reruns, etc)... these are in fact out of date... they don't really have a purchase on reality, which is now reels-ality (if you'll forgive me).
Reality - politics, war, deportation enforcement, etc - is just feed for the reels, the demonic engine of attention-enthrallment and remorseless erosion of the capacity for linear-thinking
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Borges on his protagonist's encounter with the Aleph itself:
How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency...
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland's — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon - the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.
Hauntology Parish Newsletter Yuletide Edition: Ghost Box 20th; Moon Wiring Club; Lo Five; Oneohtrix Point Never; Jean-Michel Jarre, Bernie Parmegiani, Ms. Jean Schwarz, Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab [ 06-Dec-25 12:02am ]
Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.
The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but clean forgot about my other favorite record label of the 21st Century, Ghost Box. The two imprints seemed linked in my mind as heroic projects - both in their different ways manifestations of archive fever, the disinterment of buried futures.... and sources of immense ongoing pleasure for this listener.
My feelings about Ghost Box are expressed best in this thing I wrote for the 10th Anniversary in 2015.
Twenty years - goodness me, how time has flown by! Two whole decades since me and the late Reverend Fisher started rambling on about hauntology (although of course the entity had been taking nebulous form for a goodly while before its christening).
Chiltern Radio's Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick kindly invited me to chat with them about the anniversary for their show Cujo (short for The Culture Journalist) . You can eavesdrop on the witterings over here.
Further musings on this merry-melancholy subject at the end of this newsletter, but first some new news - activity in the parish.
A bursting hamper of Moon Wiring Club music - the double-CD / double-LP Gruesome Shrewd and a cassette, Grisly Exaggerated - across which Ian Hodgson develops a new sound, at once recognisably MWC and a defamiliarizing extension. Avail yourself of the "Grisly Bundle" at his online shoppe and get a taster with this film below.
Trying to capture its qualities for myself, a couple of phrases sprung to mind...."Time becomes a quicksand" is one, and the other is "stretchy". As it happens, Ian himself uses the phrase "endless elongation" in the release-rationale below.
These tracks reminds me of the process by which Brighton or Blackpool rock is made: a thick slab of taffy gets extruded out to enormous length, in the process thinning out while still retaining its internal patterning. It's the vocal element, more pronounced and grotesquely deformed than ever, that forms the "lettering" inside the stick of rock that is each sprawling track on Gruesome and Grisly.
As it turns out, the idea of tooth-enamel-eroding souvenir treats bought at the seaside is a suitable thought given that the albums are loosely inspired by coach tours and the sensation of temporal suspension experienced while on holiday. Take it away, Ian:
"One of the main aesthetic influences was what I describe as 'Coach World' ~ that feeling on a holiday (or long journey) that you've got to spend 18 hours on a coach. At first you think 'I'm going to snap' but then after 3 hours you get into a different rhythm and before long (after 8 hours) you kind of can't remember what life was like before you started the journey ~ hence entering Coach World. What I wanted was music that has something of that endless elongation vibe. Initially daunting, then meditative, then you don't want to leave and have to listen again....
Another aesthetic influence was the idea of Holiday Memory ~ a fleeting moment of a holiday situation (going around an art gallery for example), where you can remember with clarity (or what your brain thinks is clarity) a specific moment (the angle of the walls, how the lighting looked, spotlights on glass, colours maybe scents or what you were feeling) forever hightened in your mind in a specific way (because you are on holiday) but you have little or no memory of what preceded / succeeded that moment. So you end up with a loop of thought, or a series of loops as a memory of a holiday from 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Over time they might not all even be from the same holiday.... This concept was something that kept popping into my mind as I assembled the music, sort of 'bursts of heightened memory looping'.
"Sonic Procedure wise, I was getting bored of limited melodic chord changes and wanted something that had a bit of distance from what my standard compositional impulses were. Essentially the majority of the music is comprised of micro-samples (like a snap blast of fuzzy background music on a VHS tape documentary c1982) that are then cleaned up a bit and subjected to endless processes (re-sampling is apparently the key word here). After doing this for several months I had a substantial wonky library of component tune elements that were then deployed in the guiding service of the Gruesome Shrewd package holiday aesthetic.
What I found was that generally the tracks fell into 3 styles ~
a) Sludgy Psyche Rock
b) 80s Corporate Corroded
c) Ambient Slurry (naturally there was also a judicious application of disembodied voices).
I suppose you could say this sort of sound world is Chopped + Screwed (which does sound a little like Gruesome Shrewd) but whereas (in my non-expert knowledge) C&S tends to have that nice thick syrupy sound + big bass + distortion, I'd say there's something different going on with GS/GE even though some of the production techniques would be fairly similar. It's sort of elongated chewing toffee bar mids rather than cough syrup mixture lows.
Compositionally I wanted something that sounded different to the more DAW / Electronica aspects of some MWC stuff ~ 'here are the beats / here goes the bass / that melody works as a chorus / tighten up that bit / move the last bit to the beginning as it has a better hook' etc. When putting these tracks together, quite often I went against my instincts and instead of tightening things up, deliberately left things more loose and allowed elements to play out / loop for longer...
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Coaches - specifically the rippled patterns of rain streaking down the windows of a coach in motion - is one of the mental images that often comes to mind when listening to the music of Lo Five. Another is the foreshortening effect on your visual range caused by light drizzle, a muffling of distance. Something about the grey-scale shimmer summons those mundane-mystical moments where boredom and bliss are so very close indeed.
There is a new Lo Five record - Superdank, released on Lunar Module, a CD-oriented imprint of Castles in Space - and it pulls me into its paradoxically inertial motion as irresistibly as ever. Slipping Time's moorings again....
Release rationale:
Lo Five is as proud as he is anxious to present SUPERDANK, a CD album packed to the green gills with heavy dubs for sleepy schlubs.
SUPERDANK is ostensibly presented as a collection of hardware stoner jams, structured in the form of an hour long edible-induced psycho-narrative, taking the listener on an aural voyage - kicking off at pleasant buzztown, calling past existential paranoiaville, then landing back in the relative safety of sofaborough in time for tea and crumpets.
But what is SUPERDANK? What does it mean?
If we were were inclined to illustrate the vibe, we'd say it's along the lines of:
• Forgetting you had an A-level exam because you were busy making the world's largest hash brown
• Having a panic attack in the shower because you couldn't gauge how hot the water was
• Claiming to have invented the story to The Matrix before watching The Matrix
• Using the pages of a bible for cigarette paper after running out of Rizlas
Is SUPERDANK a flimsy concept designed to package a bunch of disparate tracks we weren't sure wether to release or not? Or is it more of a subconscious collective fugue state, woven into the very fabric of our confused mental substrate? Maybe it's both? Who cares?
In either case draw the blinds, turn off your mobile and settle in for a trip you'll potentially regret forever, because it's time... for SUPERDANK...
Lunar Module is thrilled to present the latest album from Wirral based sonic alchemist Neil Grant, better known as Lo Five - a record that feels like it was beamed in from a parallel dimension where melody and madness hold hands.
In an era dominated by algorithmic predictability, Lo Five remains that rarest of artists: a producer whose music is unashamedly strange yet somehow impossibly tuneful. It's the sound of a Commodore 64 dreaming it's a jazz orchestra, or a broken music box trying to remember a rave from 1993 - familiar enough to hum along, alien enough to make the hairs on your neck stand up in delighted confusion.
Beyond the speakers, Neil Grant is a quietly heroic figure in the UK electronic underground. The time he pours into supporting fellow artists - organising events, mentoring newcomers, championing overlooked talent - make him as vital a community builder as he is an innovator in the studio.
This new Lo Five album is more than a collection of tracks; it's a reminder that electronic music can still surprise, unsettle, and seduce in equal measure. It's strange. It's tuneful. It's essential.
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American exchange student Daniel Lopatin has a fab new album out, Tranquilizer.
Over at Line Noise, though, Ben Cardew invokes conceptronica in trying to explain why's he not feeling this new Oneohtrix Point Never record.
Although tickled by this idea that I danced myself right out the womb, I have to do whatever the opposite of co-sign is here: partly because I don't generally find Dan's conceptual apparatus to be overbearing, it works more as a bonus supplement for the listener, but also because I loved Tranquilizer on first listen, as a simple flood of aural pleasure, no cerebration required. (I also don't think Oneohtrix has ever really been in the business of making people dance, so it seems an odd expectation). The conceptual aspect seem to work primarily as a germinal spur for the artist. In this case, the procedure involves sample CDs from the 1990s as a source that is then put through a series of processes - sounds connotative of luxury, relaxation, high-quality, are then tesselated in ways that are weirder and more abstract than their original intended function, but retain the aura of polish and professionalism
There seems to be a spectrum of ways artists in this approximate area operate. Some have a defined framing concept from the start (The Caretaker, or Debit), others work with a procedure or an idea of what the starter material is going to be (restriction, or focus, as the mother of invention). Some (Ghost Box for example) have a mood board, a constellation of musical and non-musical reference points and coordinates that give the project its consistency without overdetermining it. And then others still grope about in the formless dark, molding and grappling without any premeditated notion of where they are going, following intuition and instinct until a direction or shape emerges (I imagine this is how Autechre go about it). In the end, it doesn't really matter - the outcome is all that counts.
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Up at the Insitute, there's been a flurry of archival activity.
Notably Jean-Michel Jarre's very vaporwave looking if not sounding experimental electronic album of 1972, Deserted Palace
And also collations of work by Bernie Parmegiani and by ex-wife Jean Schwarz
The Bernie collection includes his marvelous music for this marvelous animation by Piotr Kamler, which almost singlehandedly propelled me into the (once fevered, now somewhat dormant) obsession with experimental animation as fitfully still expressed at the blog Dreams, Built By Hand and its attendant ever-growing playlist, which would take at least a week to watch through. You'll notice that "L'araignéléphant" - it translates as "The Spider Elephant" - is the first film at the top of that playlist.
Another archival release of recent years, now itself reissued in spiffed up form, comes from our Irish affiliates the Miúin label: Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab Volume 1 now comes with a book and a poster.
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Ghost Box, I'm told, is actually in a state of hibernation these days, with one driving force occupied with other non-sonic activities and the other determinedly pushing into different areas with his Belbury Music imprint. The most recent release is Runner's High by Pneumatic Tubes (an alias for Jesse Chandler of Midlake /Mercury Rev) - a concept album about running.Intriguing murmurs reach my ears of the mood board for forthcoming Jim Jupp music - Bill Nelson, Clannad, Japan, Axxess (whoever the eff they may be)... fretless bass, ebow guitar, and the 82-84 transition moment between analogue and clunky early digital. I do not know if it will be as Belbury Poly or some other identity.
There is a parallel between the evolution of Ghost Box and my favorite labels of the '90s, Moving Shadow and Reinforced: sampladelic producers who gradually get into playing hardware analogue synths, electric and even acoustic instruments. That maturing into musicianship generated some wonderful dividends in both cases, but for me the core of hauntology, as it was with hardcore jungle, is the sorcery of sampling: chunks of dead time reanimated. Ardkore and hauntology are both wyrd British mutant forms of hip hop.
The collage aspect is one reason why Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is the supreme visual artwork counterpart to what Ghost Box and Moon Wiring Club and The Caretaker would later do. The film's audio aspect also prefigures hauntology (it was made in 1999). Fiorucci is also a convergence point - alongside Caretaker's The Death of Rave - between the Moving Shadow/Reinforced realm and the Ghost Box et al world. (Clean forgot that the Fiorucci audio-score actually came out on a imprint called The Death of Rave). Dream English Kid 1964-1999, although based around a different memoradelic mood board, is also in this zone of revenant reverie as memory work.
We really should arrange a showing of both films at the Film Club.
Let me wind this newsletter up with my Top 20 Ghost Box releases (including a couple that are technically on another label but still count as GB releases in my mind)
1/ The Focus Group - hey let loose your love2/ Belbury Poly - The Willows3/ The Advisory Circle - Other Channels4/ Roj - The Transactional Dharma Of Roy5/ The Focus Group - Sketches and Spells 6/ The Advisory Circle - Mind How You Go7/ ToiToiToi - Vaganten8/ Eric Zann - Ouroborindra 9/Belbury Poly - From An Ancient Star10/ Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age 11/ John Foxx and the Belbury Circle - Empty Avenues 12/ Beautify Junkyards - Cosmorama13/ The Focus Group - Electrik Karousel 14/ The Advisory Circle - From Out Here 15/ Belbury Poly - Farmer's Angle16/ Children of Alice17 / The Focus Group - Stop Motion Happening with the Focus Groop18/ Beautify Junkyards - Nova 19/ ToiToiToi - Im Hag20/ Beautify Junkyards - The Invisible World of
And then in a special category of its own
Paul Weller - In Another Room (mainly just for the sheer shock surprise of its existing and him being a fan but a creditable effort)
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Suddenly remembered that it was Julian and Jim who did the early version of this very circular, cranking it out back then on a hand-operated mimeograph. I can find barely any proof of its existence online but I know I have a paper-and-ink copy somewhere: The Belbury Parish Magazine.
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- The half-lives of hauntology continue - word reaches me of this book, out on Reaktion next summer.
- By my count, this is the fourth substantial book on the H-zone (not counting the A Year in the Country ever-growing seriess of volume, or the 'pastoral horror' microgenre or 'scarred by 70s kids tell'-sploitation subset).
- I suppose the first would be our dear lost boy's Ghosts of My Life.
retrochat [ 11-Nov-25 4:36am ]I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification.
The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.
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I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology...
I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year.
Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality" than Retromania.
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Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it....
In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb:
"The first quarter of the 21st Century had a paradoxical feeling - so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that's fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with."
Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.
(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re. the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).
As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective - "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones.
Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself? (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)
The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania".
Would that we were! In both senses of the word - the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.
Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave - that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.
There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.
Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things. Inventive, if not quite innovative.
The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up?
I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis).
But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?
That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial.
In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc).
But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.
The secret shame of the epigone [ 07-Nov-25 8:40pm ]Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song - appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts.
"I took an album from the ancient unit
And I walked on down the hall
"Jimi, I want to kill you"
He stood before me in a vision
With treasured secrets of the blues
A voice rang out from battered speakers
"You are not fit to shine my shoes".
Jeff Lynne, virtually a Bloomian archetype of the "weak rocker", here on "Beatles Forever" fesses up to his unrecoupable artistic debts. But then chickened out and didn't release the track.
Key couplet:
I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care
I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs
Full lyric:
Beatles forever
Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore
The beauty of the harmonies, the sound of the Fab Four
All their music will live on and on (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)
They really taught the world to sing (She came in through the bathroom window)
Beatles forever, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
Beatles forever, "All You Need Is Love", yeah yeah yeah
Beatles forever, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," wooh
Beatles forever, "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" (number nine)
'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet
You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune
Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat
I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care
I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs
Makes you wonder how they did it (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)
I wish I knew the secret, yeah yeah yeah (She came in through the bathroom window)
Beatles forever, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and ever
Beatles forever, "Nowhere Man" and "Penny Lane", yeah yeah yeah
Beatles forever, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"
Beatles forever, "Get Back" and "Yesterday"
'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet
You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune
Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat
All the children sing
Beatles forever, "Please Please Me", "Eleanor Rigby"
Beatles forever, "I Am The Walrus" (yeah yeah yeah) goo-goo g'joob
Beatles forever, "She Loves You", ooh, "Day Tripper"
Beatles forever, "Eight Days A Week", "Magical Mystery Tour"
'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet
You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune
Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat
Ah ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah ah-ah, ah-ah-all-ah
Ah, feel the beat, ah-ah-ah-ah, gotta move your feet ah-ah ah-ah
Rhythm and blues, ah-ah-ah-ah, pretty tune
Ah, rock and roll, ah-ah-ah-ah, eternity, ah-ah ah-ah
Started out, ah-ah ah-ah, as Merseybeat
Beatles forever
Beatles forever, yeah yeah yeah
Beatles forever
What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse? [ 27-Oct-25 8:29am ]Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!
This BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance.
Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score.
And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.
As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West).
There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962.
The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.
I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.
There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness.
One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.
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Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:
"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.
"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "
Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"
Overstimulation [ 24-Oct-25 7:50am ]
Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800
The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.
"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors...
And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters.
In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility. Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today
"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled.
Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798
_-_The_River_Wye_at_Tintern_Abbey_-_PD.46-1958_-_Fitzwilliam_Museum.jpg)
I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute?
Busy bee
Buzzing all day long
What's the hurry?
There's surely something wrong
I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright
'Cause your friends are picking flowers
Take away all my light
But you see busy bee
It's all for love
People pick them
You lick them all for love
Lalalalala...
She was a virgin, of humble origin
She knew of no sin
Her eyes as bright as the stars without light
Spent all the night
Hyperstatic Charge [ 24-Sep-25 2:30am ]Someone asked me what I meant by this term….
"Hyperstasis" is a concept I came up with after listening to a bunch of new electronic dance albums that had been hyped by music journalists, and having this mixed response: being quite impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the music, while ultimately being dissatisfied because nothing on the record ever really felt to me like it was "totally new" or "the future". (Which is the sensation I got all the time from electronic dance music in the Nineties, that the music was hurtling into the future and mutating wildly into all kinds of unprecedented forms). Often I concluded that the artists had managed to avoid being indebted to a single source by being diversely derivative.
Hyperstasis is a paradox, similar to the idea of "running on the spot", or the hamster who cycles endlessly and frenetically on his wheel. The "hyper" element is the way that the music, across the whole of an album but sometimes also within any given track, shuttles back and forth across a kind of grid-space of influences and sources. It is recombinant without ever quite innovating. It moves at a great speed and with great fluency within terra cognita, the sonic territory of the already known. But it never quite manages to push into the unknown and take the listener "out there".
Hyperstasis is a condition that afflicts individual artists and pieces of music. But it is also a condition that can trap an entire genre or field of music. It is not such a terrible state of affairs: good records still come out, often a lot of them. Hyperstasis is not a state of entropy and inertia so much as a febrile stage that follows a period of earlier creativity, which generated a lot of material to be reworked and recombined. But the suspicion is that the frenzy of hyperstasis is what precedes a final collapse.
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Although I have no recollection of taking it from somewhere or even seeing it before I started using it circa 2009-10… it seemed like a word that would have to have been invented for some other purpose. I did look it up once and seem to recall it had some very specific meaning in physics or maybe finance.
It feels to me to have some vague kinship with stagflation, but there isn't a direct correlation or analogy - more that both words describe something oxymoronic, "shouldn't be happening", worst of both worlds syndrome.
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Anti-Retro (Foucault else to do) [ 19-Aug-25 5:12pm ]Historians of retro concur that the first time "retro" was used in its current way was in France in the early '70s, with the phrase mode rétro - the retro style - to describe a spate of historical films about France during World War 2, which then sparked a 1940s fashion revival.
Here is an interview with Michel Foucault from July 1974 in which he caustically castigates the trend. It's from Cahiers du Cinema and it's titled ANTI-RETRO' and Foucault's interlocutors are Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana. Translated by Annwyl Williams. Disappointingly the word "retro" never passes the lips of MF himself. In truth, the discussion is not really about retro as we would understand the term - depthless and dehistoricized duplication of the past - but about historical revisionism and popular memory.
CAHIERS: Let's take as our starting point the journalistic phenomenon of the 'retro style', One might simply ask: How is it that films like Lacomhe Lucien or The Night Porter are possible today? Why are they so immensely popular? We think there are three levels that ought to be taken into account. First, the political conjuncture. Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new type of relation to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is being created, one that indicates very clearly - and in a way that is plain to everyone - the death of Gaullism. We therefore have to see, in so far as Gaullism remains very closely associated with the period of the Resistance, how this manifests itself in the films that are being made. Second, how can bourgeois ideology be mounting an attack in the breaches of orthodox Marxism - call it rigid, economistic, mechanistic , whatever you like - which for a very long time has provided the only grid for interpreting social phenomena? Finally, where do militants fit into all this, since militants are consumers and sometimes producers of films?
What has happened since Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity is that the floodgates have opened. Something which until then had been completely suppressed, that is to say banned, is being openly voiced. Why?
FOUCAULT: That can be explained, I think, by the fact that the history of the War and what happened before and after the War has never really been inscribed in anything other than wholly official histories. These official histories are basically centred on Gaullism which, on the one hand, Was the only way of writing that history in terms of an honourable nationalism and, on the other hand, was the only way of casting the Great Man, the man of the right and of outdated nineteenth-century nationalisms, in a historical role.
It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, and on the other hand the right - and we all know how it behaved at the time of the War - found itself purified and sanctified by de Gaulle. Suddenly the right and France were reconciled in this way of making history: don't forget that nationalism was the climate in which nineteenth-century history (and especially its teaching) were born.
What has never been described is what happened in the very depths of the country from 1936 on, and even from the end of the First World War to the Liberation.
CAHIERS: So, what has perhaps been happening since The Sorrow and the Pity is that the truth is making its return into history. The question is whether it's really the truth.
FOUCAULT: That has to be linked to the fact that the end of Gaullism has put a stop to this justification of the right by de Gaulle and the episode in question. The old Petainist right, the old collaborationist, Maurrasian and reactionary right which camouflaged itself as best it could behind de Gaulle, now considers itself entitled to produce a new version of its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been disenfranchised historically and politically, is coming to the fore again.
It supported Giscard explicitly. It no longer needs to wear a mask, and so it can write its own history. And among the factors that explain Giscard's current acceptance by half the French (plus two hundred thousand), one mustn't forget films like those we're talking about - whatever the film-makers actually intended. The fact that all that has actually been shown has allowed the right to re-form along certain lines. In the same way that, inversely, it's the blurring of the distinctions between the nationalist right and the collaborationist right that has made these films possible. It's all part of the same thing.
CAHIERS; This piece of history is therefore being rewritten both in the cinema and on television, with debates like those on Dossiers de I'ecran (which chose the theme of the French under the Occupation twice in two months). Film-makers considered to be more or less on the left are also apparently involved in this rewriting of history. That's something we have to investigate.
FOUCAULT: I don't think things are that simple. What I was saying a moment ago was very schematic. Let me continue.
There's a real battle going on. And what's at stake is what might be roughly called popular memory. It's absolutely true that ordinary people, I mean those who don't have the right to writing, the right to make books themselves, to compose their own history, these people nevertheless have a way of registering history, of remembering it, living it and using it. This popular history was, up to a point, more alive and even more clearly formulated in the nineteenth century when you had, for example, a whole tradition of struggles relived orally or in texts, songs, etc.
But the fact is that a whole series of apparatuses has been established ('popular literature', cheap books, but also what is taught in school) to block this development of popular memory, and you could say that the project has been, relatively speaking, very successful. The historical knowledge that the working class has about itself is becoming less all the time. When you think, for example, about what the workers knew about their own history at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the tradition of trade unionism - using the term 'tradition' in its full sense - represented up until the First World War, it amounted to something pretty substantial. That has been gradually disappearing. It's disappearing all the time, although it hasn't actually been lost.
Nowadays, cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema. And I think the whole effort has tended towards a recoding of popular memory which exists but has no way of formally expressing itself. People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been.
Since memory is an important factor in struggle (indeed, it's within a kind of conscious dynamic of history that struggles develop), if you hold people's memory, you hold their dynamism. And you also hold their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. You make sure that they no longer know what the Resistance was actually about ...
It's along some such lines, I think, that these films have to be understood. What they're saying, roughly, is that there has been no popular struggle in the twentieth century. This statement has been formulated twice, in two different ways. The first time immediately after the War , when the message was a simple one: 'The twentieth century, what a century of heroes! Churchill, de Gaulle, all those parachute landings, airborne missions, etc.' Which was a way of saying: 'There was no popular struggle, that was the true struggle: But no one, as yet, has said directly: 'There Was no popular struggle.'
The other, more recent way - sceptical or cynical, as you wish - consists in opting for statement pure and simple: 'Well, just look at what happened. Did you see any struggles? Can you see anyone rebelling, taking up arms?'
CAHIERS: There's a kind of rumour that's been going round since, perhaps, The Sarrow and the Pity. Namely: the people of France, in the main, didn't resist, they even accepted collaboration, they accepted the Germans, they swallowed the lot. The question is what that really means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is the popular struggle, or rather people's memory of it.
FOUCAULT: Exactly. That memory has to be seized, governed, controlled, told what to remember. And when you see these films, you learn what to remember: 'Don't believe everything you were once told. There are no heroes. And if there are no heroes, that's because there's no Struggle.' Hence a kind of ambiguity: on the one hand, 'there are no heroes' positively debunks a whole mythology of the war hero in the Burt Lancaster mould. It's a way of saying: 'War isn't that at al1!' Hence an initial impression that historical untruths are being stripped away: finally we're going to be told why we don't all have to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen mission, etc. But hidden beneath the phrase 'There were no heroes' is another phrase which is the real message-'There was no struggle': That's how the process works.
CAHIERS: There's something else that explains why these films are successful. They make use of the resentment felt by those who did indeed struggle against those who did not. For example, in The Sorrow and the Pity people active in the Resistance see the citizens of a town in central France doing nothing, and recognize this response for what it is. It's their resentment that comes across more than anything; they forget that they struggled.
FOUCAULT: What's politically important, to my mind, more than this or that film, is the the fact that there's a series - the network that's made up of all these films and the place they 'occupy' (no pun intended). In other words, what is important is the question: 'Is it possible, at the present time, to make a film that's positive about the struggles of the Resistance?' And of course you realize that it isn't. The impression you have is that people would find it a bit of a joke, or else, quite simply, that no one would go and see it.
I quite like The Sorrow and the Pity. I don't think it was a bad thing to have done. Perhaps I'm wrong, that's not what matters. What matters is that this series of films corresponds exactly to the fact that it is now impossible - as each of the films emphasizes - to make a film about the positive struggles that may have taken place in France around the time of the War and the Resistance.
CAHIERS: Yes. It's the first thing they say if you criticize a film like Malle's. 'What would you have done instead?' is always the reply. And of course we don't have an answer. The left should be beginning to have a point of view on this, but in fact it has yet to be properly worked out.
Then again, this raises the old problem of how to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero.
FOUCAULT. The difficulties don't revolve around the hero so much as around the question of struggle. Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense? It's an old problem: how did history come to speak as it does and to recuperate the past, if not via a procedure which was that of the epic, that's to say, by telling its own story in the heroic mode? That's how the history of the French Revolution was written. The cinema proceeded in the same way. The strategy can always be ironically reversed: 'No, look, there are no heroes, we're all worthless, etc.'
CAHIERS: Let's come back to the 'retro style'. The bourgeoisie has been relatively successful from its own point of view in focusing attention on a historical period (the 1940s) which highlights both its strong and its weak points. For on the one hand that's where the bourgeoisie is most easily unmasked (it laid the ground for Nazism and collaboration), and on the other hand that's where today it tries to justify, in the most cynical way possible, its historical attitude. The problem is: how can we produce a positive account of this same historical period? We - that is, the generation that took part in the struggles of 1968 or Lip. Is this the point on which we should go in and fight, with the idea of possibly, in some way or another, taking the ideological lead? For it's true that the bourgeoisie is on the offensive as well as on the defensive on this question of its recenc history. On the defensive strategically, on the offensive tactically since it has found its strong point, the thing that enables it best co manipulate the facts. But ought we simply - defensively - co be re-establishing the historical truth? Ought we not to be finding the point which, ideologically, would take us into the breach? Is this automatically the Resistance? Why not 1789 or 1968?
FOUCAULT: As far as these films are concerned, I wonder whether something else couldn't be done on the same topic. And by 'topic' I don't mean showing struggles or showing that there were none. What I'm thinking is that its historically true that among ordinary French people there was, at the time of the War, a kind of refusal of war. Now where did that come from? From a whole series of episodes that no one talks about, neither the right because it wishes to hide them, nor the left because it does not want to compromise itself with anything that goes against 'national honour'.
During the First World War, after all, some seven or eight million lads were conscripted. For four years they had a terrible life, they saw millions and millions of people dying around them. Back home in 1920, what did they have to look forward co? A right-wing government, total economic exploitation and finally, in 1932, an economic crisis and unemployment. How could these men, who had been packed into the trenches, still be in favour of war during the decades 1920-30 and 1930-40? In the case of the Germans, defeat rekindled their nationalist instincts, so that this distaste for war was overcome by the desire for revenge. But when all is said and done, people don't like fighting bourgeois wars, with the officers involved, for the gains involved. I believe that was an important phenom_ enon in the working class. And when, in 1940, you have men driving their bikes into a ditch and saying, 'I'm going home', you can't just say, 'What a bunch of cowards' and you can't hide it either. It has co be seen as part of the whole sequence. This disobeying of national orders has to be traced back to its roots. And what happened during the Resistance is the opposite of what we are shown: that's to say that the process of repoliticization, remobilization, the taste for struggle was gradually revived in the working class. It slowly began to revive after the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. What the films show is the reverse process: after the great dream of 1939, which was shattered in 1940, people just give up. This process did indeed take place, but within another much longer process which was moving in the opposite direction and which, beginning with the distaste for war, ended in the middle of the Occupation with the realization that there had to be a struggle. As for the theme 'There are no heroes, everyone's a coward', you have to ask yourself where it comes from and what it grows out of. After all, have there ever been any films about mutiny?
CAHlERS: Yes. There was Kubrick's film (Paths of Glory), which was banned in France.
FOUCAULT: I believe that this disobedience in the context of national armed struggles had a positive political meaning. The historical theme of Lacombe Lucien's family could be picked up again if taken back to Ypres and Douaumont ...
CAHIERS: Which poses the problem of popular memory, of its own particular sense of time, which doesn't correspond at all to the timing of events like changes of government or declarations of war ...
FOUCAULT: The aim of school history has always been to show how people got killed and how very heroic they were. Look what they did to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars ...
CAHIERS: A certain number of films , Malle's and Cavani's included, tend to abandon any attempt to deal with Nazism and fascism historically or in terms of the struggle they provoked. Instead of this, or as well as this, they hold another discourse, usually a sexual one. What do you make of this other discourse?
FOUCAULT: But isn't it quite different in Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter? Personally, I think that in Lacombe Lucien the erotic, passionate aspect has a function that's fairly easy to pinpoint. It's basically a way of reconciling the anti-hero, of saying that he's not as anti-heroic as all that. If all power relationships are indeed distorted by him, and if he renders them ineffective, by contrast, just when you think that for him all erotic relationships are similarly warped, a true relationship is discovered and he loves the girl. On the one hand there is the machinery of power which leads Lucien more and more, from the puncture onwards, towards a kind of madness. And on the other hand there is the machinery of love which seems to be following the same pattern, which seems to be distorted and which, on the contrary, works in the opposite direction and re-establishes Lucien at the end as the beautiful naked boy living in the fields with a girl.
And so there's a kind of fairly facile antithesis between power and love. Whereas in The Night Porter the problem is - in general as in the present conjuncture - a very important one: it's that of the love of power.
Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism. Which basically poses a serious problem: how can power be desirable? No one finds power desirable any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, the power of a ruler, no longer exists. The monarchy and its rituals were made to evoke this kind of erotic relation to power. The great apparatuses of Stalin, and even of Hider, were also created for that purpose. But this has all disintegrated and it's clear that one cannot love Brezhnev or Pompidou or Nixon. It was perhaps possible, at a pinch, to love de Gaulle or Kennedy or Churchill. But what's happening now? Are we not seeing the beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, developed at one derisory, pathetic extreme by the sex shops with Nazi emblems that you find in the United States, and (in a much more tolerable but equally derisory version) in Giscard d'Estaing's attitude when he says, 'We'll march along the streets in suits shaking people's hands, and the kids will have a half-day holiday.' There's no doubt that Giscard fought part of his electoral campaign not just on his physical presence but also on a certain eroticization of his personal self, his elegance.
CAHIERS: That's how he projected himself in an election poster, the one where his daughter is facing him.
FOUCAUlT: That's right. He is looking at France but she is looking at him. Power becomes seductive once again.
CAHIERS: That's something that struck us during the election campaign, especially in the big television debate between Mitterrand and Giscard; they were on quite different territory. Mitterrand seemed like a politician of the old school, belonging to an old-fashioned left. He was trying to sell ideas, themselves dated and slightly quaint, and he did so with great dignity. Giscard on the other hand was selling the idea of power as if he were marketing a cheese.
FOUCAULT: Even quite recently, you had to apologize for being in power. Power had to be erased and not show itself as such. That was, up to a point, how democratic republics functioned: the problem was to render power sufficiently insidious and invisible so that it became impossible to get a hold on what it did or where it was.
Nowadays (and in this de Gaulle played a very important role), power is no longer hidden, it is proud to be there and actually says: 'Love me , because I am power.'
CAHIERS: Perhaps we should speak about the fact that Marxist discourse, as it has been functioning for some time, is somehow unable satisfactorily to account for fascism. Historically speaking, Marxism has accounted for the Nazi phenomenon in an economistic, determinist way, completely ignor ing what was specific to the ideology of Nazism. You can't help wondering how someone like Malle, well enough in touch with developments on the left, can play on this weakness, fall into this gap.
FOUCAULT: Marxism defined nazism and fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie'. This is a definition completely lacking in content, and one which lacks a whole series of articulations. What is missing in particular is the fact that Nazism and fascism were made possible only by the existence within the general population of a relatively large fraction willing to take on and be responsible for a certain number of state functions: repression, control, law and order. That, I think, is an important aspect of Nazism. The fact that it penetrated the general population so deeply and that some power was effectively delegated to certain people on the margins. That's where the word 'dictatorship' is both generally true and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime from the moment he joined the SS or became a Party member! He could actually kill his neighbour, appropriate his wife and his house! That's where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, because it shows that side well. The fact is that, contrary to what one usually understands by dictatorship, that's to say the power of one individual, in a regime like that the most detestable, but in a sense the most intoxicating, part of power was given to a large number of people. It was the SS man who had the power to kill and to rape ...
CAHIERS: That's where orthodox Marxism breaks down. Because this implies that there has to be a discourse on desire.
FOUCAULT: On desire and on power ...
CAHIERS: That's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter are relatively 'strong'. They can handle a discourse on desire and power in a way that seems coherent.
FOUCAULT: In The Night Porter it's interesting to see how, in Nazism, the power of one man was taken up by many people and put to work. That sort of mock tribunal they set up is fascinating. Because from one angle it begins to look like a psychotherapy group, but in fact its power structure is that of a secret society. It's basically an SS cell that has re-formed, that gives itself legal powers different from and in opposition to the power at the centre. We have to remember how power was dispersed, how it was invested within the population itself, we have to remember this impressive displacement of power that Nazism brought about in a society like German society. It is untrue to say that Nazism was the power of the big industrialists continued in another form. It wasn't the power of the top brass reinforced. It was that too, but only on a certain level.
CAHIERS: Indeed, that's an interesting aspect of the film. But what seemed very questionable to us was that it seemed to be saying: 'If you're a typical SS man, that's how you behave. But if on top of that you have a certain "notion of expenditure", that's the formula for a great erotic adventure.' So the film never abandons the idea of seduction.
FOUCAULT: Yes, it's like Lacombe Lucien in that respect. For Nazism never gave anyone a pound of butter, it never gave anything but power. You have to ask yourself, if this regime was nothing other than a bloody dictatorship, how on 3 May 1945 there were still Germans fighting on to the last drop of blood, if these people were not attached to power in some way. Of course, you have to take into account all the pressures, denunciations ...
CAHIERS: But if there were denunciations and pressures, there must have been people to do the denouncing. How did people get caught up in it all? How were they ever conned by this redistribution of power in their favour?
FOUCAULT: In Lacomhe Lucien, as in The Night Porter, this excessive power that is given to them is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of The Night Porter, with the recreation around Max, in his room, of a kind of concentration camp in miniature, where he is dying of hunger. There love has converted power, super-power, into total powerlessness. Roughly the same reconciliation occurs, in a sense, in Lacomhe Lucien, where love takes the excess of power by which it has been trapped and converts it inca a rural nakedness miles away from the Gestapo's shady hotel, miles away also from the farm where the pigs are being killed.
CAHIERS: Are we then perhaps beginning to explain the problem you were posing earlier: how is it that Nazism, which was a puritanical, repressive system, is now universally eroticized? Some kind of displacement takes place: a problem which is central and which people don't wish to confront, the problem of power, is bypassed or rather completely displaced towards the sexual. So that this eroticization is really a displacement, a form of repression ...
FOUCAULT: The problem is indeed a very difficult one and it has not perhaps been sufficiently studied, even by Reich. How is it that power is desirable and is actually desired? The procedures through which this eroticization is transmitted, reinforced, and so on, are clear enough. But for it to happen in the first place, the attachment co power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exercised, must already be erotic.
CAHIERS: What makes it all the more difficult is that the representation of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle and Hitler weren't exactly attractive.
FOUCAULT: That's right, and I wonder whether in Marxist analyses one doesn't sacrifice a little too much to the abstract character of the idea of freedom. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's quite clear that there's no freedom. But not having freedom doesn't mean that you don't have power.
CAHIERS: It's on the level of the cinema and television, television being entirely controlled by power, that historical discourse has the greatest impact. Which implies a political responsibility. It seems to us that people are increasingly aware of it. For some years now, in the cinema, there has been more and more talk of history, politics, struggle ...
FOUCAULT: There's a battle going on for history, around the history that's now in the making, and it is very interesting. People want to codify, to stifle What I have called 'popular memory', and also to propose, to impose a grid for interpreting the present. Until 1968 popular struggles had to do with folk tradition. For some they had no connection at all with anything going on in the present. After 1968 all popular struggles, whether in South America or in Africa, find an echo, a resonance. No longer can this separation, this sore of geographical cordon sanitaire, be established. Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set at a distance once again. How? Not by interpreting them directly - you would only lay yourself open to all the contradictions - but by proposing a historical interpretation of popular struggles from our own past, to show that in fact they never took place! Before 1968, it was: 'It won't happen, because it only happens elsewhere'; now it's: 'It won't happen, because it has never happened! Even something like the Resistance, the stuff of so many dreams, just look at it ... Nothing there. An empty shell, completely hollow!' Which is another way of saying: 'In Chile, don't worry, the peasants don't give a damn. In France too: a few troublemakers and their antics won't affect anything fundamental.'
CAHIERS: For us, the important thing when one reacts to that, against that, is to realize that it's not enough to re-establish the truth, to say, about the Maquis for example, 'No, I was there, it didn't happen like that at all!' We believe that to conduct the ideological struggle effectively on the kind of terrain that these films lead into you have to have a wider, more comprehensive system of references - of positive references. For many people, for example, that consists in reappropriating the 'history of France'. It was against this background that we spent some time on Moi, Pierre Riviere . .. because we realized that in the end, and paradoxically, it helped us to explain Lacombe Lucien, that the comparison brought out a number of things. For example, one significant difference is that Pierre Riviere is a man who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. Malle's hero, on the other hand, is presented as a halfwit, as someone who goes through everything, history, the War, collaboration, without building on his experiences. And it's there that the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help us to make the distinction between someone, Pierre Riviere, who uses a language that is not his and is forced to kill to obtain the right to do so, and the character created by Malle and Modiano 8 who proves, precisely by not building on anything that happens to him, that there is nothing worth remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a Bolivian film, which was made for the speClfic purpose of providing an exhibit for a dossier. This film, which can be seen everywhere except in Bolivia, because of the regime, is played by those who actually took part in the real-life drama it recreates (a miners' strike and its bloody repression) - they undertake to represent themselves so that no one will forget.
It's interesting to see that, on a minimum level, every film is a potential archive and that, in the context of a struggle, one can take this idea one step further: people put together a film intending it to be an exhibit. And you can analyse that in two radically different ways: either the film is about power or it represents the victims of that power, the exploited classes who, without the help of the cinematographic apparatus, with very little knowledge of how films are made and distributed, take on their own representation, give evidence for history. Rather as Pierre Riviere gave evidence, that's to say, began to write, knowing that sooner or later he would appear before a court and that everyone had to understand what he had to say.
What's important in The Courage of the People is that the demand actually came from the people. It was through a survey that the director first learned of the demand, and it was those who had lived through the event who asked for it to be memorized.
FOUCAULT: The people create their own archives.
CAHIERS: The difference between Pierre Riviere and Lacombe Lucien is that Pierre Riviere does everything to enable us to discuss his history after his death. Whereas, even if Lacombe is a real character or one who might have existed, he is only ever the object of another's discourse. for purposes that are not his own.
There are two things that are successful in the cinema now. On the one hand, historical documents, which have an important role to play. In Toute une vie, for example, they are very important. Or in films by Marcel Ophuls or Harris and Sedouy, when you see Duclos waving his arms about in 1936 and in 1939, these scenes from real life are moving. And on the other hand, fictional characters who, at a given moment in history, compress social relations, historical relations, into the smallest possible space. That's why Lacombe Lucien works so well. Lacombe is a Frenchman under the Occupation, someone very ordinary who stands in a concrete relationship to Nazism, to the countryside, to local government, etc. We have to be aware of this way of personifying history, of bringing it to life in a character, or a group of characters who, at a given moment, stand in a privileged relationship to power.
There are lots of characters in the history of the workers' movement whom we don't know about: lots of heroes in the history of the working class who have been totally repressed. And I believe that something important is at stake here. Marxism doesn't need to make any more films about Lenin, there are more than enough already.
FOUCAULT: What you are saying is important. It's a characteristic of many Marxists today. They don't know very much about history. They spend their time saying that history is being overlooked, but are only capable themselves of commenting on texts: 'What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?' But that is Marxism if not another way of analysing history itself? In my opinion, the left, France, is not very interested in history. It used to be. In the nineteenth century you could say that Michelet represented the left at a given moment. There was also Jaures, and then a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez etc.). Today that has virtually dried up. Whereas it could be an impressi"e movement of writers and film-makers. There was of course Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale, which is a very great historical novel. But it doesn't amount to much, if you think of what that could represent in a society whose intellectuals are, after all, more or less steeped in Marxism.
CAHIERS: Film-making brings in something new again in this respect: 'live' history ... What relation do American people have to history, now that they see the Vietnam War every evening on television as they eat their supper?
FOUCAULT: As soon as you begin to see images of war every evening, war becomes utterly accepted. In other words, extremely boring - you would certainly prefer to watch something else. But once it becomes boring, it's accepted. You don't even watch it. So what do you have to do for this news, as it appears on film, to be reactivated as news that is historically important?
CAHIERS: Have you seen Les Camisards?
FOUCAULT: Yes, I liked it a lot. Historically it's beyond reproach. It's a beautiful film, it's intelligent, it explains so much.
CAHIERS: I think that's the direction film-makers should be taking. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning, another problem that must be mentioned is the confused response of the far left to certain aspects of Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter, the sexual aspect especially. How might the right take advantage of this confusion?
FOUCAULT: On this subject of what you call the far left, I don't really know what to think. I'm not even sure whether it still exists. All the same, a huge balance sheet has to be drawn up for the activities of the far left since 1968: the conclusions are negative on the one side and positive on the other. It's true that the far left has been responsible for a whole lot of important ideas in a number of areas: sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, housing, medicine. It has also been responsible for the diffusion of modes of action-which continues to be important. The far left has been important in the kinds of action it has taken as well as in the themes it has pursued. But there is also a negative balance in terms of certain Stalinist, terrorist, organizational practices. And there is equally a misapprehension of certain currents running wide and deep which have just resulted in thirteen million votes for Mitterrand, and which have always been neglected on the pretext that that was just politicking, party politics. Any number of aspects have been neglected, notably the fact that the desire to defeat the right has for some years, some months, been a very important political factor among the masses. The far left didn't have this desire because its definition of the masses was wrong and because it didn't really understand what it means to want to win. To avoid the risk of having victory snatched away it prefers not to run the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be recuperated. Personally, I'm not so sure.
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Interesting that Asterix the Gaul, comic strip about plucky native resistance to Roman imperialism, started the very year that Charles de Gaulle, hero of the Resistance, launches the Fifth Republic...
Mind you, other people have diagnosed it as being an allegory of American cultural imperialism, or even the Algerian war of independence...
Block to the Future [ 17-Aug-25 7:44pm ]"It may be that Britain - and much of Europe - is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.
And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia - music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."
Adam Curtis talking about his new-ish program Shifty
"You have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it's almost like you're treading water. Nothing is actually happening. No one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles. Four major movies about The Beatles. That's like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It's extraordinary! We're trapped!"
"Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure. That's not to diss any of what she's saying but it's quite held together in time and I don't think that expresses now."
"What you're left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you'll never find it."
Adam Curtis also talking up and around his new-ish program Shifty
regurgitating a past that never existed / regurgitating a critique that's 14-years--old (at a bare minimum) [ 07-Aug-25 3:53am ]Martin Ingle oblivious to the irony of banging on about an already banged-to-bits critique
"regurgitating a past that never existed" - apart from that being a contradiction in terms (if it never existed, it could never be consumed in the first place, let alone puked up again for the re-eating), if that is actually what is going on, then it would be quite an interesting state of affairs. Unprecedented, even!
