What Makes a Masterpiece? Science, Music and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

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I was at my parents’ place last week. We sat down one evening - the collective televisual experience always having been a staple of family life - to watch What Makes a Masterpiece?. This programme on More4 (so the more highbrow end of Channel 4’s output, right?) set itself the task of exploring the role contemporary science has to play in our understanding of music, asking ‘if the next artistic masterpiece really could come from a lab, and if science can make us all great artists.’ I was outraged after about five minutes but kept watching out of a morbid fascination. 

What follows is basically a rant about how shit and wrong it was. I doubt many of you watched it and I wouldn’t really recommend it, except (if you’re a particularly committed/bored reader) to follow along with the argument I’m making. But I think, in its own clumsy way, it bumped up against quite an important issue - the relationship between science and the arts (or indeed the humanities more generally).

Philosophy and theory have a long and rich history of suspicion towards attempts to ‘reduce’ their chosen realms of enquiry to the quantifiable, measurable strictures of science. In recent times, this hostility has probably been felt most strongly in debates around gender, sexuality and race, where moves to biologise or essentialise the issues at hand have almost unfailingly served to propagate whatever dominant discourse is going - with generally negative consequences. A classic example would be the old ‘[insert race/gender category other than white male] are in possession of smaller brains and therefore are biologically predisposed to their inferior position in society.’ This tendency is still in rude health today, albeit in more complex and variegated forms (check out the comments on YouTube vids of Judith Butler if you have a few hours to piss away). Always the tendency is to say ‘this social/cultural phenomenon is rooted in the incontestable scientific realities of the body, and therefore should be accepted unquestioningly.’ Conversely, theory aims to expose the flaws in an empirical reading of reality, in order to show that there are areas of life where a scientific interpretation is fundamentally inadequate. Obviously this is a more urgent project in the areas outlined above than it is in relation to music - but the same basic issues are carried over. Don’t get me wrong, science is a totally valid - and essential - abstraction by which we understand the world. But the temptation is to extend its reassuring absolutes and stable certainties into areas where they don’t apply - what Alfred North Whitehead would call ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.

Philosophers like Whitehead and Deleuze have a healthy respect for science. They both drew heavily on the scientific theories of their day in explicating their own philosophies. Deleuze has gone on to be an inspiration to scientists working at the vanguard of chaos theory and the like. But for both of them, science has a very specific place in our understanding of things. It operates exclusively in the realm of the actual - the measurable, the observable - but not the virtual, the wellspring of infinite potentiality from which our observable world emerges. Its role is to generalise - to extrapolate universally applicable rules from a series of encounters with reality. As a counterpart to this, philosophy - as Deleuze sees it - deals in the singularity of events, in the fundamental capacity for difference which is inherent in being. Science may be used as a springboard, but the philosopher’s trajectory is always away from the actual, the measurable, towards the theoretically infinite variability hidden beneath it. When you put it like that it seems pretty high-minded. I’ll go back to the More4 programme to explain some of the failings of a scientific approach to art that it (unwittingly) showcases.

bescarfed man-ghoul

What Makes a Masterpiece? is hosted by Channel 4’s ‘Culture Editor’, bescarfed man-ghoul Matthew Cain. As is convention, he plays the presenter-as-willing-ignoramus, blundering into science experiments in different parts of the world armed only with a list of nearly-stupid questions and his own slack-jawed wonderment. A lot of the programme is spent exploring ways in which modern science can supposedly ‘demystify music’s so-called magical powers, and for the first time explain exactly how they work.’ We’ll see about that Cain.

There’s an early encounter with ‘musicologist Ian Cross’ in an out-of-hours nightclub somewhere in the UK. His experiment involves setting up a silent disco scenario, whereby two groups of test subjects are played two different songs over their headphones, but encouraged to dance in the same space. The result is that those from the same group - listening and dancing to the same music - gravitate towards each other, in spite of having no idea which song the other dancers are listening to. Cross’ conclusion is that this is to do specifically with the different ‘rhythms’ the dancers are responding to - as Cain puts it in typically simplistic terms, ‘it’s all down to the underlying basis of music - its rhythm.’

This is a classic musicological approach, in that it treats a single musical characteristic - rhythm (it’s not even clear whether they mean rhythmic pattern or tempo in this terminology) - as ‘pure’ and therefore extractable, operating independently of and distinct from not only all other musical characteristics, but also any non-musical factors. In choosing two tracks which simply have a ‘different rhythm’ (one is ‘In Da Club’ by 50 Cent, the other is some recent eurotrance-ish thing), the experiment fails to consider: 1) other musical characteristics - timbre, say - which might induce people to dance in a certain way; 2) all the cultural baggage which comes with the subjects hearing a particular track - particularly one they undoubtedly already know - and the ways in which that might connect with particular culturally constructed ways of moving the body; and 3) the difference in experience between having music blasted into your ears though headphones and the bodily impact of music over a loud soundsystem in a more conventional club setting. Clearly the latter has more relevance to how music has been experienced collectively over the past few milennia (before the Sony Walkman basically all collective musical experiences involved sharing the soundwaves), but - for clear practical reasons - it’s neglected here. 

The experiment shows that people dancing to the same music are subconsciously drawn towards each other - a phenomenon apparently called ‘entrainment’. Fine. Their body language will likely be recognisably similar - like calls to like. But attributing this to the ‘power of rhythm’ is totally spurious - a typically blinkered musicological approach to something far more complex and nuanced. There’s no examination of what it is in the music that induces people to move in this or that way. The two pieces of music used are only chosen, as far as I can tell, on the basis of their difference relative to each other - the characteristics they possess in themselves are irrelevant. This is an experiment about social dancing, not music (and a flawed one at that). 

silent disco

We’re told that a shared experience of ‘rhythm’ releases some hormone or other which promotes social bonding and sexual attraction. Music brings people together. Cross’ conclusion is that, ‘precisely because it can’t be ambiguous, [music] allows people to relate to each other much more easily, because there isn’t language to get in the way.’ Doesn’t music have a language - one which isn’t shared by everyone? Try playing Japanese Gagaku at the Diamond Jubilee and see how long it takes for a Yeoman Warder to lose it and start shooting. Again, this is a conceit typical of musicology as a discipline - music somehow exists in a vacuum, where certain commonalities (usually, but not exclusively, commonalities within the Western classical tradition) become ineffable absolutes. 

This is all well and good (or rather it isn’t), but musicology has been a whipping boy for cultural theorists for a few decades now. More worrying is the contribution of ‘psychologist Dr. Larry Parsons’ at Imperial College (I’m putting them in scare quotes cos I can’t be bothered to google them to check facts, not because I think they are frauds). His experiment involves festooning the excitable Cain with monitors measuring heart rate, breathing, sweating, body temperature etc., before piping into his ears three different pieces of music clearly intended to be archetypical of particular musical ‘moods’. 

The first is, in Parsons’ words, a ‘very pleasing Mozart piece’. Cain’s narration notes insightfully that ‘it’s written in a major key, usually associated with happy music’, adding that ‘it’s certainly making me feel pretty good’. My memory of sitting through ‘pleasing Mozart’ at school and then music college, during my not inconsiderable ‘trying to convince myself that I like classical music’ phase, was generally of intense boredom and frustration. But who am I to argue with the culture editor of Channel 4? Apparently the nice music leads to an increase in his heart rate and temperature. 

festooning the excitable Cain

Next up is some excoriating Russian thrash metal. ‘Larry, what are you doing to me, it’s hideous, get it off!’ bleats the man presumably in charge of Channel 4’s music programming. The music triggers anxiety, causes an adrenaline rush and makes his breathing erratic. Fair enough - he hears music he doesn’t like, his body responds negatively. But what’s fudged is the point where his body decides it doesn’t like it. For people who listen to Russian thrash metal every day, I doubt they consistently have this response. For some, noisy, distorted music can be cathartic or even meditative, even if for Cain - although given his exalted position in the culture industry we might hope for a more measured response - it is ‘hideous’. 

The final specimen is an adagio by Baroque composer Albinoni. Perhaps predictably, it’s ‘in a minor key, which is often used to express sadness.’ Apparently it elicits a complex emotional response from Cain, gradually putting him in a ‘meditative state’. As the format dictates, Cain closes things off with a nice leading question: ‘so together, does all this information show that music can control our emotions?’ Fucking obviously. Obviously it can. If you’ve ever heard a piece of music and felt sad or happy then you’ve definitively solved that problem for yourself. This experiment looks at physiological responses to music, nothing more. What’s more, just as Cross with his silent disco seemed obsessed solely with rhythm, Parsons’ choice of music suggests that he is only interested in harmony - specifically three very limited categories: ‘major key’, ‘minor key’ (both using an even tempered 12-tone scale, might I add) and ‘other/dissonant/deviant’. 

Cain sums it up neatly: ‘Larry’s experiment shows that when we listen to upbeat music in a major key, our heartbeat increases and our bodies settle into a dynamic regular rhythm. Dissonant music produces anxiety and adrenaline, causing us to become emotionally withdrawn. And sad music in a minor key creates the most complex response of all, gradually putting our bodies into a meditative state.’

This is a splendid example of how this kind of research can be interpreted in such a way as to support a dominant cultural discourse: ‘dissonant’ music is inherently bad, socially undesirable, negative. People who listen to it are making themselves ‘emotionally withdrawn’, which is to suggest that they are somehow stunted or incapable of cooperating with society at large. Don’t shoot the messenger guys, it’s science! Far be it for this foolish man to suggest that people might listen to this music because the effect it (arguably) induces chimes with their own experience of socal alienation, or perhaps even more directly that people may listen to it precisely because glassy-eyed reactionaries like himself consider it so objectionable. 

At this point Cain flies to Montreal (presumably on the programme’s frankly over-generous budget) to meet neuroscientist and former record producer Daniel Levitin. No scare quotes for him, as I’ve actually read one of his books. His experiment is the most sensible yet. Cain is put in a CAT scanner and played one of his favourite pieces of music - presumably, therefore, selected by him (I couldn’t tell you the name but it’s a Classic FM stalwart). As he listens, neurological activity is recorded in order to show the precise parts of the brain which respond to a pleasurable listening experience. There are no pretensions of absolutism here, no sketchy aesthetic choices made by the experimenter. 

It’s still problematic though. Levitin states that, ‘there are are number of regions [of the brain] that music will activate regardless of what kind of music it is. Any kind of music will activate your auditory cortex...that’s the part of the brain that processes sound whatever it is...and that’s gonna happen with any music.’ This seems at a glance to be a truism but it conceals a very basic assumption - that all music exclusively or necessarily deals in sound. I guess I could get a bit of flack for this but I’m very much of the Adam Harper camp. He wisely modifies the hotly contested term ‘music’ (is John Cage’s ‘4’33’ music? Skrillex is ‘just noise’, right?) with the assertion that ‘music objects’ (a phrase which has a rigorous definition in his own aesthetic framework) are art objects which ‘relate primarily to the production of sound.’ That’s not to say that they don’t, or can’t, involve non-musical variables as an integral part of their identity. In fact, non-musical characteristics are often fundamental to a given music object - the vibe of the crowd at a clubnight, say, or how comfortable the seats are at the Royal Festival Hall (not very for the taller gentleman - Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ almost ruined).

The logical conclusion of this is that, as Harper points out, ‘musical objects can also be entirely non-sonic. The distinctive costumes worn by rock bands such as Devo or Kiss can be said to be musical objects. They are art objects relating primarily to the production of sound, they are part of the musical experience.’ Ultimately, music is continuous with life in a broad sense - the boundary separating the two is far from clear. The result of a scientific practice in which this very basic assumption is made unquestioningly (music = sound), is that arguments like Harper’s are made to seem like unhinged pedantry, the esoteric logicking of an academic whose insights are entirely divorced from reality, when in actual fact they move towards a deeper and more accurate understanding of what music really is. Science obstructs aesthetics by failing to recognise its importance, by blundering into its back garden and trying to stick a flag in it. 

Levitin and bearded cohorts

Later in the programme, Cain gets Levitin to explain (with the aid of his Country and Western band, heh) the role of tension and release in Western functional harmony (though obviously it’s not defined as such, as to define it would be to demarcate it and suggest that there are traditions and forms outside of it). Levitin and his bearded cohorts play a dominant chord, which invariably leads to a tonic - ‘some chords lead inevitably to others, by the tension that’s inherent in them’, states Levitin, displaying a certainty which is common in music theory circles even as it is conspicuously absent in the majority of contemporary music-making (where’s the perfect cadence in this Daniel? Or maybe it’s a plagal?). By Levitin’s account, the satisfaction induced by a strong harmonic resolution triggers the release of neurochemicals like dopamine (the example provided is the sputum-rock climax of Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’). Cain asks, ‘so are these neurochemicals the same thing as emotions?’ Levitin’s response: ‘emotions are simply neurological, neurochemical states. So happiness, sadness, passion, love, fear - they’re particular patterns of firing accompanied by particular neurochemical secretions, that cause us to have this feeling that seems ineffable.’

Here we’re tipping into an ugly kind of neurological determinism. There is an implied logical progression: [harmonic resolution as defined by Western classical harmonic schema] -> [neurological/neurochemical response] -> [happiness]. Clearly there’s something missing in that sequence, a crucial gap between the experience of music and our attendant response, whether conscious or otherwise. It seems supremely arrogant to assume that somebody from a culture entirely divorced from ours, whose music making uses a scale of 20 or 40 notes and is completely alien to our ears, would also get a dopamine rush from Chris Martin’s sonic discharge. Why does a given piece of music work for some people and not others? To what extent is that based on their past experience of music, and indeed of life? Can we ever accurately define or quantify who will be affected by what music and in what way? 

Whatever your rationalisation here - and there have been many - clearly this is a conundrum that science can, at best, accept as being outside its jurisdiction, and at worst (as in this programme) attempt to plaster over with generalisations, whistling a pretty tune (probably Beethoven’s 5th or something) while glibly pretending it doesn’t exist. 

Eg White and (the lower back of) Will Young

To wrap the whole thing up, Cain undertakes the task of making his own piece of music using the various morsels of understanding he’s picked up. It’s clear to you and me (and probably him) that it’s going to sound shit. That’s obvious. But the process is revealing in itself. First he goes to a lab at Goldsmiths, where his neurological response to a series of distinctly unlovely MIDI loops is measured and his ‘favourites’ singled out. The resultant tawdry collection of Logic synth preset sounds is taken to songwriter ‘Eg’ White (Adele, Duffy, Will Young - all the good shit) who, crucially, does the actual creative bit which none of the experiments shown are able to supplant (nor, I think, are they intended to, but such is the conceit of the programme). Yes, there are half-arsed references to what’s gone before - the tempo is high to ‘get the heartrate going’, there’s a ‘strong rhythm’ to ‘bring people together’ - but essentially this is a songwriter writing a song (with a bit of auxiliary input from a grinning fool). 

Cain then takes his song to ‘music analyst Mike McCready’ in New York, to be tested against this database he’s devised called ‘Hit Song Science’. The premise of Hit Song Science is that ‘virtually all music ever recorded’ (got any Evan Parker mate? No? What about Farley Jackmaster Funk?) is fed into a database with figures recorded for a large number of variables - what these variables are isn’t fully explained but it seems to be a range of things including key, tempo, chord progression and the gender of the lead singer. Apparently when you fill this database up and then isolate only the songs that have been chart hits, it becomes apparent that they are grouped, in this multi-dimensional space, in a number of ‘hit clusters’. The logic then follows that, if you feed an untried song into the machine, its probable chart success can be measured by the extent to which it falls within range of one of these clusters.

hit clusters

Apparently the system has an 80-85% success rate. McCready is quick to provide some examples: ‘we predicted the success of Norah Jones well before she was on anyone’s radar. We also predicted which of the original Maroon 5 hits would be the first to blow up.’ I can’t think of a better encapsulation of the failings of this kind of scientific approach to music. As before, confronted with a series of totally non-quantifiable determining factors - what makes a song reach number one is surely the sum total of an incalculable number of micro-decisions on the part of discerning consumers - the best approach is to deal in generalities: to use a statistical analysis of pre-existing data in order to predict future behaviour - defining what can be by mapping what is.

What this is thrusting at is a kind of majoritarian science of music: scientists can map a ‘majority response’ from listeners by establishing patterns and averages, but it will always only be statistical; its insight can never be deeper than that. The tendency of this approach is to average out the human relationship with music, to work in generalities rather than singularities. The result is a pseudo-aesthetics which valorises sameness over difference, repetition over change - hence the high strike rate on insipid, risk-averse shit like Maroon 5. How ridiculous - patronising, even - to assume that, in spite of the vast changes in the cultural landscape over the past half-century, popular tastes can no longer stray outside of what’s already known. I expect Hit Song Science, if it had constructed its database a few decades earlier, could never have predicted the ascent of hip hop to chart ubiquity. An industry relying on such a system in their risk calculations (apparently several major labels have used it) is basically a walking corpse waiting to exhaust its supply of retro-reruns (sound familiar?). 

Indeed, as Deleuze would argue, and Harper after him, the very nature of any artform, and of being itself, is change. Music should always be oriented towards its own dissolution, always looking for ways to break out of the strictures of convention. Paranoid fears that artists could be replaced by machines are missing the point - as soon as any area of music-making becomes territorialised by a generalising apparatus, the artists will already be elsewhere, propelling themselves into the beyond, the outside. Music has no absolute criteria other than change. A top-down imposition of psuedo-scientific ‘laws’ will always be one step behind.

In fairness, I’m sure the scientists in What Makes A Masterpiece? were to some extent misrepresented, their hyper-specified experiments slapped around ruthlessly in the editing suite until they resembled something with broader applicability. And undoubtedly there are more clued up researchers out there working with a far deeper understanding of these issues than I have. But a show like this is nonetheless indicative of the way in which science is viewed by a wider audience in a culture that increasingly treats the scientific method as some mystical panacea. If the outcome of this is Norah Jones and Maroon 5 then I think I’ll take my chances in the luddite wilderness.

A Rhizome for 2011 - October 29, 2011: Floating Points & Caribou @ Plastic People

One of the main criticisms (still) levelled at dance music by those on the outside looking in, at least implicitly, is that it is ‘mindless’: a tool for getting fucked and stupid, non-productive and ultimately meaningless. 

This viewpoint is a favoured whipping boy for dance music theorists. Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson identify it as a product of the legacy of Puritanism. They see the Puritan ethic specifically as the intersection of two discourses: the first, the discourse of ‘possessive individualism’ which is intimately linked with the rise of capitalism, in which (to simplify massively) a person’s ‘freedom’ is defined by their ability to own and control property; the second, the more long-standing discourse of Western metaphysics, with its emphasis on the bounded individual subject and the supremacy of mind over body, the rational over the emotional, etc. 

Puritanism was ‘a culture which privileged work above all other modes of experience’. This is a perspective which is woven into the fabric of British society - just look at the spiralling number of hours which constitutes a working week, or the gradual chipping away at the rights of those unable to work. Further than simply creating a work-oriented culture though, the Puritan ethic plays a crucial part in informing responses to so-called ‘leisure activities’. Gilbert and Pearson note that:  

‘The main priorities of puritanical discourse have been a hostility to physical pleasure, intoxication, unregulated social gatherings, music and dancing... the human subject [is] defined radically in terms of self-control, and hence a particular hostility to intoxicated and ecstatic states develops.’

Our Puritan legacy is, by this argument, the shadowy hand guiding and informing legislation against drug use, unregulated social gathering and other aspects of rave culture. 

The implied conclusion here is that we shouldn’t get sucked in by the line that hedonism is, by definition, a waste of time. The pursuit of pleasure and the collectivity of the dancefloor have social, political and spiritual merit in and of themselves. Go out! Get wavey! Be merry! 

There is an irony that shouldn’t be ignored in professional or semi-professional theorists and writers, whose job it is to observe and write about dance music culture, taking this line. We (I include myself in this group as a fringe member) have performed the ultimate Puritan checkmate on ourselves. Our pleasure is exactly equivalent to our work. Any night out is also a ‘field-trip’. The temptation then is not to switch off: to keep a small part of the brain ticking over, noting down DJ selections and crowd responses, hunting for the seeds of theories and rationalisations. It’s the same logic by which hardcore trainspotters approach the booth every ten minutes asking for a track ID. For them, going out to clubs is ultimately a way of acquiring knowledge for future benefit - either for home-listening purposes or to fuel their own nascent DJing careers. Movement on the dancefloor takes the form of a holding pattern. Is it possible to consciously seal off the work gland? Maybe not entirely - the damage is already done - but it certainly helps to try. 

I feel bad for Plastic People these days. As with all very good things, it can’t last forever, and since all that hoo-ha with the police last year pronouncements of its death have been coming thick and fast. Personally though, I really like it post-refurb. The dancefloor feels more spacious now, and infinitely better ventilated. The fact that it’s shielded from the bar and enclosed in perforated black metal sheeting means that it’s about as close to total darkness in there as you can get. When I and my flatmates went down to see Floating Points do one of his all-night sessions (with Caribou on this occasion) in October, it was one of the best nights I had all year. Granted, the sound was pretty below-par - in volume more than anything else - but the experience of being able to totally lose it in a dark corner, barely able to see my own hand in front of my face, let alone identify the person next to me upon whose shoe I just spilt my double G&T, was exceptional. 

Dan Hancox’s recently reposted ‘Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto’ touches on a similar issue. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek but the central message is a serious one. It was written in 2009, when debate around the Hardcore Continuum on blogs and message boards had swollen to the point where, for certain parties, discussion of the music seemed to totally outstrip engagement with it. Clearly I think theory is great (probably a little too great. Thanks if you’re still reading). But it seems inevitable that a ‘top-heavy’ discourse around any artform - where the trading of higher-order concepts vastly outweighs any interaction with the building blocks of those concepts, i.e. personal experience - is going to lead to stale ideas. It’s important not to forget to recharge.

Fortunately that’s precisely not what was going through my mind at half six in the morning, myself and half a dozen other survivors still thrashing around to Floating Points’ last tune (which was some kind of ten minute funk-fusion epic). When it finished and the lights came up, the DJ applauded (what was left of) the crowd. Maybe that’s a cheesy gesture but it makes an important point which is often forgotten. It’s dancers - not listeners, or fans, or writers, producers or even DJs really - who make dance music what it is. Something like the Boiler Room, which is a really smart new model for the dissemination of the music in a radically changed climate, acknowledges this fact (a live audience is integral to the format) but also threatens it. If you make the room pitch black then the webcam won’t pick up anything. But if you put me (or, I imagine, most other people) in front of a live stream being watched by thousands, I’ll probably feel a bit awkward about dancing (I can’t quite shake the feeling that the people who are totally comfortable in this scenario are exhibitionists. That’s probably unfair). Meanwhile, from the comfortable anonymity of the chatroom, an emergent generation can harvest track IDs, or evaluate and dissect a DJ’s performance, with impunity. 

I’m not sure there’s a simple or even identifiable solution here. As with climate change, though, we can all do our bit and thus feel a bit less guilty about it. I’ll be at Plastic again tonight for NYE, having a boogie in the corner.

A Rhizome for 2011 - September 12, 1995: The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

I’m not one to fast forward through opening title sequences. For one thing, it’s a lot of hassle (what if you overshoot?), and for another, humming along absent-mindedly to the theme music whilst clearing a space amongst all the old cups of tea for the new cup of tea is part of the ritual. My old flatmate managed to get hold of the complete Sherlock Holmes from Amazon late last year - the Jeremy Brett one from the late 80s/early 90s. It’s massive. There must be about 50 hours of crime solving in there, including all four series and the handful of feature length episodes they managed to make before Brett’s untimely death. It’s also, as far as my knowledge stretches, the best Holmes adaptation out there (I've only seen bits of the new one. It seems alright). It’s got the perfect balance of campy high-jinks and a genuinely compelling, quasi-homoerotic tension between Holmes and Watson (complete with pretty brave drug references for 80s primetime TV). Comfortably formulaic but cleverly put together. 

I didn’t get through all 41 episodes - barely a quarter of them in fact. My Holmes experience took the form of a single concentrated binge with my girlfriend at the time who, as well as being a massive Sherlock Holmes fan, is also one of those people who, when on her own, will settle on a film or TV show and watch it over and over again for weeks on end, until it achieves a status somewhere between wallpaper and mantra. To her, I think, this is a comforting thing. To me the idea of it is incredibly depressing.

I’m shit at watching films on my own anyway really. I’ll scan the shelf in my room, checking each title to see to what extent the very thought of it induces an odd, unpleasant sort of nostalgia. Anything which trades in high emotion, is uplifting or life-affirming, is out. As are light-but-touching Rom-Coms, gentle comedies etc. Seasonal films are a definite no-no (I’d forgotten Die Hard was a Christmas film until I re-watched it recently, the swines). I’m reminded of William Bennett of Whitehouse fame, speaking in a recent interview for his excellent new percussive project Cut Hands: ‘I get depressed by films with happy endings. I think there's a sort of tyranny to response, as far as music's concerned, where music's used as a trigger to make you feel one way.’ 

Except for me I don’t think it’s a reaction against the insidious positivity of your average Hollywood tearjerker. If anything I’m terrible for getting swept along in the emotional current of even the shittest, most manipulative of audiovisual constructs. Embarrassed as I am to admit it, that Planet Earth advert from a few years back with the Sigur Ros song on it used to do things to me (in fact, programmes which celebrate nature in all her majesty are also on the list). So no, it’s not a kind of smug inversion of the terms by which the majority of people watch things, a rejection of ‘mainstream response’ (I think people who claim to experience this are often being disingenuous, but in Bennett’s case, given the music he’s made for decades, it’s hard to doubt him).

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what this feeling is, this nostalgia which can be induced by even the flimsiest cinematic pap. Nostalgia’s a funny one - it’s a great word to bandy about, but for my money there are dozens of different types and shades of it, from a full blown golden-era-reminiscence down to the odd twinge you sometimes get when you think about something you did last week. I’d love to read somebody’s attempt to taxonomise and explain all the different types - I bet it’s been done. Evan Eisenberg eloquently defines nostalgia as ‘the need to belong’. It’s the sudden awareness of a distance, however small, between reality and some idealised vision of the reality you feel you should be in. A slippage between life and your mental tracing of it. As people and events drift further away in the rear view mirror, for some reason the sense of lack can become more acute and well-formed until even pretty mundane things start to tug on the heartstrings. In fact, it’s often the mundane things that carry the most nostalgic currency. 

But I think consigning nostalgia to the past is a cheap way of downplaying its potency. Eisenberg identifies ‘the most common and most pernicious nostalgia, nostalgia for the here and now. For most of us feel that we are at home, and yet we don’t feel at home. We think: I was born for an age like this, so why don’t I belong?’ A friend of mine, who struggles to belong in a lot of contexts, recently confessed that he frequently wallows in nostalgia. Rather than a perspective per se, it’s a vector for your desire - away from wherever you are, towards an unattainable thing that never really existed. 

In The Mermaid And The Minotaur - which is, I’m led to understand, a seminal feminist text - Dorothy Dinnerstein constructs a theoretical explanation for the gender imbalance embedded in society, pretty much from first principles. She focusses on child-rearing as the central point of difference. In Western society - as in most others - children are generally raised by the mother. Clearly this means that the child has a different relation to the ‘feminine’ depending on their own gender. The implications of this later in life are, Dinnerstein argues, fundamental to the way society is structured. She notes that ‘when the boy, as an adult, finds...delight in heterosexual lovemaking, he finds it outside himself, as before, in a female body.’ By contrast, ‘the mother-raised woman is likely to feel, more deeply than the mother-raised man, that she carries within herself a source of the magic early parental richness. In this sense - even if not in others - she is more self-sufficient than the mother-raised man.’ 

Dinnerstein uses this argument to explain the male need to control women - to have unfettered access to the ‘parental richness’ they supposedly possess. But I think you could just as easily use it to explain the more melancholic strains of male expression which are widespread in contemporary culture: the image of the lonely, lovelorn male artist. In music, you could cite Morrissey, or - a more up-to-the-minute example - Bon Iver. 

The line between this kind of melancholia and a (perhaps) specifically male experience of nostalgia is pretty blurred. You could argue that both draw on (Dinnerstein again) ‘the mother-raised boy’s sense that the original, most primitive source of life will always lie outside himself.’ It’s that pervasive sense of something intangible being lost, something which is then given form in the idealisation of past objects, events, eras (with Bon Iver’s breakthrough album it’s a twofold looking-back: the first, his own meditation on a failed relationship; the second, our ‘false’ memory of that heavily romanticised recording-session-in-the-woods scenario). 

The reality presented in TV and cinema tends to be about as idealised as you can get (we’re talking Hollywood here, not Haneke). Watching E.T. (as I just have, Christmas Eve, heh) is, from one perspective, a cruel raspberry blown at its viewers; a declaration that ‘this’ - the flawless romanticism of the situation, the essential goodness of all things, the rendering ‘meaningful’ of existence - is precisely what your life is lacking. When I first watched E.T. - I must have been seven or eight - not only did I cry copiously at the end but I was furious at my Mum for letting me and my brother watch it. It doesn’t actually have a sad ending. Things turn out about as well as they possibly could (i.e. the alien in question dodges a vicious autopsy and gets to go home). It was more the fact that this magical world was unattainable, a fiction, and the meaningfulness which the protagonist (also a small boy) finds in his relationship with this improbably anthropomorphic extra terrestrial wasn’t available to me. I remember skulking around our garden, post-film, in my teary state, watching my parents rake up leaves (it must have been autumn). Everything seemed horribly colourless and mundane.

The soundtrack (which, in the case of E.T., is pure John Williams bombast) tends to be the syringe that delivers the solution directly into your bloodstream. I don’t think the pharmacological analogy is a bad one: watching a film or TV programme can often have a comedown as the credits roll and you’re forced to adjust back to the dull room you’re sitting in. The music over the credits of a film can be, I think, particularly affecting in a kind of discordant way. Familiar melodies and themes, now freighted with significance and emotional charge, shuttle around the non-space between fiction and reality, divorced from the narrative and the world it creates but still prodding at your emotions, inviting you to dwell on what you’ve seen. 

Re-watching something incessantly, as my ex-girlfriend liked (and probably likes) to do, might entrench the information in your synapses so that dialogue, characters, scenarios become familiar, comforting; like the Lord’s Prayer, or the small repertoire of poor jokes my Dad frequently tells. But, from another perspective (my perspective), it heightens the flimsiness of the construct - the essential emptiness of it. The rift solidifies as actions and events repeat, become rote rather than meaningful - the rift, that is, between the quotidian reality of your living room and the quasi-divine teleology of the fictional narrative you’re being seduced by. 

All of which is a bit of a digression from Sherlock and his japes. But I guess my point is that, even with relatively emotionally neutral music for the screen, the repetition and ritual which come to surround it can build cumulatively to create this effect. The elegant strings of the Holmes theme seem to imply a mild but ultimately contained - even slightly quaint - peril, much like the drama itself. Like all the best theme music, it’s inoffensive but kind of catchy. I used to find myself whistling it all the time. But listening to it now, the details of our old windowless living room with its shapeless sofa and mess of N64 controllers and DVD cases scattered over the floor seem to impregnate it. There’s a whole raft of sensory information which spins out of it, suggesting possible entryways into neglected memories. And the result isn’t particularly pleasant. As much as I like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - and as willing as I suspect my old flatmate would be to lend me the box set if asked - I’ve not felt the need to ask, and I don’t think I will. 

A Rhizome for 2011 - May 7, 2009: Solemn Days

2011 was the year I discovered Levon Vincent (I think so anyway - it could’ve been late 2010, but let’s not dwell on that). It’s certainly not the year when most people discovered Levon Vincent. But then that’s part of the point of this blog - it’s a space where I can choose to ignore journalistic orthodoxies, one of which dictates that people should discover and discuss music in a measured and linear manner. We are encouraged to foster the myth, in our writing, of there being a uniform route through music which we all take - ‘this is the record that everybody’s talking about’ - when in reality things have never been so fragmented. Sometimes I find it empowering, in a passive aggressive sort of way, to ignore ‘important’ records when everybody else is raving about them. Similarly, it can be nice to trawl trough the waters of the middle-past: the confused wake trailing behind the surging wave of the ‘new’, in which things bob about, waiting to be caught up in the undertow of some retrospectively titled ‘musical movement’ where they can then be archived, picked over and venerated.

It’s one of the (few) benefits of getting involved in music writing just as the last slim possibilities of earning a decent living from it are squeezed out: there’s no real imperative to participate in the rat race, unless you have some burning desire to do so. Why toady up to PRs you don’t like, or give positive reviews to records you’re indifferent about, when your writing is never likely to ascend beyond the status of low-paid hobby? Even if you feel you should try, you can be fairly certain that there’ll be some industrious blogger out there who actively enjoys applying the term ‘networking’ to his interactions with musicians. He will do it better than you. If your writing is too impenetrable, self-indulgent or irrelevant for a wide readership (ahem), you could always just start a personal blog.

I first discovered Levon (he’s become mononymous, which is the sign of true success) through a repress of his first record on the Deconstruct label, 2009’s ‘Invisible Bitchslap’. It’s a record I liked enough to buy (I still play it sometimes), but not a life-changer. An idle Discogs trawl, though, instantly threw up some gems - in particular ‘Solemn Days’. That was my Levon epiphany. 

The more music I’m exposed to, the more I find myself becoming aware of an uncomfortable tension which I think all ‘critics’ must experience: between the unspoken acceptance that there is such a thing as objective quality (‘this is a good record’/‘Buble is shit’), and the creeping understanding that, in aesthetics, relativism runs deep. People’s tastes will differ wildly from your own, and they’re not always simply ‘wrong’.

I don’t think either of these perspectives can, or should, win out over the other. The process of opinion-making around music (whether it’s in writing a review or simply deciding whether you like something) involves a balancing act, a tightrope walk between the two: is this record rubbish, or am I missing something which other people are getting? Lean too far one way and you become dogmatic, close-minded: your tastes become territorialised by a narrow set of criteria and preconceptions. You will find that, increasingly, the majority of music doesn’t interest you. You will stop seeking out new things and become disillusioned. You will feel stagnated, and perhaps bored with music. Lurch to the other end of the spectrum, though, and you lose altogether a sense of your own relationship with music. It will always be mediated through the opinions of others as you try to understand what makes something ‘likeable’ by second-guessing the criteria by which your chosen tastemaker(s) are judging - be they the collective actions of a scene, the pronouncements of a magazine or the selections of a particular DJ. 

I’ve been in both of these positions in the past, and will probably be drawn to one pole or the other at points in the future. The trick lies in finding some kind of equilibrium. Deleuze and Guattari would, I imagine, describe this process as destratifying your tastes; constantly probing the geography of your own likes and dislikes to find escape routes into the beyond - plotting a line of flight away from the familiar towards the unknown. But this destratification should be controlled - strip away the layers of meaning too fast and you lose your orientation completely. 

‘Solemn Days’ was just such an escape route for me. Those long, dead synth notes, dropped over the mix like so much lead halfway through the tune, crushing the life out of everything they touch, are like bugle calls from house music’s atavistic past. As with all of Levon’s productions, it’s assembled largely on hardware - something which is almost tangible in the stilted, asymmetrical way it works through its ideas, soupy spring reverbs surfacing and disappearing, synth motifs materialising suddenly or petering out at unexpected junctures. Levon seems to break - or more likely just ignore - any rules you might hold about what makes dance music sound ‘good’. It can be alienating and ugly (give this a spin) as often as it is unexpectedly beautiful. I’m reminded of Ewan Pearson’s description of a recent Caribou track: ‘It sounds like embodied people interacting in real-time with machines and it gives me goosebumps every time I play it.’

Beyond the halfway mark, ‘Solemn Days’ reconfigures around the gentle lapping of that most familiar of dancefloor signifiers, the Berlin dub-techno chord. Levon’s repeated use of this sonic trope seems a bit odd coming from a New York cat - he freely admits that, ‘the dubbiest I’ll get [in my sets] is one of my records...that’s the furthest out I want to go.’ Levon’s deeper excursions bear comparison with the much-bitten Basic Channel formula, but what sets him apart from BC’s legion of sterile Teutonic imitators - and, more generally, the vast majority of producers making house at the moment - goes beyond some vague recourse to the ‘warmth’ or ‘authenticity’ of analogue sound. 

Levon has his own criteria, however unknowable they may be to a more standardised conception of house. For example, he’s mentioned structuring tracks according to the golden ratio (I’m certain I’ve read this somewhere online but can’t find it...anyone?), which accounts for some of the more mindfucking breakdowns in his discography. His tracks are often four-square only obliquely, in a way which calls to mind other proponents of hardware like the Analogue Cops: measured 16- or 32-bar structures, and sometimes even the first beat of the bar, can be difficult to pinpoint with any certainty. What these artists share isn’t simply a technology-fetishism (though it might be partly that), but a fundamentally different perspective on the constituent parts of the music. Rather than hearing ‘one-two-three-four’ - the closed, symmetrical rhythmic form from which higher order structures can be built with mathematical consistency, striating the music with regular, predictable patterns of tension and release - they seem to hear ‘one-one-one’: the sheer force of a kickdrum breaking the air, a constantly repeating ‘now’. 

Drew Hemment observes and describes this phenomenon in early house music - clearly a predecessor to Levon’s sound - where DJs like Frankie Knuckles would layer a regular 808 kick straight over the mix: ‘the metronomic pulse is transformed into a force of rupture when it is pushed to a limit of sheer, intensive repetition, the mechanistic grid of digital clock time is punctured by an intensity, the succession of abstract instants postponed by the arrival of the present...’ To modern ears (even, or maybe especially, those of a dance music connoisseur), this approach can be destabilising as your internal clock, semi-consciously clocking up 4s, 8s, 16s, measuring out levels of anticipation and reward, is repeatedly subverted by unforeseen structural pitfalls and alien sonics - until it’s forced to narrow its scope down to the most basic building blocks of the music. ‘One-one-one’.  

The power of this approach lies in its ability to induce what Hemment calls ‘surface-affect’, a condition whereby ‘nuance and inflection are heard because of a reduction of indeterminacy on another level.’ In other words, ‘what we find here is that the expression of surface is heard not despite a rhythmic simplicity, but because of it. The subordination of time becomes a condition of the textural affect.’ As you learn to zone in on the repeating ‘one’, paring your perception down to the recurring present, your brain is, paradoxically, opened up to the uncanny textures spinning off its surface into synthetic space. In many ways Levon’s production is defined not by his percussion but by the richness and strangeness of the surrounding atmospherics.

When DJing, Levon seems to thrive on this destabilising effect. Sure, he can do ‘deep’ in a more conventional sense. He’s not incapable of seamless blends and the measured pacing with which house and techno crowds are familiar. But his sets often exhibit a taste for chaos. When I saw him play at Corsica Studios earlier this year, a friend summed it up neatly with a single word: ‘twisted’. It was a late slot in the main room, and the soundsystem had been pushed up to crushing volumes. Not only did the bass rattle innards, but snare drums could be felt beating against the skin, disrupting balance organs, making eyeballs jump in their fluid. Levon seemed flighty, shuttling between tempos with only passing concern for a smooth blend. But rather than simply feeling disjointed, the effect was unsettling - scary almost. The hour, the volume and his mixing conspired to make friendly old vocal house tunes sound alien and threatening, and barebones analogue beat workouts seem like the sweatiest shit you’ve ever heard. The bug-eyed morning crowd took it bravely but you could detect signs of angst in their movements. Their faces seemed to say, ‘I thought I knew what house was...?’ 

Another case in point is his recent Boiler Room set. He keeps things more reigned in (perhaps fearing the righteous condemnation of the chatroom, heh), but still delights in dropping out beats and cutting unpredictably to silence. Filtering is applied chunkily, in a way that demands to be noticed. At points, records are thrown on with a few bars’ introduction, yanking the contour of the set in unexpected directions.

If you look at DJing as a demonstration of the DJ’s power over the music they’re manipulating, then most house and techno mixing these days is a display of complete dominance. Tracks are seamlessly blended. The power of the record is totally subsumed to the will of the DJ. You only need to look at the use of the term ‘DJ tool’ to refer to the most manipulable of tracks to see the widespread acceptance of this aesthetic. Tracks become just that - tools. Perhaps that’s why the shift to digital was so painless in these scenes - digital formats are even more pliable and submissive than their physical counterparts. 

Richie Hawtin in his minimal phase is probably the apex of this. He exercises total control over a homogenous pool of tracks (I’m sure I read somewhere that he no longer bothers to listen to individual tracks before playing them, so narrow is the range of possible variability). Don’t get me wrong, as an approach this has a lot of creative potential - but with the infinite power and flexibility of digital DJing software (something which Hawtin has championed), much of this potential has been explored. Constructing a flawless 60 minute mix doesn’t by definition demonstrate any creative nerve any more - the only thing it proves with any certainty is that you’ve got some nice software and a passable MIDI controller.  

By contrast, Levon’s sets are a visceral demonstration of the voodoo-like power locked inside an inscrutable black slab of vinyl. He shows a willingness to be ‘dominated’ by the record, to reveal its seams, to allow its distinct dynamic contours to impose themselves on the dancefloor. It’s a genuine demonstration of the singular potency that music seems to wield when tied to a physical form, and a welcome counterpoint to the high-minded, pseudo-moralistic ‘digital sucks’ rhetoric which is often trotted out by deep house purists. 

Dave from the excellent MNML SSGS blog recently touched on something similar in this piece on ‘post techno’. He identifies a collection of artists working with older gear, restricting their creative options and eschewing the infinite possibility of digital software, as being closer to the ‘spirit’ of techno: a relationship between man and machine. The music he talks about is fascinating and an education to me, although his thesis is frustratingly half-formed (I guess that’s just my taste for the 3k word quasi-academic treatise coming through). But there’s a parallel with what I’m trying to say here in one important sense: the trappings of this aesthetic may appear ‘retro’, a throwback, but for the artists involved this isn’t an endpoint in itself but a means to achieving a particular goal. As the technological options available to a producer shrink, the significance of each choice made grows in scale. Just as in the soundworld of Levon and others (in particular his NY compatriots Jus Ed and DJ Qu) the singular power of the kickdrum - these days so often denigrated or subjugated to the ‘higher’ imperatives of prescriptive, normative structures - is restored to a position of all-encompassing rupture: the beating heart of a never-ending present.

A Rhizome for 2011 - December 14, 1981: I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)

A friend recently divulged to me that she once faked a stomach ulcer for 3 months in order to avoid the vicious bullying she received at school. I had a similarly unpleasant experience when I moved Primary schools at the age of nine, but lacked the calculated élan to pull off anything on that scale. Instead, every morning as my Mum and I embarked on the half hour drive into town, I would exercise a carefully honed form of denial, meticulously cherishing every moment of non-school in an attempt to elongate it as much as possible (road works were manna from heaven). This was accompanied by Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show, whose carefully vetted selection of middle-brow, middle-everything chart pop became part of a sort of life-affirming ritual in which my Mum and I would sing along as we crawled forward in the rush hour traffic, trying to drown out the pervasive roar of the car’s air blowers (I would like to point out that my Mum has since eschewed R2 and now listens almost exclusively to Radio 4 and the Janis Ian album I just got her for her birthday).

In amongst the tracks to which time has been less kind (Aerosmith’s ‘I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing’, which Wogan played basically every morning at one point, became the centrepiece in an opulent crush I had on the head girl. Steve Tyler’s great wide mouth seemed to disgorge all the wild emotions that my nine-year-old heart could barely contain), the show’s playlist furnished me with an education in the musical landmarks of the 80s which has proven surprisingly handy in the current climate. A particular favourite was Hall and Oates’ Yacht Rock classic ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’. In spite of hearing it probably dozens of times, once I moved to Secondary school and started getting the bus it lay forgotten, gathering dust in the back of my mind, until it was dredged up last year by this article in the Quietus. 

Hearing it again was a bit like unlocking some ancient ancestral memory. The thing about memory is that it ultimately resists the digitisation of culture - the reduction of everything into a googleable matrix of 0s and 1s, a perfect filing cabinet of infinite depth. The third episode of Channel 4’s recent mini-series, Black Mirror (I thought it was all good, thought-provoking drama, but the third one was particularly fine) explores this idea. It depicts a near-future where it’s de rigeur to have a small, bean-like chip inserted behind your ear, linked, by what looks like a tiny fibre-optic cable, to your brain. This chip functions as a storage bank for ‘memories’: audiovisual recordings of your experiences from a first-person perspective, which are then filed away by keyword and category; searchable, browsable, playable on wall-mounted screens in every room of your home. 

Like all good speculative sci-fi, this scenario isn’t so difficult to believe. It’s more an extrapolation from the current trajectory of our culture than a wild stab in the dark. The recent introduction of the Facebook timeline is the latest in a series of moves to equate human memory with digital storage. It’s an extension of the logic of the photo album as a reification of remembrance - an object that literally holds memories, rather than simply stimulating them in the mind. But, released into the intangibility of the digital ether, the line between memory-object and actual memory becomes increasingly difficult to demarcate.  

Black Mirror explores the emotional and relational side effects of this new technology. Arguments with loved ones are rewound, repeated, looped; incriminating things people said years ago are dredged up and played back at them in flawless HD; past sexual encounters are relived as personalised porn. But on a more fundamental level you could argue that it is a deception; that the digital’s claim to ‘perfect memory’ is a sham.

As far as hating on digital goes, Aden Evens is the go-to man in contemporary theory. His arguments, following Deleuze and others, plot a thoughtful, in-depth critique of the digitisation of culture which draws as much on philosophy as it does the technicalities of recording and playback. For Evens, something fundamental is lost in the translation of lived experience into binary data. The digital’s conversion of everything into a generalisable, universal code renders it ‘pure form’; form without content. As he puts it, ‘the digital captures the general, the representable, the repeatable, but leaves out the singular, the unique, the immediate: whatever is not formal. Actuality always exceeds its form...the actual is not a neat sequence of frozen or static moments but an irreducible complex process that cannot be cleanly articulated in time or space.’

By Evens’ argument, the process of quantisation which occurs in digital conversion - the defining of a threshold of resolution (sample rate in audio recording, the number of pixels in video) beyond which detail isn’t captured - means that ‘there will always be an excess, always more than the digital can capture...the actual is not fixed and static but creative.’ What is ultimately lost in a digital recording of an event is the ineffable quality of ‘thisness’ - or, to use the philosophical term, haecceity - of that event. In Evens’ words, ‘a productive difference, a not-yet-determined, an ontological fuzziness inherent to actuality itself.’

Clearly it’s ridiculous to claim that human memory is somehow more faithful to reality than its digital pretender. Most of us forget or misremember the vast majority of our experiences throughout our lives. But, as Black Mirror neatly encapsulates, what’s harmful is the slippage between lived actuality and digitised ‘remembering’ - the pervasive idea that the two are basically interchangeable, rather than irreconcilable, and that digital encoding offers an irrefutable ‘perfection’, an objective reality. The programme’s characters are almost perpetually immersed in their digital databases. They may be physically present in a location but they’re often not really there; their eyes lit with the computerised glow which signifies their interacting with the machine, going through re-runs of past events. The programme ends (spoiler, sorry) with the protagonist gouging out his bean with a razor blade and a pair of pliers, preferring to live with the fuzziness and unreliability of human recall rather than be submerged in the mercilessly repeatable digital facsimiles of things that are lost to him. 

Obviously I’m no evolutionary biologist, but it seems logical to say that the systems by which we remember have developed in sympathy with our experience of the world. Our memory is a finely tuned response to the problem of retaining important information with the limited resources at our disposal. Severe trauma can make us forget, because sometimes remembrance does more harm than good. And there’s something arcane, mystical almost, in our experience of this labyrinthine, asymmetrical system. Part of what’s lost in the ‘databasification’ of culture is a sort of magic of recollection. 

Deleuze and Guattari refer to long term memory as functioning in an arborescent, ‘rooted’ manner. Playing across this is short term memory - which, by their definition, isn’t necessarily linked to recent events but ‘can act at a distance, come or return a long time after’, and is defined by its qualities of ‘discontinuity, rupture, multiplicity.’ Crucially, it ‘includes forgetting as a process.’ Things may seem orderly up there, but in reality they rarely work out that way. There’s a magic to stumbling across long-neglected memories, or exploring half-decayed ones, or interrogating the inconsistencies in seemingly solid ones. We’re fascinated by the imperfections in what is essentially the foundation of our identity and our experience of the world. 

This fascination finds an outlet in cultural activity. Interestingly, memory-as-subject-matter has become an increasingly prevalent aesthetic with the rise of technologies designed to augment it: from the phonograph (Edison originally conceived it as a means to store and recall the voices of the deceased) through to the decentred, instant-access archive of YouTube. The output of an (in my view brilliant) artist like Oneohtrix Point Never navigates through these technologies, all of which, by their nature, tend towards a theoretically ‘perfect’ memory - higher fidelity, longer shelf-life, better replicability. But he does so as a means to explore the ruptures, the misfires and the duds. An album like Returnal or this year’s Replica (if I did a top 10, it’d be in there) plays on these black spots, teasing out half-formed memory-matter from the recesses of the brain, reminding us that there’s no such thing as ‘perfect’ recall.

Over the last couple of years, ‘I Can’t Go For That’ has become almost canonical in certain circles. Some friends of mine have deployed it more or less every time I’ve seen them play. And it is something you deploy. You use it with caution. It’s the track that can’t be followed. And I mean this without a trace of irony - I and my flatmate attempted to follow it a few weeks back, record bags stuffed with peak-time house and techno, and ended up forcing them to put on something else to soften the blow. In my head, this track is a blueprint for what chart-busting pop should be. It’s refined without sounding plastic. It’s infused with an unthreatening, mellifluous warmth which welcomes you in, but there’s still the merest hint of funk grit under the surface; just enough to prevent it descending into the torpid.

My love for this track came to a head when I found myself at a cousin’s wedding near Newcastle this summer, nth pint in hand, waxing lyrical to my Dad about what is probably the most luscious bridge section in pop history (or so I would contend) as it played over the village hall PA system. ‘This is pretty much my all-time favourite track’, slurred I (or words to that effect). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just the booze that allowed me to overcome my usual taxono-phobia (it’s my blog, I’ll coin what I want). I guess it’s because of our long and unique shared history, but ‘I Can’t Go For That’ seems to do things to me which sit outside the more familiar patterns of musical enjoyment. Its affects - tied up in nostalgia, in a bundle of hazily defined associations - seem to bypass the various critical frameworks with which I usually listen to things. 

Perhaps you might use the term ‘guilty pleasure’ to define this kind of response, but it’s not a phrase I’m keen on. Its application tends to reveal slightly uncomfortable truths about the notions of ‘authenticity’ held by whoever applied it. It’s kind of a get-out clause for those who have discovered that their sense of what is ‘legitimate’ artistically doesn’t, in this case, match up to what they actually like. In that Quietus article on ‘smooth’, Charles Ubaghs gives short shrift to the term. For him, it ‘holds little currency today...Our ability to access almost all music ever made with just the push of a button has been slowly weakening this particularly virulent strain of puritanical elitism for some time now.’

YouTube omnivorousness does go some way to explaining why this kind of 80s MOR gets so much love from twenty-somethings in 2011. There are far fewer barriers to people falling into the warm embrace of the smooth, now that it sits alongside virtually all other recorded music on an equal footing. And it is a bloody brilliant song. But I don’t think that’s a full explanation. The appreciation of a track like this on a contemporary dancefloor, from the perspective of someone like Simon Reynolds, is a wallowing in ‘retro’: a shameless plundering of the stylistic fancy dress box of the past, a kind of ‘decade tourism’ which has little or no productive outcome. 

But for me, listening to ‘I Can’t Go For That’ probes something deeper. It takes a small fragment of the fabric of my memory and holds it up to the light. I can’t be the only person with that kind of relationship to it - lord knows it’s been played enough in the last couple of decades, lurking on radio playlists and in wedding DJs’ record bags. But everybody’s sense of that relationship will be unique, following the bespoke contours of their own imperfect, fleshy database. Tugging at the threads of recollection places an emphasis on our memories as irreducibly subjective and unique (my Primary school car journeys could be another’s family holiday to Cumbria, etc.). In the face of the relentless forward march of the digital, in which everything is standardised, normalised and universalised, maybe there’s a nascent craving for ‘thisness’ in our lives.

A Rhizome for 2011 - November 22, 2011: Sister

If you’d told my sixteen-year-old self that I would be writing about this track in 2011, I would have smirked disdainfully from behind my egregiously long fringe. My route to house music was a long one. As a teenager an unhealthy obsession with The Mars Volta (you could argue that any obsession with The Mars Volta is, by definition, unhealthy) meant that dance music was the enemy. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t doing anything remotely innovative. Mind you, when ‘innovative’ means 70-minute concept albums and an unfathomable enthusiasm for words like ‘scabrous’, almost everything else is going to seem a bit shit. 

My migration onto the dancefloor came via the two-pronged assault of dubstep and breakcore - neatly encapsulated in (I think) the first clubnight I went to, a Planet Mu thing at Corsica Studios, where both Vex’d and Venetian Snares blew my mind in their own respective ways. It was all downhill from there really.

I imagine that’s not so uncommon a narrative among dance music heads. The archetype of the young male shedding the rockist partisanship of his teenage years when he’s old enough to start going to clubs crops up in interviews with producers and DJs all the time (it seems to be a particularly, though by no means exclusively, male thing to be so militant about your tastes one month, only to perform a radical u-turn on them the next). A big shift in your aesthetic compass from childhood to adulthood is, I guess, normal - everybody has skeletal albums in their musical closet. 

But how do you account for a large group of informed adults consensually changing their tastes? In the accelerated ecosystem of dance music, where ‘generations’ only last a handful of years, this happens all the time. While my prog-snob teenage self might’ve put it down to fickleness, it can usually be accounted for by a kind of productive neophilia: audiences hanker after new sounds, which in turn spurs producers and DJs on to create or seek out these sounds. It keeps the machine oiled, stops things from rusting up. This is a key part of the cluster of ideas which makes up Simon Reynolds’ conception of the Hardcore Continuum. 

One of the spectacular achievements of Energy Flash, essentially the nuum Ur-text, was to reconfigure the terms of debate around dance music. Reynolds showed how certain characteristics of hardcore and its descendants, which may previously have been considered undesirable attributes in a scene - an insatiable lust for novelty, a functionalist view of tracks as essentially disposable, an emphasis on anonymous collective creativity rather than lone genius - in fact contribute to a healthy, self-sustaining culture. He’s used this logic to explain, for example, producers hopping between genres in the space of a few years, as many did in the late 90s from jungle to UK garage. Rather than shameless bandwagoneering, he argues, these producers are simply following the ‘spirit’ of an essentially chameleonic culture - they’re pursuing the ‘new’, rather than allowing their own musical identity to be tied down to a fast-ossifying set of musical characteristics.

But what about when the ‘new’ isn’t new? This is the problem currently faced by champions of the nuum. House is the thing. It has been since 2009, give or take. And 2011 has, if anything, seen it become even more central to the scene’s M.O., rather than show any signs of giving way to something else (as I think some established critics may have hoped). But house is as old as the hills. It has its own vibrant international culture - including a sizable stronghold in London - and its own vectors of innovation. Not only is it not an entirely new form which could engender the ‘future shock’ of, say, jungle or garage, but the fact that it never went away means it’s not even particularly ripe for revival.

In a recent panel discussion for WIRE magazine Martin Clark aka Blackdown, a dubstep blogger whose influence can’t be understated and a very astute observer of the nuum, recalled the critical scrum around house auteurs like Moodymann in the early 2000s. For a writer just getting started, as he was, these artists where basically inaccessible, already exhaustively covered by established critics in the UK and elsewhere. His response was to seek out relatively neglected innovation on his own doorstep - innovation which he found in the incipient grime and dubstep scenes. You can see why, for British writers like Blackdown, there’s an element of perceived ownership over the nuum - or at least a symbiotic relationship whereby the nuum defines them just as they define and champion its various permutations. To draw a parallel, I enjoy a lot of hip hop, but I don’t feel a strong personal connection to it and so have no urge to write about it. Music writing isn’t simply a case of research and exposition. It’s an expression of the flows of meaning between you and a thing - bidirectional flows - and if those flows aren’t of particular significance to you then writing about them is a waste of everybody’s time. 

As the year has drawn to a close, there’s been a lot of mutterings that UK dance music of the post-nuum variety is experiencing a bit of a lull. I’m not going to work up a sweat arguing against this. Truthfully, it’s made up a much smaller proportion of my listening lately than you (and I) might think (this might be mainly due to a paucity of Hessle releases - I was shocked to realise they’d only put out two records this year, aside from their huge [and excellent] compilation. I’m not criticising them, they’ve had a great year. Someone else needs to pick up the slack). 

As with most of the world’s present ills, I think house might be to blame. Since UK Funky and Joy Orbison broke in ’09, if you could identify a single coherent direction in the UK scene, then it’s been a voyage into the heart of the beast - shedding successive layers of its own identity in the process. I don’t think this is a particularly bad thing, nor is it an irreversible process. As far as I’m concerned, the best stuff around at the moment comes out of a willingness to meet house on its own terms, rather than attempting to create a controlled hybrid, excluding certain sonic characteristics which are ‘what makes house shit’ (I’m pretty sure that’s where RnB vocal cutups and neutered garridge drums come into it). As such, it seems like a lot of the creative energy rising up from the bottom of the swamp - aspiring producers, relative unknowns - has been redirected from ‘wot-do-u-call-it’ into straight up, unashamed house. Its goals are different, and the dialogues opened up may not be through the traditional channels, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t great music being made.  

Bristol is a great microcosm of this - a case study if you will. It’s always been a healthy satellite city as far as the nuum’s concerned, managing to mix the latest set of innovations with its own rich soundsystem history and distinct personality. Perhaps Bristolians don’t feel the same weight of expectation on their shoulders as their London counterparts - the sense that everything they do must be the continuation of a glittering heritage. Or maybe, conversely, it’s that they feel they have something to prove, being deprived of the automatic subcultural capital which comes with being part of a ‘London scene’. Either way, they often come up with the goods. In fact, it was Appleblim’s Dubstep Allstars mix in 2008 which first got me curious about techno and opened the floodgates for everything else. My brother lives there now and I’ve been to visit once. I really liked the place. I might move there when I leave uni and run out of money. 

A new house scene has exploded in Bristol this year. It’s been charted brilliantly by my esteemed colleague and ex-Brizzle resident Rory Gibb in his monthly column for The Quietus, which is supposed to be a general round up of electronic music but often ends up reading like a particularly erudite missive from the cultural arm of the Bristolian Tourist Board (that’s a compliment Rory!). 

This scene has all the trappings of a neophile shift à la nuum. It’s shepherded along by veterans of the city’s previous scene: Peverelist, who has showcased house on his established Punch Drunk imprint as well as contributing house-indebted tracks to other labels; Kidkut, whose Immerse label, previously a bastion for breakbeat-y dubstep, is now a go-to for the new sound; and the aforementioned Appleblim, whose production and DJing have both taken a distinctly 4x4 turn. It has a record shop, Idle Hands - whose founder Chris Farrell worked at Pev’s now-defunct Rooted Records - and a regular midweek clubnight, Western Union, which might end up assuming the mantle of ‘scene hub’ after long-standing dubstep night Dubloaded bowed out this month. It has a rash of new, interesting labels: Schmorgasboard, BRSTL, TANSTAAFL and Idle Hands, run out of the shop. And, of course, a clutch of promising new producers to go with it: Kowton, Outboxx, Andy Mac, Vessel, El Kid, etc. The list goes on. 

What’s striking about this scene though, is the extent to which its eyes are turned outwards, away from the institutions which are commonly held to define any ‘UK’ sound. The TANSTAAFL label is a joint venture by Bristol producer October and the Berlin-based John Osborn. Their staunchly analogue aesthetic has more in common with the Hardwax family than anything closer to home. Vessel and El Kid skulk around the peripheries of the dancefloor, often taking cues from more waywardly experimental sources (this Vessel mix is exquisite by the way). More generally, there’s no longer a sense that this music needs to assert its difference from the wider house and techno milieu. It has a distinct sound, but that sound arises through an unselfconscious re-interpretation of international sources, rather than a conscious response to a local heritage. 

‘Sister’ is the second release on Livity Sound - a Pev-instigated, vinyl-only white label series. I think it’s one of the best things to come out of Bristol this year. One of my favourite tracks of 2011, in fact. Partly because it’s so understated - totally un-hyped, both in promotional terms and sonic character. But mainly because it’s bloody good house music. It just rolls along, propelled by deep, mahogany sub-weight, navigating through a winding sequence of ghostly harmonies and muted piano lines. It’s masterfully paced. I can (and do) listen to it over and over again. When you’re really into house, as with any kind of music, the good stuff is like a warm loaf of granary bread, or a cup of tea after a long day. It’s nourishment, plain and simple. 

A Rhizome for 2011 - Introduction

As someone who aspires to be a professional music writer about 50% of the time, I ought to like lists. Lists are a staple of the diet. Around this time of year (or really a few weeks earlier - predictably I’ve left this til the last minute), good writers compile brilliant lists glittering with all the fascinating gems they’ve unearthed over the last 12 months, meticulously ordered and presented for digestion and delight.

I find this tricky. Mainly, I think, I lack commitment. I probably only listen to a tiny sliver of the quantity of music needed to make any kind of informed assessment about what was good. But also I’ve always been terrible at favourites. As a child, there was the dreaded ‘what’s your favourite colour?’ Every time I changed my mind, which was often, I felt like a fraud. Now it’s ‘what is your favourite art object in this category?’ (Halloween film/Philip K. Dick novel/dance music record ever/album released this year/etc.) My mind always goes blank. So here’s a solution, which is also an excuse to write down my broadly unpublishable (because they’re abstruse, not because they’re sordid or whatever) thoughts about the year 2011 in music and other things. 

Deleuze and Guattari contrast the centred, hierarchical root- or tree-like - ‘arborescent’ - systems, which they perceive to dominate Western modes of thought, with the ‘rhizome’. The rhizome is ‘an acentered, nonhierarchical, non-signifying system.’ The name is taken from botany, where it designates laterally connected structures - grasses, for example -  where all parts are equal, and any part can be connected to any other. There is no central node, nobody in charge, no focal point to which meaning or agency can be attributed. Just an irreducible multiplicity.

The implications of this idea are far too complex and wide-ranging for me to go into (also really too complex for me to understand fully). But in the flimsy dichotomy I’m setting up here, end of year lists are a chance for us to exercise our hierarchising tendency - to construct an arborescent formation, thereby teasing a divine order out of the jumbled chaos of the annual release schedule. It’s comforting and good for debate but - ignoring the three or four weeks at the end of the year which tend to be neglected by over-eager editors - it misses out a lot of what constitutes a meaningful relationship with music, for me anyway. So, in the spirit of D&G’s thousand plateaus, here are five of my own. The majority of the music I ended up writing about wasn’t released this year. Some of it was really incidental to the thing I actually wanted to write about. 

Memory is a heavily recurring theme. It just turned out that way, but it makes sense. When you think about it, EoY overviews are as much about the geography of your own memory as anything else - as I’m sure any artist whose February release has been thoroughly ignored in the annual roundups would attest. 

I’ll leave you with Deleuze and Guattari again, neatly and presciently summing up the process of attempting to write several blog posts simultaneously: 

‘We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there...Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau.’