Burrowing in for the Long Winter IV (Can the Ripple Be More Important Than the Splash?)

In the last installment of this series of posts, I’ll address two lingering questions. First, what does everything discussed in parts 1-3 have to do with the goal that we started with in the introduction? And second, why does that goal even matter? We can answer both of these questions by venturing further into the master's study.

In regards to the first question, the glib answer answer is… nothing. Parts 1-3 were basically a longwinded digression from my original aim. That aim, you might recall, was to lay out an alternative to the view according to which only music from a newly emergent subculture has the capability to shock and amaze. An alternative to the assumption that once your formative subculture has been supplanted, you, as a creator, have effectively been supplanted. Yet in my last post, I contended that many artists do seem to lose their powers once they’re no longer part of a thriving scene. And in the posts before that, I suggested that artists rarely create anything worthwhile before they come in contact with a scene, either. So where is the promised alternative? None of this contradicts the view that we started with.

The exception is the master’s study. It’s where the youth subculture-centric view and my perspective irreconcilably diverge. The youth subculture-centric view assumes that past the scenius stage, your creative efforts basically don’t matter—whereas I think that post-scenius efforts can matter as much or more than what came before them. (Hopefully you already got a sense of what I mean by “matter” in the introduction.) If there’s one idea I want you to take away from these posts, it’s that a third archetypal stage, after the teenage bedroom stage and the scenius stage, at least exists. Not everyone reaches this stage in their creative development, but there is always the possibility that they will.

Furthermore, even the ideas that I’ve “digressed” in covering are useful to our initial purpose insofar as they inform our understanding of the master’s study. In parts 1 and 2, I talked about how this third stage builds on both preceding stages: the teenage bedroom teaches you creative independence, while scenius teaches you creative agency and provides you with a more tangible aesthetic foundation. All of which you'll need moving forward. In part 3, I described the ways in which creators often take wrong turns once the scenius stage comes to an end. Which indirectly clarifies the third stage by establishing what it's not about. (Also, that so many artists lose their way at this point no doubt contributes to the perception that only what The Kids are up to really matters.)

There’s more to learn from this latter non-stage I call “the fallout” in particular. While discussing the different approaches that artists take at this juncture, I tried to mention not just the downside to each approach, but the upside as well. Each tactic may lead off our envisioned path, but there’s something each one gets right. Some trait that’s shared with the master’s study.

What the first approach, Delia’s approach, gets right is that you need to distance yourself from the scene once the flow of creativity abates. The master’s study is by nature solitary. Losing yourself in the whirlwind of art, ideas, and impressions generated by an ecology of talent at its peak is incredibly valuable. But that moment won't last forever. If you want to develop further, you'll eventually need to step back and process, ask yourself what you want to be doing, based on those experiences. (Whether you grapple with this intellectually or entirely through your creative choices.)

What Plaid’s so-called “Japanese approach” gets right is its underlying loyalty. Stepping back doesn’t equal renouncing. The scene gave you values, reference points, and even formative experiences. You would be heartless to throw all that away either a) because the scene eventually let you down or b) just for the chance to hang out at the current cool kids’ table. And, again, I have the intuition that it’s healthier, when possible, to build on rather than tear down and replace an existing foundation. That way you’ll get farther along with what you’re doing in the limited available time.

The value of the Bowie solution is more nuanced. It’s also extremely important to our understanding the master's study, and therefore worth covering in depth. Essentially, thinking of yourself as a perpetual student can be extremely helpful. The obvious associations—curiosity, openness, diligence, humility—are certainly part of what I have in mind. But I want to sketch out a conception of student mentality that goes beyond general personality traits. One that’s more detailed and idiosyncratic. Unlike Bowie and his ilk, I don’t think we should aim to be transfer students. But I also don’t like the idea of staying under the wing of a single mentor forever. Why yield to the views of another person, or group of people, so completely? Art is about trusting your own intuitions. This leads us to a somewhat paradoxical solution: you should aim to be your own student. What I have in mind entails a sort of combining of the lessons identified in the two preceding paragraphs. It entails reflecting on your artistically formative years, and investigating what being loyal to those years means to you on a personal level. What others perceive as signifying loyalty to the scene is irrelevant, superficial. What did you get out of those years that's really important? Your answer might be completely “wrong” to your old peers. But you just have to trust your heart on this. Through such investigation, you can enter stage 3 as a new kind of student. No longer an apprentice of the scene, but an apprentice of your own aspirational imagining of the scene. That’s what a student mentality entails for our purposes.

Does stubbornly dwelling on old ideals truly lead to the mind blowing music that I promised in the introduction? You might think it would lead to the opposite: art that's pathetically regressive and uninspired. It’s difficult to understand how this approach works, and why such concerns are misplaced, without getting into a few examples. Consider two case studies. And not obscure ones. Artists we can all agree on as among the greatest of all time... Beethoven and Autechre.

We’ll start with the former. Here’s how /mu/ user Schoenberg Defense Force describes Beethoven’s artistic development:

This is an interesting interpretation because of the counterintuitive assertion that Beethoven’s late work was simultaneously more traditional and more radical than what came before it. As a transitional figure between the classical and romantic eras, Beethoven initially learned to compose in a “proper” classical style, then drifted away as times changed. Yet he created his best work by returning to ostensibly outdated classical era principles and doubling down on them so hard that the results were strange and innovative instead of boring and conservative. His output became so “self-consciously hyper-classical” as to no longer be classical—but something else entirely.

Reviews and interviews show the same dynamic at work in the music of Autechre (despite their occupying a completely different position on the musical map):

If Autechre were conceived in a moment of epiphany, it was when they listened to the Mantronix megamixes and found themselves drawn to the lightning-fast edits and remixes of The Latin Rascals and Chep Nunez. The essence of these records, they discovered, was in the treatments. "We were always waiting for those bits and we were always thinking, it'd be great if music was like this all the way through, this cut-up," recalls Booth. (2003)

Sean Booth: I mean, I have a lot of mates who buy hip-hop and garage and grime and what have you. Occasionally I buy hip-hop, but almost all of the hip-hop I buy is from my childhood, really mid-80s stuff y’know. (2005)

Advancements in production technology were rapidly outpacing their expected purpose and previously inaccessible music-making devices were suddenly attainable to kids from across all cultural and economic lines. Hip-hop and electro, house and techno, bass and freestyle grew out of this cross-pollination and quickly turned weird. Autechre fully inherited the values of that era and they might be the only artists of our time to still live in them today. So much on NTS Sessions seems to offer a hypothetical alternate timeline to ’80s electronic music: What if it all just kept growing? What if each and every Latin Rascals razor blade micro edit was to re-edit itself violently? What if the stuttering vocals of Miami bass dubs were to develop sub-stutters? If all the acid house squelches grew into roars? If the extended DJ mixes lasted for entire days? And what if all the oh-shit moments that first came with these innovations were still central to the enjoyment of contemporary dance music? It would, presumably, keep evolving until it was no longer even recognizable as such. (2018)

If Beethoven was obsessed with building off the aesthetics of the classical style, Autechre are obsessed, in a way, with building off the aesthetics of early electro. Not the cute retro genre signifiers, but what Noz refers to as the “oh-shit moments”. In both cases, we find this process of honing in on an interpretation of scenius values and extrapolating this interpretation into the future, while casting aside the superfluous nostalgic trappings. It’s not that you still remember, it’s that you still believe.

A few clarifications. First, this process takes considerable creativity. Mere intensification—making fast music faster, or heavy music heavier—is inadequate. Your efforts ought to be more versatile and multifaceted than that. There needs to be learning involved. Remember, you want space to maneuver and explore potentially for decades. And second, even though I’ve been discussing this approach in very individualistic terms, it’s not purely about solipsistic withdrawal from the world. The work of each artist would not exist in a remotely similar form had they spent their entire lives closed off to external cultural influences, hadn’t been there to take part (however inconspicuously) in a historical moment larger than any individual. So while the extrapolation process depends on you, the inciting spark comes from the outside world, i.e. other people. Another analogy I used previously was that scenius functions as the launchpad for genius: if you want your journey to turn out right, you'll want to start from there. 

(Before we move on, here's one more angle on the extrapolation process: John Luther Adams once remarked that “the music knows more than I do”. Meaning that any given art is more than the sum of its creator’s conscious intentions. There are revelations hidden within the work, waiting to be found by a discerning observer and put to use. So this is a sense in which attention to past influences is connected to future creativity.)

…Anyways, I hope you get something out of all that. In particular, I hope that at this point the path I’ve outlined feels very distinct from the other view we started off with—the one in which everyone can at best hope to be “relevant” for a brief moment and then be consigned to ineffectual “elder statesman” territory for all eternity. From my perspective, that understanding ignores the valuable time spent before the highlighted moment, and even moreso the valuable work that can follow it. If only the full path were traveled more often. 

That brings us to the second question. Why did I bother with these posts? What—if anything—does this discussion accomplish? You won’t find intentionally constructed arguments in the preceding text. Only assertions, sometimes based on personal observation. Even the examples supplied are highly contestable, as one could easily interpret the trajectory of any artist I’ve mentioned in a different light. So I’m not trying to convince you that any of this is airtight in a historical or philosophical sense. I hope that’s obvious. This is not an appeal to your rationality, but to your imagination.

Maybe you’ll share some of my enthusiasm as an audience member for the possibilities of late work—with the understanding that it has the potential to be the best shit ever, to explore possibilities merely hinted at during earlier stages. Most of us readily accept this possibility in regards to literature and visual art. It’s even widely accepted in regards to classical music. (I thought Beethoven would be a good example to use because he’s one of the poster children for amazing late work.) Over the past 70 years, popular music has become a huge, incredibly varied region of artistic activity. The days when it simply equaled “dance music for teenagers” are long gone. Perhaps the youth subculture-centric view is a carryover from those days, and it's time we accept that its creators are as capable of reaching stage 3 as any other artists. I don’t particularly care if you like Autechre or not, but I encourage you to think of them a 2010s and 2020s act, not a 1990s act. For audiences, the output of the master’s study can be idiosyncratic to the point of bafflement and even frustration. Yet if you’re willing to try and understand this output, there’s a good chance works from the master’s study will blow your mind, as promised.

Maybe, better yet, you’ll share some of my enthusiasm as a creator for the possibilities of late work. An awareness of the value of pressing on. If you enjoy what you’re doing, and you don’t buy into the youth subculture-centric view, there’s no reason to stop. My only stipulation is that you’re not allowed to buy into Plaid’s silly ideas. Arriving at the music you’ve “always wanted to make” and subtly refining that formula over and over looks respectable enough on paper. But in practice I just don’t think anyone suddenly, finally perfects their own formula in its third decade of use. You have to remain loyal, it’s true—but also push yourself, make yourself uncomfortable, stop yourself from falling back on the same old motions. That’s how you outdo your previous work. The approach Plaid advocate really amounts to a denial of the possibility that you’ll ever make something better than you have already. We miss out on all sorts of potentially amazing work because people will travel part way along the path and decide, however unconsciously, that there’s simply nowhere further they can go. If you’ve reached what you think is such a point, consider the possibility that you’re selling your own imagination (and your scene’s imagination) short. 

Even after 18 years I can vividly remember the room in our old house where my dad kept most of his books. A lot of them must have been acquired while my parents were still in school. But I never thought of these books as mere lifeless, dusty trophies of past learning. I felt that they contained potential. More generally, that study and immersion contained potential. Potential for what, I couldn't have exactly said—but generally, to fuel something important and genuinely surprising. I’ve since come to realize that such sentiments are very much out of sync with popular notions of creativity. “Creative”, we often assume, equals wild, untutored, undisciplined, utterly intuitive and without self awareness. The implication of this kind of thinking is that knowledge is not, in fact, power—but rather a hinderance, if you want to act rather than onlook. Reluctantly, I’ve come to realize that there is a very important element of truth to that. You can get bogged down in the old books. Yet perhaps it’s not the whole story. Perhaps knowledge can be power if your heart is in the right place. Perhaps our greatest efforts cannot be achieved without longterm study. 

Let’s close by returning to this quoted passage discussed in part 1:

Until recently one could take a unique solace, that alone on a hill in upstate New York a mad thinker was hard at work manufacturing sounds never heard before, and wild futuristic theories previously unthunk. One didn’t need to know what exactly the sonic research was, how the madness manifested specifically, or the current state of the musical art; all one needed to know was that the visceral imagination would go on plodding sans distraction, and that some sort of abstract formulation of auditory utopia was in the making.

“Solace” is absolutely right—there is something both deeply comforting and deeply galvanizing about knowing that people like Amacher are out there. You don’t hear about them much these days, and I sometimes wonder if more such people existed in America and the UK in the past, especially around the middle of the 20th century. Or perhaps then they were simply more visible and celebrated. But none of that should matter. That sort of diffidence to the heights of the past goes completely against the spirit of the process we’ve outlined. What matters is that this path exists, invitingly beckoning to us.