“You ought to make an effort . . .” She pauses. “To clear your mind of such . . .” She pauses again. “Echoes.” The Handmaid’s Tale
As with all the distinctions we’re making, this isn’t a matter of innovation, it’s a matter of evocation. It’s London vs. Dubai. It’s the kipple-cluttered future of Blade Runner vs. the amnesiac-pristine future of Star Trek. In the rhetoric that surrounds electronic music, critics and fans often fall into the trap of equating a lack of reference to the past with creativity or futurism. To the contrary, a blank slate may be just that: blank, technically distinct from the past yet lacking the discovery of anything truly resonant. And it can be an incredible feat of creativity to transmute inherited relics into new yet equally timeless forms.
Each side of the coin has its own charm. Worlds of the former kind allow us to experience through a child’s eyes (or perhaps an explorer’s)—curious and impressionable, encountering everything for the first time. The latter kind allows us to experience through an elder's—attuned to allusions, and to the meaning and power of familiar things. (Perhaps cultures start at the former and move toward the latter… but maybe it’s not that simple, and their evolution is more like a tug-of-war.) To complicate things, these poles of experience can blur: music that first seemed to offer a clean break can gradually reveal itself to contain echoes of the past. Since we’re beings forged by the past, we need these echoes… although to exactly what extent is forever up to debate.
No genre’s shifted as dramatically from clean slates to palimpsests as East Coast hip hop did between the mid 80s and early 90s. We can hear this by comparing two tracks produced by one of the genre’s early legends, Marley Marl. Production-wise, “The Bridge” is nothing but rattling multi-ton machinery and a cold war apocalypse siren that’s cut in and out in an aggressively unnatural manner. Even if you catch all the references in the lyrics, the track’s mysterious sparseness gives it the air of an artifact stolen from some cold, unplaceable brutalist future. So much hip hop that came out of the same time and area has a similarly posthuman sheen. In any subsequent decade, a track from Krafwerk’s Computer World would sound hilariously out of place next to the latest NYC rap… but “Numbers” and “Tour de France” sound perfectly congruent in hip hop mixes from the mid 80s. Marl’s production half a decade later on “She’s Dope! (EPOD Mix)” is much closer to home, unabashedly sampling the familiar sound world of the 70s, rather than just drawing on its grooves as latent structural inspiration. In truth, old sounds were always present in hip hop. Marl twisted a 70s horn sample into the siren wail heard on “The Bridge”, and ironically Kurtis Mantronik’s ultra-futuristic production on Music Madness went further back in time than anyone else in the era with the sampling of big band music. But in the 80s these artifacts were more likely to appear in an altered or otherwise defamiliarized form, functioning as sonic scrap material, not as warmth-giving heirlooms of the past.
Yet the sonic conservatism of 90s East Coast hip hop also created a new region of affect. It's exactly this memory-laden quality that makes its production so evocative. There’s a powerful juxtaposition of beautiful old melodic fragments of jazz and funk with grim, unblinkingly detailed stories of poverty and violence. In the remnants of a metropolis fallen into decay, where what little upward momentum the government had granted black Americans in the mid century—not coincidentally, the same era that 90s hip hop producers sampled so much—had been reversed by escalation of austerity measures and the war on drugs, this sound world carries the historical and visual density of NYC. The architecture of the music evokes the architecture of the city itself.
Remember how Mobb Deep quote Norman Connors’ “You are My Starship” in “Trife Life”? The latter starts with the exact same sparkling keyboard run that opens the former, and also transposes up the song’s bassline, transforming it from a weightless gliding into an ominous creeping. Given how anti-romantic the lyrics of “Trife Life” are, you could interpret this as ironic, as Havoc and Prodigy mocking the head-in-the-clouds romanticism of generations before them. But artists are always less motivated by irony than critics like to assume. There's an implied reverence in how little they fuck with the fragments lifted from the original song. What this reference evokes is a harder to place emotion; the echo of “Starship” serves as a dream-warmth that haunts you as you as you return to cold reality. A mirage you can't forget. (The song reaches a natural close… and then, after a brief silence, the beat starts up again, like an object in a haunted house coming to life of its own accord.)
Hip hop is by no means the only music of “roots and future”. It's present even in the most fervently modernist artistic cultures. When he was asked to create a work celebrating musique concrete’s 50th anniversary, Francis Dhomont was uniquely qualified for the job. He’d experimented with a kind of proto-concrete before the term existed, and had been quietly present for all the discoveries and conflicts that arose along the expedition led by Pierre Schaeffer. One of the central recurring motifs in “Cycle of Sound” is a sequence lifted from the opening seconds of Schaeffer’s “Etude in Objects”. What’s striking is how Dhomont takes these sound objects, now rusty ancient museum pieces, and enchants them into a shimmering material which casts unpredictable trails of light in its wake. It’s a beautiful effect which elevates the original sounds to a higher plane. The cycle is dedicated to “musique concrete’s unfortunate creator”, which itself is a quotation… it’s how Schaeffer, the burningly curious yet forever disappointed explorer, once referred to himself. With this context in mind, Dhomont’s magician tricks with Schaeffer’s sounds feel like a touching rebuttal to the latter’s pessimism, a way of saying, “Don't despair! Look how far we’ve come, thanks to the possibilities you opened up!” The work is rich with other allusions, like the spooky recurring presence of medieval choral music (probably related to Dhomont’s contention that musique concrete was the Ars Nova of the 20th century), and a drone passage interrupted by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks to classic works of concrete—ephemeral yet potent phantoms. A former student of Nadia Boulenger, Dhomont absorbed both the aesthetics of the “old world” and European modernism through lived experience. While the initial impression that “Cycle of Sound” generates is one of blinding futurism and alienness, the work's inventiveness is inseparable from the cultural erudition and lived memory that went into it.
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