“And phone calls don't cost a dime
In the caverns of your feeling where the sun will never shine” The Meat Puppets“As someone else said, the fact that all these years have gone by and we still haven't found most of the samples for this album is incredibly eerie for some reason. Almost as if this album shouldn't exist” Carl Wagner
If we linger on the issue of how history and memory play into the listening experience, things start to get weird. So far we’ve established a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, musical worlds that are shrouded in mist; on the other, musical worlds that are filled with lares et penates. We understand that first impressions can be deceptive on this front. But what’s more, history and memory themselves are malleable, and that can have a profound impact on musical diegesis.
It’s possible to reach the zone of affect known as the uncanny, where the familiar and the unfamiliar blur into one. This feeling is neither the comfort of nostalgia nor the shock of the new. It’s the feeling of encountering something that seems to have been excavated from the subterranean rivers of your unconscious. Make no mistake, you are in for a shock. But the shock of the experience comes from the familiarity as much as it does from the strangeness. It’s like you’re getting a glimpse of a dream you had a long time ago, or an important memory you forgot… Or maybe it's someone else's dream, living on long after it should've faded away, and miraculously reaching you just before it’s finally gone.
These experiences can be triggered by artifacts that are recognizably old, yet not canonical. That is to say, they were obviously born out of a bygone era, yet their essence didn’t make the jump into whatever narrow set of tropes now define that era in cultural memory. We can make an analogy here with photography. When I look at an iconic photo of a famous historical event that happened in 1951, any sense that that seeing what I’m seeing ought to be impossible—given the temporal chasm between me and the captured moment—is negated by how the image reads like a larger-than-life cliché, a museum piece rather than a memory. But when I view the same view that someone living in Ham Lake, Minnesota saw when they looked out their window one morning in 1951, I feel as though I’m confronted with a vision to which I shouldn't have access. That’s when these basic recording technologies really do become dark magic. This applies tenfold to music, where what a given work conveys feels even more specific, in that it seems to carry more of an interiority and spirit unique to the period of realization.
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| important bit of internet mythology |
The shock of the subterranean doesn’t have to come about incidentally. It can also work as an aesthetic target. Success requires the artist to be so in tune with the shadowy corners of our heads that they can create a kind of forgery. The most lasting examples of this are the works that both channel a magical “lost” quality and create a sort of Borgesian conundrum where the music points us to an aesthetic thread running under the radar through the past. But the draw of this stuff isn’t historiographical, it’s visceral.
Even so, isn’t this tactic a kind of retreat, a shirking of our true responsibility to reach for the shock of the new? I don't think so. A discovery is a discovery. That’s true whether it’s an uncharted island or a rumored ancient city that’s been buried underneath us all along. Don’t you feel an urge to explore Tartarian ruins concealed from our sight by the Mudflood?
Vektroid’s ultra influential run of releases under various pseudonyms in the early 2010s is worth a close look. The most infamous “surfacing” of the subterranean ever, “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing” had nearly 50 million views on Youtube before it was taken down. But to a more attentive subset of listeners it's accepted wisdom that the memed-to-death Floral Shoppe wasn't necessarily even its creator's best work that year.
Let's focus for a moment on New Dreams Ltd. - Initiation Tape - Part One. The title's a fitting one, evoking grainy corporate training vhs tapes from the 80s. But it doesn't prepare you for the tape itself. What’s most striking is the deathly nocturnal aura that hangs over the whole thing. The opening minutes deserve a lot of credit in establishing this tone: the first presence you encounter is the fearful, doomed voice of a ghost that’s been lost in lightless backrooms for uncountable years; then a looped radio news tag appears, one which wouldn't be so unsettling if it weren't cut in such a way that it begins with an enigmatic growling noise. This is followed by a transition into the CBC Late Night theme (which a youtube commenter accurately describes here as being “terrifying”); this is followed by an escape outside into the city night air with the feverish siren-like guitar of “Timecop”. A romantic yearning emerges in the following tracks, culminating in “hydrocodone / prom night” and then “you appeared / you didn't”, in which the glow of “Bette Davis Eyes” is warped and intensified into a delirious swooning. The last section has a solemn, ceremonial atmosphere: weighty voices, punctuated by a window into the void (“Upper Spheres of Consciousness”). The End is upon us.
Initiation Tape wears the influence of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 on its sleeve. But although Lopatin was no doubt aware of the esoteric emotions instilled by his fragments of kitschy radio pop, Eccojams feels like a collection of experiments united more by their methodology that any deliberately cultivated atmosphere. Initiation Tape goes further by deploying this formal technique to carve out a very specific vision. It evokes the feeling of being alone and madly in love on the last night, the eve of the end of the world... if this feeling was somehow preserved and reached another world many years later, a message in a bottle. Despite the tongue in cheek connotations, the promise of the title is genuine: if you listen you’ll be trained in, initiated into the cult of the subterranean.
Another more daunting Vektroid case study is Peace Forever Eternal - Nextcentury. Released half a decade later, the album reflects a creative shift in the wake of viral “success”. The dashed-off nature of her most famous work may have bothered Vektroid. It gave her an reputation among critics and casual listeners alike as a kind of conceptual provocateur—the musical equivalent of an artist who's paid millions of dollars for stacking a pile of cinderblocks in the middle of an art gallery. Not the reputation a teenager who grew up idolizing the puzzlemaking of Autechre, Aphex, and BoC must've wanted.
It’s tempting to hear an implicit challenge in the sampladelic mazes of Nextcentury. If earlier releases like Initiation Tape borrowed from the more famous side of Eccojams, the parts where fleeting moments of truth in pop songs are converted into perfect mobius strips, Nextcentury borrows from the moments of breakdown, of destruction of form… and cranks them up a hundredfold. The music is so jagged and dense that it makes John Oswald sound naturalistic. (Vektroid beta tested this approach with the comparatively restrained Eden a year earlier, and may have also been influenced by Internet Club’s ░▒▓ New Deluxe Life ▓▒░ --▣ Freed from the World ▣, a shockingly crude and unsettling work that gained infamy in corners of the internet like 4chan for being “cursed”.) It’ll infuriate the same people who were infuriated by Vektroid’s earlier work, but for the opposite reason; there's not too little done with the samples—there's too much. Yet there’s an alien logic running through the whole thing, particularly an attention to background harmonic color that comes through in maneuvers like the album spanning meta-motif wherein a sample repeats twice, then once in a transposed register, then once more at the initial pitch.
The result is subterranean shock of a different flavor than Initiation Tape. The music’s utterly counterintuitive handling of its persistently half-familiar source material invites you to imagine an explanation. Again, the title seems to offer a hint. Maybe it’s the product of AI combing through the detritus of human culture after some disaster wiped out our species. (A late 20th century nuclear conflict in an alternate timeline? But then, how the hell did that "I wanna be a cowboy, baby" vine get in?) If the AI’s attempting to reconstruct the original artifacts, it’s failing miserably. But in the process it’s uncovering emotions and sensations that’ve never existed outside our most addled electric age dreams.
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