Burrowing in for the Long Winter I (Stages of Solitude)

We can begin to sketch out this path by considering the following quotes:

https://deepmeditationtherapy.blogspot.com

the door to the teenage bedroom is always closed as it is the first space we learn to expand into. within those limits we extend consciousness beyond the skull walls. it is a training programme.

http://www.bretschneider.xyz/the-death-of-maryanne-amacher

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.

To my mind, these passages are closely related.

First--both reference the same kind of activity--a kind that's very difficult to describe straightforwardly due to how abstract it is. For now, I'll refer to it as exploratory progress: a process of learning and creating without a textbook or manual to guide you, a process entailing regular and fruitful expeditions into the unknown. (For our purposes, this concept centers around the creation of art and music, but perhaps it could extend to other subjects as well.)

Second--both cases involve a withdrawal from the outside world. There’s no literal exploration of terrain involved, as it's all from within the safe confines of home. There's no meeting new people, either.

The difference between the quotes above is conveyed in the phrase "training programme". The activity described in the latter is the grownup version of that described in the former. No longer the teenage bedroom, but, in Scheider's words, the hill in upstate New York. The master’s study. The eccentric relative's attic. Dumbledore's office, with its inscrutable instruments and old portraits.

---

I won't go into much detail about the idea of the teenage bedroom--after all, it's Luka's term, not mine--but for me the basic notion is as follows.

It’s a matter of discovering a new way to spend time, and then making this new way of spending time a habit. It turns out that you don’t have to spend every minute either hanging out with friends, passively consuming media, working, or studying for a test. This is the stage where you discover that there’s another option, which is “exploratory progress”.

Most likely, you will not be particularly focused or ambitious at this stage. Since you aren't attached to any prior expectations (internal or external), there isn't yet any pressure to be those things. You don't have to be Descartes, systematically constructing his pyramid of knowledge from the ground up. It's unlikely that you will accomplish any specific goals of lasting significance.

In the case of music, the teenage bedroom stage could entail making a lot of music, but it also could entail simply listening to music and thinking about it. Consider Juan Atkins’ recollection of how the Belleville three listened to music in their teenage years: “we used to sit back and philosophize . . . half the shit we thought about the artist never even fucking thought about!” Even if they weren't practicing their craft in the most literal sense, they were learning and being creative. So you can make exploratory progress without (yet) producing anything tangible.

As a stage of development, the teenage bedroom is less analogous to making progress along the path, more to gradually figuring out that the path exists.

---

We can already get some sense of how the master’s study is different. It is everything the teenage bedroom couldn’t be: focused, ambitious, learned. At this point the foundations / path are firmly established (though perhaps still subject to scrutiny and modification). The task is making progress on top of them.

Solitude figures into each stage, but for differing reasons. The teenage bedroom is a place of solitude because you can only discover the new way of spending time it offers if you’re alone (or with a very small group of friends). The master’s study is also a place of solitude, but for a different reason: no one else could make the same kind of progress. They don’t have the same arcane, specialized knowledge, and you’ve already progressed far enough that it’s clear that the vision beckoning you is unique.

You don’t have to stop thinking, but at this point thoughts aren’t enough. You need to produce concrete evidence that you’ve been doing more with your time than, you know, endlessly rewatching Sniper Special Ops or something. You need to make your progress real so that it won’t all die with you. And if that’s the goal, wouldn’t you want to realize it to the fullest, least compromised extent that you can manage?

---

With two stages of our path identified, we might now ask how one graduates from the first to the second. In order to answer this, I think that an additional stage must be introduced.

Burrowing in for the Long Winter (Introduction)

With a new decade beginning, it's natural to speculate about the future of music. What exciting developments are around the corner? More worryingly, are there exciting developments around the corner?

On Dissensus, the latter question inevitably transforms into another one: will there be a new music-based youth subculture? The assumption, of course, is that these questions are essentially the same. Fresh, exciting music is the domain of The Kids. If we want new and mindblowing sounds, we look to them and no one else.

In this series of posts, I won't explicitly argue against the above claim. (It's very compatible with the history of pop music, after all.) But I will try to offer an alternative perspective that I find vastly preferable to that one.

I'll do this by outlining what I see as the archetypal stages of an artist's development. This progression isn't necessarily appealing to everyone--let alone viable for everyone in a practical / material sense. But I think it's the path that results in the greatest possible body of work from the artist, and for that reason I see it as aspirational.

Why is this envisioned path incompatible with the youth subculture-centered view above? Because it suggests that exciting new music doesn't in fact belong to the kids. At least, not entirely. It suggests that the moment in which an artist is enmeshed in a larger cultural movement isn't the only stage at which their work can surprise and matter. In fact, it's what you do after that initial moment has faded that can have the most value.

second phase

the farlands post has reached an astounding 62 views!!! i think in 2020 that puts me in the top 1% of all blogs in terms of active readership.

 c'mon when's the next post coming??? we're dying to know!

time to clean this place up. i've unpublished several of the more embarrassing old posts and will hopefully be adding a few new ones over the next week or so. i'd like to be able to say that i've grown tremendously as a writer over the past two years, and that the coming posts will blow the old ones out of the water in originality, clarity, depth, and style--but that would be a total lie. but since, as of one week ago, i'm officially a NEET,  there's no reason to half-ass these next few posts. as a wise old man once said, "we always look for doctors but sometimes we're lucky to find a frosh".

plaid are the wynton marsalis of IDM

https://warp.net/editorial/what-makes-plaid

Andy: We've always said we're not experimental musicians but we've been lumped into that category because we started when it was an experimental form: everyone was hearing these electronic sounds for the first time. Now people expect revolutionary sounds every couple of years, based on what happened back then, but that's just not possible.

...because if there's one message that you want to get from artists, of all people, it's "that's just not possible"

We're about the craft of what we do more than about artistic manifestos, I think. We're definitely not about reinventing ourselves for every project - it's more about understanding our tools and the processes of composition, and refining the processes every time. We definitely have an affinity to the Japanese approach, where artists are proud to repeat and refine their processes. We're very happy to make "another Plaid record", and if we're about anything it's about that refinement of the craft. If we've done something that satisfies us, it may or may not work in the world, but we can feel happy that it's honest.

a good way to justify this approach might be to look at what the best albums in Plaid's area of music are. if a lot of these albums were made by older artists who spent decades polishing their craft rather than reinventing themselves, then I'd say this is a solid defense. evidence that lifelong repetition and refinement pays off with this kind of thing. except--
https://www.dummymag.com/10-best/10-best-warp-albums-plaid/
notice how all but 2 of these albums were made by people in their twenties. (also, all were younger than plaid currently are, and many were in their very early twenties.) and warp itself has been around for 30 years now--it's not like there's a shortage of warp material from more "refined" to choose from. I'm not sure why Plaid think "the Japanese approach" is such a good idea for them when they evidently don't think it's worked for anyone around them.

underlying my (not real) annoyance with their answers is the fact that 100% of the time I see someone whinging about newer autechre, they are a diehard plaid fan. "um, it's very 'experimental' and technically impressive and all but it's unlistenable, there's no melody. it's the emperor's new clothes. you're just listening to it to look smart." even the band themselves do the exact same thing in the 10 best albums link above.

what I'm getting at is that maybe you could invert the usual accusations thrown at autechre at plaid. maybe plaid and their fans don't actually enjoy their newer music. they just hear it and think, "ah, this is proper music with real melodies, not like that awful racket autechre are making these days."

the past wasn't good enough

a while ago someone on dissensus mentioned a quote from some guy in the incredible string band. it was something like "there was a period in the 60s where we lived in the woods and i genuinely thought that money wouldn't be a thing in like six months."

before that i listened to a recording of an AMM performance from around the same time, then to a few minutes of a more recent recording of theirs. the difference was striking. maybe it's not fair to compare them, since the one from the 60s was the group at their most cacophonous, and in the later one they were certainly aiming for something different: quieter and more delicate. but still, there was a sickeningly 'mature' quality to the second one. you could tell that by its time they had decided that they had to draw from not just the new, but also temper it with the timeless. but the first performance was interesting BETTER because it was ruder, more visionary, seeming to announce "your conception of music will be completely different in six months, get with it!"

in the 90s sean booth said that music in 10 years would sound completely different from how it did then (/does now). "i was young and naive, what can i say."

anyways these kinds of sentiments are very inspiring, i think. sure, it's easy to fall back on the narrative loved by middle-aged (well old now) classics-western-cannon types that there wasn't anything particularly special about these eras (other than how delusional they were!) and the quotes above are just myopia: people buying too hard into the hype and fads of their times--being so arrogant as to assume that they could leave mozart or whatever--the Timeless--behind. basically the story of icarus, except instead of the sun it's the new. (it's been 100 years now and the postman still isn't whistling shoenberg!) a lot of the time i side with this boringly reasonable take.

but on some level, i really want to think that even if these magical eras didn't fully make good on their promises, nevertheless, new forms, sounds, etc. will come along / be discovered at some point that will blow everything before (everything that we know) out of the water. so we should explore the past, by all means--but keep looking forward too. cause maybe the future holds possibilities so revelatory that they'll BTFO everything we've known and done. sure it's absurdly optimistic... but wouldn't that be cool?

Note: This user has not visited Rate Your Music in the past 60 days

well obviously i've sort of lost interest in this blog for the time being, but i have a lot of "good" ideas that I'd like to develop at some point

- "Balancing" Experimentation and Accessibility is Stupid
- is interpretation bullshit?  (this one's important, probably 1st priority) 
- aesthetic possibilities unlocked by recorded music
- weight of the 20th century culture archive
- yearning for the algorhithmic

that's probably enough for now. actually i might do one of these in the next few days. lots of arguments grounded in FACTS and LOGIC incoming

edit: fuck it, will probably wait until summer after all 

you just activated my trap card

it doesn't matter if i think it's good or bad, that's just what's happened

Chuck Klosterman (MN represent!) said some things about music criticism that I thought were kind of interesting in a recent interview: 

When I first got into criticism as a life in 1994 or 1995, one of the prerequisites of the job was, “Can you distance yourself from the life of the artist and just look at the art? Do you have the ability to do that?” Because at the time the thinking was: A lot of people can’t. A lot of people in the audience can’t do that. They can’t look at somebody like Marilyn Manson and not think of his character as a way that informs them about what the music means, but as a critic you’re supposed to be able to that. You’re supposed to be able to say, “I can just look at this art and examine its merits almost separate from the individual.”

And now that has completely reversed. Not only do people not expect you to do that—they don’t want you to. There is an expectation that, of course, you’re going to think about the individual’s real-life persona within even their fictitious work, so that has changed.

Isaac Chotiner: What’s your feeling about that?

My feeling doesn’t matter. [Laughs.] It doesn’t matter to me if I think it’s good or bad. That’s just what’s happened.

          ---

There’ve always been critics and writers who went outside of the text, where it would be like everybody’s writing about Hootie & the Blowfish, everyone’s writing about the Hootie & the Blowfish record, and they’re talking about whether the music is cool or lame or are they actually talented or are they not really talented or talking about who the audience for this music is.

And then there would be a few critics outside of that, who’d be like, “Let’s think about Hootie & the Blowfish as an idea. What does it mean for this to have happened that this band is so much bigger than all of these other artists who we perceive as being more talented or more important or more insightful. What does it mean, almost politically or socially, that for this brief period of time the biggest band in the world is Hootie & the Blowfish?”

There was always a sliver of people doing that. I suppose, when I first got into this, I sort of perceived myself as being in that sliver of people doing it. And now this has completely flopped. Now that is the overwhelming majority of criticism. That’s the only way to do criticism now. What used to be sort of the fringe is now the center of everything.

It seems like Klosterman is describing two distinct, but very entwined ideas that are foundational for a lot of music criticism today. The first is that we should reject the old(?) notion of separating the art from the artist. Amanda Petrusich explains this idea and its rationale here in somewhat more depth:

 

The second idea described by Klosterman is that we should analyze music in terms of its broader cultural meaning. Here's just one example of what this approach looks like in practice, but you can find it pretty much everywhere.

Anyways, the interesting thing about these ideas is that--despite being tenets of current (popular) music criticism among journalists--they are pretty controversial outside that inner sphere. The video above, as of my writing this, has 44 likes and 271 dislikes--which seems pretty rough for an unassuming "professional from x field opines on a topic in that field" type video. Even Klosterman, who I'd expect to be more aligned with music journalism, expresses some misgivings in the interview above about how prevalent these ideas have become. I generally don't like them much either.

That said, I also think that it would be crazy to evaluate such ideas from a majority rule angle. What would Petrusich think about the backlash against her opinion in the video? Probably not that her ideas were wrong, but that the people who hit 'dislike' weren't ready for, or felt challenged by them. That's probably sort of true. Comments on the video are disabled, but if they weren't, there would no doubt be a lot of whining about "ess jay double yoos", etc.

I'd like to think, though, that we can have better reasons for (at least some of the time) rejecting these ideas. I sort of already explained why I'm not a huge fan of Petrusich's approach in this post. As for the cultural meaning tenet, this ilm forum post from Οὖτις nails why it can be unappealing (it's "otm" as they always say there lol):

some work is less important for the experience of actually digesting the content it presents to you and more important for the discourse that it has created

and this is the point I *really* disagree with, because thinking like this is how music criticism (and to some extent the broader music industry - certainly the mainstream industry) arrived at the sorry state it's in today, where the "narrative" of an artist's career is more important/of more interest than the work itself. Celebrity becomes everything, telling (and discussing and responding to and judging) the larger meta-story about the celebrity's life transcends the work itself. Which, I have to say as both a musician and a fan, I very much resent and hate, because it devalues the work itself, the actual content/creation that is supposed to be performing that function of engaging and absorbing the listener. With great works, I forget p much everything about the creator and myself and get immersed in it, it's like a little world to walk into, a comprehensive experience. But artists will be less inclined to even shoot for that goal if their primary concern isn't creating something good, it's just *being* interesting themselves.

Anyways, to end on a more positive note, here's a excerpt from John Luther Adams that's (part of) maybe my favorite music-related quote period. I'm not gonna say it completely BTFO's the views expressed by Petrusich in the video (Adams himself probably wouldn't think so) but...

In fact, nothing makes me happier than when you think or hear or feel or experience something that I, the composer, didn't anticipate or didn't understand was present…was implicit in the music. That is very exciting to me. Look, the music always knows more than I do. And the reason I do this…the reason we dedicate ourselves to music and the reason music is so essential to our lives is that it’s bigger than we are. It’s deeper…. it’s like the ocean. There’s not just one current or one stream. There’s this ocean of possibility. I revel in that. I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just listening and trying to hear something I haven’t heard before, and then my job is to try and make that audible so you can hear it too. What it means is up to you.

...it sure seems liberating by comparison.

techno 1990

Bleep / Cold Futurism / Quaint Sci-fi

Veda

(People have already compiled tons of this stuff, I probably don't need to go on.)

Lush / Utopian / Dreamy

 Live the Dream

 

Only a Dream

 

The Attic

 Dreamworld

 Industrial / Mechanized Rock Riffs / Proto-Hardcore(???)

 

1200 AD

 Powerhouse

Bring That Beat Back

Revolution

In my ongoing attempt to get a better sense of electronic music history, I've moved on from Chicago / Detroit stuff from the late 80s to UK / European house and techno from the 90s--sort of following the trajectory of Energy Flash. So far I'm only at 1991, but I wanted to note a few of the aesthetic directions I heard in the tracks from 1990 (without writing another longwinded essay-type post). Obviously there's a lot of overlap between these; they're more like currents running through the music than discrete genres.

Edit: entry title reminded me of this video lol

no one creates music to make the world a worse place

This is an idea that's so foundational for my musical outlook that I'm not even sure how to clearly articulate it. But basically, it seems fair to me to say music (and maybe art in general) is created to be enjoyed / appreciated. As such, our goal in listening to it should be figure out how to do so. When we can't, we're missing out and should want to fix that rather than gloat about our superior taste. 

Maybe that assumption about why music is created isn't--or wasn't--always true. But even if you want to say that it can serve other functional roles (e.g. ringtones, tearing down bourgeois assumptions about what music is, keeping teens from loitering outside a 7-eleven), you can surely admit that "music is created to be enjoyed" holds true for most of what we consider "music" in our current society (maaan). If you are interested in music for those other roles it can have, you're certainly reading the wrong blog.

The boring Anthony Fantano-type response, though, is that Music Is Subjective™ and everyone has their own tastes, so you shouldn't force yourself to like things when in fact everyone is going to like some music and dislike some music. And that's obviously all true. But missing out is still missing out, regardless of how inevitable it is. So while you shouldn't worry too much about not "getting" a particular artist or whatever, I just don't see why you wouldn't want to be able to appreciate more things. Why take pride in not appreciating something when it exists solely to be appreciated? (Not that it can't be fun or even beneficial to try and articulate why you don't like certain music, but that's another post.)

Another truism-based response: Everything Is Political™ and so we shouldn't recklessly praise and support music without thinking about its impact in the external world. But I'd note that "enjoy / appreciate" doesn't necessarily mean "praise and support" (and I think it would need to for this objection to work). Also, granted, that is certainly a necessary consideration for everyone, but it's not the focus of this blog. (I mostly leave the more nuanced thinking on this dynamic to the geniuses over at Pitchfork.com.)

One more less fashionable objection might be that in order to determine what is aesthetically good / worthy of appreciation, one must also be able to determine what is bad--meaning some music must not be worthy of appreciation. And while I could just fall back on the old "nothing's objectively aesthetically good, it's just subjective opinion" line, a slightly more satisfying response might be say that there are practically an infinite number of reasons you might think a work of music is good--so even if that does suggest that other works are not as good in a particular respect--it doesn't mean you couldn't find other reasons to appreciate them. That said, I also don't see why my approach should prevent you from deciding that you like one work more than other (although it admittedly makes that harder).

I feel like I still haven't made it totally clear why I think this is so important, but oh well. This is a blog post, not a treatise. Just try to lighten up and enjoy things once in a while, I guess!


Edit: I guess one more important clarification is that I'm not saying you should actively seek to enjoy as wide a variety of music as possible if you aren't interested in doing so (my own listening habits are pretty narrow at the moment). I just find that this is a helpful way of looking at things when you do run into music that you don't immediately like. 

Listening 1

[This is the first of maybe a series of posts where I note what I've been listening to lately, and try to articulate what I liked (or at least what stood out to me) about it. Not sure if it'll be worthwhile but I'll give it a shot...]

vektroid - ocean color road

-extremely evocative, both on the level of sound design (lush magical water/wave sounds, aquatic tropical pads and leads) and the level of composition/pacing (some songs reminiscent of extended periods of oceanic travel, others of stopping at some mysterious island; each song is distinct and memorable in its own right)
-similar "segahaze" sound to Neo Cali and Starcalc but more fully realized: feels like a journey rather than a collection of songs that are just based on the same aesthetic template
-I know a sort of ironic detachment is often attributed to kindred spirits like Lopatin, Ferraro, Internet Club, etc. especially when they make music that seems to reference escapism--but damn if this doesn't sound like a pretty sincere attempt at making something that feels really escapist: a world you could (and would want to) stay in. not saying that's all there is to it--but that's probably why I like it so much more than anything I've heard by any of those artists

future - future

-I don't exactly know what drew me to this rather than any other mainstream trap albums, but I think it has to do with how it exemplifies the 2010s trap sound while offering some subtle freshness production-wise: it mostly eschews with the usual "epic" choir pads and spooky descending motifs in favor of brighter, more lush ambient and melodic sounds; at the same time, it exemplifies the interesting rhythmic feel of recent trap with its complex, contorting hi hat and kick patterns and use of interchanged kicks with varying degrees of loudness/punchiness. 
-future has a similar loose, singsong approach to a lot of other popular rappers--but he does it best imo. a lot of older rappers (even post-80s) sound stiff / lacking in groove sense by comparison

kanye - tlop

-turns out this actually his best album
-I'm assuming some of the critics who (comparatively speaking) panned it offered reasoning along the lines of platitudes like "it's sprawling and unfocused" and "it doesn't have distinct, unified aesthetic that could 'change the game' like his previous albums".
-personally I think such criticisms miss what makes this album so interesting: critics always love a neatly classifiable "new sound" album--but here he does something better: taking the most successful and distinctive elements of previous works to an extreme
-1. his earlier soul/gospel style and later more abrasive style are put in a blender: choir samples, rnb-style vocals, etc. are featured heavily but processed--clipped, distorted, delayed--in weird ways (almost reminding me of "gesange der junglinge" at times tbh)
-2. more generally though, it takes his approach of building songs around unusual sounds and unexpected changes to an extreme while still being basically a pop album. maybe my favorite example of how unorthodox his approach is right now is in "Wolves": right as the carthartic chorus/hook comes in (e.g. at 1:24), a bunch of other sounds also enter the mix, one of which doesn't even seem to be playing at the same speed as the rest of the song. very chaotic and 'wtf' in a fun way.
-also, I guess I've ignored the thing that always seems most important to critics when reviewing kanye west albums: psychoanalyzing the man himself. I don't have much to say there (c.f. megan garvey's review of ye), other than that lyrically there are, as usual, a lot of "groaners" and a few funny lines here and there. as for his broader public persona, it just amazes me that so many liberal music commentators / enthusiasts seemed to think for awhile that an impossibly rich, egotistical celebrity was genuinely "on their side" and would always be a responsible voice for the causes they (we) think are important.

a guy called gerald - "escape"

-basically exemplifies gerald's inimitable early approach: counterintuitive rhythms that are somehow angular yet smoothly flowing, and composition that holds interest by "drifting" in odd ways--favoring intuitive variation of initial elements over the introduction of completely new ideas. plus the "we've got so much power now" sample has a really cool industrial sound included, and i love how the delay used turns it and other samples into 'clouds' of sound rather than rigid grid patterns. overall very badass-sounding. fuck that guy who uploads old house tracks like this on youtube but always uses footage of a """sexy""" second life(?) avatar dancing it to accompany it though.

alright, its 4:00 AM, time to stop writing...