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.  

Burrowing in for the Long Winter III (The Fallout)

Scenius has its limitations. An understanding of these limitations, and of the strategies that artists use to overcome them, is necessary if we want to understand the final stage of our path.

To this end, the following observation from Blissblogger provides a helpful starting point (with scenes rather than “genres" in mind):

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it.

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts.

The difficulty Blissblogger identifies here is that the energy that an ecology of talent generates is fragile and unsustainable in the long term. Eventually it dies down. Instead of producing exciting art, the scene increasingly produces uninspired and rigidly formulaic art. Mutual reinforcement and likemindedness—the very features that allowed the scene to flourish in the first place—ossify into orthodoxy.

This ossification is often accompanied by a newfound sense of disillusionment, the departure of an “anything is possible” spirit formerly in the air. I’m not sure which comes first, loss of creative optimism or stagnation on a formal level. But regardless, the whole situation forces a choice: either accept the ossification or get out.

—

One artist who saw the writing on the wall and took the second option was Delia Derbyshire. Later in life, she recounted how “something serious happened around ’72, ’73, ’74: the world went out of tune with itself and the BBC went out of tune with itself”. The shift that she felt in her surroundings prompted Derbyshire to leave the Radiophonic Workshop, and more broadly, Swinging London—a creative environment in which she had thrived for over a decade, and which her partner described as being “[Delia’s] heaven”. Derbyshire recognized how valuable her stay had been—but looked around and concluded that it would not continue to be so. There comes a point when if you want to keep developing creatively, you have leave the scenius stage behind.

But although abandoning ship can be a wise course of action, it doesn’t always work out the way you'd hope. This was likely the case for Derbyshire. She spent the second half of her life writing music but never, in all that time, published anything. Practically none of her work past ’75 amounted to fully realized music. That such a fate befell someone who was extremely driven and imaginative is telling. Leave the scene as it begins ossifying, and you can still easily fall into a kind of stasis of your own. It’s unlikely that an organism will thrive once removed from the ecosystem that nourishes it.

—

Yet there’s another way to escape a scene that’s in decline: simply move from your current scene to a different scene that’s going strong. If the scenius stage amounts to a sort of apprenticeship or schooling, then this tact is transferring to a different school (whereas the previous course of action is essentially dropping out). Music critics absolutely love when artists do this. Rock musicians and pop stars who can gracefully maneuver from one ecology of talent to the next are held on perhaps the highest pedestal by critics. And their veneration of this approach makes some sense. It allows you to capitalize on the advantages of being involved in a scene without suffering the drawbacks.

But as great as it looks on paper, this solution has its limits in practice. The problem is that you can only transfer schools so many times before you age out. Hardly anyone has the requisite mental flexibility—no, malleability—to spend an entire lifetime jumping from one scene to another. Each scene comes with its own set of shared values, reference points, and experiences. So each jump requires you to effectively replace one set with another in your mind. Our brains are wired to build upon existing knowledge, yet with this “transfer student” approach, you are perpetually starting over. (Even if, as a person, you remember your past experiences in other scenes, as a creator you must forget them.) At best, most artists have maybe one or two successful “scene transfers” in them. If they do try again, they most likely won’t land the jump. Which is to say that they will fail to tap into the shared energy generated by the new scene. For example, take one of popular music's most adept scene-jumpers: David Bowie. Droid describes Bowie’s attempt to harness the energy of jungle in the 90s as follows:

The reason I think this is instructive in terms of the earthling disaster is that its indicative of Bowie's inclination to take the easy path in his later career. His success was built upon a highly astute personnel choices. Ronson, Vandross, Eno, Rodgers and (perhaps most brilliantly) Davis, Alomar and Murray. After Let's Dance this sense seems to dissolve. he works with whoever is convenient or at hand. You would think that the man who pulled together so many brilliant bands would have the nous to do the same when approaching an occult genre like jungle... throw Rob Haigh, Photek or 4Hero a fat cheque - fuck it, even get Nookie or something, at least find someone who knows what they're doing instead of some random rock producer who cant cut up a break to save his life. I mean, Mark Plati... who the fuck was Mark Plati? So yeah, he couldve made a decent stab at a jungle LP if he hadn't been so lazy and he could have come to proper jungle nights full of manglers instead of some corporate astroturffed Bono shite, and I could've been at that secret gig in 97.

Droid sees Bowie’s problem as laziness, yet I think we can also interpret his problem as a reluctance or inability to truly immerse himself in the scene he had his sights on. He was unable to adopt the junglist mindset enough to recognize who was "real" and who was not, i.e. who was channeling the genre's true creative potential and who was not. In the past, Bowie had been more discerning—but with this attempt, he overextended himself. A revealing case study for scene-jumping, I think. Ultimately this solution simply inverts the problem: instead of the power of scenius eventually failing you, you eventually fail to channel it.

—

There is also a third option: loyalty. You don’t need to change course when the things start slowing down. You can freely accept this depletion of energy. You can conclude that where you have ended up must be the best of all possible worlds. How could the scene be wrong? I already essentially covered this approach by complaining about Plaid’s attitude (as expressed in a recent interview) here. When they say that they are proud to make (almost) the same album over and over, and that, currently, "revolutionary sounds . . . [are] just not possible", Plaid exemplify the mindset I'm talking about. The advantage of this approach is that it’s less likely to result in outright failure than the previous two. If you stay the course, you'll neither lose focus nor take an overt misstep.

This disadvantage is that, as I argued in the linked post, no one ever seems to make their best album 25 years into the refinement process. It's exceedingly likely that they'll make their, I don't know, seventh best album, but exceedingly unlikely that they'll outdo their previous work in any meaningful sense. Which raises the question... why even continue? FFS, I want to hear the best music ever, not music that's just like something else I heard years ago, except not quite as good.

—

But wait. Surely none of the transitional approaches we've identified lead to the master's study. So what was the point of discussing them?

For one, I just find them really interesting in their own right.

I also wanted to convey is that the transition from scenius to master's study is dangerous. It's the spot where most artists (including many really amazing ones) take a wrong turn. But if you manage not to, you might find that the best is yet to come.

And finally, we will see that the master's study has something in common with each of these "wrong" approaches.

Burrowing in for the Long Winter II (Scenius)

You can't stay in solitude forever. Come to think of it, I discussed this with Version once. We were trying to think of musicians who had developed in total isolation from any relevant peer community and couldn't come up with any. Even the iconoclasts and rugged individualists inevitably find their way to some kind of artistic social sphere (however niche it may be). For a time, they have allies, mentors, and competitors. So before you get to occupy the master’s study, you have to spend some time away from your bedroom and actually... go outside. At least figuratively.

Some affirmation of this comes in Brian Eno's concept of scenius. He describes it as follows:

I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution. 

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. 

The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent. 

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Interestingly, his description doesn't completely match how we often use the term. On Dissensus, we tend to set scenius in opposition to genius not just conceptually, but in terms of membership. We categorize our favorite musicians as either individualistic geniuses OR the products of a collective scenius. But that's not exactly what Eno is saying. As he describes it, the two concepts are closely entwined. Scenius functions as a sort of launch pad that allows what we ordinarily call "genius" to get off the ground.

We can integrate this idea into our envisioned path. Besides the two stages described in the previous post, there has to be a brush with scenius. So we have the "teenage bedroom" stage, which is about letting your mind wonder, and the "master's study" stage, which is about realizing your vision--and now an additional "scenius" stage.

But what is this stage "about"? I would contend that it's about apprenticeship. As I said earlier, the teenage bedroom doesn't require focus or discipline, yet the master’s study does. So you need to learn those skills at some point. And getting involved in the sort of "ecology of talent" discussed above can help you do that.

When you become part of a scene, you have to learn to meet its standards. This is somewhat true of any social group, but it's particularly true of the sort of milieu that Eno has in mind. To be a constituent part of scenius, not merely an onlooker, you need to be able to hold your own. This means absorbing ideals and developing skills that other members view as crucial. It means learning how to impress and win over your peers. Here, unlike in the teenage bedroom, you are learning and creating in accordance with an external model, as opposed to being lead entirely by your own whims. So “apprentice” seems like an apt term for someone at this stage. An apprentice to the scene.

For an example of what I'm talking about, consider this youtube commenter's take on early Afx:

The qualitative judgements of the early and later work here aren't important. What is important is the observation that before Aphex became a full on auteur, he just another kid learning how to DJ and make tracks he could play in a rave. A member of the scene, rather than standing apart from it. If you only knew Aphex as "that one electronic music super genius who gets namechecked by indie rock musicians" (like I did when I first saw this comment years ago), this interpretation of his artistic development would surprise you. The way he's talked about in the indie kid sphere could merit an entire post in itself--but suffice to say that you do not get descriptions like: "one of thousands of artists", "nothing special at the time", or "he was good but so were many others". You get this image of Aphex as a lone eccentric--but there was a time when he was on more or less the same page as everyone else.

Together, the teenage bedroom and scenius prepare you for the master's study. One does not sequentially follow the other, since these two stages don't build on each other so much as provide complementary skills. If you skip the teenage bedroom stage, you'll know how to imitate and impress with your work--but not how to extrapolate creatively beyond what others around you are doing at the moment. And if you skip the scenius stage, you won't learn how to make anything worthwhile at all.

But one question remains: once you're part of a community where you're surrounded by energetic, creative, generally inspiring people, why would you ever leave it behind for the comparative loneliness of the master's study? That's what we'll be thinking about in the next post.

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.