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.

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