*This Simon Reynolds essay is great. I feel I must annotate the whole thing. Oh wait wait wait – I have to appropriate it in toto – that's it.
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-noticed-curious-equivocation-in-press.html
*Reynolds speaks:
I noticed a curious equivocation in the press release for Contact, Love, Want, Have
"While on the face of it the album seems to traverse a number of retro-futurist styles, including dubstep, UK funky and garage, 80s synth pop and computer game soundtracks, it remains totally contemporary, coherent and focused, making the idea of restraining [Ikonika] to a single genre irrelevant"
(((So, who is "Ikonika"? Well, she's this multi-ethnic, multi-culti young London deejay; an Egyptian Filipino Briton named "Sara Abdel-Hamid.")))
http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com/2010/03/pitchfork-march-ikonika.html
That sleight of rhetoric struck me as emblematic for the music of Now (not just the nuum-not-nuum/nu-IDM/nuum-IDM sector, but electronic dance music as a whole, and possibly most left-field music–but that would be too big a topic to address at the present).
(((Simon is very big on what he calls the "nuum" or "continuum," which is his concept of a long-term, slowly evolving, techno dance-music ultragenre. It's a kind of European Union of digital pop, which covers a whole lot of subcultural space, but not all of it. I know that a term like "nuum-not-nuum/nu-IDM/nuum-IDM sector" sounds impossibly abstract, but I truly sympathize with critical efforts of this kind, and I am convinced that they matter.)))
"On the face of it"–what does that mean in this context? This being music, it must refer to "the sound-surface as it directly presents itself to the listener's ears." So the first half of the sentence is saying "well audio-wise it's, you know, recombinant bizniz yeah?" But there's this immediate pivot to the assertion that, in some way that we can't quite pinpoint or articulate but nonetheless insist on, it's groundbreaking, pushing the envelope, etc.
You get this kind of slippage in reviews of dance music all the time (which often consist in greater part of intricate breakdowns of the dance-historical sources and components that the track or artist's style or sub-sub-subgenre assembles itself out of). Nobody ever really gets around to explaining how something can be retro-futurist/recombinant and yet contemporary/original at the same time (the closest anyone's got would be various writings by Rouge's Foam – perhaps he could have a go with Ikonika?).
(((So. "Nobody ever really gets around to explaining how something can be retro-futurist/recombinant and yet contemporary/original at the same time." That's a really interesting theoretical problem. Let's have at it.)))
(((I would call that problem "atemporal." So, why is this woman Ikonika "contemporary/original"? It's because she's so very network-culture, that's why. She lacks a single ethnicity, a single nationality, and a single musical genre. There's no way to compel her to have those older qualities that we associate with, say, ethnic "urban black music" or national "British music" or scenester "disco music". Those are old-fashioned critical categories that do not map on to a person like her. Her art and her life are inherently recombinatorial. You can't really declare that Ikonika is the "avant-garde of Filipino Egyptian London sampladelica chicks.")))
(((Now, as to the "original" part, it's not really about that as originality was previously understood. This novelty is more like the "novelty" in a "new" kaleidoscope pattern. The kaleidoscope is a novelty-generating mechanism that hasn't been substantially "improved" since Sir David Brewster invented it in 1816. EVERY kaleidoscope pattern is "new." They're a kaleidoscope continuum.)))
The equivocation in the press release does actually capture precisely the equivocal reaction I have listening to the album and most other things in its genre-not-genre, which combines being impressed ("well this is relentlessly intelligent, well-made, etc") with nagging reservations about the fact that you are never actually smacked in the face with the feeling "this is utterly new," "never heard anything like this before" and so forth.
(((Well, this reservation is not a problem with the likes of AVATAR, a computer-generated film product that DOES smack you in the face with all kinds of gosh-wow ground-breaking technical novelty, without being "relentlessly intelligent." So who is more progressive: AVATAR or Ikonika? I don't think it's an accident that, in 2010, you could have a movie called "Ikonika" and a hip deejay named "Avatar" with no problem at all.)))
A common aesthetic strategy that pervades the glutted/clotted era (and that extends beyond dance music for sure) (((I concur, which is why I avidly read this guy even though I'm no music critic))) is the artist who avoids having one influence by having lots of influences–so that there's no single lineage you can be gen(r)ealogically traced back to and placed within, no specific forebear that puts you in shadow.
((("Network culture." "Scenius." "Commons-based peer production." "Steal from one it's plagiarism, steal from twenty it's research." So, let me ask, what specific forebear would one expect Ikonika to have? Another Filipino Egyptian West London techno deejay? Why?)))
Now you could call that being multifaceted/open-minded/poly-whatever; certainly fusion can lead to the forging of new compounds. Too often though, it just means that the artist in question is diversely derivative.
(((Okay, but how diversely derivative do you have to get before some originality sets in? If there was a totally nonderivative musician at large right now, what would we be properly expecting to hear from this person? And through what means of distribution and production would we hear that?)))
What I get off even the most inventive and energised nuum-not-nuum stuff is a sense of these potent musical intellects struggling to find exit routes to a beyond, to terra incognita. Hence the peculiar quality of hyperactive evasiveness to things like Untold: the music shuttles back and forth within a kind of grid-space of influences and sources, never settling into genre-icity, yet remaining a long way short of being limitless (there are areas that are off limits to it).
((("Waking from the nightmare of history." This is a very sad paragraph in some way... It reminds one of those abandoned game-worlds where lonely players endlessly wander through endlessly generated spaces without ever levelling up.)))
((IIt's also quite like the melancholy of a really strong drug trip, which provides the illusion of awesome spiritual breakthrough while eventually leaving you broke and with a headache. Mmmm... better have some MORE of that, eh? I was right on the brink of enlightenment there.)))
(((Forward, into the past! It's no wonder that Reynolds likes to read Owen "Militant Modernism" Hatherley, who is the world's most aggressively retrospective and nostalgic revolutionary socialist. Hatherley is like a historical crisis all by himself. Maybe this plight is about the inherent limits of digital hardware, of an information society – the apparent ease of use, the power-to-be-your-best, that is actually a larger trap. A continuum bed of Procrustes. Jump into that sandbox, and you can make anything you like, as long as it's made out of quicksand.)))
(((As a thought experiment, imagine that you kidnap Ikonika, and remove her from her sampler deck and her AutoTune gizmos, and carry her off to a desert island where she has to hand-make her own instruments out of coconuts and tortoise-shells and mud. Okay, is that resultant music *more advanced and original,* or LESS advanced and original? More surprising or less surprising? Better, or worse? More now or less now? Where is it?)))
The word that springs to mind for this restless sensation–for this Moment in music–is hyperstasis. ((("Krokerian spasm," "Dark euphoria")))
Perhaps if there wasn't such a lot of hype about its output, the sensation of vague dissatisfaction induced by it wouldn't be so pronounced.
(((Maybe, maybe not, but there sure ISN'T a "lot of hype about its output." Not at all. The Beatles and Elvis Presley had a ton of hype about their output. By those historical standards, there isn't much hype about the output of any contemporary musician.)))
(((The most hyped cultural figures in the music world are not innovative musicians, but very up-to-date, multimediated convergence-culture dance acts like Lady Gaga. They're global, relentlessly-touring show-biz celebrities who come across like Internet vaudeville hoofers. I happen to think that Lady Gaga is a much more significant figure than Ikonika, and a woman who more or less deserves the fame monster she pursues so ardently. But I don't think this is a "hype" problem. It's an ideological and philosophical problem. When do we fully realize that that our "progressives" are conservatives, and that our "conservatives" are panicked radicals? When do we get it that networking is not a way forward, but a web in all directions? That it's the hyper that creates the stasis?)))
