Something Moon Wiring

This Moon Wiring Mix looks (and indeed sounds) awesome.

Hauntology, England's Hidden Reverse, G-Funk, Trip Hop, IDM, Dilla, Zelda, Grime, Wonky, Witch-house ... and then some really crazy stuff.

Only thing missing is my new favourite sound : Maribou State (think Lucky Dragons meets James Blake in a Glo-fi House vibe.)

Dance Music Is Alive!

Good reasons (and links) to think we're in an exciting era in terms of electronic dance music. The "post-step" world.

And no mention of either hauntology or hypnogogic pop / witch-house / chill-wave. (Although as part of the wider electronic landscape they can't really be ignored.)

Ah. Simon Reynolds is guest blogging for Bruce Sterling

Very nice. For a while I've been making a connection between Bruce Sterling's ideas of Atemporality and Dark Euphoria and some of my favourite musical movements. (That's why the hauntology bloggers are all under "Gothic High-Tech" in my blogroll.)

Now I see Bruce Sterling is debating debated Simon Reynolds who's also been tracing the end of musical progress in recent writings.

Should be a fascinating discussion. Hope there's a podcast.

I have a feeling I should be reading Frederic Jameson.

We hey! I'm now a FoundObjects contributor.

Even more opportunities for you all to waste your time.

Ned Ragget :

So in the end when I saw that photo above and thought a bit, the truest comparison that leapt to mind was another band, now gone — Coil. In their emphasis on ritual and electronics, on the tactile and the contemplative, while the work of John Balance and Peter Christopherson still differs from Cargill and Keenan’s in many important ways, they arguably took different paths to similar end points, exaltations of creativity of the now that were also continuations of a secret history, of a time that seems more removed than it is, or more accurately a perceived time, a perceived past. And when there are always jokes that anything before one’s own birth or earliest memories is simply ‘ancient history,’ then Broadcast using the sonic starting points of the 1960s and otherwise would simply mean that they were working in just such a field in part, but never in the whole.

RIP Trish Keenan

I'm reading some absolutely fascinating articles about neo-folk, apoliteic music and attempts to build a fascist, green, anarchist synthesis.

Very confusing and scary. Like Michael Barkun's "improvisational millennialism" without the flying saucers (yet).

Fits right in to conspiracy theories and netocracy though, doesn't it?

Further thought. Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music? With the myths of a cosy, Reithian, paternal modernism replacing the the folk-tradition celebrated by the rightists?

Music links

I like this.

And all these.

Interesting rejection of fascism and neo-folk.

Genius! Entrances to Hell :-)

Hat-tip Justin Pickard, great story about technology and melancholy in The Guardian.

Great Moon Wiring Club podcast.

Gloomcast is pretty ace!

I can't stop listening to Seed Ships from the end of the new Belbury Poly album, (From an Ancient Star).

Outrageously lovely and packed with echoes and references : the "oceanic waves" at the end blatantly mimicking the fade-out of Jean-Michel Jarre's haunting Oxygene 6; the key-changing, reverbed arpeggios recalling The Black Dog's permagasmic Chesh; the melody patch which sounds like it's stolen from Plone.

And then when the big tune gets going, it keeps reminding me (although, I know it's neither the same melody or rhythm), of Momus's Flame into Being. Or maybe that's just me.

Infinitely familiar and strange at the same time, and utterly gripping.

Apart from that, I have mixed feelings about the album. There's no doubt that he has refined and sophisticated the Belbury sound. The compositions are more complex and developed. But what I miss, are the outliers; the tracks that don't conform to the standard library-synth pattern but which made "The Owl's Map" more varied and therefore more unexpected. The rocky Scarlet Ceremony and atmospheric Music, Movement & Meaning.

And it's lost some of the overtly folky bits too. Ratlers Hay and Wetland were subtle and sympathetic hybrids. On the new album, only From an Ancient Star seems interested in the same trick, and here the folk seems bolted on, more like one of Momus's clumsier "folktronicas". I guess there's something Steeleye Spanish about Widdershins too. But frankly I don't feel I'm in anywhere like as spookily pagan a place this time. It's all rather comfortable and cosy.

The Guardian's hauntological offer tomorrow.

What the hell! The hauntology of the next (80s) generation. When a global 8-bit video game, power-rangers mythology merges with an incongruous 90s rave / 2010s dance.

Behance has an interesting competition for artists to contribute ideas for the future of mobile music.

So far, though, I find the entries incredibly depressing. It's not exactly that they're bad or that some of the ideas don't seem "cool".

It's that the idea of music that they convey is 100% the one of "music as personal cocoon from the world". The personal devices are all about escaping from the social space into a world of ... well, if it was a world of "art" maybe that would be OK.

But there's no apparent love of music in the proposals. Industrial suppliers of musical escapism talk about "the music you love" ... thereby sidestepping the issue of what aesthetic vision *they* are trying to sell. Rock, soul, hip-hop, dubstep. They don't care. Music is the means, not the end. Their product is isolation.

In contrast, despite my pro-pirate tendencies, I just cracked open my PayPal piggybank and bought a real CD : Moon Wiring Club's Shoes Off And Chairs Away directly from the Blank Workshop site. Because of a Paypal mishap I had to mail him / them / the strange inhabitants of Clinkskell and ask for the CD to be sent to my UK address and not Brazil.

It arrived promptly yesterday, and I am ecstatically happy. Not so much with the music itself - the last Moon Wiring album grew on me rather than grabbed me immediately; for this new one, the atmosphere and weird juxtapositions are there, but the melodies haven't hooked into my brain yet I'm sure they will.) - but with the act of buying and getting a real CD from an artist who is so self evidently in love with the world he has created.. This is what makes it great music for me.

Update : semi-related. Over on the comments in SmartDisorganized, Albert gave me a nice compliment :

As I said before, what I liked the most about SDIdesk is that you actually use it yourself as opposed to being just the creator of an application. I personally am looking forward to starting with features that you would like to use yourself. Why? So then they will be implemented in a way that you would find convenient to use.

Of course, "build for yourself", like "scratch your itch" is a great heuristic for a programmer. Some of the best software is built like this.

Also some of the worst, of course. :-)

Hauntological note.

It's not simply that people of my generation are getting nostalgic for the tropes and indications of our childhoods. No, of course not!

What's happening is that we're doing the important historical work of sifting. In every cultural moment there is "good" and "bad" ... that which is well made within the context and rules of the genre, and that which is not (which is mere tired copyings of earlier styles or mere pastiche of the signifiers of the genre itself.)

Our job, now, is to begin the process of analysis. To identify what will stand for us in futurity and what later generations can safely forget.

Obviously ;-)

K-Punk on Oliver Postgate :

This was the voice of an adult speaking to children; an obvious point, no doubt, but where in children's TV now would you find such a mode of address? There are no children, there are no adults, there is no wonder: only adolescents in waiting, being spoken to by screamingly selfconscious adolescents in their twenties and thirties.

Just watch. Postgate is about to get elevated to the patron saint of Hauntology. Can't you just imagine GhostBox bringing out a tribute album?

Update : watch this documentary. I'm sold on the cult of Postgate. That's Composing!

You know what I'd like to see?

A mashup collaboration between Jackson Fish Market and The Blank Workshop.

Readers are left to imagine what form, media, or even multiverse, such a coupling would produce.

More Hauntology