LOCKDOWNTIME #24
"i never liked melodies, because melodies are like worms in your head" - conrad schnitzler
had a lot of kind messages from people the past few days about the newsletter: thank you all so much. often fool myself into thinking that what i’m doing here is completely ineffectual, akin to pissing into the void, and it’s really good to be reminded that there is actually something going on here, the construction of some kind of productive cultural circuit, which is good.
it’s also good because i’ve been sent some sick recs, which will be emerging over the next few newsletters. keep ya eyes peeled.
nick, alex and i have been watching documentaries every saturday around the loose themes of past and contemporary countercultures and the weird/strange eccentricities of british identity. this week was my pick and, having been listening to some industrial music this week (largely Nurse with Wound), i was interested in learning more about the history of electronic and industrial music, so picked this fantastic documentary on the history of kraftwerk, krautrock and german electronic music (youtube here).
the documentary is 3 hours long (we didn’t finish it) which means it’s incredibly in-depth in a way that makes most tv docs look extremely superficial. it really gives a lot of time and attention to the foundational infrastructure that made the music possible, exploring the network of german art communes and schools that hosted germany’s counterculture, and the desire to stand out against british and american pop.
what particularly stands out is the firm modernist commitment to experimentation and the drive to give a shape to the “future” throughout the german electronic scene of the 1960s/70s. in a very punk way, a lot of the musicians interviewed make clear their absolute indifference to “pleasing the crowd” or going commercial — their first priority was to give a concrete form to the “new” or the “future”, indeed to make such a thing thinkable in the first place. as Diedrich Diederichsen makes clear in the documentary’s intro:
[Kraftwerk’s] aesthetic investment was into something completely different from what all the other bands were into. All the other bands were into… was experience. And Kraftwerk was not that, it was obviously about distance… there was something conceptual, there was something humourous, there was irony…
this notion of distance is really important imo, and reiterates a point i briefly made in newsletter #5: music is precisely at its best when it’s not “just about the music/fans, man”. music should be a release valve for tensions in society, it should aspire to an explicit philosophy, aesthetic, and movement. anything less is superficial lowest-common-denominator dross.
as is custom after our viewings, nick, alex and i discussed where this kind of countercultural, experimental impulse exists today, and if it doesn’t, why it doesn’t. there are definitely still experimental pop auteurs today (grimes and kendrick lamar are the first two to come to mind), but what seems to be missing is the connection between these stars and a countercultural base, or the sense that they’re part of any kind of movement or scene. (grimes’ recent output, for instance, seems to be the outcome of her twiddling her thumbs in her mansion, throwing a dart at an edgelord list of “controversial” topics that she could skewer on her next LP.) as the kraftwerk documentary unveils, the german electronic scene was precisely made a “scene” by a very concrete countercultural infrastructure: communes, venues, art schools, and the like. today, at least in the uk, this is basically gone. multinational entertainment companies hover over art schools dangling grad schemes in front of students while other art schools are closed; high rents have shut down swathes of alternative venues; and communicative capitalism, through the dopamine rush of the “like”, engineers our desires to conform with the norm.
the first step to getting out of this is, in the vein of kraftwerk, is a cold and frosty distance, a refusal. say no to the grad scheme; say no to social media’s mandatory positivity, and in the process say yes to a life-to-come, beyond anything we can think right now.
creds to jack for sending me this amazing mix by bjork, which, in her words, is “most definitely flute and air themed”. i think this does a massive understatement to the magic of the mix, which is the way it draws out the abstract essence of the voice, transforms it into something eerily unhuman.
the voice becomes strangely depersonalised in the mix, detached from the constraints of linguistic meaning and individual personhood, less an instrument than a kind of environment or milieu that one passes through and investigates. if you want to understand what deleuze and guattari’s concept of “deterritorialisation” actually means concretely, you could do worse than listen to this mix. in short: bjork effects a deterritorialisation of the voice.
it’s very reminiscent of my bloody valentine’s loveless, which did the same with the guitar: the guitar was not simply an instrumental tool to achieve a particular sound, but was a terrain of experimentation in itself, something to be played with (rather than simply played), pushed to its limits. (the album’s cover makes this even clearer.)
it’s also wonderfully composed: the placement of kelela’s “take me apart” at the end is an incredible concluding crescendo.
last up, simon reynolds did some great reflections on blogging here, alongside xenogoth who responded here. great passage:
Bruce describes it as "a form of psychic relief... by blogging, I removed things from the fog of vague interest and I oriented them toward possible creative use"
That chimed with my own feelings about the value of unpaid labour: writing as freeform fun, as mental calisthenics, as intellectual hygiene... the blog as public notepad, a testing space or site for the construction of thought-probes.
honestly, everyone should have a blog for precisely these reasons. “mental calisthenics” is an excellent turn of phrase.
it doesn’t matter if no one reads it, just the act of getting thoughts into writing helps develop them and can push you into new directions you could never anticipate. this is basically how i approach my blog: i watch/listen to/read something and make a connection i hadn’t made before, think “huh that’s interesting”, and then challenge myself to explain why that’s interesting by making a blog post. most of the time i start writing and have no idea where it will end up. it’s openly messy, the arguments a bit slapdash, but it allows the new to rise to the surface in a way it just wouldn’t have otherwise. instead of tweeting your ideas, blog them. it’s way more healthy.
phew, finally finished. next delivery wednesday @ 8am. in the meantime, stay safe and send in recs!
jake x