murmurations

One of the mini-essays in Mark Fisher's fractured but brilliant book Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2013) discusses Grant Gee's 2011 film Patience (After Sebald) , where the film-maker 'replays' W.G. Sebald's walk along the Suffolk coast in his prose-work The Rings of Saturn . Fisher's interest in the film is reflected in the more general themes of the book: on forms of 'formal nostalgia' in today's popular culture, not so much feeling nostalgic for the past as endlessly recycling past cultural forms; and the traces of a 'popular modernism' in forms of pop and electronic music that push beyond this redundancy and lack of innovation. Gee's film, like Sebald's work, plays with the idea of memory being embedded in a landscape, and therefore with the question of how one confronts that past-in-the-present, what an ethical or political stance towards it would look like. Fisher was largely unimpressed with Sebald's writing and ambivalen...

[ The first of a series of posts on sleeplessness in music - see part 2 ] With its crisp, piercing cover imagery of a Rorschach drawing, Dasha Rush's Sleepstep sets itself up as an album about dreaming. The picture suggests a record which probes unconscious desires, or perhaps a record which itself allows for desire (of course, as you read into the drawing you project whatever you see on to the album), which opens you up into a dream-world where those hidden thoughts will be made manifest in musical patterns. But the subtitle of the album suggests something less clear than the way many reviewers read into the record. 'Sonar poems for my sleepless friends' leaves you with questions: is Dasha bringing back messages from her own subconscious, to soothe her friends' pain? Is she trying to induce a hypnotic sleeping state in them – that is, is this a cure? To me, the record feels most like a set of consolations for the wakeful, but more than that, an ode to the period whe...

In the last post I looked at how metaphors attached to different musical elements can shape the way we listen to a whole track. Specifically I looked at Xela's gorgeous debut album For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights , arguing that its music conveys the notion of human vulnerability juxtaposed with mechanised artificiality. This might imply that the mechanised part of that, the clockwork-style drums, somehow 'defeats' the vulnerable or empathetic elements, reigning over them in some cruel way. But what's so striking about this album is that the drums display little malevolence whatsoever. In fact there's a pleasing naivete to the drums and the synths, something quite emblematic of this style and period of IDM. This naivete is actually part of the emotional impact of Xela's early work; the pining melancholy I described in the last post is made up of musical metaphors, and this is one of them. The naivete of For Frosty Mornings... of course stems ...