revenge of the living dead
Simon Reynolds, early rave evangelist, has been posting what seems to be increasingly ill-considered posts about the hardcore continuum (check here at Dissensus for merely a fragment of the debate) and the (in his eyes lack-of) merits of dubstep and now ‘wonky’ both in relation to the nuum and as genres themselves.
However, this week it really kicked off after a particularly misguided Reynolds blog on ketamine and wonky in The Guardian. You can read that here.
Zomby responded pretty furiously to this with this:
The Guardian, Ketamine and Wonky….
No one does Ketamine right ? ..i thought it died in the late 80’s after that shitty Madonna tour ended, maybe you know more…..
though i have seen a crusty white dude with dreadlocks rolling around in his own puke ‘going off on K’ in Brixton not long back ..dunno how inspirational a event for a artist that is however.
None of us make ‘wonky’…the notion is similar in descriptive terms to calling Heavy Metal ‘Loud’ or Jungle ‘Fast’ ,adjectives cannot function as noun’s..
its fairly unimaginative and ignorant by this point, at first the term was used loosely as it was a playful in-joke for producers working in disharmonic structure or notation, to make the link to Ketamine is wild.
Next time you write a piece in a national newspaper try have some accuracy or even some intellectual property on the creativity or artisty of the music/artists rather than lowest common denominator music journalism i.e ‘Drugs & a new music’. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/mar/05/wonky-ketamine-dubstep-zomby
Read it through Shutter shades on Hoffman 225’s, its more believable that way.
There was a Paragraph that work’s.
“Listen to Zomby tunes like Spaceman and Aquafresh (off his recent 7-track EP for Hyperdub) and it’s like someone’s taken the monochrome diagram that is dubstep’s rhythmic grid and scrawled woozily all over it with fluorescent marker pens.”
The genre known as wonky is really dividing sides right now and the first generation of rave journalists seem to be falling into the anti side, if there is such a thing. What is perhaps so very wrong about this is that the genre is really only in a stage of infancy and this kind of reportage by someone who is hugely famous for his work on dance music coud be quite damaging, especially when it is so wide off the mark. It should be remembered that dance music took so long to be recognised in the music press simply because of all the dodgy old rockers who were too scared or ignorant or jack-ass-stupid to know anything about the rave scene. It was never a listen-at-home music- it has to be felt. This does not preclude having an opinion on the music of course, far from it, but when you are writing for a huge national paper (even if it is in the web version) it is pretty out of order to pen a piece based entirely on some kind of intuition of a scene for which said writer has no experience whatsoever, especially someone with the calibre, talent and nous of Reynolds.
the powers of 10
Charles and Ray Eames’ short film documentary produced with IBM in 1977.
media translation part II - the festival of britain 1951
This video opens with a derelict scene of the abandoned festival land just shortly after it had closed its doors to the public. The presenters seem like futuristic tourists looking upon the ruins of a once great metropolis that has been simply left, preserved in it’s time. Sadly enough most of the festival buildings were only ever intended to be of a temporary nature and this video is probably the last time it was documented in full before the vast majority of it was demolished. However, it’s not really the content of the footage that I’d like to draw attention to but rather to the quality of sound that has been warped through the translation of the footage from the older formats, so much so, that at times, I feel slightly seasick as if it had been recorded under water. It was like the futurama footage, it is irritating yet intriguing.
(Note - if you do listen to the content - the derrogatory use of the victorian reference. Time is a weird thing, here the victorians were seen to be the older unhip relations to be dismissed. Now a victorian influenced Bourgeoisie are back with a vengeance in London, what with their shabby chic cocktail bars and cluttered clothing. I suppose I want to make a point of them here because I like them - for particular reasons - to me their methods in town planning and social etiquette are still are an important influence in how we live in the UK and especially around the Olympic site zone (a late victorian suburban sprawl), in fact the themes of regeneration stem directly from them)
loie fuller performing the serpentine dance
Recorded in 1886 by the Lumiere brothers. A really beautiful and mesmerizing perpetual folding movement from the dancing dollybird of futurism.
media translation part I - the hindenburg disaster
“oh the humanity”
Hebert Morrison’s reporting and footage of the Hindenburg airship disaster remains one of the most famous broadcasts in media history and incidentally enough was a direct influence for Orson Welles when producing his legendary radio drama ‘War of the Worlds’.
The footage of the disaster was captured separately from Morrison’s voice recording contrary to the impression given in the newsreel presented. His voice was intentionally dubbed over the footage to adapt to the more modern style of television reporting. The cool thing is that the recording was captured at a slightly slower speed, so when it’s played back at the normal levels Morrison’s celebrated deep, smooth voice is now frantic and high pitched. The difference can be heard in the reel below.
There’s also some very beautiful colour footage (with an excellent choice of music) of the airship afloat here
media archeology #3
Abacus Galore.
the futurama part II
Further to my last post on the Futurama.
The Futurama was an exhibit/ride presented during the New York’s World Fair 1939. It was the pre-WWII futuristic utopian thinking of designer Norman Bel Geddes and is widely held to be the first introduction of the American public to the concept of a network of superhighways connecting a nation. The ride was sponsored by General Motors so hence the emphasis on motorways as well as the cities and suburbs they facilitated.
Visitors were taken around the gigantic, heavily detailed model on a moving platform as a narrator described the world of tomorrow - the potential vision of 1960 - speaking of personal freedom of movement and communication with the ability to be instantly connected to the rest of the world at any given moment. The exhibit was enormously influential in that it set the blueprint for the widely accepted grand vision for the future (although what was actually produced certainly didn’t live up to the original utopian notion).
World’s Fairs came about from a want to create and encourage a fiction of national identity and helped spread the colonial ruling notions. The Fairs have always kept an emphasis on technological advancements, firstly to use the stage to bring them all together and show current uses of technology and then later on to speculate upon the technology of the future. I found a really interesting point in an article from Wired magazine about the Futurama exhibit so I’ll paraphrase; up until this exhibit, manufacturers had used such fairs to show how their products were made and could be integrated into daily working lives, but through the Futurama exhibit General Motors were able instead to sell a propaganda for a taxpayer funded national highway system though the creation of a fictional world, they speculated upon the future (a General Motors future) and let the audience imagine how technology could be used if only it were allowed to come into existence.
“GM is telling us what they expect from us: we must build them the highway so they can sell us the cars” (E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair)
Standing in a privileged position with the ability to look backwards and assess the situation, the huge impact of this festival exhibit is clear, a version of what they imagined did take place on a global scale, look at the reality in Britain; a predominately car-only environment maintained by these superstructures where the commuter has become a motorist and no longer a passenger, radio stations make drive-time hours, commercial outlets situate themselves beside motorways and everyone has at some point brought and over priced, luke warm, foul tasting beverage from a service station.
The model itself must have been a magnificent site due to the sheer size and complexity of the thing. It reminds me a lot of why I liked walking around the Olympic site - the great vantage point - it offers the ideal opportunity to witness the existing system as it creates new connections and builds relationships. An ariel view allows one to have a broad vision and map the ecology, seeing how the geographical, physical and non-human elements all interweave and influence one another.
muto, a wall painted animation by blu
For whose of you who might not know him, Blu is an amazing Italian graffiti artist.
This clip just show you how brilliant he is.
bale storm
suburban ideology and the regeneration theme
There are a huge amount of dystopian outcries surrounding the suburbs, but i’d like to explain why i can never really experience them in that way, and why I cannot take sides in the usual socialism/capitalism stalemate. I suppose i’d like to take this opportunity to make sense of my preoccupation with it for myself as much as explain it to others and to highlight the relationship it has to the regeneration theme, so here goes…….
Ebnezer Howard's 'The Three Magnets'
Suburbia is a throughly produced space; a top down process where an environment is imposed upon others by those in power; planned spaces such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities and later on New Towns are great examples of this utopian dream. Another interesting contemporary example of this is Thames Town in Shanghai (another post will come on this later - it’s much too weird not to deserve its very own post). Suburbia is an enthralling topic for me as it is the most common lived existence in the UK. It gives structure to much of the culture and ritual in the country and it is the basis of the regeneration ideal. Therefore it is an integral part of every media ecology and it is essential that it’s influence be examined.
For three years I lived in a small town called Alsager just off the M6 at J16, which began life as a suburb way back in the mid-C19th when wealthy potters from the near by Stoke-on-Trent looked to find a quiet retreat away from the filth and pollution of the inner city. As with all suburban areas any trends in infrastructure had major implications and so Alsager had a few growth spurts over its lifetime, most notably during the WWII when an Ordanance factory opened in the town and then again at the opening of ‘Britain’s backbone’ (the M6 motorway) and the birth of the car-only environment. With Alsager I wanted to describe the nature of its situation, to evoke the expression of this particular ecology and investigate how it could be viewed in a different light and no longer be seen as a dull, depressing, bland existence. I wanted to explain how I approached the suburban theme.
I really loved the blatant drive towards consumerism within the suburbs that was backed up by a christian moral undertone (due to the fact that the first few waves of british suburbanites drew heavily upon the idea of ‘godliness is next to cleanliness’). I loved that every problem could be solved by a trip to the local retail outlet. I loved that people did actually wash their cars on a Saturday afternoon. However I had definite issues with suburban ideology or utopian visions and, more expressly, their subsequent malaise. The bemoaning affected ego of a postmodern individual drowned in the mantra of ‘i shop therefore i am’ wouldn’t stop nagging me. It struck me has being quite similar to an American musical ideology circa 1930s and 40s - where every situation is injected with so much meaning and semantics that, to me, it is impossible to explore the many variations outside of this one particular standpoint.
‘i shop therefore i am’
In a tongue and cheek sort of way I began to portray myself and my surroundings as this super/post-modern individual (oddly though most of my attempts to merge my face onto another’s body resulted in very uncanny tranny experiments more than anything else - maybe i’ll put up another example at a later date). I used specific imagery from one of the very first pastoral musicals ‘Meet me in St. Louis‘ (Vincent Minnelli 1944) which tells the nostalgic tale of a suburban family’s ups and downs in the St. Louis suburbs 1904. The entire film is centred around the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904 (or the St. Louis World Fair) and contains strong themes of christianity, consumerism, and patriotism all wrapped up in the further seductive ideology of musicals. I combined these images with others from around Alsager itself, taking care to evoke the two ideologies, to create a visual language that communicated a version of the suburban world anew - a technicolour fiction.
I’ve inserted a few images throughout the post illustrating the work.
With the regeneration theme I am coming up against all those demons yet again; the heavily planned space; the utopian/dystopian vision; the persistent opposing standpoints of capitalism/socialism; the temporal collapse and vision of the future, as well as the emphasis on communication and infrastructure…. the list is endless. The idea of making a space new again, of developing it to be the perfect combination of town and country, of the peaceful urban existence all began life in suburban ideology.
