Stringing the web. Letting go of sound studies for a while. Thinking about music as a practice to explore these questions <3. It is sound!
I’m very excited about pop music recently. Pop music analysis is a bridge between my research and practice. I don’t make pop music but I would like to develop my music to reach more people, that’s the dream. Pop music is the voice of the parasite. A loose accelerationism teaches me to embrace and hack into the parasite if it’s for temporary relief or a change in our direction. Politicians call it steering the big boat. How can we hack into the parasite and make it more ecological? How to combine the techniques of popular music with ecological ethics or perspectives? What does it mean to represent ecological being with accelerated music?
The flaw of accelerationism perhaps is it’s (xenofeminists, Fishers and Lands) blindness towards materials as a base for production. (I say blindness but perhaps it’s a question why materiality is not at the center of their discussions.)The acceleration of production ~ (capital), and technological development ~ (capital’s modes of domination) relies on earthly bodies and materials. Are the accelerationists infected by meta’s belief in an infinite virtuality? I guess they describe an ending which aligns with a running out of resources. Is this nihilism?
Could an alternative to – running out of resources be mining and extracting other planets?
In popular music, the iconic Sophie was a primary producer in forming hyperpop. It is an exaggerated, often harsh rendition of pop where digital life and identities is represented with a sound design more sensational than the physical. The newness of the sound has created a space for young queer people who are disillusioned with the intentions of mainstream pop music.
This immateriality of sound design matches the idealogies of the communities emeshed with the music. Sophie’s track “Immaterial”: We’re just, im-ma-ma-material (I could be anything I want)
Immaterial, immaterial boys (anyhow, anywhere)
Immaterial girls (any place, anyone that I want)
Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial
Some trans people feel liberated by the immaterialities of virtual life. Enmeshment. I feel enmeshed with digital space.
This is not a critique of Sophie. It is an accelerated music both in it’s intensity and in a techno-optimism: that the internet and the virtual is a space for self-transformation and liberation. I don’t think Sophie is defining the future in the song “Immaterial”, I think she is defining right now. Hyperpop is born in times of acceleration, complex identities and movements against a biopolitics tied to conservative ideas of sex and gender.
I am curious about these paradoxes between the new materialist ecological thought and the accelerationist techno-optimism of hyperpop music. The blessing of hyperpop is that it hacked into the parasite and changed it forever. It makes pop music more queer and inclusive. It is also an updated sonic rendition of contemporary life. It captures the sounds of the digital condition in a way no other music has done.
Can there be a way to make pop music more ecological? We could sing about earth and our moments of awe here. We could represent nonhuman voices through the platform of a ballad or an earworm. I put my dog at the end of a compilation I made with friends.
We can also remix, revive and edit folk and traditional musics into contemporary forms. This is already happening! Let’s join in.
https://chinabot.bandcamp.com/album/inner-self
https://procfiskal.bandcamp.com/album/siren-spine-sysex
Proc Fiskal brings gaelic and folk music from the British Isles into a Hyperdub record!
I often find electronic renditions of folk musics that are in a critique of the representations of traditions. I am interested in a new step of carrying a heartyness/earthlyness from these traditions and the critique will still maintain in the remixing of the “original”. But I don’t want to be an essentialist 🙁
We can also write new folk music loosened from borders, ethnicities and places.
I am particularly interested in new-materialism as an instigator for sound design. How can we respresent assemblages of materials, active object, nonhuman agency and tensions between force through sound design? DAWs have the power to do so. I have been experimenting with this style for a while and can attatch this philosophy as a mild interpretation of what I’ve been doing. Foley and sampling can be another way to have a clear representation of materials. Imagine a stimulating sensational and accelerated pop music using earthly materials as percussive and melodic instruments. I want to build more sample packs of the objects around me.
People have been using these techniques for a long time. But I am interested in a contemporary use of sampling and folk musics that harnesses the power of accelerated digital music. I am entranced with the accelerator as I am within it and part of it. Digital space is a part of me as long as I can access it.
Accelerated new-materialist pop is full of contradictions. Is this rendition so far removed from an original situation of materials that it could not instigate physical change in consumption or desire? Working digitally and emphasizing the power of digital software is techno-optimistic. It feels like, if we just continue for a while, keep developing, we will make it through. This does not feel like a de-growth music. But a great vaccine/sedative. That’s the main question of accelerated media! : is it a vaccine or a sedative? Does it help us cope and embrace our situation to participate, or does it numb a heart longing for something different?
These are questions to explore through practice. < 3
Tiny note: is the artist’s role to expand the capacity of society for consuming new media? as in to accelerate.
No long tropes, always a subtle change that may be dramatic.
A question: Is accelerated music a vaccine or a sedative?
Quotes from Paul Preciado on smoking tobacco as vaccination:
“Chemical substances that can be assimilated by an
organism function like potentia: they provoke a substantial modification of the body and consciousness—provided that subjectivity allows itself to be affected, that it
makes itself dynamic in the Greek sense of the word dynamis, which is to say, it allows its potentiality and its capacity to pass from one state into another to emerge. The
transference that is understood to be the cornerstone of
psychoanalytic therapy depends on a model of substance
transport, a traffic in images, memories, and emotions that
will modify a network of somatic links. Similarly, alcohol,
tobacco, hash, cocaine, or morphine, as well as estrogens
and androgens, are neither synthetic tunnels for escaping
from reality nor mere links from point A to point B. Rather,
they are technologies of the subject, microtechnologies of
the mind, chemical prostheses from which will issue new
practices for defining frames of human intelligibility. Modern subjectivity is the management of self-intoxication in
a chemically harmful environment. Smoking in the plasticelectric-nuclear metropolis can be seen simply as one way
of vaccinating yourself against environmental poisoning by
means of homeopathic inoculation. The battle for modern
subjectivity is a struggle for immunological equilibrium.
The ingestion of drugs or psychoanalysis is the experimental ground on which we learn how to live in a somatic and
semiotic environment that is becoming ever more toxic.” Testo Junkie pg 360
Smoking in the plasticelectric-nuclear metropolis can be seen simply as one way
of vaccinating yourself against environmental poisoning by
means of homeopathic inoculation. I imagine to apply this framework of substance use/self modification to music consumption.