Not Not Fun
“[…]Underground music making is becoming a niche market, a form of hip(ster) consumerism that slots right next to distressed furniture, microbrew beer, artisanal cheese and vintage clothing. No longer art as an intervention in the battlefield of culture, but art as ‘décor for life’” Simon Reynolds on The Wire continues after the brake
NNF mix for pontone.pl
Tracklist:
Jonas Reinhardt Leaving The Touch Taboo (from forthcoming “Music For
The Tactile Dome” LP)
Xander Harris Fucking Eat Your Face (from “Urban Gothic” LP)
Dylan Ettinger Lion Of Judah (from “Lion Of Judah” 7″)
Sand Circles Stellar Waves (from “Midnight Crimes” CS)
Maria Minerva The Other Side (from “Talinn At Dawn” CS)
Cankun Kids House (from forthcoming “Jaguar Dance” CS)
Pedro Magina Kickflip (from “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five” CS)
Ensemble Economique Shacks Built From Plyboard (from “Physical” LP)
Psychic Reality Fanta (from “Vibrant New Age” LP)
Peaking Lights Amazing & Wonderful (from “936″ LP)
Umberto Put Out An APB On Those Bastards (from “Freeze!” 7″)
“[…]Asked if they can delineate the sensibility of their generation, Britt and Amanda’s [Not Not Fun label bosses] thoughts converge with my own doubts. “I consider it to be post-creation,” offers Amanda. “Pastiche. We’re all now just pulling and pulling and pulling. Someone like Prince was thinking of people in the past, but it didn’t feel as funnelled and as specific. We’re a bit derivative, unfortunately, and it’s not to our detriment always – but we are direct descendants and there are all these lineages. It’s an interesting time for music because people aren’t trying to create anything brand new.” She points to NNF artist Umberto: “He’s making music that sounds like Goblin, which you’ll have heard if you’ve watched old Argento movies. But he’s one of the few people making that kind of music today. So that is the choice you make: you go for who is stepping a little bit outside of the box – the box being the demos we get sent everyday. But you can’t say, ‘Umberto, he’s so original’. Originality is not a thing anymore.”
Britt compares the way today’s groups operate to crate-digging. “It’s like, ‘I’ve just stumbled across a thing that nobody else has referenced yet’.” Citing Zola Jesus’s Nika Danilova, Amanda elaborates: “The people who stand out are those who use famous people as an influence that nobody else is using. So when Nika was like, ‘I’m going to make sort-of Goth, everyone was like, ‘We forgot about Goth! We forgot Siouxsie was cool!’ But Nika’s not trying to reinvent the wheel.”
One side effect of this chase for fresher things to rediscover, and from the sheer abundance of past music people are exposed to these days is that artists aren’t attached to specific styles so intensely. “It used to be that people would bond at a formative age with a style and then keep going with it, evolving of course, but staying pretty constant,” says Britt. “Now people are more like, ‘I have my Witch House band over here, that plays by certain rules, but I also like still playing beach pop. Everyone’s got a million projects.”
With all this multipolar activity, it makes sense to see the music put out by labels such as Not Not Fun and Olde English Spelling Bee as not so much separate genres (Hypnagogic, witch house, drone, nu-Goth, et al) as a single macrogenre. Artists move back and forth within an ever-expanding post-historical (and increasingly post-geographical) field of resources. Sometimes they combine elements from different archival seams (Italo disco, horror soundtracks, screw, Coldwave, Afrobeat, etc) and sometimes they’ll focus on a specific period style. Which is why overtly retro genres like garage punk and psych are tolerated in this realm, despite their done-to-death staleness compared with fresher recombinant strains.
I love so much of the music coming out of these Zones of Alteration, but one thing that disconcerts me is its relative lack of an expressive element. There are exceptions: Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal contains deeply personal emotional resonances, while the two records by Sex Worker serve a similar function of catharsis following a bad romance. But generally you don’t get much sense that the music comes from the artist’s life beyond music. “Everyone’s more inspired by a style and the desire to be creative,” agrees Britt. “It doesn’t mean there isn’t emotion in the process, but nobody sits down with a guitar thinking, ‘I’m going to write about this thing that just happened to me’. It’s more, ‘I’m going to get up and do this every day, whether I feel remotely inspired or have anything at all to say’. There’s a discipline to that and high art has come from it. But it does feel a little divorced. That’s why a lot of contemporary styles can have a sheen of irony, because there’s not a ton of people really fervently standing behind what they do. There’s no Fugazis anymore.” Amanda, for her part, says that “when I make music, I’m only interested in thematics. I think, ‘What do I want to present?’ I’m trying to make a certain statement. And that takes it out of emotionality and more into a cerebral place. ‘Meaningful’ becomes more of an adjective than ‘soulful’.”
When music is only rarely about releasing inner emotional pressure (“I have very little angst!” says Amanda) and nor is it formed in reaction to its political/social environment (“we’re pretty educated, we’re middle class, we don’t have much to complain about”), then the model for the modern musician becomes the conceptual artist. Or even the critic. That’s what strikes me about the new breed: they think like critics. They navigate the history of music using a kind of combinatorial logic (Goth + dub = LA Vampires/Zola Jesus). They frame projects with over-arching concepts or clearly designated reference points. […]” Simon Reynolds on The Wire
Posted in de-dans, sets on May 4th, 2011 by de-dans | 0 Comments
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