{"id":4212,"date":"2011-05-04T12:18:59","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T09:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/?p=4212"},"modified":"2011-05-04T12:20:47","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T09:20:47","slug":"not-not-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/?p=4212","title":{"rendered":"Not Not Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not Not Fun Records<\/a><\/p>\n

“[…]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 \u2018d\u00e9cor for life\u2019” \u00a0Simon Reynolds on The Wire continues after the brake<\/em><\/p>\n

http:\/\/pontonemixtapes.com\/mixtapes\/pontone_nnf.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/p>\n

NNF mix for pontone.pl<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tracklist:<\/p>\n

Jonas Reinhardt Leaving The Touch Taboo (from forthcoming \u201cMusic For
\nThe Tactile Dome\u201d LP)
\nXander Harris Fucking Eat Your Face (from \u201cUrban Gothic\u201d LP)
\nDylan Ettinger Lion Of Judah (from \u201cLion Of Judah\u201d 7\u2033)
\nSand Circles Stellar Waves (from \u201cMidnight Crimes\u201d CS)
\nMaria Minerva The Other Side (from \u201cTalinn At Dawn\u201d CS)
\nCankun Kids House (from forthcoming \u201cJaguar Dance\u201d CS)
\nPedro Magina Kickflip (from \u201cNineteen Hundred And Eighty Five\u201d CS)
\nEnsemble Economique Shacks Built From Plyboard (from \u201cPhysical\u201d LP)
\nPsychic Reality Fanta (from \u201cVibrant New Age\u201d LP)
\nPeaking Lights Amazing & Wonderful (from \u201c936\u2033 LP)
\nUmberto Put Out An APB On Those Bastards (from \u201cFreeze!\u201d 7\u2033)<\/p>\n

“[…]Asked if they can delineate the sensibility of their generation, Britt and Amanda\u2019s [Not Not Fun label bosses] thoughts converge with my own doubts. \u201cI consider it to be post-creation,\u201d offers Amanda. \u201cPastiche. We\u2019re all now just pulling and pulling and pulling. Someone like Prince was thinking of people in the past, but it didn\u2019t feel as funnelled and as specific. We\u2019re a bit derivative, unfortunately, and it\u2019s not to our detriment always \u2013 but we are direct descendants and there are all these lineages. It\u2019s an interesting time for music because people aren\u2019t trying to create anything brand new.\u201d She points to NNF artist Umberto: \u201cHe\u2019s making music that sounds like Goblin, which you\u2019ll have heard if you\u2019ve watched old Argento movies. But he\u2019s 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 \u2013 the box being the demos we get sent everyday. But you can\u2019t say, \u2018Umberto, he\u2019s so original\u2019. Originality is not a thing anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Britt compares the way today\u2019s groups operate to crate-digging. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019ve just stumbled across a thing that nobody else has referenced yet\u2019.\u201d Citing Zola Jesus\u2019s Nika Danilova, Amanda elaborates: \u201cThe people who stand out are those who use famous people as an influence that nobody else is using. So when Nika was like, \u2018I\u2019m going to make sort-of Goth, everyone was like, \u2018We forgot about Goth! We forgot Siouxsie was cool!\u2019 But Nika\u2019s not trying to reinvent the wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t attached to specific styles so intensely. \u201cIt 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,\u201d says Britt. \u201cNow people are more like, \u2018I have my Witch House band over here, that plays by certain rules, but I also like still playing beach pop. Everyone\u2019s got a million projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t get much sense that the music comes from the artist\u2019s life beyond music. \u201cEveryone\u2019s more inspired by a style and the desire to be creative,\u201d agrees Britt. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t emotion in the process, but nobody sits down with a guitar thinking, \u2018I\u2019m going to write about this thing that just happened to me\u2019. It\u2019s more, \u2018I\u2019m going to get up and do this every day, whether I feel remotely inspired or have anything at all to say\u2019. There\u2019s a discipline to that and high art has come from it. But it does feel a little divorced. That\u2019s why a lot of contemporary styles can have a sheen of irony, because there\u2019s not a ton of people really fervently standing behind what they do. There\u2019s no Fugazis anymore.\u201d Amanda, for her part, says that \u201cwhen I make music, I\u2019m only interested in thematics. I think, \u2018What do I want to present?\u2019 I\u2019m trying to make a certain statement. And that takes it out of emotionality and more into a cerebral place. \u2018Meaningful\u2019 becomes more of an adjective than \u2018soulful\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

When music is only rarely about releasing inner emotional pressure (\u201cI have very little angst!\u201d says Amanda) and nor is it formed in reaction to its political\/social environment (\u201cwe\u2019re pretty educated, we\u2019re middle class, we don\u2019t have much to complain about\u201d), then the model for the modern musician becomes the conceptual artist. Or even the critic. That\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not Not Fun Records “[…]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 \u2018d\u00e9cor for life\u2019” \u00a0Simon Reynolds on The Wire continues after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-de-dans","category-sets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4212"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4225,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions\/4225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freshgoodminimal.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}