Incessant production – not only of wares, ideas, feelings and attitudes but also of psychosomatic conditions – turns out an endless flood of material that survives as tenacious trash or as dustbunnies: cut-out scenes of distorted lifestyle designs, elevator Muzak, digested and undigested leftovers, splintered fantasies of perverse practices, blog entries, and YouTube videos with less than six clicks.
Faced with this output – the outcome of human or non-human activity respectively of machines of production – one can decide either to throw it away (which makes no sense at all, as it’s impossible to get rid of entirely); or, like Ferraro and Lopatin, one can use it as a springboard for further designs. To accuse these guys of searching trash dumps eclectically misses the point, and also overlooks what is a truly heroic undertaking: for the stuff that really requires an effort is the resistant remnants – resistant insofar as they are of no use either to shareholders or stakeholders. But the alchemist can turn them into gold: into a shimmering surface, as blindingly bright as the starry heavens. The more exposure one has to its rays, the more euphoric one becomes – and even a suntan is not ruled out.
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MODULE 3 – POST-TRAUMATIC EUPHORIA
Daniel Lopatin is the man behind Oneohtrix Point Never. His previous album Returnal (Editions Mego, 2010) was made using vintage synthesizers to create widescreen ambient landscapes. His latest album Replica (Mexican Summer, 2011) manipulates samples from 80s TV commercials to construct evocative tracks of unexpected emotional depth. Although Lopatin has complained about people using the word »nostalgic« to describe his music, the term is rather apt. But Oneohtrix Point Never is not about dissecting retro aesthetics or glorifying some alternate version of the past (as may well be the case with his other project, Ford & Lopatin). In the best sense, Replica does indeed conjure a feeling of nostalgia: as if someone has hacked into your vaguest, most distant memories and reassembled them as clear recollections of things that never really happened.
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pointnever.com
James Ferraro is a critically acclaimed artist of something that might best be named 21st century Pop Art. His most recent output includes 2011’s Far Side Virtual (Hippos in Tanks), which has undoubtedly fuelled the amount of discussion and theorizing that surrounds his diverse body of work. In Far Side Virtual, Ferraro explores the chaos in today’s world by focusing on its most garish aspects and on the fetishes of today’s hyper-real capitalism. Fascinated by a culture of copies of copies of copies, where both older and newer products are readily available, have to compete for consumers’ limited attention, and need to be passed on endlessly, Ferraro has also turned his attention to radio culture in his newest album, I H A L E C – 4 $$$$$, released under his new BEBE T U N E S moniker. An album that is meant to sound best on iPhone speakers or mobile devices, it has the eerie quality of sounding both exactly and nothing at all like what’s on mainstream radio today. The songs are titled so as to make the listener feel like they are browsing through a ringtone library, never far away from today’s omnipresent consumer culture.
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muscleworksinc.blogspot.com
Geeta Dayal writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology for major publications, including a.o. The Wire, Frieze, The New York Times, Wired, Rhizome. Her first book, Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is currently at work on a new book on the history of electronic music.
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theoriginalsoundtrack.com
