“We should have another quarantine where nobody dies.”
“Yeah, where everyone’s locked-in.”
— Jane Remover and d9lton
To counter the acceleration of networks and circuits the world will seek slowness, inertia. In the same movement, however, it will seek something more rapid than communication: the challenge, the duel. On the one side, inertia and silence. On the other, challenge and the duel.
— Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
I threw my phone into the sea…
— Porter Robinson, ‘Knock Yourself Out XD’
Coda
A culture shift, but also a considerable vibe shift…
Still in London for a few more days, Byro takes me to see Porter Robinson at Brixton Academy. Support comes from underscores, who we blogged about together last year, flirting obliquely, nurturing a romance that spread from comments to DMs to posts to the IRL.
I was new to the worlds of six impala, dariacore, digicore and the other vectors of a post-hyperpop generation back then, but have found myself exploring their depths over the nine months since.
Byro makes a sign to celebrate the full-circle moment. Since we are seated so far back, we don’t end up unfurling it, but the fact we’re there together is enough.
The whole time, laughing together on the Victoria line and into the night, with all the thoughts that have made up this series so far still percolating, I have snippets from a recent podcast with Jane Remover and d9lton going ‘round and around in my head… “We made it off the Discord!”
“The Internet’s where home’s at”
“For my birthday, I plan on making a video, like, ranking every year of my life, and I think 2020 is an S-tier…”
“Lowkey, yeah.”
“I just really feel like it was so fire.”
“Yeah, I feel like it was like a net-negative for the world, but like, I think, like, for the individual… If you know what I mean…”
“I was starting to feel ashamed of, like, being on the Internet all the time, but when Covid struck is when it became the lit thing, and when I reconnected with everyone, like we’re on Discord until, like, 3am, and I’m meeting new people, and [there’s] things like e-festivals. I’m like, nah, this is home, this is home base, I know where home’s at, the Internet’s where home’s at.”
“I feel like 2020 was such a formative year. Whether you like it or not… Like, I know some people didn’t have a good 2020. Me personally, I feel like 2020 was, like, the most important year of my life, probably… Now that it’s, like, 2025, and it’s like, I feel far removed from it, in a sense where it’s like, I don’t really know how to use Discord anymore, you know? Like, I don’t join VCs… I’m actually, like, scared of VCs… But now it’s like… I don’t wanna say ‘nostalgia’, cos nostalgia feels like… Saying the word ‘nostalgia’ feels like acid coming down your throat… It’s a fond memory.”
This has been the hardest part in this series to write, because I have been attempting the near-impossible task of not sounding old… But it is hard to avoid the fact that my experiences of the early pandemic were very different to those younger than me.
It’s actually pretty funny, thinking back on it. In 2020, I was newly 27. At the end of the previous year, my first book had been announced and gone to print. Thinking it would be too performative to keep up my online anonymity, I threw off four years of facelessness and published under my own name. Events were soon organised and I hardly wanted to talk about the book in person whilst wearing a mask or something, MF Doom style – although the thought had crossed my mind…
I flew to Berlin to speak at the January 2020 edition of CTM Festival in Berlin, somehow keeping my cool when I got there, looking out on a sea of faces, many of which belonged to artists I recognised and loved. I could get used to this, I thought, flying back to London 24 hours later, feeling completely wrecked after a night in Berghain – but I never did. On March 10th, I spent the whole day being interviewed for an unreleased Mark Fisher documentary, before speaking to Kodwo Eshun on stage at a sold-out event at the ICA. The day ended drunk, brain-fogged, and paranoid about the virus in some crowded Soho club. I felt the overwhelm start to chip away at something.
One week later, newly un-anon’d and ready to face the world, we all went inside for a year and life was more online than it had ever been before…
The period of time between Mark Fisher’s death and Covid was such a pressure cooker — those were undoubtedly the most formative years of my life thus far — but the difficulty of the last 2/3 years post-lockdown has been figuring out how to not get stuck there and reinvent myself now that every single thing about my existence on this planet has irrevocably changed.
It’s been an uphill battle and I’ve recounted the particulars on here many times before — too often, probably, but I’ve yet to neatly resolve these experiences. The repetitious going-over of everything is probably a lingering trauma response, since I still can’t narrativize the weirdness of those wilderness years — and clearly not for lack of trying. The Internet was home before 2020, and then I wanted to get away from it but couldn’t, and now I don’t know if it’s home or not. It is, as it has always been, undecidedly unheimlich.
Extracting the digiCore
Enter a loose group of artists who have not been so stricken by self-consciousness on the other side of the pandemic…
Who am I talking about? They’re a difficult group to categorise. Jane Remove, six impala, underscores, Porter Robinson (tangentially), and a legion of anon Soundcloud producers making digicore, dariacore, hyperpop, jersey club – whatever you want to call it…
Jane Remover is the lodestar; her output in particular, over the last few years, has been astounding. Her summer 2024 singles — ‘Flash in the Pan’, ‘Dream Sequence’, ‘Magic I Want U’, ‘How to Teleport’ — were on constant rotation for me, soundtracking the early days of a love affair. But I was surprised to hear that she’d trashed the whole album in favour of something(s) more ‘herself’ — that is, in all of her fragmentary and unstable glory.
So far in 2025, they have released two singles for a wholly new record called Revengeseekerz, which grab a life offline by the throat — ‘JRJRJR’ and ‘Dancing with your eyes closed’. But Remover’s year began with something very different: Ghostholding, an album released under her venturing alias.
The latter was initially a hyperstitional, memoradelic shoegaze-y project that sought to manifest a discography for a non-existent band “formed in small-town Britton, South Dakota (pop. 1,215) … active from 1990 to 2002”; a kind of midwestern Memorial Device that “consisted of the fictional members Melanie (vocals), Fawn (guitar), Daisy (guitar), Barney (bass), and Steve (drums)”. It is fascinating to have an artist invent a record that… How do I even put this, whilst holding onto some kind of sense?… A record that anachronistically conjures up and invents one of her own influences…?
The record was prepped to slip into the convoluted streams of a time-spiral, but with its release, the message from Jane now is “no more lore”; it is no longer an album aping the Internet’s resurgent fascination with ‘lost media’. “This is just a Jane Remover album now under a different name … I didn’t feel like telling a story anymore”. It is likely the album I’ve listened to most so far this year, eagerly awaiting whatever is coming next. Her productivity boggles my brain (and that’s coming from someone whose productively has a tendency to boggle everyone else).
In the aforementioned podcast interview, Jane explains that the album she originally intended to release was so good that it was likely to jettison her into the pop stratosphere — a claim that doesn’t sound implausible, going by last summer’s singles. Wavering, however, and considering whether this was something they really wanted, she instead opted to carry a certain facelessness forward into the IRL.
I’m reminded of the slippery, fragmentary, multiplicitous identities of early Eminem, discussed in Part 3: Mark Fisher’s 2001 ode to a “dramaturgical proliferation of personae, or simpersonae”; the “seething population of virtual selves, fictional potentials given actualization”; the “revelling in ontological confusion and implex, whose deep schizophrenic truth is that there is no truth but the version, that there is no transcendence.” But whereas Eminem played with a series of masks within the confines of hip-hop as a genre, it is genre itself that becomes a plaything for Jane and those around her. They emerge from lockdown bedrooms not as fully formed artists, ready to take over the world, but as legion, each already multiple, riding the countless waves of schizo-frenetic productivity and experimentation, no pronoun preference, scrambling every code.
Bedroom Culture (redux)
“Girl culture starts and finishes in the bedroom” was the sociological mantra that sought to make sense of all cultural engagement that begins at home.
In their seminal 1976 essay, ‘Girls and Subcultures’, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber write about the overt attention given to boys in the subcultural research of the mid-twentieth century, noting the “absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area”. “When they do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar”. McRobbie and Garber instead begin to wonder how we are “to understand this invisibility.”
A faceless feminine is materially obscured by “the crucial dimension of sex and gender structuring”, they argue. Beginning in the 1950s, McRobbie and Garber observe that the subcultural options pursued by boys are the result of “the structuring effect of class”, but no less so for girls, whose positioning in different subcultures of the time “may be, not marginally, but structurally different”, since “their ‘involvement’ was sustained by a complementary, but different sub-cultural pattern.”
Whereas masculinist subcultures take to the streets and cafes and pubs, a feminine undercurrent engages in experimental practices that are unscene. “There was room for a good deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the ‘culture of the bedroom'”, McRobbie and Garber argue: “experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up the boyfriends, chatting, jiving”. You know, girlie things… But these examples are only the beginning, the seeds of new forms of cultural tinkering and patriarchal resistance: make-up experiments as subcultural camouflage; listening to records as an immersion in more private sound-worlds; reading the mags to keep an eye to the outside; sizing up the boyfriends as an analysis of patriarchy; chat as knowledge exchange; dance as body autonomy… The boys don’t know what’s about to hit ’em.
Before long, a series of bridges emerge between the underground for girls and the overground for boys. First, subcultures shift from rough-and-tumble Teddy Boy gangs, renowned for their knife violence, to Mod culture — no less ready to go to war against the Rockers, but also “a ‘softer’ working-class subculture … in which girls did much more openly and directly participate”. Next, a middle-class Hippie subculture featured women and girls even more prominently, no doubt owing to the concomitant Sexual Revolution that the Hippies remain associated with. Then came “the growth … of ‘Unisex’ styles”, and “the rise, within the pop industry itself, of the deliberately ‘feminine’, camp, or bi- and trans-sexual singer and star”, like David Bowie most famously.
McRobbie and Garber conclude: “We feel that when the dimension of sexuality is included in the study of youth subculture, girls can be seen to be negotiating a different space, offering a different type of resistance to what can at least in part be viewed as their sexual subordination.” But all of this nonetheless hinges on more expansive forms of pop-cultural representation. Participation is still judged on visibility. If you want to join our scene, first let me see your bedroom…
A few decades later, cyberculture becomes all the more closely associated with the invisibility of the feminine. Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones remains the most invigorating overview of a countercultural history of women’s technocultural resistance in this regard. It beings with the following:
Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limbless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We.gave no thought to anything at all. Everything was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world.
The indeterminacy of this opening paragraph is already so provocative. It seems to be Plant’s description of a kind of state of unnature; formless, unrepresentable, feminine soup. Then access to a solidarity without solidity is revoked by masculine power. A blackout begins, before the ‘net opens up new egresses to a space that is out from under the shadow of a towering Phallus.
When the desktop computer finds its place in the corner of the family living room, and later in the teenage bedroom, the scrambling of codes once confined to domestic privacy leaks out into the ether(net). The subordinating polarity of binary gender is reversed, and only partially eroded.
The Internet today has arguably become increasingly rigid, relative to its fluid beginnings, where old binaries struggle to reassert themselves, unable to retain their desired stasis for long on a quantum plane. This stasis isn’t only the product of a manosphere that attempts to colonise all visible terrain, however; it finds its corollary in wilful dissenters who claim that, today, “everyone is a girl online”.
As a term, “girl” is polarizing: feared for how tightly it connects youth and desire, reviled for its infantilizing, passivity-inducing properties. On the face of it, girlishness is simply dismissed as being frivolous, immature, unmasculine, disempowering, reductive. At worst, the girl is an apolitical neutralizer of direct action. At best, she is simply enjoying herself with the junk society has given her. In either state — harmless or neutralizing, hedonic or willfully ignorant — the girl becomes an attractor of hatred, envy, and fear. As opposed to mainstream narratives of female empowerment and their sliding scale of access to power and resources, the girl is a far more politically ambivalent state.
Quicho then lays out three errant categories of online girlhood:
One: Consider that the girl is a symbolic category, unfixed from biological sex or social gender…
Two: The girl is a consumer category that can’t be delinked from capital… She is a “living currency,” a “war machine,” and a “technique of the self” driven by the “desire to be desired”…
Third: The girl is an inhuman category… To survive and thrive, the girl encodes language, invents behavior, manipulates social codes, and, most importantly, shares and intuits this information. As such, we can consider the girl to be a subject condition that is closer to that of collective or even superintelligence.
But girlhood becomes a mixed semiotic in this instance, splicing references to Klossowski, Deleuze-Guattari, Foucault and Lacan to make a heady elixir that struggles to make coherent sense. A disjunctive synthesis? More needs to be said…
Sadie Plant:
Lacan lays down the law and leaves no doubt: “There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things,” he explains. She is “not-all,” “not-whole,” “not-one,” and whatever she knows can only be described as “not-knowledge.” There is “no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal.” She has no place like home, nothing of her own, “other than the place of the Other which,” writes Lacan, “I designate with a capital O.”
If everyone online is a girl, and desire, for Lacan, is only the desire to be desired, what happens online when there is no longer any phallic presence to court? It appears that not only is everyone online a girl, but everyone is also gay. This rings true; isn’t the implicit sexualisation of girl-culture as bedroom-culture not underwritten by the male fantasy of girls making out with each other behind closed doors? And what becomes of this tacit lesbianism when it is reduced to a performative otherness for the pleasure of the male gaze? And this is inseparable from capital? (Interestingly, Žižek has an post that takes all these elements together in a reading of Ayn Rand’s novels, and that seems to resonate with a techbro view of the Internet’s feminine power.)
But the other side of this, removed from male fantasy, is a militant lesbianism lurking behind a lot of 1990s cybertheory; both Sadie Plant and Nick Land refer to Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères in their writings, in which a band of women violently fight for their autonomy in a war between the sexes, but in a manner that seeks to override sexual difference as natural category altogether.
What happens, then, if, instead, we truly consider the Sapphic girl online as an empty (albeit positive) signifier to be filled with whatever you wish, in such a way that girlhood is devoid of the ‘natural’ characterisations that otherwise define it (something Quicho pays lip service to, but struggles to keep at bay)? What happens when bedroom culture, which is girl culture, is recognised as the persistent hole in cultural discourses that it is, and thus not simply a site of consumption but also (re)production and anti-production?
I’m reminded here, perhaps controversially, of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which he writes of the boudoir’s ultimate secret, which is that the most delectable pleasure to be explored by women, who are nonetheless subordinates, is sodomy. Here too I am reminded of Deleuze’s famous acknowledgement that his philosophical operations within the history of philosophy are a kind of buggery, taking thinkers from behind.
Zero, the set of all sets, is not only the vulva but also the anus. Plant turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-production through this same mixed semiotic, driving a stake through Quicho’s logic trap of singles and multiples when she moves away from Lacan to Deleuze and Guattari:
Zero was always something very different from the sign which has emerged from the West’s inability to deal with anything which, like zero, is neither something in particular nor nothing at all. And it is certainly the case that,
with or without the signs that represent them as inert negativities, holes themselves are never simply absences of positive things. This is a purely psychoanalytical myth. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not even enough “to say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through it…” Holes are not absences, spaces where there should be something else. “Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.” Adrift in the doped lattices of a silicon crystal, a hole is a positive particle before it is the absence of a negatively charged electron, and the movement of electrons toward the positive terminal is also a flow of holes streaming back the other way. Holes are charged particles running in reverse. For the quantum physicist, ”holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light.”
We have yet to fully reckon with the full force of this framing, perhaps because this discourse around the errant feminine is closed off from other theories of Otherness, which are further along in the process of analysing the kaleidoscopic consciousnesses of now… In fact, by recalling Gilroy’s address of essentialist versus pluralist conceptions of race, we can perhaps find a similar flaw in the logic of Quicho that replicates an essential binary, albeit with strategic elisions to suggest otherwise.
Malcolm Bull, for instance, problematising the sliding back into dichotomies that arguments like Quicho’s are prone to, provides some clarity regarding the stakes of her wildly combinatory theory, which is made less dynamic than it appears by the legacy of Lacanianism. Bull writes: “The problem with these arguments is that they progress only by exploiting the ambiguity of the terminology and moving from a whole/part distinction via the unity/disunity opposition to a single/multiple dichotomy.” This is precisely the same move seen in the new discourses around a digitised sexual difference. The masculine One, the figure of the Phallus, is contrasted to the feminine Zero, the vulvic multiple. The binary is not overcome; it is only shifted on its axis. How, then, to properly scrambled the codes? To wilfully confuse flying anuses and speeding vaginas? How to erase the difference between productive and unproductive holes in our discourse?
This is an important consideration for us, if we are to rescue the bedroom from the gendered discourses of a second-wave sociological feminism, which has surely been unfolded dramatically by the Internet, and allow the bedroom to become a space not only for the brewing of girl culture, but also, as Kodwo Eshun pointed out, black culture, by way of Detroit techno, trip-hop, and many other kinds of ‘headmusic’.
This is something I hear in the bedroom culture of a post-Covid generation of Internet musicians, who nonetheless refuse to be contained by the particular circumstances of this or that event and this or that postmodern space. Theirs is a music, after all, that makes good on the blissed-out 90s cultures that previously operated distinctly and yet in alignment; here I am thinking of Simon Reynolds’ debut, looking at “the raptures of rock”, which dissolve through egresses into hip-hop and hardcore, acid house and acid rock, shoegaze and dream pop. What I love about this generation is that they pass through these various genres fluidly, combining the cutting edges of each of these genres together to produce a sound that is so achingly and shockingly contemporary.
Art and Critique
We don’t name genres like we used to. For better or for worse, we might have Simon Reynolds to thank for that. Critics who take up the task of naming genres perhaps have a more taxonomic approach than those who emerge from such scenes themselves. “Post-rock” is clearly a critic’s term, as is “hauntology” even more obviously; both lack the nonsense of new nomenclature that proliferates more comfortably around ‘hip-hop’ — the silliest of genre names, if you allow yourself to stop and think about it — and its offshoots (drill and bashment are too more recent terms that no critic would invent with a straight face).
Names are conspiratorial. Something is offered up, but it takes a corral of interlocutors to agree to keep using it. The names we give genres of music are also, in this sense, musical in themselves. Hip-hop remains a good example. Think of that viral Hannibal Buress clip lampooning early hip-hop: the name of this sound is almost onomatopoeic, as the jagged cadence of the word has a swing to it that immediately mirrors early rap verses. The same can be said of other hip-hop subgenres too — drill, again, feels apt for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Even earlier, ‘bebop’, ‘free jazz’, etc., carry this same tension between onomatopoeic and process-music.
But it is a disinterest in categorisation from artists themselves that gives way to critics attempting to assign more molecular names, not to sounds or processes but categories of relation, all of which carry with them a kind of afterwardness. The prevalence of suffices like ‘hyper-‘ and ‘post-‘ are, in this way, a nod to a relation to prior forms themselves; something which perhaps began with ‘fusion’, as the most literal genre name for postmodernist recombinatory tendencies in and beyond jazz. It’s vague, but appropriately so, even if a name like ‘fusion’ may well, like other genres, slip into a kind of nominative determinism for all that follows in that same vein. Indeed, what happens when, with the passage of time, we start to feel like all artists are ‘post-fusion’ now?
There are nonetheless three worthy questions we might ask ourselves, lurking behind any desire for categorisation: What is the sound of this music? What are the processes through which it is made? What is its relation to cultural time — music’s past, present and future? Regarding the generation of musicians currently of interest, the first resists easy answer, although ‘hyperpop’ might do; the second and third questions, taken together, lead us to conveniently place them in the camp of ‘post-Internet music’, but again, more can be said here.
It is in this arena that the writings of Deleuze-Guattari become relevant again. How to write of a music that defines all criteria for nomination?
For Kant, “[t]here is no science of the beautiful, but only critique, and there is no fine science, but only fine art.” This is where we find ourselves in trying to understand a set of cultural currents that resist all criteria for nomination, and it is also with this quotation from Kant that Steven Shaviro begins his book on the topic, Without Criteria.
Drawing on the philosophies of Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro gives a compelling account of why contemporary artists might seek to resist categorisation quite so adamantly. Indeed, we might note the difficult relationship between artist and critic as being like that rehearsed by Deleuze in his analogy of the wasp and the orchid — the ways that orchids mimic and exaggerate the alluring characteristics of wasps to encourage them to copulate non-reproductively with flowers, who then proliferate themselves. This is different to the relationship between bees and flowers, whose pollination is a by-product of bees’ use of pollen to make honey as a source of protein. For Deleuze-Guattari, the wasp and the orchid instead provide an example of interspecies reproduction and anti-production.
Shaviro:
The orchid “adapts itself” to the way the wasp apprehends it; as a result, the wasp finds the orchid beautiful. The orchid isn’t beautiful in and of itself; it is only beautiful for the wasp (and perhaps, too, for us). The orchid’s interests, however, have nothing in particular to do with the wasp; the orchid only uses the wasp as a vector for its own pollination. It suits the plant just as well if a human being, having been seduced by the flower’s beauty, pollinates it instead. Thus the orchid is indifferent even to the existence of the wasp; the exchange between the two organisms is what Deleuze and Guattari, quoting Rémy Chauvin, call “the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”
Critics may think of themselves as bees, but they are wasps or gardeners, drawn into the beauty of musical production by “a lure of feeling” (Whitehead). But rather than pouring scorn on the critic tout court — particularly as someone who thinks of all art as encounter, enjoying the resonances between practices of writing and photography, at once critical and creative — we must acknowledge that artists themselves are caught in a similar set of processes:
The orchid is not beautiful in itself: but something happens to the wasp, or to the gardener, who encounters the orchid and feels it to be beautiful … Beauty is therefore an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower is not beautiful in itself; rather, beauty happens when I encounter the flower. Beauty is fleeting, and it is always imbued with otherness. For although the feeling of beauty is “subjective”, I cannot experience it at will. I can only find beauty when the object solicits me, or arouses my senses of beauty, in a certain way. Also, beauty does not survive the moment of encounter in which it is created. It cannot be recovered once it is gone. It can only be born afresh in another event, another encounter. A subject does not recognize the beauty of an object. Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it. The object touches me, but for my part I cannot grasp it or lay hold of it, or make it last. I cannot dispel its otherness, its alien splendor. If I could, I would no longer find it beautiful, I would, alas, merely find it useful.
The conceptual engineering of genre nomination is itself a creative act, but too much critique looks for what is useful in enacting it. It fails, repeatedly, inevitably, to cage the encounter it seeks to designate and singularise. In this way, although an understanding of the orchid-wasp encounter is as relevant to artists making music as it is to critics hoping to write about it, it is artists who linger among the noumenal essence of their own activities, far more so than the critic who wants to be useful, naming qualities whose only function, in being beautiful, is to elude us.
All of this is to say that I don’t think it matters what we call this music — or rather, it shouldn’t matter, if we hope to remain attuned to the uncategorisable nature of postmodern sonics — but the aforementioned questions are nonetheless interesting ones to ponder, as we try to situate ourselves in a dizzying present, and since I feel like the most integral context for understanding this movement is the period of online gestation made possible by the pandemic, I’m going to refer to theirs as a post-Covid sound for easy reference.
Although such a decision equally runs the risk of overdetermining this music’s circumstances of emergence, it nonetheless feels fitting to tentatively name it after an event. In fact, to speak all the more generally, it is precisely a music of events and encounters that takes shape here. If this music feels so achingly present to me right now — more so than any other subcultural current — it is because I hear in the output of these artists a persistent and constantly adaptive attempt to make themselves worthy of the things that happen to them. No nostalgia for what came before, only an errant play in the wreckage of all pop culture that straps together modes of expression to respond to the circumstances they have been through — whether that is lockdown, as was the case between 2020 and 2023, or the strangeness of going overground that has defined their experiences from 2023 to now. (Note the distinct lack of party-hauntological overtones, like those found on Brat, which Byro contrasted to underscores’ Wall Socket — more on this later.)
Indeed, from this confluence of events, we can draw out many other names — names for other processes, for other kinds of encounter. Another one could be post-videogame music, but again the same problem of over-determination persists. Still, this helps illuminate — all too usefully and unbeautifully — the various strands of a knot in the process of tightening.
Pocket Monstrosities
“I’m not gonna lie, fuck the music, bro. What’s up with Pokémon? Why do you like Pokémon so much?”
“I just think it’s hard, and there’s so many of them, and they all look cool.”
As a generation of Covid artists escape the bedroom and offer up the fruits of their sequestered productivity, all the activities that take place in the bedroom gesture to relations with the outside world, each informing the other. All become tenuous ways of referring to modes of facelessness.
This is something we can demonstrate by way of Burial’s music, for example — and his forthcoming collab with Harmony Korine is moving him in a direction that feels tangential to this post-hyperpop current. Yes, he samples videogames, but the samples themselves are also telling: a shadowy, quasi-anonymous producer builds a song around a sample from a covert stealth simulator like Metal Gear Solid 2; an artist wandering through the oneiric nightmare of modern life opens his second album with dialogue from David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE; a hero to many, who plays with the constraints of a singular sound by trying on the garb of other genres, samples the cackles of Skull Kid in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
Shifting this kind of consideration to an artist like Jane Remover, the influence of Daria on a genre like dariacore is already obvious, but the various Pokémon samples are just as enlightening.
Games played at home start to feel like training simulations for the world at large. But since the world itself is a simulation, everything perused in the bedroom is also brought into the light. The bedroom becomes a virtual domain, jettisoned as a hole-particle that passes through everything actual, and so Remover’s love of the Pokémon franchise soon begins to feel like an affection mirrored in the wider scene’s approach to cultural salvage, montage, bricolage and de/reconstruction.
The story goes like this: You wake up in your room. There’s your bed and a computer. Your mom is downstairs wondering when you’re going to start your life. The mad professor wants to see you, and before long, you have a choice to make. You begin an adventure out into the world, navigating creaturely companionships as you train different genres of friend before duelling with your heroes.
But Pokémon is not a game for the bedroom, for the home console. The franchise dramatizes its own escape; the game’s pocket-monsters are a reflection of Nintendo’s innovation of the pocket-console; of handheld devices that are inherently portable. The sheer excitement of 90s tech was that your bedroom could now come with you. The Gameboy and the mobile phone set the world along a pocketable path, followed by the mp3 player, on which your home hard-drive, containing all of your pirated music, is now transferred to your pocket also. Everyone is and carries with them a pocket-monster. (Pokémon Go and the home-world hybridity of the Switch take this even further; Animal Crossing‘s significance during lockdown brings with it additionally worthy considerations.)
The familiar premise of any given Pokémon game is not, then, a replacement for one’s IRL adventures but an analogous training simulator for the aspiring cultural producer. Monster battles give way to sound clashes as you organise your team. There is no escapism here, but an interrelation. Bedroom culture and pop stardom come together apiece — but I’m not about to suggest we refer to all this as “post-Pokémon music”…
“So Online It Hurts”
There is now a mass of former Discord-dwelling pop meddlers making moves to break into the overground, pockets brimming. A lot has been written about these ‘online’ artists over the last few years, but not a whole lot of it has been interesting or has really understood the implications of the hole-context they emerge from. So, let us briefly consider what has been said nonetheless, to provide some contrast, before turning to what I think is the most intriguing thing about the culture shift they represent — that is, the ways in which a decisive dissolution of on/offline dynamics cuts through a persistent (and arguably outdated) interest in ‘cyberculture’ as its own discrete domain.
This perversion of the on/offline is undoubtedly a wilful reaction to the context into which Jane and others were initially placed by the music press, owing to an irreverent undercurrent that wants to perpetually resist categorisation, or rather laughs in the face of a music-journalistic hesitancy to do so, confounded by the swarming processes that define so much contemporary music’s confusing and conflating nature.
For example, “Digicore Hero dltzk Is So Online It Hurts” is the typical headline of an early interview with Remover (under an older alias) for Pitchfork in 2022. But even with just a few years hindsight – the speed of this amorphous scene’s development is extreme – it’s a journalistic context that feels like it has not yet adjusted to the climate of (post)lockdown life, which is surely when everything changed; when being online was not an escape from the ‘real world’, but the knotted entwinement of a new normal:
Their mom and dad might not know it, but over the past year [Jane] has become one of the faces of digicore, a scene of zoomer SoundCloud artists who make agitated, mercurial music usually featuring blown-out production and sullen, Auto-Tuned singing. Listening to some of their songs can feel like blasting through TikTok at supersonic speed, a sensory overload that could very well send your elderly neighbor into cardiac arrest.
Note the familiar distance — the Othering — sketched between those online and offline, between young and old. This binarization continues when the article splits their musical output into “two camps”:
There’s the prankish mixes they put out under other aliases (leroy, DJcoolgirl9), like their “dariacore” mash-up compilations, named after the ’90s animated series about a sardonic teenage girl … The style is something like future bass meets Jersey club meets SoundClown shitposting — sped-up versions of the music [Jane] was fascinated by when they were 9…
Then there’s [their] more personal, original dltzk material. Dealing with the disorientation of adolescence and the stultifying sense that they had no real future ahead of them… [Their debut album Teen Week] bears the imprint of their EDM obsessions, especially the galactic electronica of their idol, Porter Robinson, and embraces production elements that have been trendy in underground online communities, like breakbeats, stutters, and bitcrushing.
But are these two ‘camps’ really so different? Is this not Jane negotiating the divergent standards of contemporary music production and its outputs / outlets? Yes, a dizzying array of influences are heard on almost every track, and the most sample-heavy tracks are released for free or more ephemerally to avoid copyright litigation, but it seems like a mistake to place a wedge between their various outlets on the basis of a strategic negotiation of legalities alone. (I want to nod to Byro’s brilliant thesis on dariacore’s relationship to copyright here, which was the reason we first came into contact.)
Everything released and given a life beyond the bedroom, whether physically or on a multitude of SoundCloud accounts, emerges from the same melting pot. Indeed, for the listener immersed in the activity of these artists as a whole, there is a clear sense that what emerges for public consumption is only a series of free radicals that gather enough momentum to break free of a more primordial soup where everything is available everywhere all at once. So much remains unseen; unheard. The bedroom is a nexus from which only a few things are afforded escape.
By way of another example, take the following attempt to describe Remover’s third album, 2023’s Census Designated, in Paste magazine:
Critics have found it impossible to talk about Jane’s music without grasping at the straws of comparison. There’s little singularity between the names that have been thrown around, even in talking just about Census Designated: Slowdive, yeule, Ethel Cain, my bloody valentine, Deftones, Midwife, Ethel Cain again, Bladee and Ecco2k, Porter Robinson, Puce Mary, A.R. Kane. It’s hard to talk about Jane’s music without making references to those other artists who have influenced and been influenced by her style, but it’s also hard to talk about her music with reference to the people who surround her. The truth is, she just doesn’t sound like anyone else. Census Designated is so masterfully disconcerting that, even as we try to grasp onto snippets of sound that could possibly remind us of something familiar, we fail to clasp our fingers around a single beam supporting our feigned acquaintance with her sound.
So much of the music press over the last two decades has continued to reproduce this kind of cop-out. This was far more pointed when I was in my teens, when every young music journalist trying to make their name seemed to think cultural commentary was a way to obliquely flex your own music knowledge, slotting the new into one’s own overbearing sense of a canon, whilst name-dropping underground darlings to tickle the ego of those also in the know.
The Spotify era of algorithmic taste-making has made this worse, since it thrives on comparison explicitly, but in response, the music criticism of the 2010s thankfully changed tack in exciting ways. (I’m thinking of Boomkat’s wonderful album write-ups or the much-missed tone of FACT mag’s Singles Club.) Here in Paste mag, however, the tendency re-emerges for the 2020s – even this move of listing comparisons before negating them in the same breath is painfully familiar. The following paragraph, however, discussing Jane’s own derision of genre categorisation, starts to reveal a sense of what is so enthralling about this scene:
When I talk to Jane, she’s deliberate with her words, taking care not to usher herself back into the boxes inside of which she has previously been contained. In our near hour-long conversation, words like “hyperpop” or “glitchcore” don’t surface once. Even terms like “shoegaze” or “rock,” the latter of which Jane has been more eager to embrace as a baseline descriptor of Census Designated, are set aside, replaced by ideas like “art-making,” “fulfillment” and “community.” The way we talk about and classify music in the age of the internet is steeped in an abbreviated ephemerality. “Hyper-,” “digi-,” “glitch-,” “chill-,” and “break-” get attached to “-core,” “-wave,” “-gaze,” “-step” or “-beat” in some sort of do-it-yourself genre of mad-libs that, in a search for uber specificity, ends up becoming utterly meaningless. These clipped word labels get cycled in and out as fast as attention spans wane, and internet kids get tired of one thing and madly seek the next amalgamation of clips and fragments that excites them.
Here again, however, there’s that Millennial situating of a generation alongside its folk-pathologies: digital natives with no attention spans becomes a backhanded compliment that fails to grasp the accelerated recombinatory tendencies on display. That is, it becomes a way to explain (away) an irreverent attitude towards received information and a disinterest in prescribed categories and pedagogic authority.
This constellation of attitudes is far more attuned to the present than older generations tend to acknowledge. Never has a generation been so wantonly dismissed for its school-time apathy, but also celebrated for its political militancy with respect to the ‘outside world’. It’s a conflicted pomophobia extended towards an irreverence that emerges from the kaleidoscopic syncretism of a world that further scrambled what Paul Gilroy called the black Atlantic.
Just because their elders cannot recognise their strengths and the general fortitude of their strategic engagement with social infrastructures does not mean that these considerations are absent. Indeed, it is a novel approach to the cultural detritus picked up and reworked that is lurking behind the artist comparisons here for me. Take the vague emphasis Remover places on “art-making”: what are the processes involved here, exactly? They might not care to express them like a critic or cult-studs professor, but you can hear them if you park any desire to contain them within over-familiar signifiers and aesthetic criteria.
For example, does Jane’s music sometimes sound like Deftones? Yeah, kinda, if you squint your ears. But more broadly, her music feels indebted to the culture clash of 2000s nu metal and the bastardised stylings of 2010s EDM / nu-rave emo and hardcore. How to theorise the nu metal moment? I’m not sure if anyone — outside of academia — has tried, or — within academia — been all that successful, at least beyond the acknowledgement that it is a fusion sound that recombines every significant musical innovation of the 20th century. Its manner of doing so has hardly inspired a great deal of cultural theorising, since its ambivalence to the neatness of aesthetic categorisation resists codification at every level, but here we find the knotted culmination of submarine currents and processes brought to light by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, double-cupping the club and the bedroom in a way that makes the two seem inseparable, or as two sites of molecular-cultural emergence interlinked.
Post-Post-Internet
“What I really liked about hyper-pop was how important it was for a lot of queer music and how it never felt like a revival. There was some nostalgia to it, but it always sounded like 2020. I want to carry that on, take older ideas to create something new. I want everything to feel like hyper-pop, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”
Returning to an aforementioned attempt at categorisation, we could choose to align this errant set of cultural tendencies with what Michael Waugh has called “post-internet music”, but a generation of post-hyperpop artists differentiates themselves from this association by refusing to make their technological allegiances so explicit.
This is a current that overlaps considerably with what Simon Reynolds infamously called “conceptronica”; artists, Waugh writes, prone to “self-consciously highlighting Post-Internet themes in their work [my emphasis]”, who “fuse the posthumanism of Post-Internet identity with the fluid gender deconstructions of queer theory … inspired by the ability to perform multiple ‘selves’ in the (relative) anonymity of virtual spaces, as well as the emotional and symbiotic relationship that the Post-Internet generation holds with its technological devices.”
“Thinking ‘in the fashion of the network’ occurs organically for those that accept the ‘centrality’ of the Internet within contemporary culture as a commonplace aspect of everyday life”, Waugh continues. But the culture shift for a post-post-Internet generation is one that profoundly lacks the aforementioned self-consciousness that otherwise characterises the contexts in which more well-established artists have found their footing. Indeed, the artists that Reynolds brings under the cover of the ‘conceptronica’ umbrella — a move none of them seemed to appreciate — are grouped together on the basis that the white cube of the art gallery has become the space in which they explore the intermediation and interrelation of “[t]he bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: [those] labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves,” to again quote Kodwo Eshun.
But a new generation has no such aspirations. No less a cultural vanguard, they burrow further down into the trash stratum of a bedroom culture that is less ill-at-ease with itself and its outside than it is with the elevated spaces a preceding generation has sought to nest in.
The Great Psychic Outdoors
Bedroom culture is still an integral starting point here. When Jane Remover’s record Frailty is described as “exuberant and kaleidoscopic” with “lo-fi passages reminiscent of the Microphones”, the shadow of another bedroom lineage — lo-fi — sneaks into view here.
Enrico Monachelli’s The Great Psychic Outdoors — the title of which wonderfully encapsulates the tension I’m interested in here — is a core text on this, with the book’s first chapter, “Teenage interzone: On lo-fi and escape” being indispensable. I often think back to the way Enrico synthesises his interest in bedroom culture with the radiophonic more generally — the sense in which the bedroom is one island among an archipelago; home base for the cultural radar; Mark and Justin Barton’s line: “Send a few clicks into the unknown. See what comes back.”
In an interview on the concept of adolescence, the philosopher and clinician Felix Guattari claimed that adolescence “constitutes a real microrevolution, involving multiple components, some of which threaten the world of adults. It is the entrance into a sort of extremely troubled interzone where all kinds of possibilities, conflicts and sometimes extremely difficult and even dramatic clashes suddenly appear”, an outsideness, psychedelic and dizzying, unbound from any sort of “specific phase”, natural cycle or physiological period, always pressing against the dreariness of so-called normal life.
Monacelli adds later:
[Guattari’s] interest in free radio, this ancestral predecessor of lo-fi production, was a love affair deeply rooted in his personal and theoretical life. Free radios were an integral part of his redefinition of politics and political involvement — a post-political politics, if you will. He would often state that the appearance of a free radio “betrays, first of all, a collective sense of being ‘fed up’ with official media”, a will to redefine our communal lives outside of State-and-Capital-sanctioned modes of existence. And he would insist that producing something like a free radio (or a lo-fi record, we might add) was not just a “symbolic” protest against the status quo, but a direct act of escape from the quotidian. A jailbreak, so to speak, that he would define as a “molecular” movement, a drifting outside of normality’s strictures and coercions through the irreverent use of each and every eccentricitym technical quirk and opening in the fabric of everyday life. An escape that could virtually produce new, freer ways of being one’s self.
Adding further context, Monacelli quotes Guattari at more length:
“What characterizes the ‘molecular’ is that the lines of escape combine with the objective lines of deterritorialization of the system to create an irrepressible aspiration for new arenas of freedom. (One example of such an escape line is the free radio stations. Technological development, and in particular the miniaturization of transmitters and the fact that they can be put together by amateurs, ‘encounters’ a collective aspiration for some new means of expression.)”
Guattari returns again in the book’s final paragraph:
Just like Guattari predicted, there’s already something political about ditching the drudgery of how things are normally done, whether you’re a kid fixated on black metal and lean or a kid with a free radio. “Push it further, make it uglier, do it yourself”… Even if guitar music is dead and the times are a-changing, our luddite, acid calling isn’t. This all might substantially change once the capitalist culture industry and economy at large dies out, either by natural causes or under the pressure of some revolutionary action we are currently unable to imagine. That’s a given. But until then, our ethos will change its sounds but not its method. Break the machine. Make it work otherwise.
Mountains and Websites
I think that the pandemic, whilst not sounding the death knell for the capitalist culture industry and economy at large, has certainly changed the sounds of an adolescent ethos. Indeed, the stylings of a new generation of artists do not sound so recognisably “lo-fi” anymore — not entirely, anyway, which is undoubtedly because the grit of analogue technology has been replaced by the digital, allowing for a maximalist DIY that may not be distinguishable from pop fodder, but nonetheless repurposes the sounds of a pop that has embedded itself anew in the bedroom, veiling the egresses of old in the shine of contemporary simulacra.
I see Jane Remover as an artist who moves seamlessly beyond the self-consciousness of early lockdown along these more bombastic DIY vectors — a self-consciousness that became, for me anyway, far more pronounced when the pandemic first hit. Indeed, my posts on the blog back then trudged nostalgically through the sounds of (my) adolescence, as I sought to make sense of this unexpected return to the bedroom, interspersed with adventures into the barren solitude of a Yorkshire wilderness; into the vast psychic outdoors where ‘social distancing’ was not only possible but also exaggerated to become a joke that was a little on-the-nose.
Various self-conscious refrains floated back and forth across my brain in 2020… Most regularly, I held onto an earworm of the way Phil Elverum pulls back the curtain that quivers between nature and culture on ‘Through the Trees, Pt. 2’, given new significance as the space between home and world felt more pronounced, but only because attention was drawn to the process of its steady erasure:
And it’s hard to describe
Without seeming absurd
I know there’s no other world:
Mountains and websites
Or the way Grouper pines for “the place the spirit meets the skin” on ‘Living Room’, or the un/natural stalking of wild and domestic interzones on Animal Collective’s Campfire Songs…
Then came the post-lockdown culture shift, where that distinction faded once again into the background… Yes, lockdown rebirthed a bedroom culture, but not the one I once knew. It was something else. Something defined by work and study, rather than a place to escape those things. Thus, the ethos of lo-fi culture had to necessarily change — a change spearheaded by those who were coming out of adolescent during that period.
Nature Nurtured
Again, a lot of this has a tendency to make me feel old; it’s true, I am no longer an adolescent, although I try to cling onto the microrevolutions adolescence makes possible. But one of the benefits of age, of direct experience of what came before, is that I can also feel more sharply the emergence of an entirely different set of sensibilities for a generation that found lockdown to be a time of accelerated gestation rather than a stopgap. Indeed, we share a great deal in common, but our differing experiences of lockdown become a hinge around which a far more condensed set of cultural crisscrossings have taken place, and it is amidst these differences that a vital exchange of sentiments can take place.
For example, Porter Robinson and I are roughly the same age, although we travel through very different worlds. His sound is also quite different to the likes of Jane Remover and others (although Jane’s earlier releases do very clearly demonstrate his influence; see “kodak moment”.) Indeed, it is due to these subsequent differences that his influence on and championing of a generation that follows in his wake cannot be understated. The affective concerns of his music are all familiar, but there is a generational disjuncture at play here, with Robinson laying down a blueprint that a new generation has run far with. It is partly for this reason that I have found myself so obsessed with his hyperpop stylings over the week that follows the gig Byro and I attended in Brixton, and have been most surprised to find an aesthetic syncretism in which web-surfing and grass-touching become powerfully blurred.
Take Robinson’s 2021 album, Nurture. Emerging mid-lockdown – seven years after his EDM-flecked debut, Worlds – the album reflects on its own protracted gestation openly, at the same time as the timing of its release feels like a happy accident in speaking to the subcultural nurturing of a generation of lockdown musicians, who aren’t so terminally online, but rather explore the world with as much wonder and irreverence as an open-world videogame.
Immediately, the album begins with cheery piano melodies that remind me of wanders through Hyrule towns, fields and villages in Breath of the Wild, and the songs’ lyrics themselves are liturgical odes to the great (psychic) outdoors that is as deeply rooted in videogame exploration as it is in an affirmation of IRL adventuring.
‘Look at the Sky’, for instance — the album’s opener, following a brief, introductory instrumental — could easily soundtrack like the first steps taken on a hero’s journey, with Robinson offering himself up as avatar, as we explore videogame and real-world with equal wonder. (It’s a coupling that is boosted further by the unintended context of album’s release, if we maintain the uneasy comparison between Breath of the Wild and the Covid years, have succumbed to a pervasive, life-diminishing scourge.) The lyric video is itself a well-paced walk through a videogame environment, but a self-consciousness with regards to the escapology afforded by the virtual and the actual sit in tension with one another here.
“I cherished the flowers beneath my feet / But then something must have changed in me”, Robinson sings, which seems suggestive of the uneasy pull of a bedroom culture and the depressions that may well be weathered there. However, whilst so much of the album is wistful and melancholic, it is nonetheless brightly so. A track like ‘Musician’, by way of another example, could well slide into the party-hauntological self-consciousness of Brat, but instead seeks to lighten the load of pop fame; there’s even a shade of Mark Fisher’s (post-capitalist) desires here:
No, I don’t miss the feeling anymore
Yeah, I want something new to love
I was so nostalgic
But I’m fine without it
You don’t really want what you think you want
Okay, maybe the pop life isn’t all its cracked up to be, but it is a vector for amplifying a microrevolutionary adolescence:
No, I don’t wanna lose it, this emotion
Yeah, I just wanna do everything
I get so excited
When I finally find it
It just gets brighter from now on
The pressures of the adult world still come calling:
Then you sigh
“You know I love you, so I think I should tell you, Porter
This life, well isn’t it time that you grow up?”
But catching a wave to success is no reason to forget what buoyed you to the surface in the first place:
Oh, it’s calling
I just can’t stop, I’m sorry
I can feel a new day dawning
I burn up, burn out
I shouldn’t do this to myselfBut sincerely
Can’t you feel what I’m feeling?
I can see my life so clearly
I burn up, burn out
I shouldn’t do this to myselfWell, this is why we do it for the feeling
How do you do music?
Well, it’s easy
You just face your fears and
You become your heroes
I don’t understand why you’re freaking out
It’s a sentiment taken up powerfully by Robinson’s wandering understudies, who are moving out of formation to take the lead. As Robinson’s world tour comes to an end, it’s not him on the cover of the UK’s NME; it’s April Harper Grey aka underscores. She talks about “once [being] just a playful member of several artsy, experimental online collectives” — “‘Collectives were huge. Everyone from 2014 to 2020 was making a fucking collective,’ she laughs. ‘And I was in, like, three of them'” — and “speaks fondly of those early, ‘low stakes’ days holed up behind the computer.”
But these aren’t the days of bedroom culture anymore. Unwilling to lose ‘the feeling’, she turns it inside out on a debut album that
sees Grey, a self-confessed “woman of American circumstance”, observe the fictional town of Wallsocket, Michigan, where three suburban girls come of age and reckon with religion, violence, class dissonance and feminine rage. She pertinently critiques the tensions of Middle America, which proved popular among her politically informed audience. “Exploring those little pockets of frustration is important,” she asserts. “I was thinking a lot about the cards that are dealt in America. The US has a unique lottery. Everyone’s a victim of American circumstance.”
It’s a great feature that gets to the core of the new direction these bedroom-dwellers are taking: “a one-woman musician behind a computer, straddling the line between fiction and reality, wielding the satirical boisterousness of hyperpop to critique the surreal, contemporary American landscape.” But it’s a joyful assault on the complexities of life. Like Robinson, the tensions are brought to the fore, at the same time as any joy possible is eked out what might otherwise be a deeply depressing time to be a victim of American circumstances.
Indeed, at a time when a mantra like ‘joy is a revolutionary act in the face of despair’ bears no teeth before the material struggles that face many Americans and others around the world — trans people and racial minorities especially — underscores finds a heartening balance between fun and fury. Though sharing a hyperpop upbringing with the likes of Charli xcx, Byro was right when they observed that “the lyrical bratiness of underscores brings into view more sharply and bites down into capitalism as a domineering structure inducing anger and insecurity by contrast to Charli xcx.”
The coupling of videogame aesthetics and real-world critique becomes all the more powerful here; a world of escape given a real political edge, perhaps not unlike that explored by Kode9 on Escapology and Astro-Darien, at least in principle and with a very different sonic palette; an approach less Death Stranding and more Grand Theft Auto.
The Holiday is Over
The first third of the Porter Robinson gig is given over to songs from his latest album, SMILE! 😀, featuring a menagerie of digital-maximalist pop-punk numbers that are, like those on Nurture, as indebted to video-game soundtracks and other sonics familiar to the terminally online as they are about wrestling with contemporary measures of arrested development like daily screentime and the dopamine hits procured by being a Face online.
I wasn’t actually that familiar with Robinson’s output before attending, being more familiar with underscores, and was actually surprised by how well the band translated to the stage, compared to the digitality of the record itself, which I’ve had on repeat ever since. He has a fantastic live show and the sense of intimacy conjured in a space as huge as Brixton Academy, especially given his subject matter, was less saccharine than one might think on listening to the album, and instead far more galvanising and inspiring. Byro and I — not the most comfortable people in crowds — opted for the balcony over the pit, but perhaps came to regret this. Porter was adept at elevating everyone out of a seated repose.
Perhaps it’s silly of me to be so surprised by this. What I heard, but did not expect, was a music that moved seamlessly between listening stations, traversed intersecting nervous systems, at once achingly pop and subterranean, alive with the contradictions of an era, and above all, an range of antidotes to the pervasive malaise of now. It felt cute/acc. It was tender and enlivening.
“Don’t kill yourself, you idiot” is, at one point, beamed out from the stage in dayglo pink and black. There is a sense in which the pupil becomes the master here, following the lead of a younger prodigy. After underscores runs (quite literally) through their underground hits (and some covers by others more overground) during her half-hour support slot, Porter opens with Smile 😀 cut ‘Knock Yourself Out’ — its opening line: “I threw my phone into the sea…” This is sound more defiant than on Nurture, but for all flirtation with luddite tendencies, the now-familiar immersion in on/offline worlds has been transformed less into a scornful and haranguing view of the present than it is an attempt to wrestle back some autonomy from a totalising touchscreen capture.
It is the feeling I am enraptured by for most of my remaining time in London, feeling somewhat off-grid, or at least firmly off-the-clock; feeling more immersed in the present and all its has to offer than I have been for years. Perhaps Porter Robinson is a surprising vehicle for getting there. His fluency with all the dominant pop tendencies of now may well sounds cringe… But it is free!
What is left unacknowledged throughout all of this is how difficult I found it to descend into the air-conditioned boxes of London’s galleries, as I took in exhibitions for The Face and Noah Davis. The desire to write about it all — about the faces and the faceless, the critical and the joyful — was only an excuse to linger longer in the spring sun, lying on my stomach to tap away and touch grass. All of this was written by basking in the moment. It has felt good, and it feels good to make things under the big sky.
But nothing lasts forever. The situation engulfing Repeater and Zer0 Books meant this post took longer than anticipated. But even then, the joint statement was drafted in London sunshine too. The future feels bright for so much of this world, for my world, for my love. So much else is shrouded in shadow. The future of Palestine, in particular, is clouded. I long for a future without Israel…
The future (and its joys) are already here, but they are so painfully far from being evenly distributed. Still, it is all mixed together, the joy and the terror, and as I board my train back to Newcastle, and for many days on end alongside, a tender moment of audience participation at the Porter gig lingers in my ear: a wistful chant of wish-fulfillment…
What’s left is go out and make it all happen, to manifest, to materialise and immaterialise, on- and offline. The spring sun warms gently with its baroque sunbursts, as sun rays hint and glint, not so much at a spectre, but at a playable avatar, already in a world that is and could always be more free.