I watched Alex Garland’s Warfare on my day off, and for whatever reason, it made me join Letterboxd. I’ll probably just throw the occasional brief note up there and see if it can’t help me lubricate my desire to watch more movies. But I may also occasionally duplicate, polish and expand upon those stray thoughts here on the blog… Case in point below…
Warfare is The Alamo in Iraq, and since I’m a sucker for finding the latest mutations of the American Western de facto interesting, I found it a decent watch.
Is that a lazy comparison? Potentially — and on making it, I began to wonder why.
What is most revealing about the film is how it is completely detached from any sort of wider context, and necessitates the filling-in of so many blanks. It’s narrative is brutally minimal, and as a result, it’s easy to assume it is choosing to rely entirely on a variety of assumed “givens” that any viewer might bring to it. Since it’s a film documenting a recent war, it assumes that we all know the context already — and we likely do — so chooses to simply tell a story about some men who got stuck in a pickle.
But this also makes Warfare a sort of Rorcharch test, as demonstrated by the other reviews on Letterboxd that see it as nothing more than your usual American propaganda. But this isn’t Clint Eastwood directing American Sniper — although it echoes it. In fact, its fragmented and detached nature makes it feel like a loose jigsaw piece that can be slotted easily into an American tradition of genre-film propagandising, but watched more generously, I think its choice to rely on the viewer filling in the surrounding lacunae is an effective provocation in its own right.
Placing the all-too-familiar Band-of-Brothers narrative to one side, I don’t see how this is any sort of positive portrayal of American involvement in Iraq. We see the soldiers do nothing but terrorise Iraqi civilians and give their local neighbourhood every reason to despise them. Their actions are also couched in the usual Islamophobia; an otherwise understandable animosity to their blatant disregard for their military impositions on the locals is framed immediately as men doing Jihad.
But the film’s lack of any wider political context, or its refusal to give any particular reason for why the soldiers are doing what they’re doing, also means the film itself has no overarching purpose. There’s no obvious mission, no goal, just routine ‘displays of force’.
Because no reason is given for why they are there or what they are hoping to achieve, the viewer again makes assumptions and fills in the blanks, but in suspending these presuppositions, all we have to draw upon is a first act of cold tedium followed by a second act of gore and suffering. It’s hard not to see this alone as a tacit critique of the war itself. It’s all tension, thrill and impenetrable codewords — but for what?
The film’s closing scene, which briefly shows the real persons whose memories are the basis for its narrative, is notably accompanied by Low’s “Dancing and Blood”, from their 2018 album Double Negative — an album of disintegrating songs described by Rich Juzwiak, writing for Pitchfork, as “a scowling and shellshocked response to Trump’s America”, and “an ambiguous, modern wonder”.
Alex Garland is no doubt going for something similar here. But there’s still something to be said for his shift from horror/sci-fi to modern warfare, which says a lot about society… War movies are the new containers for highly technical language and psychological limit-points — that is, for futureshock. This was a terrain formerly occupied by, for example, cyberpunk, where high tech meets low life. In a cunning reflection of where the world of tech has headed, our cyber present is no less a material reality lived by social dropouts, but these dropouts have since enrolled in the army. A life of tech and dirt isn’t lived so much on the streets of our world’s capital cities than it is lived exclusively by soldiers on battlefields.
Like the Low album it draws upon for its singular use of non-diegetic sound design, sitting before this ambiguity is uncomfortable, even masochistic. I remember going to see Low in London on the Double Negative tour at the Barbican and being shocked to hear that album’s beautiful songs untainted, allowing me to enjoy the album even more for the bold decision to re-present something beautiful in such a degraded manner. Warfare left me feeling similarly.
Perhaps it reflects the degradation of the world in which it is set — ours — a little too closely, and perhaps it could have been more explicitly political. It is understandable that may viewers may be left feeling like we’re long past the point of trying to make Iraq this century’s Vietnam. This film is no Apocalypse Now. But I also respect it for not trying to be that, for not milking the knowing perversity of a high-art anti-war film. In truth, it’s ambiguity is really where all of its richness lies, outside of the heroism and psychedelia we might be more used to.
Civil War was perhaps a more obviously interesting film, but I nonetheless enjoyed Warfare as a very different approach to contemporary conflict — perhaps even the exact opposite approach taken in Civil War, with its aching fascination with the spectacle of making history. That being said, I don’t feel great about having enjoyed it. But I respect the cultivation of that ambiguity.
What is (or was) hyperpop? The YouTube commentator debates have raged for years, with most either trying to formalise an errant trajectory, or affirm its un-codifiable nature. For the most part, this is a tale as old as time. No matter the medium, genre-markers and collective nouns are rarely chosen by those to whom they apply. It is generally the critic who denotes the contours of a group or sensibility — as ever, we must take our hats off to Simon Reynolds, for probably being responsible for more of these names than most are aware of.
Although names rankle those to whom they apply, charting the development of these names is as fun as inventing them in the first place. The history of whoever tries to take possession of a word is always interesting, as is a refusal to be named altogether, but familiar tensions arise when we attempt to bridge the gap between these two modes of thinking (or not thinking) about what defines a particular genre of music.
Hyperpop is no exception, even though its claims of non-categorisation as particularly loud among artists and archivists alike. In 2023, for example, YouTuber Jauque X presented a short artist-specific primer titled “How Brakence Ruined Hyperpop”, addressing this complicated relationship to genre explicitly. However, far from the scathing overview that might be expected from its clickbait title, X argues in his video that brakence’s ruining of hyperpop was intentional, claiming that 2022 album Hypochondriac
doesn’t fit into the hyperpop landscape at all, nor does it fit in with any genre. Hypochondriac is a complete deconstruction of the idea of music genres. Why try to fit into a box when you can do all of this instead? This was an idea that many of his biggest influences, like Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, also believed. An entire generation of experimental music was categorised under the umbrella of hyperpop by major labels to make them more marketable, even though this went against the movement’s core message: music doesn’t and shouldn’t fit into boxes. And maybe brakence, a nineteen-year-old kid from Ohio, would be the one to finally kill hyperpop and the need for genres in general.
As discussed here the other day, it is partly this scene’s deep refusal to codify itself through marketable terms that has fascinated me in recent months. But it nonetheless remains true that hyperpop has a history, and that its refusal to be codified is not always entirely convincing.
The various sonic forms strapped together by brakence — midwest emo, pop, hiphop, r&b, glitch, et al. — do not suggest a total break from some sense of cultural history. It is possible to chart its various influences, and I think it’s worthwhile to speculate on why it is these sounds and not others that have been chosen for recombination. In fact, at a certain point, to list these various influences, worn openly and identifiably on brakence’s sleeve, starts to feel like a far more appropriate use of genre than the use of ‘hyperpop’ as a catch-all. Multiplicity wins out over singularity here, but so does particularity win out over generality. There are very particular sonic sensibilities being drawn on here. I even get a strange feeling, when listening to brakence, that whilst his music might refuse to be put into a single genre, the genres it utilises are a cross-section of contemporary pop forms: those sonic sensibilities most widely circulated by the algorithm itself, as if his sound doesn’t want to be a trend but is nonetheless a culmination of trends.
If this is ‘hyperpop’, it starts to sound not like a freeform gluttony of pop forms — which is perhaps what ‘hyperpop’ should be, if we are to understand the ‘hyper-‘ as a designation of something that is ‘more pop than pop’ — but rather a mastery of all that is contemporary. This is to say that, on the one hand, it is a sound that melts together all the popular motifs that you might hear on an average TikTok scroll session, but whereas the more extreme end of the hyperpop continuum might reflect the affective qualities of this semioblitz, which a scroll is likely to induce, brakence takes a less hyperactive and more salvagepunk approach, in Mark Fisher’s sense:
salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs. While signs are interchangeable, objects have particular properties, textures and tendencies, and the art of salvage is about knowing which objects can be lashed together to form viable constructions.
brakence demonstrates this viability for now, and is all the more pop for doing so, as his sound is less a shockingly aberrant mutant than it is a broadly palatable culmination of contemporary pop trends. It’s no less interesting, but this palatability also sets it curiously aside from a lot else that falls under the hyperpop banner. If brakence ruined hyperpop, then, it is not in the sense of pushing beyond that loose genre’s limits, but in establishing a sound that is a contemporary ‘pop’ pure and simple.
This is the sound of a ‘hyperpop’ now, but it was not the sound of hyperpop old, and in trying to understand where this new sound has emerged from, I’ve gotten the impression that hyperpop has become a strange beast that — like other contentious genre markers, such as ‘dubstep’, before it — has passed through a number of iterations and, perhaps most significantly, has also undergone an explicit process of Americanisation, sacrificing a far more global (and also perhaps more ‘political’ and minoritarian) sound that once defined it. [Count me among those eagerly awaiting an English translation of Julie Ackerman’s Hyperpop in the hopes it charts this trajectory more extensively than I plan to do here.]
The dubstep comparison is useful here, and I’d like to unpack it. To do so will take us momentarily away from a consideration of hyperpop, but since dubstep must also be acknowledged as a hyperpop antecedent in its own right, we will return to it in due course. To nonetheless quickly prefigure the question to be arrived at shortly, my intention here is to ask whether a tentative relationship between dubstep and hyperpop can be made generally, or whether it is this only applicable to its more American current…
On the one hand, there was the British dubstep scene, which was already the product of socio-cultural combinatory impulses, reflecting the influence of a racially diverse and errant underground. It is a sound that was vaporously distilled in the output of Burial most famously, but before that it was a far less subdued sound, combining elements of grime, 2step, dub, and jungle, and known for its bass-driven, spacious, and tensely minimal-maximal production style. In this regard, it was still often raucous, angry, expressing a melancholic rage — a sort of return of the repressed through sub-bass — but it also felt acutely haunted by the spectre of UK rave culture far more specifically than its American cousin…
The American maximalist scene, synonymous with Skrillex, displayed a subtly different approach to bass, which did not take itself so seriously, and also sought to produce a very different set of affects. Whilst UK dubstep was haunted, US dubstep leant into a farcical approach to bass that pushed a UK sensibility to an extreme.
When I first started going to clubs in the late 2000s, both of these scenes were at their peak, and although the two styles initially felt diametrically opposed — with the US version being so achingly and obnoxiously American that it was, for some time, an embarrassment to the UK purists (and therefore termed ‘brostep’ to distinguish it, later blurring into the generic non-identifier ‘EDM’) — the two currents nonetheless began to cross-pollinate, such that it wasn’t totally surprising to hear the likes of Mala and Skrillex at the same club night.
Where the two scenes differed most was perhaps in their relationship to a wider political landscape. Listening to Mala’s classic 2006 track, ‘Anti War Dub’ — the b-side to single ‘Haunted’, which was a Digital Mystikz (Mala + Coki) production — makes the differences between the two scenes seem extreme. When listening to the a-side, however, the blown-out baselines show that these two scenes are more like related than many liked to think.
Even looking superficially at the track titles — ‘Haunted’ versus ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ — there is a shared invocation of para-normal sonic sensibilities here, of another spectral world of ghouls and monsters, flirting with countercultural and socio-cultural excess. But if these scenes were stubbornly distinguished all the same, it was perhaps because US dubstep felt at a greater distance from a Jamaican dub culture and its more particular association with the duppy.
American ghost stories, particularly those that feature poltergeists, are obviously inseparable from its wrestling with racialised terrors, but UK dubstep retained a relationship to a wider political history that often felt overshadowed by an American maximalism. The UK’s dubby/duppy sensibilities can be traced back to the doubling and strafing of the maximal and the minimal in 1960s and ’70s Kingston with far more ease, as this was so key to dubstep’s UK context in the early twenty-first century.
We might argue, in this regard, that UK dub culture exacerbated the tensions of its Jamaican uncle. It is notable that Jamaican dub arose around the same time that the country gained independence in 1962, and so dub’s (or the “double”‘s) process of ‘versioning’ can be read as a way of engaging with the rupture / impasse felt between a colonised sense of alienation and a newly independent crisis of identity. [For more on this, see my 2023 post on Edward George’s ‘The Strangeness of Dub’.]
For Paul Gilroy, this is the (non-non-)essential quality of black culture in general, in a post-slavery world, made difficult to extract from two warring perspectives, which argue that music is, on the one hand, “the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness” — that is, questions of (multi)cultural identity — whilst on the other hand, there are “those who would dispute the existence of any unifying, organic phenomenon” that designates ‘black’ culture as such.
There is a telling contradiction here, which has nonetheless been explored productively and at length by many over the last few decades. Fred Moten, for instance, in In The Break, sees blackness itself as errancy, as that which exceeds all categorisation. But how are we to understand this errancy and excess as a quintessential characteristic of specifically black culture? How is it possible to categorise a subject position on the basis of its elision of category as such?
Gilroy makes a similar point — more succinctly, if no less complexly — when he argues that anyone who thinks about black culture and pop culture (with the two being increasingly inseparable today) is faced with “the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilising flux of the post-contemporary world.” This errancy can be traced back to specifically black modalities of expression, but it is an errancy that has also been appropriated and recuperated in ways that are both a consequence of that errancy itself and a reflection of capitalism’s own powerful destabilisation of codes. There is thus a paradox wherein a black errancy is both response to and consequence of capitalism’s own attempts to striate black bodies and their modes of cultural expression.
The erratic and recombinatory modalities of black culture are nonetheless powerful when expressed in this context regardless, in that they knowingly walk this peculiar tightrope, dancing in the break between evasion and recuperation. Gilroy continues:
it is tempting to endorse the Brechtian suggestion that some version of “montage” corresponds to an unprecedented type of realism, appropriate to the extreme historical conditions which form it. But these dense, implosive combinations of diverse and dissimilar sounds amount to more than the technique they employ in their joyously artificial reconstruction of the instability of lived, profane racial identity. An aesthetic stress is laid upon the sheer social and cultural distance which formerly separated the diverse elements now dislocated into novel meanings by their provocative aural juxtaposition.
Gilroy again explores this tension in relation to the commodification of dance music in the late-twentieth century, “whereby a commodity like a twelve-inch single, released from the belly of the multinational beast, comes to anticipate, even demand, supplementary creative input in the hidden spheres of public political interaction that wait further on up the road” — that is, in the sense that twelve-inch was “a new type of musical product that could maximise their [the record companies’] own economic opportunities, but this had other unintended consequences”, with this new format lending itself to new methodologies of “dubbing, scratching, and mixing … join[ing] production and consumption together”.
UK dubstep latches onto this wonky trajectory explicitly, oscillating between music-industrial recuperation and a next-level countercultural evasion, wrestling with a new post-empire sense of identity that was giving rise to a pervasive melancholy at the start of the twenty-first century, when the increasing homogeneity of pop-cultural expression necessitated the further exacerbation of those affective and aesthetic qualities that were most subversive — for the time being — to the recuperative tendencies of the overground.
The intensification of bass is integral to this, as I think it is notable that bass — particularly digitally synthesised bass — can become a problem for the commodity-object. I’m reminded here of DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, which cannot be properly reproduced on a vinyl format because — as she has often had to tell those who ask for a vinyl release — this physical format simply cannot handle the sub-bass sounds she has produced without losing a lot of their detail.
Dubstep twelve-inches may not have had this same problem, but they nonetheless pushed the format to its physical limits, necessitating new approaches to mixing and mastering. This objective errancy is important, and we can make a leap here from attempts to push the commodity-form to its limits and the eventual evasion of the physical product altogether, as dance music twelve-inches are eventually replaced by digital files, which once again allow for greater profit for record companies, but also lead inadvertently to new avenues to evasion from music-industrial capture and lawful dissemination, i.e., digital piracy — most notably in the lively remix/bootleg culture that dominates a platform like SoundCloud.
All of this is significant, in trying to distinguish UK dubstep from its US counterpart, because what we begin to see is how ‘brostep’ functioned as a recuperation of dubstep’s sonic palette. US EDM culture looks very different to its UK counterpart, and subsists on a wilful idiocy that vacates any political subterrain from its modes of expression.
Let us stick a pin in this observation for now, as what is interesting about a more contemporary hyperpop sound, in being openly influenced by its US dubstep antecedent, is that many artists have hoped to reinvigorate this sound with a micropolitics that it had previously ejected…
Remaining with UK dubstep, however, we can also note how the growing complexity of these methods of evasion from music-industrial capture, continually jousting in the break between identity and alienation, gave rise to a nihilistic tendency that was anathema to its US cousin. This was a consequence of rave’s long-since commercialised status, leading to a certain melancholia seeping into the underground. Indeed, there was a sense that the UK wanted to murder the pop-rave culture it had inadvertently given rise to, looking for the new by both eschewing an American influence — in UK hiphop specifically — and exploring new levels of intensity as even rave’s most radical currents found themselves susceptible to recuperation within the context of the music-industrial marketplace.
The emergence of grime is integral here, and must be understood as a defiant and nihilistic UK subculture that sought to distinguish itself from all American influence most forcefully. But it also had a far more complicated relationship with the UK’s own cultural history as well. This wasn’t music for the free party or the new cool of the private gatekept clubs; this was a music that reflected life on Britain’s streets, taking a perverse sort of pride in London’s quintessential ‘griminess’ in particular.
[O]ften when people are talking about the history of rock music, they say that punk killed rock. Punk was the end of rock and everything after then was just, like, undead zombie rock. I think you can do a parallel in the UK – I don’t know how far you could run with it – by saying it was grime that stuck the knife into rave. It was grime that killed this kind of peace, love, unity, respect, the hippy side of rave…
Kode also notes, however, that
every innovation of rave kind of came from a kind of mini-death. Rave has died a thousand deaths over the last twenty years, and each one of them produced something interesting. Darkside jungle, for example, was a breakdown of rave culture. It was a mini breakdown. It was a psychological breakdown, a mental breakdown, and it produced amazing music.
Grime was the product of another British breakdown, and dubstep arguably emerged as a kind of post-grime mutation that sought to deal with the melancholic aftermath of grime’s dark visions of life in the present, whilst also trying to recuperate some of what grime had sought to kill off before it. Dubstep is, after all, a mutant combination of dub sensibilities (particularly in its approach to bass), but is also coupled with the skittish drum patterns of 2-step garage. ‘Skittish’ is the operative word here, as whereas the original swing of 2-step gave it a romancing swagger, its dubstep variant can feel far more anxious.
And that was how Britain felt at the time: anxious. It is not for nothing that various classic dubstep tracks — Mala’s ‘Anti War Dub’ included — were used to soundtrack Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men. Dubstep was the sound produced by twenty-first-century children of empire; a multi-racial but nonetheless predominantly black subculture that expressed a certain kind of melancholia in response to the UK’s dwindling global significance and the alienation this produced in the children of immigrants who saw the UK both as coloniser and promised land. It was the sound of an identity crisis, and perhaps even an attempt to wrestle with a post-Y2K cultural impotence, as every dissenting subculture found itself recuperated too quickly.
I think you could argue that hyperpop developed in tandem to grime’s ascendancy, but far from its UK and American variants remaining terse and relatively detached, they have since been collapsed together and integrated with scenes spanning every continent.
A few nights before we went to see Jane Remover at the ICA, I was thinking about this whilst listening to Ryan Hemsworth’s COOL DJ MIX in bed with Byro — a mix I’d burned to a CD-r that rarely left my car in 2014, but which I hadn’t listened to since. Although Byro and I have bonded over a shared love of hyperpop this past year, it suddenly struck me how the version of hyperpop I was more familiar with was so different to the hyperpop Byro knew. In fact, it was most striking to me how indebted to grime this first wave of hyperpop was.
Hemsworth’s mix opens with the voice of Sarah Bonito, of hyperpop pioneers Kero Kero Bonito:
Hi there, this is Ryan Hemsworth. I’m a young adult who still wears a retainer sometimes because my dentist tells me to. This is a mix inspired by life, death, technology, rap music, Japan, being a cool DJ, kissing, cuddling, feeling hurt, feeling happy, feeling dumb, and other feelings. Please enjoy this mix because you are awesome and you deserve something enjoyable in life.
And from here moves at a surprisingly leisurely pace (compared to the extreme speeds of a more contemporary hyperpop) with unmistakable grime productions, at once cold but also sugar-coated, sitting alongside transatlantic R&B that is as joyfully romantic as it is melancholically wistful.
I’d never realised this before, but it appeared that this first wave of hyperpop had attempted to reinvigorate grime with rave’s peace-and-love tendencies, which grime had otherwise stuck the knife into. It is interesting, then, that grime, as rave’s ‘punk’ moment of blackened nihilism, begat not only dubstep, but also hyperpop.
Hyperpop too has had its own breakdown moment, in the form of its second wave, aka digicore, exacerbating the growing influence of an equally shaky emo-hardcore continuum to cut kawaii across a whole plane of affective intensities. Here, all affects collapse together, love and hate alike; far from being negated, however, the genre is buoyed by what Mark Fisher might call “an erotics of affect — it is about emotional engineering, not about the removal of all affect.” The task here is “to increase your affects.”
In so doing, the first wave of hyperpop collapsed together everything that came before it: 90s sugar pop, 00s rap metal, grime, dubstep, cloudrap… You can hear every pretty much every identifiable subcultural current of the last 35 years thrown in the mix, if you listen hard enough. It was a loving, intercontinental genre privileging online cuteness over grime’s streetwise fury — more cyberpunk than crustpunk. But it was perhaps its complicity in the viral cuteness of online culture in general that led to hyperpop becoming a categorical disaster for those associated with it. It is a movement that is at once born of the internet, and all the more susceptible to online homogenisation. It is for this reason that it was always at risk of collapsing into unlife. Hyperpop is dead; love live hyperpop.
Digicore — to use the title that is perhaps more fitting of hyperpop’s second wave — is notable in much the same way. Although the two waves sound entirely different, they share an approach to the total collapse of now. But a collapse is a movement into oblivion. It makes sense that hyperpop would appear to disappear once again…
I obviously like Revengeseekerz but it felt like a premature headstone on the whole JR project that had opened up with Census Designated. Not because it’s a stylistic hybrid but because the coming out/cash out of Revengeseekerz committed to exhausting the tension that had been built up until then – Census Designated, beyond even its aesthetics, touched limitless tension in a way that was legitimately shocking and traumatic, like it might truly build forever. Ghostholding building into/against that felt properly Baudrillardian, its putative placement in urban LA biographic misdirection for its sheer basalt curvature, like falling on the moon. So if Revengeseekerz insisted on slash and burn, surely it’s deserved relief, but its entropy dump is something like a Death Stranding whiteout, a hard launch on whatever was folding up here. In that sense, I thought the ubiquity in the press of the “terminally online” descriptor, while obviously lazy case by case, was actually earned: a meltdown indicator readout. If she really does another rebrand it’ll be appropriate: once you call your shot on being main pop girl I don’t really know that you get to just defer forever.
This is an amazing comment, honestly, and incredibly perceptive. Byro and I were talking about this recently and I think C X has completely hit the nail on its head.
I should emphasise that a lot of the previous post on Revengeseekerz and getting to see Jane live (offline) was reflecting on a personal connection, and that connection is particular, irrespective of a kind of individual-artist trajectory.
I feel very new to this universe, and so I didn’t hear Teen Week or Frailty or Census Designated when they came out. If I did, I reckon they would have resonated a lot (as they have since), but I reckon I’d have felt a deeper attachment to them then, as the affective structure of all of those records is totally where my head was at, especially during lockdown.
My introduction to Jane remains dariacore, and so I love the hybridity of that plunderphonic approach being applied to Jane’s own music, collapsing everything together, self-plundering. The shift from last year’s singles to now was nonetheless jarring, and I felt disappointed initially, because I was really looking forward to whatever that album was gonna be. Expectations quashed, however, I respect the shift massively. What’s more, if I feel hooked into the Revengeseekerz slash-and-burn impetus this year, perhaps that’s also about being in a similar stage of (gender/life) transition and seeking a similar catastrophic break from the melancholic plateau that Census Designated held open so majestically.
That being said, Census Designated is the album of Jane’s that I’ve yet to have a really deep connective moment with. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it or I don’t rate it as highly as the others. When Byro and I were chatting about it, we were reflecting on how it feels cinematic, like a movie (not for guys), and it is best experienced as a whole. I’ve had blissful experiences listening to it on long walks or on trains, but in my day-to-day listening, it doesn’t often get the dedicated listen it warrants.
But putting all of that aside, and removing the personal, I think C X is right on the money. I’d honestly love to read more on this, cos this is the sort of engagement that I really want to see around Jane’s work. (That’s partly why I’ve been attempting to produce something like that for myself — if you haven’t yet seen what you want to see, make it for yourself, etc.)
I guess my question is whether there is really a perpetual deferral going on here. What is the difference between deferral and evasion? Is there one? Is Jane vying for a “main pop girl” crown? Is its acquisition inevitable? Is deferring forever not the Census tension, and why can’t it be explored through another affective mode? Melancholic avoidance versus defiant deferral?
At the moment, I’m thinking about all of this alongside the whole “”””hyperpop”””” scene’s relationship to pop, the pop-as-total-noise position of John Oswald’s plunderphonics manifesto, and the noisy pop that Ray Brassier talks about via To Live and Shave in L.A. in his “Genre is Obsolete” essay…
More to come, but I thought this intervention from C X was really vital. It will remain in the back of my mind going forward, for sure.
Sunday 15th June 2025 Free party in the Ouseburn Valley, organised by Open ArmsNCL
I have lived at the top of the Ouseburn valley of the past two years. In the winter, it is a dark and frigid place, where roe deer lurk alongside the unhoused. I walk through it most days on my way to work, and have shown you my walks there a few times this year already (1, 2).
It is summer now. The valley is muggy. Walking past my local shop on the way to work on Saturday, I saw a flyer for a free party stuck to the side of a bin. Special guest Sherelle, it said. That’s bait, I thought.
I’ve seen Sherelle twice over the last few years: the first time was in Berghain, at CTM Festival, in January 2020; the second was at Bang Face 2023, at a Pontins near Southport. She’s one of the funnest new artist-DJs to emerge from the UK over the last few years, and the Ouseburn valley would be a fitting addition to that lineup of surreal venues, but it seemed unlikely.
It turned out it wasn’t bait. Michael mentioned that he’d heard she was aiming for a more grassroots promo tour for her latest album, playing more free parties up and down the country. I took the slope down into the valley at around 5.30pm to join a small crowd of Sunday afternoon ravers. Families and joggers passed by looked equally bemused, and things only got stranger when, towards the end of Sherelle’s set, father-and-son duo MC SP80 and Junior brought some Makina flavour to her jungle rollers… A collab I never in a million years expected to see.
Local hero Zinzile played a hour of footwork for the next hour. By 9pm, I was danced out and ready to go home. The whole thing was surreal…
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Jane Remover’s first UK headline show at London’s ICA, with support from Dazegxd.
For a sold-out show, the main theatre at the ICA feels spacious. The back half of the room is almost completely empty, but this is not for a lack of attendees. The queue outside stretches down the Mall, and when we make it inside there are maybe two hundred people vying for the barrier, wanting to be as close as possible to the stage.
For the first hour, bodies bop in formation to jungle and jersey bass lines; Dazegxd quickly secures his ‘honorary Brit’ status. This is no ‘support act’. It is a warm-up, in more ways than one. When Daze switches from transatlantic rollers to trigger the start-up sounds of Revengeseekerz, the crowd, after close to an hour of dancing, is rigged to explode and engage in a new kind of movement.
This was already assumed to be a relatively intimate show, but Jane’s fans are either equally happy to get intimate with each other or are otherwise indifferent to personal space. No shade; it’s a good job that they are, either way. Because as soon as the first sub-bass vehicular calamity of TWICE REMOVED hits, the room is rocked as everyone jumps into the air simultaneously, mirroring Jane’s twirling leaps across stage. Bodies collide and drift through space like flotsam. In a moment of zero-g, I am swept off my feet by a wave crash of sweat. I do not touch back to terra firma where I first engaged lift off. A tech-tonic shift will now take place every few minutes. I probably haven’t been to a show like this in twenty years.
Throughout, Jane commands pits to open — and they do, immediately. Sweat flying, air vibrating, the temperature in the room rises and rises and rises. The crowd, initially clustered, breaks apart and spreads out necessarily. Energy may begin to lapse as heat fatigue sets in, but the hoard is called repeatedly back to attention, as if anyone was willing to take their eyes off the stage for even a second. Were this any other artist, I’d expect a crush and at least a couple of fainting spells. There are calls for water, and Dazegxd seems frustrated that the venue has not supplied any inside the theatre itself; attendees have to go to the bar outside to rehydrate. But everyone is locked in. I gradually take off layer after layer of clothes, drenched, body striving for homeostasis, failing, but not wanting to miss a thing.
Listen! Turn up!
The ICA is not so much a ‘full-circle moment’, but rather a further drifting towards the spiral centre of an atemporal vortex, which I’ve been in the orbit of for only the past year…
Time queered, it is through a growing fanaticism for the incomputable five-year productivity of the digicore discontinuum that I am able to rewrite my own sense of the recent past and keep gathering pace, racing into unknown summers. I have Jane Remover to thank for a lot of it; I have Byro to thank for turning me onto Jane, and for my tuning-out the wreckage of before.
In the aftermath of the gig — and not for the first time — I’ve returned to an ongoing attempt at articulating the new sensibilities picked up on bedroom antennae since Byro first came into my life thirteen months ago. Something is happening here that interests me deeply, perhaps because it is an emergent structure of feeling that remains persistently unnameable. Maybe it should remain so. And yet…
Byro and I first started chatting online in May 2024, after they sent me a piece of writing they were working on that extended Mark Fisher’s hauntological reading of (the death of) rave through Grave Robbing, Jane Remover’s (final?) 2023 release under their leroy moniker, which can be credited with laying the foundations of ‘dariacore’ — a SoundCloud hashtag-microgenre, spinning off from digicore, which takes it name from the three-volume hyper-pirate plunder-project released under the same name.
To do this, Byro draws on the inter-blog conversation I had with Matt Bluemink some years ago, where I argued that Bluemink’s conceptualisation of an “anti-hauntology” within contemporary dance music — supposedly epitomised by SOPHIE — was actually just “accelerationism”, albeit in Alex Williams’ originally speculative sense of “an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which … would operate in a similar manner” to hauntology, but “would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning“;
a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern audio-necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation.
The tension within our conversation back in 2021 was that, even though an anti-hauntology was sought after, it nonetheless came to the fore through mourning once again, following SOPHIE’s sudden death in January 2021. Anti-hauntology — somewhat more aptly named than may have been intended — thus remained indebted to the very thing it was opposed to. Things were not as accelerationist as they had initially seemed.
But in the meantime, a scene was emerging, unbeknownst to both of us, that was actualising this pop-nihilistic vector more intensively than we could then imagine…
Enter Byro, who makes the inspired connection between then and now, noting the absence of mourning in the digicore cyberspaces of 2021 and the tumultuous effervescence of dariacore — an absence that could not be any more explicit than on Grave Robbing, which twists a post(-death-of)-rave irreverence into a plunderphonic sensibility for now, joining the dots between the self-consciousness of the pomo 2000s/2010s and the later bastardly salvagepunk proliferation of SoundCloud edit dumps that could not give a fuck about all that cult-crit handwringing.
I thought it was amazing. It reignited a fire in me after the depressions of the lockdown years that I’d struggled to shake off. In fact, dariacore (still) feels like the first sonic style to really makes good on Williams’ accelerationist provocation. Far more so than SOPHIE, dariacore is a mutant approach to audio collage and digital detournement that is a truly deliberate and gleeful affirmation of pop fashion-flux, collapsing every significant (and insignificant) sonic current of the twenty-first century thus far into a seething mass of total(ly danceable) noise.
But far from being an easily codified current for the armchair critic to wax lyrical about, this mass constantly teeters on the edge of self-annihilation, dancing with the irrational and unnameable. On the dariacore releases, for example, we hear the frequent deployment of the leroy producer tag, which consists of variations on a robotic monotone voice declaring leroy, this song is fucking garbage, quit music forever, or leroy what the fuck was that? Tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but plenty of their peers have apparently quit music forever. Indeed, as soon as digicore was firmly designated with a name (or names), the scene was readily discarded by many.
The scene is legion; its names are certainly many. Digicore is not dariacore; the return of hyperpop is a de/recuperated moment of pandemic productivity, rather than a single identifiable style; a doubly-scra(p)ped scrapyard, having been scoured through for multiple whirlwind seasons of a cybercultural Scrapheap Challenge; a moment of cultural productivity already re-abandoned and strewn with the bassheadstones of so many cyberRimbauds.
It fascinates me how this scene is still unknown to so many as a result, with numerous friends recently experiencing the same belated rush as I did last year. Struck by the shock of something already over, we ask what happened? and realise the narrative is impossible to reconstruct. But push through the initial sensory overload that retains a violent contemporaneity, despite its disavowal by many of those who were there, and you will soon have your brain rewired. It certainly rewired mine, becoming a gateway to now.
For the first time in a long time, I felt the tip of my keyboard crest the peak of a futureshockwave. I finally know what it must be like for many blog spelunkers trying to make sense of our furious discoursing throughout the 00s and 10s. And far from being unrelated to this period of cybercultural productivity I’m more familiar with, I felt confronted by a formal futurism that seemed to achieve the auditory hallucinations of twenty years ago, through a sonic palette that could only be a product of now. But what has been all the stranger, as a thirty-something who felt in retreat from the world when all of this was being produced, is that my accosting by this sonic disuniverse already feels like an archaeological encounter with decontextualised ancient history… I’m just one more millennial playing catch up…
Eternal thanks to Byro all the same, who opened a door that I didn’t know was there. It is an encounter made all the more galvanising by its dovetailing with our love affair. Last summer’s nerding-out soon turned flirtatious and Byro arrived in Newcastle last June for the first of many dates. We were meant to go and see Soccer Mommy somewhere in Newcastle — a reflection of my lingering post-pandemic sad-girl tendencies, but also any excuse to hang out and go see something happening in the city. An excuse wasn’t needed. In the end, we bailed on the gig to make out, order pizza, and have a Grave Robbing listening session in my flat.
I remember the first listen made me feel so fatigued. I couldn’t finish it before succumbing to a deep desire to lie down in bed. Thankfully, with our first date lasting two or three days — yes, I know, lesbians — I woke up the next morning feeling like something in me had shifted. Cute/acc to the core, I became hooked on this explosive scene that was by then all but over, or which had at least drastically mutated. I became fascinated by the prolific code-scrambling of pandemic-culture Discord effusions, and fell in love with the scene as I fell in love with Byro.
The pandemic, it turned out, had not been a completely miserable shitshow for everyone, and in immersing myself in this impossibly condensed and ephemeral strand of recent cultural history, arm in arm with a hot guide to lead me through the still-irradiated zone of context-collapse, I realised that the future didn’t have to be a miserable shitshow either. There was joy still lurking in the Ballardian wreckage, less horror show than sexy f/g-ender-bender excess.
There is no need to continue to dwell on the pandemic rupture here. If you’ve been reading this blog over the last five years, you already know that nothing about my life bears any similarity to what it once was. I initially struggled to adapt as all prior habits were forcibly broken. But for an emergent subculture closing out their teenage years in quarantine, it appears the rupture produced a newly viscous cyberspace of free play and experimentation. No habits to be broken, the rulebook was rewritten, if not ignored entirely, reclaiming modernization just as two decades of postmodern melancholia came crashing down on millennials who had already been white-knuckling an era of perpetual crises.
Digicore, although a product of that time, doesn’t help make any sense of it. It sits out of every time, at once echoing my own youth and being so fantastically different from it, like a remix on Y2K. Forum culture becomes Discord culture. Whereas teens once uploaded their lo-fi forays into brilliantly naive cultural production onto mp3 blogs and MySpace pages, thousands of tracks are uploaded to SoundCloud and collected by nascent archivists of scenes so volatile they die out like supernovas in an instant, with only the faintest of pops heard lightyears away in the algorithm’s extractive radar systems.
Here on the web scenes are born and soon die before capital’s seismographs can register a single tremor, evaporating immediately on contact with the algorithm. Digicore is no more, because it was a scene that sped drastically ahead of any recuperation by the hype-machine, its vanguard moving swiftly onto the next confounding interruption. We’re all left trying to keep up…
It must be acknowledged that this scene cannot be reduced to its BPM extremities. Jane Remover’s first few releases — 2021’s Teen Week EP; first album Frailty, released the same year; and 2023’s Census Designated — are all quietly devastating. There is an interesting corollary — not dissimilar from the tensions between emo and hardcore scenes, where Skrillex notably got his start — between production styles that trespass across the boundaries of all ‘good taste’ and the lyrics themselves, which reflect the struggles of fickle social circles and interpersonal betrayal.
Jane’s early hit ‘homeswitcher’, performed last at the ICA as a noncore, begins with the refrain Don’t talk shit about me / You know it makes me mad / And it comes back to bite you in the ass / And I feel so surrounded / By all these pebbles covering a mountain and later repeats the line I just fall silent when it starts to hurt. It’s a telling disjunction, where lyrics about the difficulties of (online) communication — You get excluded like a private VC — are chanted over a production style that generally denies ‘silence’ as a foreign concept.
If the legacy of these early years still overshadows Jane and co. — an inevitable consequence of a scene that is only four years old, but which has developed at impossible speeds, leaving most culture critics in the dust — perhaps it is because these early tracks tap more explicitly into universal emo-pop concerns. Primarily, these are albums about social alienation — a subject matter inseparable from our conceptualisation of the ‘teenager’ itself. But Jane Remover is no longer a digicore artist, and appears a lot less alienated (if no less alien) as well. The sonic world of leroy is still inscribed deep within their DNA, and their grungier currents have found a home in last year’s Venturing album Ghostholding, but Remover’s self-annihilating motor takes no prisoners — least of all themselves. Let me go, let me go, let me go.
The velocity of this self-negation is so all-consuming that it seems much of their music doesn’t even make it to the public ear before being grave-robbed for newer projects. They put together a whole album last year, for example, releasing four singles from it over the summer, before scrapping it, then salvaging and up-cycling it for 2025’s Revengeseekerz — compare the already-much-versioned-and-demoed Dream Sequence to Dreamflasher for a sense of just how dramatic this salvagepunk sensibility can be.
This tendency to self-sample results in an album that also flirts continuously with Jane’s unstable public persona. So should I change my name again? JR, JR, JR / JR, JR, JR, JR, JR, JR, JR / Bitch, I hate the way it rolls off the tongue, full circle. The tandem becomings of artist and private self, both perpetually evasive, lead any reference even to a past artist moniker, like dltzk, to feel like uncouth deadnaming, compounding the twice-removed quality of Jane’s persistently doubled self-negations.
Revengeseekerz is all the more notable for its tonal shift in this regard. Jane has acknowledged that the album is their Kill Bill moment, with the album art depicting them crouched in darkened room — which is home, as other images from the photoshoot illuminate, to what look like late-twentieth-century Internet servers or a nuclear-fission control room — holding a flaming samurai sword. From aching alienation and interpersonal betrayal, Jane is in their ronin era. They (re)emerge, on- and offline, as a new kind of cyberpunk.
“Cyberpunks use all available data input to think for themselves”, writes Timothy Leary in 1991’s Storming the Reality Studio, epitomising “the strong, stubborn, creative individual who explores some future frontier, collects and brings back new information, and offers to guide the gene pool to the next stage.”
Leary — who infamously implored the 60s counterculture to turn on, tune in, drop out — meets his match in Jane’s insistence that her audience listen and turn up. They come to resemble his vision of a new figure on the fast-approaching horizon of the twenty-first century — a new ronin emerging to combat technofeudalism:
As early as the eighth century, the word ronin, translated literally as ‘wave people’, was used in Japan to describe people who had left their allotted, slotted, caste-predetermined station in life. Samurai who had left the service of their feudal lords to become masterless.
Cyberpunk as digital ronin:
Cyber means ‘pilot’.
A cyber-person is one who pilots his/her own life.
On Revengeseekerz, Jane takes up their samurai sword to enact an acutely modern sense of revenge against the entrenched manorialism of cyberspace itself. The Internet is no more ‘home’ than the bricks and mortar of meatspace. Both spaces have their lords and masters; these days, its often the same masters lording over each.
Taking cyber- in Leary’s sense, it feels necessary to dissociate Jane from the Internet as some sort of native land, but the critics haven’t caught up to their trespassing across the on/offline divide yet either.
Take a cursory look at a cross-section of reviews of Jane Remover’s Revengeseekerz and the phrase repeated ad nauseum is that they are an artist “terminally online”. It is a description that could not be more inapposite, however. Jane, and the wider scene of which they were a part, was only as “terminally online” as the next person during the pandemic years. Cultural production moved more emphatically online just as everything else did. But Jane and co. do not live on Discord anymore. What is most fascinating, right now, in bearing physical witness to the aftermath of digicore’s undeath is how its subcultural recombinations have flooded meatspace with an unprecedented intensity
Recognising this, Jane takes revenge on every dictatorial entity they’ve encountered, even on the new hegemony of post-internet self-consciousness itself. This is the revenge of absent-presence, of (re)emergence, of (re)invention. It’s transfemme revenge bodies remixing (im)materials. This too is a far cry from 2021. Why can’t I be her? … Shut up, faggot, bury the hatchet, Jane sings on Teen Week‘s ‘woodside gardens 16 december 2012’. But they are that bitch now. Vengeance is live, enacted on old crushes and old selves. There’s still a lack of certainty here, but also a defiance that paradoxically affirms what is perpetually undecidable.
Jane the remover is always-already removed, the traces left behind nonetheless feeling like meteoric craters in scorched earth, the impacts so great and expansive you might not realise what you’re standing in without an impossible-to-acquire bird’s-eye view. They are an artist continuing to develop at hyperspeed, and what remains so exciting about their output of late is precisely how unsettled it remains. Their refusal to settle into their own ‘sound’, denying all codification, suggests that, unlike many of their former web peers, they are far from done — and the best is still yet to come.
All of this comes to bear on the pop-cultural theorising of twenty years hence. During the mid-2000s, bloggers and forum dwellers were struggling to imagine what this kind of self-negation — performed with shocking ease by someone like Jane Remover — might look like, and how it might possibly stay one step ahead of the reterritorializing tendencies of a hegemonic and homogenising postmodern culture. Capitalism, after all, as a system of class struggle, is determined by its own capacity to name and recuperate the excesses produced by the system itself.
(Gilles Deleuze: “what we call the well-known power [puissance] of recuperation within capitalism — when we say recuperate we mean: each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes; it reabsorbs all this, it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again … [T]his is the fundamental action of a society: to code the flows and to treat as an enemy anyone who presents himself, in relation to society, as an uncodable flow, because, once again, it challenges [met en question] the entire earth, the whole body of this society.”)
How can a scattering of micro-genres, which take excess in all its exoforms as raw fuel, continue to resist this, at a moment when it appears the twentieth century has gorged itself on its own resources, with every excess all too easily recoded into the splintering system that lords over all?
This is an analogy Alex Williams made in 2009, asking whether it would “be absurd to deem cultural resources as operating in an entirely dissimilar way to energy resources?”
Oil and natural gas are the products of millions of years of lifeforms absorbing energy from our sun and the actions of the earth’s geology, and hence are strictly finite. In much of the discourse surrounding energy crisis it is a commonplace to consider the thesis that the twentieth century was an absolute rupture or aberration, powered almost entirely by the global tapping of hydrocarbon energy resources to enable an unparalleled technological expansionism. That capitalist ‘realism’ always covers over its intrinsically radical status blinds us to the fact that recent history is borne entirely upon the back of a brief window of opportunity created by an utterly contingent and ultimately meagre resource. I would want to argue that in a similar sense the unbearable necrotic grip of the postmodern exists partly in response to the approach of another looming impasse within the field of cultural resources. In a similar fashion perhaps, the total output of the world’s cultures to date might be considered to equally have a material limit.
Far from this being a situation in which nothing new can ever happen, however, what is left is to find new ways of intervening in this plenitude, of decoding what lurks beneath the surface of this great reservoir of productivity. This needn’t be a kind of cultural “degrowth”, but rather a way of jailbreaking processes of modernization that are deployed only for gated communities, doing their utmost to privatise what we already have in abundance. But what we already have, private or otherwise, can be retooled to satisfy the new needs and desires produced by the system itself.
This process of retooling is thus a kind of necessary theft, but a theft of what is already pumped into the public domain, such that what is gatekept through copyright law is nonetheless paradoxically disseminated with a radical transparency and accessibility — it is all too easy to use Williams’ analogy to compare music to something like water, that most essential resource, taken for granted by some, but increasingly privatised and pumped full of microplastics and shite all the same. Still, it’s a resource for sustaining life and generating power, and will only remain so if we are able to filter out the corporate corruption.
All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we’re bombarded by it. In its most insidious state, filtered to an incessant bass-line, it seeps through apartment walls and out of the heads of walk[ing] people. Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the total noise; specifically, in music, those with megawatt PA’s, triple platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate, how does one not become a passive recipient?
The answer is to engage actively with the bombardment, harnessing the energy flashes of semioblitz for a nu-clear fission. It is the digicore generation that has made most good on the growing intensity of pop’s public-private totalisation in this regard, becoming conduits for total noise, reshaping the incessant flow of granular vibrations passing constantly through the public domain, their hands immersed in it like wet sand, crafting fleeting castles of leisurely escape, taking little interest in their individual capacity to “fix” the pomo state of things and instead speed ahead of the sluggishly tidal hype-machine pummelling their eardrums from without. What is otherwise over-commodified to hook and subdue becomes one more thing to steal and betray and deconstruct, exacerbating whatever is latently excessive in pop and electrifying it into a Frankensteinian monstrosity, twitching in the ether, affirming the mutations that the system did not intend for itself.
the avant-accidental, [which] functions partly because the creators have yet to fix it [in the dual sense of ‘repair’ and ‘stabilisation’]. In certain respects this is a matter of technical facility and expertise, but I think a much more important factor is that the creators have yet to actually work out precisely what it is that they are heading towards. Hanging undecided, the music sits liminally in a position of pure potential. However as soon as the music is fixed, it loses its avant-materiality (the actual sound of the tracks shifts towards a genre conventionality) as well as the feel of potentiality (we now know what Grime is, it has been decisively fixed, and hence in some regards, ossified).
What to do with a subcultural current that refuses even to codify itself? Which cannot be reduced to any one sensibility? That frustrates even the imitative tendencies of the next generation who might reduce their outputs to a formula?
Jane succeeds by frustrating the imitators and algorithms at every turn, shaping the future whilst being evasive of now. Take ‘Dariacore Song Tutorial’, the closer to 2022’s Dariacore 3… At least I think that’s what it’s called?, which hilariously sounds nothing like a dariacore song, but is rather a power-chord thumper that could have been produced at any time over the last thirty years, with raucous guitars chuntering over a let’s pin the tail on leroy, let’s pin the tail on leroy refrain. It’s a telling end to the three-volume set of rave collages, reflecting how Jane — far from existing in a vacuum, but nonetheless becoming the best-known figure in a post-digicore scene tentatively breaching the mainstream — provides the best response to the imitators by treating the total noise of their own productivity and knack for melody as a source for bloodyminded self-sampling.
Three years later, they continue to take this sensibility to new levels of intensity, repeatedly breaking their own pattern.
I spent just under a week in London, with a few days either side of the Jane Remover gig, and in that time I read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition — a very belated foray beyond the Spawn trilogy he is best known for, the first entry into which is Neuromancer.
The ‘When-it-all-changed’ (a phrase attributed to Gibson by Fredric Jameson in his 1991 book Postmodernism) is here felt in orbit of the trauma of 9/11: an event on the peripheries of the book’s main narrative, but which becomes a traumatic rupture in Cayce Pollard’s understanding of her personal history; a trauma in the sense that, whilst 9/11 was The Day It All Changed, it is an event out of time, without origin, without end, without sense, without closure, utterly consequential in such a totalising sense that the consequences themselves seem impossible to locate with any fixity in the initial aftermath.
The novel’s central question is thus: When everything is changed, how are we to orient ourselves outside the now-alternate timeline we had anticipated, which may have arisen from the event’s not-occurring?
Cayce is sensitive to all of this. She is a “coolhunter”; “a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing”, afflicted by semiotics in such a way that she has internalised Naomi Klein’s No Logo to make it a newly “tame pathology”. Hers is a sensitivity that is in fact “closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace.”
Throughout the novel, Cayce oscillates between selling her sensitivity to brands and market researchers and also basking in the new and deeply felt affects of online countercultures. The two worlds are not so cleanly cleft, but it appears that Cayce is indifferent to her frequent movements between the two.
Laden with all the trademarks of the day, Pattern Recognition is a novel that skewers the hype machines of Y2K and feels no less applicable to the automated coolhunting of the algorithm — the first job to be made redundant by AI? Cayce isn’t alone, although her talents exceed those of her co-conspirators. All of the various characters ponder the new and their ability to recognise it. A useful exercise, discussed over dinner, is one of imagining how the present might be codified by those who come after us. “How do you think we look to the future?” It is no longer so easy to say, if it ever was. But now this exercise becomes a preoccupation that is almost suffocating.
Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is so volatile … We have only risk management. The spinning of a given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
If anything, the future is already here in this volatile now, and it sees us bare and naked for what we really are.
The future is there [in the past] looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
Corporate marking as capitalist surrealism. The markets are hyperstitious, making culture into a future-past fiction for now. But what about what reverberates at its edges?
Since we can only speculate about its position in a hypothetical narrative, how can we judge its relative significance?
There are those, like Cayce, who seek to evade this future altogether, because that also means evading the now. Those who recognise the pattern hope to become unrecognisable to it in turn
Pattern Recognition is fascinating fiction to read in retrospect, as unlike the rest of Gibson’s work — or at least far more emphatically here than was intended elsewhere — it is entirely of its time. To read it is to feel immersed in the semioblitz of 2003. (2004 was the Year Zero for k-punk too, interestingly.) It is the era of forums, of niche cyberfanaticism, not yet fully conspiratorial, or at least far more intentionally and provocatively so, such that everyone knows they’re being toyed with, manipulated, and even enjoys being the plaything of some larger entity.
9/11 looms large, even on the periphery. It is framed as a “vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.” A pattern-breaker. But 9/11 exists outside of culture in such a way that it is also the very heart of culture. We have long since sublimated the sights, sounds and affects of that day into the more usual sort of blockbuster, as in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which felt like a cinematic speed-run of the whole War on Terror in a parallel universe, from dust-clouds over Brooklyn to the alien(ated) body-horrors of Abu Ghraib.
But in talking to Byro about my fascination with the novel, they made an important point. 9/11 only frustrates the pattern-recognition of a hegemonic culture. For the Global South, those sequestered on the underside of a newly global class struggle, 9/11 isn’t so much an unthinkable event as a familiar pattern of violence plotted elsewhere on the imperial grid. It is even an act of terror brought about by the imperial grid itself, in its staunch attempts to ossify its supremacy. As Baudrillard argues, “anomalies and terrorisms [are] a phenomenon … brought about by over-protection and over-coding.”
Baudrillard likens terrorism’s mutating of the social body to the effects of AIDS on the individual body: a kind of autoimmunity; “a certain type of violence … arising from the depths of the system itself and countering, with reactive violence or virulence, the political over-control of the social body, the biological over-control of the physical body.” Their effects are catastrophic, in a dramatic sense, signifying a denouement after which the entire system must be recalibrated on the basis of this singular mutation. He continues:
This is the privilege of extreme phenomena, and of catastrophe in general, since all these viral processes are clearly of the order of catastrophe (not in the moral sense, but as an anomalous way of things turning out). The secret order of catastrophe lies in the inseparability of all these contemporary processes — and, also, in the affinity of these eccentric phenomena with the banality of the whole system. All extreme phenomena are coherent with one another; they are so because they are coherent with the whole system.
In a post-pandemic world, where Baudrillard’s sense of virulent catastrophe exceeds itself to reach a new limit, it is interesting to think about digicore’s catastrophic sonics are wholly coherent with that moment in time. It is impossible to neatly demarcate the overlap, aligning points of affect as if laying tracing paper onto a map, but it is certain that nothing is the same after that moment.
Others will no doubt attempt to sketch out this fidelity — something which will only become easier with the passage of time, if the pandemic is not wholly repressed in our collective consciousness — but this is not the task of those who were there.
The Jane Remover gig is a setting most pressurized than any I think I have experienced since the pandemic, but rather than give into a comparative reading of then and now, what is most exciting about a post-digicore coterie of artists is the way in which they refuse to stop and reflect. They emerge from the catastrophe taking a whole new structure of feeling for granted, making themselves fully worthy of all that has happened to them, storming ahead. In this way, they are the catastrophe. It is hard not to adjust yourself to their paradigm on encountering it. (As such, my catastrophe is no longer Covid — it is new love and digicore; it is Byro and Jane.)
Yes, digicore is a pattern-breaker, but only for a culture that had become unwittingly stale. The total noise of its future mutations remain unexpected, undecidable, irreparable. They widened a new breach in the hypernormativity of pandemic cyberspace and now step out onto post-pandemic meatstages. They display no self-consciousness around millennial woes. They are not afflicted by the post-internet world. They are the excess that cannot be codified. They are the difference that cuts down the same with a blazing sword.
Baudrillard:
He who lives by the same will die by the same. The impossibility of exchange, of reciprocity, of alterity secretes that other invisible, diabolic, elusive alterity, that absolute Other, the virus, itself made up of simple elements and of recurrence to infinity.
The pandemic generation were not only most affected by the virus; they are the virus. Noise is a virus. Love is a virus. Revenge is a virus. These are the mutators. These are the accelerants.
Those who were described with pity as a Lost Generation enact revenge through total presence. If they can do it, so can the rest of us. We must come to know, as they already know, better than anyone, that we must now turn up or die.
