A childhood spent driving to all destinations, no matter the distance, has meant that flying never gets old. From my seat by the window, the sun glamours in rivers and ponds. The speed of it all. Forty-five minutes in the air to cover most of an island home I have yet, in thirty-two years, to see the whole of.
I can’t turn my eyes away from the water below. It burns wet meanders against my retinas, and I sneeze. Little land capillaries are now everywhere I look.
I know the sun is so unfathomably distant, but I can’t stop thinking about how I am blinded by its reflection a mile below. For a moment, that mile below seems more distant than any other glanced up into, high above. Everything expands again into lightness. I gained so much weight after the fall. It is shed as I come to know another life.
The sky is the first source of knowledge. Jacques Lacarrière on the Gnostics lies open on my lap. Here are my underlinings:
A quest to know is “launched against the entire universe, against the immensity of the firmament, against man’s original alienation and the falsity of systems and institutions”.
“All the beings of our world are … the sediment of a lost heaven.”
“Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our conditions, our destiny, and our death.”
“The task of the Gnostic [is to] discard or lighten all the matters of this world”; to “break the ancient curse which made the world a cheat and a sham, and cast us down, far from the sparkle and blazing illumination of the hyper-world”.
On Saturday 27th April at 2pm, I will be chatting to Jon Greenaway at the Lubber Fiend in Newcastle upon Tyne, all about his new book, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch.
Following the recent Spanish translation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, I was interviewed by Luciano Lahiteau for Revista Ñ, the cultural supplement of Clarín, Argetina’s biggest newspaper. We talk about the lectures, how they came about, and unpack some lingering questions around Fisher’s approach to class and desire. You can read the interview here.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Luis Diego Fernández has a review of the lectures themselves.
Last year, Lighthouse, Edinburgh’s radical bookshop, selected Narcissus in Bloom to be a part of Beacon, their current affairs subscription bundle. To introduce the book to subscribers, they sent me over a few questions and I recorded some answers. They’ve just recently uploaded that video to their YouTube channel.
A few months later, Lighthouse invited me to take part in a panel discussion, alongside Nathalie Olah and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, on “The Stories We Bring” for the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair. You can watch that here.
I feel bad for him, honestly. Personally, I think the track bangs. It infuses a bold new life into “Archangel”, as any good remix should. I don’t think that’s a sacrilegious thing to say when talking about an artist otherwise synonymous with “the (un)death of rave”. The tension under discussion at that time — and arguably making a return — was the capacity for a “degraded ideal” (as hauntological music was described) to still make something new. Whether the edit is to your tastes or not, I think it is really interesting to imagine what that original ideal might have been, as if making an un-degraded version of what “Archangel” sounds like. It takes nothing away from the original; it literally add to it.
Seinfeld makes the point perfectly in his tweet when he says:
Go listen and enjoy Burial. He made his tunes imagining what the clubs were like from the outside (yes ive read Mark Fisher too), and I simply always enjoyed imagining his tunes playing inside of the club.
Is it really such a bad thing to — with tongue firmly in cheek — bring Burial “to life” in this way? To emphasise rave’s undeath, which Burial’s sound has increasingly been doing, only to throw aside its wistful core? Does it miss the spirit of Burial, or is Burial not the haunted spirit of that big room sound? DJ Seinfeld has boldly inverted Burial, and I think this makes the edit genuinely interesting. It’s an edit that makes a classic track new and more appropriate to now.
We’re emerging from a global pandemic, after all, during which many of us didn’t go clubbing for almost two years. A whole generation of teenagers missed out on messy informative experiences I know I took entirely for granted. We’ve only recently emerged from a time when many of us — whether we’d been to a million raves or none at all — were stuck daydreaming of big sound systems and the pressure of bodies against bodies and the sweat and the joy and the freedom to move and breathe however we want to. It was a time when Burial’s music made a (re)new(ed) kind of sense, and the Tunes 2011–2019 compilation was my go-to driving record for most of that time.
In light of all that, I think there’s something wonderfully symbolic about marking a return to the dancefloor with a fat edit, on which the bass isn’t a haunted memory but a new lifeforce. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier, or at least in a way that has so quickly caught our collective ear. (Credit where due, Kode9’s remix of “Rodent” might even be better than the original, and I loved hearing him play it out over the months that followed its release. I also think DJ Seinfeld’s edit of “Archangel” is better than the Asa & Sorrow one that usually gets applause from Reddit lurkers. In fact, the only remixes that please the fans are those that don’t mess with the formula too much. But I couldn’t be less interested in those, personally…)
In a similar vein, I’m curious as to whether this backlash also illuminates a tension that has always been present amongst Burial fans. What continues to make me laugh, for all my deep love of Burial’s entire output, is that Untrue is one of the few “electronic music” albums a lot of my rockist friends will tolerate and even enjoy. In fact, it was a gateway album for a lot of people I knew when it came out. They’d never really listened to dance music in their lives and thought it was all boring, repetitive shit anyway. But Burial — much to the surprise of everyone, I’m sure — broke down that barrier for a moment. No doubt this was helped by the weird unsettled pop-culture moment it arrived into. Burial doing a remix for Bloc Party, for example, feels like a bizarre blurring of boundaries that could only have happened in the late ’00s, when everyone my age was mainlining the latest season of Skins and pirated Adam Curtis documentaries, whilst being bombarded with the suggestion we were living beyond the end times, but his haunted two-step shuffles really do sound good on anything.
Burial converted all the rockists (and the rock stars) to a bold new popular modernism. People who had no real interest in UK club culture suddenly heard this beguiling album and wanted to know what it was mourning or haunted by or dreaming of or what this anonymous producer was straining so hard to hear. It spoke to the experience of the uninitiated, those on the outside, on the threshold. For a certain generation, this outsider position was that of younger siblings fascinated by a strange music coming from bedrooms they were barred from. (The joke now doing the rounds about Burial apparently never going into a club misses the point of hardcore’s hazy continuation outside of that space.) As DJ Seinfeld mentions, Burial has spoken about being the younger sibling of a passionate raver; an older brother who regaled him with stories of another, more nocturnal world that Burial the younger could only imagine. He talks about loving that music just as much as his brother did — darkside jungle in particular — but he also had a very different, more solitary relationship to it as a result, hearing it in bedrooms rather than on dancefloors. But that context is no less valid. Kodwo Eshun talks about this in More Brilliant than the Sun: both the dancefloor and the bedroom were established as laboratories of chemico-libido-cultural engineering in the 1990s, and both spawned strange mutations across the hardcore continuum. These spaces should — and did — speak to each other. But the Burial purists don’t seem to agree.
Lee Gamble is another example of someone who has also spoken about this kind of relationship to dance music, in the context of his own oneiric post-rave records. Even I’ve written about my experiences of being a ’90s kid and hearing this weird music drifting across estates or out the windows of passing cars or only hearing it properly once a year at Hull Fair. For a long, long time, I only associated jungle and hardcore with fairground rides, and I’d remember the relative calm of the car ride with my Dad before the sensory overload. He’d put on Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy as we drove toward the big lights and fast sounds, and when I’d listen to that album in my room, “No Quarter” always evoked the shadowy breakdowns of darkside jungle in my imagination. The bedroom-bound imagination built aberrant connections to barely experienced worlds outside, which made albums like Lee’s or Burial’s make sense immediately when I first heard them, because I knew what it was like to dream of raves as not even a teenager and imagine a foggy spectral music in between the bedroom and the car and the dancefloor, yet understanding all of these as liminal sites for the emergence of the carnivalesque.
Beyond those informative experiences, I didn’t go to my first club until after dubstep had hit its peak, around 2006, doing most of my young adult raving to Welsh mutations of a now-classic Bristolian sound in tiny, grubby clubs from 2010-2013. But no matter what time period I bring to mind, it is always weird and wonderful to come from the periphery and go chasing rave’s white rabbits across cities you can’t afford to live in or contexts you barely understand. It’s an experience to be wholly affirmed, because dance music is always at its most exciting when its chasing the wisps of an imagined ideal and trying to bring it into being from “nowhere”.
But it seems that this expression of an outsider ear has also resonated with those who fail the promise of those dreams and, in bringing their rockist sensibilities with them, give way to purist tendencies that have always been anathema to dance music in general. An album like Untrue becomes a melancholic ode that is loved by people who couldn’t give a shit about the thing it’s pining for in the first place! That’s not a hauntological response; that really is just postmodernism. And that’s what leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the transcendent popularity of Burial. Compared to that bullshit, DJ Seinfeld’s edit is harmless. I’d even argue that Burial’s music, as the expression of the undeath of rave, its rhythmic shuffling onwards, has been asking for this kind of big fun defibrillation for a while — just as rave culture in general has, since death certificates are continually being written in spite of all assertions to its actual lifeforce. “Hardcore will never die” gives way to a peculiar unlife all the same. With that in mind, yes, this playful exercise in putting meat back on the wistful bones of Burial’s hallucinatory sound might even be interesting! It’s sad to think that that kind of generous ear — and the hope I’ll get to dance to it in the club soon — would be an affront to anyone.
But again, none of it is that deep. It’s fun, and I refuse to believe that anyone would stop dancing, cross their arms and scowl about it, if it ever came on in a club. The rave only dies when we stop dancing anyway, and this edit definitely isn’t going to manage all that.
Wollen wir wirklich, was wir zu wollen behaupten? Diese Frage stellte sich der britische Kulturtheoretiker Mark Fisher in seinem letzten Werk »Sehnsucht nach dem Kapitalismus«, das dieses Jahr erstmals auf Deutsch erscheint. In der Diskussion mit dem Herausgeber des Buches, Matt Colquhoun, geht es – in einem ideengeschichtlichen Ritt durch das Denken der Neuen Linken, der postmodernen Theoretiker*innen und der konservativen Reaktion – um die Rolle der Begierden.
On 20th March 2024, I will be talking about Mark Fisher at the invitation of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Circle and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It will be a keynote address preceded by a discussion featuring Sinaí Banda Bernal, Jacqueline Calderón Hinojosa and Edgar Morales Flores, and moderated by María Alejandra de la Garza Walliser.
I’m going to talk about post-capitalism, depression, and the search for lost time. The talk will be in English but there will be live translation to make up for my monolingualism. You can register for the online stream here.
As blogosphere discourse seems to have settled into a new quietude, I’m interested in documenting events in meatspace more intentionally in 2024. Amongst friends, conversation regularly turns to the state of the club scene here in Newcastle. There was a new energy here post-lockdown, with new events and venues springing up every few months, as local artists emerged from hibernation with new vigour, deeply proud of the local and wanting to see it flourish anew, as well as bringing in new blood from out of town.
This has been my perception so far, at least. I moved here two years ago now, and having found little of the music scene I wanted to experience whilst living in Huddersfield (again, because of lockdown), it felt like there was a lot of potential for Newcastle to put itself on the map. And thankfully, there is a lot of talent here that could make that possible.
Slack’s radio is a hub for many local DJs, continually growing and going from strength to strength, and a variety of events at the Lubber Fiend, the Star & Shadow, Cobalt Studios and elsewhere have been a tonic after a few years spent inside. Personal highlights over the last two years include performances by Elvin Brandhi and Yeah You, Mariam Rezaei, ZINZILÈ, Stephen Bishop, the Trans Lament nights at the Lubber Fiend, events promoted by Industrial Coast, community-focused queer event Bend & Shake and — though I am biased here — various exciting and adventurous sets by my friend Kitty.
On the other side of this, however, is a sense that things have changed for the worse. Venues are nonetheless struggling, as they so often do, and some promoters have called time on long-running event series. Crowds at the majority of club nights I have been to have also been… challenging, to say the least. But this seems to be an issue that is not exclusive to Newcastle. Variably, I have spoken to others who bemoan the prevalence of ketamine on dancefloors, as whilst the drug is a perfect gateway to dancefloor depersonalisation, a k-hole also feels like a deeply individualised place to be. But my personal theory is that younger crowds of students, perhaps going clubbing for the first time at a slightly older age than generations past, have missed out on informative experiences that may have developed a kind of “rave etiquette”. There is a performative (perhaps social-media-influenced) performativity, where the outside world is never left at the door, and egos run rampant as people actively fight for personal space on the dancefloor.
Some nights have responded to this by adopting 21+ policies for admittance, but this hasn’t had much of an impact as far as I can tell. There is a machismo and social disregard at many nights that is far more prominent than I remember at nights attended in the late 2010s. Even as a teenager, when dancefloors felt a different kind of tense, the experience was still enjoyable and preferrable to whatever the vibe is now. This isn’t so much a moralising point; it’s not a problem that can be policed, beyond the eternal scourge of sexual harassment. But I do miss a sense of raucous communality that made nights feel both more interpersonally dangerous and also safer and more welcoming (for marginalised bodies in particular).
A particular pet peeve is the prevalence of cookie-cutter techno and house nights. Though a fan of both genres in principle, I’ve found myself quickly bored at nights that stick to 140 BPM, perhaps out of a sense of purity, whilst DJs also fail to bring a dynamism to such nights that I’ve previously experienced. We can’t all be DJ Sprinkles, but there is a real lack of adventurousness that fundamentally fails to hold my attention, or that of many of my friends.
In feeling somewhat bereft at the state of the club scene in general, I have been reminded of Leyland Kirby’s The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback), particularly the liner notes:
The idea for ‘The Death Of Rave’ was conceived in early 2006 after a visit to the Berghain Club in Berlin. At the time Berghain was about to explode on the international club scene as a temple. The feeling was in the air that something special was happening. I went and saw a pale shadow of the past. Grim and boring beats, endlessly pounding to an audience who felt they were part of an experience but who lacked cohesion and energy. For me personally something had died. Be it a spirit, be it an ideal, be it an adventure in sound. Rave and techno felt dead to me.
This is a sentiment I also feel for myself right now. It’s not so much that this now ancient melancholy is only being felt now, belatedly, as I trudge grumpily through my early 30s — and admittedly, 2006 was around the time I was old enough to first get into clubs, catching the tail end of dubstep’s creative peak, so you could argue I’ve experienced nothing except Kirby’s degraded ideal. On the contrary, the rave scene I thoroughly enjoyed more recently, in the late 2010s, which felt experimental and like it was trying new things before the pandemic, has once again died a death due to Covid-19. Or, at the very least, the rest of the UK has fallen back on a degraded ideal of what clubbing can be, and is lagging behind what is happening elsewhere right now in London, Manchester and Glasgow.
This may be a constant struggle for more provincial towns, outside this island’s de facto cultural hubs, but as many people attempt to rekindle the embers of a pre-pandemic nightlife, there is an unfortunate feeling, in Newcastle at least, that many club nights are trying to ape an idea of a Berlin club scene that, for many, was already on its last legs. There is a constant push to put on no-phone, leather-harness-dress-code, tacitly queer nights that are ultimately devoid of any soul.
But I am resistant to giving into this bubbling rave melancholy. I am also aware that this feeling may be influenced by a nostalgia for my time in London and a jealousy regarding nights going on there now. From 2017 up until the pandemic, Hyperdub’s ∅ nights at London’s Corsica Studios were a tonic, albeit existing at a time when the city was still mourning the closure of Plastic People and other clubs that had helped foster local scenes in the 2000s and 2010s.
Today, London nights at Venue MOT, the Avalon Cafe and elsewhere show there is much still to enjoy. But this country has long had a problem with London-centrism, and I feel critical of my longing for the replication of that kind of scene in the North. In fact, I want the opposite. I am longing for the development of a proper “scenius”, a collective club consciousness that is particular to this city. Instead, there is far too much attention focussed elsewhere, as preconceived ideas of club nights or impressions of events experienced elsewhere feel like they are undermining the emergence of something more unique to the toon.
There are other issues here too, of course. Material conditions are hardly apposite for a new rave consistency. Everyone is struggling, time-poor, making do. But there is nonetheless a community spirit that is self-supporting. Some of my favourite nights over the last two years have been nights we as a community have organised ourselves, as amateur enthusiasts. A big for k-punk all-dayer in late 2022 was organised with limited funds and by calling in a lot of favours — as they always have been. It was an amazing day, and that spirit has been extended to the organisation of fundraisers for gender-affirming surgery and other events. But this model is hardly sustainable, as it relies on energies that are already in short supply.
Material circumstances aside, as much as I love this city so much, there is still something else fundamentally lacking here and I cannot quite put my finger on what it is — whether it is a lack within the city itself or something misplaced in my own attitude. Either way, I am bothered by it.
I am nevertheless excited that friends who feel similar are making an effort to bring something different to this city, fostering a scene that has a healthy sense of competition, encouraging each other to push the boat out and develop something singularly northeastern.
I feel a mixture, then, of pessimism and optimism, which nonetheless feels familiar. Our conversations at present feel very similar to those had in the late 2000s, when everyone was talking about the death of rave. We are almost twenty years on from that moment now, and ten years on from the most significant reflection on it, offered up at CTM Festival in 2014. The cyclical nature of this melancholy has led to an atmosphere of further reflection as we enter a new period of apparent rave stagnancy. I wonder, if we can make forceful contact with those pre-existing currents, if something might grow out of them.
Again, this is arguably already happening in London, with a recent reiteration of Death of Rave in the form of a two-day residency held at the start of February 2024 at Café Oto — which I could not attend, being so far north — celebrating the Manchester record label of the same name:
Named after V/Vm’s 2006 elegy to the extinguished energy of original, ‘90s Northern rave music, the label began in 2012 with a vinyl pressing of the soundtrack to Mark Leckey’s cult video collage ‘Fiorucci Made Hardcore’. It has since issued over 40 divergent releases by a mix of contemporary English artists (Teresa Winter, Rian Treanor, Sam Kidel, Croww) and dare-to-differ innovators across the world (Wold/Black Mecha, Oï les Ox, Christian Love Forum, H-Fusion, NYZ, Gábor Lázár) that imply a shared energy between a modern subcultural rhizome .
(As an aside, the residency featured “the first presentation of ‘Makina Trax 2013-2023’ by Roc (EVOL)”, which is especially intriguing, given Makina is a long-maligned genre that has a particular association with the north east of England, outside of its birthplace in Valencia, Spain. See this article on Vice from 2015 and a more recent Boiler Room documentary. I’ve yet to make contact with that scene whilst living here… Maybe that will have to change in 2024 as well.)
The label captures the original tension at the heart of death-of-rave discourse well, as its affirmation of rave’s death has allowed the label to flourish as a petri dish for a new experimentalism. As Steve Goodman argued at the original Death of Rave panel discussion, to affirm the death of something need not be position of mourning, but rather of a creative destruction — a tension central to much of my own work, I think, in that both Egress and Narcissus in Bloom explore a movement of mourning that seeks a communal rebirth after death and stays with the trouble of creative living after any supposedly world-ending crisis or breakdown.
In thinking about all of this — and I expect to explore these themes in much more detail over the months ahead — I have been listening back to the original Death of Rave panel discussion repeatedly. I have thus found myself wishing there was a transcription of this talk available that would make pondering it a bit easier — to the best of my knowledge, one has never been done. And if something doesn’t exist, why not produce it yourself? What follows is such a transcription. (If the powers that be have any issues with this reproduction, I am happy to take it down and save it for personal use, but caring is sharing, after all.)
It’s a striking conversation to listen back to today. So much has changed since.
Amusingly, Lee Gamble, at one point, reflecting on the then-recent release of Diversions 1994—1996, suggests he does not make jungle and wouldn’t even attempt to “without a lot of practice” — something he’s clearly had over the years since.
There are also Mark Fisher’s contributions, which are, at first, exceedingly pessimistic and furious about the the state of things in 2014. As someone who has spent a lot of time arguing against the perception of Fisher as a depressive whose melancholy got in his own way, it is hard to stand by that argument in this instance. But surrounding Mark, offering forceful counterpoints to his perspective, are Lee Gamble, Alex Williams and Steve Goodman, who may also feel there is a problem with contemporary rave culture, but are far less stubborn in their pessimism. In fact, it seems that, over the course of their discussion, they reorient Mark towards a more accelerationist perspective, which he would affirm doggedly over the last two years of his life.
There is a positive ambivalence here, then; an attunement, which seems to be using the then-palpable death of rave as a springboard for a new defiance. The discussion ends, significantly, with an interjection from Steve.
Mark briefly introduces the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of “consistency”, related to planes of consistency, which they describe as follows:
There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. … We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development).
Mark and Steve apply this consistency to a rave urbanism, to the radical undecidability of a mutating scenius, and fall back on an almost Stoic perversion of capitalist complicity and servitude, asserting that the new — divested from capitalism’s co-optation of banal novelty — emerges when we attune ourselves to those processes of creative destruction that escape the dynamics of neoliberal market fetishism. It is a point that, for all its ambiguity, has rekindled my excitement for the year ahead. Indeed, I cannot wait to see what might emerge, both from a collective will-to-rave and the unexpected ripples that might usher out from our urban centre.
Just as under Mark’s depression there is a simmering negativity that refuses to bend to the impositions of the present, within Lee, Steve and Alex’s contributions here, a new dawn emerges, as they gesture towards baroque sunbursts on the horizon that might soon come back into view. I think that’s what many of us in Newcastle are likewise looking for at the moment. I expect, as we try to make a change, I will come back to this discussion as another kind of guiding light.
Announcer: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the penultimate day of CTM.13’s discourse program. Now we have a special series of talks under the title “The Death of Rave”, which is part of a kind of sub-programme within CTM called “The Death of Rave: Rave Undead”. So I’m really pleased to have a great selection of panellists here today.
Some of you might have caught the concert on Tuesday night in HAU [Hebbel am Ufer], where we screened Mark Leckey’s 1999 video art piece Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, and we have performances from Theo Burt of The Automatics Group and Lorenzo Senni. Tonight, in Berghain, we have a full program from eleven o’clock with Conor Thomas, Samuel Kerridge, Shed, Powell, EVOL, Andy Stott, Marc Archer from Altern 8, and Lower Order Ethics.
And the first panel is exploring the notion of the death of rave within “The Golden Age”, which is this year’s festival theme. So I’d like to introduce Lisa Blanning, who’s going to moderate the panel for us. Lisa is originally from the States and lived in London for ten years, where she worked for The Wire magazine, and she’s freshly moved to Berlin and now works at Electronic Beats. So take it away, Lisa. Thanks.
Lisa Blanning: [inaudible] …ully. To my left, we’ve got Lee Gamble. He’s a musician, has been for quite a long time working with the CYRK collective, of which he’s a founding member. He’s done a lot of work with the composer John Wall, and last year put out two stunning records on the PAN record label.
To his left, we’ve got Steve Goodman, also known as Kode9, who runs Hyperdub Records. You’ve probably seen him out and about.
Mark Fisher, who is the author of the book Capitalist Realism and also teaches at UAL and Goldsmiths, and is the commissioning editor of Zer0 Books.
And finally, but not… Last but not least, we’ve got Alex Williams, who is a PhD student at UAL and the author of the forthcoming book Folk Politics.
So, we’re gonna start off with a presentation from Alex, outlining some of the things that we’re gonna touch on. [Some of this talk was drawn from Williams’ e-flux article “Escape Velocities”.] So we’ll let Alex go ahead and…
Alex Williams: Thanks, Lisa.
Writing in 2011, the music critic Simon Reynolds recounted that, “[o]nce upon a time, pop’s metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-into-the-future feel of periods such as the psychedelic ‘60s, the post-punk ‘70s, the hip-hop ‘80s and the rave ‘90s. The 2000s felt different”, and as they continued, “[t]he sensation of moving forward grew fainter” – or, as the theorist Franco Berardi put it more pithily in a recent book, “the future has been cancelled.”
This talk will explore the crossover between our present cultural moment – a moment of the end of the future, or even nostalgia for the future – and the legacy of a curious reengage academic entity called the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit – in particular, its leading thinker, a guy called Nick Land.
Land’s ideas of acceleration, I think, are quite important to thinking rave and post-rave dance musics – in particular, techno, hardcore and jungle – as well as for thinking capitalism, in a certain way. What I’m gonna basically suggest is that some of the influence of Land’s thinking might give us some guidance as to how to escape the impasses that we find in our current cultural moment, through a kind of reinvigoration of this idea of acceleration, which he had.
Let’s begin with arguments around the death of rave.
So, the root of these debates can be found in the UK blog scene of the mid-to-late 2000s. The core of the argument, which was made most prominently by Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, was that there was an aesthetic, cultural and social entity, termed by Reynolds “the hardcore continuum”, which was responsible for at least a decade of outstandingly creative music, from rave itself through hardcore, towards jungle and early grime. Then, so this argument runs, the wellspring of novelty and innovation runs dry sometime around the emergence of probably dubstep in the early 2000s.
This argument is extended by both theorists to encompass virtually all genres of musical production – so, house, techno, rock, hip-hop, metal, mainstream pop, even jazz and modern classical musics. But the most heated discussions focussed on this sort of post-rave British dance music, perhaps as possibly one of the last areas in which the radically new was still available. Even within this fertile territory, though, the element of sonic ingenuity – this sort of element of radical audio future-shock – was no more.
So, you know, this argument wasn’t entirely accepted by everybody, as you might imagine. The critics of this argument basically said that, really, this was a case of these particular writers being basically out of touch. So, they were unable – according to these people – to keep up with the still-vital pace of innovation in sort of modern British post-rave dance music. But really, I think this was a bit of a misreading of the argument. Because rather than finding see this contemporary bass music or whatever so alienating as to not be music at all – which is sort of familiar in sort of generational alienation – instead they only found banal repetition.
“Shock us,” they said. But no shock could convincingly be found. As Mark Fisher puts it: imagine playing a piece of mid-nineties jungle to someone from the 1970s, and they would be absolutely astounded. But play a piece of current bass music to someone from the early 1990s – the same twenty-year difference in time – and there would be no such reaction. Where once popular electronic dance music was able to conjure entire new genres, as well as generating entirely unheard sonic effects – for example, time stretching, respace, hyper-accelerated breakbeats – along with new forms of collective experience to match, now it appeared to be shuffling together a preexisting deck of possibilities. While new music was still being produced, and clubs still well attended, the aesthetic vitality, the sonic suppleness of the music, its openness to radical change and transformation (in other words) had become markedly sclerotic.
What are we to make of such a state of affairs? I think it’s certainly insufficient to blame this on individual cultural producers. It’s not for lack of will, creativity, ingenuity, or hard work that the ability to generate the radically new appears to be over or stopped or blocked. Certainly there has been a cultural shift away from a world where producers and listeners alike demand the new, through a constant will to negate the past. Today, producers of all kinds of cultural products are largely at ease with repetition, pick’n’mix generic interbreeding, or skilfully crafted pastiche. But this is still to confuse, I think, an effect with a cause.
In his book of the same title, the music critic Simon Reynolds describes this broad condition as being one of “retromania”, which he defines as an all-pervasive cultural symptom of a chronic addiction to regurgitating elements of the past, whether in suffocatingly accurate museum-piece homages or more sort of familiar postmodern, bricolaged patchworks of sounds and influences.
Now, obviously, all musical entities contain influences from the past. Necessarily, musical creativity is an evolutionary process. We only need to think of the role of sampling, for example, to think about how new musics bootstrap themselves into the future using the resources of the old. And yet, push beyond a certain proportion of mixed retro elements of an entire ecosystem of sound will serve to undermine the overall dynamic of innovation. It is this inability to turn the old into the new that is really at the heart of retromania.
So, in terms of Reynolds’ book, he spends a lot of time looking at kind of retro cultures and he has a lot of empirical research, which is quite interesting. But really, the stuff that I find most fascinating is where he looks for causes. So, what’s behind these changes? And he spends a lot of time focussing on technology’s role in transforming the way people produce and consume music today. On the side of production, ubiquitous home computing and studio software enables anybody to create music with a minimal initial outlay. On the side of consumption, file-sharing and torrenting have also lowered to zero the costs of consumption. So now any genre or piece of music can be located, having been lovingly digitised, and where once the past was largely eliminated over time, today, you know, it is on the present in vast online archives that we can access instantaneously.
So this will obviously have effects, but I think this doesn’t work to explain what’s going on. The past is available as never before, but so too is the present. So one might expect such massive democratising shifts to kickstart an entirely new wave of musical ideas; to act as an accelerant, as much as a handbrake.
Reynolds touches on the wider social and political currents only in the last chapters of his book. So here he talks about a sort of broader examination of the loss of the future on a social and historical level. And as Reynolds recounts it, the first two-thirds of the twentieth century saw astounding leaps forward in both technology and political and social consciousness, with the era immediately after the Second World War, running up to about 1979, as the apogee of future-oriented thought in scientific and popular culture. So here you have kind of futurological visions – so, ideas of the revolutionary intersection of scientific development and social transformation, but around 1979 these become replaced by a yearning but kitsch retrofuturism. And no more is this encapsulated than in the abandonment of space as a very literal final frontier. From the 1970s onwards, huge Soviet and American space programmes collapse under the strain of political pressure and budget cuts.
One response to this culture of nostalgia for the future by musicians has been to make music about this condition itself. This is what Reynolds and Fisher describe as “hauntology”. So, named after Derrida’s concept of an “absent presence”, hauntological artists use retro-pastiche, alongside foregrounding of the materiality of sonic media, to draw attention to the feeling of our times – this feeling of kind of chronological sickness or displacement, or inability to generate the new.
But I kind of think that whilst, you know… In exploring the nostalgia mode, artists like Burial or The Caretaker also work as objects of nostalgia as well. So whilst a lot of great work has been produced in the last ten or so years, which can be described as hauntological, I don’t think we can push past our present moment through this strategy alone.
Now, the furthest Simon Reynolds comes in thinking the broader collapse of the future is in using some of the ideas of a guy called Oswald Spengler. So here he defines the essence of Western civilisation as being one of an impulse of acceleration, a boundless reaching out into empty space. From this perspective, our era of the end of the future diagnoses a Western world in decadence and decline. So Reynolds thinks that perhaps rapidly developing countries like China or India might be the hope for innovative cultural production in the future. But then I think this misses a crucial dimension, which is the present and continuing omnipresence of neoliberal capitalism throughout the world. To paraphrase the cultural critic Fredric Jameson, what Reynolds calls “retromania” can be identified as the pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism. And this diagnoses a deeper inability of this economic and political paradigm to generate the kind of creative destruction which its ideologues always promise us.
Okay, so now I’m going to talk about this weird entity called the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. So, in a sense, the CCRU – the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit – were amongst the most prescient thinkers of the kind of capitalism which emerged in the mid-1990s.
The CCRU was founded in 1995, and it was a renegade, parasitical entity initially living off the body of the philosophy department at Warwick University in the United Kingdom. It basically was a sort of intensely multidisciplinary entity which sought to dissolve the sort of pious scholasticism of the university under a deluge of chaotically interbred disciplines.
The CCRU combined, as its name suggests, cybernetics – so, the study of information and control in the animal and the machine – with emerging Deleuzo-Guattarian theory, complexity science, but also things like UK rave culture and cyberpunk pulp fiction. And crucial developments in thinking and writing about this new dance music emerged closely in connection with the CCRU, especially in the work of Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman, where basically the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari – of basically depersonalised affects spanning the human and the machine – take over from a previous pop-music discourse mired in a kind of humanist authenticity of traditionalist rock criticism, which is largely concerned with lyric and attitude and the sort of things you associated with Bob Dylan.
The full richness of the CCRU’s many cultural and theoretical outputs are actually impossible for me to explore in the limited time I have, but perhaps the most significant was the philosophical thinking of its later leader, Nick Land. Land was heavily influenced by ideas from Deleuze and Guattari’s project – the basic idea being that capitalism proceeds through processes which they call “deterritorialization”, which in essence liberates previously inhibited dynamics of creativity implicit within social systems. Land took these ideas and basically hijacked them, and brought out a kind of inhuman pro-capitalism which they [Deleuze and Guattari] kind of want to refuse.
So Deleuze and Guattari asked, what is “the revolutionary path”? Is it “to withdrawn from the world market … Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further … in the movement of the market … Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’…” So, to this sort of question, Nick Land answered “yes”. Where Deleuze and Guattari counselled caution, to accelerate with care, to avoid total destruction, Land favoured an absolute process of acceleration, and he identified capitalism as the ultimate agent of human and posthuman history.
Here, basically, in Land’s visioning of what capitalism is in the mid-1990s, deregulation, privatisation, commodification will serve to destroy all stratification which exists within society, and in the process generate unheard-of novelties and innovations. In this world, politics and all morality, especially of the leftist variety, are a blockage to this fundamental historical process. So Land had a belief that capitalist speed alone could generate – very literally – a global transition towards technological singularity, where even the human itself can be eventually discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations. You know, as Land puts it, through this acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, the human is eventually dissolved in a technological apotheosis, and we experience a species-wide suicide as a kind of ultimate stimulant headrush.
As bizarre as it may sound to the ears of the present day, this kind of thinking actually made a twisted kind of sense in the 1990s. This was the decade after the collapse of actually existing communism, when capitalism stood entirely unopposed, when Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history. And while much of the culture was already mired in retro manoeuvrings – in particularly rock culture and especially in the UK – underground dance music was fully embodying the inhuman science-fictional visions of Nick Land. In particular, the jungle of the ‘90s exhibits many features of the Landian imaginary, suffused with alien sonic innovations, and the whole thing is kind of contorted into an apocalyptic paranoid euphoria. As Land put it himself, this was “impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dancefloor” – a prime way, alongside the production of theory and the ingestion of accelerant drugs, that the unrepresentable speed of capitalism could be experienced by individual humans like you and I.
So this was an alienation that was enjoyable and to be perversely desired. But if Land’s rabidly nihilistic vision of planetary capitalist acceleration made sense, perhaps to some extent, in the 1990s, it makes less sense today. The soundscape of the present is marked by the absence of the kind of alienating temporality that suffused jungle and techno in the ‘90s. As I think it, Land confuses speed with acceleration. So we may be moving fast today – everything is constantly changing – but only with a strictly defined set of parameters that themselves never waver. As Deleuze and Guattari recognise, from the very beginning what capitalist speed takes apart on the one hand, it puts back together on the other. Social innovations become encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past; Thatcherite-Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian back-to-basics family and religious values. Or the acceleration of jungle leads only towards the arid, high BPMs of techstep. Supple, swarming breakbeats ossify into a dull but efficient trudge of bass, kick and snare.
So, it’s fair to conclude, I think, that there’s a deep tension within neoliberal capitalism, in terms of its self-image as a vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernization, and its promise of a future it can’t actually provide. So, far from dissolving the social in a universal acid of hyper-technological acceleration, today the best we can hope for is marginally better consumer gadgetry, against the backdrop of increasing inequality, ecological collapse, and declining standards of living.
Technological progress, rather than erasing the personal, has become entirely oedipalized, entirely grounded in supporting the liberal individual. The very agent, capitalism – which Nick Land identified as the engine of untold innovation – has run dry. What does this mean for ideas of the future, of acceleration, and of culture in particular?
So, one of the ways that I think we can escape the impasse in Land’s machinic thinking of acceleration is to rethink what acceleration is. The CCRU – and, in particular, Land – have been extremely influential on the next generation of philosophical thinkers, especially within what’s become known as “speculative realism” and in particular a writer called Reza Negarestani. Negarestani basically thinks the problem with Land is that his idea of acceleration is simply an endorsement of an idea of increasing speed. What does this mean? This sounds rather abstract… It means to say that, within Land’s viewpoint, acceleration can never call into question the rules under which it operates. Capitalism, and its ultimately tedious logic of accumulation, remain the same. So what Negarestani thinks is that you can broaden this idea of acceleration into one which becomes navigational – an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. And this space is not limited to that defined by capitalism, but radically open-ended.
One example of somebody who has perhaps tried to reconfigure musical thought around something which resembles this idea of this universal space of possibilities is the musicologist Adam Harper. Harper has objected to some of the things that Mark [Fisher] and others have said about the death of rave from his perspective of a parametrised concept of musical creativity. So what does that mean? Well, as Harper puts it, imagine for a moment all the dimensions music exists within. You can have different types of rhythm, different types of harmony, different types of melody, different types of chord patterns, different types of sonic effects, different types of social configurations that are listening to it and producing it… These are your parameters. Now, Harper believes that we exist in a time of infinite music, as he puts it – he has a book called Infinite Music – given the infinite nature of all of these parameters. So this idea is basically deeply informed by modern digital music production interfaces. So if you’ve ever used modern production software, you have this seemingly infinite range of choices available to you, through the range of knobs and dials and different synthesiser units you can plug in. And yet, I think there’s something which remains a bit unsatisfying about Harper’s ideas. There’s a sort of gap between what he talks about, this infinite possibility space, and everyday reality. So what you actually get today with underground dance music and other types of music, which is sort of tired postmodernism. So I think what he sort of fails to admit to – or not enough, at least – is the relationship between musical creativity and the broader social and political world. So the creation of the new, as I see it, has to extend beyond simply crossbreeding different varieties of sonic sources or manipulation of pre-given parameters, but it’s rather about the accessing of entirely new worlds of sound. What former US Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call “unknown unknowns” – the entirely contingent.
It also depends upon how these sonic aesthetics correspond and resonate with specific social groups and identities. And I think to get to this point requires injecting these ideas from the ‘90s, from ‘90s dance music and from ‘90s philosophy coming out of the United Kingdom, of acceleration, with the very thing that so appalled people like Nick Land, which is politics. And it’s only by being able to understand the strictures and crippling effects that thirty years of neoliberalism has quite clearly had on global culture that we can begin to see the need to transform our present situation in more fundamental ways.
This is not to suggest that culture is just a puppet of politic, as if music has no role in creating a new world. Because just as neoliberalism has run out of cultural energy, as it clearly has, the politics of the left today has long been denuded of any kind of accelerationist force, preferring these days to privilege various retrogressive imaginaries of its own. So, you’ll find retro-Fordist fantasies of social democrats, or the folksy localism of direct democracy. But this broader collapse in the idea of the future is, for me, a symptom of the regressive historical status of our age. And any future politics, which seeks to build a new hegemony against the stultifying strictures of our times, has to engage with the forward-propelling energies that are embodied in the best of UK rave music: its posthuman ingenuity, its alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and impersonal desire. And what this ought to push towards is a future which is more modern, an alternative future which neoliberalism and our present moment is inherently unable to generate.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Lisa Blanning: Just to give you a bit of context, [on] this specific panel we’re talking about the UK specifically. And although clubbing obviously wasn’t invented in the UK, the idea or received history has it that raving did. Or at least arose in the UK first, as an effect of late ‘80s, the rise of acid house and the UK Summer of Love, which would have been ’88 or ’89, and involved a lot of ecstasy and a lot of electronic music, and became a counterculture that was so widespread that, in 1994, the criminal justice act was passed, basically giving the police the right to arrest people if they were suspected of going to a rave or holding a rave, which is commonly referred to as “repetitive beats” legislation, meaning if there were a group of, I believe it was six or more people, and there were repetitive beats involved, usually in an outdoor situation, they could be arrested.
So you can see how this really affected an entire generation.
And a little bit more context is that both Steve and Mark were at Warwick and studied with Nick Land and were members of the CCRU.
And then in 2006, James Kirby, under the alias V/Vm, releases a huge musical project which he calls The Death of Rave, which is where the title of this panel comes from. And so you see that this has a massive impact culturally in the United Kingdom, which has now, in retrospect, a huge lineage of electronic music that’s influenced a lot of what’s going on in music around the world today.
So, let’s talk about this “Golden Age of Rave” idea. And now that we’re narrowing the parameters of what rave is… You guys that grew up with this music and who have witnessed first-hand the way it has changed the landscape of the country that you grew up in – countries – what do you think about this idea of a “Golden Age” of rave?
The whole concept of a Golden Age is only something that you would think about after the fact. You never think of it while it’s going on, or at least that’s what I would think. But Steve, Mark and Lee were all there, although perhaps not quite as early as ’88 or ’89, dancing and all that. But… [Laughs] But certainly during the jungle era… All three of them have made public remarks on the era.
So, maybe we can start with Lee.
Lee actually comes from Birmingham, which is the second largest city in the UK, and grew up on… What was it? Actually the second largest council estate?
Lee Gamble: Oh, I was born… [inaudible; a brief pause as the mic is passed to Lee]
Hi. Yeah, I was born in Birmingham. Yeah, I was born on a large council estate, but I didn’t grow up on there. Although some of my family still live there, so I have contact with that place, yeah. Which is a kind of ugly, brutalist, yeah, futuristic, you could say, looking place.
Lisa Blanning: So how did this music filter down to you guys as youths?
Lee Gamble: For me? How did it filter down? I mean, weirdly, as you said, ’88 and stuff. I mean, I was too young. Even early rave, like ’91–’92. I was way too young to get into clubs and stuff, but I’ve got a big family, and my older cousins had a lot of this stuff. So I was kind of accessing it through the wall of the bedroom. I’d hear them playing it, or in their car, or I’d borrow their tapes and stuff. And I remember being totally intrigued by this stuff.
One of the reasons was because you couldn’t get into the place, you know? It was always that like, “What goes on in there, then? What is this stuff?” And I do remember it sounding like… From sitting at home and watching Top of the Pops, you’ve got Kylie Minogue, and then you put this thing in and you’ve got this… I always remember this one track. It had like a Maggie Thatcher sample in it. I don’t know who it’s by or whatever. But it was this ravey, really ravey track and it had a Margaret Thatcher sample. Anyway… Yeah, and I always thought, it did seem like it was from somewhere else completely, like some other… I mean, I was young, so I didn’t know… It wasn’t like… It felt like it was proper alien to me, compared to what was going down on the charts anyway, which was the only other music, really. Or my Dad listened to Bowie or whatever.
Steve Goodman: Well, I started DJing in about ’91, and then it was in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and I remember getting DJ Hype scratch tapes of hardcore and early jungle in ’92 and ’93. And basically straight after that, I discarded all the music I’d been playing and entered a long, dark tunnel of jungle for the next five years, roughly.
And so I was playing out as a DJ, but I was also studying at the time. And what was interesting about it – and maybe it was the speed of it, the acceleration, the polyrhythmic dimension of it – but it also was clear that it wasn’t just the most amazing dance music I’d ever heard in the history of the universe. (That’s a “Golden Age”, isn’t it?) But also, it did something to my brain. I’m studying; I was writing. And it became the soundtrack to writing as well as dancing. So it was rewiring your brain. You’re kind of typing… You become a polyrhythmic typer… A polyrhythmic typist.
So it affected your body. It changes the way you move and dance. And it was rewiring people’s brains. It was speeding up people’s thought processes, I think. And that’s why, you know, when we talk about it – when we talk about that Golden Age, if it was a Golden Age – then you can’t really think about it in terms of a split between mind and body, because it was something that just transcended that binary opposition. It was totally active physically and immaterially as well; mentally and physically, but in parallel ways. And then, in a way, everything has been… Yeah, everything since then has been a bit like the echo of that – to use Reynolds’ phrase – that “energy flash”.
Mark Fisher: Okay. I want resist the idea of a Golden Age. Just because we’re in a dismal age now, doesn’t mean it was a Golden Age then. I think we’re in the dark ages now. That’s what we really have to come to terms with. And I think that there wasn’t this particular instantiation of what I would call a kind of “popular modernism”, where the leading edge of experimental culture was not to be found in universities or in the elites, but on dancefloors led by non-white and working-class producers, largely. That wasn’t just one single moment. It was really the product of a whole history, going back from the post-war period. And I think it’s increasingly clear to me now, looking back, that my expectations were formed at the height of that. Which wasn’t just the ‘90s, which was the end of it. I was born in the late ‘60s, so [there was] wave after wave of popular modernism, which created a high expectation of change, innovation, and also of experimentalism being in the public sphere. One example is the Radiophonic Workshop, the work of Delia Derbyshire, etc. Where musique concrete etc. was extended and used in children’s [TV] programmes. And so, right from that young age, you’ve got an expectation of the future, the experimental, and an intolerance for the recent past, being part of what culture was about.
What I’ve never been able to come to terms with is that that intolerance for the recent past, as the driver of culture, has dissipated. I’ve not been able to come to terms with it at all. And really, all of my work, I think, that I’m known for, is really to do with that inability to come to terms with the tendency of the twenty-first century, and a kind of deep melancholy. And I mean this… It’s not an affectation. The end of the CCRU – there was never an official end, but like the way that things usually do end, which was a kind of messy, slow, and painful – was very dramatic for me. These very high expectations, which reached a real… Which, as I say, were in waves… And really, probably, as a kind of peak plateau with jungle, where everything sort of came together… And that just crashing onto the kind of reef of the twenty-first century… At the time, when you were deeply immersed in the jungle culture, that could seem like, well, this is enough! Although, as Alex was saying, the broader tendencies of the wider mainstream culture at the time were towards retrospection. The emergence of Britpop, etc. This is what everyone else was talking about. But for us, this was just a laughable throwback. “Who’s going to be into this?!” History has the last laugh, of course. And when I first heard Oasis, I laughed! I thought: “Who’s gonna like this load of crap?!” [Laughter]
But of course, then it was laughable at that point. But then the horror of the gradual situation where that became normal. When retrospection became not only normal but invisible. We’ve got a situation where retrospection is so naturalised that we don’t even understand any alternative to it anymore. I still can’t… I cannot come to terms with this. Just can’t come to terms with it.
And initially, when in that moment of CCRU disintegration in 2000–2001, I was severely depressed to the point of being on a psychiatric ward. And in some ways, I think a lot of my work since then is trying to come to terms with how to live with that massive disappointment and melancholy without accepting the situation we’re in. And in a way, that’s partly what the role of hauntology etc. is.
I agree with Alex. It doesn’t solve anything. Hauntology, harking back to things, doesn’t solve anything. But at least melancholy is a strategy… A certain kind of melancholy is a strategy of refusing to accept the inevitable, in a way. Okay, it might be inevitable, but capitalist realism, as I’ve called it, which is, on the other hand, as you put it, the cultural logic of neoliberalism in terms of retrospection and pastiche… That might be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to accept it, actually. [Chuckles]
Lisa Blanning: Well, let’s talk about this idea of the death of rave. Because we’re talking about specific moments in history, although it’s a long span of British cultural history. And I guess partly, it depends on whether you believe death is the end. Or whether death is actually a good thing for culture… Parts of culture… And some of the broader ramifications are, for instance, now… I’m sure quite a lot of you have been to [Barcelona music festival] Sónar by Night? And I really get this feeling of post-apocalyptic raving. For instance, Shackleton has released a double-12” called Death is Not Final… And then there’s the afterlife of rave, which you could call maybe an artist like Burial. His work as mining an idea of an afterlife of rave, or the existential angst of rave. So there’s a lot more to it than just the moment when rave was as big as it was. There’s these aftereffects of rave.
It sounds as though, maybe… You were touching on this: about how so much of your work now is an aftereffect or relating to dealing with the affects of that period. What about rave as… Is it a concept that we’re still working with now? Or have we absorbed it and moving on? As an artist, obviously Lee’s release from late year, [Diversions 1994–1996], would be another example of the afterlife of rave. Can you talk about how that afterlife infuses your work?
Lee Gamble: Yeah, weird. I mean, I never really thought about it in terms of a hauntological document. I mean I was aware of that at that time, but I never thought about it in that way at all, really. I mean, I guess it is a personal afterlife, yeah. I mean, I wasn’t putting it there like, “yeah, here’s what it was like”, or “here’s what you should think it was like” or whatever. Never. It was a matter of digging through some old stuff.
The reason I was going back to that stuff… I realised, a couple of years before I even started resampling any of this stuff… I was listening back to this old stuff. A lot of it had started appearing on YouTube and stuff. A few years ago, a lot of old sets from that period… They wasn’t around, really. There was some rave archives, but then all of a sudden they’re on YouTube… That kind of period of jungle and drum‘n’bass… I mean, if you go on YouTube now, it’s like one of the best places to find a lot of the 12”s. It really is. It’s weird, but it is.
So I kind of did that. I also got some records back out of my Dad’s loft that had been there for years, that I’d kind of just ditched away and just left. So, for me, I really distanced myself from that music. At a certain point, ’97–’98ish, I was just like, right, gone, done. And I really literally put it in the loft. I mean, quite physically, and you know, mentally.
And yeah, then when I realised that I was starting to go back to this stuff and it was sounding good to me again… Now, whether it sounded good to me again because the stuff happening around me that was being made right now didn’t sound good to me again and I was searching for something… I’m always looking. I’m always clicking on stuff and having a listen to what’s going on, so it’s not like I was away from it all. But yeah, the idea of going back to it was obviously there for me. Although I didn’t go back to it with a heavy heart or, you know, “shit, I should have done this.” It was never that for me. It just seemed like an interesting… It just seemed like simple thing to do, really. I’d never sampled anything up to that point either, so for me it was like, “oh, if I’m gonna sample something, then maybe I should sample this”, which was kind of… It felt like the first music that was mine, really. That’s how I would describe that period. Music that I found. I wasn’t given [it]. I dug it out, I found it, and then, yeah, decided that, yeah, this was my sound, this is what I wanted to listen to, this is what I wanted to go to. So it seemed natural to go to that anyway.
But yeah, I don’t know. The death thing. I’ve no idea. It’s a religious connotation too, which is a weird thing. Of course, no, it’s not dead. These little embers will be around forever. People will pick up on these little bits and do something with it. Which is fine, of course. I’m less intrigued by absolute revisionist… Someone said to me, or on some blog or something, “Diversions, it’s not a jungle record”. No. No, no. It’s not. No, absolutely not. I don’t make jungle. I wouldn’t even attempt to kind of do that stuff. [Laughs] Not without a lot of practice, you know! So, no, for me, the idea of just re-revising something and making an exact sort of version of something that’s already happened is probably dull. But doing something with the little straggle ends, or the interpretations you have as a nineteen-year-old in, I don’t know, South Africa or something now. Well, yeah, that could be interesting, I guess!
Lisa Blanning: Yeah, I think that’s actually part of the success of the release [Diversions 1994–1996]… It’s not retromanic at all, although the source samples, of course, do come from the jungle era. But I think that when… Now moving onto the other idea of whether death can actually be a good thing… Steve made a very telling statement, a very astute statement, last night. I wondered if you could repeat it for the audience? When you were speaking about the effect of grime…
Steve Goodman: Yeah, I mean, often 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. I don’t think that’s something to be… I mean, I’m ambivalent. Depending on the day of the week, I’m either melancholy or upbeat about this. But I think you can see this as a process of creative destruction. I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic, but I think when there’s this kind of creative destruction implemented by a genre on a culture, then it clears the way for something. And where I’d agree with Mark and Simon and so on is that something significant hasn’t really come into that void yet. If anything, what it’s making me think is that the UK has been… The UK has still got a bit of a hangover. It’s still clinging onto this idea that it is the centre of the underground electronic musical universe. And I just don’t think it is just now.
Last year was the first year since I started DJing where most of the music I was playing was actually American and not British. So I think that’s quite interesting and quite telling.
The other thing is, what was so exciting about rave… Or 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. And the other thing we haven’t talked about, but which you need to factor into this discussion, as well as technology and sociology and so on, is drugs.
I’m certainly not seeing a lack of people consuming a lot of drugs and dancing. Certainly, this musical culture has become much more stratified, channelled into commercial clubbing networks and superclubs and so on, but whether all these people are zombies, the living dead after the death of rave, I don’t know. But really, I think that rave was constantly dying. And each one of those deaths was a creative death. And that’s what makes me not suicidal. [Laughs] That’s what makes me, you know, sometimes optimistic.
Mark Fisher: If only things would die, we’d be in a much better situation than we are. I think that’s totally right, that the driving force, the negation of the near past, the idea that this stuff is dead, it might carry on but it’s obsolete now… This notion of obsolescence – it’s obsolete, it’s old – that is what has gone. Nothing ever really dies. Everything comes back. Everything persists. And I can’t really cope with this! This persistence of things long passed their point of death. There’s this endless circulation of the undead, and as Steve says, that’s fine, that’s always happened, but that there’s nothing to have replace it, is the kind of shock. And it’s this past-shock rather than future-shock, which I always register. What, I’m listening to this… I could have heard this literally twenty years ago! Literally twenty.Twenty years ago! At an experimental music festival! I’m hearing music that could have been played twenty years ago! What the actual fuck! [Laughter] I just can’t… I just can’t… I just can’t… I just cannot come to terms with this. Still. Maybe I’d be happier if I could somehow. But I just never will be able to.
There is partly this phenomenon of – [which] I think Simon points to – of just the availability of things. We can forget this. The scarcity of culture at the time… Jungle is pretty hard to hear at the time. We knew almost nothing about it. We knew nothing about the artists. It was a lot of hallucination, speculation, etc. Whereas now, like… I mean, it’s totally right what you’re saying. When I had to do 20 Best Jungle Tracks for FACT, I was trying to think of some, I was away from home, I didn’t have all my CDs and records, but you could go on YouTube and people have just uploaded these 12”s, there’s a whole jungle archive there…
Lee Gamble: That’s only happened, like, fairly recently…
Mark Fisher: Yeah.
Lee Gamble: In the last few years, I’ve noticed that. Almost as if you feel there’s a need out there. Someone wants to… I know it’s not one person. It’d be wicked if it was just one person. [Laughter] It just feels like there’s this pressure, like, “shit, there’s nothing happening, there’s nothing… grime’s done, dubstep’s done. When we need this, I guess we’ll go back here then, because this hasn’t been done again.”
Mark Fisher: It’s a totally ambivalent phenomenon, isn’t it? Because it’s an amazing human achievement, YouTube, right? Runs totally counter to the logics of capitalism or neoliberalism, which is that people only do things for gain, for monetary gain. It takes a lot of time to convert stuff from analogue to digital. It takes a lot of effort to put stuff up there. It’s a love and enthusiasm for the music which motivates… The impulse to share and all of that. So there’s a massively positive side to YouTube, etc.
But it’s a question of the difference between a museum and an archive, isn’t it? An archive is something you use for research in order to develop something new. And often in a history of music – and that comes out in Simon’s book, partly – so people had to go back to a certain period of the past in order to move things forward. I think it’s in Retromania where Simon discusses The Beatles or whatever, where that whole move into rock was regarded as a throwback anyway! At a time… Rock was regarded as finished, in lots of ways, in the early ’60s. But they went back to this ostensibly superseded thing and then repurposed it. I think that we need a positive case on the archival potentialities.
It’s the failure to repeat things, often, as well. The failure to adequately repeat things properly which generates newness. People start off trying to copy. That’s the thing with British rock in the first place, wasn’t it? They were simply trying to be American bluesmen, and their failures to do it were…
Lisa Blanning: But that’s how people learn in general, though.
Mark Fisher: What’s that?
Lisa Blanning: From copying. That’s how people learn. From children all the way up to artists. There’s a lot of established artists who have admitted that they started out trying to copy their favourite artists.
Mark Fisher: Sometimes I wonder if actually just trying to copy stuff might actually be better than doing some kind of montage, bricolage, etc. It’s that kind of… If you do read Fredric Jameson from the ’80s on postmodernism, it is a perfect description of music culture now. And not just the so-called bad stuff in the charts, but the experimental stuff more, really. You’ve just got little bits and pieces of previous forms montaged together… Maybe give up that bricolage and actually try and copy stuff. And the failures of copying it might generate something new! I don’t know. [Laughs]
Lisa Blanning: Okay. Steve, you mentioned hedonism, and of course, this is a big aspect of what makes rave so attractive, is that it’s fun. It feels good. Dancing, taking drugs. It can be a lot of fun. And it seems that, you know, in the West we’re very privileged. So, Alex, can we see hedonism as a symptom of capitalism? And does the exchange ratio, in a party, of it having some sort of symptom of resistance or opposition or political otherness to hedonism, that flux…?
Alex Williams: I think like, as regards hedonism, I was talking to Steve about this last night. What was interesting about things like the early days of rave music, is that it’s fun, but it’s serious fun. It’s seriously fun. But also it has some… There’s a kind of a sense that sort of eliminating yourself collectively through drugs and music is an intense and meaningful experience. So I think that we have, exactly as Steve says, we have… Kids still go out. They still have a good time and people still take lots of drugs and become highly intoxicated. The question is of… And this isn’t just in terms of something like dance music, but it’s sort of more broadly throughout culture… A kind of a lack of seriousness on a certain level. So, the lack of the idea that this could be a good time that is also more than a good time, in a certain sense. An intense experience that could be transformational, in some way. Maybe not political. I think in many ways, all of this stuff stands in for politics. The politics we’re not allowed to have. So, you were talking about before, about death and whether things live or die. Is rave now undead? I think already within the impulse that you see in rave is a lot of things coming from the failed revolutions which were happening in 1968, which couldn’t happen. They failed. So that impulse, then, sort of reverberates throughout culture, and pops up every now and then. And rave was one of these things.
Lisa Blanning: And has that shift, though, in… That hedonism, that lack of seriousness, or… Is this a symptom of accelerationism?
Alex Williams: I don’t know. The sort of idea that you sort of, you know… The sort of idea that had in the past was one where… Which to a lot of eyes today seems naïve. We think it’s naïve that you could treat a rave as if it was really serious, as if, like, this sort of being together with people and having this collective experience could be transformational. We view it a bit distastefully, as if it’s sort of jejune, or sort of hippy-ish. It’s something to be kind of viewed with contempt. Is this a… I think that’s wrong, actually.
But is this a symptom of accelerationism? I don’t know. Because I think accelerationism, and the thinkers around that, especially the CCRU, took dance music very seriously. This didn’t mean that they were not taking lots of drugs and not dancing. The very opposite. But in a sense, this is something we need to get back in dance music and culture more generally, is if you take it seriously and if… Which doesn’t mean being stony-faced. It doesn’t mean being miserable. It probably means the very opposite a lot of the time. But if you take it seriously, then it means that you’re less satisfied with the kind of things that Mark is so viscerally appalled by. [Laugher] This idea that people can be… This contentment or an acceptance of repetition.
Mark Fisher: I mean, I think the key affective figuration of our time is depressed hedonism. Depressive hedonism. Like the way Drake sings, “We had a party, we have a party, we had a party”. [Laughter] It’s like the saddest sound you’ve ever heard. [Laughter] I think Drake is great for this. The best kind of critiques of capitalism coming out of, like, Drake and Kanye West… Like, super rich… Even if you’re super rich, you’re totally fucking miserable. [Laughter] You can buy… In this world, you can buy all the women you want. I had this woman, and I’ve got these other ones I’ve got to fly over here now. [Laughter] And just the absolute abject misery of on-tap hedonism, actually. And the sense of… In that Drake record… Even if you’re stupendously wealthy like he is, there’s still something missing. That, I think, captures something really fundamental, which was available even to the poor in the ’90s, which is [the] collective delirium of depersonalisation.
Alain Ehrenberg has that phrase, the title of his book on depression, The Weariness of the Self. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves! It’s not just you. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves, and Annie [Goh, the moderator of the CTM discourse programme] didn’t want us to mention the F-word, the F-B-word today… [Facebook] This is completely… The rise of reality TV and social media are completely convergent with… Completely coincident, rather, with the decline of what we’re talking about here. It’s a kind of magical capture that is all done with mirrors. On the ’90s dancefloor… You know that great line from Nick that you quoted about “impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dancefloor”. We all wanted that enjoyment of the dissolution of identity, which is just miserable to be human, for all of us. Instead of that, the key kind of social technologies of the twenty-first century, then, are facializing, encouraging us back into this identification with ourselves. What the Willem Defoe character in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ calls “the most pathetic level of reality”. Psychological individualism. That’s just, you know… It’s much better to be these kind of depersonalised intensities than to be a person.
Lisa Blanning: It’s actually kind of another way to describe what other people have framed as an egalitarianism of the dancefloor. The unity. The shared experience. But I like the way that you’ve put it. [Laughs]
But what about that aspect? The word “hippyish” has come up a couple of times, and I assume that that’s what we’re talking about. The sort of “Loves Saves the Day”[the name of David Mancuso’s famous disco party, first held at The Loft in New York City in 1970, with the story of its impact and influenced chronicled in Tim Lawrence’s famous 2003 book of the same name], the love of the dancefloor. Even though the dancefloor is the place, the argument goes where race, sexuality and gender really join together in a non-judgemental way may be, may be, for the first times, in some aspects of a history… Obviously, we’re talking about, like, the ’70s here, and New York at this point… But this escapism that Mark is describing as an escape from your own self, actually… Is that related to… How has that changed? Or has it changed? Does that relate to the political change of the past twenty-five years in terms of capitalism and neoliberalism?
Maybe it hasn’t… Maybe it’s not changed…
Mark Fisher: Well, I could answer…
Lee Gamble: I mean, for me, this kind of idea of the dancefloor being this… As I was saying, I was pretty young when I went to my first… I remember going to my first rave. I was too young to get in. I do remember that. But we got in… And I remember being… It did feel, although I didn’t have the sort of mental articulation of what it was… But it did feel like a kind of autonomous zone. Like, you went into this door, and when you went in there, you were outside of the… The Digbeth high street in Birmingham wasn’t there anymore. Quite literally. It wasn’t drugs or anything. It felt like a completely autonomous space. The rules were different. Everyone who normally was in that part of town or that part of town were in here. It wasn’t always harmonious and this kind of… You know, there’s this black guy, this white guy… It wasn’t all that. There was frictions and stuff, of course. You’ve got different people from all over Birmingham all just coalescing in a room. It’s not always that straightforward. But it certainly had those aspects of… Because of course, you’ve got this one little universal thing in there, which is this sound that’s coming out the speakers, and that one MC, who is the kind of head man there or whatever. So it did have this kind of feeling, but I never thought of it in a hippy way. It never felt hippy to me, in a sense that… You know, it feels derogatory almost… I don’t mean it to be…
Mark Fisher: I think that’s the political value of it, and why it’s key to hold onto it as a moment. All of that rave stuff, that early rave stuff, that neo-hippy stuff, just, you might be surprised to hear, just didn’t really cut it for me at all… [Laughter] I don’t know, smiley faces and all that… Horrible, fluorescent club…
Lee Gamble: As soon as it went like that, I wanted to get away from it. [Laughs]
Mark Fisher: You know, public school boys making lots of money out of… Really, the jungle turn… The junglistic turn, for all of us, I think… It was, in a way, this libidinalisation, you could say, of the ’70s Cultural Studies agenda, which was about, in a way, this escape from these kind of identities that we’d been assigned. Racial, class, gender, etc. And like I say, the fact that the producers of this had come from these subjugated groups… That was really key to it. And also the deracialising dimension of it. It was that story from Doc Scott, I think, when he was saying… When Goldie… This mutual incomprehension… Doc Scott couldn’t believe that it was a black guy who produced jungle. [Laughs] And Goldie couldn’t believe that a white guy would do it.
But rather than it being this kind of worthy one-worldism. Hey, man, we’ve all got to get together hippie-ism. The form of desire that was involved, the glossy lure of the depersonalising and dehumanising… That was part of it! That made this kind of move out of identity, the fixed identities of everyday life, the identities that power ascribes to us… That made that libidinally alluring, instead of that kind of worthiness. And the degeneration… Part of it, alongside this, is the degeneration of leftism into kind of moralistic policing of identities. Instead of embracing the possibilities of escape from the self, etc.
Steve Goodman: I think part of the problem is trying to understand… Or is overexaggerating the importance of hedonism in the most interesting moments in rave. Because I think what goes alongside what Mark talked about as depressive hedonism… Maybe it’s flip is what I see a lot, which is what I’d call enforced hedonism. You must have a good time. And what was exciting about these various moments in the ’90s was that it actually wasn’t always pleasurable. There was some element of accepting… Of submission… Of accepting domination by the sound system, by the MC, by the DJ, etc. Of making yourself… Almost allowing yourself to be victimised by the intensity. And you can’t understand that purely in terms of pleasure and hedonism. Like Lee was saying, often there was tension in the clubs. And the tension was often very important… A sense of what made it exciting and libidinally compelling. But it wasn’t necessarily pleasure. There was a kind of aestheticization of paranoia.
Lee Gamble: It was kind of our tension, if you like. It was the people in there’s tension, rather than, you know, the pressure you might get from, you know, at my point, your parents or whatever. That was a vibe. I liked that vibe. I didn’t mind that. It wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, when it started to leave, that kind of music, that’s when I left too. I didn’t want… You don’t want a difficult time. But there’s some vibe in there that needed to be there. It needed to be there in the community, in that area of the community, obviously, because it manifested itself in those spaces, heavily. It was in the air. And that was fine. It felt acceptable. It was okay.
I thought, anyway… Now if I went, I’d probably just shit myself. [Laughter] But then it was alright. [Laughs] I was just a kid, I didn’t care, you know? [Laughs]
Steve Goodman: These collective instances weren’t about trying to enforce hedonism on people, on a situation that had tension. It wasn’t about resolving the tension and, you know, be happy. It wasn’t about that. It was about going through the dark side, going through the paranoia, going through the tension, and channelling it rhythmically and vibrationally and so on. And so I think it’s important just to not rely too much on the idea of hedonism when looking back at what was functional in rave and what was dysfunctional and so on.
Lisa Blanning: I feel as though there’s just so much to talk about, and we’ve really just scratched the surface, but we’ve got a finite period of time, and we would like to take some questions from the audience now, if anyone has anything they’d like to ask the panel.
Audience Member #1: Yeah. Hi. I would like to ask Mark Fisher especially. I had this feeling that there is actually this idea of a transformational experience in the club or other circumstances that seems to be really important. To me, it’s something that almost feels like a constant to society, to humans. Through all times, there were different kind of ritualistic ways of making these transformational collective experiences. But then, on the other hand, you talk about this progression of form, and the horror that it doesn’t progress, and that we don’t forget what has happened before, and so on. I wonder how you see that relation? How does that really fit together? The one is kind of constant or circular or kind of permanent, and the other one needs progression. Why do we need the progression to find a new transformational experience?
Mark Fisher: That’s a really good question, I think. I think it comes to the heart of lots of issues that Alex raised, and about the whole question of accelerationism, etc. I think this is what is touched on in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and of Nick Land especially. Is there a kind of direction to history? Albeit not the old style, sort of grand opera of nineteenth-century kind of progressivism. But there is a… Capitalism as the great virtual attractor of history. Which either… For Deleuze and Guattari, you can see all social formations in relation to capitalism, even before capitalism arrives, as it were.
What are the coding systems of, or the rituals of, so-called primitive societies about? They’re about the negative appearance of capitalism, or rather capitalism appears negatively in them. They’re a kind of pre-emptive exorcism of capitalism. But once capitalism has appeared, though, there is this kind of directionality to things, I think. A kind of historical death drive, as it were, that can’t be put back in the box. We can’t go back to the cyclicity of so-called primitive societies anymore. Capitalism unleashes and depends upon a kind of desire for the new. But as Alex says, that literally gets cashed out in terms of the most banal way, i.e., the new accumulation of profit. But the other side of that desire is this kind of intolerance for the stable, for the fixed, etc. And for me, there’s nothing bad about that desire in itself. It’s the articulation of that desire to capitalism which is the issue.
And the other problem, which is why, not only are these kind of agrarian, back-to-basics, organo-bourgeois kind of… You know, let’s all hold hands and weave insulin out of locally sourced cotton or whatever. [Laugher] Not only are these things just inherently kind of dubious and reactionary, there’s a libidinal problem with them. We’ll all say we want – well, I won’t – but most of us will say we want organic, locally sourced stuff, but we’ll always buy mass-produced plastic. And why, as it were? There’s nothing wrong with that desire for the mass-produced plasticity. It won’t go away – that’s the other point. It won’t go away.
There’s a reactionary apocalypticism that hides behind many forms of leftism now. The desire, really, for the whole technological infrastructure of this world to kind of disappear, so we can go back to [a] neo-primitivist kind of world. And I think not only is that, like I say, political dubious, it’s not possible. We don’t want it. No one really wants it. So the question is, then, a disarticulating [of] that desire for newness, for novelty, that directional desire, from capitalism. Which is arbitrarily – only arbitrarily – conjoined, I think.
Lisa Blanning: Anybody else have a question?…
Steve Goodman: Yeah, I mean, it’s like you said yesterday at some point, Mark, that you have to make a distinction between the rhetoric of innovation and innovation itself. And to a large extent, I think, capitalism has appropriated the rhetoric of innovation. What it would be for a complete subsumption of innovation to capitalism, I just don’t think makes any sense. So I think you have to keep apart the rhetoric of innovation from innovation itself.
Lisa Blanning: Did anyone else have a question that they’d like to ask?
Audience Member #2: Yeah, I just wanted to sort of question a bit what seems like a largely psychological history of rave, and sort of consider that the death of rave is related to the death of the circumstances, the kind of constituent material circumstances for rave to happen in the UK at that time. So, the period of the ’90s has been kind of characterised as like a period of dole autonomy, which means that there was sufficient unemployed benefits to be able to live fairly well and potentially to produce records with. There was myriad available kind of empty industrial spaces. Squatting was still possible, i.e., free accommodation was possible, but also the occupation of large spaces for raves was possible. And I wondered if you could kind of maybe discuss… You could also kind of understand rave culture generally as a sort of form of refusal of work, even. This kind of idea of kind of destroying your personality as also a kind of element of destroying your category as… yourself as a category of wage labour. So I wondered if that could kind of inject some class and kind of material circumstances into this potted history?
Lisa Blanning: I know Mark has something to say about this. [Laughter]
Mark Fisher: Yeah, I 100% agree. I don’t think that was clear to us at the time, to the extent that it is clear to me now. And I think that is part of my critique of Landianism. Actually, the conditions for Landianism were a university department, actually. And…
Alex Williams: And the welfare state as well, in a bizarre sense.
Mark Fisher: Yeah. Yeah, and also where postgraduate students like us could be freed from work for a number of years in order to immerse ourselves in this kind of thought. Running in parallel, exactly as you say. Spaces free from work. I think this is totally right, what you’re saying, and also is one of the key political points about the attack on work. It’s an absolutely crucial thing now, at a time when the shadow of work is over us at all times, even and especially when we’re unemployed or under-employed. This is, I think… A crucial phase is to recover this attack on work. That it was good that people weren’t work a lot of the time, and that’s why the culture was vibrant. There was a space for people not to be working.
Alex Williams: But isn’t it also that there’s been a kind of contamination of play with work? This is kind of what you get with sort of post-Fordism social media… We’re basically all working for these organisations for nothing, for use of their services, and with various sorts of deleterious effects. So the idea of work has sort of permeated everything in a weird sense. Both kind of from the point of view of having this non-working space, where you can be creative because you don’t have anything else to do, but also having the mental space of boredom, which gives you the drive to want to do this. And the sort of media environment which we exist in. There’s always a constant low-level stream of entertainment and engagement, which is also work, by the way! Which doesn’t give you this mental space or this kind of economic or physical space.
Lee Gamble: Was the unemployment figures higher in England in the early ’90s than they are now? Or any time after that? I don’t know what the…
Alex Williams: Yeah, I think so.
Mark Fisher: But I think it’s more about that you could be unemployed for a long time with minimal kind of pressure, without being hassled onto restart courses…
Lee Gamble: Sure, sure. Sure, sure, sure. I was in my first job then…
Mark Fisher: Right, okay. [Laughs]
Lee Gamble: …so I was like working out how to grind!
Mark Fisher: No, it is a really key point! Because I spent most of the ’90s either unemployed or on postgraduate courses, and the actual difference between those two is pretty minimal a lot of the time. [Laughter] But that was good! That was a good use of time.
But part of the reason I got psychiatrically depressed was, “Waahhhh, I’ve wasted my life! I’ve wasted my life! And I can’t work! I’m not fit for anything!” And the painful readjustment to a world where you had to be useful to capitalism was extremely traumatic, I think. That’s a lot of what’s behind my book Capitalist Realism, I think, is that sense of… There was a space that I could hold for ten years where I didn’t have to be useful to capitalism in any direct way, or didn’t have to cash out what I was doing in terms of some spurious business rationale. But the terror of suddenly having to do that caused a panic! And I think that was part of this shift away from a sort of wide acceptance of people weren’t working and it was good(!), into a world where we have to overwork… That miserable north European Protestantism of work is good no matter what you’re doing.
Alex Williams: But that’s the whole thing. It’s work for no point. It’s work that has become a kind of good in itself, even when you’re not generating any value and it’s not enjoyable.
Lee Gamble: Because people in them days. I remember there was a kind of separation of what happened. You had small shops, the MC was there. That was his job, in a sense. Then you had a dubplate place, a mastering place. A DJ or a producer. Everything was kind of seemingly sort of fairly organised in relation to some kind of work. People were making some money. I’m sure a black market, but they was still working, in a sense. Enjoying it, as you say. It wasn’t like the grind. But there was a work ethic in there somewhere. They weren’t dossing around.
Mark Fisher: No, no, no. But I think that’s the opposite… Work, in a way, you could say, is anything you don’t want to do.
Lee Gamble: Sure.
Mark Fisher: And there was a possibility of… The fact that these scenes… One of the interesting things, and this is part of the markets-versus-capital dynamic that was interesting about this was… This scene was not supported by big major labels. It was self-supporting via it’s own… via some kind of market dynamics which weren’t those of corporate capitalism at all. And that sense of a highly experimental scene that could sustain itself outside dynamics of capital… That was part of why this was an important moment, I think.
Lee Gamble: I know you have a lot of… In dance music cultures now, sponsorship is heavy… It needs it, somehow. But I don’t remember… It didn’t seem like… You didn’t see Red Bull everywhere when you were raving in 1993. I didn’t notice it. I’m sure it was somewhere, but I didn’t notice it. It seemed to be like, “he does the sound system, he does this, he does this…”
Alex Williams: But I think also you used to be able to make money by selling records. If you had a hit underground rave record, you could make some fast cash. And I think the experience nowadays is that it has become harder and harder to kind of do that. So, the economics of it changed. So, sort of perversely, whilst work permeates everything, within in the culture industries work doesn’t pay anymore.
Mark Fisher: Yeah, and I think this is where this fits in with what… The importance of a lot of the Terre Thaemlitz talk the other day about the poverty of audio producers now, etc. I think that’s a key thing, where the decommodification of music, or the partial decommodification of music, has not benefitted producers.
Alex Williams: Well, isn’t it the case that it’s still a commodity, you just can’t sell it for anything?
Mark Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Like you said before…
Steve Goodman: Because artists are mostly making their [money] from performing and touring, then the actual music itself becomes a mode of marketing.
Lisa Blanning: Let’s go back to your question about… [inaudible]
Mark Fisher: Yeah, okay. [Laughs]
Lisa Blanning: [inaudible]
Audience Member #3: I just have a question… I don’t know. Somebody mentioned that the discussion is from a UK-centric platform, and just as I understand it, I think somebody said that capitalism is like an immanent system, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, but always touches its border on a higher order. So this border that its touches has been pretty clear, and [there are] some ways out of it for creativity, innovation… And I was just wondering, I don’t know, what your opinion is on a more global scale? So to say, I don’t mean, like, as a post-world music kind of thing. This blogger from Brazil can send music to this blogger in Indonesia and he DJs it. But I don’t know if you have any opinion, for example, on the idea of creativity and empire, which has itself some critical implications, as it might be, again, representational?
Alex Williams: I think there’s a sort of popular imagining about musical creativity that, in the world that we’re in, where producers and listeners from anywhere in the world now, through relatively cheap production technology and also communications technology, principally the internet, can find and listen to anything from anywhere. And this is totally possible through blogs, to listen to globalised dance music coming from literally South America, South Africa, the Far East, everywhere. And this has had interesting effects both in the underground and in the pop charts as well, with like the rise of Korean pop music and stuff like that.
But the downside of it, I think, is that it underestimates the role that territory has. So, things which are quite tightly knit, closed off from the outside, communities of listeners, dancers and producers, are able to… A bit like an island in the middle of the ocean… When explorers go there, what do you find? You find strange and bizarre animals that you’ve never seen before, because they’ve been closed off from the rest of the world. And I think that some of the most interesting underground dance music to come out recently has been footwork or juke, and what was interesting about it was the fact that it was relatively closed down, so it had time to become genuinely strange, certainly to most European ears. It still had that feeling of future-shock, which is really a feeling of encountering something that is alien. But in order for something to be alien, I think it has to have this… develop in a certain territorialised fashion. So what you get now is, because everyone has access to everything immediately… Is that possible anymore? And so, will everything just become this generic soup, where it’s all kind of…
Mark Fisher: Yeah, and I think, just following up from what Steve was saying there about… This sort of globalised producer/performer… I once interviewed Mike Banks from Underground Resistance, and he said he deliberately stays in Detroit the whole time. He just lets the others go off and DJ, so he can, in a way, be this fulcrum, where… Because I think this other concept from Deleuze and Guattari of consistency is key. And the difference between consistency and bricolage, as it were.
Bricolage retains the integrity of the original elements, whereas I think with consistency you force the elements together into… A certain kind of compression has occurred, such that they change form and a new consistency emerges.
The history of music has been this kind of city-based, relatively enclosed scene, that has reliably generated these new forms. So I think, whilst I accept, of course, that there’s something good about this capacity to exchange, there’s also severe problems with it, such as along the lines that Alex has said.
Steve Goodman: I think it’s that, on a couple of levels, there’s a question of concentration and distraction. Apart from all of the positive dimensions of globally networked music culture, what the internet also does is provide a massive means of distraction. And what is important both mentally, like being mentally distracted, or being able to concentrate something, in terms of urbanism, people being scattered and deterritorialized, or being concentrated in an urban centre, is that when you get this concentration, you enter the tunnel, you shut off the outside, and you allow the process that Mark’s talking about to happen, which is consistency to occur that hasn’t been rushed from the outside, that finds its own speeds, and allows a collective intelligence to emerge, or what Eno called scenius. And you can’t rush scenius. I mean, I say you can’t rush scenius. Scenius is impersonal and collective, so nobody controls it. So, agency is distributed around a circuit, and a distracted collective often can’t find that consistency.
Lisa Blanning: And that idea of scenius is part of what’s made the history of UK dance music so great. But I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, so we’re gonna have to end here. I’d like to thank the panel: Lee Gamble, Steve Goodman, Mark Fisher, Alex Williams. Thank you very much for coming.
