Monday, May 17, 2010

re the nu-IDM / nuum-IDM

so much of it sounds like music from the mid-90s. like subeena -- sounds like something that would have been lucky to get a lukewarm review when I was doing a round up of 12 inches in Melody Maker. Like it could have been on some San Francisco electronic listening music label

what's with the greena, subeena, mosca, ikonica ting of an 'a' on the end.... as if trying to remind you of 'electronica'

Mosca 'nike' is a microcosm of the whole genre-not-genre/scene-not-scene flux-of-now.... i think the beat is carrying a kind of ideological message which is that infinite flexibility/receptivity = only way to survive late late capitalism ....

so it's the opposite of militant.... whereas funky (particularly those boombastic devine tracks) still has a bit of soldier in its beats

the way it ('Nike') shifts the groove in this frictionless, non-jarring way did seem to be almost like a sonic manifesto for what this not-scene/not-genre is all about, which is 'we can assimilate everything' and I think that is the ideology of the global information-processing, fully networked class of which most people in the postdubstep world are actually members…

been kicking this idea around for a while and then found some support for it in the ideas of Bloch who sees utopian ideas of the future as being pushed by the coming bearers of society -- i.e. it's the rising class, not the ruling class (which always justifies itself by reference to the past -- antiquity, tradition, harking back to a golden age now fallen)

in other words 'utopia' is always an expression of collective narcissism, the self-mirroring of a class

Jameson also has some useful comments on postmodernism, "its progressive endorsement of anti-essentialist multiplicity and perspectivism also replicates the very rhetoric of the late-capitalist marketplace as such"

Mutation, flexibility, transversal, polymorphous perversity, and the negatives (rigidity, rigour, solid, sedimented, etc etc) : all these buzzwords of the wonky-thinkers seem very 90s and very much of the Wired/Mondo 2000/illbient era, i.e. pre the Crash, pre 9/11 -- "the irrational exuberance" of the info tech boom

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