10 Records of 2015: easyFun's Deep Trouble EP

Given the amount I’ve been listening to the PC Music label this year, I thought I might have to include their Volume 1 compilation in this list, even though I’ve only listened to it through once. There are plenty of incredible tracks on there; however, their inclusion together on a single release invites a particularly annoying response that is common in the label’s critical reception, whereby every release is lumped together in terms of a single ‘project’, which we are invited either to approve of or disapprove of. Happily, the label released another record this year — easyFun’s Deep Trouble EP — which exemplifies a lot of what I love most about this music, which often gets left out of the debate.

But first: another short kvetch about music criticism

I think about half of what is written on PC Music is bullshit, and this bullshit is largely responsible for the pretty superficial way in which the music has been received. The entire label is reduced to a provocation, or a single conceptual statement standing in for an identifiable set of post-internet phenomena (this is compounded by the label’s iconography, including the image of black-lit cables on the compilation cover), and as a result, the huge diversity exhibited among the associated artists (or ‘avatars’) risks going unremarked.

This appearance of aesthetic unity has clearly been a goal of the label, given the way it presents itself. My favourite PC Music-related releases have actually been A. G. Cook’s various mixes (in particular, the ‘Radio Tank Mix’ for Tank Magazine), which reproduce the bewildering experience of his DJ sets. Like all mixes, these releases not only showcase influences and exhibit taste; they function as long-form theatricalisations of some of the label’s more oblique, object-like singles. This approach goes further than curation; as on a dance floor, the tracks are melted down and remade within a new context. This allows the artist to foreground certain elements of the tracks — unravelling the mess of influences, from European sentimentalism and kitsch, to East Asian alter-humanism and Black avant-gardism — that disappear behind the more overt cultural references and satire. Placed within a certain sequence of samples, remixes, covers and other detritus, these tight little bundles of contradictory elements begin to resemble one thing or another. Their irony or ambivalence is replaced by a kind of commitment. Most importantly, the mix creates a contextual frame for the vocal experimentation that can otherwise seem like a gimmick. For me, as with The Scene Between (see previous post), the success of these mixes relies on our refusal to hear the result as the smart-alecky posturing of a single hipster producer (or his private empire of signs) and instead allow the music to comment on, deconstruct and critique itself. Presumably this was easier before the day of superstar DJs, auteur producers and Boiler Room sets, but I’m sure it is still possible.

10 Records of 2015: The Go! Team's The Scene Between

For all my attempts to expand my musical horizons over the last few years, my spirit genre remains indiepop. Perhaps it will always be thus; I feel a weird affinity for a certain set of sounds — or perhaps its more a relationship between sounds — that can still seduce me wherever they arise. The Go! Team had already explored this territory as part of the more multi-faceted retro fantasia of their previous albums (Rolling Blackouts’ ‘Buy Nothing Day’ and ‘Secretary Song’ are obvious precedents) but on The Scene Between, they’ve gone full twee. For me, the result is nine achingly poignant time capsules from my fantasy adolescence (a parallel universe that can be loosely dated around 10 years before my actual adolescence; it opened up around the time I first saw Donnie Darko in 2002, and collapsed in on itself around the time I saw the Pixies play Reading in 2005).

The Scene Between is a panorama of perfect structures. While the vocalist, instrumental forces and stylistic touchstones vary from track to track, the ubiquitous wall-of-sound production makes each self-contained construction seem to stretch away towards a single horizon. I’ve previously described the Go! Team’s distinct production style as a kind of mediating device — the equivalent of radio crackle or the frame of a television screen — which presents all of their channel-hopping transmissions as emanating from the same fantasy source. However, the application of this device on The Scene Between feels less knowing; rather than just acting as the glitter glue in a retro scrapbook, its primary role is in removing some of the personality from the individual songs, and helping them to appear outside of history and authorship.

10 Records of 2015: Beach House's Depression Cherry

Beach House remain the most inscrutable of bands: their music uncannily perfect but very difficult to write about. Nevertheless, listening to Depression Cherry as I rewatched Twin Peaks among the lonesome smokestacks and Grimm woodland kitsch of post-industrial Saxony (and after seeing Xiu Xiu perform their version of the soundtrack in Leipzig), I was affirmed in my belief that Beach House are one of the most properly ‘Lynchian’ of bands. It isn’t just that the talismanic title hook of the suggestively titled ‘Beyond Love’ is the distillation of every Julee Cruise performance in the TV show, nor that this moment always takes me back to the band’s quotation (back on Teen Dream) of the ‘Giant’ who appears in the middle of Cruise’s most pivotal cameo in the second season (probably the climactic moment of the whole series): ‘It is happening again. It is happening again.’

In pursuing the ‘Lynchian’ aspects of Beach House, I couldn’t help but return to the old cliché of ‘dream pop’, which I actually think is as good a route as any into Depression Cherry. We might ask what the term ‘dream pop’ actually means? Is it something to do with the indistinctness — the ‘soft focus’ — of the various elements (an imperfect visual analogy), or rather with the obtuseness of the lyrics? Does it concern a lullaby-like gentleness, mixed with some sort of surrealist dimension? As with the 4AD-style ’80s aesthetic that Beach House renovate, there is a particular dream logic at work here that relates to the way the voice inhabits and interacts with the rest of the track.

10 Records of 2015: Advance Base's Nephew in the Wild

This album was the soundtrack to one of the most beautiful autumns of my life, beneath the resplendent foliage of Plauen’s wide, quiet streets and sprawling Stadtwald. Like so much of Owen Ashworth’s music, it’s small-town music, but it’s the first time that I’ve ever really lived somewhere that fits this bill. Similarly to Sufjan (see previous post), Nephew in the Wild finds redemption in details, although this functions in a very different way.

In addition, as in the case of the Sufjan album, the Pitchfork review of this record really pissed me off. One line in particular: the reviewer lists the ‘hallmarks of [Ashworth’s] sound’ as ‘twinkling melodies’ and ‘sustained minor chords’, even though there are hardly any minor chords on this or any Ashworth record. It may seem like I'm being awfully pedantic here, but this is important because, for me, one of the actual hallmarks of his sound is precisely this absence of minor chords. While the use of technical jargon is by no means necessary for music criticism, it seems a little perverse for a reviewer to choose to deploy a technical term like this in such an utterly erroneous way, and I think it suggests a rather cursory engagement on their part. (Perhaps I’m just aggrieved at the Pitchfork review for employing what is now my most hated review cliché: ‘[Insert album name] feels like a logical progression from their past work’. Euuurrrgh, ban this filth!)

What Ashworth does on Nephew in the Wild, as on previous records, is deliver concise epistolary stories within a kind of ‘deadpan’ sonic medium of organs, electric pianos and drum machines. I’ve described his previous project —Casiotone for the Painfully Alone — in terms of voicemail messages, on which the cycling of major key harmonies (or ‘pre-recorded’ progressions) added to a sense of detachment, or the performative ‘withholding’ of a composed message, suggesting currents of untraceable feeling beneath. While his Advance Base songs switch similarly between first-, second- and third-person perspectives, there is a greater sense of authority in the lyrics, which tends to shift the focus from the singing voice itself onto the people it describes or addresses (with the understandable exception of Jody Weinmann’s guest vocal on ‘My Love For You Is Like A Puppy Underfoot’).

10 Records of 2015: Sufjan Stevens's Carrie & Lowell

This was a year in which a spate of overly biographical reviews nearly ruined certain records for me. As a listener, I have no interest in the actual biographies of artists. I have no interest in listening to songs about anyone’s actual parents, just like I have no interest in listening to songs about Matthew Barney or Andy Samberg. I find musicians’ biographies pretty boring anyway. A lot of them have fairly similar backgrounds and routines, and the more we obsess over their biographies in our reviews and features, the more we reduce the scope of each record to meditations on their careers, their ‘artistry’, the recording process itself: a horizon of interpretation that extends little further than the studio’s soundproofed walls.

More to the point though, I would argue that this kind of biographical listening is a doomed pursuit anyway. For example, none of the general listenership actually know Sufjan Stevens’s family, the purported subjects of Carrie & Lowell, just as none of us know Sufjan. Thankfully, we do not need to know them (or even try/pretend to know them) to understand, enjoy or value the music.

This is not to say that such records don’t play with the fictionalised biographies of fictional personas. No doubt there are parents on the record. No doubt there is a son who has lost his mother. We can listen for this son and this mother in consecutive songs and imagine their biographies in the silences between. However, this is not the real Sufjan or the real Carrie; these characters are already composites of the clues on the record (and perhaps in photos, interviews, press releases) and all the mothers and sons (perhaps our own, perhaps ourselves) that we know. Maybe, for real Sufjan, this record was an exercise in autobiography. There is still no way that this can be communicated to the listener in any meaningful way: songs are always fictions.

10 Records of 2015: Listening Through 2015

I haven’t attempted an end-of-year list like this since 2012. This may be because that was the last year in which there were at least 10 new records that had a significant effect on me. It probably helps that I listened to more albums this year, so the odds of finding ones I liked were higher. I think there have also been a few other factors determining my susceptibility to new music though, which are detachable from the sounds themselves. For example, I’m sure that my recent move to a small town in southeast Germany, living with my boyfriend for the first time, and all the other changes in circumstance that have accompanied this, have made me more open to new music (a new scene deserving of a new soundtrack), as well as leaving me with more money to buy it and more time to listen to it.

However, at the same time, my listening this year has been overwhelmingly determined by my research interests. As should be abundantly clear from the last few posts on this blog, I’ve spent much of the year working through ideas about the pop song and the place of the voice within it. Naturally, much of the new music that has really engaged me this year has provoked further questions or ideas in relation to these themes.

As a result of this, I’m not going to attempt a ranked Top 10 this year; instead, I will trace a few ideas through these albums, talking about each as it fits in with my train of thought. The resulting list — as much about me as a listener as ‘the music itself’ — is meant to be an articulation of my musical year, giving up on any pretence of general expertise or objective judgement. As an unconventional strategy, this is meant to reflect another key theme of my musical year, which is an increasing exasperation with online music journalism/criticism (especially album reviews (and especially Pitchfork)), and indeed pop music discourse in general. Inevitably, some of my particular 2015 bugbears will make cameo appearances as I address particular albums, but rather than introducing undue negativity to this list, my intention is really just to express how certain tiresome critical obsessions can stop us from talking about how exceptional the music really is.

So, without further ado…

...my 10 favourite records of 2015, unranked:::

1. Sufjan Stevens — Carrie & Lowell
2. Advance Base — Nephew in the Wild
3. Beach House — Depression Cherry
4. The Go! Team — The Scene Between
5. easyFun — Deep Trouble EP
6. Carly Rae Jepsen — E·MO·TION
7. Grimes — Art Angels
8. Micachu & The Shapes — Good Sad Happy Bad
9. Joanna Newsom — Divers
10. Oneohtrix Point Never — Garden of Delete

[click on each title to read my post…]

Chapter 2.5: Sonic Bodies, Vocal-Objects and the Aural Gaze

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

Over the last three chapters, I’ve discussed Donna Summer’s 1977 hit ‘I Feel Love’ in relation to a particular politico-aesthetic programme that found its most perfect manifestation in the rave culture of the late ’80s/early ’90s. As a disco song that anticipates house and techno, both in sound and in spirit, ‘I Feel Love’ and its vocal protagonist haunt the fault lines between shifting genres, identities, listening cultures and ideologies. Yet even the newest and most violent aesthetic eruptions cool and harden into something familiar. Deterritorialisations remain relative (see Chapter 2.3): each has its complementary reterritorialisation (see Chapter 2.4). The utopian spark of dance culture reterritorialises on specific spaces and institutions (clubs, labels, music festivals, style tribes), and on rave nostalgia, with its lost futures and historical fictions. Sounds reterritorialise on genre, style, voice, language, song, vocal-subject, meaning…

So what then are we left with? Desire passes from ‘intransitive intensity’ to something more straightforwardly sexual. Donna Summer materialises within the songworld as a vocal-subject, along with her own object of desire: ‘Oo I’ll get you’. And the listener/dancer is present as well, in a relationship with her and her desire. One of the obvious dangers that the listener faces when polyvalent desire gives way to unidirectional pleasure is one of an exploitative objectification. Is the vocal-subject then always first and foremost an object of the listener’s pleasure? And would this not turn Drew Hemment’s ‘house without a home’ — the ‘nomadic block of space-time’ that constitutes the heterotopian dancefloor (Hemment 1997: 5) — into a kind of mobile cage for the vocal-subject: the shrieking diva locked inside her diva house attic?