teengirl fantasy, miracles club, mi ami, 100% silk and the rise of HIPSTER HOUSE: S/D

im sure weve argued about this before enough already but i dont think theres a point trying to divorce this stuff from how you 'xp' it irl or whether or not you xp it irl the h1pster tag is no better or worse than or false than calling it 'space-out' music. like clarke's interpol dig is p telling & if that the way hes framing this stuff than who cares its not really illegitimate some ppl read tumblr some ppl read levi-strauss some ppl make diamond catalog remixes it doesnt have to 'mean something' or it can mean 'everything' in how you understand/interpret the music.

dmr- hm, yeah that's the thing about grouping all of this together... some of it could almost be aptly described as 'hipsters getting into house' (bringing this post-indie lofi aesthetic to it), but a lot stuff getting grouped in here, especially the 'dysfunctional' stuff, is more specifically an outgrowth of the post-noise/drone/psych underground and could probably be better understood in the light of that approach to (and experience of) music making

okay i like the virgo four stuff a lot more than this, but a lot of very early house has this sense of wonder, the magic of machine music combined with the mundanity of consumer electronics. worlds inside boxes inside your house. i guess i would see 100% silk as arriving out of a partic narrative similar to the cliche about noise bands turning into chillwave bands. there's this sense in which the more primordially ecstatic vein of post anco musics has turned to early house as an analogy, an interrogation of the narratives of bedroom primitivism and futurism and bodies in the dark and machines and magick. like jamie principal writing Your Love alone in his room but also jackin until your skin is burning. i can see why these particular things would feel worth reviving, worth coming back to, at this moment within another genealogy.

I guess I'm just emphasizing that electronic-music-as-psychedelia was always one of the currents in the American rave scene, and some of these acts are kind of coming to it more from that angle

I'm suspicious of "you're listening to it wrong" arguments generally, even though I disagree with Clarke's take here.

Probably the most pernicious unspoken assumption in this thread is that everything's gotta be either avant noise space out or raw authentic house music.

exactly, i think its really this moment of elision

like this moment where one thing looks like another

largely agree with chris. the start of this thread was wildly off-base, even if you care about the negative stereotypes about "hipsters" this music is not even typical of that, it doesn't fit the prefabricated criticisms.

i do feel some of it potentially is club music, but maria minerva has a very strong artist album feeling that is rare enough in house/techno.

i'm not sure that you can make the interpol comparison any more readily with these us artists than you could with people reviving ron trent or basic channel.

plus just because technology allows music to go one way or move doesn't mean every good idea has been done at whatever point that happens.

Probably the most pernicious unspoken assumption in this thread is that everything's gotta be either avant noise space out or raw authentic house music.

or that house music has to be club music!

Listen to, say, a Stereolab song and a Neu! song side by side and tell me one doesn't sound more detached and clinical...

which songs?

i think most neu! songs sound more detached and clinical than "john cage bubblegum", "mountain", "wow and flutter", etc

sounds like you're using "detached and clinical" to mean something negative though

you like mika vainio? he's detached and clinical.

I'm not against critiquing this stuff by dance music standards, just questioning framing it all as 'hipster' music - bringing in a lot of assumptions that don't all necessarily aply, and putting all of this stuff together in the same category

x-posts (to be addressed)

okay i like the virgo four stuff a lot more than this, but a lot of very early house has this sense of wonder, the magic of machine music combined with the mundanity of consumer electronics. worlds inside boxes inside your house. i guess i would see 100% silk as arriving out of a partic narrative similar to the cliche about noise bands turning into chillwave bands. there's this sense in which the more primordially ecstatic vein of post anco musics has turned to early house as an analogy, an interrogation of the narratives of bedroom primitivism and futurism and bodies in the dark and machines and magick. like jamie principal writing Your Love alone in his room but also jackin until your skin is burning. i can see why these particular things would feel worth reviving, worth coming back to, at this moment within another genealogy.

Love this, and agree totally, which is why it's frustrating for me that this stuff tends to feel so kind of tentative and restrained. I want that ecstatic release. I want it to be more sinister, more unhinged, more visceral feeling. I'd be really thankful for suggestions of tracks more in that vein.

b-b-b-but the feelings are in your ears not the records

yeah^^ the ecstatic release/magick is the real connection here xp

im just going to post this youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqr00BtUSw

b-b-b-but the feelings are in your ears not the records

True, and it just appears we have pretty different ears when it comes to this stuff (given your Stereolab feeling less clinical than most Neu! comments, too).

I'm not against critiquing this stuff by dance music standards, just questioning framing it all as 'hipster' music - bringing in a lot of assumptions that don't all necessarily aply, and putting all of this stuff together in the same category

Yeah, I'm starting to feel bad about having painted it all as "this stuff"--it's obviously grouped together in some folks' minds not entirely without justification, but it doesn't really get us very far to paint in such broad strokes.

I'm not against critiquing this stuff by dance music standards, just questioning framing it all as 'hipster' music - bringing in a lot of assumptions that don't all necessarily aply, and putting all of this stuff together in the same category

― Chris S, Monday, 13 February 2012 11:09 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd like to think we can all agree on this? Judging music by what you think of the people making or listening to it isn't always the worst of all possible moves but I'd not want to bet against it much.

you like mika vainio? he's detached and clinical.

Sure, he's AIGHT. But being detached and clinical in a genre like his is different from being detached and clinical in a genre that, at its best (in my opinion), expresses some degree of joy and/or release and/or ecstatic abandon and/or rawness.

i don't really think there's much of a problem with the HH label as its kind of tongue in cheek and as meaningless as like witch house or chillwave or w/e. to me it just signifies the "outsider" aspect of it. btw, are pretty much all of these acts american?

no kompakt is german

hipsters surely don't listen to Kompakt in 2012

Lamp, that Diamond Palate has some good stuff going on... I dig the sludgy vibe and the dread of it. I really dislike the little lead line, though; it seems too obvious of a signifier. "Hey, in case you were wondering whether or not you were allowed to dance to something so murky, this will assure you that it's alright!"

re the HH label, yeah Clarke B, the conversation on this stuff (from the outside) has to be started somewhere, guess the details/distinctions-of-genres/scenes can be worked out as the converstaion develops (as is the case)

one thing I will say for the post-noise/drone/psych underground, is that the moment one tries to say 'they're focusing on house/beachpop/whatever now' the thing has evolved on to mutate goth/techno/whatever-else. I mean, the witchhouse-ier end of it are already on to cyberdelia/cyberpunk, jungle, and anime right now

Looking forward to hipster handbag house crumpler house.

Tote bag house?

I just read the Ital interview on Little White Earbuds linked upthread... It flows along nicely, Ital giving fairly candid and thoughtful yet unrehearsed sounding answers, until he's asked about the mix he put together for LWE:

"The end of WWII brought about a revolution in the international music/art scene from which we are still in many ways reeling today. As serialism took (strangle)hold across Europe and in the academy (a panicked attempt to restore order after a period of chaos and horror?), outliers in America established themselves as the radical dissidents and creative mavericks. In the compositional milieu, bizarros like John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Earl Brown, Terry Riley, Lamonte Young, David Behram, Philip Glass, Yoko Ono, Morton Subotnik and Meredith Monk, as well as the artists featured on this mix, were all fucking shit up in ways their stogy, order-obsessed counterparts dared not imagine (Berio, I’m looking at you). Blurring the lines between heady 60′s psychedelia and conservatory-level precision, this extended family happily gave us the foundations for noise, new age, techno, krautrock, drone and (ahem) performance art, as well as a bunch of fuckin’ crazy tracks that no one really knows what to do with to this very day."

Folks, now THAT is what I call "clinical and detached"...

yeah, just because people know their shit doesn't mean they're clinical and detached. you're almost not allowed to be too clinical and detached in California, hence all the 'fuckin' crazy's and 'fucking shit ups' in that quote. people in the post-noise scene are often a funny mix of brainy and casual/stoner (which goes back to that 'Artists with a Syllabus' thread... there is a syllabus for that scene, but it's, like, myth studies + underground comix + the Internet + books on sigil magick + information theory + post-everything musical exploration)

let me know when u guys start talking about seapunk

i dont think ilm is the kind place where up-to-the-second knowledge of micro­trends in dance-­music culture is generally assumed

I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX is tho

haha i meant to contribute an anecdote to your excellent thread but it had been locked by the time i saw it

i unlocked it

let me know when u guys start talking about seapunk

― max, Monday, February 13, 2012 4:56 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah my earlier mention of witchhouse/meme-pop kids getting into cyberdelia and jungle was partly in reference to seapunk (and icepunk, ravewave, etc)

the '-punk' in some of these btw more recalling cyberpunk rather than punk rock... as is really apparent when u see the aesthetic (the 'sea' imagery too is more in reference to online flow/the sea of information - all this stuff about cybershamanism, memes, etc)

I'm starting to almost think that Visual Culture Studies would be a better way to critique and understand the dynamics of the post-psych/drone underground than through literature or musical references... the scene really spreads and evolves by way of visual atmospherics and symbols (through an almost 'visual' approach to atmospheric music, occult-themed underground comix, psychedelic tumblrs, even a certain atmospheric approach to writing in the zines... always riddled with the same triangles, sigils, interest in new terrains and settings, pop-culture-as-magic, media, etc). like the whole thing can be mapped as the continuing evolution of this multimedia, self-mutating 'triangle'-meme (almost like an egregore in occult terms) and its seemingly endless self-regenerations, that u can trace back into freefolk, up through whatever it is becoming now (kind of splays off into a lot of directions now). could be studied through memetics as well, I've been conceiving this idea of a lot of this stuff as a self-consciously 'memetic' thing (especially witchhouse/chillwave/etc)

haha i would have described seapunk as triangle bands do happy hardcore but thats a p good post

i dont know if its about specific visual culture studies stuff as much as a relationship with technology and self-presentation that creates a throughline btw all these different microgenres. also i think a sort of sense of the density and impossibility of history that sees all this stuff as neither old or new but sort of outside of time an accumulation of signs w/o significance

lol my ma is in visual cultures, i take a class w someone who claims to
have invented it

haha i wanted to get your take on that post!!!

i mean i feel like it kind of reiterates a bunch of stuff we talked about on the chillwave thread already but the longevity of like inverted crosses and triangles and vhs is kinda interesting to me too

hey do you know what else endless self regenerates?

the punchlines to bad jokes?

i was gonna say machine elves

why are you so full of hate, man

cuz no one on ilm cares about lee noble like i do...

also i was hoping youd bring so serious science teacher info about echinoderms

also i think a sort of sense of the density and impossibility of history that sees all this stuff as neither old or new but sort of outside of time an accumulation of signs w/o significance

Yeah this feels right to me.

It's also why I think it's a mistake in the case of 100%Silk et. al. either for the artists or the listeners to get too hung up on the influences and source material, this stuff works much better when it codes as kind of obliviousness or indifferent (in a "too high" sense) to the need to genuflect to past masters.

dude i have been to a party with judith and kaja, i can bring you so serious info

anyway, isn't this all just a fancy way of saying some of these bands might have been to art school?

lol yeah def some happy hardcore - and jpop and anime soundtracks - in seapunk

yeah, having qualities of both the old and the new I think has always been a thing with psychedelia for whatever reason. there's a referential component to this stuff but also a chaotic, improvisational aspect, constantly transforming old signifiers into freshly charged technology for ecstasy/transport

that use of old cultural and religious signs I've actually been seeing as a self-conscious return to ritual in art - there's this sense of trying to disorient onself from media-programmed use of the sign, yet also a continued interest in it (all that totemic/nostalgic/media/pop imagery), maybe out a need to hold onto some sense of cultural ritual or constancy, but taking control of, and realigning, the sign to one's own uses, or something

xxxxp

judith that's rad. I study visual culture myself

transforming old signifiers into freshly charged technology for ecstasy/transport

doesn't like the strokes do this too though?

or even like zz top?

it seems like you're ascribing a lot of stuff to this music that isn't particularly novel

for example "spreading through visual culture" - isn't this like punk and hip-hop 101?

i mean i agree with your general conclusions about how culture works but just because this music is marketed to eggheads doesn't mean it's the only music that functions on an eggheadscribable level

there's more emphasis on rapture/ecstasy with this stuff I think than with the Strokes, plus a more self-conscious sense of 'we are magically invoking the __ totem to create an aura of ___' kind of vibe to it all

I guess a heightened sense of the ritual/ecstatic is the emphasis here, plus more interest in fucking with the code and turning it into something more out there/fresh