Opening the drawer of anticipation #musicjournalism #practices
Doing some clearing out of CDs from their drawers I realised I needed to document some of the music I got sent to review and for interviews back in the 90s when writing for The Guardian and The Independent. Though I did interview Ozzy in his home, Sharon O. was there too, before they became TV celebrity ethnography (they were both really lovely) my music beat was mostly #eccentric #experimental #electronic.
Drawer #1 Weak signals
Thinking about my journalism made think about my practice more generally. Dr Jamie Brassett and myself are currently reading the final written for and edited a book on the emergent discipline of Anticipation, and part of my beat at the time was to anticipate new sounds and directions in music. As a junior I didn’t get to do the major musicians, I got to go out and listen to what the trend forecasters would call ‘weak signals’, bands whose innovation in sound might connect to how we might want to experience the world, sonically, visually, sartorially. That is more purposive than it was, I just enjoyed rocking up to see bands, but editors were really keen on finding out about the next big thing, not just musically but culturally. I used to write ‘cultural thinkpieces’ too – before medium, before the social media which promoted them, mainly white men like me got to think in print, and then form the ‘think’ as a ‘piece’.
Drawer #2 Music is prophecy
Pop music culture is a good place to tap into change. Jacques Attali, who worked as an adviser to French President Francois Mitterand in the 1980s and became the first Head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, wrote in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, that, “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.”
Aside from associated future-signalling cultural change, popular music’s dematerialisation from vinyl, to CD, to streaming was prophetic for so many other industries. My act of anticipation as a music journalist, was mostly about ‘the next big thing’, but I aspired to something else. Really good music journalists, the ones I aspired to such as Paul Morley, Kodwo Eshun, Simon Reynolds (it was a blokey list) did music anticipation rather than interpretation.
In their reviews, their expressive writing anticipated the new world in which this new music would emerge in. Music interpretation gave way to music anticipation when their music review explored the languages, perspectives, cognition which would be needed in order to experience this music. And because anticipation is also a matter of anticipating a past yet to come, (my chapter in our book is partly about chronopolitics) these writers would also anticipate a different pop history and pop space. In 2003, Morley wrote Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City a kind of road journey with an avatar Cyber-Kylie through a different history of pop, inspired by the attempt to connect two pieces of music Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head (and its promo) and Alvin Lucier’s 1969 experimental art piece, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier. Eshun’s More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (1998) remains for this reader one of the most original and exciting books on music, culture and futurism ever written – in any genre or discipline. Anticipation demands different kinds of words and arrangements of words.
Drawer #3 Sensors not censors
One of the problems of traditional foresight processes is that they asked the client to engage with their futures using the cognition and languages of the present. It’s not simply about perception it’s about norms, our habits of mind which also embed values which direct feelings. Our values are embodied as feelings which help us navigate the present but also lock us into familiar ways of thinking, feeling and sensing the world.
It’s why it’s worth quoting a chunk of the opening to More Brilliant Than The Sun, where Eshun, explaining the lack of critical attention to things like rhythm and the groove in music criticism, shows how it’s connected to cultural norms that embed a fear of new ideas and different ways of sensing the future. He is talking about music but it applies to the culture and politics of foresight more generally:
“All today's journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches…”[p.006]
“….You are not censors but sensors, not aesthetes but kinaesthetes. You are sensationalists. You are the newest mutants incubated in womb speakers. Your mother, your first sound. The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves, the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum. The future is a much better guide to the present than the past. Be prepared, be ready to trade everything you know about the history of music for a single glimpse of its future.” [p.001. The pagination in Kodwo’s introduction is a countdown from 7-1]
We can move beyond the head-based-thinking of traditional foresight and strategy companies (with all the problematic hierarchical values that brings with it) with the inclusive, embodied and sensory practice of anticipation.
Drawer #4 Post-rock
Back to the grid of covers that includes Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die. The Wire magazine made it their album of the year in 1997.
This #eccentric #experimental #electronic music often-needed journalists to make up new genres and names for, such as Tortoise’s #post-rock a term coined by Simon Reynolds.
Like all Reynolds’ pop-concepts, post-rock had many levels. 1. Sonic Matter: The music itself, the purpose of writers such as Reynolds and Eshun was to show the thinking of music, music as philosophy, music as materialist thinking, thinking with sound, music generating cognitive and cultural openings and directions for thinking with new words. 2. Cultural and Chronological Mapping: Post-rock was a new generation of kids marking and mapping their territory with sound, in this case a kind of quantum jump away from Grunge, playing into a different musical history 3. Method: Rock bands using their instruments and band-form to create non-rock sounds. 4. Post-nostalgia: In the UK Reynolds championed post-rock bands such as Stereolab, Disco Inferno and Pram, as an alternative to the backwards looking Brit-Pop which he saw as culture cannibalizing its past. 5. Afro-futurism: He highlights how it was a way in which UK bands were keeping up with forward-looking black music, at the time it was hip-hop, techno and jungle, rock keeping its engagement, “with the black vanguard, embrace its latest advancers in rhythm and production, its innovations in expression and mood.” (Bring the Noise, Reynolds, 2007).
I’ve just been riffing on Reynolds to try and make sense of part of my own practice at the time, I was reading him and Kodwo Eshun. Because I had been an art critic, some of this more experimental stuff got pushed my way, and once you’re on the list of contacts for labels such as @muterecords @Cityslangrecords @thrilljockey @dominorecordco @theleaflabel @matador you find yourself drawn into a network of people and music. And it’s easier to pitch to mainstream music editors because no one else is doing it. These particular labels were populated by people not just trying to pitch bands in their chat at gigs and press releases, to anticipate a future in which this music would affect the present.
As a writer you want to celebrate and champion creativity, I loved it. But the music in this panel of CD covers which really lit me up was the Japanese musician Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) and his album #Fantasma – a Japanese-studio-wizard-Brian Wilson mashed with the Mop-Topped Beatles (actually, really just Paul). Unlike Macca, Oyamada’s whimsy is both magical and conceptual, aided in his later promos by his curation of filmmakers to work with where image is as important as sound. Oyamada took his pop name ‘Cornelius’ from the scientist in Planet of the Apes, echoing his approach of futuristic sci-fi pop engineering. From memory, when I interviewed him at MTV In London he was wearing an ape mask.
Where else would you begin a recording other than with a mic check?
Drawer #5 Anticipating History
[Fantasma’s sonic and cultural feedback, is where Cornelius gets too close to an alternative timeline of pop, opening up a timeline where Paul McCartney’s 1960s experiments with tape loops create a different direction for the band. The Beatles become the #Beta-les, a techno-pop experiment with #BillyPreston and #DeliaDerbyshire joining the #Beta-les. In this timeline, the hash-tag was a symbol associated with a powerful strain of cannabis developed on the side by graduate students in late 1960s Stanford working on the Arpanet project].
Drawer #6 Post-rock
Fantasma is a pop ecstasy of sampling, playing with chronology, expectations, anticipation, looping you into a sound space then, then yanking you out just as your peaking, your ears relocating to a radically different environment, tempo and rhythm. These sonic and sensory jumps give it a psychedelic flavour – Fantasma as a sonic pharmaceutical designed by Cornelius to animate you.
It’s all blended with crisp and clever musicianship, among others, Sean O’Hagan of Irish band Microdisney, and later The High Llamas plays banjo on Thank You For The Music, and violinist Chieko Kinbara plays on God Only Knows.
Kinbara also plays with the Pizzicato Five, another group I sought out as I became slightly obsessed with Japanese pop, acid jazz and DJ culture, such as Susumu Yokota (Grinning Cat, 1st column, 3rd row) Yoshinori Sunihara (3rd column, 3rd row) – Sunihara and Oyamada now form part of the wryly named Japanese supergroup Metafive, which I didn’t know when I stuck them in my Spotify playlist.
I think my hyperbole forced the hand of the editor and The Guardian made my review of Fantasma the album of the week. Like most of my other choices, no one bought them except for librarians, where I would find my niche selections. I guess kind of obvious that for librarians, The Guardian arts pages might have been the go-to for music info.
Drawer #7 Restriction anticipating innovation
One CD in the grid that I didn’t have the language to understand its innovation at the time was Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions simply because of its spellbinding electro-funk rhythms.
Earlier albums had sampled domestic objects such as toasters, Bodily Functions (2001) followed a set of rules, similar to filmmakers Dogme 95, that Herbert drew up in 2000.
“Personal contract for the composition of music incorporating the manifesto of mistakes
This is a template for my own work and not intended to be a definitive formula for writing music, either by me or by other people.
1. The use of sounds that exist already is not allowed. Subject to article 2. In particular:
· No drum machines.
· No synthesizers.
· No presets.
2. Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist’s own previously unused archive are available for sampling.
3. The sampling of other people’s music is strictly forbidden.
4. No replication of traditional acoustic instruments is allowed where the financial and physical possibility of using the real ones exists.
5. The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions.
6. The mixing desk is not to be reset before the start of a new track in order to apply a random eq and fx setting across the new sounds. Once the ordering and recording of new music has begun, the desk may be used as normal.
7. All fx settings must be edited: no factory preset or pre-programmed patches are allowed.
8. Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear. Revealing parts of the recording are invariably stored there.
9. A notation of sounds used to be taken and made public.
10. A list of technical equipment used to be made public.
11. Optional: Remixes should be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist.”
Drawer #8 “Who’s in here?”
There are recordings of bodily functions and body parts which are then sampled. As designers well know, sometimes self-imposed restriction is the mother of innovation.I don’t have any rules but I do have drawers, and the drawer which I occasionally pull out that reminds me that, like Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room. Now. Typing. I didn’t anticipate the extent to which the sound (and the sleeve art) in my drawers anticipated my future practice, in communications, branding, strategy and teaching. If I had bothered with the practice of thinking about my practice, how I myself have been changed by my practices, I would have realised that listening to this anticipatory music, trained my senses and cognition, inspired new words, re-arranged the drawers, turned the drawers into an installation or a blog article – “Ah there you are! You’re different?”
It’s only recently that I registered that the challenge for researchers and clients, teachers and students, is not to mistake the spectacle of the future, the spectacle of innovation the post-it notes etc for the future. Jamie Brassett, who I also worked with on an innovation management course, used to tell our students: ‘You are your own innovation management project.’ There is no innovation without us learning to make ways that help us understand the change we are making.
Professor of Literature, Steven Shaviro writes in his book Without Criteria, “How can we come to terms with forms of ‘knowledge’ whose very effect is to change who ‘we’ are? How do we judge these disciplines, when they undermine, or render irrelevant, the very norms and criteria that we use to ground our judgments?” One starting point for anticipating the future, to make the future change the present, is to ask the question posed by Shaviro. “The question we should be asking, therefore, is not: How can we establish valid criteria and critical standards? but rather: How can we get away from such criteria and standards, which work only to block innovation and change?”
A creative philosophy of anticipation, by Dr Jamie Brassett and Dr John O’Reilly is being published by Routledge in late 2021