There was this charming quality to a lot of ambient music in the ’90s — optimistic and melodic, far off from today’s dominating dark drones. It was a different era, and perhaps the sound reflected a rosy view of what awaited in the new millennium. But what we find in the 2010s are the hushed rushes of disconcerting noise and queasy clashing of synth lines, an ambiance of tension and uncertainty befitting our times. It makes sense — the world is an increasingly scary and debilitating place, and sometimes our music sounds like it. But optimism is resistance — it really is — and that’s what makes Jogging House’s latest album Lure so welcome, special, and quietly radical.
Jogging House — whose name is apparently a letter added to ‘jogging hose,’ AKA sweat pants — states the album is “about accepting the things we cannot change and finding comfort in uncertainty.” This philosophy is the pragmatism of the stoic, and it’s also not being paralyzed with helplessness when the world is out of control. Staying in motion and hopeful as an artist and creator rather than blocked and immobile in the face of hourly ‘breaking news’ and topical turmoil. That’s resistance.
I want to connect Jogging House to Brian Eno, but not to compare him to another composer working in the ‘ambient’ realm. Instead, I think Lure‘s songs closely reflect something Eno said in an interview: “One of the reasons one makes music or any kind of art is to create the world that you’d like to be in or the world that you would like to try. You would like to find out what that world is like.” That’s how I feel when I listen to “Tulip,” Lure‘s opening track. It’s transportive — light and playful, melodies as aspiration and reassurance that’s calm and kind. And it’s gorgeous, on the verge of sadness but not quite getting there. This is a world I’d like to try.
The album’s eight tracks share this gentle atmosphere, evoking a separate era. It’s the optimism of the past looking forward, like the mentioned-above ’90s electronic acts but also not too far from those pioneering the form in the ’70s. I’ll give in and sonically connect Eno anyway, as the beautiful “Weavings” wouldn’t be out of place on a Cluster album.
But I emphasize this isn’t merely a throwback — it’s music fit for our times. These sounds are an encouragement to persevere rather than wallow; to foster hope and the imagination of something better for us all. You may ask, how can something so serene inspire action? It can, I respond. It really can.
The documentary Conny Plank: The Potential Of Noise was more touching than I expected. The film is a collaboration of director Reto Caduff and Stephan Plank, Conny’s son. Stephan drives the documentary as conversations with musicians who worked with Conny Plank help him understand and rediscover his father.
Conny Plank died of cancer at 47 when Stephan was just 13. A lot of Stephan’s memories of his father revolve around these odd musicians who stayed and worked at the farmhouse studio. Often the musicians would join the family for dinner (indulgently prepared by Stephan’s mother Christa), and they would become Stephan’s temporary playmates in between sessions. So, in this documentary, Stephan is meeting people who not only have perspectives on his father but are also part of shadowy childhood memories. The musicians are also taken aback — the last time they saw Stephan he was a child and an oblivious studio mascot.
The highlight of the documentary is Stephan’s meeting with the classic rap duo Whodini. Did you remember that Conny Plank produced part of Whodini’s first album? I forgot, too, until this film pleasantly reminded me. Whodini was an upstart act in their late teens, suddenly flown to a farmhouse in rural Germany in a bold choice by their label. The duo grew to love the eccentric but brilliant Conny Plank, and this love and respect pour out of their interview segment. Stephan is visibly emotional as he hears another warm story of the universal impact and guiding influence of his father. Even I choked up a little.
There’s so much more in this film, including interviews with Michael Rother (Neu! and — early on — Kraftwerk guitarist), Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart (who may have been the last to work with Plank), and Holger Czukay (Can). Czukay comes off as kind of a jerk in his honesty about how Conny cared more about his studio than his relationship with his young son. It seems that Stephan has come to terms with this.
Noticeably absent is Brian Eno who stepped into Plank’s studio on more than one occasion. A section on the recording of Devo’s first album allows Eno most of his screen time, and that’s given to Gerald Casale talking about how he didn’t like Eno’s attempt to add his ‘pretty’ vocals and synth lines throughout the record.
Conny Plank: The Potential Of Noise is inspiring and a stirring tribute to a person who lived the creative life. But most of all it’s the story of a son finding his talented but distant father. With Father’s Day approaching, I can’t think of a better movie to watch, especially for those of us missing our dads.
Conny Plank: The Potential Of Noise currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available as a ‘rental’ on other services. And here’s a fine interview with Stephan Plank about the documentary. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure the no-show Stephan refers in that piece is Eno, not Bono.
From an insightful piece by Philip Cosores in Uproxx:
From track lengths to chord progressions to song structures, the amount of math involved in what sounds good to the ears is the least sexy aspect of music, right up there with the language of recording contracts and the cleanliness of tour buses. But it wasn’t until the rise of services like Spotify and Apple Music that the mathematics of music felt so dangerous. Namely, the math involved in streaming. […]
It’s been music critics who have been beating the drum about the dangers of streaming algorithms lately … but most of the time the criticism is less about well-researched investigations and more about gut feeling call outs, directed at music that is often simultaneously commercially successful and critically derided. Over the course of the last year, you’d be hardpressed to find a negative album review that didn’t at some point evoke the idea of The Algorithm being to blame for the music’s perceived lack of quality — it has become this specter hovering above popular music, ready to sink its talons into anything that finds commercial success. […]
Of course, the music world has changed because of streaming, and many artists and labels will always look to trends when creating their own strategies and aesthetics. But blaming streaming for the music that you don’t like feels increasingly closed off from reality, where streaming is, in fact, influencing most of the music that is being consumed, regardless of quality. This is no better or worse than it has ever been, it’s just a recent mode of consumption that musicians are learning how to work with.
It’s impossible to argue that in the history of commercial music — even before recording technology — there was a time when the means of delivery wasn’t an influence on songcraft. Whether it’s writing an opera with
Of course, there are artists creating music specifically to exploit Spotify as a platform — the ‘poop song’ guy immediately comes to mind — but I agree with the thesis of this piece. It’s easy to accuse music we don’t like of solely catering to ‘the algorithm’ just as we once derided songs made specifically for pop radio or albums in the ‘70s that seemed so serendipitous they were obviously capitalizing on a trend.
The favored target of the music critic is ever-changing (and I love music criticism and feel it’s necessary, so don’t take this as a slam). The identity of that target is a gauge of where music stands and the ways we, as music fans, feel uncertain in its progress. Emerging trends create a widening feedback loop, making it increasingly difficult for the critic to separate the calculated from the cultural. Yesterday’s disparaged made-for-MTV band is today’s algorithm-friendly artist. And, soon enough, probably tomorrow’s A.I. assisted songwriter.
🔗→ Stop Blaming Streaming Services For The Music You Don’t Like
You Don’t Have To Read ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ To Name Your Song
Previously I mentioned that Brian Eno and David Byrne named their seminal album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts without reading the book of the same title. The latest issue of Philip Christman’s The Tourist newsletter talks about other song titles taken from unread books:
Joy Division recorded the song “Atrocity Exhibition,” which in mood and feel is a pretty exact match to the almost unendurably grim J.G. Ballard novella of the same name. JD and Ballard are often mentioned together, as having a similar sensibility. But Ian Curtis wrote the song without having yet read the book–all he needed was the title. It’s as though he knew the book without knowing it. The inspiration for Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” was her catching the last few minutes of a 1967 TV adaptation of the novel as a child; though she did eventually get around to reading the book, you get the sense that her doing so was almost an afterthought. The song is about those last couple minutes, that demanding ghost at the window, as seen by a nine-year-old musical genius. {…}
{A way to think about it} is that our half-formed conceptions and the things that inspire them are both actualities–the song Ian Curtis started hearing in his head when he learned that there existed a novel called The Atrocity Exhibition and the actual novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, are both real things, and they need to be kept in some sort of ecological balance in order for both to fully exist. The song isn’t ready to confront the novel until it’s had some time to grow.
I remember, in my teenage punk band, naming songs after artsy books and movies I hadn’t read or watched. My motivation was to appear smarter and more rounded than I was but, I assume, it’s the same end result as Christman notes above. ‘Art’ is shaped by the ghosts and impressions of its inspirations, despite whether those inspirations are fully ingested or understood.
A terrific article on Medium by Stuart Dredge occupied my thoughts this morning. The title is provocative, but does accurately convey the piece’s thesis — Music Created by Artificial Intelligence Is Better Than You Think:
Human-created music already spans everything from the sublime to the unlistenable. While an A.I. may not be able to out-Adele Adele (or Aretha Franklin, or Joni Mitchell) with a timeless song and performance, it can compose a compelling melody for a YouTube video, mobile game, or elevator journey faster, cheaper, and almost as well as a human equivalent. In these scenarios, it’s often the “faster” and “cheaper” parts that matter most to whoever’s paying.
These ideas mirror what I was saying the other day. A.I. generated music will create significant problems for the library music circuit. But these ‘fast and cheap’ productions will fuel more soulful, distinctive music from those of us who are up to the challenge. I believe the environment will also create increased demand for highly personal music and songs with relatable stories behind them.
And I admit I’m excited about the idea of generative music in public and private spaces. There are many possibilities for this aspect, and my mind boggles. Yep, it’s Brian Eno’s world, and we’re just living in it.
However, there is one part of the article that I have questions about:
Amadeus Code claims to “enhance your songwriting with artificial intelligence” and is squarely aimed at people who are already writing and recording music. Its pitch: “Get unstuck with your songwriting with the power of artificial intelligence and say goodbye to writer’s block for good.”
I don’t have a problem with A.I. as a collaborator. That’s not far off from other creative games we already use, from Oblique Strategies to sample packs to unauthorized remixing. But I am wary of touting A.I. as a cure for ‘writer’s block’ rather than a tool a creator uses with intention.
I fall into the ‘there’s no such thing as writer’s block’ camp. I see it as a crutch, as the lizard brain screaming, as The Resistance. The cure, if we need one, is showing up and doing creative work with consistency and purpose. Selling A.I. as a remedy to ‘writer’s block’ gives more power to the concept. What are we replacing The Resistance with if we turn to A.I. whenever we’re not ‘feeling creative?’ Will there be a danger of letting A.I. tell us too much — giving us the chords, the melodies, the lyrics — whenever we don’t feel like showing up?
I’ll point to Izotope’s Ozone as an example. This software is a mastering suite that analyzes audio and, using an A.I. engine, creates settings for a mastered output. Ozone is an incredible tool. I bought it. I use it. And the company repeatedly emphasizes that what Ozone comes up with is meant to only be a suggestion, a starting place for your tailored tweaks. But I fear the majority of the software’s users probably default to the suggested settings. For some it provides a tempting fallback, an excuse to take it easy and not push oneself.
And that’s my issue. That feeling of ‘writer’s block’ is there for us to push through — to provide a challenge — and many times the result is our best work. I don’t doubt that collaborating with A.I. tools can result in great work. But, if we turn to the technology every time we feel blocked or in a creative rut, then I think we deny a very human aspect of the process. C’mon — we don’t need an easy cure for writer’s block.
🔗→ Music Created by Artificial Intelligence Is Better Than You Think
I’ve written previously about the phenomenon of music made to sound like it’s playing in a mall and the evocation of fake nostalgia. A recent piece in MEL Magazine examines this oddball subgenre and attempts to make sense of it all:
… Tills’ life at the mall is imaginary. He’s nostalgic for the 1990s, which he thinks was a better time to live. At the core of this mental construction is “mallwave,” a lo-fi subgenre of vaporwave that listeners refer to as “music optimized for abandoned malls.” Like Vaporwave creators, Mallwave musicians use soft drum tracks, ambient sounds and low-quality synthesizers to create soft, calming electronic music. But they also mix in pop music associated with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the purpose of creating a holistic “nostalgic” experience, one that recreates the experience you would have had when visiting the mall. Or, in Tills’ case, what that experience might have been like, for people who lived it. […]
To Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the turn to nostalgia in vaporwave is all about this reflection of contemporary societal trends — whether it’s grappling with late capitalism or dreaming of an allegedly sunnier bygone era. Speaking over Skype, he tells me, “Nostalgia is a popular tool in marketing, and it’s probably the most defining cultural product of our time. You see it in movies and TV with reboot trends, and of course, apps like Spotify use algorithms that recommend music that you’ve probably listened to in the past.”
Simon Chandler, writing for Bandcamp Daily, dares to dig even deeper:
… society for decades has been pursuing consumerism and neoliberal capitalism when it’s often accepted that neither
are perfect, and the way some of us have coped with this is through adopting a position or attitude of irony (cf. David Foster Wallace). We’ve mocked politicians on both sides while continuing to elect them and we’ve ridiculed McDonald’s while continuing to buy Big Macs, and vaporwave has masterfully symbolizedthis social phenomena by subverting clichéd samples while relying on them to a massive extent. […]
Nonetheless, it can be argued in vaporwave’s defense that, like much uncompromising music and art, the genre’s ‘mission’ appears to be focused more on mirroring our imperfect world than on reforming it. It may not offer any solutions, but it almost perfectly depicts a political domain in which media-generated images have alienated us from reality, and in which a minority of us have drifted into self-conscious irony as a way of coping with an imperfect environment (we think) we can’t change.
There’s an interview with Brian Eno (that I can’t find) where he says that he often makes music as a soundtrack to his hopes for a better world. This is like the opposite of that.
🔗→ The Teens Who Listen to ‘Mallwave’ Are Nostalgic for an Experience They’ve Never Had
🔗→ Music of the Spectacle: Alienation, Irony and the Politics of Vaporwave
