Monday, March 5th, 2012 // Paperhouse
Minimal techno, black metal, witch house, goth: They are all some of my favorite music genres, but they’re also some of the bleakest. While reviewing end-of-the-year lists from a slew of magazines, it appears that I am not the only one who has become obsessed with darkness. In the past decade, many genres of music have begun shifting toward dark, sluggish, and spooky themes. All of this begs the question: Why has our culture, or at the very least our musicians, become obsessed with darkness?
Darkness in music is nothing new: The ’80s, for example, were dominated by post-punk and were dark in their own right. But it’s been over 20 years since darkness has been in vogue. Perhaps music is finally becoming a reflection of the global trauma evident in the news: oil spills, economic ruin, riots, revolutions, tsunamis.
As cultural analyst Simon Reynolds points out in his 2011 book Retromania, trauma induces repetition and regression, or hyperstasis. Reynolds implies that while we appear to be moving somewhere, we are actually staying in the same spot or even traveling backwards. In this state of hyperstasis, the past is perpetually reanimated into present culture. This results in individuals exhibiting an aching nostalgia for even the most irrational sorts of retromania.
As a result of global trauma, a large portion of the music being produced today seems to be haunted by the past. It is in music that we are seeing a distinctive reaction to the political and economic atmosphere of the world. This sort of sluggish and spooky music is not like the ’80s music that was dark for the sake of being dark, but rather is a result of social, political, cultural, and environmental shocks. Musicians today are taking ideas and styles from the past and are reworking them to become a reflection of the present. The world isn’t a good place right now, but the darkest hour is just before the dawn.
Monday, February 27th, 2012 // Paperhouse
The future of music is blasting out of the sound system at Zizek Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina. DJs and producers are mashing up cumbia (a popular Colombian genre), reggae, hip-hop, and electronic music, creating a space in which musicians can work with new ideas and giving them the chance to show what they’re doing in the current music scene.
Zizek Club — arguably the epicenter of the borderline avant-garde transformation of the Latin American sound of cumbia — has created a whirlwind of energy in just a few years, spawning the acclaimed record label ZZK Records.
Established in 2008 by producer Grant Dull, ZZK Records now manages 11 “new cumbia” groups. ZZK belongs to a new movement of rhythms born out of cities that are being reinterpreted using electronic music to create something new, fresh, and fun. Baile Funk from Brazil and Kuduro from Angola were popularized by M.I.A. and Buraka Som Sistema, respectively, evidencing the rise of this global movement of sonic reinterpretation.
The movement is exemplified by Tremor, an Argentine trio on ZZK Records. Tremor bridges generations, genres, and geography through technology to produce its signature style. The group’s sound is equal parts electronic music and native drum. It owes as much to anthropology as it does to popular music.
Today, ZZK is home to the psychedelic cumbia of Fauna, the experimental beats of Chancha Via Circuito, and the hard-hitting cumbia hypnotics of El Remolon, among other artists. To experience the ZZK sound, the best place to start is its newest release Amazonico Gravitante by Argentinian artist Mati Zundel.
Monday, February 20th, 2012 // Paperhouse
Last October, M83’s sixth album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, was released. After months of build-up, a pretty good single, and a music video about runaway telekinetic kids who throw a super-hip party in a warehouse (or something like that), critics and fans alike devoured it.
As a huge M83 fan, I was just as pumped as everyone else for the supposedly epic double-album that would forever change the way that I would perceive music. After listening to the album a couple of times, waiting for that moment of spiritual awakening, I realized the awful truth of Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming: It was just another M83 album. A very good M83 album, but an album that was hyped to an absurd extent.
Due to this hype, it was impossible for me to tell if I genuinely liked the album. I eventually got so sick of all the praise that I started to hate it on principle. On the flip side, when my friend introduced me to M83’s debut album a couple years ago, I didn’t have some exterior force telling me how I should react to it. I felt like I was truly discovering something, building a relationship with the music.
This relationship-building is why there are so many venerated classics that continue to be played to this day: Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, pretty much everything The Beatles ever put out. But our inability to detach ourselves from this relationship and our continued insistence on publicly extolling them has prevented anyone who came after their time from building a real, individualized relationship with the music.
So if you have an album you really love or a band that you would give anything to see live that you just have to show people, check yourself. Suggest it and let your friends discover it for themselves. The only way that good music will survive the generation it was composed for is if a new generation can view it as genuinely meaningful, and not just as a facet of culture.
