Alright, enough lying around. Time to pull the brain out of the holiday bear cave.
While restrictions related to COVID-19 dumped a bucket of molasses on electronic music in Norway for most of 2021, they also underlined a problem that was already lurking beneath the surface. Norwegian dance music temperament has always been out of sync with continental Europe. This is partly because Norway does not face the same scale of urban tension, and partly because of the heavy nightlife regulation, which slams venue doors shut and kills the PA at 3 am. As a result, there was never a particularly prevalent need to match urban tension with musical intensity. This effectively relegated faster and harder styles to the lower echelons of the scene, while the upper echelons got increasingly populated by slower house music and “Nordic disco” sounds that would later be derived from it (thanks in large part to Bjørn Torske and the crucial pool of talent that coalesced to become Tellé). Unfortunately, when applying COVID-19 to this kind of temperament, the end result is an absolute quagmire of self-reference, rhythmic sluggishness and punter apathy that stands no chance when competing with other forms of nightly entertainment. House DJs are turned into human jukeboxes for seated punters, and big room techno DJs stuck in seating-only cafés wind up smashing ants with ACME-sized mallets.
The gap between the designated function of and current environment for electronic music in Norway creates the need for a catalyst that accelerates temperamental development. In theory, the development of scenes outside of Oslo could function as such a catalyst. Other cities have, every now and then, yielded talent and music that veer sharply off the traditional Nordic path, such as the hardcore/breakcore grey area dweller Sunjammer. The recently formed, Bodø-based collective Draug Media seems like another example of this. Unfortunately, their recent label sampler Draug 006 doesn’t quite manage to escape the swamp. For every 4/4 banger that twists and morphs itself out of the Berlin-gazing crowd, there are another three or four tracks dragging the compilation down by relying on yet another amen break or neon-colored synthwave trope. Clearly, the right mix of distance from nostalgia, tempered reverence for innovators and extraction of potential from previous generations hasn’t been achieved just yet. Once the grip of the pandemic is loosened sufficiently, it will be crucial to find it.
Over in the UK, Dream Catalogue shut down. Again.
After a deluge of hideous monkey avatars and bougie influencer hype, the use of NFTs is now cleaving fan followings and artists into halves, even as the pandemic drags them kicking and screaming towards more viable revenue streams. One of the more unexpected artists that tried out NFTs as an alternate form of monetization is Ryuichi Sakamoto. In December, he created one NFT for every single one of the 595 notes in the first 96 bars of the right-hand melody to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, selling them for 10 000 yen each (or an equivalent amount in ETH). These functioned as tickets to an auction for a copy of handwritten sheet music for the same piece by Sakamoto himself, which started at 100 000 yen. Goodbye, Ticketmaster. The reaction from his fan base was predictable. Since the NFTs would all be purchased with Ethereum (a blockchain notorious for its humongous carbon footprint), and since Sakamoto has previously engaged in environmental activism against nuclear proliferation, his Facebook page was bombarded with angry comments accusing him of hypocrisy and scamming. The entire ordeal is emblematic of how artists are now, once again, caught between a rock and a hard place due to capital. If your previous body of work is identified with any sort of anti-capital sentiment, subverting expectations of said sentiment by attaching yourself to cryptocurrency and NFTs could easily backfire. Right now, artists making wholesale use of cryptocurrency will drive a class-tinged wedge between their needs as an artist and a fan base that expects their work to represent some semblance of counter-culture. This can’t be avoided as long as the market is so volatile, artificial scarcity divorced from matter isn’t made comprehensible enough and skepticism towards crypto top-down dynamics isn’t quelled. What good is decentralized value exchange when nobody is buying?
In the latest edition of Never Meet Your (Dance Music) Heroes, a similar contradiction arose when the monarchy-approved mega rave Soundstorm 2021 was held in Saudi Arabia. Underground titans like Adam Beyer and Jeff Mills face planted on social media, either while attempting to defend their participation in the event ethically or obnoxiously flaunting their status while rubbing elbows with monarchy stooges. As a response, Resident Advisor published a scathing piece that accused organizer MDLBeast of “culture-washing” (an article that now seems to have been nuked from the website), further underlined by The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights condemning the event as pure PR fodder for the Vision 2030 project. You could scarcely cook up a greater cataclysm of capitalist tension than this. As discussed on this Substack previously, there is no concrete border that indicates just when a scene actor crosses over from altruistic to egoistic harnessing of capital. This explains why techno social media effectively turned into a frenetic cross-fire of criticism and incredulous protesting of “negativity” after the line-up for Soundstorm was unveiled. Content consumers were blitzed with rapid-fire posting of smiling revelers and DJ booth dwellers, which only half way succeeded in overshadowing an angry comment section pelting scene actors with proverbial rotten tomatoes. On the ground in Riyadh, Saudi punters (including women) smoked, drank and danced their way through the event as if they’d been teleported to Tomorrowland or Electric Daisy Carneval. The only intervention in the proceedings was the Muslim call to prayer, which descended on the event like a headmaster reigning in the school’s rambunctious children.
Back on Twitter, Eric Prydz managed to annoy an entire fraction of the techno elite with just one tweet:
In fact, this tweet was so provocative that even Ben Sims felt compelled to fart angrily in Prydz’ general direction. However, once all the personal attacks, eager name dropping and jokes about sampling Steve Winwood were peeled off, any actual arguments were (unsurprisingly) far and few between. The seemingly only one who tried to approach Prydz’ claim about techno’s nostalgia problem critically was Shawn Reynaldo. However, even he offered little more than a shrug and resignation to the idea that artists are getting old and out of touch, to the point that there’s nary a single prescriptive argument in the entire article. The crux of the matter is that techno as a subculture (even across the somewhat arbitrary “business techno” border Dave Clarke has tried to draw up) isn’t immune to being subsumed by capital, even as artists kick and scream louder than anyone against the malevolence of the very same industry it relies on for subsistence. What if DJs and artists have shown a bit too much reverence and respect for the genre’s innovators, to the point that it is making the entire genre sclerotic and creatively rigid? Stop trying to choose between paying respects to musical ancestry and turning “Good Life” by Inner City over a dinky 4/4 beat into content fodder. Techno’s influence has leaked into so many different kinds of musical territory, be it HKE’s consistent return to the kickdrum after years of ambient pioneering, Tripped peeking out behind the hardcore curtain or Jlin precision-engineering a techno-footwork hybrid. For DJs and artists, it is a crystal clear prompt to employ the power of synthesis for themselves.
Speaking of hardcore: Where will the different musical strains from the hardcore continuum end up when there is no more space left to contract? The shortening of track duration, over-reliance on drop dynamics and other means of contracting rather than expanding the space that jungle, dubstep and UK Garage were built around do not make for musical longevity. It’ll provide diminishing returns, considering that a steadily growing avalanche of other music will compete with you for listeners in the era of digital audio workstations and algorithms. If space is a finite resource for producers to employ, what happens when it can no longer be contracted for further competitive edge in the data sprawl?
Dream City Turmoil spent 2021 analyzing contradiction and tension within electronic music. It is clear that the focus needs to be shifted in 2022. New ideas need to be proliferated in regards to slamming the gas pedal to the floor, speeding up both music and scene dynamics for mutual cross-border benefit. The question is: which ones will drive us to a sustainable future, and which ones will keep bouncing us off COVID-19’s creative walls?