Reflections on the "end" of music
A stream of consciousness inspired by the 2020 album "The Anon Database" from The Wushimi Complex.
“When we have used the phrase "end of music" in the past, a lot of people have taken its meaning at face value, as in we have declared that music has simply come to an end, its potential as an artform no longer necessary or valid in the shadow of modern living.
Our intention has in fact been to declare music's sonic exploration over, its totality discovered - in that we can begin again the process of re-exploration, a new extrapolation of potential, to deconstruct the old and replace it with the new, the re-application of context - a music for those living today, becoming post-human.”
- Dream Catalogue, April 2020
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Music isn't ours anymore. Every note plucked from the frayed strings of the Fender CP-100 that's been decaying in a corner for years, every hit on a cymbal that echoes throughout the arena, every key being pressed on the tiny Novation synth you bought for cheap ages ago and every breath exhaled into your studio mic hurtles into a merciless riptide of bits, data clouds, equalizers, filters, sidechains, compressors and brickwall limiters. Your precious, heartfelt moments of creative catharsis are forced into big blocky chunks of data which yield to AI, data corruption and digital stimulus overload, and are then harnessed by machines and warped into a tech juggernaut that immediately robs you of any claim of ownership. The data has to pass through a big data value conversion process, which machines and AI also harness. The big black obelisks of Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun, Santa Monica and London Bridge are jammed into the earth's surface, continuously absorbing crimson magatsuhi (god of disaster, 禍つ霊, マガツヒ) emanating from the global population's kaleidoscope of musical tension and release, one of the steadily decreasing number of methods humans can employ to establish emotional bonds. Can humans claim post music for themselves at this rate?
Music starts with humans. It doesn't exist without the first firing of the between 14 and 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex. Without humans, there is nothing machines can convert into digital food. And yet, even though we (arguably) aren't hooked up to the infamous human electrical energy harvesters of cyberpunk of yore, the interfaces for magatsuhi-AI value transaction are omnipresent. They attract the human psyche like a flailing moth to a lightbulb, leading to the ceding of mental autonomy in droves to the select few individuals who (for now) are manipulating the levers of big data. The effects of said omnipresence are palpable. In 2012, Facebook surreptitiously altered the news feeds of almost 700 000 users to test their susceptibility to emotional contagion. The experiment, carried out without prior user consent, yielded a small, yet significant shift in emotional expression in the users' respective feeds, depending on how many positive or negative news items they were fed. Down in Oakland, California, Pandora's Music Genome project has now analyzed 400 000 songs from more than 20 000 artists, breaking down all of your favorite musical characteristics into “genes”. These will assist media outlet titans like Amazon in feeding you exactly the type of music that YOU like down to the most minute detail, such as how much distortion the lead guitarist should be using or which chord progressions that create the most immediate listener impact. While you offer up your magatsuhi willingly, Instagram's excess of 500 million users and 100 billion dollar net worth demand your own emotional and creative state to be curated along advertiser and algorithm friendly lines. As machine media dominance sinks its fangs into the branching pathways to and from the human amygdala, the accompanying lure of capital rages through our synapses, sending humans into an LED fueled haze of desire and despair, where it becomes harder and harder to claim our minds and bodies for ourselves, never mind the musical output from them.
Does music have no sense of time? Dreampunk as a form of cultural expression ticks a large number of boxes for the typical traits of postmodern music, as set out by Jonathan Kramer in Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening from 2016. Jump into a stream for an online dreampunk festival, and you will find fans alternatively baying for the introduction of death metal guitar chords or sweeping ambient atmospheres to elucidate their inner city turmoil. Meanwhile, artists and DJs gleefully thwart exactly these expectations, assaulting its listener base with bludgeoning kickdrums pillaged from an approximately 30 year old tradition of hardcore techno, which a large number of the listeners weren't even around to take part in. A bigger and bigger audience is taken in by the music's escapism and sense of common urban experience, including the cognitive dissonance of relishing aural and visual ecstasy while simultaneously despairing at an emotional apparatus getting increasingly blunted. Producers respond to this by somehow burrowing even further into the past and submerging themselves in anxiety filled tristesse, culminating in offerings like Service Work by HKE, where the thudding, punishing kickdrums and grungy acid underpinnings harken to veteran Hague acid stalwarts like Unit Moebius and Bunker Records (the reverb laden vocal samples and synth washes, however, do not), and My Planet Is Burning by Ray Faded, a complete swan dive from the soaring melodic heights of previous releases into a droning, dystopian hellhole. One could argue that dreampunk actually subsists on friction and schism rather than being impeded by them. Music is about to end anyway, right? What use is there for a progress bar for time and creative development, when the fruits of said time and development simply stack the idea tower even higher and widen the field of vision?
The idea of post music, at least as outlined by the quote at the beginning of this essay, however, doesn't quite seem to give itself over to the same anarchic impulses. There is no “end to sonic exploration” in dreampunk. There is no “musical totality” in dreampunk. There is no “replacement of the old” in dreampunk. The concepts hinted at in such terms belong to the very same traditions of order that a postmodern project like dreampunk would like to leave behind. Returning to Kramer, we can easily identify one of his most salient observations of postmodern music within dreampunk, namely the lack of interest in a repudiation of the past. Thus, there is room for artists like Thugwidow, who maintains his firm grip on the amen break through a kaleidoscope of atmospheres, and AUT2M, who steadfastly warps the space around the subwoofer for a new decade, where the legacies of artists like Mala and Vex'd can be dragged even further into murky digital waters. For every artist throwing the proverbial wrench into the cogs of established electronic music order, there is another wistfully drawing on previous textual unity, chasing the same emotional relief as anyone else involved in the overarching vaporwave continuum. Can we really speak of a post music era when the deconstruction of music hasn't even been agreed upon yet?
As it stands, post music could end up as a white flag to the forces of alienation. Grab your favourite AI-magatsuhi interface, dive head first into the data stream and center your heads up display on the first image of a distant future that you come across. What do you see? This?
[…] A choking haze of smog, slashed through by piercing, luminescent hues of pink, turquoise and crimson, scattering across the dull, worn and dreary tower block husks that are slowly encroaching upon and snuffing out the view to the outside […]
Or maybe this?
[…] A glass pane suddenly reveals a bright flash of ghostly, radiatingly pale skin, providing somewhat of a respite, but no warmth or shelter, from the burden of sludgy, never ending acid rain […]
Or perhaps even this?
[…] The grid yields. Lush, thick and deep green foliage sinks down, heavy with morning dew. A sweet aroma tickles the nostrils, pulling on the strings of the sensorium, encouraging deeper exploration along a stream of shining aqueous diamonds towards the treasures that the grove may hold […]
Are these images “real”? Are you actually looking at the world around you? Who created these images? Why were they created? Who or what instilled the human need for these images and symbols in us? To what extent can we still distinguish between image and reality? Is there even a difference? The idea of post music seems to imply that we abandon the attempt at distinguishing between the real and the hyperreal, the dense sheen of images that is slowly seeping in and covering our material world while we are busy trading parts of ourselves in for a dopamine hit. What’s the point of holding on to humanity’s musical legacy, considering that any and all expressions of it will be inevitably be assimilated into the digital magatsuhi conversion process?
As mentioned at the outset of this essay, the acceleration of the edge blur between symbol and material will rapidly erode the chain of communication that takes music from artist to listener. This happens in large part due to the ever increasing amount of digital gateways for further (involuntary) mutation of the artist's intent. A proponent of a post music era would nevertheless likely see the aforementioned development as a potential for liberation. No longer are we encumbered with the particular demands, expectations and limitations stemming from the old notions of musical unity. No longer will time be squandered on petty scene squabbles. No longer will artists be staring at an empty pattern in their production software, drilling their skulls into the mental brick wall standing between them and their next masterpiece. Embrace the withering of the material for the green grid pastures of the symbol! Deus ex machina (literally)! This is hubris. It assumes humans will harness a kind of synergistic potential emanating from the earth's respective black obelisks, which are teeming with the kind of capital that Marxist figures like Mao Zedong described as a sort of proliferating fungus (Note: I can’t find the exact quote for this, but I’ve included it here anyway, as it very much fits the bill for a Marx original on steroids), driving societal development without regard for alienation and thus needing constant suppression. Instead, there is now a huge risk that the elongation of music's communication chain results in a borderline unbearable strain on the connection between the human and its musical manifestation. The result is a merciless and paralyzing addiction to symbols from the maw of capital to fill in the gaps in meaning. Indeed, there will be no more petty scene squabbles. However, that is only because the double edge of hyperreality is atomizing the notion of a musical community (the number of nightclubs in the UK dropped by more than 20% between 2017 and 2018, around 20% of the US' population suffered from anxiety disorders in 2019, almost 60% of the total value of the music recording industry is being sat on by a handful of streaming platforms, and the average global concert ticket in 2019 cost about 100 USD).
Music must be reclaimed. Cornelius Harris, aka Atlantis from foundational Detroit techno group Underground Resistance, posits the following on the opening track of the 2005 release Interstellar Fugitives 2:
“We are living in a world filled with chaos and order, much of it negative on both counts. The widespread chaos of drugs, disease and war have taken their toll on the planet, while political and corporate order threatens the freedom of not only the human body, but the mind as well. When the mind becomes slave to an order that would destroy its freedom and create chaos within the soul, it becomes necessary to disrupt that order […] There is a new chaos coming. One that has been growing over the past century, threatening to destroy all that the old order has built.”
In Harris' world, it is crucial to destroy poisonous order and accelerate “positive” chaos for emancipatory purposes. However, if people do so without any semblance of a new positive order, the subsequent torrent of magatsuhi that is released will function as readily available nitromethane for new black obelisks of high tech power. These will convert greater and greater amounts of cultural sustenance into radically restructured nutrients that may stimulate and energize humans who have only a modicum of power, but ultimately cannot satiate their hunger.
An era of post music growing out of the current cultural status quo is a terrifying prospect. In order to minimize the dystopian potential of such an era, humans must figure out some way to dispel the illusion of decentralization projected from current platforms for music and retain control of where their magatsuhi flows. Dreampunk crystallizes many such concerns into one cohesive cultural expression. It remains to be seen whether this can lend us enough foresight for the dream to not turn into a nightmare.