Hi everyone,

I’m winding up Microplastics this year.

Since launching this newsletter, I’ve become less involved and attached to the journalistic beat of music writing (you may have noticed).

Rattling around in my archive was an essay that Resident Advisor had commissioned, but didn’t publish, as part of their start-of-the-decade coverage in 2020. (Long story.)

It was about the dwindling of hits, the startling lack of lighter-lighting anthems, in club music.

It’s more than six years old, so you may regard it as a bit untimely. But, actually, has that much changed in the meantime?

Because it feels like I’ve been reading the same “culture-is-over” essay for the past few years, the latest of which is this (good) one by the Yale Review’s Audrey Wollen.

Gabriel Szatan recently wrote a tune-specific version for Resident Advisor, and the thrust of his arguments feel right—we cannot metabolise this much stuff.

One of the effects relevant to the essay below is a lack of a status quo as a foil against endless novelty. If we accept the idea that hits are distinctive because they make a splash, then the state of culture is less a person cannonballing into the pool than a school of fish swimming busily underneath, leaving the surface undisturbed.

Anyway, back to me. I’m currently working on two magazine stories that will come out in the autumn. But with my job and parenting and whatnot something had to give: this newsletter.

I’ll keep this thing hobbling along for updates and another edition of “Last Night A Writer Saved My Life,” but my newsletter, a venerable hit factory in its brief moment, is now on the wane.

How do you bring a roomful of people together? If you’re a peace envoy, cult leader or DJ, you’ll have a better idea than most. The last group, however, has had a handy shortcut to persuasion: big tunes. It’s easy to pinpoint the factors that allow them to arise—lots of big DJs rinsing it, ubiquity on mixes—but what makes them stick? One thing they seem to have in common is some strikingly novel feature. It might have an infernal drum roll, a snake-charmer synth lead, this timeless sample, or someone saying, “We just used to, like… “

Whatever form it takes, you know a hit when it hits. It seems to powerlift the whole room. Or does it charge it with electricity? If it’s hard to describe their effects without slipping into overwrought language, that’s because some of these dance floor anthems seem to express things that would be too cheesy, too earnest, too much to feel appropriate for anything other than the moments in which they turn whole crowds into positively emotional wrecks. Others got big not through an inherently populist appeal but by cultivating a mystery that people wanted to get to the bottom of, or just immerse themselves in.

Lately, though, the hits haven’t been landing. Or, when they do, their impact isn’t felt as widely. Late last year, I found myself wondering why big tunes hadn’t been circulating with the same fervor as before. At the last round of summer festivals, the track that several different DJs normally drop in the space of a weekend didn’t really materialise. One of last year’s biggest tunes was a remix of another big tune from 2017. There were a lot of excellent tracks that many people loved, but it’s difficult to think of something in 2019 that everyone got behind, that every DJ played, that we were all dumbstruck by.

While it’s hard to pinpoint why, exactly, it’s easy to read the runes. The political centre ground, to take one example, has never looked less appealing. The unity candidate gets on everyone’s nerves as much as the person to their left or right. We are a lot more fanatical, too—strong opinions about one thing usually follow strong objections to something else. We seem less inclined to say, “This’ll do,” and more insistent about “THIS!” Our freedom to choose, and the algorithms that create that illusory possibility, turns the consensus view into a vanishing point.

Since the middle of last year, VTSS, the Polish techno DJ, has been playing out a new track called “Atlantyda.” What’s remarkable about it—aside from its dramatic interplay of power-drill bassline and final-boss lead—is that for months you could only hear it if you saw her play it in person, or were one of the 45,000 people following her on Instagram. “Atlantyda” was shared repeatedly on her Instagram stories. On one of her story highlights, you can see several clips of her dropping this Instagram dubplate as filmed by clubbers who’d tagged her in their stories, which she had reposted.

DJs reposting clips such as these on their Instagram stories after a gig became commonplace in 2019. Notable here is how that reposting catalysed the popularity of this one track, reposted over and over by VTSS and her fans for months before its release in November. The total YouTube and SoundCloud streams for it are modest, only a little over 190,000 at the time of writing. But “Atlantyda,” boosted by some audience participation, has been inescapable in one corner of the internet, which we could call Techno Instagram. “Atlantyda,” a track that emerged from a microclimate of popularity, might represent a possible future for voguish bangers—adored within that scene, nearly invisible to everyone else.

It’s not just our selective immersion with online platforms that will limit the impact of big tunes. Club music’s avant-garde has also accelerated what Chal Ravens identified in The Wire last year as “the demise of the steady kick drum,” displaced by reggaeton, gqom, batida, kuduro and countless other jerky, destabilising rhythms. (Much of this music has come from collectives comprised of women, queer artists and BIPOC artists, a fact which is often integral to the material.) That has led to a big squeeze on the house-adjacent, midtempo zone that most anthems of the ‘10s occupied—the most recent examples that come to mind are Objekt’s “Theme From Q,” DJ Koze’s “Pick Up” and Peggy Gou’s “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane).”

As more headlining DJs experiment outside of a cruising tempo of, say, 127 BPM, the bandwidth for a new “Inspector Norse” gets slimmer by the year. Now, it’s becoming more common at festivals to come across DJs who play fast, slow, or switch easily between both. If you imagine a stage with four DJs on the bill, it is far likelier than ten years ago that each will play at a different tempo and with different records. The constricted space for house and techno amid the influx of so many other club-music styles echoes pop music’s conversion to “Pop 2.0,” a term coined by the critic John Caramanica to describe pop not as a single kingdom but a multiverse that includes trap, reggaeton and K-pop.

Selector culture is also reducing the floorspace for big tunes. The term, whose origins are found in Jamaican soundsystem culture, essentially describes DJs who emphasise music selection over technical skill. In practice, that divide might look like spending weeks sifting for Thai funk and Tanzanian singeli through 13 Discogs tabs, three YouTube wormholes and a Soulseek account versus, say, working towards 10,000 hours of practice mixing techno on three decks. To this realm’s most zealous disciples, big tunes—or anything that sounds like one—are the mark of a chancer in a milieu that respects obscurity as effort and treats record shopping like a craft.

There will always be pushback against the elitism that implies—Young Marco, though a DJ in the selector mould, has staked out his right to drop Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in mid-July. But the vast pool of music at our fingertips has made famous classics or established canons less visible, and deference to them less inherently appealing. (The related upswing of reissues, listening bars and ambient music has also instilled a principle of subtlety that’s nudged the needle further away from floorfillers.) Selector culture has even affected established house-and-techno DJs. Joy O, for example, released a Dekmantel compilation in 2017 that seemed to consolidate a shift in his thinking. Where once he might’ve thought nothing of dropping “Ellipsis” in a set, it’s now unusual to hear him play anything recognisable.

Tech platforms are not only breeding sleeper hits like VTSS’s “Atlantyda,” but whole scenes as well. In a lot of cases, they’re hiding in plain sight. The UK drill producer Emil Proffit, talking in 2018, asked himself how he’d managed to miss a whole genre of music – that is, UK drill – in London, where he’s from: “It was because of my age.” What kept him from being wise to it, more specifically, was that he is not a 14-year-old who is very online. The place to get informed about the style, a deadpan, slang-rich mutation of Chicago drill, is YouTube, where you’ll find music videos, reaction videos, explainer videos and Snapchat clips—a rich supply of music, drama, commentary and in-jokes that keeps an entire community of fans hooked.

UK drill is at once hermetically sealed from the mainstream and racing towards it. Its most popular videos regularly exceed ten million views, and two of its breakout stars, Headie One and Russ, scored top-ten hits last year (even as the police continue to censor and jail artists). Floating Points remixed a Headie One track, “Back To Basics,” from one of the scene’s few full-lengths, Music X Road. As an insurgent style creeping into the charts as well as DJ sets, UK drill might be uniquely positioned in 2020 to offer an anthem for both.

Innovative scenes can still arise IRL. But their growth is increasingly mediated by tech platforms. Gqom producers in Durban use WhatsApp to swap tunes. A new genre of hip-hop came from SoundCloud. YouTube has given UK rappers a global platform. TikTok is reshaping the pop-song format. These walled gardens are facilitating some of club music’s most vital scenes, though the world-swallowing domination that minimal or dubstep once enjoyed is now almost impossible to imagine (the former was so ubiquitous that it inspired a rare thing in dance music: a diss track). There is just too much to choose from, and the thrill of discovery is a satisfying reward for being picky.

If dance music is undergoing its own 2.0 upgrade, then big tunes will likely emerge from a more closely fought contest of musical ideas, the victors of which will rarely be clear-cut. Or maybe we’re just in flux. In a best tracks roundup 11 years ago, Resident Advisor noted that it was “almost impossible to label 2009 as the year of anything.” One year later, we saw “the glorious return of the anthem.” Where did they come from? James Blake, Girl Unit, Ramadanman, the first flush of what we now call post-dubstep and UK bass.

We might yet get a fresh wave of big tunes this year, but the most consequential of them will come from scenes in the process of becoming. Hits that seem to come out of nowhere will actually have emerged from online hinterlands—whether that be Techno Instagram, The Identification Of Music Group or GRM Daily—that will feel peripheral to everyone except young, clued-up fans (and, occasionally, music journalists). Once it becomes impossible to keep up with everything, the most satisfying alternative is obsession. Will we miss having the same ones?

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to lately.

READING

• A lo-fi rebellion against AI – Kyle Chayka [New Yorker]

• Rehearsing for humanity’s future on Mars – Elena Saavedra Buckley [Harper’s]

• There is no sound of the 2020s. Yet. – Gabriel Szatan [Resident Advisor]
  
  LISTENING

• Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970-1980 – Various [Soundway Records]

• The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music – Marisa Anderson [Thrill Jockey]

Hey everyone,

I’m republishing an essay that first appeared in No Tags: Conversations on Underground Culture at the end of 2024. I thought now would be a good time to revisit an era of being online that already feels distant and impossible to fathom, and whose long-term effects are beginning to come into view.

Over the years, I’ve been scathing to friends about online activists—single-issue posters accusing a person or institution, in a screeching register, of moral murder—and I’ve always wanted to draw a line under that period without myself being dragged into the reputational whirlpool.

But campaigners are not wholly to blame for this toxic smog. Too many nightlife workers sincerely believe that what they do is of monumental importance. Twenty years ago, DJing was a nerdy hobby for shut-ins. It is now unblinkingly described as a “practice,” like medicine or architecture, or as an inherently political act.

This is an under-discussed source of the anxiety that underpinned peak Techno Twitter. When you’re under the illusion that gigging around the States three times a week amounts to NGO work, a resentful poster who’s skimmed some therapyspeak and French post-structuralism is uniquely capable of paralysing the guilty liberal mind.

In a previous Microplastics I said, as a joke, that I felt sorry for DJs, but in this case I actually do. They take way more flak than is deserved. The logic of online activism is such that “accountability” is sought from public figures who seem most reachable—a tactic that suits the people who actually make things happen.

This atmosphere of hyperaccountability has strange consequences. Artists, perhaps feeling the need to always “speak out,” are beginning to attach current affairs with conspiratorial significance to an ever-growing, all-encompassing theory of power, one that must be resisted.

But I’m not sure how normal people, by which I mean anyone not gorging on Instagram content in airport lounges, are supposed to confront—what was it?—the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire.” On Instagram, an even bigger DJ posted, then deleted, a long-winded, QAnon-adjacent spiel about Epstein. On the grid!

Call me a chopped unc or whatever, but child trafficking isn’t really on the nightlife community to solve. We’re being driven to distraction by awful events over which we have negligible power. In our corner of the world, perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to bring people together for a few hours to forget that.

Why are we still tuning into Techno Twitter?
—first published in No Tags, 2024

In the opening pages of “Tyll” by Daniel Kehlman, the novel’s jester performs to a crowd of villagers somewhere in middle Europe. After singing, dancing, acting and ropewalking to the throng, Tyll goads the audience into taking part, first by daring them to toss their shoes, then insulting them—”you crumb heads”—for their bovine obedience. Using the Musk app is not unlike the experience of those townsfolk, where I am by turns entertained and berated by shitposters I barely know. Yet there I remain, gawping peasantly at the circus.

People often wonder why The Discourse has become so toilet. A few have already written great essays about this; P.E. Moskowitz refers to the “secular puritanism” espoused by those who habitually assume moral superiority over others. For me, one overlooked aspect of the televangelising that prevails on X is the way in which the speculative hyperbole and outrage of tabloid newspapers and right-wing talk radio neatly traces the apparent instincts of users who’d sooner self-immolate than be seen reading The Sun or watching Fox News.

What’s this got to do with tunes? Well, exactly. We just used to, like, talk about them—specifically, in messageboards like Dubstep Forum and I Love Music. For the last few years those conversations have migrated to a place we sometimes call “Techno Twitter.” But it’s long been clear that the chat about music there is about as essential as a lobotomy. One memorable shocker, from a producer I won’t name, was the suggestion that noughties dance music was “bleeaaakkkk”; I, for one, will not tolerate bad language in this microhouse.

Techno Twitter has its uses. On a good day it speaks truth to power. And as an ersatz Freudian superego, it probably keeps the industry’s lowlifes on edge. But too often the public conversation about sensitive issues—those that require not only “nuance” (bleurgh) but, more broadly, adult behaviour—is hijacked by eggy accounts or self-elected local cancellers with no special expertise or intel to speak of. It’s also difficult to take a poster seriously when the lingua franca is therapyspeak and the Twitter handle is Dildo Baggins.

Not that messageboards were the apex of human achievement. An authority acquired through logging 10,000 hours on Discogs should be held lightly. And, as anyone who spent the noughties hanging out in the Slam forum will tell you, messageboards were themselves awash with bad vibes. But if Charlie Brooker’s right and Twitter is basically a video game, playing it well means adopting an aggy Darwinian posting style concerned less with sharing knowledge with like minds than presenting the illusion of it to no one in particular.

When I was in the Slack channels at RA a colleague had opened a thread called “shitstorm.” It had been set up for senior editors to talk through social media drama and consider how to respond, if at all. For a time it was an essential sounding board. But, gradually, it became a twitchy alert system for any negative tweet about RA, mostly from the same few accounts. I said at the time that I wasn’t sure it was healthy to be so consumed by posters whose goal was not to offer constructive criticism but to scold the magazine to death.

I thought about that period when I came across a recent study in Psychological Science, which aimed to explain an element of political polarisation in the States. By comparing the responses of X users and members of the public to the tweets of US senators, researchers found an odd discrepancy: while the general public preferred bipartisan tweets, they admitted that they’d be more likely to fall in line with prolific X users’ bias for what researchers call “dismissing” tweets when using the platform.

It’s easy to imagine how that’s shaped Techno Twitter’s tunelessly combative style; even DJ friends of mine who know better slip all too comfortably into “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but.” But whatever X’s effect on its users, it remains detached from reality. What’s more, too many ostensibly professional people—worst of all, shiftless editors who commission stories based on views sourced exclusively from X—have lost sight of where the village ends and the carnival begins. A simple solution comes to mind: shall we try another tent?

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to lately.

READING

• The world’s worst journalist – Hannah Gold [Harper’s]

• God, ULEZ and Emmanuel Frimpong – James Sharp [The Fence]

• How politics went hyper – Anton Jäger [The New Statesman]

• A messy evening with Bassvictim – Kieran Press-Reynolds [Pitchfork]

• How Russian brainrot became a hit for children [The Economist]

LISTENING

• Kinshasa In Action – KINACT [Nyege Nyege Tapes]

• Yoyi – Grupo Los Yoyi [Mr Bongo]

• Unreleased Works ‘94 – ‘97 – Susumu Yokota [Transmigration]

• Mirrors – DJ Sundae [EPSM Institute]

• Marty Supreme OST – Daniel Lopatin [A24]

Subscribe now

Early in Vincenzo Latronico’s formally excellent novel, Perfection, Tom and Anna, a pair of digital nomads from “Southern Europe” living in Berlin, describe Tempelhof Feld as “the true essence” of the city: “five kilometres of pure potential.” The former airport, which in 2014 Berliners voted to protect from property development, is a blissed-out civic limbo—kites fly, spliffs burn, plans drift. There’s nothing to do and everything to gain.

But, forever on the threshold of Dyonisian promise, Tom and Anna go through Perfection in a state of itchy dissatisfaction. As freelance designers, they’ve grown up believing “that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.” Tom and Anna are in thrall to this idea. They’re happy with their sex life, for example, until the possibility arises that it might pale in comparison: “Shouldn’t they fuck more often, come harder?”

Perfection sends up the homogenous tastes of millennials like Tom and Anna by taking apart the phantom rivalries that instigate these constant updates. Someone, somewhere, is doing the same thing they are, but “better,” with an Olympian sophistication glimpsed in the pages of Architectural Digest. They are under the thumb of their algorithmically mediated idea of aspiration, and oblivious to the ways in which it shapes them.

Latronico’s authorial voice adopts a reporter’s register, or what Georges Perec, writing a similar book which influenced Latronico’s, described as a “passionate coldness.” Perec’s 1965 novella, Things: A Story Of The Sixties, follows another couple, the market researchers Jérôme and Sylvie, who fall under harsher scrutiny. “They tended to be on edge, tense, avid, almost jealous. Their love of wellbeing, of higher living standards, came out most often as an idiotic kind of sermonising.”

What Perfection gestures towards Things states plainly. (You sense a necessary hesitancy on Latronico’s part to be as explicit as Perec for fear of mimicking Things’ waspish sting.) Like Latronico’s contemporary Berliners, Jérôme and Sylvie’s interest in the arts is superficial, but Perec cuts deeper about their assimilation to a professional field of “mannerisms that make the right impression.” Sylvie likes to quote the names of social scientists “of whose works they have read not three pages.”

What all these characters share is a spiritual void that a contented life may ordinarily occupy. Their ephemeral work plays a part—in different ways they are all employed in what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.” With an apposite lack of introspection, they try to fix their ennui by going elsewhere. Jérôme and Sylvie leave Paris for Sfax, in Tunisia, while Tom and Anna try Sicily, then Lisbon. Their baggage follows.

So what’s wrong? Latronico gets to the heart of it. Tom and Anna’s friendships, exclusively with fellow expats, are “precarious and brittle”—no memorable people or conversations interrupt their hermetic life together. If Perfection has a flaw, it’s that the invisibility of other people, set against Tom and Anna’s onanistic longing, becomes a drag; sharp commentary is no guarantee against numbing effect. It’s hard to summon enthusiasm for the fortunes, potential or otherwise, of screen-flicking bores.

What compounds the reader’s distance from Tom and Anna is their glib relationship with whatever lies beyond their screens. They glide through clubs and galleries for no better reason than to be there. Their interest in the city’s art scene, though they describe it as the “pulse of their life in Berlin,” is contingent: “Over time they might have learned how to talk the talk, but Anna and Tom were aware that they didn’t actually ‘get it’.”

Perfection ably captures a post-Airspace era in which fourth-wave coffee shops convinced us to accept second-rate culture. In Clive Martin’s piece for Vice about “Normans,” he describes a style tribe whose gauche habits Tom and Anna would surely turn their noses up at. But a couple that prizes the quotidian luxuries of an Uber Eats membership is not so removed from Martin’s Hinge-swinging, queue-for-pizza hyperfoodies in their Erasmusised Berlin.

By coincidence the first book I read after Perfection was This Is Memorial Device, a novel by David Keenan published in 2017, and it struck me as a magic counterfactual to Tom and Anna’s existential discontent. It’s a glimpse of the hopeless devotions that may already scan to nostalgic TikTokers like an offline fairytale—one in which, as Andrew Weatherall described it, “people created beautiful, beguiling art because the punk rock aftershock had democratised it.”

This Is Memorial Device is a “hallucinated oral history” of an ‘80s Airdrie post-punk group of the same name. We’re introduced first to Ross Raymond, Keenan’s fictional chronicler, who explains that he wrote it “to stand up for Airdrie,” a maligned town in the west of Scotland. Memorial Device’s guitarist, Big Patty, lives on “the worst street in Airdrie, the most boarded-up street in Airdrie, the street that effective announces it is all over for Airdrie.”

Here’s Ross, a little later, walking to a house to meet Lucas Black, the band’s otherworldly frontman, or perhaps frontbeing: “I put my Walkman on and listened to ‘Dirt’ on Fun House on the way over. Iggy was a genius. It never sounded better. My entire body was vibrating with the music and the Buckie and the sunshine. When I got there the place looked like a dumping ground. The garden was a mess, there was trash all over the front grass and there was a filthy caravan parked in the driveway.”

The group itself casts an elliptical spell. We hear from Andrea Anderson, who recalls an affair with the band’s enigmatic bassist, Mary Hanna (”impossible to get to know"), and a rehearsal under a railway arch—”The whole room would shake with this industrial noise”—that opens up a portal in Andrea’s mind vivid enough that it inspires her to paint a landscape and present it to Lucas. (His girlfriend, sneering at this earnest gift, nearly starts a fight.)

The stories about Memorial Device—the folk tales—are the point. The novel is not so much about the music at the time as its lifelong reverberations. Between asides on beer (“You don’t crush your can when you finish drinking it? What’s that about?”) and IPA that tastes like melon juice and the word “plamf,” Miriam McLuskey, billed as Big Patty’s “secret sidekick” and interviewed by Ross, says this about one Memorial Device gig:

“… he had this whole thing where he acted as if he had exhausted songs, he shrugged and he shivered and he cried—it was like rockabilly to me—and then he went into this thing where he started spouting nonsense… and that’s when it struck me. He was singing about nothing. It’s the only thing that songs haven’t been written about. D’you get me? And it was like a love song… a song to something that was so lacking in love that even the mention of its name would bring it back to life and we would all notice it and fall in love with it like a prom queen or a movie star.”

In Keenan’s novel, a perfect photo negative of Perfection, obsession is an interior pursuit that leaves the concrete outsides of North Lanarkshire unloved and unkempt. Its inhabitants are too busy with Albert Camus and the Pop Group and Leigh Bowery; with Airfix models and DIY volcanos and performing magic. The drabness of Airdrie, perhaps, is an aid to the imagination; its council flats and flowerless gardens are also a useful repellant.

“Everyone else thinks it’s a dump; a horror show; an asylum,” writes David Kilpatrick, former guitarist with Chinese Moon (again, not a real band). “That just serves to keep out the curious.” Its inhabitants, meanwhile, are a motley crew comprised of “the least responsible workers; the slackest teachers; the most committed intellectuals; the oddest astronomers; the most obsessive collectors; the most serious amateurs; and of course the greatest failures.”

These “originally weird” characters’ preoccupations, enjoyed from “solitary bedsits” and “grim flats,” propel them to fates of varying strangeness: pop stardom, careers in porn, running off to the Levant. As Perec describes Jérôme and Sylvie pursuit of a better standard of living as singularly exhausting to them, it’s especially striking that so many of Keenan’s artists and chancers, no matter how many power lines they topple or cement bags they fill, are tirelessly on the sniff for an intellectual high.

Hand-wringing about gentrification is a dull habit of self-inoculation. But Perfection shows us how market forces, once they do their work on real estate, muscle in on our interior selves. And while it may be tempting to romanticise This Is Memorial Device’s heedless cast as icons of ungroomable authenticity, few of them are necessarily immune to a softer way of living—Big Patty ends up in Paris, “eating these pyramids of goat’s cheese and drinking all this wine (and buying new plants and art supplies).”

What feels most alive about This Is Memorial Device is its militancy about distinction, if not for art then a way of being with a logic that is accented and internal, not placeless and algorithmic. It’s one thing not to care. But to rub along by kidding on that you do amounts, in Keenan’s Airdrie, to an unthinkable social crime.

Tom and Anna’s obsession with possibility—actually, their inability to meet the moment when it becomes tangible—reminds me of what must be the most famous page of any punk fanzine: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” If perfection is the enemy of the good, potential is no friend to commitment, either.

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to since forever.

I’m a dismal contributor to list season. I wrote a few blurbs for RA’s 25-year best-of rollout, which I loved doing—links to tracks, records and mixes here btw—but I am totally lost about which records came out this year that were good or not. In a period of peak demand, I realise this is totally unsatisfying—so I’ve made a list of my favourite records ever, below a few things I’ve enjoyed writing and reading recently.

READING

• The goon squad – Daniel Kolitz [Harper’s]

• Tupac Shakur: Lion or loser? – Dorian Lynskey [New Statesman]

• Some people can’t see mental images. The consequences are profound – Larissa MacFarquhar [New Yorker]

• The empty soul of Britain’s Palm Springs – Miles Ellingham [The Dispatch]

• Where should Britain hide its nuclear waste? – Ray Philp [The Economist]

• A theory of dumb – Lane Brown [New York]

LISTENING

• LP5 – Autechre

• Fabriclive 36 – James Murphy & Pat Mahoney

• Come Visit The Big Bigot – Severed Heads

• Whichever Way You Are Going You Are Going Wrong – Woo

• The Pavillion Of Dreams – Harold Budd

• Pagan Tango – Chris & Cosey

• Supreme Clientele – Ghostface Killah

• Entertainment! – Gang Of Four

• Warp – New Musik

• Straight Up Detroit Shit (Vol 1-5) – DJ Assault

• Pier & Loft – Hiroshi Yoshimura

• Camino Del Sol – Antena

• The Surgeon Of The Nightsky… – Jon Hassell

• Forever Changes – Love

• Seigen – Seigen Ono

• Vasco – Ricardo Villalobos

• Dancin’ & Prancin’ – Candido

• The Noise Made By People – Broadcast

• Entering Again – Colin Potter

• Chas Jankel – Chas Jankel

• 風のオアシスII～森と水の物語～ – Takashi Kokubo

• My Government Is My Soul – Bourbonese Qualk
  

A sentiment that may pass for an endangered species: I feel sorry for DJs. In the era of the "multi-hyphenate"—the first and last time you'll see a shocker like that in this newsletter—DJs are moonlighting to get ahead. Getting a dance floor going, turning out bangers—what once amounted to a career is now minimum viable product. So the side hustles proliferate: podcasting, visual art, film scores, graphic design, writing (back off), therapy, kebabs, and—brace position!—"content creation."

In the spirit of empathy, I’ve enlisted a few of my favourite writers—AKA the ones who filed in response to my pleading emails—to cover for the pros. Seven scribes, plus me, have chosen an emergency track—something they'd be willing to put their fists through some glass for—if a make-believe gig was going south, which, given our self-doubting nature, it invariably would. But as far as I can tell from their selections, you’d be in good hands, inexpert (and bloody) though they may be.

—

Tom Lea, co-host of No Tags and ex-editor of FACT

As someone who spent my twenties DJing at a fairly ropey but always fun bar in Camden every Friday night, I know that the best DJs have spent a good chunk of their 10,000 hours playing to unforgiving bar crowds who’ll vote with their feet the second you play a dud. You’ll learn more about reading rooms and instinctive DJing in those spots than you ever will smashing out techno at fabric. Anyway, this is all to say that Justin Timberlake’s "Señorita" has never failed me in my life—for extra garnish, loop the acapella call-and-response section and slam in the intro to Missy Elliott’s "Work It" underneath. Works every time. When it comes to "cool" DJ gigs, the closest thing I’ve known is the late-2000s bootleg of Lighter’s "Skanker" and Masters at Work’s "Work." If this doesn’t save a dance floor then it’s simply not worth saving I’m afraid.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: I'd love to say something about daring blends of styles and genre, but the older I get the more I've realised there's a very precise correlation between the amount of mid-'00s Karizma records I play and how well my sets go—so let's just say it sounds like that.

• Subscribe to Tom’s Local Action newsletter here, and listen to a DJ set

Max Pearl, writer at the Guardian, New York Magazine and the Baffler

I've mostly stopped DJing clubs, but I'm always down to play friends' weddings—because I love them, yes, but also because I can't bear watching some rental DJ do the usual crowd-pleasers. Over the years, I’ve compiled about seven hours of songs that won't scare grandma but also won't make me groan, and Earth, Wind & Fire’s "Brazilian Rhyme (Danny Krivit Edit)" is the ultimate multi-generational banger. It’s got this smoldering intro that can mix out of anything, which makes it perfect for reviving the mood.

How I’d describe my DJing, when it’s going well: Ideally shirts are being taken off and waved in the air. Or if it’s a wedding, at least all the way unbuttoned.

• Read Max's newsletter, Separator, and listen to a DJ set

Ed Caesar, staff writer at the New Yorker

"Enjoy," by Iron Curtis & Johannes Albert. The tune has this echoey repetition of the single, titular word over drums, and amid a swelling ocean of arpeggio and gorgeous organ. Six years ago, at about 3 AM in a dark and overcrowded room at DC-10, in Ibiza, Mano Le Tough played "Enjoy" in the middle of one of the best sets I've ever heard. The roof nearly came off. Right time, right place, right tune, and now, the right memory. There are in our existence spots of time, as Wordsworth said. This was one such spot. I only have to hear the opening notes and I'm happy.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: My DJing is inexpert, heartfelt, and relies too heavily on the loop function.

• Read Ed's most recent piece, for Esquire, here

Philip Sherburne, editor at Pitchfork

Forgive me if my pick seems too glaringly obvious, but my no-fail get-out-of-jail-free card is "DJ Safety Track," released by Diego Herrera under his Suzanne Kraft alias in 2016. I can only imagine it earned the on-the-nose title after getting the American-born DJ out of more than a few holes of his own. A bumpy, low-slung house track with a low end like a blown speaker cone and a jaunty M1 organ line, it really does have an uncanny ability to turn around the energy of a flagging set. Curiously, it’s not particularly energetic; the tape-warped chords and FM chimes are balmily Balearic, and the drums do the bare minimum to sketch out the groove. But I’ve dropped it multiple times when I just couldn’t figure out where I wanted a set to go, and every time it’s pulled the dance floor under its heads-down spell. I suspect a lot of the magic has to do with its syncopated bass drum, which kicks like a mule; even though the rest of the track is fairly laid back, that muscular punch supplies the necessary oomph to start building the set back up from there. And as someone who tends to go blank when it comes to remembering song titles in the thick of the mix, "DJ Safety Track" is so self-evident, it might as well be a little red hammer ensconced behind glass.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: A little bit punchy, a little bit moody, and a little bit trippy, with an eye on the long game—but also not above the occasional cheeky serotonin hit.

• Read Philip's newsletter, Futurism Restated, and listen to his most recent DJ set

Holly Dicker, journalist and author of Dance Or Die: A History Of Hardcore

I learnt to mix during one of those lull periods in life. I mixed UKG, performing my first public set on the steps of my mate’s house as part of the million street parties kicking off in Britain for the royal wedding in 2011. Five days later I landed in Berlin, beginning my career in music, and never thought about DJing again. Fast-forward a decade to a world in crisis. I’m now in Rotterdam, and mixing again, just to get through this. I return to UKG, pairing the hits of my teenage youth to the uni bass music and Berlin bunker techno that paved my raving route to Gabberland. I open my first (and last) proper club set—at Worm in between lockdowns—with Daniel Bedingfield’s "Gotta Get Thru This" because, fuck, I was terrified. But I was gonna get through this. Four painful years of writing Dance Or Die followed, where I gave up everything else: friends, family, music, people. I went through the lowest lows. But then I would blast this tune on YouTube, and suddenly I could get through this.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: It clangs, but it also bangs.

• Buy Holly's new book, Dance Or Die: A History of Hardcore, and listen to a recent DJ set here

Chal Ravens, co-host of No Tags and head of audio at Novara

I can't say I've needed to rescue too many sets—my mates know my taste and seem to like it, and among a cluster of DJ friends who specialise in the stranger ends of dub, disco and Balearica, I tend to bring the faster, tuffer, sort of 'nuum selections. If anything, I'm too ready to give people what they want: more garage classics than strictly necessary, too many songs per hour, and an alter ego set consisting of half-forgotten Y2K radio hits. But in a party situation where the dancers know your records, I'd say the way to rescue a sagging crowd is to stop playing bangers—counterintuitive!—and give the room a breather while digging into the trackier corners of my house crates. Then I'd probably go for something with a bit of "music," as DJ Storm would say—a songlike composition that people probably don't know but that might sweep them away. I'll go for 4Hero's "Hold It Down (Bugz In The Attic Co-operative Remix)," which I heard Scratcha play once and thought, woah, that'll be useful. Big beautiful broken beats for the sweat gang at the front, a soaring singalong chorus, perfectly balanced masc-femme energies—works like a charm.

• Listen and subscribe to No Tags, and read Chal’s recent piece about Art Of Noise’s “Moments In Love” on Resident Advisor

Tom Faber, culture and technology writer at the Financial Times and the New York Times

The track I've been playing recently to save dance floors is the chaotic mash-up track "Funeral" by Sigfrida on the underrated Low Income $quad label. Often when people are leaving the dance floor I'm left wondering whether I should be going harder, cheesier, or just keep ploughing my own furrow and trust they'll return in good time. This track does everything at once, with a switch-up every 30 seconds, rave sirens and piano stabs, bait vocal samples, and a gloriously elastic bassline drop that always gives me shivers. It's pure joy. And you can go anywhere afterwards.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: One left turn after another.

• Read Tom's work here, including a recent piece about Leigh Bowery for the New York Times

Ray Philp, writer at GQ Magazine, The Economist and The Fence

Years ago I was DJing at a warehouse afterparty in Glasgow; my pal and I were the first DJs people would see coming from a festival called Electric Frog (appalling name for an event). At doors open the dance floor filled up straight away, like that Slam Tent video from T In The Park a lifetime ago. But what really struck terror into our soft hearts was when, not five minutes after, a shirtless man with bulging traps screamed at us to "play some fuckin' tech-nohhh!!!" (He might've been to see Len Faki at the festival, and how the fuck do you compete with that.) We assumed we'd be playing to nobody so I thought I was being very smart by opening with this Reagenz tune: subtle, sophisticated, and as useful then as a silk scarf in a knife fight.

Anyway, we had to go up the gears or get booted off, so we worked our way up to playing "Loneliness" by The Conservatives, and I swear that track—imagine, if you will, an Italo A-side in a North Face puffer—has pulled me out of so many trenches. In more intimate settings I've often played an edit of Juliane Werding's "Grossstadlichter," a kind of heroic German schlager disco track, but you have to mix it with the right thing or it doesn't pop, and I've found that a sparkly Model 500 number will usually do it.

How I'd describe my DJing, when it's going well: Poundland Optimo, half-price sale. (Love you, Keith and Jonnie.)

• Subscribe to The Fence to read a recent piece about Britain's doomsday preppers, and listen to a not-recent DJ set here

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to these past few months.

LISTENING

• Axis Of Love - Eighth Ray [Emotional Rescue]

• Native Dancer - Wayne Shorter & Milton Nascimiento [Columbia]

• Pick Up The Flow - Model 500 [Metroplex]

• DJ Harvey b2b Andrew Weatherall - RA 1000

• Στoν Eλaιώνa / Ston Elaióna - John Also Bennett [Shelter Press]

• JD Twitch - RA 087

• Message From Home - Pharaoh Sanders [Music On Vinyl]

• Salutes Mix: Optimo - BBC6 Radio

READING

• How music criticism lost its edge - Kelefah Sanneh [New Yorker]

• The sick town of England - Jacob Furedi [New Statesman]

• The man who invented Shoreditch - Will Buckley [The Fence]

• Margaux Blanchard, the journalist who didn’t exist - Jacob Furedi [The Dispatch]

• RFK, Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the revolt against expertise - Daniel Immerwahr [The New Yorker]
  

KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity (PE) firms, is headquartered at 30 Hudson Yards, a skyscraper with a Family Guy underbite. The glass jaw that protrudes from the tower has hosted some less-than-knockout music—Edge, as the observation platform is called, has borne the weight of a packed Martinez Brothers party and Tiesto’s singular ego. But PE and club culture are far cosier than a few naff gigs on a skydeck. And when KKR describes its mission as “unlocking potential, securing futures, [and] delivering outcomes,” this corporate language also resembles how dance music talks about itself.

Last year, KKR paid another PE firm $1.3 billion for Superstruct Entertainment, which owns more than 80 festivals—a roster that includes Sónar, Brunch Elektronik, Field Day, Sziget and Awakenings. Then, in January, Superstruct acquired Boiler Room from the event ticketing business Dice for an undisclosed sum. For the past few months, these facts have surfaced, disappeared, then surfaced again on Instagram’s 24-hour doom carousel as part of a boycott campaign against KKR investments alleged to enable illegal Israeli settlements and Canadian fossil fuel projects on First Nations land.

A digital network of nightlife activists—the Instagram account Ravers For Palestine is the most high-profile, with nearly 24,000 followers—argue that DJs who perform at festivals or platforms linked to KKR are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, more than 52,000 of whom have died since October 7th. A number of artists, including 8ULENTINA, Animistic Beliefs, Beatrice M., Ikonika, Juliana Huxtable, Midland and Rosa Terenzi have followed this guidance and dropped Superstruct gigs. The few artists and collectives who have publicly dissented argue that working with Boiler Room does not contradict BDS and PACBI guidance.

One aspect of this story that is little discussed is the extent to which PE has established a controlling interest in our lives. In the UK alone, it is becoming a cradle-to-grave service, reaping profit from nurseries and nursing homes alike. Private equity has a stake in gas supplies, prescriptions, office lunches, many shit chain pubs, half the Premier League, and every David Bowie record ever. KKR was recently announced as the preferred bidder for Thames Water, itself a particularly disastrous example of private stewardship; how do I distance myself from my tap water?

The latest IMS Business Report points out that the global electronic music industry is worth nearly $13 billion. Clubs and festivals continue to make most of that money, though PE investment also spans artist agencies, audio equipment and music production software. That figure, however, is not nearly as impressive as it sounds. Within the ruthless logic of “value creation,” the cumulative joy of every extant dance floor experience is only about as important as Grammarly, the glorified spellchecker. PE’s presence in dance music is, in a real sense, marginal to its own interests.

There should be less doubt around PE’s impact on club culture. If, following the typical model of a leveraged buyout, a purchased business is loaded with debt as part of the financing for the deal, then the bottom line is that a party that is Russian dolled into that ownership structure will get more expensive. More insidious still, as Resident Advisor’s Nyshka Chandran describes it, is the prospect of “decreased cultural diversity,” which could mean more lineup overlaps between festivals owned by the same group, or that an upstart rival is bought out, then given a pair of concrete shoes and tossed in the river.

As Ed Gillett points out in Party Lines, hedge fund money also breeds desperation. In 2019, a Boiler Room executive had emailed Aaron Clark, the Pittsburgh-based cofounder of the queer party collectives Honcho and Hot Mass, proposing that he organise a branded party—nothing unusual, except that Boiler Room wouldn’t film it, and Clark would have to pay a “brand fee” for using their logo. At this point, the company was struggling to turn a profit; reading between the lines, a scheme this stupid could only have emerged either from an especially dim bulb or an ultimatum from corporate: our investors want to see a return, or else.

If, in the 2010s, there was a manageable tension between club music and big business—Red Bull Music Academy, for which I wrote, emulated a kind of Medici patronage of young artists until, suddenly, it didn’t—the relationship now feels far less equitable. We’d grown to believe, perhaps, that the taboo of selling out was archaic. But in the digital activism that has coalesced around KKR, a new kind of anti-commercial sentiment is emerging. While the onus has been placed on artists to accept or decline the call to boycott, another, less visible group has escaped censure: talent agencies.

In a recent Instagram story, an independent label owner I know well said, “When there’s no small promoters or clubs left, please let’s not forget just how responsible some of these booking agents are.” This echoes a criticism espoused by the New York nightlife entrepreneur Nicolas Matar about the downstream effects of soaring artist fees. If unscrupulous agents bear some responsibility for pumping the system with enough cash to attract the gaze of PE, it’s not clear to me that this largely invisible layer of the DJ business infrastructure is being scrutinised sufficiently.

Talent agencies can present other ethical dilemmas. The CEO of Wasserman, for example, is a donor to right-wing Israeli causes—in 2019, Casey Wasserman gave $525,000 to the Friends of the Israeli Defence Force (FIDF) towards an “outdoor athletic centre.” Across 2022 and 2023, he donated $50,000 to the Israeli Emergency Alliance, an advocacy group that has stifled pro-Palestine sentiment and promoted an expansive and disputed definition of antisemitism. I mention this not because I want the eye of Sauron to swivel onto Wasserman artists. But it illustrates how entangled DJs are in other people’s financial decisions.

Earlier on I mentioned complicity. In a UK legal sense, proof of complicity requires the active participation in the planning, if not execution, of an offence. By this measure, it’s unclear how Superstruct organisations, once removed from KKR ownership, could be said to have supported, much less had a say, in KKR’s investment portfolio. But the fact remains that they are now, as the Latin etymology of the word describes, “folded together.” Boiler Room, to their credit, has made clear that they’re unhappy passengers. Statements from Field Day and Sónar resemble, by contrast, the creepily opaque argot of B2B marketing.

What makes Boiler Room’s case especially tricky to untangle is that PACBI recently “welcomed” their public statement, thereby creating a narrow pathway through which Superstruct businesses could exculpate themselves. Campaigners including Ravers For Palestine and London Creatives Corporate Watchdog, on the other hand, regard this as a form of incrementalism that allows compromised organisations to engage in “BDS-washing.” Disagreements among activist groups pushing for radical change aren’t necessarily untoward. But I get the sense that this line of thinking is driven not so much by political principle as personal disdain.

There’s a school of thought which says that Boiler Room has been under disproportionate scrutiny among the Superstruct stable. I buy that. But, other than the sheer number of rakes that Boiler Room has stepped onto, it has become hopelessly dislikable for reasons that only the literary theorist Raymond Williams could explain: “the structure of feeling” around Boiler Room is of a faceless corporation that erects drilling rigs over culture. The truth, of course, is far more complicated—but in the amoral void of private equity, good intentions are immaterial to profitable returns or the lives that stand in the way.

The Microplastics Digest [special apology edition]

What I’ve been paying attention to—and doing—this past few months.

Before I get into the recommendations, a mea culpa: my absence between posts have grown ever larger this year (first post in 2025 and we’re nearly halfway—awful). But I have been busy. Let me count the ways…

• Take No Prisoners by Keith Robinson [Velocity Press]
  I wrote the epilogue for the late, great Keith Robinson’s extraordinary life story, which took him across the illegal rave scene in Glasgow, driving a sound system to Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan War, the European free party circuit, and multiple tours of Afghanistan as a TA soldier. It also contains a long, never-before-published Q&A with him that formed the basis of a profile I wrote ten years ago for RBMA, which likely remains the best piece I’ll ever write. Take No Prisoners is out next month on Velocity Press, and is available to pre-order now.

• Sandwell District - End Beginnings [Pitchfork]
  For Pitchfork, I reviewed Sandwell District’s new album, which I was expecting to like but, well—look, bro, just read the review, OK, bro, because I agonised for days, bro, over getting the Ajax analogy right (thanks again, ) and, bro, the intro about expensive rocks and fake bathrooms, c'mon bro, please clap, OK.

• AOB #1

  I’ve got this piece for Pioneer about listening bars and why they’re suddenly everywhere. I’m late to the game, but one reason the piece is strong enough to mention is because I spoke to Nick Dwyer about the longer-than-you’d-think history of ongaku kissa; he’s released an excellent documentary, A Century In Sound, that gets to the heart of it all.

• AOB #2

  You’ll find a story of mine in the next issue of The Fence; the reporting entailed spending a day in South Wales looking at knives and crossbows, and either side of that I hung out a lot in an especially conspiratorial corner of YouTube. From the research I undertook, I’d recommend Bradley Garrett’s Bunker, an invaluable book.

  ---

LISTENING

• House Of God - Tony Morris [Optimo Music]

• Edison Machado & Boa Nova - Edison Machado [Far Out Recordings]

• Junk - Bryon Gysin [WeWantSounds]

• A.I.É - Le Compagnie Créole [Pardonnez-nous]

• Sirius Syntons - Lindstrøm [Smalltown Supersound]

READING

• Art In The After-Culture - Ben Davies [Haymarket Books]

• Hotel Britannica - Anonymous [The Fence] (this alone is worth subscribing for)

• The Gen X Career Meltdown - Steven Kurutz [The New York Times]

• The Invention Of Mood - Peter Saville (in conversation with Jack Self) [Real Review]

• Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out The Washington Post? - Claire Malone [The New Yorker]

DONATING

• Medical Aid For Palestinians

• Palestinian Red Crescent Society

• gofundme (search “Palestine”)

Early in the novel Moon Juice Stomper, by the DJ Ray Castle, an everyman raver called Jules is in a Goan restaurant ringing a friend in Australia, telling him that “the most vile fun is being had” and that he’d better get himself over there. The parties, he says, represent “the wildest edge of experience,” peopled by “tribal warriors,” “galactic star divers” and “laser cowboys,” all engaged in a “cosmic conspiracy” in which “all kinds of crazies [are] gettin’ down.”

What Castle is describing, in one of the novel’s more sober passages, is the stage for what he calls “special Goa music.” But what that means to whom, exactly, is a generational question. Since the late ‘60s, Goa has been a bacchanalian Mecca for wanderers and seekers who’d reached the end of the so-called Hippie Trail, whether they’d come for the “high hippie music” of, say, the Grateful Dead or the “machine-gun music”—the kind with Roland drum machines—that followed.

When the DJs replaced the bands at the centre of Goa’s sandy stages, the wind and heat compelled them to mix with tapes instead of records. But the hostile weather had a big upside: it created more space for edits, shaping a recognisably unique sound that avoided vocals (unless spoken) and applied intense rhythmic pressure; though DJs in Goa often did the edits themselves, the San Francisco remix service Razormaid! was also emblematic of the freaky Goa style.

The subject of three recent compilations, by the labels Sound Migration and Full Circle, is the Goa scene’s initial bursts of industrial, new beat, synth pop and proto-techno records during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. What’s worth noting here is the scarcity of “trance”—as in “Goa Trance”—from the compilations’ titles and liner notes, where the word, when mentioned, is variously dismissed as part of a “catchphrase” and the last exit towards “high-speed oblivion.”

• Gonzo Goa Party Music ‘87-’94 [Sound Migration, 2023]

• Gonzo Goa II Party Music ‘86-’93 [Sound Migration, 2024]

• Kicking Dust: The Goa Way, A Full Circle Compilation [Full Circle. 2024]

In style and sensibility, Kicking Dust and Gonzo Goa instead evoke a kind of naive ecstasy. With the exceptions of Chris & Cosey’s eternally fantastic “Exotika” and Richie Hawtin’s “F.U.2 (Re-edit),” a techno all-timer that drills through the mind’s eye with spirographic perfection, the music often feels intuitive yet not wholly sure of itself. This, to me, suggests a scrappy kind of innovation, where bold ideas emerge in the moment and are held together by little more than crossed fingers.

Only once is the result less than inspiring. On “Dreams (Final Dance),” a straight-to-video Phrygian lead struggles to carry some badly rinsed ‘80s dance music tropes (belch-preset bassline, bad-porn vocal). Your mileage with a few other tracks will depend on your tolerance for the orientalising habits of that era’s European producers—not least Peyote’s “Alcatraz,” a demure prototype for the German duo’s stinking breakthrough hit of 1998, “Power Of American Natives.”

But the margins of success or failure for music that embraces this much risk are remarkably thin. One track that nails the brief, by some miracle, is C.C.C.P.’s “Orient Express.” Its imperiously tasteless synth melody, which resembles nothing so much as a despotic national anthem in a vaporwave hue, honks with farcical pride, underscored by an absolutely hoofing kick drum; a more on-the-nose name for it might’ve been “The Irony Curtain.”

If the music sometimes indulges in taking the piss, other tracks manage to hit some uniquely sinister notes. “You Can Run" (Razormaid Mix),” by 3 Times 6, is a special case in point. Starlit melodies twinkle as though gesturing to our better angels, but the rest of it is wading in filth; vile fun indeed. There are Giallo screams, Mortal Kombat-adjacent taunts, and a frankly evil bassline that sounds like a gang of wasps having a big one at Alton Towers.

With artists like Jah Wobble and Psyche among the other contributors, there’s serious pedigree here. People do bang on a lot about the early ‘90s as a great time for dance music, but Gonzo Goa and Kicking Dust illustrate exactly why the case is made so forcefully. And yet I’ve rarely heard compilations from that era that feel this essential. Besides being exceptional, the compilations also share the explicit belief that by 1994 the belle époque was done. I was curious: why?

***

One track across the compilations has given me chills whenever I listen, and it’s Syntech’s “Discontented.” Few records I’ve come across have earned the right to be called “epic” quite like “Discontented,” whose Weatherall-baiting cosmic acid arpeggiations, arranged with graph paper precision, climb towards a steely prog Italo crescendo. It is magisterial with a touch of the absurd, as though it was music for the coronation of a space cowboy.

in hindsight, “Discontented” also sounds like one of the skeleton keys for whatever turned “special Goa music” into “Goa trance.” By the mid-’90s, Goa-as-concept was everywhere, and the music itself grew in refinement if not ambition. Paul Oakenfold popularised the new sound to a global audience with 1994’s “The Goa Mix,” which combed the industrial grit clean (compare that with Ray Castle’s Goa-themed mix for Sound Metaphors—about as smooth as a sailor’s hands).

A few months after the Oakenfold mix, i-D, the Grim Reaper for things that are cool, ran a Goa feature asking, “Is Trance The New Acid House?” You can see the result of this trend-chasing in a Channel 4 news report from 1995 about what’s billed as the Goa trance scene, though the broadcaster speaks exclusively to promoters and DJs in the UK, all of whom display a conspicuously gaudy, fluoro-syncretic visual style.

On a string of compilations and LPs around that time, Goa trance often looked and sounded like a too-literal copy of the psychedelic style pioneered by DJs like Laurent, Fred Disko and Goa Gil. Sometimes, the music is merely second-rate. Or sounds like white hippie shit. In one especially egregious case it resembles a dark reboot of Inspector Gadget. Worse still, more than a few indulge in gap year kitsch. But the style’s worst trait is that it cannot help getting carried away with itself.

Simon Reynolds once identified the “maximalist” impulse in Goa trance artists like Hallucinogen, but on top of ascribing that to an “absurd generosity” of musical ideas I’d also argue that there’s an unattractive Emerson, Lake & Palmer showmanship at work; I also wonder if there wasn’t an imposter syndrome fuelling this style, an overdetermination to interpret the scene’s transcendent potential from a cohort of artists with fewer first-hand experiences of the Goan hippie myth.

Some Goa trance tunes—Etnica’s “Tribute,” Psychaos’s “They Tried To Grab Me,” Spectral’s “Moonstone” and X-Dream’s “Do You Believe (Sync Mix)”—are actually insanely good. But too often I’ve found flatulent 303 lines that need a Pepto Bismol and a lie down. And because I should stress that I didn’t emerge with this opinion after 30 minutes, I’ve gone through most of the music on this list with open ears but, alas, my third eye shut.

***

Dance music scenes undergo fascinating make-or-break shifts when the emphasis transfers from DJs driving the sound to producers replicating it. In the case of, say, ghettotech, the anthems inspired by the radio blends of Miami bass and sped-up techno helped a style also known as electrofunk become “the indigenous sound of Detroit.” On the other hand, it could go the way of tech house, where the scene is flooded with pap. (I’ve gone deep on both genres for RBMA and RA, respectively.)

Perhaps my hesitation around the Goa trance era is that it falls short of feeling like a lived-in musical culture. But you’d have to wonder about how true that is of the period spanning Gonzo Goa and Kicking Dust. After all, the lives of Indian locals and their relationship to the scene are, with noble exceptions, absent from Western accounts of this music; meanwhile, the few Indian people who appear in Moon Juice Stomper are cast as crooks and worse.

Was Goa itself incidental to the distinctly European and American character of the records, DJs and dancers who got together on Anjuna beach? In Arun Saldanha’s compelling 2007 book, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and The Viscosity of Race, he describes being at a party and witnessing “whites taking up the dance floor in the morning and somehow managing to dispel Indians again and again,” through a mostly implicit set of subcultural rules.

He goes on:

“Why would a white microcosm be re-created if the whole point of going to India and Goa is adventure, escape, becoming different? … Young whites are in Anjuna seemingly to sample and develop a lifestyle quite different from what they’re used to, but the way they do this betrays the limits of their escape and rebellion… an escape from whiteness can perversely reinforce it.”

One of the intriguing ideas Saldanha proposes, besides safeguarding the interests of the local families that benefit from rave tourism, is a “freaking” of whiteness that makes possible the “proliferation of race,” or, in other words, a remixing of Goan party stereotypes: “white chai mamas, Indian deejay celebs, some Bollywood breaks and house alongside the monotonous psytrance, locals teaching the in-crowd to dance.”

Summoning that reality requires a degree of imagination that neither the compilations nor Castle’s autofictional novel—otherwise significant documents of Goa’s dance music heritage—should be responsible for realising. But as it is, their respective portrayals of paradise are by turns idyllic and insufficient; when one of the DJs in Moon Juice Stomper brings up Charanjit Singh, the Indian acid house pioneer, the cursory chat elicits no greater reflection.

In her i-D travelogue the writer Bethan Cole mentions that “Goa the location has become Goa the state of mind.” That strikes me as the scene’s enduring strength. Through a tweaked-out sound that spoke to the cloistered exotica in which ravers found themselves, “special Goa music” feels like a familiar yet unknowable world; a second summer of lust that drove its devotees to ecstasy, madness, paradise—and possibly, once the drugs had worn off, a good job in finance.

The Gonzo Goa Way: further listening

Push! – The Invincible Spirit
Killer Machine – The Laser Cowboys
Space Dance - Laserdance
Outer Space Odyssey - Voltage Control
Space Trouble - Why Not?
Jabdah - Koto
Tune In (Turn On The Acid House) - Psychic TV
Neue Dimensionen - Techno Bert
Program It (Instrumental) - DAF
p:Machinery - Propaganda
A Split Second - Flesh
Addiction - Skinny Puppy
Paranoimia - Art Of Noise
Masterhit (Masterblaster) - Front 242
The Great Divide - Portion Control

”Special Goa Music” mixes

Unveiling The Secret: The Roots Of Trance - Dave Mothersole
Back To Disco Valley - Full Circle
Gonzo Goa Party Music ‘86 - ‘93 Launch Party at Schrippe Hawaii, Berlin - Ray Castle

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.

LISTENING

• Acid House + Medusa’s - Chicago, 1987 - 1992 - Scrappy

• Works - Egberto Gismonti

• Comme de Garçons, Volume 1 - Seigen Ono

• DE9: Closer To The Edit - Richie Hawtin

• Reminiscent Suite - Mal Waldron & Terumasa Hino

READING

• Goldsmiths Realism: How London’s radical university ate itself - Miles Ellingham (The Londoner)

• No Tags: Conversations On Underground Music Culture - Tom Lea & Chal Ravens

• Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann

• Amusing Ourselves To Death - Neil Postman

In 1856, the English naturalist Alfred Russell wrote effusively about a “food of the most exquisite flavour.” Published on the margins of botanical academia, his account of a fruit he’d encountered in Borneo proclaims its “perfectly unique character,” though he went on to say that it also resembled:

“A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds… there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp… which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect.”

He was talking about durian, whose odour is habitually compared to old socks, rotten flesh and raw sewage. All the same, it draws cultish devotion from people who, like Russell, insist on its unsurpassable sensory appeal.

It strikes me that adoring critics of what we might call difficult music face a similarly sticky problem: how to reconcile an intense affinity for prickly art that to almost everyone else sounds like dog shit.

***

In his recent book about Arnold Schoenberg, Harvey Sachs begins with the Austrian composer’s contrite admission to a new acquaintance: “You can see it isn’t easy to get on with me. But don’t lose heart because of that.” It remains a big ask. The experience of Schoenberg’s music is comparable, for me at least, to reading Ulysses in Basque; there are rules that govern his compositions, but the effect on all but the academic’s ear is barely distinguishable from anarchy.

I can’t claim special knowledge of the code that unlocks Schoenberg’s music. There is a flinty pleasure in Pierrot Lunaire, a sensuous and arcane melodrama in which the vocal accompaniment rises and falls with the music in diabolical whirlwinds. But there are other pieces that Sachs himself describes as exhibiting “hyperemotional” qualities (Erwartung); elsewhere, orchestral flourishes amount to “random overkill” (Die glückliche Hand). That’s politespeak for total bobbins.

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I’m not so curious about Schoenberg’s music as I am the revelation that he and other members of the avant garde promise. What rewards await the listener willing to encounter, in C.S. Lewis’s turn of phrase, a “hostile novelty”? And how might we justify the existence of challenging art beyond a selfish interest in it? In Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, a stand-in for Schoenberg, offers a conventionally elitist answer:

“To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.”

The exaggerated stakes, the false note of altruism, the sneer towards normie taste—it’s deliriously petulant. Still, like a fool, I can’t help taking Leverkühn’s side, even if I also wouldn’t be caught dead keeping his kind of company. That’s because I have a funny relationship with experimental music; I am repelled by and attracted to it in the same breath. A lot of the mannerisms that come with it seem freighted with a desperation to be taken seriously. I therefore can’t.

There’s a better argument for art that confronts the limits of established taste. In creative walks of life, there are those who do and those who follow—pioneers and disciples. Then come the chancers and second-raters. These latter groups effect the bloat that swells an inspiring musical style. The self-perpetuating normal that follows, what we come to understand as mediocrity, harasses culture to open the gates to more of itself. What experimental artists do, moreso serving a devotional idealism to art itself than “all men,” is to change the locks.

***

In the introduction to Distinction, a landmark text on taste and cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu describes the “pure gaze,” a mode of perception that situates art as an “autonomous field of artistic production”—that which exists for its own sake. The pure gaze valorises form and style over what art may “mean” or represent. In other words, it makes possible the preference for the cosmic abstractions of Piet Mondrian over, say, this early Dutch still life.

We could say that experimental or underground music encourages this gaze, since the implicit claim among these artists is that whatever the current rules are, they are being broken and redrawn. A familiarity with form is the price of admission. This understanding between artist and audience is secure so long as these evolutions in style are navigable by a community large and devoted enough to follow them.

But as far back as 1969, the writer Hans Stuckenschmidt recognised the fractal predicament that music of the hinterlands faced: “As compositions and styles increasingly deviated from convention and tradition, and as composers pursued ever more some particular principle of style or technique, so the chances of music being comprehended dwindled. The message was dispatched but no longer addressed. At worst, it was a bottle thrown into the sea, its destination unknown.”

If it’s safe to say that there are far more singers, composers, songwriters, et al than there were 55 years ago, then, well, you see the problem. There’s nothing useful to say about whether or not there are too many musicians. But if most working artists today risk being a drop in the ocean, I worry that the consequences for music that deviates from some “norm”—increasingly difficult to establish in the first place as the half-life of novel trends shorten—may be existential.

The music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds has reported on internet scenes that represent a hyper-individualised reproach to what Brian Eno once referred to as “scenius.” In a typical scenario for the world of platform-centric genres, a name for a specific sound has barely circulated (e.g. “sigilkore”) before it’s disowned out of boredom or misappropriated through opportunism. In the semantic vacuum that follows, an emergent musical form is ungraspable for all but the most feed-fried.

A common refrain I hear—most often from fellow music journalists—is that there is more great music than ever before, a fact which should be a source of bottomless gratitude for the plebs. Maybe so. But this embrace of plenitude smells to me like the feckless adoption of free-market logic that places the musical consumer at the centre of the buffet, with no regard for broader situational questions about, say, an artist’s ability to mature at their own speed instead of Daniel Ek’s.

The closing graf in Press-Reynolds’s sigilkore piece gestures to a persistent symptom of musical abundance that I regard as fatally superficial. In short, an obsession with innovation for innovation’s sake, which music journalists—and their successors, playlist curators—routinely overvalue at the expense of artists who are exceptional at the ordinary, and obsessive about craft to the exclusion of everything else—above all, hype.

“I can’t think of a recent scene that successfully named itself and survived more than a year. The fractured structure of the internet makes it difficult for communities to agree on tags—they’re not in a physical space and can’t rally around things like regional pride. The viralscape also discourages musical growth. After an artist gains traction with a microgenre they’ve invented, there are two outcomes: they sign and the label helps them dilute the sound (e.g. hyperpop), or it becomes a ‘type beat’ with endless derivative copies (rage rap, new jazz, etc.)… The scenes are suffocated and formularized before they have a chance to truly evolve.”

***

In Fear Of Music, a 2008 polemic about experimental music’s marginal place in public life, David Stubbs tut-tuts at a parodic tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen by EJ Thribb in Private Eye, which goes like this:

“So, Farewell
Then Karlheinz
Stockhausen.

Famous modern
Composer

All together
Now –

Bing. Bang!
Three-minute silence
Knock. Knock.
Beep.
Plonk.
Bang!
Whirr…

I hope I
Have got
This right.”

As Stubbs mentions other newspapers and magazines that took the piss out of Stockhausen’s work, it occurred to me that there are worse fates in an attention economy than being laughed at. As a side point I notice that music coverage for a long while in the arts pages of newspapers has often amounted to, “RIP, boomer,” or, “We found something on TikTok.” The chasm between these two generational poles of nostalgia and metrics seems increasingly difficult to bridge.

I opened Fear Of Music hoping that it would light the way for me here, but I came away with an, err, unfortunate impression of the author. Stubbs talks up his love of comedy, but is consistently touchy and unfunny about his chosen subject. A number of baffling anecdotes reflect an adolescent snobbery—a story about his dorm at Oxford (yawn) and a woman named Pam makes him resemble not so much the writer of a Monty Python sketch as its hapless subject.

While Fear Of Music fails to satisfy Stubbs’ questions about the public’s preference for challenging visual art over its musical equivalent, he makes a useful observation about the latter’s singular ability to traumatise. If 20th century composers like Stockhausen were defined by dissonance because they sought to reflect the postwar era’s anxieties and disasters, there are countless examples of the contemporary avant-garde operating in a similar register.

But let’s be real—none of that is cutting through. The prevailing mood of this century’s most striking experimental music has been about numbing out: the private nihilisms of The Caretaker, claire rousay and William Basinski on the one hand, and—less impressively—the evocative fake-depth of corecore on the other. (One of my favourites along these lines, which is both conceptually rigorous and nice to listen to, is 106 Kerri Chandler Chords by die Reihe, AKA Jack Callahan.).

***

How, exactly, do you persuade people to try durian?

From personal experience I’d suggest lying about it. Years ago I brought some durian-flavoured sweets into my office at The Scotsman, knowing my colleagues, though sceptical in most situations, would scoff the lot without asking questions. I left a handful by my keyboard and waited for the requests to roll in. “Yeah, help yourself,” I’d say, but I avoided offering them—essential to the ethical success of the mission, which was to laugh without feeling bad.

Anyway, you know the rest. (“Yuck!”; “What the fuck are these!?”; “This isnae mango…”) But sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d left 100 durian sweets on my desk. I might have become the durian-sweet supplier to the chief sub and the rugby correspondent—”I must have more of this most exquisite flavour, pal!”—but probably not before being given the boot for very gross misconduct.

OK, what about this. What if I’d left 100 durian sweets on my desk every day for a month, perhaps as a provision of essential aid amid a national sweet shortage. Would that have led to a four-page supplement about a new Scottish delicacy—”to rank alongside the pungent power of Tikka Masala,” as a hacky phrase from that imagined pull-out may have read—that tastes like ripe banana in a burst nappy? I quit a few months later, my durian scheme unfulfilled.

***

In recent years I’ve nurtured a strong dislike for music in the vein of what Simon Reynolds has called “conceptronica.” I’ll be blunt: when the music isn’t toilet, it still feels like homework. What bothers me about it is the sense that artists in this cohort seem to feel confined by their own medium, perhaps even above it. In that world, an album is not just an album—it is a post-structuralist sci-fi opera about techno-fascism from a multi-hyphenate visionary. OK?

What I object to most, though, is the hard sell that these Ableton essays often represent. Through interviews and onesheets, artists unwittingly pre-digest the experience of the music, squeezing the space for the listener to meet a record on their own terms. The insistence that the work not only be interpreted but received in a particular way is not so much the revenge of the intellect upon art, as Susan Sontag had it, but the revenge of the artist upon audience.

In this context, “experimental music” is a description not of a method of inquiry but of an anti-genre; a set of atomised conventions that dares not describe itself for fear of exposing its clichés (not liking capitalism, expressing that atonally). Fresher ideas are found elsewhere. One example: innovative club tracks from Sao Paolo, Kampala and Mexico City, among other places, complicate the ever more fungible category of experimental music, such that it deserves to be made redundant.

***

A couple of years ago I went to a Zoviet France and Autechre show at the Barbican. I remember feeling very ill and dragging myself out to enjoy-slash-endure this thing. (For reasons long since lost to me, I wrote down “mouse playing violin” and “melodies are illegal” on the Notes app that night.) As the music bore down on me in the dark—Autechre lock the doors and kill the lights during gigs—I felt as though I was swimming in an oil spill.

What struck me about that gig was the whooping and hollering in a seated venue to this not-quite-music. One reason among many that Autechre can draw a reaction like that is that they have, simply, persisted. People stuck with them—no matter how freaky or abrasive the albums became. From 2001’s Confield and beyond, Autechre music—no doubt to the bafflement of the day’s critics—has grown into its own exotic delicacy.

That bafflement may have a simple explanation: Autechre don’t talk endlessly about what their work “means.” It is music, instead, of unfathomable depth and shimmering surface, rendering the material world as an envelope of discovery. That night at the Barbican, I made out bits that resembled collapsing girders, b-boy scratches, glittering constellations—all bent into impossible Butoh figures of texture, rhythm and sound. They captured the imagination by setting it free.

The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.

LISTENING

• Pounding – Frank Bretschneider

• Pagan Tango – Chris & Cosey

• Dust Devil – naemi

• No. 1 In Heaven – Sparks

• Gonzo Goa Pt 1 & 2 – Various Artists

READING

• Larry David’s Rulebook For How (Not) To Live In Society – Wesley Morris (New York Times Magazine)

• I Want A Critic – Andrea Long Chu (New York Review Of Books)

• James Chance, 1953 - 2024 – Lucy Sante (The Baffler)

• Live At The Liquid Room, Tokyo, Jeff Mills – Gabriel Szatan (Pitchfork)

Music criticism is down on itself, but not on the music it reviews. Observant critics have noticed for years that negative reviews have fallen out of fashion. I’ve had similar conversations with colleagues, and each time I felt like we were old vultures circling dry bones, flapping impotently at a situation that had long passed us by. We’d come up with lots of reasons that contributed to the absolute state that music reviewing was in (listed below). But what could we do about it, and what did it mean? 

• Ableton and other DAWs enabled more people to become independent artists—just as consumer spending on physical formats began to tank (and still is)

• The social distance between the artist and critic has grown narrow, as their respective industries have become economically precarious

• A bad review for a new artist or one of modest means—for most websites, that’s most of the artists they cover—became an instance of “punching down”

• When negative reviews are published, the writer, probably a freelancer, is more exposed to negative blowback, including:

  • withdrawal of access (sometimes from PRs, but more often artists, label owners or other lords of clout)

  • an absence of future commissions (if an editor values their access more than the writer’s articulation of a truth they supported enough to publish)

  • labels pulling ads in the wake of a negative review in a magazine, indirectly eroding editorial independence and further damaging writer-magazine relations

  • anime zealots and other Twitter reactionaries frothing to interpret a line or paragraph in the least generous way possible

• Step-by-step YouTube tutorials, together with the advanced functionality of Ableton et al, increased the general competence (and amount) of the music circulating

• Poptimism had cracked the terrain on which certain types of takedown were founded (i.e. a record’s aesthetic value was irrelevant if made by a lousy sellout)

• The reevaluation of pop by critics in the 2010s coincided with an artistic reassessment, upending taste categories by which oldhead reviewers swore

• Streaming neutered the critic’s role as middle-man (and it was usually a man), whose job of describing as-yet-unavailable music was suddenly redundant

• With more music to review, editors like me filtered out the hopelessly mediocre, instead covering artists who felt, by some possibly arbitrary measure, worth it

• The most energetic music criticism has turned away from matters of form towards the streaming business and redressing systemic prejudice

• Twitter has turned everyone into a “cultural critic,” offering what Lyz Lenz has called “cheap clarity” in the mould of “Thread Man” 

And so on. But in light of the layoffs at Pitchfork, I’ve thought less about music criticism itself than the audience it supposedly serves. Yet I keep coming back to this absence of negative reviews, and I’ve come to think these two ideas are in each other’s orbit. 

It’s worth saying what reviews are definitely not. With alarming frequency they remain understood as the arbitrary expression of preference by Some Guy, wordy furniture for a set of stars or a decimal score to live in.

Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s former TV critic, gave my favourite description of her job on this podcast, which was to “perform her opinion.” A music critic is a writer, after all, and we read not only to extract information, but to bloody enjoy it.

What should we expect from good critics? Context, of course, through diligent research and imaginative recombination (though there is such a thing as too much, to the extent that it smothers the subject under the weight of history).

If we’re lucky, we get prose that is itself capable of musical quality; on reading David Toop’s “Ocean Of Sound” years ago, I felt the text cast a strange synasthesic spell, as though I was reading perfume and melody on the page. 

We should also hope that our critics are generous—specifically about intentions and sensibility, a willingness to follow the artist’s logic as well as theirs. Good work has the humility to interrogate its own assumptions, maybe even argue with itself. 

(The child inside does, however, miss the old puerility, like a review of The Kooks in Stylus Magazine, written as an oily exchange between the band’s manager and their label, or that infamously Duchampian Pitchfork review of Jet’s Shine On.)

But the most powerful gesture available to a critic is to say hold on, or, sometimes, no. Drawing those lines represents a passion for music that has firm limits, making it all the more sincere and heartfelt. (RIP Neil Kulkarni, a model critic in this way.)

How would you define a negative review? Let me be clear that I’m not talking only about an old-school pasting; I mean any review that expresses disappointment, scepticism, mixed feelings or ambiguity.

Writing that reflects accurately the experience of encountering music—however intangible and tricky to articulate—is one that readers will always connect with. But reviews today often fail to convey that complexity of affect. 

Here are some reviews, though, that I think successfully span the emotional range I’m describing:

• Lost Lovesongs / Lovesongs Pt 2 - DJ Healer

• Hit Parade - Roisin Murphy

• LP5 - Apparat

• Moon - The Area Of Influence - Jeff Mills**

When no is said, it’s often towards an artist whose politics, whether articulated or inferred, is found repugnant. Fine by me. I think it’s funny when people, once an artist shows their arse, issue themselves a purity certificate. (“I never liked them!”)

What I also notice are inverse situations where bang-average music is fig-leafed by a story that is too nice to knock, or a cause too important to tear down. How should today’s critic navigate this, if at all? 

Like a dentist doing root canal. Unpleasant work, and professionally disastrous if you get it wrong. But when performed with sensitivity… well, OK, the artist will feel sore, and onlookers will rubberneck in awe or outrage. So what’s the point?

***

Artists and writers alike have it bad. But the person I feel sorriest for is the reader. When a magazine tells them that every record is at least a 7/10, the ones who haven’t long since given up on reading reviews must feel they’re being mugged off.

A review that defers excessively to a type of writerly politeness, one that can’t distinguish between fairness and hedging, is a convenient break clause in the social contract between writer and reader that says, “I will be straight with you.” 

Writers and artists are mutually concerned about punching down. It’s a delicate issue. My feeling is that reviewing very new artists is unwise [DM for further explanation, if you like], and some other type of lower-stakes coverage is more sustainable.

I also wonder if writing about several records with overlapping aesthetic themes in the same review (The Wire does it) could be a more exciting way of talking about artists doing cool things that’d otherwise struggle to be read about. 

In any case, it’s impractical to ask writers to judge the respective good fortune of themselves and the artist, or else weigh up unprovable assumptions about another person’s material circumstances. 

A few modest proposals for refreshing music criticism

• Several albums grouped by theme reviewed in one piece

• Stop reviewing very new artists; let them grow into themselves first

• Much less emphasis on the album as the unit of musical currency 

• Specialised editors whose role is to listen relentlessly and shape conceptual, ideas-led coverage (as opposed to those based on profiles and album cycles) 

  • e.g. Vox’s amazing series, or RA videos like this

• Assigning writers to cover records they wouldn’t normally pitch, making that a format in itself

• Greater transparency about the process of critique (e.g. Notes On Process)

• More direct dialogues between readers and writers than trad review formats allow (e.g. newsletters?)

• [Any other ideas you’d like to share? hmu!]

The notion that only powerful artists deserve a rebuke implies that a critic should “champion” all the others (as though writers serve artists before readers). That sounds like marketing to me—in which case, invoice the label and ask for double. 

The effect is to participate in a patronising activism—less a nod of respect than a pat on the head. It is, above all, a disservice to the art, whose recommendation is asterisked because it is sodden with the spittled praise of a cheerleading writer.

To be clear, I’m not saying that writers should “punch down” more—only that the notion applied to music reviews is just too vague to be useful, except perhaps in a small range of particular cases, including but not limited to:

• Hyperlocal or online microscenes not otherwise attracting much attention 

• Citing an artist’s identity as being intrinsic to some shortcoming in the work

• Toying with your prey a little too much; that serves critics’ egos more than it does readers

One last thing I want to say about criticism is that it has the power to seed doubt, if not change your mind. Greil Marcus recently recalled a debate with his shadow self, Roger Scruton, about where the “dimension of the sacred” could reside in art. 

Marcus, having doubted he could find it so intensely in the art of antiquity as in blues and rock ‘n’ roll records, was later “reduced to a puddle of acceptance” in the presence of a Titian he assumed couldn’t possibly move him to revelation.

In the era of algorithmic content and reader analytics, the experience of being confronted by the limits of your distinction is becoming rare. Audiences are now used to having their opinions reflected back at them admiringly.

Criticism that disturbs the overweening certainty around what you like and believe is an opportunity to renegotiate your sense of self with the future, from the realisation that neither art, nor you, is fixed in time. 

To demand more from art, to say that something isn’t quite there and to express on a kind of stage exactly why that is, is to take the music, the artist, and the writing of it seriously—a far higher compliment, I think, than half-arsed flattery. 

For the artist who might want to throw a chair at me, know that there is no reviewer that can pick music clean of all its mysteries. Neither musician, critic nor reader has a monopoly on the wisdom or foolishness that an album secretes. 

No consensus is settled. All art can inspire. But only some of it is good. For as long as there are any websites or inboxes left, we should say so forcefully in those places before music criticism is zero point zeroed into oblivion. 

***

PS. — If I’m going to insist that critics should be more forthright about their dislikes, I thought it would only be fair to show my hand, so:

• The 100-track compilation (Who is it for? Ah, your booking agent)

• “‘Dreamy,’ ‘lush,’ ‘soulful’ (oh, God) pads,” to quote Moopie

• Gallery wall text music (You know what I’m talking about)

• Those private-press records? Respect their privacy by not reissuing them

• Quote-tweeting like an old fishwife over the fence (“Oh my, isn’t this terrible?”)

• Music journalism workshops (“Come on in, the water will melt your skin”)

• Boomkat blurbs namechecking T++ (OK, we get it, this bad music has been produced)

** OK, one of mine—but I think it’s good!

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The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.

LISTENING

• A Night In The Skull Discotheque – CCL

• European Primitive Guitar (1974 - 1987) – Various Artists

• Il Mondo Da Una Nuvola – Patrizia Pellegrino

• Cat – Hiroshi Suzuki

• Searchlight Moonbeam – Various Artists

READING

• Remembering Silent Servant – Chloe Lula (Resident Advisor)

• TikTok Invaded This Cruise For Content – Zachary Siegel (New York Times Magazine)

• The Musical Age Of Shitpost Modernism – Kieran Press-Reynolds (Pitchfork)

• Constantly Hating: Eli Schoop’s Worst Albums Of 2023 – Eli Schoop (No Bells)

Years ago, I took a personality test for an old employer whose results made a startling recommendation to colleagues: “Do not touch Ray.” I’m not that forbidding, I complained at the time, though the underlying suggestion that I don’t warm easily to others, and that perhaps my ideal office environment would enclose my desk with iron bars, was truer than I wanted to admit.

I’m not a weirdo, I promise. But as I get older my sensitivity around personal space has grown more acute. It is punishment enough to commute beside a stranger inclined to spread their legs, arms and ailments, like a biohazardous Swiss Army knife. But personal space for me is also auditory, and what tends to rattle my cage are the sounds that randos love to emit from their phones.

Recently I learned that one category of this behaviour is called sodcasting, which as a word sounds like a classic example of journalese so I’m a bit reluctant to use it. It gets fitful press coverage because it’s a low-stakes issue, but the op-ed consensus is that it’s rude and annoying. And sometimes, yeah, totally. But I’d like to offer a partial defence of it here, not least because what seems to be succeeding it is much worse.

When speaking to Dan Hancox for the Guardian in 2010, the musicologist Wayne Marshall got to the heart of sodcasting’s social utility, as a way for certain groups—particularly teenagers—to stake out and assert social territory through music:

“Transistor radios and ghetto blasters are both good examples of a longstanding history of people making music mobile. The case of the transistor radio shows that people have long been willing to sacrifice fidelity to portability; while the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one's music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as 'noise'.”

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” that nicely captures the social subtext of spatial disputes set to music. When Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out slam open the doors of Sal’s pizzeria, they demand that he makes space for Black people on his wall of fame. In case Sal doesn’t get the message, Raheem plants a boombox—playing Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”—on the countertop, right in his face.

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It’s useful to think about that scene, and the conflict that Lee’s film depicts, as symbolic of a persistent trend—one in which marginalised communities struggle to be heard and acknowledged. That’s important to explain, because what I’m talking about is a different, newer kind of noise pollution that I’ve noticed from smartphones: the sound of a mindless flick through social media.

***

Music situates us in the world. It’s the immaterial mark of personhood; one of the effects of fandom is that your heroes bend the crook in your antenna, tuning the signal you send out to the world. That’s a romantic notion, I know, which fewer people share so intensely. In his book “Major Labels,” Kelefa Sanneh observes that people no longer identify with music as much as they used to. He writes:

“It’s odd that some of our old tribal musical boundaries seem to be dissolving… I sometimes wonder whether political convictions are replacing musical convictions as the preeminent marker of subcultural identity. Perhaps some of the kinds of people who used to talk about obscure bands now prefer to talk about obscure or outré causes, instead.”

That’s not to say that (young) people should care more about music than politics; only that as they pay less attention to the former, and turn to other, more insular kinds of entertainment, I wonder if music’s proto-civic function fades. I’ve come to think of being really into a band or scene when you’re 14 as good practice for forming proper political convictions, at an age where bad judgement and poor taste matter less.

Some of my fondest experiences of living in London are built on catching a few seconds of music. One April a few years ago I remember hearing T2’s “Heartbreaker” from a car window by Hackney Downs; a sick reminder to wind the clocks forward. In my local park, I often see a guy in a mobility scooter playing stuff like “Inglan Is A Bitch” from a chunky three-foot-tall speaker that sits between his legs in the footwell.

But lately I’ve felt the air changing. Music is making way for The Feed. I’d been wondering for a while about why people do this, and I’m a bit hesitant to tell you that I arrived at an answer not by hours of study at the British Library, reading academic papers and sorting the arguments in syntopical fashion. Instead, I had an argument with a stranger outside a café a few months ago.

A guy in white chinos and a ponytail, dressed like an NPC at a strip club, took a seat at the next table, and immediately tapped and dragged through Instagram Reels with the sound on. After a minute of this I asked him to turn it down. “Why?” I hadn’t come here to listen to the sound of his phone, I said. “But we’re outside”—the implication being that there was no clear etiquette to say that what he was doing was not on.

It’s easy to see how we got here. We decided to solve the problem of annoying sounds in public space by privatising the experience of moving through it. I do it, too—I seldom go anywhere without noise-cancelling headphones, which are extremely good at blocking out things I’d rather not hear. But the effect has been to collectively cede sonic territory; and if the space isn’t being contested, it’s not being looked after, either.

***

Most of the music I’m into lately has been by Harold Budd and Hiroshi Yoshimura. I’ve been especially mesmerised by the exquisite plainness of Surround, a recently reissued ambient album by Yoshimura that was commissioned for a prefabricated housing estate. It’s no big leap to imagine it setting a neutrally pleasant mood in some of the scenarios I’ve described.

In earlier drafts of this newsletter, I made a foolish attempt to untangle whether a certain collection of sounds or types of music might work best for public space, and it gave me a headache because the debate could fill several (tedious) newsletters. But one thing I wanted to pick up was a description of two hypothetical positions by Steve Goodman (AKA Kode9) in the realm of “sonic power.”

Here’s how he talks about “the politics of silence” in his 2010 book, “Sonic Warfare”:

“It is often orientalized and romanticizes the tranquility unviolated by the machinations of technology, which have militarized the sonic and polluted the rural landscape with noise, polluted art with sonification, polluted the city with industry, polluted attention with marketing, deafens teenagers and so on. Its disposition is almost always reactionary.”

He makes a careful distinction between this and the politics of noise, a domain that Goodman is equally dismissive of for its relativism (“one person’s noise is another’s music,” as he puts it), and its tendency towards sophomoric gestures of protest (“instead of a shock to thought, a provocation to boredom”). Written 13 years ago, passages like these strike me as oddly optimistic now.

The spaces in which these philosophical auditory skirmishes might take place—nightclubs, the music press, various kinds of public space—are either disappearing or being diminished. One effect of this has been, if not a recession of music from civic life, then a kind of collective neglect, even as its oversupply means we’re living in a period of unsustainable abundance. (I’ve written previously about this for The Wire.)

Where Goodman feels a “reservoir of potential” in a concept of sonic power that positions frequency (i.e. infrasonic and ultrasonic sound) alongside amplification (i.e. loudness and quietude), it’s hard to imagine a capable setup escaping the hermetic confines of an Atonal festival premiere, much less being deployed by some decrepit local authority, who might only use it to clear schoolkids out of a Westfield anyway.

But when Goodman points to the consistency of “black noise”—UK drill, gqom, and amapiano being among the most recent examples—as a font of sonic innovation and “affective tonality” he’s onto something. Against lengthening odds it keeps spilling out of car windows and precarious mobile sound systems. As these vibrations speak, they’re reminders that the places we pass through still have interesting things to say.

The Microplastic Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.

LISTENING

RA 909: Bake (Resident Advisor)
The mixes I like best are the ones that lead to The Tunnel (see: Shackleton’s fabric 55 CD, and this Donato Dozzy mix). You know the place: lean, moody, sinister, intense. It’s a zone I could happily (or, you know, moodily) stay locked in for hours, and this is a killer example.

• Moritz Von Oswald – Silencio (Tresor)

• Colleen – La Jour Et La Nuit Du Réel (Thrill Jockey)

• Aesop Rock – Integrated Tech Solutions (Rhymesayers)

• Various Artists - 10 (Music From Memory)

• The Mystery Kindaichi Band – The Adventures of Kindaichi Kosuke (WeWantSounds)

READING

• Vengeful Pathologies by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)

• The Hoffman Wobble by Ben Lerner (Harper’s)

• How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe by Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)

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Let me welcome you to the first edition of Microplastics. (I hope you think the name is cool.)

Every month I’ll write about an obsession, either one of mine or other people’s. It will often be a piece of music, but it could also be a YouTube video, or a book that starts an interesting conversation. It may be old or new.

For those who don’t know me: I’m Ray, and I’m a writer. This is me, in Naples last year:

And, if you’ll indulge me, let me tell you a bit about myself.

In a past life, I wrote for a dance music magazine called Resident Advisor, and was an editor there for a few years until 2020. I’ve also had pieces in Pitchfork, GQ Magazine, The Wire, DJ Mag, and a number of publications that no longer exist.

Early in 2022, I got a 9-to-5 outside of music and/or journalism, for reasons that are all too familiar—I simply c.b.a. with the chronic insecurity, and I generally disliked the freelancer lifestyle. For reasons I’ll explore some other time, it wasn’t for me.

Since then, I’ve had some space to reflect on what I’d want to say in a newsletter like this and how I’d share that in a way that is as far removed from the attention economy, and the hot-take tourism of social media, as possible.

So, Microplastics. What’s it actually about?

I’d like to represent a style of writing about culture that is engaged in serious ideas, but doesn’t take itself seriously. I’d like to experiment and see what happens. I’d like to see who’s interested in what emerges and have cool conversations with all three of those people. (Gallows humour! I would be happy with five.)

Now, about money. This newsletter is free. But if you’re feeling generous enough to toss a few pennies in the well in the months that follow then consider my bowler tipped respectfully in your direction.

And if you want to know where that money might be going, the answer is, probably, a nappy on my newborn daughter’s bottom.

And, maybe, a reasonably priced Seigen Ono album on my Discogs wantlist. Here’s a song from The Green Chinese Table that I hope you agree is sick:

Till next month: love you, bye!