(Tidy) Tracks Of The Day

The first in a once-off series

When it comes to all things 4X4, my allegiance will always lie on the Hard House/Trance/Happy Hardcore side of things rather than trad Techno/House, for reasons of age, geography and historical circumstance (though nothing beats Detroit Techno for reading about). 1999-2003 (those crucial adolescent years when I was starting to really get into Dance music) seems now to have been the golden era for this kind of stuff, before it was subsumed into the post-9/11 heading-for-apocalypse Goa-Trance-meets-Noisia-style-DnB monster-genre of Hard Dance.

 

Bass Keep Pumping - Rachel Auburn

Looking Good - Lisa Lashes

Are You Serious - Stimulant DJs

 One interesting thing, to which I didn’t really attach much significance at the time, was that loads of my favourite trax were by female producers. Hard House in particular seems to have benefited from a  greater number of big-name women DJs/producers relative to other genres; Lisa Lashes, Lisa Pin-Up, Rachel Auburn, Anne Savage were all pretty massive at the time (thats only four, but still double what I can think of off-hand for either techno or jungle). You can hear the gender mixology in the sounds; the pitched-up hip-hop vocals, playfully agressive hoovers, and that ever-present on the off-beat spaceball sound, all elude characterisation by standard gender-specific descriptives.

 

The Stimulant DJs (aka Happy Hardcore legends Brisk & Ham) track is an almost perfect techno-fairground dance tune. The polymorphous mentasms(yay!), the jumpin-jumpin-bass-keeps-pumpin mid-line, the hoover-MC “ooah ooah” bit in the middle, the bonkers tempo-shifting breakdown, and then the “Are You Serious” refrain getting shredded  in the jet-speed drop; wicked!

Work (Meta-Mix)

 

 

There was a slew of whopper posts recently on the subject of work. One thing struck me though where Infinite Thought sez “The service sector is certainly run in the main on those character traits that Virno mentions, and the exploitation of basic forms of sociability and linguistic capacity, but it is also not entirely removed from modes of Taylorism, and the old idea that ‘you are not paid to think’, as Steve Wright reminds ut us”. But what I find so especially pernicious about Late-Capitalist/Post-Industrial/Immaterial labour (especially in lower-status jobs), is that while you may still be engaged in work that is as menial, constricted and draining as Fordist factory micro-repetition, you are being paid to think, but paid to think thoughts that are not yours.

It’s the forced cognition of sales tactics, the articulation of an alien business language and the anti-social interaction with co-workers and customers/clients/victims that really pushes the repugnance to the next level; the voluntary impregnation of the capitalist brain-slug; the jettisoning of the bits of your system design that you actually value, so as to make room for the worker mind-virus, all in order to do something that you really do not want to do (or at best, to do something that you DO want to do, but in opposite way of how you SHOULD do it). And because these thoughts are assimilated into your mind, becoming fixtures of your cognitive circuitry, you cant just simply ‘switch off’ after work, even if you didn’t have to live with the ever-present threat of your boss ringing/texting/e-mailing you to pick your brains, get you to perform ‘just one more’ task, or drop any non-work related activity to come in and cover someone’s shift.

 

(This is in no way to eulogize old-skool physical labour either, apart from the de facto heinousness of all labour exploitation, anyone who has seen another person spend their whole life engaged in good ‘ol honest manual labour knows the crushing mental as well as physical toll that is inevitably incurred.)

 

The Pinocchio Theory:

Today capitalism demands of its workers not just physical exertion, but mental exertion as well. In order to survive, we are forced to sell, not just our “labor power” (as Marx called it), but also our affective and cognitive powers, our abilities to think and feel and create, our aesthetic sensibility and our capacity for enjoyment. Capitalism does not just steal the fruits of these powers from us. It also organizes our very expression of these powers in the first place

 

Under these circumstances, the function of education is to smooth out (and often perform) the operation of cognitive implantation, to counter any rejection or resistance in the host mind, and above all else, to convince the student-worker drones of the inevitability of this whole process, to hardwire in the belief that there is No Alternative. 

Fangirl:

There is no “initiation into a field of study” which, eventually, might bring one’s acquired knowledge into direct conflict with the world-as-it-is-presented: the initiation is precisely one into presentation itself; a training into neo-liberalism’s glassine vocabulary and enervating rhythms

 […]

This seduction works like nitrous oxide, pernicious and foggy, lowering mental and bodily resistance to the unsense of the dominant political rationality.

 

 […]

 

The acquisition of a university degree becomes increasingly compulsory the more it furnishes proof for an employer of one’s willingness to enter into neo-liberalism’s training.

 

 

 

Most contemporary accounts of Post-Industrial society derive their ultimately pessimistic conclusions from the depiction of the social body as inherently divided; disparate and atomised on a subjective level; permanently disunited by the PoMo credo of infinite social identities/endless difference, isolated inside personalized entertainment Pods; and ideologically neutralized by the hegemonic doctrine of Individualism. But what unites the multitude is the collective experience of being (wirelessly) plugged into the cognitive network of Late Capitalist Labour. The crucial aspect of this is that the experience cuts across all class/race/gender/age lines. Everyone’s position is interminably insecure, their nerves chronically frought, systematically forced to transgress any conception of good-bad or right-wrong - to abandon or distort any facets that are not compatible with capitalist onotology - in the name of paying the bills/keeping your hours/maintaining the bottom line/sealing the deal/MAXIMISING THOSE PROFITS. Everyone is plugged into the same network, subjected to the same mind-virus >>> susceptible to the same anti-virus

No Reaction

It would be painting only half the picture to characterise the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty as an Oedipal tantrum by voters who, as Fintan O’Toole rightly points out, would undoubtedly re-elect their Fianna Fail Father-government right now if the opportunity arose.

The referendum itself has to have been one of poxiest things in ages to impose itself upon the thoughts of anyone unlucky enough to have engaged with the ‘issues’ for more than five minutes. The sense of futility that accompanies participation in the formality of a General Election is magnified in EU Treaty referenda, where the Government doesn’t even bother going to the trouble of trying to convince you that what you think has any bearing upon what they do, beyond delaying their gratification by as long as it takes to force through the result they desire.

It’s hard to figure out to whome exactly the ‘disconnect’ between the political classes and the electorate has now so suddenly and dramatically been revealed. The Business-Managementarians, the only group who mainstream politicians can be said to genuinely represent, were all in favour of a Yes vote, and presumably cast their ballots accordingly. The rest of the FF-voter-types (a group which includes most PD and Green voters obviously, but also many FG, SF and Labour voters) could only be said to be ‘connected’ to their political overlords via redundant historical allegiance or, in the majority of cases, a lazy superstition which reinforces the paternal bind; ‘THEY were in charge during the Celtic Tiger, therefore THEY must be the only party capable of generating economic growth/giving me what I want’ (ignoring, of course, the many years of economic contraction overseen by FF, the role of the Rainbow Coalition, the interchangability of FF and the constituents of the former, the utter ineptitude of FF in managing the ‘Tiger and thus the inevitable return to many years of economic contraction overseen by FF). Everyone knows that politicians dont represent Us, but Voters will always be tied to politicians as long as the difficult break is avoided; until then hatred, resentment and occassional acts of showy disobedience can only be expected.

The other half of this sorry vista is the myriad of genuinely painful daily grievances and chronic sense of dissatisfaction suffered by most people, grievances which Politics has divested itself of any obligation or capacity to address.

While a more integrated Europe must surely be a good thing, its positive potential is seriously tempered by much EU policy’s unwavering and outdated faith in Neo-Liberal Capitalism. And while the No result is satisfying on the level of pissing-off our aggrieved overlords by embarrassing them in front of their cool Euro-mates, and (maybe) expressing genuine reservations about trends in EU policy, the lack of a coherent opposition to express these concerns has handed some of the most reactionary elements in the country an opportunity to claim victory; the confused voices of dilapidated nationalism, nu-racism, Home-Ownerism and PoMo-catholic selective-puritanism have managed to contort the result into a vague mandate, with Joe-Higgins’ dogged workerism lost somewhere in the mix. But what exactly would the ‘better deal’ that they are demanding from the Father-government look like?

 

 

What the sloppy morass of desires attributed to the Average Voter points at it is the desperate collective need for an alternative trajectory, for anything beyond more of the same half-baked neo-liberalism. The great danger to be avoided is the consolidation of neo-conservative tendencies on one hand (anti-immigration, familialism, pro-business fiscal policy), and the neutered entrenchment of the Left in exclusionary politics of protectionism on the other, a process which has already taken hold in individual member states. Such developments conserve the worst products of Neo-Liberal Capitalism (deepening structural inequality, cultural degredation, the pissing away of the environment, intra- and international exploitation), while inhibiting its few positive side-effects, such as globalisation and the destabilisation of repressive traditional identities. Now more than ever there is the impetus, and the space, to begin articulating a way through the double-bind of Oedipolitics; a way, it now seems, that must be at once both Pro-market and vehemently Anti-Capitalist. (More on this to come…)

Severely Memed

Tagged by the chronically inspirational Sit Down Man You’re A Bloody Tragedy:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

 

 

1) Foul Play - Finest Illusion (Illegal Mix)

Since coming to college, the fleeting feelings of totally-consuming giddy excitement that used to accompany the arrival of summer/end of the schoolyear have been replaced by a conflicing mixture of relapse to nostalgia and boring dread. The annual June appearance of the tractor-mower plowing through the knee-high grass of the green accross the way used to signal towards the theoretically limitless potential for 2 months of exploration and joyful experience - i.e. about as far from the suffocating dismal hell of school as one could possibly be. Now it heralds the return to counter-productive regimentation and discipline via one or more crap ‘full-time’ service jobs, where notification of toilet-breaks is required, telling-offs are doled out for not having the correct uniform, and everything must be done the inefficient, protracted and wasteful, but official standardised and therefore ‘proper’, way. In spite of the lonely brain-kill this arrangment engenders (not to mention the stifling horror of the thought that this is quite likely the future), that same giddy excitment still occassionaly manages to sneak through the cracks of the lonely labour market walls, engulfing every billimeter of nerve-ending in quietly rapturous pleasure; hopping from the bus on the eve of a day-off, watching the landscape mutate into dense mythological rural glory on a sly trip down the country, or chilling with Paddy Kavanagh by the canal as a certain comrade recites fantastic stream-of-consciousness remixes of the PK canon. When the vocals, NRGised piano and pushedtothelimit Amen finally coalesce after three minutes, nothing else can capture that feeling so totally.

 

2) Rihanna - Take a Bow

Didn’t like this at first, put off before even the first chorus by how standard it all sounded; standard post-Irreplacacble  808 ballad-beat, standard tinkly-tender piano, standard semi-soulful melifluosness. Foolishly, had only half-paid attention to the lyrics. How could someone make an entire song’s worth of derision and sarcasm* sound so utterly beguiling? The grace with which the invective is dolled out multiplies by a million the gutted self-loathing of the regretful manbot at the receiving end.

*While we’re on it, sarcasm isn’t really half as bad as the old adage makes it out to be is it? Sexual innuendo is surely the absolute nadir of humour.

3) Asian Dub foundation - New Way, New Life

Community Music touched so many bases at the time; popular experimentation, overt politicism and defiant optimism. At times the various pieces of outsider-rap, neo-punk, Asian trad and after-the-moment-jungle didnt fit very neatly togther, the rough joints tellingly visible and some of the lyrics could have done with a bit of fine-sanding, but taken as a whole, as a collective (Mode), it was genuinly inspirational. Dusting it out recently, it sounds so out of tune with current trends but utterly necessary because of it. Chosen here is ‘New Way, New Life’, a paen to parental struggle and the wonders of immigration.

 

4) Nas feat. Kelis - American Way

In anticipation of his new abum, have been listening to his last Great one, Street’s Disciple. Nas is the only mass-appeal rapper who can still excite some genuine fanboyism. No matter how succesful he becomes, he seems incapable of being fully ingratiated into, and rendered utterly irrelevant by, the establishment a la Jay-Z, Snoop, Ice Cube et al. Always cutting a lone figure, the unsatisfiable autodictat without a true home, always caught between conflicting desires and aspirations, he is one of few rappers with the nous and the will to talk intelligently about something actually worth taking about. While Public Enemy have sadly allowed themselves to be carved out of pop/mainstream hip-hop and into a corner for the already converted, Nas has successfuly evaded typcasting and so still commands the attention of a more diverse (political and sonic) audience. Here, in the space of less than 5 minutes he achieves what most ‘political’ artists of any genre might struggle to achieve over an entire album - if ever -, expertly calling out capitalism, neoliberal ideology, class segragation and Patriarchy, with Kelis giving sardonic voice to their common root;
I don’t care about the runaways/ I don’t care about who’s gay/ I don’t care about dying of AIDS/But I care if I got paid
Who even cares about the president?/ I think they’re making a mistake/I don’t care about the hurricane/ As long as my family’s safe

 

5) Burial - Endorphin

Blissblog declares he no longer believes in beats, Villalobos cuts out the sacred kick drum for one of his greatest tracks yet, and a sizeable proportion of the best tracks on Untrue are completely beatless; bring on the trend.

 

6) Stephan Bodzin - Bedford

The flipside to ‘Daytona Beach’ and a personal favourite out of all of his tunes so far (though haven’t managed to keep up with much of his recent stuff). Begins with what sounds like an old Trance melody that’s been locked in a dark basement for the past decade grown wretched and psychotic, hate swelling and spewing out sporadically over the two minute intro. Then, everything quietens down to an unnerving, unbearable calm; a seemingly innocuos bassline lurches into the sounscape, drops of plinky, slightly atonal melody dripping down upon it. >>>> Fuel begins pumping into the bass-engine, growling louder and louder, liquid hi-hat quickly pouring in before combusting into pure white noise; powering one gigantic black-chrome machine, the component parts are still distinct enough to convey the rythmic angles. This track has everything that the Border Community/Get Physical pseudo-trancers and the Ed Banger entrist rockers have been trying at for what seems like ages now. Like Villalobos, Bodzin refuses to take the mechanics of the Track for granted; but where RV is refining and redefining them spatialy, Bodzin is down in the engine room, loosening the valves, letting off the saftey latches and bypassing the limiters, to see what it can really do.

 

7) Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating

(Waits for someone to point out that Crystal Castles aren’t original as their patently retro sound might make you believe)

 

To be anTagonised: Please Keep Dancing, The Colour of Memory, anyone at Weareie, Pop Feminist and HIMAN!

Work

 

Some disjointed thoughts related to this and this:

 

Lucy Kellaway Financial Times 11/5/2008:

              

The search for meaning at work not only goes on unabated but also seems to be getting more urgent all the time. When government ministers join City professionals in fretting that their work doesn’t amount to a row of beans, we are really in trouble.

 

  

 

 

 

 

In an excellent chapter in this on the history of the Work Ethic, Zygmunt Bauman charts its development from instrument of economic manipulation to ideological weapon against the new non-working classes (referring both to those who are not working and those engaged in de-skilled non-work).

 

The concern with the meaninglessness of Capitalist work is not quite as old as the FT article portrays it.

 

As Bauman outlines, the origins of the Work Ethic, as an explicit moral code rather than in-built inclination towards productive activity, were coterminous with those of the Industrial Revolution, and more specifically, the advent of factory work. At the beginning of their meteoric rise, the new capitalists found themselves bereft of the industrial-relations arrangements available to their feudal and plantation-owning predecessors, and not yet enjoying the ideological hegemony of their successors. A new socio-economic paradigm was needed in which they could corral the great mass of ‘lazy and immoral’ workers into the factories with a minimum of opposition. Their main obstacle was simple but devastatingly fundamental; why would anyone want to spend more than the absolute minimum amount of time necessary to earn a living wage engaged in pointless, undignified, degrading, mentally and physically damaging work? To avoid eliciting destructive resistance from the growing urban populations, their response would have to be more sophisticated than blunt coercion; what was needed was a full-spectrum assault on the mind, body and soul of the worker.

 

 

 

The ascription of idle and immoral characteristics to the working classes was ludicrously at odds with the reality that these were the same people who had been artisans, guild-workers and self-sufficient farmers before economic restructuring destroyed these modes of work. As Bauman notes, the Work Ethic as espoused by employers, preachers and parliamentarians, was in fact an attempt to force upon the new working-classes a reworked set of previously taken-for-granted norms for which the necessary preconditions had been obliterated by the new economic imperatives.

 

 

 

Bauman [8]

 

The moral crusade aimed at the re-creation, inside the factory under owner-controlled discipline, of the commitment to the wholehearted, dedicated workmanship and the ‘state-of-the art’ task performance which once upon a time came to the craftsman naturally when he himself was in control of his work.

 

[…]

 

It was a power struggle in all but name, a battle to force the working people to accept, in the name of the ethically nobility of the working life, a life neither noble nor responding to their own standards of moral decency.

 

 

 

 

The social and moral appeal of being ‘productive members of society’ was obviously diminished by the reality of factory work. For those not fully convinced of the spiritual merits of such labour, the legal imperatives of the Poor Law and (somewhat later on) the economic incentives of higher wages would be the respective stick and carrot deployed alongside the metaphysical impetus of the Work Ethic. The functioning of the Poor Laws hinged on The Principle of Less Eligibility, which sought to render even the most degrading, damaging and worthless work more attractive than not working, by ensuring the latter was made as unbearable as possible through visceral expressions of public opprobrium, systematic stigmatization, and the cutting off of any form of material support to the ‘undeserving poor’ outside the dreaded de facto prison of the workhouse.

 

 

FWD   >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >   STOP

 

 

The complete surrender of autonomy, insiduous supervision, meniality, repetition, financial insecurity, psychological instability

 

 

Job Cuts Announced Despite Rising Profits,

                         

Rising Profits Announced Because of Job Cuts

 

 

Ralf Dahrendorf:

Our values, which emphasize the need for work, no longer coincide with the economic requirements of our society […] the underclass may represent the ultimate extrapolation of the fate of the many.

 

 

 

As masochistic, irrational work has been normalised, the Work Ethic’s economic function has been superceded by Late Capitalist Ontology, where pointless work is life, its very fabric, that which, without it, life as we experience it would be unrecognisable. The distinction between means and ends has been irrevocably blurred, so that a ’successful job’ is success, as no level of material accumulation can ever be enough to constitute ’sucess’ within LCO. The role of the Work Ethic is now purely that of a political tool for managing those whose official productive role is limited to the provision of a steady supply of interchangable low-pay service sector fodder.

Bauman [65]

While no longer supplying the means to reduce poverty, the work ethic may yet help to reconcile society to the eternal presence of the poor, and allow society to live, more or less quietly and at peace with itself, in their presence.

 

The Work Ethic is only political here in so far as it acts as an agent of de-politicisation. Unemployment and underemployment are no longer political, social or economic issues (the disjuncture between Political Reality and reality growing ever wider); it is personal, the result of laziness and immorality rather than of impoverished job supply and anti-moral work.

 

 

 

FT:

 

There is a tiny glimmer of hope that we will all soon start to be less unreasonable in demanding reason from work. And that glimmer comes, of all places, from the credit crunch.. [T]he people who worry most are in grand City jobs… But when these people feel that their pay may cease altogether as they join the other thousands who have just been fired, they may suddenly find that their jobs aren’t quite so meaningless after all. Or, better still, they will stop asking themselves the question.

 

 

 

As the  Work Ethic has become outmoded and suceeded by LCO, what happens when the weight placed upon the veneer of ‘meaning’ within the latter is too much for it to bear,  collapsing in upon the void that it conceals?  The horrific truth of capitalist production laid bare for all to see; the experience of the ‘underclass’ becoming ‘the ultimate extrapolation of the fate of the many’.

 

 

 

Poxy exams

Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles, at its best, struggles to convey the effects of music over-exposure, the numbness to sonic-stimulation that ipod dependency induces.

On Untrust Us and Crimewave, all of the components of language are present, but the vowel-sounds, consonants and phrasings fail to add up to anything comprehensible; they sound like words, bear all their superficial life-signs, but never register in the brain and communicate as words should. Just as so much of the vast swathes of new music flowing through white wires and out of computer speakers frequently sounds like it should be great, but ultimately fails to resonate or impact in the way great music should, the effect is disillusioning; everything is being done ‘right’ but the desired end never comes about.

The other vocal tracks like Alice Practice, Courtship Dating and Love and Caring give some expression to the feelings this condition stimulates. Despite all the anguished screams of stressed-out isolation, nothing cuts through and impacts fully; in fact the angrier and more affected the cries become, the more they disintegrate and are subsumed into the totalitising white-noise morass of digital distortion, emasculated and reduced to a waveform which alienates sound from any intent that once lay behind it. This is the sound of subjective desire for emotional expression accumulating into one overbearing mass, pouring ever further into meaninglessness as every extra attempt overloads the listener’s response system, causing it to block everything out.

Crystal Castles really only works in this context of overexposure leading to desensitisation. Free your ears for a few days, let them regain their sensitivity, and the album is almost unlistenable - both because of the over-compressed production, and the abundance of familiar stylistic signifiers that slip too easily into line with those of the rest of the rock-dressed-in-dance’s-clothing crew (especially prevalent on CC’s instrumental tracks). But this context-specifity is what makes the album so compelling, its attempt to articulate (as a symptom rather than a cure) those sensations of system-jam which nothing outside of this context appears able to do.

The album’s conclusion, Tell Me What To Swallow, seems to imply that the way out is a return to introspective ethereal acousticness, but does this not lead only to a complete solipsistic self-immersement; a solution just as horrific and isolating as the alternative of a desensitized, but fully aware, inability to communicate?

________________________________________________________

Separate but related, Blissblog and Please Keep Dancing take up the problem of contemporary beats and bass, and a possible solution in the form of wonkiness, in particular Rustie’s recent output. What is most striking about this stuff is how familiar it all sounds, the Keyshia Cole remix in particular not feeling wholly different to a lot of Polow Da Don’s or Timbaland’s productions, except for being slightly more cluttered and a little less danceable; for the latter reason, BlissBlog makes the comparison to 90’s drill n bass/IDM. This speaks volumes for how far underground music has fallen; its the Pollow/Timbo’s who occupy that territory which lives off both experimentation and popularity (and have done for a good while now), while the underground becomes increasingly conservative, formulaic and contented.

Bring on the ‘cranks’

Many ‘echt’ authentic Irish people have themselves encountered the feeling that to be different in any way is to be a nuisance. This is not even a question of being Black, or a Traveller, or an asylum seeker. It may be a question of being Irish-speaking, or a cyclist, or a lesbian, or a poor or a blind person, or a person with a disability, or an anti-globalist. Difference is exceptionally poorly tolerated in Ireland. This Irish intolerance of so-called ‘cranks’ of any description contrasts markedly with British or Dutch traditions of internal dissent and the acceptance of eccentricity.

Ireland likes to think of itself nowadays as a go-ahead entrepreneurial society, and is regularly presented as such by its governing politicians. But its attitudes do not encourage, still less reward, innovation and risk-taking in the social domain.

Piarais MacEinrí ‘Our Shelter and Ark?’ p 99

One thing really striking for the Hibern-o-bserver is Róisín Murphy’s lack of any discernable Irishness, even though from watching the video there are no obvious signs of her being “Irish-speaking, or a cyclist, or a lesbian, or an anti-globalist” which might exclude her from being a Standard Issue Irish Person. What does mark her out though, is her Glamour. k-punk has brilliantly elaborated on Róisín’s Glamorousness before and on Glam’s foundation on aspiration for and relation to an Aristocratic sensuousness; it is precisely this that makes her appear so un-Irish.

Any identification with aristocracy in Ireland is obviously taboo; when Irish identity across all classes is so confused and clings only to one aspect of its history, to desire the extravagance of royalty is to identify with the Enemy, a betrayal of all that is Irish, since all that constitutes ‘Irishness’ is to a greater or lesser degree anti-Englishness (in its most full blown xenophobic incarnation or the ‘I’ve nothing against English people, just the English establishment’ sense).

In the 90’s then, as house, techno, jungle, garage and hip-hop galvanised British youth, encapsulating the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-ideological makeup of its followers, Trance took hold in Ireland. Trance, the most melodramatically extravagant, baroque and sonically formal of all of rave’s sub-genres, as well as one of its most mono-cultural (as Ireland was until recently).The willfully epic refrains and speed-tunnel rhythm satisfying the adolescent needs for acceleration and self-mythologisation. The repetition of the experiences of speeding cars, trespassed fields and overblown raves encoded in the music itself. Not Glam then, but a pseudo-classicism, and a sense of sublimation that never lasted longer than the experience itself. The need for aggrandisement squeezed out of daily life and into night-life, accompanied by the inevitable day-after comedown into tow-the-line dont-betray-the-cause Irishness. Trance offered a brief catharsis, one that left all of the repressive social norms unchallenged, its flirtations with grandeur ultimately reigned in by the exceptionally strong desublimating force of Ireland’s unique form of late-capitalism.

The bypassing in Ireland of a full-on industrial phase of capitalism gave the working-classes no opportunity to form a reflexive collective identity on the scale of the labour movements in Britain or the Continent. This lack of collective memory has allowed neo-lieralism to take swift root with no real opposition worth speaking of.

This is all our generation knows, the totalising present of neo-liberal late-capitalism, with no memories or experience of anything else.

Ireland’s pop output has faithfully reflected this situation, churning out a seemingly endless line of identitiless Tesco own-brand cheap substitutes for (already dull and conformist) pop and loathsome indie. The likes of The Coronas, The Thrills, U2, Damien Rice and countless others (including their ‘underground’ correlates) are the perfect musical complement to our cheap-labour service economy, the fake American accents of Irish singers echoing the creepy US business-speak, sales scripts and PR-buzzwords spoken by Irish workers. Dissatisfaction with both new music and new work is usually dealt with by the same responses of ‘it could be worse’, ‘think about how bad it was in the 80s’ etc. Why should we settle for that now?

Lets get Cranky.

Les Enfants/Les Artistes

Mentasms has been intensified by Ricardo Villalobos’ Les Enfants for some time now. Villalobos’ strength lies in his unfailing allegiance to a particular aesthetic, his enthusiastic rejection of the mediocritising forces of eclecticism.

Blissblog and K-punk have previously articulated the link between dance music’s structural repetition and Deleuze & Guattari’s conception of the ‘plateau’ as the ideal mode of extracting jouissance. Villalobos takes this method to the extreme; the effect of his use of repetition - no matter how mesmerising - is never to induce a trance (“a half-conscious state characterised by an absence of response to external stimulation”), rather it requires and manipulates a state of hyper-consciousness where even the tiniest introduction of/variation in stimulation induces intense effect.

Over the course of his tracks and live sets, the endless 4X4 beat is internalised, becoming part of the body, allowing all that occurs elsewhere in the soundscape to be experienced more intensely. Les Enfants goes even further in RV’s reconstruction of the track, doing away with the kick drum altogether - subtracting the unnecessary but taken-for-granted formailities and expanding outwards, beyond the artificially imposed limits on (track) time and space. As Enfants’ piano riff is filtered outwards and upwards the brain feels as though it is being sucked through an airlock leading to another gravitational field. All the while the children’s refrain oscillates between schoolyard playfulness and militaristic battle chant, never settling over all of the track’s indivisible seventeen minutes.

Xxxchange’s remix of Santogold’s Les Artistes transplants the original’s fantastic melody and lyrics from their dull indietronica casing and onto reinforced crunkoid beats and a black-noise bassline reminiscent of the spectacularally grimey sonic proton-charge in Ashanti’s Only U. This mutation makes the desire for a transition into an unknown mindscape all the more stirring; the feelings of determination, doubt, optimism and loneliness fighting and feeding of each other in the inevitable emotional conflict that preludes the creation of a reconstructed self

Change, change, change, change
I want to get up out of my skin
tell you what
if I can shake it
I’m ‘a make this
something worth dreaming of

I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up

Electric Picnic

Anarchy, funk, nostalgia, surrealism….just another day at the Electric Picnic.

This brief assemblage of slightly countercultural and embarrassingly outdated buzzwords (except nostalgia of course which is painfully now) demonstrates aptly how the success of Electric Picnic lies in its knowing articulation of bourgeoisie collective fantasy.

The reaction to the announcement of this year’s obligatory unexciting lineup was as lukewarm as could be expected (it is slightly encouraging that despite the enthusiasm many people seem to be able to force for the likes of Duffy, Franz Ferdinand, Foals, Josh Ritter etc in their individuality, when taken as one giant mediocre whole even the most die-hard Indie-ists cannot deny their collective underwhelmingness). However, as anyone involved will tell you, the appeal of the EP has never been music (which from the start was notably absent from the title ‘Music Festival’, replaced by a telling ‘Boutique’), rather, it is the experience.

The experience, when recounted second hand, never fails to sound like a slightly grubbier, slightly ‘artsier’, weekend health-spa retreat; naturalistic chill out zones, organic Fair Trade snacks, clean toilets, and a general ‘positive atmosphere’; indeed the whole thing is like a temporary realization of the contents of multiple broadsheet weekend supplements. Everything is calibrated perfectly to appease the latest middle-class concerns; eco-friendliness, fair trade, health foods, ‘awareness raising’, and of course a tiny part of the profit goes to charity. The festival thrives on one of the great bourgeoisie fallacies of our time; that good, or at the verry least a clean conscience, can be wrought from the exercise of consumer choice.

What really defines the EP experience however, is what is absent, or more accurately, what is excluded. The EP is a private zone created exclusively for the young middle-classes, a brief utopia which allows them to enjoy themselves, to exercise their choices, to ‘voice’ their moral concerns in a context where that which normally spoils their enjoyment, curtails their choice and undermines their moral choices is excluded.

EP’s exclusion mechanism is subtle and insidious, encoded in every aspect of its design. For who exactly would want to fork out €240 to effectively go drinking in a field, albeit under the pretence of purchasing a brief engagement with pseudo-hippiedom (pseudo, because while sixties hippies believed - however wrongly - that their permissive hedonism might actually have some sort of revolutionary purchase, today’s hippies are under no such illusion) soundtracked by an endless softly barrage of nostalgia-rock, world music, alt.folk, and conscious rap in the company of slumming students, coked-up bankers and weekend bohemians?

This exclusion is made explicit only by the punters who define themselves and Electric Picnic itself in opposition to Oxygen and its denizens. Oxygen, where commercialism is not insidiously concealed behind a muddy gloss of whimsical earthiness, where the food is fast and greasy, where the music is often good (or at the very least inspires some enthusiasm among the youth), and where the crowd is frequently *horror* working class.