Hello everyone, welcome to the penultimate day of CTM 13's discourse program. Now we have a special series of talks under the title The Death of Rave, which is part of a kind of sub-program within CTM called The Death of Rave, Rave Undead. So I'm really pleased to have a great selection of panelists here today. some of you might have caught the concert on Tuesday night in Howe where we screened Mark Leckie's 1999 video art piece Fear It Chew Made Me Hardcore and we had performances from Theo Burt of the Automatics Group and Lorenzo Senny tonight in Berghain we have a full programme
from 11 o'clock with Connor Thomas, Samuel Kerridge, Shedd, Powell, Evil, Andy Stott Mark Archer from Alternate and Lower Order Ethics and the first panel is exploring the notion of the death of rave within the golden age which is this year's festival theme so i'd like to introduce lisa blanning who's going to moderate the panel for us lisa is originally from the states and lived in london for 10 years where she worked the wire magazine and she's freshly moved to berlin and now works at electronic beats so take it away Lisa thanks to my left we've got Lee Gamble
he's a musician has been for quite a long time working with the Cirque Collective of which he's a founding member he's done a lot of work with the composer John Wall and last year put out two stunning records on the Pan Record label to his left we've got Steve Goodman also known as Code 9 who runs Hyperdub Records you've probably seen him out and about Mark Fisher who is the author of the book Capitalist Realism and also teaches at UEL and Goldsmiths and is the commissioning editor of Zero Books and finally but not last but not least we've got Alex Williams who is a PhD student at UEL and the author of the forthcoming book Folk Politics So we're going to start off with a presentation from Alex
outlining some of the things that we're going to touch on. So we'll let Alex go ahead and... Thank you, Lisa. Writing in 2011, the music critic Simon Reynolds recounted that once upon a time, pop music's metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging into the future feel of periods like the psychedelic 60s the post-punk 70s, the hip-hop 80s, and the rave 90s. The 2000s felt different, and as they continued, the sensation of moving forward grew fainter. Or, as the theorist Franco Berardi put it more pithily in a recent book, the future has been cancelled. This talk will explore the crossover between our present cultural moment, a moment of the end of
the future, or even nostalgia for the future, and the legacy of a curious renegade academic entity called the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. In particular, its leading thinker, a guy called Nick Land. Land's ideas of acceleration, I think, are quite important to thinking rave and post-rave dance musics, in particular techno, hardcore, and jungle, as well as to thinking capitalism in a certain way. What I'm going to basically suggest is that some of the influence of Land's thinking might give us some guidance as to how to escape the impasses that we find in
our current cultural moments through a kind of reinvigoration of this idea of acceleration which he had. Let's begin with arguments around the death of Rave. So the roots of these debates can be found in the UK blog scene of the mid to late 2000s. The core of the argument, which was made most prominently by Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, was that there was an aesthetic, cultural and social entity termed by Reynolds the hardcore continuum, which was responsible for at least a decade of outstandingly creative music from rave itself through hardcore towards jungle and early grime then so this argument runs the wellspring of novelty and innovation runs dry sometime around
the emergence of probably dubstep in the early 2000s this argument is extended by both theorists to encompass virtually all genres of musical production so house techno rock hip-hop metal mainstream pop even jazz and modern classical musics but the most heated discussions focused on this sort of post-rave british dance music um perhaps as possibly one of the last areas in which the radically new was still available um even within this fertile territory though the element of sonic ingenuity and this sort of element of radical audio future shock uh was no more so you know this this argument wasn't entirely accepted by everybody as you might imagine
the critics of this argument basically said that really this was a case of these particular writers being basically out of touch so they were unable according to these people to keep up with the still vital pace of innovation in like in modern british post-rave dance music but really I think this was a bit of a misreading of the argument because rather than finding this contemporary bass music or whatever so alienating as to not be music at all, which is sort of familiar in sort of generational alienation, instead they only found banal repetition. Shock us, they said, but no shock could convincingly be found. As Mark Fisher puts it, Imagine playing a piece of mid-90s jungle to someone from the 1970s, and they would be absolutely astounded.
But play a piece of current bass music to somebody from the early 1990s, the same 20-year difference in time, and there would be no such reaction. Where once popular electronic dance music was able to conjure entire new genres, as well as generating entirely unheard sonic effects, for example, time-stretching, re-space, hyper-accelerated breakbeats, along with new forms of collective experience to match, now it appeared to be shuffling together a pre-existing deck of possibilities. While new music was still being produced and clubs still well attended, the aesthetic vitality, the sonic suppleness of the music, its openness to radical change and transformation, in other words, had become markedly sclerotic.
What are we to make of such a stage of affairs? I think it's certainly insufficient to blame this on individual cultural producers. It's not for lack of will, creativity, ingenuity or hard work that the ability to generate the radically new appears to be over or stopped or blocked. Certainly there has been a cultural shift away from a world where producers and listeners alike demand the new through a constant will to negate the past. Today, producers of all kinds of cultural products are largely at ease with repetition, pick-and-mix generic interbreeding, or skillfully crafted pastiche. But this is still to confuse, I think, an effect with a cause. In his book of the same title, the music critic Simon Reynolds describes this broad condition
as being one of retro-mania, which he defines as an all-pervasive cultural symptom of a chronic addiction to regurgitating elements of the past. whether in suffocating the accurate museum piece homages or more sort of familiar post-modern bricolaged patchworks of sounds and influences. Now, obviously, all musical entities contain influences from the past. Necessarily, musical creativity is an evolutionary process. We only need to think of the role of sampling, for example, to think about how new musics bootstrap themselves into the future using the resources of the old. And yet push beyond a certain proportion of the mixed retro elements
across an entire ecosystem of sound will serve to undermine the overall dynamic of innovation. It is this inability to turn the old into the new, which is really at the heart of Retro-mania. So in terms of Reynolds' book, he spends a lot of time looking at retro cultures and he has a lot of empirical research, which is quite interesting. but really the stuff which I find most fascinating is where he looks for causes. So what's behind these changes? And he spends a lot of time focusing on technology's role in transforming the way people produce and consume music today. On the side of production, ubiquitous home computing and studio software enables anybody to create music with a minimal initial outlay.
On the side of consumption, file sharing and torrenting have also lowered to zero the costs of consumption. So now any genre or piece of music can be located, having been lovingly digitized, and where once the past was largely eliminated over time, today it's on the present in vast online archives that we can access instantaneously. So this will obviously have effects, but I think this doesn't work to explain what's going on. The past is available as never before, but so too is the present. So one might expect such massive democratizing shifts to kickstart an entirely new wave of musical ideas to act as an accelerant as much as a handbrake. Reynolds touches on the wider social and political currents
only in the last chapters of his book. So here he talks about a sort of broader examination of the loss of the future on a social and historical level. And as Reynolds recounts it, the first two-thirds of the 20th century saw astounding leaps forward in both technology and political and social consciousness, with the era immediately after the Second World War, running up to about 1979, as the apogee of future-orientated thoughts in scientific and popular culture. So here you have kind of futurological visions, so ideas of the revolutionary intersection of scientific development and social transformation. but around 1979 he's become replaced with a yearning but kitsch retrofuturism and no more is this encapsulated but in the abandonment of space as a very literal final
frontier. From the 1970s onwards huge Soviet and American space programs collapse under the strain of political pressure and budget cuts. One response to this culture of nostalgia for the future by musicians has been to make music about this condition itself. This is what Reynolds and Fisher describe as hauntology. So named after Derrida's concept of an absent presence, hauntological artists use retro pastiche alongside foregrounding of the materiality of sonic media to draw attention to the feeling of our times, this feeling of kind of chronological sickness or displacement or inability to generate the new. But I kind of think that whilst, you know, in exploring the nostalgia mode,
artists like Burial or The Caretaker also work as objects of nostalgia as well. And so whilst a lot of great work has been produced in the last 10 or so years, which could be described as hauntological, I don't think we can push past our present moment through this strategy alone. Now, the furthest that Simon Reynolds comes in thinking the broader collapse of the future is in using some of the ideas of a guy called Oswald Spengler. So here he defines the essence of Western civilization as being one of an impulse of acceleration, a boundless reaching out into empty space. From this perspective, our era of the end of the future diagnoses a Western world in decadence and decline. so Reynolds thinks that you know perhaps rapidly developing countries like China or India might be
the hope for innovative cultural production in the future but I think this misses a crucial dimension which is the present and continuing omnipresence of neoliberal capitalism throughout the world to paraphrase the cultural critic Frederick Jameson what Reynolds calls retro mania can be identified as the pop cultural logic of late neoliberalism and this diagnoses a deeper inability of this economic and political paradigm to generate the kind of creative destruction which its ideologues always promise us. Okay, so now I'm going to talk about this weird entity called the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. So in a sense, the CCIU, the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, were amongst the most prescient thinkers of the kind of capitalism which emerged in the mid-1990s.
The CCIU was founded in 1995, and it was a renegade parasitical entity initially living off the body of the philosophy department at Warwick University in the United Kingdom. It basically was an intensely multidisciplinary entity which sought to dissolve the sort of pious scholasticism of the university under a deluge of chaotically interbred disciplines. so CCIU combined as its name suggests cybernetics so the study of information and control in the animal and the machine with emerging Deleuze O'Guitarian theory, complexity science but also things like UK rave culture and cyberpunk pulp fiction and crucial developments in thinking
and writing about this new dance music emerged closely in connection with the CCIU especially in the work of Kojo Eshin and Steve Goodman where basically the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari basically of depersonalized affect spanning the human and the machine take over from a previous pop music discourse mired in a kind of humanist authenticity of traditionalist rock criticism which is largely concerned with sort of lyric and attitude and the sort of things you associate with Bob Dylan. I mean the full richness of the CCIU's many cultural and theoretical outputs are actually sort of impossible to explore in the limited time I have. But perhaps the most significant was the philosophical thinking of its later leader, Nick Land.
Land was heavily influenced by ideas from Deleuze and Guattari's project, the basic idea being that capitalism proceeds through processes which they call deterritorialization, which in essence liberates previously inhibited dynamics of creativity implicit within social systems. Land took these ideas and basically hijacked them and brought out a kind of inhuman pro-capitalism, which they kind of want to refuse. So Deleuze and Guattari asked, what is the revolutionary path? Is it to withdraw from the world market, or might it be to go in the opposite direction, to go still further in the movement of the market, not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process?
So to this sort of question, Nick Land answered yes. Where Deleuze and Guattari counseled caution to accelerate with care to avoid total destruction, Land favored an absolute process of acceleration. And he identified capitalism as the ultimate agent of human and post-human history. Here, basically, in Land's visioning of what capitalism is in the mid-1990s, deregulation, privatization, commodification will serve to destroy all stratification which exists within society and in the process generate unheard of novelties and innovations. In this world politics and all
morality especially of the leftist variety are a blockage to this fundamental historical process. So Land had a belief that capitalist speed alone could generate very literally a global transition towards technological singularity, where even the human itself can be eventually discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence, rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilizations. And as Land puts it, through this acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, the human is eventually dissolved in a technological apotheosis, and we experience a species-wide suicide as a kind of ultimate stimulant head rush. As bizarre as it may sound to the ears of the present day,
this kind of thinking actually made a twisted kind of sense in the 1990s. This was the decade after the collapse of actually existing communism, when capitalism stood entirely unopposed, when Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history. And while much of the culture was already mired in retro maneuverings, in particularly rock culture and especially in the UK, Underground dance music was fully embodying the inhuman science fictional visions of Nick Land. In particular, the jungle of the 90s exhibits many features of the Landian imaginary. So it's suffused with alien sonic innovations, and the whole thing is kind of contorted into an apocalyptic paranoid euphoria. As Land put it himself, this was impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance floor,
a prime way alongside the production of theory and the ingestion of accelerant drugs, that the unrepresentable speed of capitalism could be experienced by individual humans like you and I. So this was an alienation that was enjoyable and to be perversely desired. But if Land's rabidly nihilistic vision of planetary capitalist acceleration made sense, perhaps to some extent in the 1990s, it makes less sense today. The soundscape of the present is marked by the absence of the kind of alienating temporality that's a fused jungle and techno in the 90s. As I think it, Land confuses speed with acceleration. So he may be moving fast today, everything is constantly changing,
but only with a strictly defined set of parameters that themselves never waver. As Deleuze and Guattari recognize from the very beginning what capitalist speed takes apart, on the one hand, it puts back together on the other. Social innovations become encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past. That's right, Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian, back-to-basics family and religious values. The acceleration of jungle leads only towards the arid, high BPMs of tech step. Supple swarming breakbeats ossify into a dull but efficient trudge of base kick and snare. so it's fair to conclude I think that there's a deep tension within neoliberal capitalism in terms of its self-image as a vehicle of modernity as literally synonymous with modernization
and its promise of a future that it can't actually provide so far from dissolving the social in a universal acid of hyper-technological acceleration today the best we can hope for is marginally better consumer gadgetry against the backdrop of increasing inequality, ecological collapse, and declining standards of living. Technological progress, rather than erasing the personal, has become entirely oedipalized, entirely grounded in supporting the liberal individual. The very agent, capitalism, which Nick Land identified as the engine of untold innovation, has run dry. What does this mean for ideas of the future, of acceleration and of culture in particular. So one of the ways that I think we can escape
the impasse in land's machinic thinking of acceleration is to rethink what acceleration is. The CCIU, and in particular land, have been extremely influential on the next generation of philosophical thinkers, especially within what's become known as speculative realism, in particular a writer called Reza Negrostani. Negrostani basically thinks the problem with land is that his idea of acceleration is simply an endorsement of an idea of increasing speed. What does this mean? This sounds rather abstract. It means to say that within Land's viewpoint, acceleration can never call into question the rules under which it operates. Capitalism and its ultimately tedious logic of accumulation remain the same. So what Negrostani thinks is that you can broaden this idea of acceleration
into one which becomes navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. And this space is not limited to that defined by capitalism, but radically open-ended. One example of somebody who has perhaps tried to reconfigure musical thought around something which resembles this idea of this universal space of possibilities is the musicologist Adam Harper. Harper has objected to some of the things that Mark and others have said about the death of Rave from his perspective of a parametrized concept of musical creativity so what does that mean? as Harper puts it, imagine for a moment all the dimensions music exists within
so you can have different types of rhythm, different types of harmony, different types of melody different types of chord patterns, different types of sonic effects different types of social configurations that are listening to it and producing it. These are your parameters. Now, Harper believes that we exist in a time of infinite music, as he puts it. He has a book called Infinite Music, given the infinite nature of all of these parameters. So this idea is basically deeply informed by modern digital music production interfaces. So if you've ever used modern production software, where you have this seemingly infinite range of choices available to you through the range of knobs and dials and different synthesizer units that you can plug in. And yeah, I think there's something which remains a bit unsatisfying about Harper's ideas.
There's a sort of gap between what he talks about, this infinite possibility space, and everyday reality. So what you actually get today with sort of underground dance music and other types of music, which is sort of tired post-modernism. So I think what he sort of fails to admit to, or not enough at least, is the relationship between musical creativity and the broader social and political world. So the creation of the new as I see it has to extend beyond simply cross-breeding different varieties of sonic sources or manipulation of pre-given parameters. But it's rather about the accessing of entirely new worlds of sound. what former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call unknown unknowns,
the entirely contingent. It also depends upon how these sonic aesthetics correspond and resonate with specific social groups and identities. And I think to get to this point requires injecting these ideas from the 90s, from 90s dance music and from 90s philosophy coming out of the United Kingdom of acceleration with the very thing that so appalled people like Nick Land, which is politics. And it's only by being able to understand the strictures and crippling effects that 30 years of neoliberalism has quite clearly had on global culture that we can begin to see the need to transform our present situation in more fundamental ways. Now, this is not to suggest that culture is just a puppet of politics,
as if music has no role in creating a new world. because just as neoliberalism has run out of cultural energy, as it clearly has, the politics of the left today, in fact, has long been denuded of any kind of accelerationist force, preferring these days to privilege various retrogressive imaginaries of its own. So you'll find retro-Fordist fantasies of social democrats or the folksy localism of direct democracy. But this broader collapse in the idea of the future is, for me, a symptom of the regressive historical status of our age. And any future politics which seeks to build a new hegemony against the stultifying strictures of our times
has to engage with the forward-propelling energies that are embodied in the best of UK rave music. It's post-human ingenuity, it's alien sonic vocabulary, and it's manipulation of affect and impersonal desire. And what this ought to push towards is a future which is more modern and an alternative future, which neoliberalism and our present moment is inherently unable to generate. Thank you. APPLAUSE Just to give you a bit of context, this specific panel we're talking about
this, the UK specifically and although clubbing obviously wasn't invented in the UK, the idea or it received history has it that raving did or at least arose in the UK first and as an affect of late 80s the rise of Acid House and the UK Summer of Love which would have been 88 or 89 and involved a lot of ecstasy and a lot of electronic music and became a counterculture that was so widespread that in 1994, the Criminal Justice Act was passed in basically giving the police the right to arrest people
if they were suspected of going to a rave or holding a rave, which commonly is referred to as repetitive beats legislation. Meaning if there were a group of, I believe it was six or more people, and there were repetitive beats involved, usually in an outdoor situation, they could be arrested. So you can see how this really affected an entire generation. affected an entire generation. And a little bit more context is that both Steve and Mark were at Warwick and studied with Nick Land and were members of the CCRU. And then in 2006, James Kirby, under the alias VVM,
releases a huge musical project, which he calls the Death of Rave, which is where the title of this panel comes from. And so you see that this has a massive impact culturally in the United Kingdom, which has now, in retrospect, a huge lineage of electronic music that's influenced a lot of what's going on in music around the world today. So let's talk about this golden age of rave idea. And now that we're narrowing the parameters of what rave is, What can you guys who grew up with this music and who have witnessed firsthand
the way it's changed the landscape of the country that you grew up in, countries, what do you think about this idea of a golden age of rave? The whole concept of a golden age is only something that you would think about after the fact. You never think of it while it's going on, or at least that's what I would think. but Steve, Mark, and Lee were all there, although perhaps not quite as early as 88 or 89, dancing and all that, but I think... But certainly during the jungle era, all three of them have made public remarks on the era.
So maybe we could start with Lee. Lee actually comes from Birmingham, which is the second largest city in the UK and grew up on what was it is it actually the second largest council estate? Hi, yeah, I was um I was born in Birmingham Yeah, I was born on a large council estate, but I didn't grow up Although some of my family still lives there, so I have contact with that place, yeah. Which is quite a kind of, yeah, ugly, brutalist, yeah, futuristic, you could say, looking place. So how did this music filter down to you guys as youths?
For me, how did it filter down? I mean, weirdly, as you said, 88 and stuff. I mean, I was too young. I mean, even the early rave, like 91, 92, I was way too young to get into clubs and stuff. but I've got a big family and my older cousins would listen to, had a lot of this stuff. So I was kind of accessing it, you know, through the wall of their, you know, I'd hear them playing it or in their car or, you know, I'd borrow their tapes and stuff. And I remember being kind of, you know, totally intrigued by this stuff. One of the reasons was because you couldn't get into the place, you know, so it was always that, like, oh, what goes on in there then? What is this stuff? And I do remember it sounding like, you know, from sitting at home and watching Top of the Pops, you've got Kylie Minogue and then you put this thing and you got this. I always remember this one track. It had like a Maggie Thatcher sample in it. I don't know what it, I still don't know who it's by or whatever,
but it was this ravey, really ravey track and it had a Margaret Thatcher sample anyway. Yeah, and it did seem like it was just from somewhere else completely, like some other, you know. I mean, I was young, so I didn't know, you know, it wasn't like, yeah, it felt like it was a proper alien to me, yeah, yeah, compared to what was going on in the charts anyway, which was the only other music really or my dad listening to Bobby or whatever well I started DJing in about 91 and then it was in Glasgow and Edinburgh and I I remember getting DJ hype scratch tapes of hardcore and early jungle in 92, 93.
And basically straight after that, I discarded all the music I'd been playing and entered a long, dark tunnel of jungle for the next five years, roughly. and so I was playing as a DJ but also I was also studying at the time and what was interesting about it and maybe it was the the speed of it the acceleration at the polyrhythm rhythmic dimension of it but it also was clear that it wasn't just the most amazing dance music I'd ever heard in the history of the universe. But that's a golden age, isn't it?
But also, it did something to my brain. I'm studying, I was writing, and it became the soundtrack to writing as well as dancing. So it's rewiring your brain. You're kind of typing. You become a polyrhythmic typer, polyrhythmic typist. So it affected your body, it changes the way you move and dance, and it was rewiring people's brains, it was speeding up people's thought processes, I think. And that's why when we talk about it, when we talk about that golden age, if it was a
golden age, then you can't really think about it in terms of a split between mind and body, because it was something that just transcended that binary opposition. It was totally active physically and immaterially as well, mentally and physically, but in parallel ways. And then, in a way, everything has been, everything since then for me, has been a bit like the echo of that, to use Reynolds phrase, that energy flash. OK. That one. I want to resist the idea of a golden age. Just because we're in a dismal age now doesn't mean it was a golden age then.
I think we're in the dark ages now, that's what we have to really come to terms with. And I think that it wasn't this particular instantiation of what I would call a kind of popular modernism, where the leading edge of experimental culture was not to be found in universities or in the elite, but on dance floors, led by non-white and working class kind of producers largely. that wasn't just one single moment. It was really the product of a whole history,
and going back from the post-war period. And I think it's increasingly clear to me now, looking back, about that my expectations were formed at the height of that, which wasn't just the 90s, which was the end of it, But, you know, I was born in the late 60s, so wave after wave of popular modernism, which created a high expectation of change, innovation, and also of, you know, of experimentalism being in the public sphere. You know, one example of this is, you know, the Radiophonic Workshop, the work of Dede Derbyshire, etc.,
where music, etc., was extended and was on children's programs. And so right from that young age, you've got an expectation of the future, the experimental, and an intolerance for the recent past being part of what culture was about. What I've never been able to come to terms with is that intolerance for the recent past, you know, as the driver of culture, has dissipated. I've not been able to come to terms with it at all. And really, a lot of, I mean, all of my work, I think, that I'm known for is really to do with
that inability to come to terms with the tendency of the 21st century. And kind of deep melancholy and I mean this the most you know it's not an affectation I mean the end of the CTIU which never was an official end but the way things actually do end which is kind of messy, slow and painful was very dramatic for me you know like these very high expectations which reached a real as I say we're in waves and really probably as a kind of peak plateau with jungle, where everything sort of came together.
And that just crashing onto the kind of reef of the 21st century, where, you see, at the time when you were deeply immersed in this jungle culture, that could seem like, well, this is enough. Although, as Alex was saying, though actually the broader tendencies of the wider mainstream culture at the time were towards retrospection. You know, the emergence of kind of Britpop, etc. This is what everyone else was talking about. But for us, this was just a laughable throwback. Who's going to be into this? You know, history as the last laugh, of course. You know, when I first had Oasis, I laughed. Who's going to like this load of crime? But of course, then it was laughable at that point. But then the horror of the gradual situation where that became normal.
Where retrospection became not only normal, but it's invisible. We've got a situation where retrospection is so naturalized that we don't even understand any alternative to it anymore. And I still can't, I cannot come to terms with this. Just can't come to terms with it. And initially, in that moment of CCI, youth disintegration, in 2000, 2001, I was severely depressed to the point of being on a psychiatric ward. And in some ways, I think a lot of my work since then is trying to come to terms with how to live with that massive disappointment and melancholy without accepting the situation that we're in.
In a way, that's partly what the role of hauntology, etc., is in a way of, okay, I agree with Alex, it doesn't solve anything. But, you know, hauntology, harking back to things, doesn't solve anything. But at least, I mean, melancholy is a strategy, a certain kind of melancholy is a strategy of refusing to accept the inevitable, in a way. It might be inevitable that capitalist realism, as I've called it, which is on the other hand, you know, you put a cultural logic of neoliberalism in terms of retrospection pastiche, that might be inevitable, but it doesn't mean I'm going to accept it, actually. Well, let's talk about this idea of the death of rape, because we're talking about specific
moments in history, although it's a long span of British cultural history. And I guess partly it depends on whether you believe death is the end or whether death is actually a good thing for culture, parts of culture. And some of the broader ramifications are, for instance, now, I'm sure quite a lot of you have been to Sonar by Night, and I really get this feeling of post-apocalyptic raving. And for instance, Shackleton has a release, a double 12-inch call, Death is Not Final.
And then there's the afterlife of rave, which you can call maybe an artist's burial his work as mining an idea of an afterlife of rave or the existential angst of rave. So there's a lot more to it than just the moment when rave was as big as it was. There's these after effects of rave. And it sounds as though maybe you're touching on this about how so much of your work now is an after effect or relates to dealing with the effects of that period.
What about Rave? Is it a concept that we're still working with now or have we absorbed it and moving on? As an artist, obviously Lee's release last year, Jungle Diversions, would be another example of the afterlife of Rave. Can you talk about how that afterlife infuses your work? Yeah, weird. I mean, I really never thought of it in terms of a hauntological document. I never was aware of that sort of term, but I really hadn't thought of it in that way at all, really. I mean I guess it was a personal afterlife yeah I mean I wasn't putting it there to you know oh here's what it was like
or here's what you should think of what it was like or whatever never it was a matter of just yeah digging through some old stuff I mean the reason I was going back to a lot of that stuff I realised before like a couple of years before I made even started resampling any of this stuff I was listening back to this old stuff a lot of it had started to appear on YouTube and stuff a few years ago a lot of old sets from that period there wasn't around I mean there were some rave archives but then all of a sudden they're kind of YouTube long you know and there's this you know and that kind of period of jungle and drum and bass I mean if you go to YouTube now it's like it's like one of the best places to find a lot of the 12s I mean it really is it's weird but it is so I kind of did that I also kind of got some records back out of my dad's loft that had been there for years I just hadn't you know I just kind of ditched away and just left
so for me I mean I really distanced myself from that music at a certain point 97-8-ish I just was like right gone done and I really literally put it in the loft I mean quite physically and you know mentally and um yeah so I kind of yeah then then when I went when I realized I was starting to go back to this stuff and it sounded good to me again now whether it sounded good to me again because the stuff happening around me that was being made right now didn't sound good to me again and I was searching for something I'm always looking I mean for whatever I'm always clicking on stuff and I've been listening to what's going on so it's not like I was away from it all but yeah I mean the idea of going back to it was obviously there for me although I didn't go back to it with a heavy heart or you know shit I didn't you know should have done this or no it was never that for me
it just seemed like an interesting little it just seemed like a simple thing to do really I'd never sampled anything up to that point either so for me it was like oh I'm going to sample something then maybe I should sample this which was kind of it felt like the first music that was mine really that's how I would describe that period music that I found, I wasn't given to, I dug it out, I found it, and then, yeah, decided that, yeah, this was my sound, this is what I wanted to listen to, this is what I wanted to go to. So it seemed natural to go back to that anyway. But, yeah, I don't know, the death thing, I have no idea. I mean, really, yeah, I mean, it's a religious connotation too, which is a weird thing. Of course, no, of course it's not dead. I mean, you know, these little embers will be around forever, and people will pick up on these little bits
and do something with it, which is fine, of course. I mean, I'm less intrigued by absolute kind of revisionist. Like someone said to me, oh, there's no... or on some blog or something. Divergence, it's not a jungle record. No, no, no, it's not. No, absolutely not. I mean, I don't make jungle, you know. I wouldn't even attempt to kind of do that stuff, not without a lot of practice, you know. so for me it was the idea of just re-revising something and making an exact sort of version of something that's already happened is probably dull but doing something with the little straggle ends or the interpretations you have of it as a 19 year old in I don't know South Africa or something now well yeah that could be interesting I guess
yeah I think that's actually part of the success of the release is that it takes It's not retro-manic at all, although the source samples, of course, do come from the jungle era. But I think that when... So now moving on to the other idea of whether death can actually be a good thing. Steve made a very telling statement, a very astute statement last night. I wonder if you could repeat it for the audience when you were speaking about the effect of grime. Yeah, I mean, often when people talk about the history of rock music, they say that punk killed rock. Punk was the end of rock, and everything after then was just like undead zombie rock.
I think you could do a parallel in the UK. I don't know how far you could run with it, but saying that it was grime that stuck the knife into Rave. It was grime that stuck, that killed this kind of peace, love, unity, respect, the hippie side of rave, really. And that's, I don't think that's something to be, I mean, I'm ambivalent, depending on the day of the week. I'm either melancholy or upbeat about this. But I think you can see this as a process of creative destruction. So I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I think when there's this kind of creative destruction
implemented by a genre or sub-genre on a culture, then it clears the way for something. And where I'd agree with Mark and Simon and so on is that something significant hasn't really come into that void yet. If anything, what it's making me think is that the UK has still got a bit of a hangover. It's still clinging on to this idea that it is the center of the underground electronic musical universe. And I just don't think it is just now. Last year was the first year since I started DJing where most of the music I was playing
was actually American and not British. So I think that's quite interesting, quite telling. The other thing is with what was exciting about Rave, or every innovation of Rave kind of came from a mini death. Like Rave has died a thousand deaths over the last 20 years, and each one of them produced something interesting. You know, Dark Side Jungle, for example, was a breakdown of Rave culture. It was a mini breakdown. It was a psychological breakdown. It was a mental breakdown, and it produced amazing music. And I suppose the other thing we haven't talked about, but you need to factor into this discussion as well as technology
and sociology and so on is drugs. And I'm certainly not seeing a lack of people consuming a lot of drugs and dancing. Certainly, this musical culture has become much more stratified, channeled into commercial clubbing networks and super clubs and so on. But whether all these people are zombies, the living dead after the death of Rio, I don't know. but I think really I think that Rave was constantly dying and each one of those deaths was a creative death and that's what makes me not suicidal, that's what makes me sometimes optimistic.
Yeah, I mean, if only things would die, we'd be in a much better situation than we are. I mean, I think that's, you know, I think that's totally right, that the driving force, you know, the negation of the near past, the idea that this stuff is dead, it might carry on, but it's obsolete now. This notion of obsolescence, it's obsolete, it's old. That is what was gone. So nothing ever really dies. Everything comes back. Everything persists. And this is the comedy code with this. This just persistence of things long past their point of death. You know, so everything, there's this endless circulation of the undead. And, you know, and nothing, as Steve says,
then there's, that's fine, that's always happened, but it's the, it's that there's nothing to have replaced it. You know, it is the kind of shock. And it's this past shock instead of future shock, which I always register. Well, I'm listening to this. I could have heard this literally 20 years ago. Literally 20. 20 years ago at Experimental Music Festival. I'm hearing music that could have been played 20 years ago. What the actual fuck? You know, and I just can't... I just cannot come to terms with this. Still, and I sort of... Maybe I'd be happier if I could somehow. But I just never will be able to. And, you know, that's... I mean, that is partly this phenomenon of...
I think Simon points to... of just the availability of things, which we can forget this. The scarcity of these, the scarcity of culture at the time. You know, jungle is pretty hard to hear at the time. You knew almost nothing about it. You knew almost nothing about the artists. And, you know, it's a lot of hallucination, speculation, et cetera. Whereas now, like, I mean, that's totally right. right where you're saying, I mean, I wanted to do 20 best jungle tracks for fact. And I was trying to think of some, and I was away from home. I didn't have all my CDs and records, but I could, you could go on YouTube, and the people have just uploaded these 12 inches. That's only happened fairly recently. Like, in the last few years, I've noticed that it looked pretty, almost as if, like, you feel there's a need out there.
Like, someone wants to, I know it's not one person. It'd be wicked if it was just one. But I mean, it just feels like there's this pressure, like shit, there's nothing happening, there's nothing, grime's done, right, what do we need this, we'll go back here then, because this hasn't been done again, so we're here. It's a totally ambivalent phenomenon, isn't it, because there's amazing, amazing human achievement, YouTube, right? Runs totally counter the logics of capitalism, which is that people, you know, on neoliberalism, that people only do things for gain, you know, for monetary gain. It takes a lot of time to convert stuff from analog to digital. It takes a lot of effort to put stuff up there. It's the love and enthusiasm for the music which motivates the impulse to share and all of that. So there's a massively positive side to YouTube, etc.
But it's a question of the difference between a museum and an archive, isn't it? An archive is something you use for research in order to develop something new. And I think that, and often a history of music, and that comes out in Simon's book partly, so people had to go back to a certain period of the past in order to move things forward. Like, you know, I think it's in Retro Mania where Simon discusses, like, the Beatles or whatever, where, you know, that whole move into rock was regarded as a throwback anyway at a time. Where, you know, because rock was regarded as finished in lots of ways in the early 60s, but they went back to this ostensibly superseded thing and then repurposed it. I think that would be a positive case on the archival potentialities. It's the failure to repeat things often as well.
The failure to adequately repeat things properly which generates newness. People start off trying to copy. That's the thing with British rock in the first place, wasn't it? They're simply trying to copy American bluesmen. And their failures to do it will work. That's how people learn in general, though, from copying. That's how people learn from children all the way up to artists. There's a lot of established artists who have admitted that they started out trying to copy their favourite artists. So I sometimes wonder if actually just trying to copy stuff might actually be better than doing some kind of montage, bricolage, etc. It's that kind of, because that man, exactly, I mean, if you do read Frederick Jameson from the 80s on postmodernism, it is a perfect description of music culture now.
And not just the so-called bad stuff in the charts, but experimental stuff more, really. Where, you know, you've just got little bits and pieces of previous forms montaged together. maybe give up that kind of bricolage and actually try and copy stuff and the failures of copying it might actually generate something new I don't know Steve you mentioned hedonism and of course this is a big aspect of what makes rave so attractive is that it's fun it feels good, dancing, taking drugs it can be a lot of fun and it seems that you know, in the West we're very privileged, so can we see, Alex, can we see hedonism as a symptom
of capitalism, and does the exchange ratio in a party of it having some sort of symptom of resistance or opposition or political otherness to hedonism, that flux? I mean I think like as regards hedonism I was talking to Steve about this last night is what was interesting about things like the early days of rave music is that it's fun but it's serious fun it's seriously fun but also it has some there is a kind of a sense that sort of eliminating yourself collectively through drugs and music is an intense and meaningful experience.
So I think we haven't, you know, exactly as Steve says, we haven't, kids still go out, they still have a good time, and people still take lots of drugs and become highly intoxicated. The question is of, and this isn't just in terms of something like dance music, but it's sort of more broadly throughout culture of a lack of seriousness on a certain level. So the lack of the idea that this could be a good time that is also more than a good time in a certain sense. The idea of an intense experience being transformational in some way. Maybe not political. I mean, I think in many ways all of this stuff stands in for politics, the politics we're not allowed to have.
So you were talking before about death and whether things live or die and, you know, is Rave now undead? I think already within the impulse that you see in Rave is a lot of things coming from the failed revolutions which were happening in 1968, which couldn't happen. They failed. So that impulse then reverberates throughout culture and pops up every now and then, and Rave was one of these things. And has that shift though in the hedonism, that sort of that lack of seriousness, or
is this a symptom of accelerationism? I mean, I don't know because I mean like there's the sort of idea that, you know, so the sort of idea that you had in the past was one where, which to a lot of eyes today seems naive, right? We think it's naive that you could treat a rave as if it was really serious, as if like this sort of being together with people and having this collective experience could be transformational. It's sort of we view it a bit distastefully as if it's sort of sort of jejeune or sort of hippie-ish. It's something a bit to be kind of viewed with contempt. So is this, is this a, which I think that's wrong actually, but like, is this a symptom of accelerationism? accelerationism i don't know because i think like accelerationism and the sort of thinkers around
that so uh especially the ccriu took dance music very seriously um this didn't mean that they were like not taking lots of drugs and not dancing um the very opposite but i mean i think that they're in a sense this is something which we need to get back in dance music and in culture more generally is if you take it seriously, which doesn't mean being stony-faced, it doesn't mean being miserable, it probably means the very opposite a lot of the time. But if you take it seriously, then it means that you're less satisfied with the kind of things that Mark is so viscerally appalled by. This idea that people can be this contentment or an acceptance of repetition. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that the key affect
figuration of our time is depressed hedonism. Depressive hedonism. The way Drake sings, we had a party, we had a party, we had a party. It's like the saddest sound you've ever heard. I think Drake is great for this. The best kind of critiques of capitalism coming out of video, Drake and Kanye West. Even if you're super rich, you're totally fucking miserable. You can buy in this world, you can buy all the women you want, you know, and it's, you know, I had this woman, and I was kind of, I got these other ones, I've got to fly over here now, and just the absolute abject misery of on-tap hedonism, actually, and the sense of, you know, in that Drake record,
you know, the sense of the, you know, even if you're stupendously wealthy like he is, there's still something missing, and that, you know, that I think captures something really fundamental, which was available even to the poor in the 90s, which is collective delirium of depersonalization. Alain Ehrenberg has that phrase, the title of his book on depression, the weariness of the self. It's miserable for everyone to be themselves. It's not just you. It's miserable for anyone to be themselves And, you know, Annie didn't want us to mention the F word, the FB word today. But, you know, this is completely like the rise of reality TV and social media are completely convergent with, completely coincident rather, with the decline of what we're talking about here.
You know, it's a kind of magical capture that's all done with mirrors. On the 90s dance floor, that great line from Nick that you quoted about impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor. Because we want that enjoyment of the dissolution of identity which is just miserable to be human for all of us. Instead of that, the key kind of social technologies of the 21st century are then facializing, us back into this identification with ourselves at what the William Defoe character in David Cronenberg's Existence calls the most pathetic level of reality.
Psychological individualism. That's just much better to be these kind of depersonalized intensities than to be a person. Well, it's actually, that's kind of another way to describe what other people have framed as egalitarianism of the dance floor, the unity, the shared experience, which I like the way that you put it. So, but what about that aspect? You know, the word hippie-ish has come up a couple of times and I assume that that's what we're talking about, the sort of love saves the day, the love of the dance floor. Even though the dance floor is the place, the argument goes, where race, sexuality, and gender really join together
in a non-judgmental way, maybe for the first times? in some aspects of history, obviously we're talking about like the 70s here and New York at this point, but this escapism that Mark is describing as escape from your own self, actually, and is that related to how has that changed or has it changed? And does that relate to the political change of the past 25 years
in terms of capitalism and neoliberalism? Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it's not changed. I mean, for me, this kind of idea of the dance floor being this... When I was, as I said, I was pretty young when I went to Moffat. I remember going to a first rave. I was too young to get in. I do remember that. But we got in, and I remember being, it did feel, although I didn't have the sort of mental articulation of what it was, but it did feel like a kind of autonomous zone. Like, you went into this door, and when you went in there, you were outside of that, like, the Digbeth High Street in Birmingham wasn't there anymore. I mean, quite literally, and it wasn't drugs or anything. It was just, it felt like a completely autonomous space. You know, the rules were different. Everyone who normally was in that part of town or that part of town
were in here, you know, it wasn't always harmonious and, you know, and this kind of, you know, this black guy, this white guy, it wasn't all that, you know, it was, there was frictions and stuff, of course. You know, you've got different people from all over Birmingham all just coalescing in, you know, a room. You know, it's not always that straightforward, but it certainly had those aspects of Barrett, you know, because, of course, you've got this one, like, little universal thing in there, which is this sound that's coming out of the speakers, and that one MC who's, you know, the kind of head man there or whatever. So you did have this kind of feeling, but it wasn't... I never thought of it in a hippie way. It never felt hippie to me, in a sense that I know. I mean, it feels derogatory almost. I don't know. I don't mean it to be, but it feels... I think that's the political value of it and why it's key to hold onto as a moment.
I mean, all of that rave stuff, that early rave stuff and that neo-hippie stuff, just... You might be surprised to hear, just didn't really cut it for me at all. And it's just, I don't know, smiley faces and all that. Just a horrible fluorescent cut. As soon as it went like that for me, I wanted to get away with it. You know, like public school boys or, you know, making lots of money out of, you know. It's really the jungle turn. It's a junglistic turn for all of us, I think. Where you, it was in a way this libidinization, you could say, of the 70s cultural studies agenda. which was about in a way the escape from these kind of identities which we'd been assigned racial, class, gender
etc. and the fact that the producers of this had come from these subjugated groups that was really key to it and also the deracialising dimension of it. It was that story from Doc Scott, I think, when he was saying that when, you know, Goldie, this mutual incomprehension, like, Doc Scott couldn't believe that it was a black guy who produced Jungle, and, you know, Goldie couldn't believe that a white guy would do it. You know, it's this, you know, and, but rather than it being this kind of worthy, worthy one-worldism, hey man, we've all got to get together, hippieism, it was, you know, But the form of desire that was involved, you know, the glossy lure of the depersonalizing and dehumanizing,
you know, that was part of it. That made this kind of move out of identity, the fixed identities of everyday life, the identities of power ascribed to us. That made that libidinally alluring instead of kind of this worthy, you know, this worthiness. and the degeneration, I think part of it alongside this is the degeneration of leftism into moralistic policing of identities instead of the embracing of the possibilities of escape from the self, etc. Yeah, I think part of the problem is trying to understand or is like over-exaggerating the importance of hedonism in the most interesting moments in Rave because I
think what goes alongside what Mark talked about is depressive hedonism. Maybe it's flip is what I see a lot which I call like enforced hedonism. You must have a good time. And what was exciting about these various moments in the in the 90s was that actually it wasn't always pleasurable. There was some Some element of accepting, of submission, of accepting domination by the sound system, by the MC, by the DJ, of making yourself almost allowing yourself to be victimized by the intensity.
And you can't understand that purely in terms of pleasure and hedonism. Like Lee was saying, often there was tension in the clubs. And the tension was often a very important sense of what made it exciting and libidinally compelling. But it wasn't necessarily pleasure. It was kind of an aestheticisation of paranoia. It's kind of our tension, if you like. It was the people in there's tension rather than the tension you may get from, at my point, my parents or whatever. It was this. Everyone was... I didn't mind that. It wasn't a problem at all.
In fact, when it started to leave that kind of music, that's when I left too. I mean, you don't want a difficult time, but there's some vibe in there that needed to be there. It needed to be there in the community, in that area of the community, obviously because it manifested itself in those spaces heavily. It was in the air, and that was fine. It felt acceptable. It was okay. I thought anyway. Now if I went, I'd probably just shit myself, but then it was all right. I was a kid, I didn't care. So these collective instances weren't about trying to enforce hedonism on people on a situation that had tension. It wasn't about resolving the tension and be happy. It wasn't about that.
It was about going through the dark side, going through the paranoia, going through the tension and channeling it rhythmically and vibrationally and so on. So I think it's important to just not rely too much on the idea of hedonism when looking back at what was functional in Rave and what was dysfunctional and so on. I feel as though there's just so much to talk about and we've really just scratched the surface, but we've got a finite period of time and we would like to take some questions from the audience now if anybody has anything they'd like to ask the panel. Yeah, hi. I would like to ask Mark Fisher especially.
I had this feeling that there's actually this idea of a transformational experience in the club or other circumstances that seem to be really important. To me this is something that almost feels like a constant to society, to humans. I mean through all times there were different kind of ritualistic ways of making these transformational collective experiences. But then on the other hand, you often talk about this progression of form and kind of the horror that it doesn't progress and that we don't forget what has happened before and so on. So I wonder how you see that relation. How does that really fit together? The one is kind of constant or circular or kind of permanent and the other one needs progression.
Why do we need the progression to find a new transformational experience? That's a really good question, I think. But I think it comes to the heart of lots of issues that Alex raised and about the whole question of accelerationism, et cetera, because I think there is a kind of... I think this is what is touched on in the work of Deleuze and Qatari and of Nick Land, especially. Is there a kind of direction to history, albeit not the old style sort of grand opera of 19th century kind of progressivism. But you know, capitalism is the great virtual attractor of history, which either, you know, which you can see all social formations in relation
to capitalism, even before capitalism arrives. What are the coding systems of the rituals of so-called primitive societies about. They're about the negative appearance of capitalism. Or rather, capitalism appears negatively in them. They're a kind of preemptive exorcism of capitalism. But once capitalism has appeared, though, there is this kind of directionality to things, I think, and a kind of historical death drive, as it were, which is this kind of, that can't be put back in the box, that we can't go back to the cyclicity of so-called primitive societies anymore.
Capitalism unleashes and depends upon a kind of desire for the new. But as Alex says, that literally gets cashed out in terms of the most banal way, i.e. the new accumulation of profit. But the other side of that desire, Is this kind of intolerance for the stable, for the fixed, etc.? And for me, there's nothing bad about that desire in itself. It's the articulation of that desire to capitalism which is the issue. And the other problem is, and what is why, not only are these kind of agrarian, back-to-basics, organo-bourgeois, kind of you know let's all hold hands and weave you know make weave insulin with with you know
out of locally sourced cotton or whatever they're not only these things you know just inherently kind of it's just dubious and and reactionary they're also just there's a libidinal problem with them you know people people will all say we want well I won't but most of us will say we want organic locally sourced stuff but would always buy mass produced plastic and you know why as it were and that it i think that there's nothing wrong with it with with with that desire for the mass produced plasticity and and it won't go away that's the other point it won't go away and that that what there's an a there's a reactionary apocalypticism that uh hides behind many forms of leftism now.
The desire really for, you know, the whole technological infrastructure of this world to kind of disappear and so we can go back to neo-primitivist kind of world. And I think that not only is that, you know, like I say, politically dubious, it's not possible. We don't want it. No one really wants it, and that's why, you know, the question is then disarticulating that desire for newness, novelty, etc. that directional desire from capitalism with which it is arbitrarily, only arbitrarily conjoined I think. Anybody else have a question? Yeah I mean it's like you said yesterday at some point Mark, that you have to make a distinction
between the rhetoric of innovation and innovation itself and to a large extent I think capitalism as appropriated the rhetoric of innovation. What it would be for a complete subsumption of innovation to capitalism, I just don't think makes any sense. So I think you have to keep apart the rhetoric of innovation from innovation itself. Did anyone else have a question they'd like to? I just wanted to question a bit what seems like a largely psychological history of rave
and just sort of consider that maybe the death of rave is related to the death of the circumstances, the kind of constituent material circumstances for rave to happen in the UK at that time. So the period of the 90s has been kind of characterized as like a period of dull autonomy, which means that there was, you know, kind of sufficient unemployed benefit to be able to live fairly well and even potentially, you know, to produce records with. There was myriads of available kind of empty industrial spaces. Squatting was still possible, i.e. sort of free accommodation was possible, but also the occupation of large spaces for raves was possible.
And I just kind of, I wonder if you could kind of maybe discuss, you could also kind of consider rave and rave culture generally as a sort of, as a form of refusal of work, even this kind of, this idea of kind of destroying your personality is also a kind of element of destroying your category as, yourself as a category of wage labor. So I wondered if that could inject some class and material circumstances into this potted history. I know Mark has something to say about this. Yeah, I 100% agree then. I don't think that was clear to us at the time to the extent that is clear to me now. And I think that is part of my critique of Landianism.
that actually the conditions for Landianism were a university department actually where people and the welfare state and also where postgraduate students like us could be freed from work for a number of years in order to amass ourselves in this kind of thought and running in parallel exactly as you say space is free from work I think this is totally right what you're saying, and also is one of the key political points about, you know, the attack on work is absolutely a crucial thing now, you know, at a time where the shadow of work is over at all times, even and especially when we're unemployed or underemployed, and this is, I think, a crucial
phase is to recover this, you know, this attack on work. It was good that people weren't working a lot of the time, and that's why the culture was vibrant, because there's a space for people not to be working. But isn't it also that there's been a kind of contamination of play with work? This is what you get with your sort of post-Fordism social media. We're basically all working for these organisations for nothing, for use of their services. So, and with very sort of deleterious effects. So the idea of work has sort of permeated everything in a weird sense. So both kind of from the point of view of having this non-working space where you can be creative because you don't have anything else to do, but also having the mental space of boredom, which gives you the drive to want to do this.
and the sort of media environment which we exist in, there's always a constant low-level stream of entertainment and engagement, which is also work, by the way, which doesn't give you this mental space or this kind of economic or physical space. Was the unemployment figures higher in England in the early 90s than they are now? Yeah, I think so. I don't know if it was... I think it's more about that you could be unemployed for a long time with minimal kind of pressure without being hassled onto restart courses. I was in my first job then, so I wasn't. I was actually working out how it felt to do, you know, to grind. I think it's a really key point because I spent most of the 90s either unemployed or on postgraduate courses.
An actual difference between those two is pretty minimal a lot of the time. And in terms of, you know, but that was good. I mean, that was a good use of time. And in fact, part of the reason I got, like, psychiatrically depressed was, I've wasted my life and I can't work, I'm not fit for anything. Because the painful readjustment to a world where it had to be useful to capitalism was extremely traumatic, I think. Because exactly those, and that's a lot of what's behind my book Capitalist Realism, I think, is that sense of, there was a space which I could hold for 10 years where it didn't have to be useful to capitalism in any indirect way or didn't have to cash out what I was doing
in terms of some spurious business rationale. But then the terror of suddenly having to do that caused a panic. And I think that was part of the shift into away from a sort of wide acceptance of people weren't working and it was good into a world where we have to overwork and work. there's miserable North European Protestantism of work work is good no matter how no matter what you're doing but that's the whole thing it's now like work for no point whatsoever it's work at work which has become kind of like a good in itself even when you're not generating any value and it's not enjoyable because people in them days I remember when you you know
you kind of there was a sort of separation of kind of what happened you know you had like small shops the MC would be there he would work That's his job, in a sense. Then you have the dub plate place, the mastering place, a DJ or a producer. Everything was seemingly fairly organised in relation to work. Some kind of work. People were making some money. I'm not sure of black market, but they were still working, in a sense. Enjoying it, as you say. It wasn't like the grind, but there was a work ethic in there. They weren't dossing around. No, no, no. But I think that's the opposite. Because work in a way you can say is anything you don't want to do. And there was a possibility of... I mean, in fact, these scenes, the only interesting things, and this is part of the markets versus
capital dynamic that was interesting about this, was that this scene was not supported by big major labels. It was self-supporting via some kind of market dynamics, which weren't those of corporate capital at all. And that sense of a highly experimental scene, which could sustain itself outside dynamics of capital, that was part of why this was an important moment, I think. I know you have a lot of dance music cultures now, sponsorship is heavy, that you need it somehow. I don't know, I don't remember, but it didn't seem, you didn't see Red Bull everywhere when you were at a rave in 1993. I didn't notice it.
I'm sure it was something, but I didn't notice it. It seemed to be like, he did the sound system, he does this, he does this. I think also you used to actually be able to make money by selling records. If you had a hit underground rave record, you could make some fast cash. And I think the experience nowadays is that this becomes harder and harder to kind of do that. So the economics of it change. So perversely, whilst work permeates everything, within the cultural industries, work doesn't pay anymore. Yeah, I think this is where this fits in with the importance of a lot of the Terry Tamalit talk the other day about the poverty of audio producers now, etc. I think that's a key thing where the decommodification of music or the partial decommodification of music has not benefited producers.
Isn't it the case? It's still a commodity, it's just you can't sell it for anything. Yeah. Because artists are mostly making their music from performing and touring, then the actual music itself becomes a mode of marketing. Let's go back to questions about that. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Ask a question. You've got the mic. I just asked a question. I don't know, somebody mentioned that the discussion is from a UK-centric platform. And just as I understand that, I mean, I think somebody said capitalism isn't like an imminent system, as Dulles-Gatery put it,
but always touches its border on a higher order. So, I mean, this border that it touches has been pretty clear and some ways out of it for creativity and innovation. I don't know. And I just wonder what your opinion is on a more global scale, so to say, which I don't mean like as a post-world music kind of thing. This blogger from Brazil can send music to this blogger from Indonesia and he DJs it. but I don't know if you have any opinion, for example, on the idea of creativity and empire, which has itself some critical implications as it might be, again, representational. I don't know. Well, I think there's a sort of popular imagining about musical creativity that in the world that we're in
where producers and listeners from anywhere in the world now through relatively cheap production technology and also communications technology, principally the internet, can find and listen to anything from anywhere. And this is totally possible through blogs now to listen to global underground dance music coming from literally South America, South Africa, the Far East, everywhere. And this has had interesting effects, both in the underground and in the pop charts as well with the rise of Korean pop music and stuff like that. But the downside of it, I think, is that it underestimates the role that territory has. So things which are quite tightly knit, closed off from the outside, communities of listeners, dancers and producers
are able to, a bit like an island in the middle of the ocean, when you sort of explorers go there, what do you find? You find strange and bizarre animals that you've never seen before because they've been closed off from the rest of the world. and I think that like some of the most interesting so some of the most interesting sort of underground dance music to come out recently has been footwork or Duke and what was interesting about it was the fact that it was relatively closed down so it had time to become genuinely strange to certainly to most kind of like European ears it still had that feeling of future shock which is really a feeling of encountering something which is alien but in order for something to be alien I think it has to have this develop in a certain territorialised fashion.
So what you get now is, because everybody has access to everything immediately, is that possible anymore? And so will everything just become this kind of generic soup where it's all kind of... Yeah, and I think, just following up from what Steve was saying, there about this sort of globalised producer-performer, I almost interviewed Mike Banks from Underground Resistance, he was saying he deliberately just stays in Detroit the whole time. He just lets the others go off and DJ. So he can be this fulcrum where this, because I think this other concept from Deleuze and Guattari of consistency is key. And the difference between consistency and bricolage, as it were. Bricolage retains the integrity of the original elements. Whereas I think with consistency, you force the elements together into,
a certain kind of compression has occurred, such that they change form and a new consistency emerges. And, you know, only, I think, like, in the history of music, it has been kind of that kind of city-based, relatively enclosed scene, which has reliably generated those new forms. So I think, whilst I accept, of course, there's something good about this capacity to exchange, there's also severe problems with it, such as that, you know, along the lines that Alex has said. I mean, I think it's, on a couple of levels, is the question of concentration and distraction. Apart from all the positive dimensions of globally networked music culture, what the internet also does
is provide a massive means of distraction. And what is important, both mentally, like being mentally distracted or being able to concentrate something, and also in terms of urbanism, people being scattered in the territorial arts or being concentrated in an urban center, is that when you get this concentration, you enter the tunnel, you shut off the outside, and you allow the process that Mark's talking about to happen, which is consistency to occur that hasn't been rushed from the outside, that finds its own speeds
and allows a collective intelligence to emerge or what Eno called seniors. And you can't rush seniors. I mean, I say you can't rush seniors. Seniors is impersonal and collective. So nobody controls it. and so the agency is distributed around the circuit and a distracted collective often can't find that consistency. And that idea of seniors is part of what's made the history of UK dance music so great. But I'm afraid we've run out of time so we're gonna have to end here. I'd like to thank the panel, Lee Gamble, Steve Goodman, Mark Fisher, Alex Williams.