Thanks again to CTM and Transmedial for helping make this happen. Again, like the first panel, rather than read out lengthy bios, I might just ask the panelists, Dane and Danver, to introduce themselves briefly and talk a little bit about what they do. Yeah, sure. So my name is Danver, and I teach at Goldsmiths College in the Department of Visual Cultures. And I guess I tried to write and talk and teach about certain elements of contemporary music culture through the lens of questions of race and class. That's generally about it. My name is Dane Sutherland. I am a curator. I work under the name Most Dismal Swamp, which is a kind of experimental curatorial art project
and a record label. I'm starting to appear to music soon, tomorrow, and producing exhibitions and films. I should be at home also finishing my PhD on contemporary art in a speculative turn and just generally hanging out with art stuff and music stuff. That's what I do. Thanks very much for being honest. Those things are much more honest than when people just read out this thing. I think it's a bit nicer. The last panel was to a degree a bit more fluid and a bit more open discussion. But I think given Dan Verndane's backgrounds, I've actually prepared a few questions to go into just because I think given their knowledge, I want to keep things maybe a little bit more specific but maybe it'll go off the rails and that's totally okay as well but I guess the first question I'd have is given that we're talking about artifacts you know both artifact and artifact
could we try and agree first of all on a definition as to what we mean when we say cultural artifact and cultural logic yeah I mean I can't help but think that like when I think of a cultural artifact it's nothing that's particularly special it's just like what we do what we produce like a cultural artifact is an artwork or a song, but it's also the way we pronounce our vowels or the way we sit in the toilet. It's just like normal things, but some cultural artifacts have more resources than others to kind of contribute to a cultural logic. Some cultural artifacts might work towards sedimenting particular logics. For example, artworks that... Well, not artworks, but cultural artifacts. For example, Big Brother, like you mentioned,
is a cultural artifact that might kind of sediment the logic of a kind of individualism or a certain kind of set of coordinates for how people might want to kind of perceive themselves or whatever. But then I guess you get other cultural artifacts which maybe disrupt that or maybe disrupt some kind of bit of an aged term that we need to get rid of, but you get cultural artifacts that maybe mutate these logics in one way or another. The way I think about it a little bit is there's this fantastic quote from Rezunegar Astani's Cyclonopedia where he talks about strategic weapons that governments deploy. And that might be something like a new tax system. It might be something like trying to rig an election or something. But the artifact of that is what the after effect of it. It's like the dust that's left over at the end
that no one had any intention of starting. I don't know. Danver, what's your take on that? I agree with Dane that culture should broadly be understood as stuff that people do. but I think in terms of cultural logic and cultural artefact I tend to go for some what might be thought of as old fashioned words so ideology and art they would be the two terms I'd rather go for than cultural logic and cultural artefact and that's just down to a desire not to unnecessarily complicate things when thinking about a question of culture. Because I think something perhaps important we learned from Mark is that if there's any purpose to cultural criticism
or intellectual labour, it's to try best to explain how things work. That's obviously not always easy to do. And in fact, it's quite an impossible task. That's why we keep on at it. That's also assuming that the intellectual labour is itself intentional and deliberate and not grafted onto someone. Could you expand on that? Well, if you think about something, I mean, I think someone from the previous discussion in the audience, they asked about something in relation to the colonization of cognition by capital. It's kind of like, it's a slightly tired trope maybe. But like there is an effect that comes from platform capitalism that does colonize people's cognition. And that's, it's undeniable.
It's just not necessarily the newest thing to say about it. But that is the kind of intellectual labour that you do, which is very extractive. And that's not the intentional intellectual labour that you would see in something like the K-Punk Project. Okay. I don't think all intellectual labour is de facto captured. Because then I don't think there'd be a desire for it to be captured in the first place. I think it's important to understand what you're drawing upon and what is being mapped out when you use terms like capital. And use terms like cognitive capital. And it's if whatever we think of as capital wouldn't work the way it did if it didn't keep on coming and hunting for us. So there's something that we're doing that it keeps on wanting to chase and it keeps on wanting to pursue and transform into something else.
Otherwise, it wouldn't do that. Otherwise, it wouldn't need to be so violent and be so excessive because there's something that we keep on doing that it can't quite get hold of. So I think everyone is involved in some element of intellectual labour. It's just that it operates at different levels of intensity. It doesn't mean one is captured and one isn't. I think that's a question that Mark was perhaps tussling with quite a lot throughout his own writing. To what extent it's his own labour captured. and to what extent it is in it and I think that's that he might have been a lot more hopeful about things than people often frame him as being not quite sure what next to ask
just your last point there about how his work was captured but maybe we'll come back to that in the question after this one I think but just in relation to the adopting of his ideals in the wrong way but a question that I asked the previous panel and I think it bears repeating just so I'd like your take on it was Mark Fisher never gave like strict instructions as to what culture should do but there was a diagnostician element to it okay but like what i was getting with that is that um referencing niches in beyond and good and evil niches what are the conditions uh which great cultural artifacts can emerge and fisher is asking this question in 2006 and of course he's looking um through a nichian prism uh at celebrity big brother highlighting uh his fellow blogger uh marcello who said uh where once we uh assembled
in front of screens or stages to gasp and awe at people doing and cheering things we could never hope of doing ourselves, now all we require is a humbling mirror. So what he's talking about here is celebrityality, but one which does not benefit the working classes it attempts to empathize with, but sells them a false alternative or false narrative. And we can see that about Celebrity Big Brother, but I'm trying to think about, you know, that was written in 2006, I'm trying to think about the current moment now. Like, how could we say that element of celebrity has changed in relation to something like, I don't know, like user-generated content in TikTok, you know, or even just the cult of the YouTube star, you know, there's like, there has been a shift that's taken place there, I think. I feel like in that instance, it kind of refers to like how I defined what I felt like a cultural
artifact might be. It's like something that kind of maybe props up or something that kind of diverts from a kind of ideology or cultural logic. And Mark's work seemed to kind of definitely be quite coruscating and critical over things that were kind of blindly upholding logics that were kind of detrimental to kind of actual more adventurous forms of cultural production or creating kind of artifacts that kind of act as a kind of cognitive scaffold perhaps for kind of building kind of new ideas. but then to add to his that kind of like suggestion that his role was maybe of a kind of diagnostician that he was also like i think really into like winding up young people and like challenging them like quite quite forcefully and that was all about like at the very start of that quote he's kind of interested in the the conditions that foster or the conditions
that mire um cultural production and then kind of asking a room full of young people to like name a kind of movement in music that has had the same traction as disco is bound to kind of like get people's backs up but I think that's something he attempted really hard to do to kind of make them think about the conditions under which they're making music or making cultural artifacts but that's a good provocation to make though I guess his point was it's like he's not to go to your question about why he never kind of what was it he didn't tell people what kind of cultural products to make or I mean he was a critic and he was in winding people up he was kind of in my view asking people to kind of question those conditions under which they're making. For example one of his examples I remember was
talking about Joy Division for example but the reason they kind of were able to kind of make those albums they did was because they kind of had the kind of framework of like English like welfare at the time which is kind of and by bringing that up he's kind of referred to kind of the nosedive that has taken in recent years and the kind of inability or the kind of it's no longer a cradle for cultural production in the same way as it once was i think um the the the question of kind of new points of mediation for mass culture so you know tiktok youtube stars etc becomes um interesting depending on again the lenses and the and the approach you're taking to that that question so when you when you ask that question it kind of immediately thought of a filmmaker like
Arthur Jaffer whose entire works are composed of found you could call an old-fashioned art term found materials he's kind of searched through the what you could call the detritus of mass culture and sculpt and carved out this a kind of sculpture from it so I'm wondering in what that sense that work like that and I think there's a whole bunch of artists who kind of work in a similar way, use a similar modality. An artist like Adam Farah, also known as Free Yard, kind of he's built this project around, for a period Mariah Carey appeared on a kind of television sales channel, you know where you kind of sell goods to people through TV and she
constantly used the term moment as like a noun, a verb, an adjective and he's kind of created first of all he's created this piece out of her appearances on like I think it's called QVC but he's not looking at it with irony or kind of as a kind of sense of pastiche, he takes that as a kind of urtext the moment, basically Mariah's involved in a type of theorization a kind of theorization of time which he then uses as a basis for whole other works he creates, so it becomes a kind of template, this appearance of Mariah Carey on QVC. And yeah, he's absolutely deadly serious about it. And I think that's the challenge it poses. It's easy to symptomise kind of mass media
and, well not mass media, but new technologies. But again, people are doing something in there. And it's up to us to look harder and look kind of find new ways of looking and listening, perhaps. I'm asking this question even though I know you have an answer for it but you know but are there any parts of Mark Fisher's work that you think have been badly adapted and acid communism is one that comes to mind because I think it has been done a disservice in many respects as it gets reduced to a leftist consciousness raising project and for some reason through psychedelics and that fails to communicate the complexity Fisher was alluding to and that's something that I think maybe I didn't mention in the first panel that I would have liked to is that
what Mark Fisher was very good at doing was diagnosing incredible complexity in a way that was very palpable to someone like me as a young student who didn't feel at home in the department I was in and to the next department that I went to because of very old-fashioned academic rigor. So I think, I mean, that's maybe something to just think about in terms of that it was making complexity accessible. That was another essential thing of the K-Punk project. and that's why when I hear reductive analysis of acid communism as something that no one knows what it was going to be anyway, that's something that bothers me quite a bit. But I'd like to ask you what then is your take on post-colonial melancholia, his idea that Trump's rise make American Brexit. These are different facets of the same phenomenon.
Phenomenon is kind of a strange word to use there, but I appreciate that Trump's election happened along racial lines, and post-colonial melancholia is a pathology rooted in Enlightenment thinking, and I've spoken to American friends about this but the fear of the other that finds safety in the illusion of the white suburb these are breaking points but there's a breaking point where some shift could be possibly mobilized and I think that's something again that he was trying to get across with the acid communism as well as that safety of the white suburb that instigates things like Trump being elected and Brexit happening even though you can't think that those two things are the same phenomena at all but that that was something that was temporary in the last available lecture from Mark Fisher online is all of this is temporary A weird thing I read recently was it wasn't like a published something that Mark published but it was
a transcript from one of the seminars that he conducted with his students and they were kind of questioning the term acid communism so I mean that kind of speaks to the fact that it was an unfinished introduction but it was also an unfinished project as well that probably wasn't even finished the naming process I presume that he might have kind of done that work with and through the kind of seminars he conducted with his students and part of that kind of misinterpretation or misapplication of something like Assy communism might just come in through the kind of fact that it maybe wasn't fully named yet it brings up certain kind of conceptual resources that are maybe right or wrong to what he wanted to do with it in the end like we've spoken before how he kind of really had a kind of like perverse interest in kind of like flipping
coining like neologisms and kind of seeing what kind of legs they had and seeing what kind of worlds they kind of conjured. And some of these kind of terms were just kind of used really badly, like potentially acid communism and accelerationism as well, which is something that's like... It's just part of the reason that kind of maybe didn't fare so well is because it was named just incorrectly. I think one of the kind of issues with acid communism is that it kind of referred... It's just the kind of psychedelic kind of tropes it brings up with acid. when he's not, I don't think he was necessarily playing entirely with that, but then instead referring to a confluence of resources that kind of occurred under a particular kind of, he's referring to those conditions again, the conditions of like the 60s and the 70s that kind of fostered kind of new different ways of thinking or different
kind of imaginaries. And something like psychedelia can eclipse that perhaps, or kind of give it a kind of romantic kind of tenor. There was lots in that question that I think that needs to even try to approach it, some quite careful unpacking and kind of careful navigation through. So I think the first thing, you mentioned post-colonial melancholia. So I think it's important to always recognize, like no one person or no one person who thinks, any person who thinks, as in everyone, because everyone thinks, has a handle on everything. And everyone who thinks, as in everyone, has limit points and has gaps. and has blind spots. So in regards to post-colonial melancholia,
certainly, and as Matt's taught us through his book, Mark had lots of rich and wonderful things to say about melancholia. But I would say, for me, unfortunately, he didn't have anything to say about the post-colonial. And then if you extend that or link that then to something like acid communism, it's quite correct that we don't know where he was going with it. we only have, what, a few hundred words, maybe even under a thousand words, I think. It's not even, it's a few pages of a chapter. With gaps as well. So he can't really tell where he's going with it. But something about the way it's been taken up into acid Corbynism or a kind of attempt to reinvigorate left politics
or Labour Party politics might actually point to some of the limits of Marx's own thinking. And they weren't only his own, they were kind of part of a, perhaps part of a group of thinkers he was thinking with. And that comes down to something like you could call... Would you be talking about Marquise there or Zizek? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinkers that he was talking about, people he was directly in conversation with. I think you could call it something like a provincialism, or even a parochialism. That's at work in that thought. And it really comes down for me to the question of how class is conceived in that thought. Now, I think the brilliance of Mark's work was that what he was able to really forcefully put on the table was this idea that, okay,
popular music was a revolutionary class project, right? It was a means by which a working class, working class youth were able to re-engineer lines of force within a society. And that's undeniable. The evidence is there, right, from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, up until the 90s. popular music was this class project, perhaps the most revolutionary class project that had been available in the 20th century. Would you say that was with the consumption of music or with its availability? No, its production and its consumption. But I'd say that the issue that I sometimes had with reading Mark's work on that period of popular music, and I think the stuff he takes on from the likes of Zizek, Bifo Barati, and others,
is that their conception of class was highly limited. So if you think about that period in the 60s and 70s and 80s when pop music was at its most intense in terms of its cycles of change, adaptation, newness kind of appearing. In that period, particularly in Britain, which seemed to be Mark's focus, the British conception of class, understanding of class, was undergoing a massive upheaval. And the reason it was undergoing a massive upheaval is that these people turned up from the colonies to become a new labour force. And one could argue that one of the primary energies flowing through popular music over that period was down to the fact that class was undergoing a huge upheaval. That it was actually the driving engine of British popular music
was something like dub, was funk, was the way that hip-hop travelled to the UK. And I think Mark didn't have an adequate account of that. And I think that's perhaps why acid communism has been adapted the way it is. Because if you look at what he maps out with regards to acid communism in that short chapter, if you read a different lineage of music writers and cultural critics, you could see it mapped out. It's been mapped out for years already. If you read someone like Amiri Baraka. Now, Baraka in his book on black music, which is a kind of mapping out of free jazz as it emerged, he has this brilliant line and I think it's about Coltrane or it might be about Sun Ra and he says
if you listen to enough of this music it will make you think a lot of strange and wonderful things and you might even become one of them so you've got Baraka, you've got someone like Greg Tate, you've got Nathaniel Mackie, all of these thinkers have been mapping out something that we could call acid communism for a number of years but it takes a rethinking of one's conception of class. So one's conception of class, particularly in the British context, and sorry I'm talking about Britain here, but it's an affliction. I was born there. Is that the British working class didn't begin in Manchester or Nottingham or Birmingham. They're in Kingston and Karachi and Candy. And that's not only a factual element, that's a conceptual leap that needs to be
if you're going to start making claims around popular music in Britain in that period. I had this conversation with a few friends in New York, actually, about trying to map out how some of Fisher's critiques of capital and of the left play out in the US because you can't just map one onto the other at all. And one of them being, again, as I said before, this complete rejection of identitarian essentialism, which you can't take that to the US. It doesn't work in the same way. At least I don't think so anyway. What do you mean by identitarian essentialism? Because I'm kind of confused by that. I heard you use it in the last panel and I'm kind of... So yeah, that's from his essay Exiting the Vampire Castle. So what he was arguing for
was that in order for the left to sort itself out, again, another quote that was used in the previous panel was solidarity without sameness. but the fact that you have identities battling against one another within culture and also within the left itself that's a problem that needs to be overcome but that's there's a limitation in that as well because I mean if you take that to the US I mean take the Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter movement for example like I wouldn't for a moment say to them that you need to dissolve the individual and stop being essential about your identity you know but again the same applies to Britain And Britain had slaves too. And it had colonies too. I mean, I'm just talking about more in relation to the present moment of what's been happening in the US. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm kind of, again, I'm just kind of confused
by what is meant by identitarian essentialism because, again, it takes a careful and slow and considered reading of the history of the 20th century. So if you're talking about under this kind of form of dissolving and experimentation, that that was happening in everyday culture in Britain in places where people from former colonies lived. Now in Britain you had this experimentation with what the term black meant. And that happened through the music. That happened around the sound system. The sound system was this kind of technology whereby something that some people like to misconstrue as identity
was constantly being adapted, played with, reconfigured, under conditions of intense social pressure, quite intense violent social pressure. It was already there. I think Matt brought it up in the last panel, this idea that the means were already there, and that it was already being done. We've just not paid enough attention to it. And therefore, I think the criticisms of what's called identitarian essentialism are just inaccurate. I don't know where that's coming from. If you look at the history of the 20th century, it doesn't apply, it doesn't hold up for me. You're saying that identitarianism as a mechanism doesn't hold up if we look at the 20th century? As a kind of critique of the left, or whatever the left might be, it doesn't hold up.
It's not a valid criticism, it's not a valid line of argument. But what I think that Fisher was getting at was it was more of a 21st century, techno-capital-enabled thing that is a product of platforms like Twitter. yeah but again beyond that where was there kind of evidence that this was at stake where was it in that essay in particular he's talking about the vindication of Russell Brand over an interview he had with Jeremy Paxman not that I'm going to sit here and defend Russell Brand Russell Brand is Russell Brand I don't know problems I'm just indifferent maybe you could bring it back a little bit to what you're talking about in terms of the sound system? Were you saying that an identity actually emerged from the sound system culture, or was it something that was there before?
I think something like a consciousness emerged and a way of living. I think you'd call it that, perhaps. And it's still there. It's still there. Because a lot of people would argue, and again, I don't live in the UK, but some people would argue against that, that it doesn't exist like it used to. I think it's really interesting, at least, again, with the city I live in, that there's been a proliferation or there's been various things going on around underground music culture. You've had the development of kind of quite major club ventures like we were talking about early electric works and so on. There's been lots of moving small really brilliant parties. Tropical waste has returned. A place like Ormside Projects is always putting on good parties.
But at the same time as that I think what's been really fascinating is that although it's been going on on its own pace for years, people are going back to dub sound systems. Ja Shaka is now one of the biggest parties in town. And the interesting thing about the difference between, let's say, going to, as brilliant, and I love tropical waste parties, what's really fascinating about going to Shaka is the levels of age differentiation. You're going to get from 18 to 80. And that completely changes the dynamic on the dance floor in terms of how people behave, but how they are with each other and how they are in that space. I don't know what's going on there, but I think there's something in that. I think that's something I've been missing, actually, is that breadth
of generational inclusion, which I've not really seen in a lot of things that I've been going to personally. Maybe what I've been going to is a bit more specific art crowd perhaps, which is maybe implicitly quite exclusive or but nonetheless like does foster some form of consciousness I guess and like this is the other kind of thought with something like acid communism perhaps is like it points towards consciousness raising or consciousness altering as maybe inherently good but the matter doesn't tell you how or what you're raising or altering those consciousness with like what materials are being used like what is the kind of artifactual instantiation of like an acid tab in a sense. I mean, a DJ could be a really interesting instantiation of what ACID could be in a
sense that a DJ could have, not on their own, but with the confluence of resources that the night brings, whether the community and the space and what that produces can form what you're describing, I think, in a way, but on different scales, I guess, as well. And sometimes that can be quite transitory, I suppose. I knew this would happen. I ended up going off from the script. But just what you're talking about that I mean two questions maybe but one to lead back to another example of what you were saying might be a party that I never went to but I've read a lot about which was I think called Nag Nag Nag which is an electro clash party in London but I think that might be similar to what you're saying but I don't know if you're familiar with Nag Nag Nag no okay but then I guess I'm a slight cultural pessimist in that I'm not I don't I need to be convinced at this point because I've seen what I think are the
limitations of culture and what it can produce and but I'm always open to having my mind changed about something which is something I probably gained from reading Mark Fisher's work. But I mean, if you were to try and maybe define, and I know it's a difficult question to do particularly at a music festival, but what are maybe the limitations then of what culture can produce apart from spaces? And I think that element of spaces is quite interesting because something that I had a very interesting conversation with someone who's spoken at CTM before, Matt Dreherst, And he said what is essential to this cultural emergence of new sounds and collectivism and these things is that an actual physical space is needed. And I think like Akudmachtnoy, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing correctly, but it's a space in Berlin. And that's kind of an institution that's a little bit like that. I mean, it's not that it's a super club or something like that, but it's a place that has an identity for fostering new things.
And I'm not sure, I mean, is there any, what spaces in the UK are doing that? Like, I'm not talking about actual club nights or like collective people, I'm talking about actual physical space. because I think that's something that maybe gets lost in that a lot of these sound system phenomenons, they need to move from a venue to a venue and this kind of thing. That's kind of exactly what I was going to pick on with these things have to move from venue to venue. A lot of club nights are quite peripatetic. A lot of club nights are kind of... So then there was that recent kind of article, Conceptronica, which kind of named this kind of term and applied it to artists who are maybe popping up in like art galleries that got kind of like... And therefore, by virtue of doing that, blushes their work with this idea that it's some kind of high art or concept-based thing. Which it is, but it's also an instance of
musicians and club nights using the resources that are made available to them. There's a club night appearing at the ICA in London tomorrow night called Inferno. It's not the kind of place they're normally set up in, but they've been obviously given a platform and been given some resources to use and of course they're going to use it so the point is a space like you're describing is not just a single space but it's a kind of um it's wherever that kind of identity travels and it kind of brings it's like a roving flag through the city in a way um some people can see it's like and also some people can see it and some other people can't it's like and a space is never just a space it's also just a kind of like you say a kind of um place where certain ideas or concepts or kind of ways of kind of talking to
another can flourish. Yes, space is that's the space is absolutely essential and that's why it's a constant form of contestation because one of the things we can say about perhaps the operations or nature of capital in the last 20, 30 years is that there's been a, it's turned to see the city as a resource it can exploit and hence why space is at such a premium. So that's why it's so difficult to run parties. Not even run parties, but to organise in space because even reproducing yourself living in a city has become so tough. So space in general is a pressure point in a city.
Talking about Conceptronica, there was the in our department, because Mark worked in our department, we have a Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, which Matt is key to organising and the great parties he runs after the lecture. So the lecture is like we invite someone to give a formal talk and then Matt and his friends organise a party afterwards as kind of like this double-twinned event. So we've had Kojo Eshin deliver the first lecture and then Jodie Dean and then this year we had Simon Reynolds. It's not long after he's published the Conceptronica piece. And so he's come to visit, he's actually speaking to students in a workshop for a couple of days beforehand. And so I say, you know, there's this party at Corsica run by Hyperdub called Zero, organized by Shannon SP. And I was like,
do you want to go along? And in a way, the Zero party is a crystallization of his argument in Conceptronica. The party normally has DJs in one room and an installation in another. So I was kind of wondering if it was maybe a good idea to take him there, whether he'd like it or someone might criticize him or yell at him or something. What was really interesting is that Code9 was DJing all night, who's since Richard passed, the best selector going. Within 10 minutes, Reynolds was on the dance floor, going for it. A DJ lag record, I think, set him off. Because he lives in LA, right? He's not really moving actively within those circuits. So when he was exposed to what he called Conceptronica, he quite liked it. Steve Goodman has
that power. I'm not someone who dances myself anymore, but I saw him over the summer and I did some dancing. There has been also quite conscious efforts to navigating or dealing with that kind of premium on space and how difficult it is to kind of just get your hands on. It's a threshold for access. It's just so difficult to overcome. I'm thinking of things that have been fostered online as movements. The one that got the most traction, I suppose, was back when Vaporwave was kind of emerging. You would see, was it 420? something F or they just have these online parties and stuff. And there was a festival on the Minecraft server or something. No, it was Minecraft. I can't remember what it was. And these may be stupid novelties or something, but at the same time, I know people
who were happy to go to these Minecraft parties. And again, it's like, I don't know who am I, to scoff at someone else's enjoyment. These are other ways in which the premium space is being navigated. I wouldn't underestimate those spaces actually. I went to a very interesting talk last week about that and I would have been someone who was a little bit skeptical of it but no your mind can be changed with things. Just to keep it on the topic of music though, Dan for something you mentioned in the Glassbeat article with Ali Gamble. Glassbeat is a journal I'd really recommend people read as well but what you said was, sorry you were asked about your, about the psychosocial aspects of music and the ways in which the nervous system of the technological infrastructure of music is ramified in the cognitive dimension of
the experience of music as well as social determinations and this is something I'd like to spin out a bit like how can we describe music's actual social determinations or do we need to I mean maybe you've just answered this and you're talking about the the importance of joshak and things like this but like I'm I don't know what it is about where my research has taken me in recent years but I know a lot of this has to do with Suhail Malik's critics of contemporary art but I would like to try and figure out what are the social determinations of music if we can figure out because it's not to box things in but it's a case of to try and clarify things so that people can understand that there's they don't fall into the false alternatives that happens when scenes get co-opted Again that's a really big question and it was actually necessary to do that
to work that out as part of a conversation with Lee I couldn't have done it on my own And actually part of that goes back to my earlier thing about perhaps explaining or simplifying things, that the questions that they, I mean, they're really nice people at Glass B, but the questions they sent us, Lee was kind of messaging me saying, I don't understand these questions. And I was like, I don't either, but let's just try and pick out something and run with it and see where we end up. And yeah, I think a way of talking about the social determinations of music is, I mean, it's been a long running debate, like centuries long debate. So generally the way it's looked at is that, you have this relationship between the formal and the informal, right? Broadly understood. A piece of music, a cultural object, is understood as a formal thing. It has a form, it has a set of structures, the way it works, etc.
And the social is normally understood as something that's informal. And the question is, well, how do we figure the relationship between the two? Now, the way it's been done, there's been two approaches to it. One is the approach of what you might call an anthropologist or ethnomusicologist or someone like that who goes, well, I'm going to work out exactly what is going on in the formal. Informal, sorry, the social. I'm going to formalize it. So therefore, if we work that out, we can understand exactly what's going on in the piece of music. Then you have the other pole which goes, no, no, no, no, no. We shouldn't be doing that. We should be just looking at the formal piece of music in and of itself, separated from everything else, understand it on its own terms. Now, it's not a case of finding a neat path between those two.
It's about kind of, I think, and the thing I've learned from reading others, talking to others, and just general conversation is that, well, the informal is always buried in the formal. So the social is always buried in the music, and there's always music in the social. Something that's clarified that for me now are like the opening, opening minutes of Klein's record Tommy, where you hear her hanging out with friends and then something like music just kind of bleeds out of that. It's like a pitched up vocal or something. Yeah, yeah. And if you think about it, if you start to listen, you hear instances of that all over popular music, that the formals are merging out the informal. Listen to the first seconds of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.
Classic example. It's everywhere. Yeah, I think it's paying attention to that, the kind of slippages, the bleeds, the kind of porousness of the relationship between the two. Dane, given that your work is a bit more directed in contemporary art, maybe you'd like to, I don't know, because I do like to try and separate the analysis of music from contemporary art, being that it's something that's quite liminal, quite open-ended. I think music has more of a determination to it, maybe. But sorry, you were about to make a comment. Yeah, no, it's interesting, actually, because I mean, I always take the opposite, not quite opposite, but I don't like to kind of parse out like contemporary art and music. If I'm writing something, if I say contemporary art, I mean art objects and musical objects. They're both things that produce concepts and feelings
and whatever. What was the question before you were saying again? Well, the way that we're trying to figure out what a social determination in music would be, and Danvers said that it's a mixture between analysing the ethnographic quality of it along with the formalistic and they're both two of those things are interlocked but I find with contemporary art it's far less determinate, it's a lot more about value, the tyranny of what was it called indeterminacy that comes from Marshall Duchamp and that's kind of where I'm wrong in terms of refusing to parse those things out because they actually are different and they're have different social determinations they have different economies of ways of talking about them and ways of teaching them and things like that so I mean for example the word liminal and like a kind of economy of kind of practicing artists
might maybe seem like it's kind of relegated to like a different time period whereas for a music audience or whatever might be more interesting but then it can be used in so many different ways so I mean in terms of like contemporary art kind of having I think it's interesting to try and find some kind of not balance but a way of carefully navigating that kind of determinacy and determinacy so for example one of the kind of orthodoxies that kind of emerged through kind of 90s and early 2000s contemporary art was the kind of art the social space as an artwork and that became more and more indeterminate or not more and more but was certainly indeterminate as a kind of the way in which an artist or a curator was the less they kind of determined the project's outcome and determined how people would activate
or work within that kind of social space that they had produced as an artwork was somehow a mark over its quality, like, that good things would emerge from the kind of the social, the self-organization of people being in this space, which is just not true. I think an interesting way to, like, I guess, determine that, add some kind of form of determinacy, is, again, to be aware of, like, what spaces you're producing and, like, what resources as an artist or an organizer you are including in that kind of open space of indeterminacy. So, like, yeah, it's interesting to, for example, when I work with artists or musicians, I still kind of come with something that I believe is my thesis or a model through which I can look things look through things so it's not just a kind of indeterminate open field I don't know if that makes sense
it's just like when you start when you put on a club night you don't just have I mean you have a specific sound and kind of thing going on and I don't know Dane I wanted to ask you about that relationship between contemporary art and music because there seems to be a lot of actually quite material crossover. Like the last Klein gig I saw was at the Serpentine. Dean Blunt's kind of got a mini career in kind of contemporary art. And a lot of the musicians that we kind of listened to, like Julianna Huxtable, Misa and a few others, did MFAs, like major art colleges. So there is some interface. I was wondering if you kind of had any. I feel like my answer is always going to be just a bit like,
like it's a throwaway kind of thing. People you're describing are artists. They're just like people who have an interest in making things. I know it's not a very intelligent answer, but I mean, like Dean Blunt and Klein are just like people who want to make stuff, I guess. And they've got an opportunity to do that with Serpentine or with an art... I mean, it's not like a... I'd be curious to know how much they separate their kind of artwork from their music work or whether it is kind of the same thing. And I guess when we're talking about maybe like a dub sound system as being a distributed intelligence or something that kind of comes with the music, but also the extra musical kind of characteristic as well. And I guess perhaps like Dean Blunt's kind of artwork is an extra musical characteristic of his kind of corpus. Let's maybe spin that little bit out again, because that's something that I think is quite rich,
that idea of music being a form of distributed intelligence. Like maybe I know that Dan, this is something that I think I've taken from your writing maybe, but how would you describe music as being a distributed form of intelligence? Because it's a very, very rich idea and a nice way that maybe takes it out of just the formal. It's actually a very old idea. It's taken from the work of a writer and musician called George Lewis. People don't know him. He's written this magnificent history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a collective who are still operative now but started in Chicago in the 70s. I think George Lewis spoke at CTM, if not last year. Did he? Okay, brilliant, brilliant, yeah. And the idea of distributed intelligence comes from this essay he has on the blues.
I think it's called The Blues Matrix. So he's talking about a well-established, long-established form of music, and he says, yeah, the problem with the way people tend to look at blues records, he says that they see them as markers of individual genius, and he goes actually they should be seen as evidence of a distributed intelligence as African Americans moved from the rural south to the urban north and the records are these kind of time space compressions of that movement over time and I just read that and I was like well that's club records club records are this time space compression of something that happened in a space but then the record goes on to have a life far beyond that so it's of a certain moment yet it can't be reduced to an understanding of that moment alone,
it goes off somewhere else. I think that's what I really picked up upon this idea of distributed intelligence. I thought it's a really neat way of thinking about a lot of contemporary music. It makes sense in terms of something like blues or even like 90s rave records or something, but in a digital landscape where everything's flattened, that intelligence becomes, I think, a lot harder to navigate. I don't think everything is flattened. No. Please spin that out because it's kind of a general thing that everything becomes flattened in the digital space because of algorithmic suggestions, etc. I'm very open to being convinced of otherwise. If everything was flattened, you wouldn't have what's going on in Chile right now as an open revolt.
I think that might be a way of approaching it. Things appear flattened where we are, they appear flattened. They appear flattened when you look at them through the prism of the digital landscape, right? Again, I'm kind of really fascinated by Klein's music, but Klein's music will give us an image of the digital as a not a flattened landscape, I think. I can definitely see how this digital prism could kind of present an archive, a rich archive of music or musics or cult artifacts that kind of converge into distributed intelligence. that could be flattened by that and evidenced by maybe just the vast amount of cultural producers
appropriating things without a prior knowledge of their background. It's not a hateful thing to do, but it's just the way, like you're saying, things are presented as flat. And I can see how that can happen very easily. I've spent a lot of the last year not really listening to new music. I've been a bit too stressed out, so I find myself listening to music from my childhood, like Marilyn Manson or something. All this stuff exists on this flat continuum for me, in a way, I just pick it from Spotify or SoundCloud or whatever. The archive is not really something that extends backward in history now, it's just something that's on my desktop or something. There's a way that treats real things as flat. Yeah, that can be where the problem lies, the problematic nature of treating things that have a rich history.
I think it depends how they arrive at you. It's there as a kind of, yeah, you can access millions of hours of music on Spotify, but it happens. Spotify works, I think, but it works because it's an engine for a set of social relations that are going on between us. So, example off the top of my head, a friend of mine mentioned to me, oh, you've got to listen to this old school reggae singer called Carlton Manning. So, I look it up on Spotify. He gave me, on the phone, he gave me an education about Carlton Manning. So I spoke to him and he kind of said, here's who Carlton Manning is, here's why he's important. He was part of this group, kind of part of that group. And I kind of listened to his records and they're amazing.
They're brilliant in this group called Carlton and the Shoes. but what it took me to straight away was this kind of thing I've been trying to think about with regards to the uses of the voice in a lot of contemporary music and particularly I've been interested in Eve Tumor and the use of voice there and I found a way of thinking about Eve Tumor by going back to Carlton Manning and thinking about what's going on in Carlton Manning that gives me access to Eve Tumor now that happened through conversation and then at the same time through access in this digital plane now you could call that flatness my ability to just quickly go and look up a Carlton Manning record was an instance of this flatness of this instant access but it arrived through a social relation, it arrived through someone talking to me and me
going to follow it up and then I could go phone my friend up and go listen to Eve Tumor and let's start talking about the two of them because I know a bit about Eve Tumor, he knows a bit about Carlton Manning and we create something new out of that I guess also that I don't want to keep referring to flatness as if it's a real thing necessarily, because it's definitely arguable, but I mean, another way in which that flatness can be perceived is not just through a digital prism, but also through, to take it back to Mark's work, the kind of detrimental effect of capitalist realism on cultural production. So, for example, older music existing in the same kind of cultural landscape with something like the Arctic Monkeys, who sound like they're from, I don't know when, I have no idea. They sound kind of new and old.
So that can just be a very... Especially when we're not listening to music through Spotify really just. We're also hearing it in film trailers and stuff. It's weird. Things are just being bought and sold and we're hearing them through these weird mechanisms. So for that to be a kind of aural landscape comprised of older tunes used for TV shows but also new bands that sound super old. I feel like that's something that's been lost to a degree, like the passion of finding music through films. I mean, that's how most of the music I listened to as a young person was all formed through getting a CD of a soundtrack from a film where you heard to know what was that. But to come back to what you were saying about Spotify, I have to disagree with you to a certain point in that you're in a position that you are connected to people
who have a very rich knowledge of music culture and its history, and you have that yourself. But for the general Spotify listener, I do think that's a very flat landscape of consumption because you have no way of finding out what label it comes from. I mean, I'm personally someone who really, really detests Spotify. So that's why, I mean, you know, it's... We were talking about this before actually, about Spotify, I mean, and how it just changes the way you approach music. I mean, when I was younger, I would kind of buy a CD and then I would read the liner notes and find out all the weird thank yous and stuff. And then it's like when you buy a book and you read the bibliography, it sends you off looking for more books I found that with a CD whereas those kind of credits like the production credits aren't listed It takes being connected with someone to help you to join the dots which is again why having a community
that you're in regular contact with in relation to music something that existed in forums before is something that I'd like to see materialised more where again I do still think that things are flattened for the general public Yeah okay but then actually I agree that there's a problem with regards to the discourse around music that like it's interesting at a time in which music's never been experimental and underground music's never been so conceptual there's been a waning of the ability of platforms for people to write and think about the music I think that's definitely a problem an issue but I think those right yeah we can't it's difficult to read liner notes it's difficult to read to find production credits but a lot of that stuff is permeated in the records like you always like
artists are really working alone and they'll always give production credits on the like produced by so and so or featuring so and so so the work is a is never of a singular artist and you get a sense of the connections oh like so and this person's working with that person i never thought they'd they'd know each other or make those connections or that that track was produced by that person so there's still something buried in there i think it's more to do with our analytical capacities to how to go about thinking that. Because, yeah, why is it still happening? I mean, why are the people still working together even though we live apparently quite atomized, individuated lives? Why is this desire to keep on finding other people and finding people to work with? I mean, why the hell did you email me out of nowhere, right? We haven't met each other since this morning.
I read your work. Exactly, yeah. But that wasn't something that would have happened. I don't know, yeah, I guess even there's a different autonomy in Beovold and sending emails than there are in certain platforms. But just let's maybe take it back again to this thing of conceptronica. But we had a kind of, I guess, slightly satirical conversation about this before. But, and I was saying this to Dane last night, I think that when I read through this article that Simon Reynolds had written, I didn't find anything that was highly critical because I think the things that maybe he was presenting as false, I was finding as virtues in music. because like and I mean I kind of referenced this in the previous panel but I think it's something that needs to bleed into this one is that like content heavy work is good for you you know
whether that's metadata or where it leads you to somewhere else but the idea of having a music without context or concept it seems horrific to me or maybe that's something that is it seems antiquated because it's something that you had when you had an hour hallucination in a rave in the early 2000s or something like that that was music that maybe was without context so much as when you have a contemporary piece of whatever to use a phrase like experimental electronic music, the fact that it is so concept heavy is something that I find fantastic and exhilarating. It's just interesting to refer to things that happen in a gallery space or something like that as concept heavy, whereas something that's happening in a dub sound system or someone's basement rave is not concept heavy.
That seems really inaccurate to me. and that's one of my problems with that kind of phrase that it kind of like devalues the concept kind of production of I don't know, stuff happening 20 years ago in raves or whatever or not even raves, just anywhere like in your room listening to your headphones or something Yeah, I 100% agree with what Dane said that all music is overloaded with concepts again, it's just a matter of how we dig them out and how we construct them yes, there is a certain type of music production at the moment which is bringing the concept heavily with it. That's not a good thing? No, I don't think it's necessarily good or bad. It depends if the concepts are good or not. And the music is good or not. There's conceptronica and there's bad conceptronica. It's an argument, right? So you kind of engage with the argument. I think the interesting question that poses
if you do get music that comes with a lot of associated text is then that kind of poses a different task of listening. Because then you're going, oh, does what you're hearing correlate? what's the relationship between that and the text and that's a kind of different type of listening that I think it induces I think perhaps the danger is there's an attempt to pre- and over-determine the musical work that might be a danger that you're kind of already setting up the conditions for listening but there's always been line-on-messing if generally things sound like everything else then I need that in the same way that when you go into a gallery and there's a text on the wall, you need to read that text or the artist
statement or whatever it is in order to get the work. And some people would think that that's a, and it is a critique of some works to be made, but I like the idea that there's something that's determined before I can, particularly when so much music has become kind of standardized, you know. I mean, for example, I'd think of something like the Low Company label, which is the follow-on from Blackest Ever Black. They've released some records in the past year by I think it's one guy but he's from a band the project's called Itchy Bugger now it's just a guy who has a guitar and a drum machine and it's quite parochial but the context of what it comes out of, this like Australian who moved to Berlin and stayed here for a few years but moved back but there's a melancholy to it I think it sounds like good music on its own, it's not revolutionary or anything
but the context that it comes out of that's something that is very very seductive to me as a listener I mean yeah I think any mode of cultural production any kind of mode of art making comes from a context and that context is invariably grains of it are in there it's tough really because it's so I think it might go back to that question that thing we raised earlier about the relationship between conceptual art and music if you've got people coming through quite intense and high level MFA art programs well what you're trained to do as far as I know in an MFA art program is provide a lot of explanation with your artwork, right? That's part of the skill you're taught, right? To explain what you're doing because then you're not going to have a career as an artist. If those people are making music, that might be just they're extending that technique,
that skill, that learned skill into music making. So it might just be a kind of material thing. That's why it's appeared. It might not be necessarily a philosophical kind of position. It could be just implementing those kind of learned protocols of professional development that you get from an MFA program and or just by virtue of like turning up somewhere like Serpentine and they say, right, we require from you a blurb. We require some kind of explanation for our audience, like outreach and engagement kind of criteria. And those things, I guess, could be read as kind of like maybe determining what the work is in a way. but I mean, obviously these institutions have a kind of public responsibility to kind of try and help people into the work in some way or another. Yeah, it's like, I can see about the argument for Conceptronica
as being something that like maybe, it's like the White Cube argument where like if you see something brought into that, it's kind of extricated from its context or something. And I can see why that would be upsetting. But to name it as a genre, I can say it's something that's, that belies a kind of like a deliberate decision to not engage with the scenes from which these music comes come from like Chino Moby's mentioned in it Rexund is mentioned in it and Rexund is someone for example who plays in clubs but also kind of like again like someone mentioned deconstructed club music but he literally will deconstruct the club like when he's like playing there like there was like a quantum natives gig in London where everyone was playing behind tables with laptops and then for Rexund's gig he kind of key mapped this kind of DJ controller
but to a video game that he produced in Unreal and all the kind of DJ, like his set was kind of mapped onto actions in the video game. And we're kind of just like transported from the club for a moment into being like 13-year-olds in our friend's bedroom watching him play the computers. And it was like a real interesting like deconstruction and kind of reconstruction like happened really quickly and very naturally. So it's like it's an affective space as well. it's not just a conceptual kind of like background. I thought I had during the last panel was that we kind of like finished it up and went to a Q&A but I actually thought some of the questions were quite interesting and offering provocations for further discussion. So rather than not leaving enough time I would actually maybe think we could take a few questions and see how that spins out between the two of you as well.
If anyone has any questions ready. Oh, Stephen's right there. Okay. You were good in this whole Conceptronica debate. I spoke to Matt about it before we were talking and I found it I said I was quite surprised at how kind of ignorant the article was in that it was kind of positing this intellectualism in the 2010s whilst completely not mentioning stuff in the 90s like Underground Resistance Gerald Donald Jeff Mills which is like highly conceptual music highly related with theory and he'd said that he pulled him up on that and that maybe it had been cut out of the article, which I think is interesting. In terms of, I'm just responding to some of the points.
If we think about the ICA running a night, I also heard that that's one of the few places with a 24-hour license. So maybe that could be viewed as this kind of slightly, dare I say, subversive move or something to actually let someone facilitate something especially in a place where space is of more demand I mean I find that whole conceptronica thing quite a tricky concept anyway you know people like Theo Parrish studied sculpture that's always like embodied in and it's so strange I found that article a bit of a reaction to this strange booking mechanism of like you have to have an AV show
and then it becomes this weird thing and I think it's more of a comment on that than anything because I've always found dance music very smart, intellectual, however you want to label it. Look at CCRU writing about Jungle, look at Steve Goodman writing Sonic, all the Kojo's book, all of this stuff. It's always been there. Before that, it doesn't start at club music. I think one of the maybe interesting things of people who work between art and music, I mean one thing also to acknowledge is if you're doing NFA, especially in America, you're going to be coming out with several thousand dollars, like $40,000 of debt. That's also an aspect against the British system and then also, say, the German system. If you went to an MFA in, say, Frankfurt, you don't have to pay.
All these things make huge differences. Speaking of someone personally who does go between those worlds, I find something like music very interesting is it's always presented as real or something. Or if someone sings about something or presents something, it's documentary and there is a joy of playing around with that as opposed to putting it in an art space but I think it's also that maybe that has slightly collapsed somewhat in that like what we were saying earlier about this whole music is pregnant with ideas that people have just acknowledged that it's a lot more fluid between that oh yeah there is that one thing with Spotify which the one thing I do have a problem with that is I used to be on it more I got to the point where I was looking things up
and a lot of the things just aren't on there and yeah I mean it's also like you know how you use that like if you're going you know like if you're someone who's communicating with someone like you're using it as a tool like you're using it with access to something you have a certain knowledge but I feel like a lot of their suggestions can be quite reductive or something and I think in terms of this idea of this flattening of the internet maybe like a you kind of discussed this already I think this idea that the internet might strip a lot of context and like you were saying the social relations that can happen a lot online and then it does people are starting to acknowledge that more
and that's becoming more of a mainstream conversation but maybe that's where that problem is with this idea of the internet because people would certainly use that differently. I think it's about using all these things as tools and they're not thinking themselves. I probably shouldn't talk about the internet as flattening things so much as institutions on the internet, like Spotify does that, whereas blogs don't, because I remember when blogs were like, you'd have to like, I remember there were a few blogs I followed in the 2000s that you'd download rare albums from or whatever, and it was a really good history lesson, whereas Spotify, it doesn't just Flattify, that doesn't just flatten the listening experience, it flattens an artist's corpus as well, from their perspective.
I remember there was some band asking, why the hell is this B-side from the 90s our number one song? And the answer was, because it's the one song you have that sounds like everything else. So it fits onto all these things. Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking, I don't know, I had this thing where I was thinking like film streaming services like Mubi or Netflix or whatever. And like, yes, you have a certain access to a certain film. But I basically bought a DVD player for 10 euros off eBay last January. The library in Berlin, I mean, I'm lucky enough to have access to this in Berlin, but the Hallowshire Store Library's got 30,000 DVDs. Just even the idea of looking at a DVD again where there's all these extras and there's a booklet, there's a small essay. like all these things it's like what you were saying about liner notes or something um i do
agree with like it's embodied in the music um i mean you could say like joshaka is like conceptronica you know if this idea of the sound system is kind of parallel to you know like if you go to say sonar and that someone's have like 30 strobes and it's just like crazy phenomenological overload um well you know like mark leckie like putting a sound system in a institution. But yeah, it's this whole thing of it's good to have stuff online. It's just like this, I feel like blogs, yeah, it's almost like I'm old enough to have read fanzines or something, where it's strange writing it down after the bus, on the bus home from a gig, and it's a bit more ramshackle or something, or maybe personal or something. But it's also important not to fetishize that part as well.
Things you're describing they are embodied in the music but they're also not as well because why else would you do them the image that comes with the work isn't embodied in music and if I curated an exhibition and all the artists were to say where the fuck have I not credited oh it's embodied in the exhibition I think I'm not an advocate for Spotify or anything it's just whether it's a useful tool for some things for others it's not and that's it. At a certain point the DVD was a really useful tool and now it's still a really useful tool. There's no need to stop using them. It's just questions of making judgments and
assessments on those and again, yeah, trying to keep on trying to work out what is this allowing us to do that can become useful and productive and generative and also understanding the limits of that. I mean, I literally gave up and decided to get a Spotify account like two months ago because I used to use blogs. They used to put up like the D'Angelo back catalog and then download stuff and then put it on my hard drive. And it was actually just becoming harder because the companies have become much more savvy at stopping those blogs running. Yeah, like RapidShare going or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And that was it. I just gave up because it was taking me too long to get hold of any music. I was like, all right, I'll have to give up this fight.
I'll move on somewhere else and find something else. Keep on moving. So I was thinking about art leaving the museum. Of late, I've seen lots of art traversing non-art spaces, such as a Späty, or there's a gate in Berlin where there's a project space, but it's literally just a gate. and I was thinking about art leaving the museum and how its documentation becomes a cultural affect of our need to discover new spaces beyond the cultural institution of just white walls. But then the flip side of that and a crypto rave being thrown at HKV
or a rave at the ICA. and I've been to a couple of these things and they're not that cool. They're just not that cool. What do you mean by they're not cool? I don't know. It just felt like a simulation of people doing that rave thing but actually it's more performative, like a performing rave rather than a real party. I'm not having a good time. I'm just larping one. Yeah. So I was thinking about how, yeah, like what you would say in relation to like how art has left the space and like music is kind of entering this institutional space and how you would compare that to one another.
I think maybe what we're describing is like the institutional space isn't just bricks and mortar, but maybe also like language and things like that as well and certain protocols that we've embodied. like there was that 70s artwork by Michael Asher where he participated in some like biennial or quinquennial or something and the his artwork was just a caravan sat in the street somewhere and you could only find it once you'd got in the booklet that direct you to it so the artwork only existed as an instruction and as documentation and but it kind of like served the fact of that or served the purpose of widening the parameters of what you're calling institution towards something that isn't a normal space. Yeah, but at the same time
then the documentation becomes the entity itself rather than the physical space and I think physical space is still here the class and socioeconomic issue here is that we can create documentation of a show, I can photograph my work in a spatey but at the end it does something new or you can throw a rave in a museum and it's doing something new but maybe it's losing something so valuable which is freedom to do it I don't know how to say it because it's only coming out when I make work basically but
yeah I don't know I think you're pointing there to the size of the task at hand because I think what you have to do is to try and start to map, okay, well what is it about experimental music that art institutions seem to want to use or access so much? What's going on there in that relation? I think you have to move at several different layers. You have to think about the brute economics of it, the bricks and mortar, the idea that arts institutions now tend to rely on footfall, numbers through the door running a party is a great way to get numbers through the door but also there seems to be something alongside that at a kind of aesthetic level that there seems to be something that what's going on in arts institutions
they desire something that they think music experimental music has that perhaps something within the art world is lacking or it thinks it's lacking I don't know but I think it's a really it's a big task to try and map that out and yeah I think it's going to take like several people to attack it at different points and try and map it out and then we haven't even mentioned like bridging institutions or organisations, something like Boiler Room like Boiler Room certainly in London is like brings certain artists or musicians into galleries like Boiler Room organised a whole set of events at Somerset House this summer with like, had Josh Shucker in there actually and so there's even those institutions and those organisations
which are kind of acting as a relay between these spaces and you know clearly there's money to be made there in doing that. The art world has a lot of money a hell of a lot of it Yeah, I mean I don't want to sound too cynical because I mean you mentioned some of us at house studios and a lot of people who run that are just heavily emotionally invested in that kind of music and they're super passionate about what they do whereas a lot of the things that you're asking what kind of, what experimental music or different types of music and different scenes can bring that an art world or an art institution doesn't have. And it's a situated social evaluation. That's what they don't have. Like, people are kind of suspicious of top-down evaluation. Like, they can't distrust something that would be good because a museum says it is.
So museums are more often, and probably have done for decades, like, bringing in kind of, like, more precarious, like, kind of scenes and spaces and that because they have a social value to them. It's a hyper-economy, exactly. And it's a bit like how Apple delegate the task of producing apps to indie producers because they have a different set of resources available to them that Apple don't have. So they call it Sherlocking. And it's the same kind of thing. It's like, yeah. Okay, not to open a can of worms, but going back to the identitarian essentialism and Vampire's Castle, which is one of Mark's probably most divisive essays. My reading of that essay is that he's saying
if there were economic parity, that would solve a lot of the problems of identitarian essentialism. And I think that that's actually a big, that's clearly a theoretical answer because even if everybody had universal basic income right now, we would still have centuries of baggage left over. But do you think that's, would you agree that that could be true? What if we had? Economic parity, that that would solve a lot of the identitarian essentialism issues, problems, friction. Firstly, I think that, yeah, no, it wouldn't. It wouldn't solve it overnight, but it would be a major step, a major boulder. Bringing it back to a concrete personal instance,
I work in a university, a college, and there's lots of debates around racial violence in the university that students are experiencing and questions around race in the curriculum. And an argument that I and several others are making is if you got rid of the 9K fees and it was free access, a lot of the major issues would be at least broken down. so I agree with that but no it's not going to get I mean that's an old argument that western socialists have been making for centuries and it's just painfully not true I mean I would have taken Mark's argument in Vampire's Castle seriously if he'd have read the likes of Sivan Andan if he'd have read Stuart Hall if he'd have read Paul Gilroy and taken those ideas
seriously if he'd have read C.L.R. James then yeah I would have taken it seriously but I'm sorry I'm afraid I couldn't I can't take it seriously I think that's fair although I think that you're definitely right in pointing out that he's coming from a really specific viewpoint and I don't consider that a failing because nobody can be everything to everybody. Exactly, that's the point I think that's important to recognize that. Well if nobody has any more questions I think that's maybe a line to draw there but I'd like to say thank you very much to Dane and to Danver for joining me and also to Stephen and Lisa and Matt as well and thanks very much to CTM and Transmedial for supporting this and thank you all for coming as well. Thank you.