Beyond the call of wonky...

A lengthy and rather extraordinary musicological account of wonky is available over at Rouge's Foam, who also has some extremely detailed musings on David Stubbs' recent book Fear of Music.

Invention or Discovery- or, when is a genre not a genre?

This is my paper presented yesterday at the Hardcore Continuum Event at UEL. Big thanks to Jeremy Gilbert and Steve Goodman for inviting me, to the other panelists, and to the audience who generally asked decent questions...

The most contentious claim Simon Reynolds makes regarding the Hardcore Continuum is that it is not simply a theory, a model, but rather that it is real. On Reynolds’ account the Continuum was not invented by him but rather he discovered it as an already existing thing, and merely gave it a name and described the kind of processes of which it consists. The reason why Reynolds is drawn towards defining the continuum as a discrete object is fairly obvious, since to do so is to make it cohere across time in the same way as hip hop or jazz or rock, and in so doing claim a similar space of significance for it. This certainly accords with Reynolds’ talk about a kind of musical patriotism: for him, the continuum is the greatest popular music invention to emerge from the UK, and a coherent name allows its mercurial processes, its constantly shifting genre structure (from Hardcore to jungle to 2-step garage to grime to dubstep) to be conceived as a single evolving art-form. In this sense it is hoped that its canonical and culturally significant role can be firmly asserted. Whilst few would dispute that there is certainly a high degree of interconnectedness between these scenes, the issue of the continuum as real-in-itself presents something of a conundrum. Reynolds’ claims that the continuum is an “empirically verifiable (and abundantly verified) thing-in-the-world” is usually backed up by vague accounts of demographics and technology, although both of these have changed significantly across the course of the purported continuum. A more rigorous musicological analysis has so far been absent, but might seek to demonstrate the connections between sub-genres on the basis of their percussive forms, rhythmical patterns, chordal and melodic devices, the particular textures used (with attention being paid to precise methods of generation, the envelopes, filters and tone generators used to create the sounds). This data could presumably be mathematised and statistically plotted, to be able to chart at the material level of the music itself any coherent patterns. But short of such genuinely realist empirical verification, we are left with a theory which is too open-ended and insufficiently tight in terms of what it includes and excludes. This leaves it liable to being used in a prescriptive fashion, since if there are no hard and fast rules as to what is in or out, and no attempts to demonstrate empirically how we might judge this, the temptation towards personal prejudice (to claim for example that “Grime isn’t in, its too aggressive”, or “Dubstep isn’t in, its too languorous”) remains significant. Whilst this is a problem with most genres too, it becomes particularly egregious when projected onto the scale of the continuum. It also leaves open why we ought to begin with Hardcore, when if we want to talk about Grime, Dubstep, Bassline, Funky, and Wonky it is much more coherent to talk about them in relation to their immediate predecessor sound, UK Garage.

There is a temptation at this point to throw our arms up in despair, and point towards the apparent failure of the Hardcore Continuum to be anything more than a convenient shorthand as a demonstration of the inappropriateness of any and all theorisation of Music or pop culture. I think this is a mistake. Whilst there is certainly a need for a realist theory of dance music, which would be able to precisely map mathematisable musical qualities, there is also another role for theory entirely- one which was described by the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit as ‘hyperstitional’- a form of fiction which engenders its own realities, or which can intensify our experience of the real. Another way of thinking about this is through what has been termed ‘immaterial labour’ - types of work which produce value which are not directly related to production as we might traditionally conceive it. In the case of dance music, of course there are the producers and DJs who deal directly with the creation and dissemination of the music, but there are also the dancers, the consumers, the theorists and the journalists, each of whom has a significant role in creating the context in which certain musical forms are selected over others. As has been well noted, in the case of the dancer-consumer, it is only with their positive or negative feedback relationship to the DJs and producers that enables certain percussive or affective tropes to emerge as dominant. But the context in which the DJ-Producer-Dancer relationship is forged is one which, to some extent, created by promoters, by music journalists, and by theorists. And it is only when you put together these three sides of the equation- producers, consumers, and media that the processes of dance music can be properly thought about. Because from the perspective of immaterial labour, each of these three groups is in a certain sense actually a producer, though some produce in a less tangible or immediately obvious way than others. Each is creative, and it is not really the case that we can separate out DJs or the actual creators of the music of as a special category to be given priority over the others, since their production is meaningless outside of the broader context, and it is indeed the context itself which the media, in this case music journalists and theorists, produce. Moreover I do not think that it is possible to get away from theorising- we can do so in a more or less academic fashion, certainly, but contra-Mark Fisher, I think we must consider that even the simplest of reviews contain theoretical positions, of a sort. Even the notion that this debate which we are having now is a kind of over-abstraction and that we should all head down to Forward and actually get raving, is itself a theoretical position!

The Hardcore Continuum is real, but only as a theory. In other words the theory exists and has certain effects- how it influences other forms of production, how it adds to our own experiences of music. It is certainly related to a reality external to itself (a set of musics, clubs, people) but its role is not passive, but active. The act of naming is not a naturalistic or scientific act of description, but a creative act itself, an invention, not a discovery. It puts the set of musics it collects under its name into a particular configuration, and if we buy into the theory, alters our way of perceiving them. We can indeed still take umbrage at what the Hardcore Continuum does, since though it acclaims innovation on the one hand, perversely its canonisation of the past may well act to inhibit future developments. By codifying the history of these musics and attempting to think them within a grandiose system which now stretches back at least 15 years, there is a kind of drag-effect upon the abilities of future artists (and theorists no doubt) to continue the very arrow of futurism it claims to represent. If the Continuum theory has an effect, it might not be entirely positive! But naming, whether it is of the Hardcore Continuum, of a genre or of a single track, certainly creates a powerful context which shifts the nature of the thing being described.

We might consider that in the formative stage of generic development in dance music, DJs play records in relation to a certain defined body of dancers to select certain tropes over others, largely to please (but sometimes to challenge) the particular tastes of the crowd. In the early days of hip hop, for example, before the genre existed in a pre-defined way, DJs would select music from a variety of genres, playing the tastiest breaks from rock and roll, soul, funk, disco, and even Kraftwerk. This serves to project a kind of constellation of points, between which a genre coalesces. Later dedicated producers come to write music to specifically occupy this defined space, to join the dots between the early cross-genre records. What naming does in all this is to crystallise this loose constellation of sounds, to literally define and enact the genre, to mark the point when it becomes something more than merely an assemblage of pre-existing sounds. In some ways, naming is a gamble or a wager, a bet on the fact that this rough configuration will come to be a genre. And not all genre name’s stick (if we remember the early days of what came to be called ‘Grime’, we might have equally ended up with the somewhat less evocative ‘sub-low’). Naming itself is thematised in a track like Wiley’s “Wot U Call it?”, and the moment when a body of music seemingly demands a defined descriptive label can be thought of as the “Wot U Call It” moment. It is also no coincidence that the time shortly before and after the “Wot u call it moment” is often the one which produces the most fascinating and original music within the genre.

I now want to talk about Wonky, as a paradigmatic example of naming as a creative process of intervention. It was named by Martin Clark aka Blackdown in his April 2008 Pitchfork column, and like Funky, is an adjective appropriated to serve something close to the role of a noun. In his original piece Martin defines wonky as… “A theme not a genre” and a “crossing”. In these senses Wonky is postulated as something more than an adjective, a feel, a vague descriptor, but (unlike funky) something looser than a solid or coherently demarcated genre-noun. This description is both tentative and audacious, necessarily tentative since it lashes together a seemingly disparate group of artists through the notion of a kind of common “spirit” of wonkification operating in all of them, but equally audacious since it refuses the easy option of a singular, fixed generic label. Wonky is not a box, but rather some kind of aesthetic which operates between boxes.

The key word in Martin Clark’s initial definition is very much “crossing”- and though often crossing between genres seems to give rise to a kind of bland eclecticism, a postmodern homogenisation, in this instance the nature of “crossing” seems to have a markedly different quality. Wonky is a kind of process, rather than a fixed endpoint, a liquidation rather than a fusion, a process which occurs to pre-existing genres rather than being a genre itself. It is for this reason that I like to consider how wonky operates through use of the idea of the “transversal”. A transversal is a line of connection operating between otherwise disconnected regions, transforming them and breaking down pre-existing structures, a kind of trans-generic mutational agent. I think this can be reasonably applied to wonky at present, since what it opens up is lines of contact between genres as disparate as Dubstep, post-Dilla Hip hop, Crunk, Grime, Rave, Electro, and IDM. More than simply a new passageway for musical ideas to pass through, wonky-as-process seems to be able to translate ideas, like a sort of synaesthesic wormhole, afflicting any element of a track- sometimes textural, sometimes percussive, sometimes pitch, a fluid shifting of the idea of wonky between these different elements and registers. For example, the “wonkiness” of Flying Lotus comes predominantly through use of non-quantised drum patterns, whereas for Joker it is expressed in maniacally pitch bent and modulated synths. And beyond its lurid synthetics and lopsided mutant free-funk, Wonky is intriguing as perhaps the first sound to properly embody, in a very literal sense, the kind of media-scape which has been wrought by the permutations of internet culture. The lines of communication which the term represents are genuinely transnational, and if Reynolds’ thesis encounters trouble once we reach Grime (in the cult of the MC) or Dubstep (the torpor of the percussion) then it reaches total crisis point with Wonky. Not only is it no longer a “London ‘thing”, its not even a “UK ‘thing” anymore, and yet it clearly originates at least in part within what Simon would want to call the Continuum.

The question must be raised however, as to whether wonky itself is “real”? Is it not simply a journalistic fabrication? What I would argue is that it is not so much real in the sense of a pre-existing scene which demanded a descriptive name to be given to it, but as a kind of trans-generic zeitgeist aesthetic which was crystallised in Martin Clark’s intervention. To reverse Reynolds’ formulation, this is inventive rather than simply a discovery, since though a name must have something concrete to latch onto, its reality is effectuated in what happens to that reality after it has been named, which is never a neutral process. In the case of wonky, new lines of communication have been opened up between a fairly diverse set of producers, who have now begun to remix each other’s work. Equally, promoters have a theme upon which to construct nights around, meaning that increasingly we might find wonky DJs, sometimes operating out of very different traditions on the same bills (Flying Lotus and Zomby for example). By naming wonky as a transversal form (as a line of connection transversal to genre) it is as flexible as possible, allowing the maximum potential for the unexpected and for the non-genre to be a fertile ground for new music to emerge from. If the most fecund period for a genre is often that immediately preceding and following the “Wot U Call it” moment, it is because producers are still working out the kinds of conventions which will come to define the genre, and dancers are trying to work out how to move their bodies to the new sounds and rhythms, and journalists and theorists are scratching their heads trying to come up with original ways to think this new form. Dubstep became mired in a certain set of characteristics (turgid half-step drums, unimaginative wobble bass and dodgy plastic Rasta samples) because it became too rapidly codified, in spite of the seemingly highly open-ended nature of the form (138bpm with heavy bass) and the strong awareness of the need to avoid the vertiginous collapse which afflicted Jungle in 1997. And of course there remains a danger that wonky may well solidify into “just another genre”. It is still eminently possible that a later generation of producers will emerge who treat artists like Flylo, Rustie, and Joker as a pre-generic constellation of points, and construct a static genre in the space between them, a tired collection of dried-up genre signifiers. Seen in this context, the naming of Wonky as a non-genre, as a process of disruption and liquidation, can be identified as an attempt to disturb the usual processes of genre sedimentation so as to maintain the “Wot U Call It” moment of maximum confusion and creativity even whilst simultaneously producing a term with which to describe it.

Note: Martin Clark and I were talking after the event about who coined the phrase "the wot u call it moment"-- glancing at Dissensus, it originates with Nomos AKA Paul Autonomic of Deeptime.

The battle continues...

The Hardcore Continuum? A discussion.
Presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
In association with The Wire.
UEL Docklands Campus (Cyprus DLR)
April 29th 2009 2:00pm-6:00pm

Simon Reynolds' commentary on the "hardcore continuum" - the mutating sequence of dancefloor music to have emerged from the breakbeat hardcore matrix of the early 1990s - has recently generated intense debate in the musical blogosphere. What is the value of this concept? Does it still usefully describe the context from which dynamic new beat musics emerge? Can the conditions of creativity in the 1990s be replicated in the era of web 2.0? Should we even want them to be?

Speakers: Mark Fisher (K-Punk), Alex Williams (Splintering Bone Ashes), Steve Goodman (Kode 9), Lisa Blanning (The Wire), Dan Hancox (Guardian, New Statesman), Kodwo Eshun (Author of More Brilliant than the Sun), Joe Muggs (Mixmag, The Wire), Jeremy Gilbert (Co-author of Discographies)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is recommended. For info or to register contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk

Wonky 3: Abstract decay processes.

Simon Reyonlds responds to the HCC imbroglio. I would assert very definitely that my claim towards the materiality of culture (which is never precisely merely a physicalism of course) is not at all metaphorical. Whilst the issue is clearly less simple than petroleum resources, the diagram of both situations: (essentially certain energies are accumulated over very long timeframes, then via integrated globalised capitalism rapidly exploited) bares certain isomorphy. To put it another way the “shock of the new”, the impact of a new cultural idea (in this case some kind of sonic gesture) once absorbed into a different musical tradition, is initially great, then tapers off as the possible forms this encounter is able to generate become rapidly exhausted.

As regards Wonky, Simon’s first claim, that “it does all seem a bit like a poncy way of saying ‘eclectronica’” is clearly inaccurate. Wonky is not a genre, hence its “eclecticism” is not a matter of mashing together disparate sonic fragments into uneasy PoMo assemblages- functionally it seems to operate in a more disparate fashion, transversal to other pre-existing genres. Wonky is a process, not a static endpoint (at least not yet…) and indeed within each artists’ oeuvre there is a consistency which remains firmly anti-eclectic. Simon’s other point, that it seems close in some respects to post-IDM artists in the late ‘90s taking on dance music genres (Squarepusher with jungle being the most infamous example) is a bit closer to what is going on here—and which touches upon some of Mark K-Punk’s musings on “rude energy”. In one sense the IDM-ification of club-based dance music might be seen as a gentrification, in another as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, a parodic (though sometimes loving) acceleration of certain ticks and features to the point where all dance-functionality breaks down (i.e.- the extreme end of breakcore/drill’n’bass). Things are slightly more complicated with Wonky, since its detournement of pre-existing genre templates does not act to necessarily destroy their club potential, it is not so much a bearded sonic terrorism/tiresome juvenile technology abuse/avant-garde translation of the hip new thing, as the finding of a new groove altogether. It is clearly not an accelerationist aesthetic by any means, rather as I have sketched before it is based upon decay (though without any of the gothic/romantic/Black Metal associations the term usually carries- decay as entirely abstract process). Moreover, sociologically many of the players in this umbrella formation, this non-scene, are clearly not outsiders or disinterested observers to the genres which they act upon, Joker, for example, seemingly beginning as any teenage Grime producer might.

Wonky applies, in its woozy textures, liquefying day-glow synthetics and dilating anti-quantised beats something surprisingly akin to the process My Bloody Valentine exercised upon indie rock guitar music- from within the tradition itself (not from the cynical perspective of the outsider) a method by which surplus aesthetic value can be extracted from deadened forms, by applying abtract-decay processes of liquefaction, breaking down the rigid sonic matter (be it the hard bone matter of drum patterns or the softer flesh of synth textures or the fibrous masses of bass pressure). In this sense perhaps it intimates a kind of sonic anti-affirmatory dark vitalism, at the level of process, since perversely its immediate affect is bright, crisp, colourful, rather than the dank encrustations we would traditionally associate with decay. This is unlike certain Hauntological artists (The Caretaker, Burial, William Basinski), who foreground the materiality of decaying sound recording media through crackle, in order to intimate and explore the processes of human memory and history, (and hence are spectral in nature, haunted). Hence it is not so much as K-Punk asserts that whereas Hauntology interrogates "the failure of the future; Wonky exemplifies it..." rather that both serve (in very different ways) as non-conventional trans-generic strategies for the extraction of dormant energies within inert sonic forms, though admitedly one is very much more candid in foregrounding its activities than the other. For with Wonky abstract-decay gives rise to new and perverse vitality, a vivid hyper-“now” sound...

Wonky as transversal rave.

One point of contention arising from the recent “Hardcore Continuum: Still Relevant?” brouhaha relates to the notion of the applicability of theory to the domain of dance music. As Word The Cat wrote a while ago: “music is music, everything is everything (reductive yes, but liberating in its absolute reduction). we don’t need to map our own binaries onto music (screwface/smiley face — masculine/feminine — skunk/MDMA). music takes you past that.” Whilst I absolutely agree that some of the reductive dualisms in HCC theorising are oversimplifications (and easy anthropomorphisations of the alien actualities of the music in question- especially as regards masculine/feminine codings: why ought bass-pressure to be thought of as masculine at all, its pummelling aggression is matched by a concomitant womb-like embrace, a violent amniosis…) I would maintain that theory is not to be jettisoned full stop, and indeed cannot be. Even in the absence of overt grand-narrative theorizing, low level “folk-theoretical” devices will take their place. In the writings of the critics of the HCC for example there remain certain theoretical tropes (genre, analysis of specific emergent sonic identifying points etc). The question then is not “whether theory?” but “which theory?” and further “what are the limitations of this theory, and how might it enrich our understanding of the object?”

This is certainly of key interest, above and beyond merely the HCC debate, since this is one of the central concerns of a possible speculative realist aesthetics: Whether we can ever evade the subsumption of the object beneath the organon of theory we use to interpret it. This point has been made very clearly by Schoolboyerrors here, exquisitely accurate on the over determination of art objects by their Deleuzean readings. I believe we have all read similar pieces on the internet, especially Lacanian film readings which tell you little more than how Lacanian theory itself operates (useful, true, but often with little regard to the actual object at hand). In a certain sense what the HCC critics get absolutely right is the dangerously slippery slope of theorizing, that in the end the very tool used to grasp a hold of the objective reality might alienate us from it, overdetermine it, and achieve a tyrannical grip. This in itself is a deeply Laruellian point, that in the construction of a philosophy the world is split into a world-theory dyad, the former containing the philosophical re-presentation of the world, the latter the transcendent theory sitting above the world it has created judging it like some kind of God, defeating any claims to radical immanence (as John Mullarkey accurately diagnoses in his book, Post-Continental Philosophy). It is certainly the case that it has become increasingly apparent that the single Grand Unified Theory approach to philosophy (and associated areas such as theoretical criticism) is deeply flawed. As has already been well drawn out in various discussions in the theory blogosphere, the past tendency within recent continental thought to politicise ontology is overly convenient and strictly unbelievable. In a later post I want to discuss how GUT thinking is damaging not just to pre-speculative realist thought, but equally appears to be infecting speculative realism itself, especially in its object-oriented sub-genre. This is especially clear having read the most recent issue of Collapse and Ladyman’s critique of the “small objects and micro-bangings” of analytic metaphysics.

I have admittedly yet to get a full grip on how a non-aesthetics in the Laruellian mould might operate, so I must for now limit my discussion of Wonky to more general terms, rejecting the tendency towards immobile GUTs in favour of a half-way measure, a theory sensitive to the object at hand. What is most interesting about Wonky thus far is its trans-generic nature, its relative looseness and inclusiveness to a proper diversity of disparate aesthetics: stretching between Rave, Dubstep, G-Funk, Instrumental Hip Hop, Crunk, Pop, UK Garage, IDM/Electronica, Techno… etc. Moreover it operates in a number of different tempos, (chiefly dubstep’s 138 bpm and hip hop’s slower 90-110bpm) with producers scattered between different continents, and different regimes of consumption (club and home listening). Even further, the very notion of “wonky” itself is a deeply slippery idea. Sometimes it indicates de-quantised drums (as in Flying Lotus, Lukid, and other post Dilla beat-artisans) sometimes pitch-bent synth and bass work (Joker, Starkey, Rustie), sometimes a maddening rush of 8 Bit arpeggios (Zomby, Ikonika, Rustie again). Wonky is not so much a genre unto itself. Instead it operates as a kind of trans-generic mutational agent, spreading seamlessly between bpm species, liquidating textures, distending rhythmical consistency like so much manipulable sonic sticky toffee: All that is solid melts into a new electronic psychedelia, as fluid and mellifluous as the globalised capitalism which spreads it. Wonky in the sense of off-key, out of place, misshapen, breaking through an electronic music environment increasingly characterised by myopic microgenre developments and parodic stylistic affectations, as a set of strategies to be applied to a pre-existing template. In a sense then Wonky detournes pre-existing genres (instrumental hip hop, grime, rave, dubstep etc) corroding the arid grid-like bass kick / snare matrix into something closer to the handmade asymmetrical anti-rhythms of Burial, pushing the shuffled culminating and accelerating sensual textural play towards a surrealist fair ground of Dali-esque percussive affect. However, unlike Burial it would be difficult to conceive of less hauntological artists operating today than Starkey or Rustie, their lurid neon-surreal synthetic post-dubstep negotiating everything that’s still (barely) alive within electronic dance music. Hence I would resist K-Punk’s embryonic attempts to slot certain aspects of Wonky into a hauntological conceptual schema, as the utilisation of 8-bit electronics is distinct from Ghostbox’s deployment of library music and Radiophonic-tronica in at least two respects: firstly in seeking direct dancefloor engagement, and secondly in not dealing explicitly with manipulations or foregroundings of the past (or the processes of memory). Wonky is far from nostalgic, I believe, in spite of Zomby’s Hardcore tribute record (which isn’t in fact Wonky at all).

What is clear from all this is that the Hardcore Continuum is indeed totally inadequate to describe the realities of this music (though perhaps still appropriate to some extent for Bassline, Dubstep and possibly even Funky—although the latter’s incorporation and communication with a broader range of afro-house musics and soca complicates the issue). The shifts in technology, lines of communication and influence, and geographical centres indicate a major development from prior formations: No longer a “London Thing” (or even particularly a UK thing for that matter) nor indeed quite a “scene”. To hazard a theoretical attempt to describe what might be going on here (ultimately, to my ears, consolidatory in terms of actual music, but absolutely fascinating in its anti-localism, its trans-generic scope, and the avoidance of being merely an incoherent grab bag of postmodern influences) we might turn to Félix Guattari’s concept of transversality. Taken in part from mathematics and Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, like Wonky transversality operates in a mercurial and allusive fashion within Guattari’s work: beginning as a way of conceptualising lines of unconscious force/desire within institutional structures, it later becomes the cornerstone of a complex ontology binding material, psychological, linguistic and imaginary components together. We might think of Wonky as operating as a vector transversal to genre, a transversal analysis in-itself operating beyond merely a postmodern genre-game. Rather than a pick and mix approach to generic materials, wonky is strategically applied to pre-existent genres, not as an adhesive but as a liquefying agent... [cf perhaps Negarestani's rotting objects?]... a making strange... not in the sense of hauntology's unheimlich-home, but in the deliquescent informational fluidity and interoperability of late capital, the strangeness of a blooming irridescant corpse, (not a spectre) a sonic embodiement of its distributive ground.

The vicissitudes of the hardcore continuum and the great deceleration.

An extremely interesting debate has been occurring of late as regards the status of Simon Reynolds’ concept of the “hardcore continuum”. Here it would appear there are two chief claims being made by the defenders of the continuum: that the new bass-music (dubstep, funky, wonky, bassline) fits broadly within the remit of the continuum, and that it is demonstrably less innovative than before. The counter claims from those in the generation below run that the model itself is overdetermining their response to the new, and that as such the argument is incoherent (running both that “funky, wonky, dubstep, bassline, etc… can all be safely fitted into the HCC model” AND “but they don’t fit the model, and HENCE are indicative of a generational decline”).

Putting the model to one side, I would want to focus on the most interesting claim made by Simon Reynolds and Mark K-Punk, that of the declining innovatory potentials of UK bass music, one which the younger generation fail to fully address. For whilst I agree in part with those such as Dan Hancox who argue that too little attention is being paid to the ways in which these new forms draw strength precisely from that which escapes the limitations of the continuum, be that G-Funk for Joker or Afro-House for funky, I also firmly contend that the rate and depth of innovations in this field (and indeed every field of musical cultural production) has slowed down. The reasoning for this is historical and material, and in part serves to evade the intergenerational backbiting which forms the libidinal matrix at the core of this particular dispute. For contained in Mark’s assessment is some notion that creative processes, whilst socially and economically conditioned, retain a degree of individual freedom- and hence it is a moral failing on the part of this generation to not have produced innovations comparable with their forefathers. I believe we have good reason to reject this argument, and to take a historical and material view on the processes which have informed the creation of British urban dance music over the last 18 or so years. In part it is the very capitalist realist processes which Mark so often rails against which condition the thinking that what has been always will be so (or could be so, perhaps).

In considering precisely why it is that late capital seems to endlessly reproduce in the cultural field an entropic retrospection and reiterative nostalgia would it be absurd to deem cultural resources as operating in an entirely dissimilar way to energy resources? Oil and natural gas are the products of millions of years of lifeforms absorbing energy from our sun and the actions of the earth’s geology, and hence are strictly finite. In much of the discourse surrounding energy crisis it is a commonplace to consider the thesis that the twentieth century was an absolute rupture or aberration, powered almost entirely by the global tapping of hydrocarbon energy resources to enable an unparalleled technological expansionism. That capitalist ‘realism’ always covers over its intrinsically radical status blinds us to the fact that recent history is borne entirely upon the back of a brief window of opportunity created by an utterly contingent and ultimately meagre resource. I would want to argue that in a similar sense the unbearable necrotic grip of the postmodern exists partly in response to the approach of another looming impasse within the field of cultural resources. In a similar fashion perhaps, the total output of the world’s cultures to date might be considered to equally have a material limit. For much of the history of the world these resources were accumulated, but in a manner which prevented immediate exploitation, either geographically isolated from each other or lost to the passing of history. The twentieth century might indeed be read in cultural terms as an unparalleled exploitation of previously geographically (and chronologically) inaccessible resources. In an oversimplifying model we might consider there to be three kinds of resources which enable rapid development in the cultural field:

1. Geographically remote resources- cf gamelan – made available by ever expanding globalised capitalism;

2. Historically previously forgotten/under-exploited resources- cf: dance punk – made available by ever increasing technologically assisted access to previously out-of print or difficult to obtain back catalogue;

3. Technological developments- cf: timestretching in early 90s Jungle… and which obviously exists in some kind of dynamic relation to (1) and (2).

In terms of the HCC the primary drivers have been (1) and (3), though perhaps of late it has been increasingly (2) (for example in the return to 2-step in the works of Burial, 2562, Martyn etc). Against this we might position a basic endogenous rate of change which is far less rapid, which has received in the last hundred years an unparalleled and ultimately artificial stimulus. From the current perspective it seems as if geographically remote resources are increasingly ‘dry’, the historical pockets of wealth, the exploitation of which have marked the last 20 or so years of pop culture, also looking ever more threadbare. Technology too appears to be in a state of consolidation rather than exponential growth, and hence the rate of change is reverting to a previously slower rate. That this has occurred within a economic and social system which has evolved against the backdrop of a far greater velocity means that even when resources are scarce, the economic and mass-psychological need (or perhaps we might say addiction) to a high velocity of innovation is maintained- leading, we might argue, towards the necrotic grip of retroism and aesthetic consolidation. In a sense capitalism has reached a point where geographical expansion is no longer possible, there is no outside left absorb. Given this, and the limitations of the endogenous cultural growth rate for the forms of capitalism which have evolved in this period, the deterritorialization of time itself is the symptom of an underlying resource poverty. The depressing conclusion of such a hypothesis being that once we have divested ourselves of the seamless dyschronia of capitalist-realist ideology our future appears to hold little but a protracted return to cultural and economic ice-age austerity.

Rather than thinking it is the postmodern issue of “clotted influences”-- a panoply of overly diverse and diffuse influential materials to draw upon leading to an incoherent output, as theorised by Reynolds—instead it is the very exhaustion of these materials which is at the core of cultural deceleration. For example, it is only possible for techno to absorb the hip-hop breakbeat ONCE, which initially gives rise to an immense new field of possible musical forms, but which over time become gradually worn out. So whilst I would defend funky and wonky as noteworthy innovations demanding serious attention (in the last year or so they have occupied 90% of my listening within the field of electronic music) it is indeed correct that if you played a wonky track to someone five years ago they would be unsurprised, whereas a ’97 techstep track to a raver from 1992 would seem like a radical step forward. Part of what Reynolds argues with the HCC was that a certain social, technological, and distributive network was able to synthesise influences in a way which led to emergent genres which were not immediately reducible to a mere additive process upon their influences. In contrast, he identifies much recent bass music from the UK as simply the sum total of their component parts, never reaching the point where something new emerges out of the chemical reaction between influences. But instead of this being a failure of modernist will (or desire for the new) as I detect in some of his and Mark’s arguments, the real problem is the sheer mass of history. This is operative not merely in the sense of a psychological pressure, which I think is insufficient to explain the current processes, but instead as a matter of generic “niches” within the cultural-ecosystem of dancers. I can't help thinking the real problem is percussion: after the hyper-on cut up funk of jungle and the sick alien-suave swing of UKG, there appears nowhere uptempo to go. The question is of how many uptempo stable "attractors" exist within such a limited set up. The hivemind or parallel processing capabilities of “scenius” (a complex meshwork system with certain key "sorting points") is certainly great, but not infinitely productive, especially given the eventual solidification or standardisation of previously fluid dynamics into institutional frameworks (which include the very theory of the continuum itself of course, although this perhaps has only a limited feedback potential back towards the producers/dancers etc). Hence the contemporary status of much UK bass music as being, if not actively retro-necro (which is unfair I think) perhaps simply consolidatory in nature. Whilst consolidation has always been an element of musical creativity, the exhaustion of stable attractors within a given consumption milieu (dancing, listening) means that it is left to simply additively utilise external influence-components, rather than achieving new emergent syntheses, characterised by the “shuffling of a deck” of possibilities already established elsewhere. This does not necessarily make for bad music, per se, and I am much more likely to listen to the latest Joker or Starkey tune than sit mournfully reminiscing over old Omni Trio 12”s. But the libindal investment in The Now, the addictive cultural expectation that what happens in this time is Important, (concurrent with the bad/misread Deleuzo-Guattarean notion of affirmation at all costs, and the injunction to “Enjoy!”) must not be allowed to blot out the all too real state of affairs. Ultimately it is a question of the mindset induced by capital’s de-temporalising hypnosis- in actuality what we have experienced is merely a blip, perhaps never to be again repeated, 150 or so years of extreme resource binging, the equivalent to an epic amphetamine session. What we are already experiencing is little more than the undoubtedly grim “comedown” of the great deceleration.