Thursday, October 4, 2012

"The once futureshapers have become custodians of a heritage. Like the computer, techno may have lost its most revolutionary connotations, but traces of the old promise remain: one must still override the present, if not solely for the sake of the future".

A probing and wide-roving review of Polysick's Digital Native  by Reed Scott Reid over at Tiny Mix Tapes, touching on many facets of the futurepast utopianism of techno, from the launchpad of  Polysick's debt to Underground Resistance.

And along the way achieving a Wire-writers tetrafecta of referencing (Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Rob Young, yours truly) plus redeployment of theorems from  Vincent Mosco, Georg Simmel, and Robert Farris Thompson. 

But what, prithee, is "an acid-moiled jounce"?



(It's a good record actually...  and I like the title/concept of "digital natives")


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Some other ace TMT stuff from recently: James Parker's contributions to the debate about vaporwave, and Jonathan Dean's takedown of Gatekeeper

 must admit (talking of retrofutures) that my very soul did yawn when the 303s wibbled their way out of the mix on Exo .... other aspects of the sound made me flash on Front Line Assembly, seldom a good thing

shame as they are very interesting to think about / read about and one can only salute Adam Harper for using them as a canvas to genre-coin upon: "Distroid" – the muscular music of hi-DEF doom

of course as per the Concept-Music thesis, you could say their music is their own canvas... the Sounded Word c.f. the Painted Word

1 comment:

Greyhoos said...

Had that Reid spiel flagged for later reading. Guess I need to get at it.

> seldom a good thing

You're being generous.

But: An equiv of Wolfe's The Painted Word? By that, I assume you mean something other than it being a gassy, ain't-I-the-dickens retrograde faux-Populist aesthetic screed peppered with the occasional dogwhistle anti-Semitic innuendo?