Quick programming note: I owe you Part II of my last newsletter on Furry, VR and Community. That had a followup: a presentation I did with Cade Diehm of New Design Congress at the Furality Umbra conference. In the space between writing "coming later this week" and that talk, VRChat laid of 30% of it's workforce. I won't comment more on that here except to say: 1. Yes I still work there and 2. It's Been A Lot. I promise we'll get back to that post eventually!
Lately I have recently have found myself thinking a lot about (and recommending) Mark Fisher's Ghosts of my Life, and in particular the first essay "The Slow Cancellation of the Future" where he traces the impact of neoliberal capitalism on song production. That book also introduces a lot of people to the concept of hauntology, and together sets up a dynamic that people are trying to make sense of in the present moment (I link to that last essay reluctantly - it demonstrates the point but I think completely misses the core of Fisher AND the importance of SOPHIE as well as that particular queer-futurist aesthetic she was chasing along with Lil Nas X. Fisher isn't with us anymore, neither is SOPHIE. I wish they were.)
Fisher (and hauntology in general) figures in a lot in my work, but the more recent inciting incident(s) for me have been casual chats and real-life record-diving excursions with people in the local and virtual DJ community. VRChat is such a signficant venue for parties and DJ sets since the pandemic that I am confident that in a few years it's going to be recognized alongside Detroit, NYC and Ibiza. Although what's missing now for that to happen is that it hasn't (yet) birthed its own genre. Other platforms have, and maybe this is the point I'm chasing here with the parallel to Fisher: Among all the DJs I know participating in the most futuristic of DJ venues, there is a hyper focus on reproduction.
VR DJs (who are many, varied, and awesome by the way) are largely concerned with reproducing existing and past conditions. AV effects and venues are transcending reality, but sets are mostly replicas of [insert favorite genre and venue].
To be clear there has always been an otaku-like sensibility that many music nerds have. The best disco set I ever heard was someone who specialized in disco from late 1986-early 1987 and it was entirely made up of really good tracks I've never heard of (and haven't heard since).
But here's another thought:
I'm getting old. I'm losing my edge / to the kids / coming up from behind / but... I was there.
Many of today's up and coming DJs and musicians are in their 20s, which means they were 18ish in the mid 2000s. These kids came of age in an era of online streaming services where "recommender systems" exist and are the norm. "Content discovery" here is both personalized and primarily organized around genre - or at least by mood. Not a particular album, not a particular DJ, Not Morning Becomes Eclectic, but "Eclectic Morning Playlist." Many contemporary artists don't even release definitive albums so much as sequence-placeholders, continuing to modify and re-upload tracks without noting they've been re-versioned. (Kanye's Life of Pablo was the first I noticed had track changes almost weekly. No longer a big fan, but that relationship to what an "album" is is notable).
What if the envelope around the sound - the very creation of a "vibe" - is the thing?
In Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich argues for the DJ as contemporary hero because of the role early DJs played in remix and discovery: the DJ was the mechanism by which that dusty old R+B single nobody heard of became "The Amen Break' and spawned a thousand hopefuls. Record-digging and impeccable encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric performance was a skill and an obsession, long before it was outsourced to the internet and long before Autecher fans live annotated sets via google-doc.
I don't really want to bemoan this has changed. In fact I'd argue it's a natural part of how we consume media (In Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997, a few years before Manovich), Janet Murray argues that "Encyclopedic Knowledge" is an essential property of digital media. Her argument is that the audience will (now I believe demonstrably have) possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the storytelling/listening space which will fundamentally change narrative structure.
We live in that world.
So here, as I sit here in my now vintage Echonest t-shirt listening to Death Prom dubbed onto Minidisc, what I'd like to argue is that this process, the formation and identification of genre (and micro-genre, and mood setting) is itself the primary skill of the DJ in this moment. The technical skill isn't scratching or record-digging or owning a a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. Nor is it owning a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. It's not buying a synthesizer or an arpeggiator or making a Yaz record - it's showing off how much better you are than the Spotify recommender at following one track with another. How good are you at tracing a bit of an emotional thread that exists across time and space, encoded in a particular rhythmic pattern or melody.
Can you set a mood? Bet.
Lo-Fi Beats to Relax/Study to is probably the most popular genre of music on VRChat. There is an entire lore behind the fandom. There are countless spinoffs.
Isn't that just a collection of royalty-free backing tracks that pass the copyright detector? Yes, it is. And it's a genre of sorts. The same way Airbrush Surrealism and Cassette Futurism and Sea Punk and Vapourave and for that matter EDM and and number of marketing-schemes that have escaped into reality. Now in 2024, the genres are the thing, the identification of the genre, the creation of the genre. Leading us to micro-micro genres and subsets of same.
Burial's excessive dust-loop becomes, like the Amen-Break, an entire atmosphere on top of which we weave slowed-and-chopped 808s, warm fuzzy clouds of atmospheric hold-music drifting out of a carpeted cubicle to mix with traffic sounds. The word liminal, somewhere in 2020, loses its meaning completely, and language follows use.
James Reeves Midnight Radio is delightful (thank you Debcha for the pointer):
Sometimes the sunset filters through the sliding doors at Target in a way that reminds me of church. A honey-red radiance soaks the self-checkout lanes and the mannequins in women’s apparel. We pause our carts, and for a moment, there’s a hush.
Welcome to the second installment of Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month.
Also Nightwave Plaza
And back to the early 200s, all of Soma.
Do you remember that website that overlayed LA police scanner feed on top of a beat?
DJs now serve not as the bearer of the new, but as a filter-function on an overwhelming encyclopedic access to the entire universe of sonic possibility. Hautological ghost-busting, guides on the backroads. Cults of personality organized around sonic sensibility that does not require any commitment to either time or space or label or... maybe someday... genre.
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Recently I've gotten back into Minidiscs as a format, since you can now dump discs and even write to them using a web app and there is a vibrant reverse-engineering community and mostly, because it's incredibly fun to order a collection of random discs from Japan and see what people recorded. My minidisc-hacking group recently posted this gem from Reddit, where someone (perhaps a 15-16 year old someone) discovered that audio jacks are a thing.
This is funny, sure, but as someone in the group wrote: "be nice to the kids." Phones (yes, telephones, the primary listening device), haven't had an audio jack since 2016.
