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Radiohead Kid A Mnesia Exhibition Photo Dump
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Image Persistence
“Unless poetry can absorb the machine [it has] failed of its full contemporary function”
Hart Crane
Cafeteria Scene
Two young people are hunched over a laptop at a corner table in the back of a fluorescent-tube lit cafeteria. The tubes are flickering a little too slow, and not in sync with each other. Perhaps their starter motors need replacing. Several customers have already left due to strobe-induced nausea. To make matters worse, the smell of too-old grease in an unwashed frying pan fills the air. One of the two looks homeless: dirty clothes and hair, large rucksack, shellshocked tired expression. The other is wearing a smart suit, has a short, neat haircut. Someone walks into the cafeteria’s front door. They look at each other. “What about him, is that the guy?”
Church Scene
The exterior is filmed at an inner-city church in New York, USA. The interior is filmed in a medieval country church In Yorkshire, UK. The obvious juxtaposition creates a sense of almost psychedelic disconnectedness. The actors are German, speaking English in half-decent American accents. The slight imperfections in the accents add to the overall sense of unreality. A man in his thirties dressed like a hoodlum from an eighties movie, or a homeless drifter from The Wire, sits on the front pew with his head in his hands. He fiddles distractedly with the cuffs of his thick flannel shirt. The pastor, an elderly gentleman, enters through the main door and, seeing the man, places his hand gently on his shoulder. “What troubles you, son?”
Riverside Scene
A wide river in an industrial dockland. Sky the colour of the one at the start of Neuromancer: “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Ambience of sounds of traffic and boat horns. A metal bench next to a railing beside the river. A man in a smart suit and a long coat sits on the bench. He smokes a cigarette and fidgets nervously. His shoes are freshly polished, reflecting the pale grey sky. A conspicuously nondescript briefcase sits on the ground, beside his right leg. As he finishes his cigarette, a homeless man in a huge blue overcoat and an enormous grey beard shambles over to him, almost limping. In an extremely polite tone, “Might I trouble you for a cigarette, sir?”
Former Punk Rock firebrand turned turgid reactionary John Lydon throws his hat into the Eurovision fiasco, for some reason. He has stated himself, this week on RTE’s Radio 1, that he has never watched a single broadcast of the event, which has run since 1956, branding it as ‘awful’ and ‘disgusting’. Lydon hopes to represent Ireland in the heavily politicised song contest. Hawaii is just kind of fine. Nothing special, kind of average. Lydon’s vocals are blank and uninspired, lacking his former acerbic edge. The backing track sounds like the peak 80s power ballads that Phil Collins is probably still living off of to this day. This is a shame as it is reportedly inspired by his wife’s battles with Alzheimer’s and, according to Lydon, is “also a message of hope that ultimately love conquers all.” Not something that aligns particularly well with his more recent public outbursts. I really wanted to like this. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Happy new year everyone. Today I have begun studying the period between 1870 & 1940 as part of my degree in English Language & Literature. The module I am part way through is entitled ‘Literature in Transition: from 1800 to the present’. The introduction to book 2 (entitled Movements: 1870-1940) of the module examines the contexts around what we think of as Modernist literature and art. As a precursor to some planned content examining Modernist literature over the coming year, I have decided to share my notes as I believe they serve as a useful primer to thoughts about this subject.
Unlike similar terms such as romanticism, Modernism is difficult to define and critics are in disagreement over its origins, significant features, and historical parameters. Key reference points for Modernism are three thinkers:
- Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose economic theory of capital predicted the revolutionary overthrow of class hierarchy.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose philosophy questioned truth and the moral framework of Christianity.
- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who constructed a new model of the human subject through psychoanalysis.
Some of the stylistic aspects of Modernism can be traced back to nineteenth-century avant-garde writers like poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and critic Walter Pater (1839-1894).
High point of modernism occurred between 1910 and 1930. This was also a period in which European, and especially British, colonialism entered an aggressive ‘imperialist’ phase, initiated by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. One effect of this was an awareness and interest in the art and cultures of colonised peoples.
Simultaneously, colonial rule began to be questioned and opposed during this period (ie. Ireland) and this generated politicised art such as Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907).
Artists and writers from the colonies also came to the ‘great European cities’, inflecting Modernism with their own unique perspectives.
We should keep in mind an awareness of contemporary art and literature which the term Modernism leaves out, such as Edwardian realism, New Women writers, the First World War poets, and the engaged political fictions of the 1930s.
Energies of Modernism are most evident, perhaps, within the various ‘movements’ which it nurtured:
- Forms of Symbolism and Impressionism
- Imagism
- Vorticism
- Cubism
- Italian and Russian Futurism
- Expressionism
- Dadaism
- Surrealism
An important ‘movement’ to consider is the Bloomsbury circle of writers associated with Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster, which did not have a set artistic agenda, but did pioneer innovative stylistic and formal techniques in literature.
A common feature of Modernism is its proponents seeing art and literature as having revolutionary potential. This period is distinctive in fostering radical political movements:
Anarchism and Syndicalism in Europe
Bolshevism in Russia
Fascism in Germany and Italy
Writers like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis readily adopted roles as political organisers, producing manifestos and seeing their art as a kind of challenge or attack on outmoded values and forms.
Right or Left wing, Modernist writers tended towards an equivocal or elitist stance in relation to the masses, even as they incorporated aspects of popular culture into their work. Alongside their formal experimentation, this elitism and ambivalent relation to the popular accounts for the self-conscious “difficulty” of many Modernist works.
A recurrent feature of Modernist writing is that it seeks to respond to a prevailing sense of crisis and fragmentation.
David Lodge notes that the Modernist novel rejects a linear ordering of narrative and does away with the overarching controlling feature of ‘a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator’. Instead we are often presented with a single limited viewpoint, or multiple different points of view, which are often incomplete, fallible or unreliable.
This may be seen as a symptom of Modernist literature’s concern with ‘the question of how to live within a new context of thought, or a new worldview’, but it is also a formal experimental challenge to established novelistic convention and other norms within art and literature.
Modernist writing rebels against conventions (notably forms of nineteenth-century realism) and instead presents life in more subjective, abstract or impressionistic terms.
Modernist novels and poems seem to lack proper beginnings or endings, plunging the reader instead into a running narrative.
In place of a ‘constraining’ narrative structure, alternative devices such as symbol and myth would be used to order otherwise seemingly disjointed poetic or prose forms.
The decentred and fragmented characteristics of Modernist literature reflected contemporary ideas about subjectivity, perspective, and consciousness. Sigmund Freud had shown how the human mind was not the centre of a unified self, but was split and divided into a collection of drives and socially-learnt compulsions, trapped in uneasy existence.
Modernist writers like James Joyce experimented with forms of internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness (Ulysses, 1922). D. H. Lawrence developed a new sense of the primacy of sexuality, undoubtedly facilitated by Freuds ideas (which he was personally critical of).
The broken perspectives of modern art and literature, their shattered forms and odd viewpoints, were grimly appropriate to a generation which had been physically and psychologically shattered by the First World War.
Psychological disorientation however, could also be liberating. Movements like Dadaism and Surrealism used chance objects and contingent juxtapositions to create art which subverted societal and artistic norms, enabling new, creative avenues to the representation of experience.
Scientific advances, such as The Special Theory of Relativity (1905) postulated by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the influence of philosophers such as Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the dizzily accelerating machines and vehicles of the modern era meant that time had lost its linear predictability and its conventional progressive form.
In Modernist writing, time could be arrested or reversed, and the psychologism of many Modernist texts meant that forms of subjective time and memory could be exploited for literary effect. Just as how narratives could be reframed via the narrow subjective frame of a single consciousness, the manipulation of time (as the medium within which character development usually takes place) could also change characterisation.
For some writers, the new conceptual flexibility of time had further, far-reaching implications for the apprehension of history and the persistence of the cultural trace of the past on the present.
Writers expressing the modern condition as a catastrophic and/or liberating dissolution also attempted to collate some form of system or mythology to make sense of and compensate for a lost unity. Writers like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats used myth and archetype to create a revelatory or divinatory system through which the world could be pieced back together through poetry. As Eliot stated at the end of The Waste Land (1922), which reworked classical fertility myths and the Christian Grail legend, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”.
Modernism sought to destroy and then remake the world. In this dangerous process its writers could never be sure of their cultural foundations. The intensity and excitement of Modernist literature derived from a tension between the desire to ‘make it new’ and an awareness that now the creative processes had no guiding forms and would have to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of a previous age.
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Iggy Pop – Frenzy
Peter Pan of Punk Rock is an iffy title that calls to mind dodgy allusions to everyone’s nana’s favourite pop star, Cliff Richard, but Iggy Pop is 75 and has just released a single he says will “beat the shit out of you.”
Frenzy is a three minute punk thrasher that starts with the sound of an amp gently humming to itself with barely contained menace. The guitar tone (courtesy of Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan) of the chords which rush in a fraction of a second later is fuzzy and resonant, warm as an acid bath. The drums (provided by Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Chad Smith) are precise and trimmed down to just the bare essentials, light on frills and fills, but coursing with electrical energy.
The vocals are as taught and abrasive as classic Pop and incredibly youthful and energetic for the septuagenarian punk rocker. The energy comes from somewhere though, obviously. Pop is railing against the shitshow which the world has become on the only way he knows, he’s allowing himself to be worked up into a frenzy at all those “fucking pricks” and “goddamn dicks” who are responsible for this shit. His frenzy is egged on by classic punk rock band shouts over the pummelling chorus.
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had a few beers or not, but I’m finding Frenzy to be as compelling and essential as almost anything else in Iggy Pop’s discography. Bless him.
More like this please, Mr. Pop.
Checkout the amazing animated video for Frenzy below.
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Whiteness
For historical context, this short story was written in June or July of 2020. The story was initially supposed to continue in further instalments, hence the subtitle taken from a song lyric, but the attempts to follow it up didn’t really go anywhere & I think (with 2+ year hindsight) that it works fairly well as a standalone, self contained, piece.
I don’t wanna be a prologue to history
I’ve had to hire a private security company to ferry this manuscript to my publishers. There’s a far-right hate mob gathering outside my house. They’re angry about the title. There’s nothing more dangerous and stupid than a braying horde of imbeciles who leap to defend their skin colour at the most minuscule sign of trouble. I Don’t even know why they’re so angry. Or angry at all. All they know is the title. I haven’t released any details of what Whiteness is about. For all they know, it could be a celebration of what it means to be white. It’s not, but these head-bangers have no way of knowing that. If they stopped for one second, they might realise that they could actually be protesting against something which celebrates their values. Or lack of.
There’s one guy who’s set up a kind of bar on top of my wheelie bin. I say bar, but he’s just got a 24 crate of Strongbow and a 24 crate of Stella Artois. He’s handing them out to the already drunken racists while they wave their fists and perform Nazi salutes at the Vote Labour poster in my kitchen window.
There’s a shrine to a road accident victim just over the road from me, you know the kind of thing. Flowers, cards and photographs of the victim. Maybe a couple of pictures drawn by children. One of the racists is stood in front of it, legs apart in the unmistakable silhouette of a drunk pissing in the street. There’s more of them pissing in the doorway of the Bakery across the walkway from me. Rivers of urine are flowing from the doorway, down the gentle slope towards the road.
I’d mentioned to an acquaintance on Twitter that I was working on this, and that it was called Whiteness. He retweeted it. Two of his friends retweeted it. It grew and grew exponentially. The next thing I knew I had every racist and his racist dog dogpiling me in the comments. “Lol muzzie convert twat,” “you’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for Churchill,” “Marx would be more than happy, he was born into a Jewish home, but family converted out of it. Ethnically Jewish is the only claim anyone can make. He’d be happy sat with today’s Nazis in the UK Labour party.” You know, sensible, measured, intelligent comments.
This went on for days until I had somewhere in the region of 4,500 comments on the original Tweet. Around 2000-3000 of them were from people supporting my right to call this thing Whiteness and speculating on why it’s not racist to call a book Whiteness. Others were arguing like cat and dog with the racists. Neither side willing to give ground in this social media microcosm of the culture war the reactionaries have been screeching for.
The comments from the far-right people got nastier and less coherent as the days went by. Less coherent relative to their usual smooth brained attempts at communication anyway. And then, yesterday somebody doxed me. They published my name and address on the tweet, that was retweeted about 3000 times and the rest you know. There’s an anti-anti-racism protest going on outside my home. White stupidity manifesting itself in the desire to prevent some unknown writer who they’ve been arguing with on Twitter from publishing something called Whiteness. Because they’ve convinced themselves, in their hate addled brains, that Whiteness is an attack, a criticism against them. I mean, maybe it is, but they have no way of knowing that. At this point, if it pleases the readership, I’d like to enter a laughing emoji into the official record.
So, the private security guys. Huge, muscle bound ex-military types carrying shields and batons. They’d prefer to carry guns, I’d imagine, but that would be frowned upon in the U.K., armed mercenaries guarding private residences. It doesn’t bear thinking about. They’re also dressed in thick, cutting edge, Kevlar body armour and visored helmets. One of them points into the crowd, at a young ‘roid rager dressed head to toe in camouflaged fatigues and wearing a red beret. He has a hipster beard and is performing a Nazi salute.
“See that guy in the uniform?” Says the private security man.
“Yep” I reply.
“He’s a Walt. No doubt about it. A fucking Walt. Makes me so fucking angry. I’m fucking raging.”
“A what?” I ask.
“You know? A Walt. A Walter Mitty. A fake. Pretending to be a veteran. A cunt”.
“I see.” I didn’t see. I do now though, I’ve looked it up since this exchange. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “a Walter Mitty is “an ordinary often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs”. Soldiers use it to call out edgelords on social media who claim to have served in the armed forces. They do this to win far-right debates, to justify hate crimes or to appear more interesting and important than they actually are. Usually, these edgelords have just played too much Call of Duty and become overexcited and overconfident in their own abilities. Dunning-Kruger effect, essentially. The mercenary was telling me this dude in the crowd was essentially cosplaying as a veteran. To add an air of legitimacy to their idiotic riot.
Now you’re probably wondering why I don’t just email the manuscript to my publishers. Well, that’s a good question. The thing is, I was gifted an antique typewriter by a relative for my 21st birthday (I won’t say how many years ago) and it’s been sitting in a box in my parents dusty, junk filled garage pretty much since then. Recently they decided to give up the garage as the rent was higher than they thought fair and they weren’t keeping a car in it anyway. They asked me to sort through my stuff before they cleared it out. I found sealed boxes of cassette tapes, old music magazines, books and DVDs. I opened one box and it had a full glass ashtray sat on top of a pile of magazines and newspapers. Decades old roaches in decades old ash. And finally, I found the typewriter that I’m ashamed to admit I’d forgotten I owned.
I took the typewriter and told my parents that everything else could go in the skip. Don’t want it. Get rid. I’m something of a hoarder at the best of times, so this was definitely for the best. It was a beautiful typewriter, once I’d dusted it down and replaced the ink ribbon. A Hermes 2000 manual typewriter in a wooden case. Like the one William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on. An absolute beauty. So, I decided, since I had the typewriter, and hadn’t actually used it before, I’d buy some paper and type my next significant project on it.
So, when I say that Whiteness is a manuscript, I mean that literally. A bound bundle of typewritten A4 pages printed on one side only. Placed inside a box file, sealed with tape and ready to be taken to my publisher. It was quite the challenge even convincing the publisher to accept a typewritten manuscript. It’s not really the done thing in 2020. Writers write their work in Microsoft Word (or similar) and send .docx files to their publishers as email attachments. The way you’re probably thinking I should’ve done it. But we’re here now, in this place, at this time, in this situation. And that’s all there really is to it.
You’re probably wondering how the publishers are going to transfer my typewritten manuscript into book form in this modern era of digitised publishing and e-readers. Probably the first typewritten manuscript submitted to a publisher in over a decade. Well, I guess that publishers used to work from typewritten manuscripts and anyway, they told me not to worry about it, so I’m not.
You’re probably detecting a few inconsistencies in the narrative in this section of writing. Maybe you’re wondering when exactly in the process of writing Whiteness, did I write this section. If I wrote about these events after they happened, how can I be relaying them to you here? Did I break the seal of the box file to add these pages to the front of the manuscript? Did I predict this and write about it in advance or is this whole thing fiction and I’m feeding you a pack of lies? Did I just switch from present to past tense, mid paragraph a few paragraphs ago? Well, none of that really matters so I’d probably avoid dwelling on it. In fact, you could have and should have probably ignored this whole paragraph. It’s meaningless. Nonsense.
Now the private security firm – or mercenary company if you like – has brought an armoured van to my house to pick up the manuscript. It’s like the kind you see collecting cash from businesses and delivering it to banks. Presumably ferrying it from bank to bank too. It’s parked up the street, about three quarters of a mile away. It has the name of the security mercenaries on the side of it, Stahlrim Security Consultancy. The crowd of jackboots and brown shirts (metaphorical or literal) are thick around my house, so the Stahlrim boys are going to be in for a hard time. Sure, they’re wearing thick, expensive body armour and carrying shields and batons, but these fascists are drunk, angry and spoiling for a fight. There’s also a woefully thin line of police keeping the crowd back as best they could.
If I could just beg your indulgence, I’m going to switch into past tense now. I believe that present tense has done its job and set the scene nicely. From here on out, I’ll be too busy for blow-by-blow narration. I’ll be recounting this to you after the events. An AAR, if you will.
“‘ere mate?” The lead merc shouted to one of the coppers on the line, “you guys got any teargas?”
The copper just shrugged and rolled his eyes. He looked scared. The coppers were wearing light armour too. You might call it riot gear if you were writing about it with a particular agenda, but it wasn’t really. Just a stabproof vest, a yellow hi viz tabard and their normal “tit hat” helmets. They looked woefully under equipped compared to the mercs, although they did carry riot shields.
“We’re racist and that’s the way we like it!” the crowd chanted, eager to assuage any fears that I may have exaggerated their sheer awfulness out of partisanship. I mean, I would. I definitely would’ve but they ended up being so vile that I didn’t even need to exaggerate how shitty they were. I started looking at their “banners”. I put it in inverted commas because most of them were sharpie pen on a piece of cardboard, torn from a box. Some said, “All Lives Matter” and some said, “White Lives Matter”. There were Confederate flags (I know, in the U.K.), Union Flags and George Crosses. The odd swastika dotted about. I even saw a couple of Ulster Banners. This was a teeming mass of white nationalist aggression and it was roiling away on my doorstep. I mean, fuck. I couldn’t even take my dog out for a piss or a shit whilst these idiots were there.
“We’re just about ready, sir,” the merc who’d done all the talking so far said to me. I could see the bloodlust in his eyes. He was desperate to crack some right-wing skulls. Probably the ones he referred to as Walts. He seemed to hate those idiots with an unquenchable passion.
“I dunno,” I said. I was having a bit of a wobble. A moment of unwelcome and unexpected uncertainty. “I’m not sure the world is ready for Whiteness. I dunno if the world can handle Whiteness.”
He looked at me with an amused side eye. “Sir, that’s up to you. I must inform you though that we are unable to offer you a refund for our service.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll go and fetch it. I’m sorry. I was just having a little wobble. I’m on my way.”
I went through into the back room, the box room, where my typewriter was set up. Even here, in the depths of my house, my fortress, I could hear the rabid chanting from outside. “The Jews will not replace us,” they chanted. I was actually looking forward to seeing a few of them get a truncheon in the face. I grabbed the box file and brought it out to the lead merc. He took it from me and gave me a solemn nod.
“Please be assured sir, that now we have taken possession of your parcel, we will give our all, our utmost, to get it to its destination. That is our mission. That is our pledge. If you are satisfied with this service, please give us a review on Trustpilot.”
“ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 5,” shouted another merc from a fair distance away, straining to be heard above the vile crowd noise, “HOW WOULD YOU RATE YOUR EXPERIENCE TODAY.”
I didn’t know what to say. Fuck, I didn’t know what to think. These Stahlrim boys are fucking weird. “FOUR,” I shouted back at him over the din. He looked vaguely hurt. I felt I’d just pissed on his parade. Was four not good enough? I didn’t think that four was unreasonable. Four’s really fucking good. If I wanted to slight him without insulting him, I’d have said three. To make me feel worse I saw one of the other mercs pat him, consolingly, on the arm and smile at him warmly.
The lead merc took a few steps towards the police line and turned back to me. “I’d probably get back inside now if I were you, sir,” he said. I nodded at him and stepped back into the house. I didn’t close the door though. I wanted to see these fucks getting set upon by the mercs and the police. I wanted to see blood flying and beaten, broken Nazis laying in the rivers of their own piss which they’d desecrated my street with. He whispered something in the coppers ear. The copper nodded back to him.
The privateers formed up into an incredibly compact, tight formation – a kind of pointed shield wall. They started walking forward into the crowd. The police line parted to let them through and then followed them, forming a passage through the rioters and pushing them out of the route to the van. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea or an overconfident stage-diver diving into an indifferent crowd. I could see both the coppers and the mercs dishing out hefty swings of their batons and rioters going down in sprays of blood. The racists fought back but, despite their superior numbers, they were just too angry and drunk to coordinate their attacks. Their amateurish and chaotic combat saw them get pushed back again and again with little serious trouble. The mercs advanced slowly towards their armoured van, professionally swinging their batons at the knees and shins of the anti-anti-fascists and forcing them to the ground.
It did my heart good to see so many Nazis getting knocked to the ground by the police and the mercs. I took extra satisfaction from the mercs because they were doing it in my employ, at my behest. It also did my heart good to see Whiteness leaving. Whiteness getting loaded into the armoured van. Whiteness about to be unleashed on the world, unsolicited and arrogant. Whiteness as art. Whiteness as propaganda. Whiteness as news. Whiteness as fake news, flim-flam, falsification. Whiteness as an all-encompassing attitude which everyone should be expected to adopt. Whiteness as water, air and food. Whiteness as a pandemic keyworker, keeping the world turning. Whiteness as abstract. Whiteness as dream. Whiteness as palpable nightmare. Whiteness as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When the police and the mercs had finished pushing back the protesters, they set up temporary barricades at the entry points to my street. The rioters hung about behind them, shouting racial slurs into the air, chanting their vile chants and getting more and more pissed. The crates of booze were still set up on my wheelie bin and, even though I couldn’t stand the stuff, I’d had a stressful morning, so I picked up the remains of the crate of Stella Artois and went back inside. I opened a can, fired up the Xbox 360 rerelease of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and tried to relax by gunning down Ballas and Vagos, provoking gang wars. Nostalgic vibes, good times.
Several hours later I took my dog out. The police and the racists had gone. With the object of their impotent white fury no longer present, they’d just kind a wondered off. The street was like the aftermath of a music festival, beer cans, plastic carrier bags and cig butts everywhere. Rivers of piss flowed from the doorways of the nearby shops and a burned-out police car sat in the middle of the road. My dog sniffed it as I walked her past it. She paused to piss on its charred remains.
When we got back from our walk, all signs of the fascist riot had gone. The street looked normal-ish. There was a dark stain on the road where the burnt-out police car was and another where the river of piss had been, but everything else was gone. It reminded me of San Andreas. The way that you could be battling police, massacring them by the dozen, pop inside CJ’s house to save your game and then, when you come back out, all of the corpses, wrecked cars, bikes and helicopters, even the bloodstains, all gone. As if it never happened. I went back into the house, let the dog off her lead and resumed tensely refreshing my Outlook inbox between San Andreas missions.
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Disco Elysium Reviews
Here are some hilarious reviews of Disco Elysium. I found them in Disco Elysium Cunoposting and the general idea behind sharing them is that if you want to convince someone to play Disco Elysium, don’t show them the positive reviews, show them the negative ones.
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Citizen Sleeper (first impression)
A couple of days ago I Tweeted that I had just completed Elden Ring and that life is now empty. This was a little tongue in cheek, but I have played nothing else for the last two and a half months, clocking up around 190 hours of gameplay. There’s a strange feeling of loss attached to finishing a game which burrowed so completely into my consciousness. I have begun writing something about it so watch this space.
In the meantime, I have decided to try a new game called Citizen Sleeper, recommended by video essayist Jacob Geller (on his Twitter). The game has a distinctive art style, which instantly grabbed me, and is described as a narrative RPG inspired by tabletop roleplaying games. “Roleplaying in the ruins of interstellar capitalism” is the games tagline and now I’m on the hook.
I haven’t started playing it yet but I wanted to share the artwork and the music from the main menu and character class select screen. I’ve kind of frozen up here, unsure of what class to pick, but luckily the music is this gorgeous, echoey piano melody which oozes isolation and melancholy. I have been vibing to this for a good while now. Check out the three classes you get to choose from below for an idea of the art style and give the track by Amos Roddy a play. Watch this space for more.
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Mogwai – Boltfor
Buoyed by the success of last years late career highlight, As The Love Continues, their first UK number one album, Mogwai return with triumphant new single, Boltfor.
Initially conceived during the studio sessions for As The Love Continues, Boltfor sees Mogwai at their epic best. Heavily dominated by atmospheric synths and glitchy percussion, the track begins lowkey, before ascending into a glorious crescendo of melodic synths and distorted guitar. The heroic melancholy of the underdog’s triumph.
Check out the fantastic video directed by Sam Wiehl, made up of generative CGI runners shedding light as they run through atmospherically lit environments. One shot might be a field of flowers while the next resembles the surface of the moon. Sam Wiehl says that it is “a visual metaphor for the constant movement in life and the unceasing urge to move forward as individuals.” Visual sentiments which reflect the music beautifully.
Before hearing Jäh Division’s imaginative deconstructions of classic Joy Division songs, I suppose I was already primed to accept this kind of thing. Due to the success of artists like Easy Star All-Stars & their guest-heavy reinterpretations of classic albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, Radiohead’s OK Computer & Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I was already quite receptive to the idea of hearing some of my life’s cultural touchstones rendered in Dub.
The idea of Joy Division’s music rendered as Dub calls to mind something that cultural theorist/political philosopher Mark Fisher wrote about Post-Punk bands like The Fall and Joy Division. He observed how their bass-led songwriting & production provided a white equivalent to Dub Reggae. The salient point here being that it is a white equivalent rather than a white version. Young working class white kids working out their marginalisation in bass-heavy soundscapes in much the same way as the working class black kids, but yielding completely different results.
So before I even listen to it, Jäh Division has pretty big shoes to fill. Does it succeed? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s quite enjoyable as a Dub album but it’s debatable how well the original songs hold up during the transformation. Opening track Transmission is barely recognisable with the tempo reduced to a languid crawl, only the bass line bears any resemblance to the original. It exemplifies how different an element from a song can sound if taken out of its original context. I have similar feelings about Heart And Soul Isolation too. Enjoyable enough Dub, sure, but almost unrecognisable as the Joy Division song.
Transmission, for my money, is a little more successful. The reduction in tempo & energy isn’t quite enough to ground the dizzy heights scaled by the songs gorgeous melody synth. The dubby delays even seem to add buoyancy to these heroically soaring melodies. Love Will Tear Us Apart also works quite well here. No accident that it is their most accessible and radio friendly song. It could fit into almost any genre without diminishing its appeal.
The 2019 rerelease also features four bonus tracks which are actually original compositions rather than Joy Division covers. These are all fine, decent Dub tracks. I have no complaints but they don’t really stand out & they feel a trifle unnecessary so I won’t really dwell on them too much.
Scruffy Theory 