#music_tag

[mitigatedchaos]

Music Posting

Some time ago someone asked me about my taste in music - it's not something I usually think about with respect to blogging, in part because I've found that individual musical tastes don't seem to line to either personality or even political beliefs all that much.

Music is experienced as of its time, however. The late Obama era saw the emergence of the Future Funk genre with its tremendous sense of nostalgia for a past Japan that probably never quite existed.

As we entered into the Trump era, we saw the emergence of synthwave, and I've previously discussed the dark synthwave master Carpenter Brut.

If you still want that dark synthwave feeling, but you want something a bit less intense, there's another band to listen to: GUNSHIP. They've leaned into the dark cyberpunk future not only in aesthetics, but also themes - while managing to keep it cool.

Gunship have a new album coming out, and if their most recent collaboration with Carpenter Brut - DooM Dance - is any indication, it's going to be another good one.

Dark All Day

Art3mis & Parzival

Monster in Paradise

You like vampires and VR, right? There's even a song seemingly inspired by Altered Carbon, one of the best sci-fi series streaming during the Trump Administration.

For those looking for more variety, but still plenty of darkness, dubstep musician Kill The Noise has released a new album which seems to consist of a lot of collaborations with different musicians, leading each song to have a somewhat different style.

The animation is ultra-violent.

Mirage

Paper Moon

But what if you liked 2019's City Girl - Endless Artificial, which in some sense represents the lighter, more pastel half of electronica in the Trump era culture compared to synthwave's recalling of the 1980s, and just wanted it to be 30% dubstep?

[mitigatedchaos]

Biocapital: Thick, dense, rich, deep, embodied.

Cybercapital: Geometric, sparse, low-dimensionality, and suffusing the environment.

Yes, I think you've captured this perfectly.

[mitigatedchaos]

"now [the culture] seems to be (gradually) moving under its own power again." I'm not saying you're wrong! There's a hint of this maybe? But I'd be very interested to hear what made you come to that conclusion.

From an ideological level, we can see a certain amount of exhaustion with identitarian politics after it failed to yield the dividends it was supposed to, partially discrediting its advocates in a way that couldn't be achieved by argument. And that politics was behind the bizarre "Corporate Memphis" style which aimed to be as inoffensive as possible through the removal of faces, loosening of the human form, etc.

I think the culture is still moving fairly slowly. Something like Season 5 of Samurai Jack, which popularized Carpenter Brut with its trailer, was not the culture moving under its own power, but rather a bunch of determined 50-year-old men gritting their teeth and dragging it, whether it wanted to move or not.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the culture moving under its own power, but depends on Japan as part of the loop, which isn't sustainable. It's the same for the recent movie Bullet Train, which I recommend.

But if you want to talk object level, I don't listen to terrestrial radio, but I do listen to music in stores, restaurants, etc.

In that line, Molly Burch - Emotion feat. Wild Nothing.

Two things. One, you can hear the vaporwave in this, right? That terrible nostalgic longing that burst onto the scene back in 2016 or so. Vaporwave was an offshoot, and now it's being reintegrated.

Two, who the fuck is this? I was never one for celebrities, but I've never heard of this person in my life, and I'd have to guess this is relatively mainstream from hearing it out in the wild.

Something like 2017's The Killers - The Man is good stuff, but they're an act from the mid-00's. If they put out good new stuff, that's good, but that doesn't indicate replacement personnel once they age out.

Part of what's going on - and I think Kontext will agree with me - based on Zoomers and even Gen-X wearing katakana T-shirts and hoodies as like a completely normal thing, and T-shirts for classic rock bands for some Zoomers, is a reboot from 2008 culture drawing more closely from the more heavily online, anime con, etc factions within the culture. We may be about to witness 00s-wave.

I'm from the '00s myself, and listened to electronica before it became (seemingly) the standard. Before there were vtubers, I was on Second Life. Before transgenderism burst onto the scene in national politics, I knew some transgender people. Now people are talking about AI alignment, and Eliezer Yudkowsky may become a household name before this decade is through. EAs are a world-known thing now.

Overall I would say that my forecasting horizon is converging with the current timeline. I may lose my advantage in about 3 years.

I'd wager that what we're going to see is not an instantaneous roaring back of the culture, but rather an organic regrowth over a period several years.

One possible pivot is that as conservatives take up the tools of censorship currently favored by the identitarian left, factions within the left that want to exit the sterile, sexless 10's will use this as an excuse to paint censorship as 'uncool.' The original arguments were largely social power politics rather than the modern [rational/military/industrial/technocratic] style that we see among the Rationalists (as the "lost" materialist progressives), and this would allow a social power answer, at a potential loss of ability to coordinate adherence to social rules more generally.

[mitigatedchaos]

Kontext says we’re starting back up again where the ‘90s left off.

I’ve observed a lot of teenagers wearing anime shirts with katakana on them for franchises recognizable to someone who grew up in the 90s/00s.  Mixed in are teenagers wearing shirts for franchises like Rugrats that started in 1991, apparently now rebooted in 2021.  Adults are wearing shirts for the show Friends, which ended in 2004.

What about the new Batman?

Look at this motherfucker.

That guy on the right?  He looks like he could’ve walked out of a My Chemical Romance or Evanescence music video.  What is he, from 2003?  And if you’ve watched the movie, you’ve noticed that he has the attitude to match the looks.

But I don’t recall the anime t-shirts in the 00s having katakana on them.

Writers have two options for producing complex texture in media.  The first option is to be a genius and work out the equilibria of the world on your own, something necessary for prophetic science fiction.  The second is to rip off the real world, which has its own deep texture.  Writers will often do a mix of both - Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex was inspired by elements of Japanese history, while also leaning into a memetic crime wave, which made it a double-hit of coherent novelty for American viewers.

The Batman could’ve been made in 2003.  We could almost imagine a Johnny Depp Batman right next to it in the conceptual space.

Except this film wouldn’t have been made in 2003.  Like the anime t-shirts, it’s from a phantom 00s that never existed. 

Nolan’s first Batman movie was archetypal - everything was so purely the platonic representation of itself that it was insufficiently particular.

In Nolan’s second (and best) Batman, the population of Gotham are terrorized by a rogue philosopher-terrorist who poses them moral dilemmas as practical exercises - perhaps not so different from the trolls and shitposters of 2012 onward.  (The question of who tied people to the trolley tracks in the Trolley Problem at last has its answer.)

Nolan’s third Batman explores the potential energy building up for populist revolution as something for hostile elites to exploit.

Nolan was 4 years ahead.  But The Batman is not visionary - it is a processing of the political information learned by society over the course of the past 20 years, and especially the last seven.  Aesthetically, it could have been done in 2003.  In practical terms its views on institutions (and charities), on social issues/feminism, and even on conspiracy theorists, are more like zero to two years out from now.

Is it good?  I liked it.  RW Twitter liked it.  But in my view it’s fundamentally about the new generation trying to make sense of all this bullshit.  It wasn’t created for me specifically, but it wasn’t created to exclude me, either, and I was left feeling hopeful.

[mitigatedchaos]

We're in a cultural threshing period right now. The culture is working through what works of the 00's and '10s we're going to keep.

If you want to know what 'old' music people are listening to right now, I'd like to recommend, again, checking slowed music on YouTube. That trend really got going in the last few years (although I'd been listening to slowed music since probably... 2015?), so "slowed" videos indicate listeners with enough dedication to a song and enough device operator skill to slow it and upload it to YouTube.

It's a low bar, but not every song makes it.

Some content from the 2010's is going to make the cut, I think. I don't just mean Carpenter Brut's Turbo Killer, which might be the hardest song of the last 20 years.

[mitigatedchaos]

A rare treat that I doubt most of you have heard before: cyberpunk rap.

Putting it that way really undersells this track, though - makes it sound like it’s a bunch of dorks rapping about Shadowrun.  But no, it’s pretty intense.

Bonus: additional drum ‘n’ bass remix.

[mitigatedchaos]

Japanese Twitter has graciously provided us with this stunning mashup of Plastic Love and Something About Us to mark the breakup of Daft Punk.

Though as we enter into the era of Boston Dynamics, perhaps this distant future year of 2021 is the appropriate time for a group of organic men in metal masks to ride off into the sunset - the future of their originating year of 1993.

But French electronica hasn’t gone away - the darker Carpenter Brut may be more suited to the temperature of our cyberpunk future than the brighter and more optimistic 1990s Daft Punk lived in.

...though I have a feeling that people will be listening to Daft Punk for many years to come.

[mitigatedchaos]

Let's provide something more obscure: Sim Isle - Missions in the Rainforest

These haunting electronic melodies accompanied the exploitation of islands in a tropical paradise, in which the player hires agents to bring development, industry, tourism, and slash-and-burn logging on behalf of a multinational corporation, depending on the scenario.

What kind of musics do you like and/or enjoy

Perspective: Today is February 20, 2116, and you are cruising into the submarine yacht dock at Misneyland Hawaii.  In two months, an expose will be published on the conspiracy between Misney, a Philippine billionaire, and a cabal of well-connected Chinese financiers to carry out a geoengineering project in violation of international law (to be framed as an act by international terrorists), and the entire operation will be shut down at the order of congressional legislators.

You have been here before, nearly one hundred years ago.  This is the last point at which anyone has collected the necessary knowledge, personnel, and materials to stop the African Collapse, the worst climate event in history, and the supply of exotic particles to go back farther in time has been exhausted.

Things are not quite as you remember.  You feel faint tears welling up in your eyes upon witnessing the old world that was emerald green, a simpler world, where one might optimistically be a reporter...