abandoned-reality

everybody in the place

in august 2019 the bbc broadcast jeremy deller’s documentary 'everybody in the place: an incomplete history of britain 1984-1992'. it takes the form of a lecture delivered to a class of a-level politics students and deller uses archive footage to contextualise the rave movement within the social upheavals of 1980s britain.

he traces the birth of house and techno, it's introduction to britain via british-caribbean soundsystem culture, the moral panic as the rave scene goes overground and the states heavy handed response to it. the conservative government had given the police free reign in the war against the miners, a pivotal moment in the middle of the decade, and their treatment of the ravers and the traveller community is a clear continuation of that.

deller talks about ravers dancing in the empty factories and warehouses of industrial towns and cities, the same spaces where the previous generations had laboured, an inversion of work and pleasure. he calls the raves 'a death ritual to mark the transition of britain from an industrial to a service economy'.

that maybe makes it sounds like heavy going but i've watched this multiple times now as it such a beautiful celebration of this brief moment of joyful abandon. throughout there are scenes of togetherness, communality and living in the moment that all hit a little bit harder after nearly a year of lockdown.

everybody in the place: an incomplete history of britain 1984-1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thr8PUAQuag

culture war

i posted the thread below on the fediverse yesterday, i was following a train of thought and i'm not sure how coherent it was overall. mostly i'm just angry about the cultural vandalism of neoliberalism, the thwarted artistic ambitions of working class people, just the sheer loss of unique voices and ideas.

i don't think it's a coincidence that as this unnoffical system of subsidising the arts via the dole and grants was removed there was a flattening of culture. that's not to say that there aren't new and interesting things being created, i don't want this to be mistaken for a curmudgeonly 'things were better in my day' rant. things weren't better they were just different and those differences gave working class people the space to explore and experiment and push things forward.

mark fisher made this point more than once, this is what he had to say in an interview with crack magazine -

'One of the things we haven’t talked about is the class domination of things like popular culture and popular music. The absurd number of ex-private school kids who are now dominating the indie scene or whatever. Because only they can afford it; only they can afford to get into the networks where culture happens. The absurd myth of neoliberalism is that creativity is this infinite well-spring which is equally distributed amongst human beings and it’s only blocked by the state or socialists. But of course, it’s the exact opposite. The creativity only happens when there are the conditions for it and collective conditions of one kind or another, and it’s those collective conditions and that critical admixture which has been systematically dismantled.'

the references to blur vs oasis and guy ritchie were supposed to give an idea of when this was set in motion, roughly mid to late 90s. the challenge for us is to take the artistic possibilities from the recent past, incorporate them into a positive vision of the future and make it a reality.

anyway here's the thread -

thinking about how in the 70s and 80s, hell even the early 90s, if you were a musician, artist, actor you could sign onto the dole or go to college on a grant and work on your music, art, whatever without having to worry too much about how you were going to afford to live.

in the KLF book the manual (how to have a number one the easy way) which came out in 1988 they actually recommend signing onto the dole so that you can focus all your attention on making a number on record, imagine being able to do that now.

what's wild about this is that it was under tory governments, it was tony blair who introduced the 'new deal' where if you were on the dole and didn't accept a job you were offered you lost all your benefits. now the cultural landscape has been overun by the middle and upper classes.

we've lost an entire generation of working class weirdos while the establishment pushes the idea of working class people as being real and authentic because they don't have the time or money to be indulging in artistic expression, art is for phoneys not real people, blur vs oasis is sold as art school wankers vs real salt of the earth working people, which is how you end up with privately educated guy ritchie cosplaying as a cockney wideboy, what could be realer than that.

just remembered this article from a few weeks back, it's not confined to the arts either, talking up your working class credentials is a national pastime at this point, especially when it comes to justifying racism https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/jan/22/how-actors-love-of-a-humble-origin-story-may-worsen-the-arts-class-crisis

notes -

you can read the full version of mark fisher's interview in crack – https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/mark-fisher-interviewed/

stuart maconie: the privileged are taking over the arts – without the grit, pop culture is doomed https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/01/privileged-are-taking-over-arts-without-grit-pop-culture-doomed

the manual (how to have a number one the easy way) by the KLF https://archive.org/details/TheManualHowToHaveANumber1TheEasyWay

bright sparks

a few years back sheffield duo i monster released an album called bright sparks and also created a documentary about electronic music pioneers to accompany it. the documentary is now available free online and features a collection of interviews with synth designers and some of the musicians that have used their instruments.

it's split into two parts, the a side focuses on us based electronic music pioneers including bob moog, don buchla, alan r pearlman and harry chamberlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXWgBEiNhs

the b side focuses on british electronic music pioneers such as ems’s peter zinovieff, electronic dream plant’s adrian wagner and chris huggett, and string ensemble inventor ken freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXPoM9s8Trs

you can listen to i monster's bright sparks album at their bandcamp page https://imonster.bandcamp.com/album/bright-sparks

the korg monologue is a monophonic analogue synthesizer with 2 VCOs, 25 keys, 16 step sequencer, motion sequencing, microtuning, there's even an oscilloscope so that you can visualize the waveform while you're making a patch. it's got a lot of features for an analogue synth that will cost you less than £200 second hand.

it was designed by tatsuya takahashi who also created the monotron and volca series for korg https://www.soundonsound.com/people/tatsuya-takahashi-synth-designer

korg collaborated with richard d. james on the monologue and he provided scales, sounds and sequences. he also created a demo track using just korg synthesizers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUT01p-C2xo

richard d. james interviewed tatsuya for warp.net and it's very enjoyable seeing them nerd out about microtuning https://warp.net/editorial/richard-d-james-speaks-to-tatsuya-takahashi

i bought my monologue from ebay a couple of years ago, it turned up in an improvised cardboard box with no manual, a few scratches and a cash convertors sticker on the bottom. this was not a synthesizer that had been lovingly cared for.

i'd accumulated a few bits of gear around the same time so i would play with it but i never really spent a lot of time properly getting to know it. every now and then i would think about selling it but i never quite got round to it, for whatever reason.

a couple of weeks ago i decided to give the monologue another go and whenever i had a spare moment I would switch it on and make a patch or a sequence. as i spent more time working on it i started to realise what a great little synth it is despite some of it's quirks and limitations.

there's been an abundance of affordable synthesizers released in the last few years, the downside of this is that you can end up buying things on a whim and doing exactly what i did to my poor little monologue. anyway, that's all changed and we're good friends now, we should probably record some music together.

notes -

a demo video of the monologue by the wonderfully named justin delay for reverb.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq1obj8w7v4

cash convertors is a chain of pawn shops in the uk