Notes from the Underground: a Cultural, Political, and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground Music
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Notes From The Underground: A Cultural, Political, and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground Music. Stephen Graham Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD 1 I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed: …………………………………………………. Date:…………………………………………………….. 2 Abstract The term ‗underground music‘, in my account, connects various forms of music-making that exist largely outside ‗mainstream‘ cultural discourse, such as Drone Metal, Free Improvisation, Power Electronics, and DIY Noise, amongst others. Its connotations of concealment and obscurity indicate what I argue to be the music‘s central tenets of cultural reclusion, political independence, and aesthetic experiment. In response to a lack of scholarly discussion of this music, my thesis provides a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of the underground, whose existence as a coherent entity is being both argued for and ‗mapped‘ here. Outlining the historical context, but focusing on the underground in the digital age, I use a wide range of interdisciplinary research methodologies , including primary interviews, musical analysis, and a critical engagement with various pertinent theoretical sources. In my account, the underground emerges as a marginal, ‗antermediated‘ cultural ‗scene‘ based both on the web and in large urban centres, the latter of whose concentration of resources facilitates the growth of various localised underground scenes. I explore the radical anti-capitalist politics of many underground figures, whilst also examining their financial ties to big business and the state(s). This contradiction is critically explored, with three conclusions being drawn. First, the underground is shown in Part II to be so marginal as to escape, in effect, post- Fordist capitalist subsumption. Second, the practice of ‗co-determination‘ is seen to allow politically engaged underground artists to channel public and private funds into various practices of contestation. Third, and finally, I argue across Part III that in its distinctive musical and iconographic forms, the underground offers a kind of profaning, deforming, sublimating aesthetic ‗counter-magic‘, where radical aesthetic modes and radical practices of representation communicate a kind of ‗reconfiguration of the sensible‘ to audiences. I argue that this ‗reconfiguration‘ might yield emancipatory political readings, whilst also reflecting the kinds of experimental and exploratory musical practices typical in the underground. 3 Contents Part I: What is the Underground? 9 Chapter One. Introduction to the Underground 10 1.1 ‗Underground‘? 14 1.2 ‗My‘ Underground: Genre, Style, and Ideology 21 1.3 Why ‗Underground‘? 26 1.4 Introduction to Cultural and Theoretical Background 29 1.5 Method, Subject Position and Structure 31 Chapter Two: Methodology 37 2.1 Theoretical Framework 37 2.1.1 From Subculture to Scene, Through Bourdieu‘s ‗Field‘ 38 2.1.2 The Underground Scene 44 2.1.3 A Short Note on the ‗Neotribe‘ 46 2.1.4 The Configuration 48 2.1.5 Scene, Neotribe, Configuration 49 2.2. A Note on Style: Underground Music Analysis and Critical Musicology 50 2.3 A Note on Listening 52 2.3.1 Music Analysis: Consumptionism - Pertinence - Notational Centricity 53 2.3.2 Idioethnomusicology 56 2.3.3 Method - Pertinence ‗In‘ and ‗Around‘ The Musical Texts 57 Chapter Three: Underground Issues and Contexts 61 3.1 Underground Culture in the Digital Age: Issues and Topics 61 3.2. Local Underground Scenes: Introduction 67 3.2.1 Local Underground Scenes: Cities 70 4 3.2.2 The Underground Scene in Ireland 73 Concluding Thoughts 81 Part II – The Political and Cultural Underground 84 Chapter Four: Politics and Underground Music 85 4.1 How Can Music be Political? 85 4.2 Political Contexts: Real Subsumption and Flexible Accumulation 88 4.3. Excess and Alternatives: Escape from or Imprisonment by Capital? 93 4.3.1 Excess and Alternatives: Self-Organisation 98 4.3.2 Excess and Alternatives: Underground? 101 4.4. Real but Partial Subsumption: The Political Character of Underground Music 102 Concluding Thoughts 102 Chapter Five, The Politics and Culture of Underground Music: Artists 104 5.1 Artists and Political Economy 104 5.1.1 John Butcher 114 5.1.2 Vicky Langan and Black Sun 118 5.1.3.1 Eddie Prévost: Free Improvisation and AMM 122 5.1.3.2 Eddie Prévost: Political Economy and Mattin 129 5.1.4 Mattin 139 Concluding Thoughts 146 Chapter Six, The Politics and Culture of Underground Music: Digital Economy and Labels 148 6.1 The Digital Economy 149 Conclusions to the Digital Economy 156 6.2 Record Labels 158 5 6.2.1 Trensmat 159 6.2.2 Fort Evil Fruit 162 6.2.3 Not Not Fun 166 Concluding Thoughts 170 Chapter Seven, The Politics and Culture of Underground Music: Festivals (and Venues) 173 7.1 Arika 173 7.2 Colour Out of Space 185 7.3 No Fun Fest (and Café Oto) 188 Concluding Thoughts 199 Part III – Listening to the Underground 202 Chapter Eight: Noise 203 8.1 Noise as Concept 207 8.2 Noise as History 211 8.2.1 Los Angeles Free Music Society and 1970‘s ‗Amerinoise‘ 212 8.2.2 A Schematic (Musical) History of Noise Music from the late-1970s on 216 8.3 Noise as Scene 219 8.4 Noise as Politics 223 8.4.1 Noise as Politics as Contestatory Strategy 224 8.4.2 SPK 227 8.4.4 Political Noise? 233 Concluding Thoughts 240 Chapter Nine: Noise and post-Noise as Music 242 9.1 Dialectics of Form and Texture 243 6 9.1.1 Early Dialectics: ‗Japanoise‘ 244 9.1.2 Later Dialectics 250 9.2 Lo-fi and Noise Affects 257 9.2.1 Lo-fi Versus Hi-fi 258 9.2.2 The Lo-fi Genre 258 9.2.3 Performative Everyday: Conversationalism, Primitivism, and Sonic Indeterminacy 260 9.2.4 Mantic, Accidental Audition, and Comfort Noise 264 9.3 Post-Noise 269 9.3.1 Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop 271 9.3.2 Hauntology 272 9.3.2.1 Broadcast and the Oneiric Pastoral 274 9.3.2.2 Library Music, Public Information Films, and the Ghosts of Paternalism 279 9.3.3 Hypnagogic Pop 285 Concluding Thoughts 288 Chapter Ten: Drone and Black Metals 290 10.1 The Moral and Political Neotribal Scene 291 10.2 The Melancology Scene: Jouissance and ‗Productive‘ Nihilism 293 10.3 On the Genealogy of Metals 295 10.4 On the Genealogy of (Extreme Metal) Morals: Against the World, Against Life 301 10.4.1 Productive Nihilism and Black Metal: Theory 305 10.4.2 Productive Nihilism and Black Metal: Music 310 10.5 Black Metal: Politics 312 10.6 The Melancology Scene 316 10.7 The Metallic Drone 321 7 10.7.1 Drone Metal: Tonality and Affect 323 10.7.2 Drone Metal: Live Shows and Affect 330 10.7.3 Drone Metal: Repetition, Form, and Affect 333 Concluding Thoughts 336 Conclusions and Future Research Directions 339 Appendices Acknowledgements 347 List of Interviewees 348 Bibliography (and other references) 349 List of Figures and Images Chapter 8: Fig 1. The first four of Mattin‘s theses on Noise . 209 Fig. 2. The range of Noise activity in 2012, ordered by importance of ‗noise‘. 219 Chapter 9: Fig. 1. Spectrum analysis of ‗Woodpecker No. 1‘. 249 Fig. 2. Spectrum analysis of first four-and-a-half minutes of ‗Bound‘. 253 Fig 3. Spectrum analysis of first three minutes of ‗Norse Fumigation‘. 255 Chapter 10: Fig. 1. Riff structure of ‗Black Sabbath‘. 297 Images 1 and 2. Band logos: Burzum, Xasthur. 304 Images 3 and 4. Musicians: Gorgoroth and Sunn O))) 305 Fig. 2. .‗Death Becomes You‘ rendered as guitar tablature. 325 8 Part One: Introduction to the Underground 9 Chapter One – Introduction to the Underground This thesis is about what I am calling ‗underground music‘. It is an attempt to come to grips in a scholarly way with the music I deem as falling under that heading, music which, I suggest, draws in varying ways from the musical strategies and aesthetic ambitions of both popular music and experimental notated music.1 It is also an attempt to map in broad but critical terms the political and cultural contours of what I describe as the ‗scene‘ surrounding and contextualising that music. That scene, I argue, exists as a marginalised, what I will come to call ‗anintermediated‘ music-cultural configuration, marked particularly by close affiliation with emancipatory radical politics, links to but partial independence from capital and the state(s), and various aesthetic strategies and techniques of contestation and subversion, including techniques I variously, but complementarily, describe as deformation, undermining, profanation, sublimation, and ‗counter-magic‘. These various techniques are deployed, I argue, to the effect of suggesting to underground audiences a kind of ‗reconfiguration of the sensible‘. This contention about the contestatory, exploratory aesthetics of the underground echoes the similarly contestatory, radical political and cultural practices and positionality of the undergroud scene. Before getting to the extensive, systematic extrapolation of each of these claims, I‘ll spend some time in this opening section explaining a little more of the context, 1 These two categories are of course ambiguous and perpetually in flux, but for present purposes they are being used to represent commercial, seemingly aesthetically ‗moderate‘ music on the one hand, and institutional, seemingly aesthetically ‗challenging‘ music on the other. 10 underlying assumptions, and basic framework of my research. The thesis seeks to map underground music in as broad a sense as possible and as such follows the line of the multi-dimensional contexts just referenced into cultural and political discussions, as well as into more rigorously music-aesthetic2 ones. However, notwithstanding these important distinctions, the multi-dimensional influences that co- determine underground music are shown to be inextricable from each other throughout the thesis.