Ten years from its release date, Richard D. James’ final album under his Aphex Twin moniker remains as intractable as ever, an enigma that rose up from the sands of electronica and stood towering over the land while its creator slunk off into apparent obscurity.
Yet how to begin to grasp the unwieldy complexity of this polymorphous work of music, a work whose very heterogeneity would seem to defy the imperious nature of such an action. Perhaps we could begin by identifying some of the themes present throughout the album, breaking it down and creating taxonomies, categorising its tracks, perhaps by trying to pin down some of the most obvious influences: the prepared piano of John Cage, the musique concrète of composers such as Edgard Varèse, and finally, the schizophrenic intricacy of a percussion that seemed to confront the tension between the abstract and apparent chaos advocated by Stockhausen and the regularity of the “post-African” drum patterns of the techno music whose repetitiousness he famously critiqued. The result is a vast landscape of undeniable individuality, of haunting melodies, at times tinged with melancholy and nostalgia, of abrasive, jarring sounds, of frenetic, cascading percussion arrangements whose intricacy and flow remain unrivalled to this day.
However we could equally well approach the album on a different level, from within the context of electronic music itself: steering clear of the cult of personality once ambiguously coveted by the creator of the work, we could chart the development of his repertoire, noting perhaps the work’s role in marking an apogee, the end of a certain stage in his career, as well representing a fin de siècle and point of inflection for electronica as a whole. Here, the idea of an apogee, of the highest point reached by a celestial body, would seem particularly apt. While it may be somewhat anachronistic to talk in this day and age of celestial bodies and the heavens, a romantic throwback to a bygone era, there can be no doubt that the album represents a culmination in the development of electronic music, a magnificent fulfilment of its potential to break from a culture obsessed by cloying subgenres, to push beyond its boundaries and break free from its constraints; it is a work that stands out from a generation of music that had little to offer in the way of compositional substance and longevity, that was of little relevance beyond the moment and the subgenre by which it was defined. Drukqs was the point at which electronic music threatened to break free from its stable orbit and leave the genre itself behind; it was the point at which the heavenly body looked as though it might be not an apogee but instead might escape altogether, like a shooting star darting off into the realms of a smooth musical space. Here was a work that threatened to transcend electronic music, to move beyond into the undiscovered realms of something arguably more serious and certainly more mature.
Or else, finally we could immerse ourselves the minutiae of its subtleties and complexities, the personal details left behind in track names and samples, we could contrast the multiple threads of its composition, the hidden clues buried amongst the obscurity of the Cornish language; we could attempt to debunk the myth surrounding its creation, to affirm the evident truth that something so singular, so unique, could never be merely accidental.
Yet all attempts to capture the essence of this piece seem doomed to fail, condemned to come up against the inevitable stumbling block that is the lack of a suitable discourse or language with which to comprehend the music itself: the lack of well-formed concepts, of words and phrases with which to grasp it, to shape and mould it to conform to the limits of our conscious mind. Indeed, were such a feat possible, we could no doubt spend a lifetime trying to invent our own language, perhaps only to be reminded in the final instance that the real beauty of music, the heart of its mystery, is that it speaks to parts of us that language cannot, that it expresses something that words never will; for all that we may try to describe and probe it, we will never come to know it, perhaps reminding us that, in the words of Borges, the solution to the mystery is often inferior to the mystery itself.
A bucolic scene: returning from a hike in the mountains, following the course of a small brook as it wends its way gushing and burbling down the valley and into the woods, chasing away a pair of inquisitive foxes on route, before eventually arriving back at the tent. The glade takes you by surprise, cool, moist and earthy; trees tower tall above the spot, their canapés filtering out the evening sun. Dead branches and leaves litter the ground, given over to a process of decomposition that will see them reclaimed by the body from whence they came: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, returned to mother earth.
Sitting down at the picnic table, the ensuing rest is well deserved: boiling up some water for a cup of tea, a cigarette to contemplate the setting sun. Soon the barbeque is lit and the rich aroma of the meat can be smelt, wafting up the hillsides in the smoke carried by a gentle breeze. Night is falling, the daylight fading rapidly. Tucking into the meat, it tastes succulent in the gloaming. Soon, you reflect, it will be time to light the campfire, before the darkness arrives in earnest.
A pair of eyes goes unnoticed, lurking amongst the foliage. So too do the subtle warnings signs, nature’s way of saying beware—the agitation of the birds, the perceptible increase in their chatter, as if they were trying to tell you something; the occasional sound of a cracking twig; the swishing of the undergrowth—signs that, if listened to carefully, would perhaps give some clue as to the size of the beast patiently stalking its prey. Instead, what follows appears to come as if from nowhere: a blood-curdling growl, the cry of an impending attack; a primitive, animal sound, lusting on the smell of hot, juicy meat. It is a moment of sheer danger, a close shave in which the mortal threat is only averted by your bellowing voice and mankind’s ability to master that most primitive of all arts: fire.
Vivid and intense, the scene is engraved in your memory, a moment that reveals the fundamental vulnerability of the human being in its natural state. Alone, without the protection of the communities we form, we are an easy target, rich pickings for wolves, bears and wildcats. Alone in the darkness, we come face to face with the shocking truth of the fragility of our existence, a fact we are increasingly wont to forget as we clad ourselves in the conveniences of modern life, removing ourselves by an ever increasing degree from the first principles of nature to which (in spite of what vanity may tell us) we are irrevocably bound.
Simply put, it is a case of safety in numbers: only by forming communities, only through cooperating and working together, through harnessing one of the most primitive aspects of human nature, and indeed the animal kingdom as a whole, has it been possible to protect ourselves against larger, more able-bodied predators. In an era in which repeated attempts have been made to reduce the complexities of human nature to the pyrrhic triumph of self-interest, there is perhaps something revelatory to be found in this truth, like restoring the sense of vision to a blind and impoverished man.
Revisiting Jimmy Reid’s 1972 rectorial address, one cannot help but feel a fond sense of nostalgia for the politics of an entirely different era. In the words of Archie Hind, these were men with “the fire which came from a moral belief in a political idea as expansive, generous and as hot as the head of a steam boiler”.
Yet the faith of Reid and those who fought alongside him, a faith in the possibility of a fairer and more just world, has been gradually sidelined by a malignant breed of nihilism. Almost forty years on, that fire has all but died out and the strength of conviction which so markedly defined Reid and others like him is notably absent from the political landscape of our time. Indeed, with very few exceptions, the very idea of belief—be it in a God, a nation, a politics, or even in an institution as fundamental as the family—would seem an anathema to the type of society we have found ourselves living in, a risible and indulgent anachronism in a world in which the blind pursuit of self-interest, rejected in such impassioned terms by Reid, has become the prevailing norm in a spiritually impoverished society.
In growth we trust. Growth, economic growth that is, has become the unchallengeable transcendental that governs the workings of a consumer society. Both on an individual level and beyond this has led to the erosion of our belief in the power of the collective, leaving us deprived of a vital source of nourishment and undermining a powerful sense of humanity that is fundamental to Scottish culture and which indubitably constitutes one of its greatest assets.
Yet perhaps all this was inevitable. Perhaps the triumph of capitalism as the grand narrative of the twentieth century, together with its eternally-recurring desire, was inevitable; perhaps too the fact that belief was no longer to be possible on its shifting sands. Indeed, the Market’s hedonistic celebration of the most insubstantial and vainglorious of human desires has perhaps rendered it unnecessary: why bother with something as arduous and trying as faith when the misery of instant gratification is always close to hand?
For all this and more, we now find ourselves in a curious situation, living in a world in many ways alien to Reid’s. In an age of perpetual crisis, burgeoning population growth and in which competition for increasingly scarce resources grows ever more fierce, dreams of a fairer and more just world would appear to be just that: the stuff of make-believe, consigned to a poor second place by the short-sighted pragmatism of the self-interest required to stay ahead in our times.
The battlefield may have changed then, however even if the specific goals for which Reid fought are in some senses no longer valid and the utopias of yesteryear no longer tenable, the substance of which they were made, the core values that lie at their heart and the fire, returning to Archie Hind’s metaphor, that is fuelled by them, are more vital than ever before.
The great strength of neoliberalism, as we are often told, is that it appeals to human nature, that very grasping, self-centredness pinpointed by Reid in his speech. Yet such a belief remains perilously ignorant of the fact that we are but products of the communities we form, that humankind’s greatest achievements have come not as a consequence of this self-interest, but in spite of it; they are a product of the strength derived from working together, not by attempting to shirk the responsibilities this entails.
The immediate challenge them, is how to counter this zeitgeist, how to rescue and rebuild what has been stealthily eroded by the increasingly dubious “progress” of recent decades. “What has made global capitalism more difficult to challenge”, writes Eagleton in Trouble with Strangers (2009), “is the fact that it has grown more predatory, not less so”. He continues: “this means that the very changes in the system which have helped to dispirit and deplete the left are also why the need to combat the system remains more urgent than ever”. Yet the question remains of how to grasp such an incipient and omnipotent problem, something that has become so systematically embedded in the structure of our societies.
What better place to begin than reflecting on Reid’s words, reviving his faith, his conviction, in the words of the great orator himself, that “real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women”.
If one half of analogue and digital music is defined by the decision of a certain lineage
of electronic music to turn its back on the technocracy inherent to digital production techniques, the other, made explicit in the title of the Monolog X release Analog Music 4 Digital People, has been its embrace of an aspect fundamental to the time in which we live: the demise of the physical medium. As such, analogue and digital music can be interpreted as a response to a new age in which the digital file format, the intangible product of a new setup which hacks away at the clout of the big labels and the cult of the collector in one fell swoop, reigns supreme. Only the artists and the communities they create are left standing, with little opportunity for industry to directly fill or commoditise the spaces in between. In a nutshell: the landscape has been dramatically altered.
A direct consequence of this fact, and one which could not be fully realised until physical formats had been rendered all but obsolete by a far more ubiquitous medium, is that communities and niches which were once presencial and local, together with the scenes and fan bases that sprung up around club nights, record shops and those who frequented them, have become both virtual and global: on-line networks dispersed across the Internet in which innovations grounded in different countries and cultures are free to mix much more fluidly, unconstrained by geographical boundaries. To employ one of postmodernity’s most well-worn clichés, music has become decentred: analogue and digital is perhaps as much about artists in the United States and Sweden as it is about those from its birthplace in the British Isles.
As a movement, it brings together a series of decidedly low-key, polymorphous artists, releasing their work under different aliases and using personal websites and small-scale net labels to reach their public. Perhaps it is this lack of physical identity (or at the very least an interesting consequence of it) which means that the cult of personality that grew to be so pronounced around certain big names of a previous era now appears undesired, if not wholly irrelevant. The emphasis has returned to the music itself.
Herein we find what constitutes perhaps one of the greatest strengths of analogue and digital: no longer able to rely on crutches such as reputation and profile to guide their tastes, freed from the quality control of traditional record labels, listeners are challenged to make their own judgements about the music they hear. Releases no longer come pre-judged and privileged because they bear the name of a certain artist; innovation and creativity are to be sought out and discovered, not inherited or given. In this sense, analogue and digital can be viewed as a reinvention of a certain tradition in electronic music, actively seeking to abandon a structure which ultimately grew to stifle creativity and represent a paradigm in which it was easier to imitate than innovate. One cannot help but feeling that part of the idea behind the enterprise was to create something of a clean slate on which to experiment and produce innovative music once again; similarly, perhaps it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that the low profile, flimsy identities of certain artists may act as a clever safeguard to maintain this balance.
Yet the reliance on a digital community of listeners is not without its shortfalls, the most obvious being in the discovery of the music itself. While in theory, music released on the Internet is available to all, it is also true that the low-key nature of the enterprise renders it somewhat inaccessible to those who remain outside of its core community. In this respect, listeners left to discover the music by chance are perhaps more likely not to discover it at all, and it is questionable whether a more mature generation of listeners will have the time and energy to expend on joining a series of dots which on more than one occasion would seem to actively resist being joined.
One of the most obvious consequences of this is in terms of momentum: with such limited exposure, it can be challenging to build the momentum of such a project, raising the possibility that analogue and digital will struggle to grow beyond being more than just a niche (returning to Monolog X, note a question of a similar nature in one of the track titles on the release Analog Music 4 Digital People, ‘Why Am I Relegated to Acid?’). This it would seem, hints at a tension between the scale of the scene which preceded analogue and digital, endowing it the means to achieve that vital symbiosis between impact and a large community of listeners, and the reticence of this new music to follow suit. It might be interesting to reflect then, whether this is an aspect which leaves the genre in danger of being forgotten before it has even been discovered.
This leads into a second and final point: the issue of longevity. While there is no doubting the excellence of many analogue and digital tracks in terms of their technical, aesthetic and compositional dimensions, for the large part they remain releases of short tracks. Adept exercises in microcomposition that still fall short of the artistic maturity and strident vision offered by an album such as Drukqs. This point had already been noted part 1 of this article, however it is interesting to raise it again in a different context, posing the question as to whether there is something inherently ephemeral in digital technology, whether as a mode of expression it is capable of supporting the substantial and complex ideas which have been so essential to the development of our civilisation.
One might remark that perhaps analogue and digital musicians, or even the genre itself, have no pretentions of pursuing such lofty ambitions; yet in this respect, they undoubtedly sell themselves short. If ‘digital people’ and their faculties of comprehension are unable to appreciate the substantial, this is not to say that our creative possibilities should be limited thus; in fact, quite the contrary.
Nonetheless, analogue and digital music presents us with a kind of creative tension: an attempt to redress the balance between the potential of the digital era and the empowerment it brings on the one hand, and its dominance in our lives which threatens to reduce a substantial part of our consciousness, thoughts, feelings and the creative possibilities through which they are expressed, to strings of ones and zeros on the other. In this respect, it should be duly commended as a serious if occasionally carnivalesque attempt at engaging with this tension, retaining something of the warmth and substantiality of the physical world while embracing the dazzling possibilities offered by the brave new digital one we are in the process of inexorably forging.
Scenes of anarchy across the English capital which quickly spread to engulf other parts of the nation. An act of aggression by the police was to prove the spark that ignited a tinderbox which fireballed rapidly out of control into a four night spree of violence, looting and arson as mobs of feral youths ran amok in cities throughout England.
Apologists for the disturbances such as Jody McIntyre were to be heard making ill-judged and self-righteous comparisons with Martin Luther King (“a riot is the language of the unheard”) followed by pious proclamations such as “my solidarity does not lie with the corporations making millions and their fully insured smashed windows, it lies with human beings who lose their lives and families”, fanning the flames of the fires and attempting to give events a political motivation (and here we must take care to distinguish between motivation and context) as around them people lost their homes and livelihoods at the hands of gangs unable, unwilling, or perhaps simply not bothered to take the trouble to make such distinctions.
Let there be no doubt: regardless of any subsequent contextualisation, these events were not about social justice, and nor were they about people with a coherent message protesting or combining together for a just cause. This was something much more serious: what we witnessed was a lawlessness in which many individuals and minority groups took advantage of the impotency of the emergency services for their own selfish ends, indiscriminately ransacking and looting from shops and stores for no greater cause than their own personal gain.
Other naïve comments included those along the lines of “this is what a conservative government looks like”. The conservatives are no saints—in fact quite the contrary—however the buck does not stop with David Cameron and his gang, and it is foolish and dangerous in the extreme to believe that this is the case. What we are seeing is the result of a precarious political vacuum: while the political classes and global elite have been busy occupying themselves playing games of growth and globalisation, closer to home, communities, societies and whole nations have been slowly falling apart at the seams.
Nor is the problem confined to England, the UK or even Europe: at its heart this is about a structural problem with the Western democratic model. There is an astonishing disjunction between the ruled, who lack fundamental powers of political articulation, and the ruling who, so long as this condition persists, will continue to be so far removed from them as to be unable to govern for the common good.
If democracy is broken, which it most clearly is, the challenge facing the current generation, both ruled and ruling, is to fix it and wield it for our own ends, not to break it even further. The latter prospect is frightening: a destructive series of conflicts in which the ever needier poor are increasingly marginalised by an ever greedier global elite. In such a scenario there can and will be no true winners.
These disturbances set a dangerous precedent. They are the first signs that we have reached a point at which the only solution cannot even be to reform, but to reinvent the democratic model in order to create more equitable societies. The responsibility is a tremendous yet necessary one, however it is ultimately something that each and all have an obligation to bear, from the disenfranchised of Tottenham to the privileged elites of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Only by putting class politics aside to rebalance the interests of the rich and the poor and create societies driven by cooperation instead of thinly-veiled self-interest will it be possible to emerge stronger from the turmoil we will live through in the coming years.
The world is changing, perhaps faster than we care to realise or are willing to admit. There are immense challenges to be solved and democracy remains the preferable solution. The time has come for benefactors of the democratic tradition to put their houses in order, or step aside and leave it to emerging global powers such as China to provide new models, risking the loss of rights and freedoms that have taken millennia to achieve as a consequence.
Perhaps a good starting point would be for us to reflect upon Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who partakes in ruling and in being ruled. Should we prove unable to shoulder both these responsibilities, to echo the words from a recent speech given by Gordon Brown, “friends around the world who admire our liberties will now ask what kind of a country we have become”.
They have every right to do so, although perhaps we had better first begin by asking ourselves.
