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vroenis · 4 years

Text

Circa 2009 - 2019

Lede with a picture, righto...

In true style, that’s going to deter the lot, but gotta stay on brand.

To have this discussion, we’re going to need a list. A musical timeline of sorts with the exception of four key events;

2002 Balance 003 (compiled and mixed by Bill Hamel) 2008 Jóhann Jóhannsson, Fordlandia 2009 Telefon Tel Aviv, Immolate Yourself 22nd January - Charles Cooper dies Tosca, No Hassle Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking

2010 Jóhann Jóhannsson, And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees 2011 Bon Iver, self titled 2012 Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man 2013 13th January - Kentucky Route Zero Act I is first released Andrew Bayer, If It Were You, We'd Never Leave Darkside, Psychic The Haxan Cloak, Excavation 2014 Siavash Amini, Til Human Voices Wake Us 2015 Björk, Vulnicura Siavash Amini, Subsiding Jóhann Jóhannsson, Sicario (original soundtrack)

2016 The 1975, I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It 2017 Björk, Utopia Siavash Amini, TAR 2018 9th February - Jóhann Jóhannsson dies 29th June - Bill Hamel dies Andrew Bayer, In My Last Life The 1975, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships Siavash Amini, FORAS Skee Mask, Compro 2019 Siavash Amini, SERUS Apparat, LP5 Telefon Tel Aviv, Dreams Are Not Enough

While I’ve added a precursor of two albums to give context to two of the events that happen in the timeline, it is effectively book-ended by the two most recent albums from Telefon Tel Aviv. These albums form a frame in which so many things have happened - in my life, and seemingly in the lives of others. Some clearly in the events so evident and unavoidable, painfully so and still lingering in the minds and emotions of those they directly affect and us in the periphery who only have the most faintest of contact yet still seem to perceive ourselves significantly touched. By this I mean the death of Charles Cooper - if I feel devastated, having only ever been had an impression of his character via the channel of his art, there isn’t a universe in which I can possibly imagine what Joshua Eustis’ daily experience is, so I can’t and won’t speak to it.

And I guess that’s where the story begins.

In 2009 my best friend who remains so to this day plays me Immolate Yourself for the first time - bearing in mind they and I are slightly different people, probably me more-so than they. Our tastes in music have always been fairly broad. We’ve never been haters of pop-music at all, they’ve always embraced pop more than I but I’ve always appreciated pop. In by brief stint industry-side when I was professionally working, I did form an appreciation for the labour, but in general I still maintain a high appreciation for the craft. In any industry there will always be a valuable critique of culture and bad culture exists everywhere. We must always work to protect the vulnerable at all times, no excuses, and erode imbalances of power.

Back to 2009. The album blows us both away and I’m fairly confident in speaking for us both, changes us forever. We both have immense music libraries having purchased music constantly from young ages, but no matter what we cycle through or have in rotation, Immolate Yourself has always been evergreen. Not to say it’s in daily rotation constantly - it’s not exactly that kind of album. It’s highly emotionally charged and a demanding listen, and sometimes I am listening to it once a day for a given period, but it certainly is highly mood-dependent - more-so than some of the other music in my collection which is completely fine in that not all art has to be hitting at that level.

I remember our conversations about Charles, how shattered we were, our conversations about suicide, mental health - please be aware that at the time, it was rumoured Charles Cooper’s death was due to suicide but later several reports ruled that it wasn’t. That’s that. The purpose of bringing it up is to give context to R and my discussions. Some years prior I had my own mental health diagnosis clarified and had seen some improvements on and off with my personal management, but the rigours of life still presented challenges significant enough to cause extreme frustration, anger and anxiety. I’d say these days, in the year of our Synth Lordz 2020, I’m doing much better and on better medication management and that would still be true.

I don’t go looking for articles or interviews with Joshua Eustis about what his life has been life at all or how things are for him now. I do follow him on twitter and we’ve had a few great, unrelated exchanges. When I bought and had my first listen-through of Dreams Are Not Enough last year, I told him I wanted to delete the rest of my music collection which of-course is hyperbole and he knows that, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere (this almost always means Instagram), I always want to have these extreme responses to art. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but it has to be at regular intervals, even if they’re separated by long periods of time. Art is so important to me. Sometimes I joke - love you don’t have to work to receive, but art takes labour. Maybe I’m not joking (typical artist wank :P )

Apparat (Sascha Ring) was one of those artists I never bought back in 2009 but he was always in the playlists, always at the festivals. Maybe he did remixes? Or his music was being remixed. I dug his stuff, it was pretty cool, but back then he was probably in the periphery for me. He, like many for me, faded into the background. Because I follow Joshua/Telefon on Twitter, I randomly see a retweet or an exchange between him and Apparat, probably about software or plugins etc., and think far-out, Apparat’s still around... and he released an album in March (2019). I’m going to go have a bit of a listen and if it’s good HOLY SHIT...

To help me characterise what I hear when I listen to LP5, I’ve included a very important album from Tosca, interestingly released at the beginning of our bookend; No Hassle. I don’t really know what the zeitgeist is on this album, but my completely uninformed instinct is to say it’s not popular. For me, tho, No Hassle is absolutely divine. It’s an astonishing listen because it’s in some ways *unexciting* - it’s a severely sober listen. There’s next to no energy in it at all, even when Richard and Rupert dare to tilt into a major key, they’re still listlessly meandering along as if they got up too late or are still sitting in an old sofa or are just happy enough to be strolling and the conversation is good enough at a moderate level before we head back down as the sun sets and the night swallows everything up. It’s an album I listen to almost exclusively in the car during night drives, or in either my house or in hotels, airports, any other environment but always when it’s dark. Cheesily I call these works “Midnight Albums”, and I tend to characterise them as serious listening, when I’m feeling meditative, pensive, neutral, dead-sticking, however you may wish to describe the sensation.

LP5 is along very similar veins for me and it strikes me as extremely interesting. Sascha didn’t exactly disappear for 10 years, his wiki page lists two other albums in 2011 and 2013 respectively as well as other collaborations and work, but to me, just the sound of this album strikes me as particularly unique to being distinct from the years gone by. That sounds like a redundant statement - that might be true of everything altho with art I often don’t think that’s the case at all, but when I first heard LP5, I thought Sascha - shit’s happened to you. I don’t know what it is, but then I figure...

Shit’s happened to us all.

Anyone well inducted into the Anjunabeats cult (lol it’s a joke, you can laugh - I’m a fellow cultist) of trance will be familiar with Andrew Bayer. A good thing the Anjuna label seems to be doing and more of of late, is funnelling some of their phat stacks of cash to their talent so they can actually record full albums if they wish, a venture which I’m sure isn’t profitable for them in any way unless they go on tour, contingent of-course on the material being shoppable. I’m sure that makes Spencer Brown a darling - not having a go at him, I love both his albums to death, they’re amazing, but I genuinely don’t think there’s any pressure on the artist to produce tourable music. I feel Andrew has the latitude to do whatever he wants, and he works at the shoppable remixes because it’s fun for him and they have a wonderful community of talent in constant contact with one another so the opportunities are there.

In 2013, Andrew Bayer releases his album which upon hearing I instantly buy. It’s a pretty neat departure from all things trance - it’s beaty, synthy, broken samples and pushing at ambient at times. Then I get to the amazing last track titled “Closing Act”. This is 100% without question inspired by and styled after the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson.

On the 9th of February, 2018, Jóhann Jóhannsson dies.

I’ve just come back from stepping away from this writing for about two hours. I appreciate people interact with art, artists, performers and people of varying level of exposure (read: celebrities) in different ways so let’s just bypass any discussion of how other people behave. It’s fine. As for me, I try to maintain what I believe to be a healthy sense of distance from people of cultural note. They’re still people; human beings, and I don’t know them. Actors and musicians had died before, artists I’d “grown up with”, admired etc., but Jóhann‘s death struck me with force. It still haunts me.

Why?

I don’t know him. I never knew him. For all I know, he may have been an arsehole to everyone around him. I had to and still interrogate my emotional response and I very much do it with the greatest of intent. Is it stupendously capitalist? Am I so entrenched in my lust for his music? His product? That is literally all I can say I know of him; what he produced - what he gave, what he offered. Is it because I want more? No - not really. There are artists still alive who have chosen not to offer more and I have no problem accepting this. There are artists who have more to offer and aren’t able to due to the economics of power and the power of economics and I’m certainly angry about that while they’re alive. I grieved for Jóhann. I was so upset. I shut myself in my studio and cried.

In some way, regardless of not knowing anything at all about the circumstances of his death, I felt that we had all failed.

Knowing even in the smallest element that mental health was a contributing factor to his life and death leads me to make assumptions about the kind of world he may have existed in, what his experience may have been. Regardless of whatever differences there might be between his experiences, now finite, and my own, I still believe there is justification to draw parallels. Not because he’s semi-famous, but because we are both humans, and that it is known he struggled with mental health. It is as much about known, documented and shared stories of services, medications and social experiences as it is about everything that is unspoken that all people with mental health concerns know. We may not know to what degree we might have commonalities, but the one thing we may have in common is that there are so many things we cannot share - speak, or expose, and there are things at times we feel we must not expose in order to survive. It is at this point I must emphasise that health professionals will always dispense such advise as “You’re never alone/you never have to carry burdens alone” etcetera etcetera and I value the intention in such actions. I’m here to appreciate the goodwill behind such advice, but purely by nature of existence, we are each of us alone - this is not an emotional fact, this is simply reality. You cannot inhabit our bodies and minds and live our lives for us - nor can you overcome our physiological concerns internally on our behalf. You can offer us medications but it is still we who have to bear the process of evaluating whether we can endure the experience of synthesising them.

Professionals need to always respect that fact and never forget it.

This is key when I interrogate my emotional response and reaction to Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death. I don’t know what treatments he may have been receiving but I also don’t know what his life experience was, because treatment in and of itself is less than one half of the equation, perhaps not even a third. The total texture of a human’s experience is woven from so many fibres; and one of them is the cultural response of the people surrounding them, from the immediate individuals to generalised language in use within earshot to advertising unwillingly overheard to adopted via accepted use over time to idioms adopted when people have literally no idea what words mean and what they can mean and how they can directly affect others.

Am I blaming this nebulous spectre of Society? Of-course not. Am I wanting to focus a microscope on the microcosm of communities within this idea of Society or induce guilt on individuals? Also no. But there is still a sensation of endemic guilt and carelessness that we do not make better attempts, perhaps not even to approach a comprehensive understanding of mental health, but at least to triage some of the casual damage we do by being completely careless with it with poor cultural practice. It’s such a difficult thing to speak to because the terms are at one moment so specific and yet the next so generalised. What are we to do? How can we improve when it’s no-one’s fault and yet everyone’s fault? How can we be effective if we want to discard useless, terrible and outdated ideas like blame and backwards accountability and yet we haven’t even begun to understand how the shape of our behaviour is having such devastating effects?

The cost is literally human life.

The interrogation goes further. Why only Jóhann? Why don’t I mourn every death? At the risk of diverting to whataboutism, it’s still worth asking, because it’s clear I valued his life because of his art, and it can’t be avoided that I list Bill Hamel for the same reason. Balance 003 is for me the best collection of minimal trance in history and there has never been another since, the genre has evolved and as yet has not been revisited. Bill himself joined with some friends to work on some more upbeat and detailed music but then himself died in June of 2018, but I wasn’t to find out for months and again, was shattered. I didn’t know Bill either but there were more anecdotal accounts of his personality available online, and they certainly were glowing and positive, and that’s how I think of him - fondly, regardless of not knowing him.

Later in 2018 Andrew Bayer released his next album. It’s a collection of vocal pieces, and the final song is titled End Of All Things. Eerily but welcomed, many of its musical stylings begin to resemble Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s, and Alison May lends her voice to lyrics that include the following;

Roll down the aisle You were bold to go first With a fist to the earth

I don’t like to quote a lot of lyrics, and you can look the rest of them up if you want, but if you do, like me, you might interpret the song to be about death. I don’t know if Andrew Bayer wrote this for Jóhann Jóhannsson, or only for him or at all. He probably wrote it for someone else entirely, probably someone he actually personally knew. Maybe he just wrote it about death in general. It doesn’t matter because for me it was the first catalyst in musical form for processing Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death in some dimension. It wouldn’t be until much later, when Justin/Telefon Tel Aviv retweeted Siavash Amini that I’d find art as powerful as Jóhann's and Andrew’s and of-course Justin’s own, but each artist is their own texture and I listen to them all in different ways when in different moods.

2019 - Dreams Are Not Enough

There is so much more writing I can do with this short list of albums. I’m at 2800+ words and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That first, dull image at the top of the piece is the directory structure of my music collection, replicated on the hard-drive that goes into my car and on my personal music player - I don’t use my phone for music. While I do listen to music from every directory over time, of late I’m gravitating more and more to two main folders; Ultimate and Survival, and almost all of the music from the list in this piece comes from those two directories with only one or two exceptions.

I’m a bit miffed I didn’t get to write about The 1975, there’s some great stuff to be said about their work and I’ve written about them before, but I have so much more to say, especially culminating with Love It If We Made It as a generational, cultural proclamation. We’re on the verge of the new album tho (time of writing is 29th February 2020) so who knows, maybe I’ll get the opportunity to be topical with that but knowing me, I’ll still bury it behind a wall of text but that will be for the better, I’m sure.

I need to close on Dreams Are Not Enough, tho, and also Kentucky Route Zero. I think I’ve mentioned it before - completing Kentucky Route Zero was the catalyst for me to start writing again, and it’s there in the timeline that the first act released in January of 2013. Last tumblr entry, I briefly touched on being in a holding pattern until KRZ was completed by its developer, Cardboard Computer, and since completing it, I’ve gone off socials which means I’ve greatly diminished my activity on social media and returned to long-format writing. This entry and the last on tumblr are very much evidence of that. Way back in 2013 when I first completed that first act, Kentucky Route Zero was one of those seminal experiences I felt was made just for me. After years of playing all sorts of traditional video games, I’d grown tired of their play dynamics in many senses. I still liked traditional games, and in some ways still do now, but I will always hunger for boundaries to be pushed, for greater things to be said, for things to be said and done in conjunction and in parallel; in layers and simultaneously; artfully, with complexity and subtlety, or with simplicity but with great humanity and maturity. I remember watching Serial Experiments: Lain, the first episode and feeling like it was made just for me, and then that feeling being amplified a million times over with Haibane Renmei and Texhnolyze. There are reasons these works are so rare and so unpopular. Again - I’ll reaffirm I still love a lot of pop and there’s nothing wrong with generalised and widely celebrated art at all, a lot of it’s cool. But when you find something so unique that speaks so much to your experience in a way that’s powerful to the point of dialect...

That is what Kentucky Route Zero and Porpentine’s Howling Dogs are to me.

That’s what these albums are to me, and Telefon Tel Aviv’s albums somehow have book-ended this period in my life. Each album captures a facet of turbulence, of emotion, probably a little bit of joy, or chaos and a healthy dose of hedonism too, but I have other music for that and I tend not to talk about it much. I’m sure joy and euphoria can be complicated for others and that’s cool, but it’s not something I feel drawn to discuss.

All of this art, this Art Worth Dying For, seems to be the only thing I can engage with at the moment, in the wake of completing Kentucky Route Zero. I have shooty shooty games sitting on the Playstation that I once did really enjoy and probably will again, I don’t know. But right now I can’t bear the thought of booting them up. I think about some of the films I was keen to see some months ago and right now they look like noise, indistinct, boring to the point of textureless, falvourless null-space. I don’t mean to insult these works in any way at all, I’m not trying to diminish their value by saying by comparison to KRZ, they’re bad. Not at all. I don’t seem to be able to process them. The closest thing I can describe is the kind of mood disorders, dysthymia being one of them, doctors used to try and diagnose me with before they knew I was bipolar; a literal chemical barrier that’s preventing me from comprehending and interpreting the data I’m being presented with. I’ve lost hold of the cultural frame I’m supposed to have to understand how to place these objects in reference to my sense of entertainment and engagement.

So instead I come here and talk to myself with barely an objective in mind, other than to perhaps share my thoughts with you. And some music that I’m hoping you’ll buy. I know I’m a pain in the arse for that, and I know buying music is an immensely privileged thing to be able to do - I get it. You don’t have to buy everything right away, but if you want me to make a case for it, let me know and I will, I’ll even make a case for small steps i.e., even when you can’t afford much and how to spend a really tiny amount. Otherwise proceed as normal and click onto the next visual diary, nothing to see here.

#chrono #2020 #music #Jóhann Jóhannsson #Bill Hamel #Telefon Tel Aviv #Apparat #Andrew Bayer #Kentucky Route Zero #mental health #psychiatry #language #art worth living for #art worth dying for #Dreams Are Not Enough #writing about music

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