Writing about music: "I went to heaven and it was the scariest thing in the world"
On work by DJ K, DBX, nondi_, Kevin Gates, and Michael Fried.
I’m not sure how many of my subscribers know this, but for a number of years I was an active freelance music writer for the FADER, VICE, and other similar publications. This was a while back. I never stopped writing about music but recently I’ve wanted to do more of it. This may be the first post in a series.
Kevin Gates claims that he has been to heaven, “or what people call heaven.” His interviewer, Hot 97’s TT Torrez, asks what it was like. Without missing a beat, Gates says, “the scariest thing in the world.”
Scary Heaven is a great example of the kind of umwelt that can reliably be found in music if you know how to look. (I believe Gates, for what it’s worth. In another interview he says he found himself there after consuming nothing but water for 42 days.)
Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” draws a distinction between art that facilitates the experience of durational change, and art that draws the viewer into sync with the unrelenting presence of total conviction. What he calls “literalist” or “theatrical” work foregrounds the passing of time, while modernist painting and sculpture exemplifies the transformative encounter with raw instantaneousness. Rejecting the interminable variation of embodied temporal experience, Fried celebrates an idealization of the eternal instant. He yearns to transcend the limits of human perception: “If only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.”
It is worth noting that Fried’s notion of sublime presence supervenes upon two slightly strange conditions which he fails to mention. Absolute conviction requires either the totalization or the eradication of doubt. Either way, this hypothetical state demands bulletproof insulation from all flows of new information. Stopping time to experience eternity: Fried craves a sacred form of entropy. “What people call heaven,” in other words.
It has been a few years since I followed Brazilian funk with any regularity. The last time I did, the sound was becoming meaner and more distorted. Heliópolis, Brazil’s DJ K locates an extreme in this possibility space with his new album PANICO NO SUBMUNDO, released by Nyege Nyege Tapes. The record’s title translates to “panic in the underworld"; the music communicates something brutal, tapping pressure gradients by means of experimental chakra pulverization techniques. It’s an enervating series of subcutaneous shocks, exerting pressure by cutting back and forth between Fried’s categories. As soon as the proceedings coalesce into a continuous pattern, some sharp rip in the fabric derails its durational consistency, leaving the listener deserted in the discomfiting here and now. Repetition and variation recursively interrupt one another; over the course of the record the shifts between continuous motion and fixed presence form a rhythm of rhythms. As this larger system-rhythm gathers itself, “music” is progressively mishandled by “sound,” harassed by illiberally-mixed non-diegetic samples and punishingly over-compressed distortion artifacts. Music and sound are in a fight: scary heaven.
Music and sound are not in a fight on DBX’s speed garage / bassline tunes. “2 People” (above) and “Join Hands” are bracing and beautiful. They channel a direct sense of continuity and endlessness, sublime glimpses of something meant to feel like everything. An evocation of some elemental, pre-subjective force, taunting from the Outside. Peak low-interest rate music.
Recently Turtle Kiosk was kind enough to drive us to a remote location. We listened to lots of music. He didn’t want to listen the Lex Fridman interview with Sam Altman for some reason, suggesting that we listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska instead. He pointed at the sky and said that atmosphere is pressure, space between words or sounds is pressure. Good poetry, or a kind of good poetry, makes use of that pressure. Asked if that was actually scientifically accurate, he said no, probably not.
Not dissimilarly to DJ K, Pennsylvanian artist nondi_ splices together captivating sequences of fixity and change on her EP rejection_nondi and album shadow. The interplay between tension and release is accelerated to nightcore velocity, but its movements struggle against internal tensions. Something drags in the opposite direction, deploying speedbumps in the form of gravitational voids, snagging momentum and adding complexity. Continuous duration is destabilized by the pressure of the irruptive, captivating instant; the rhythm between the two poles instantiates an antiphonic, call-and-response pattern. It is in the interplay between the various levels of these nested relationships that the music’s most compelling affordances emerge. “Mech” appears in many of the track titles, suggesting tactical research and development, technical hijacking of the hominid corpus. The stopping and starting of stopping and starting.