That Night in Hawaii When I Turned into a Panther…
Music is just music but not even that. - Mark Fisher
The penis is an extension, it reaches out, it explores.1 I do not have a penis, so I do not reach out, or explore. Instead, I listen to Radio 4.
Capitalism has permeated our sense of reality in that we cannot imagine one without it, remonstrates the late Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism (2009)2, a term he did not coin, but which he contends with in a self-professed “exorbitant” manner, as being “…like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, …acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. If capitalist realism is so seamless and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from?” (cited in De Selby, 2017).3 Even to ask if we have ‘free will’ is to be caught up in the ideology of asking.
Three voices:
“You’re a singer, not a writer.” - A friend
“You need to get rooted, you’re all fragments, but you have so much potential, you know what I think anyway, you’re a prophet.” - Fellow PGR/collaborator
“It’s a living archive, you’re wrangling, with it, with your life… It feels right…I think this is how you were always going to do it.” - My supervisor
Music is just music but not even that
In his paper “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1995) Jacques Derrida refutes the Western preoccupation with starts, beginnings and origins via his searing critique of technologies of inscription and psychic processes, in particularly email, which he argues have irrevocably altered public and private space.
Derrida draws upon Freud’s concept of Thanatos, the death drive, in terms of ‘repetition-compulsion’, or herein, ‘fever’, which he claims functions in and through the archive as it does in psychoanalysis: a returning force to beginning.
For Derrida, then, the archive is both a public and private repository, and a zone for more intimate disclosure, which is not time-bound, but future-oriented.
In this vein, Mark Fisher’s posthumous blogging alias k-punk (2003-2013)4, which he reiterated in interviews was the sole reason that anything else ever happened to him (in terms of career trajectory), citing that neither an academic press or middlebrow journalism would have touched it, not only enabled him to write about music, but was also a means of “existing in public space”.
This latter point he was keen to stress in conversation with Green Gartside on politics and music at the 2011 edition of Off the Page festival, interjecting, in somewhat cryptic terms, that: “...music is just music but not even that” (de Selby, 2018: 00:15:19). By which he means that music is never just music.
Likewise, on calling this newsletter Blackout Baby: “Night Drives on Music & More”, sensing that I wanted to write about music and write up my PhD in a living, breathing, even sensual way, (if that was at all possible, or could be done within the institution), but also to write about whatever I wanted to write about at the time, I was conveying something of this property.
Furthermore, there is enough to be said in the impulse to write, which is “…is essentially a visceral gesture […] an intransitive activity, a variation on breathing, an end in itself; it is an affective and geometrically rigorous mode of inscription into life. If we had nothing left to say, some of us would just copy down random list of words, road signs, cafeteria menus and even the old-fashioned phone book.” (Braidotti, 2014: 163-164).
On wrangling
This PhD has been a case of wrangling, with it, life, myself. As David Grubbs puts it in his introduction to Records Ruin the Landscape (2014) though, albums are “a general confrontation with the world”5 and we have all been dealing with much else. Besides, ‘explaining’ the work is not the point of a commentary I do not think, but more to establish critical junctures between the music and socio-political, aesthetic, or cultural concerns which might counter the post-Romantic and subsequently apolitical Western musicological focus on formalism, not to be sullied by real-world concerns, in which music “has no other content than music itself” (McClary 1994: xi).
Adorno’s intellectual escapades in the avant-garde, and his ensuing denouncement of the ‘culture industry’ of course, paved the way for musical sociological analysis, and subsequently, the likes of Fisher, who maintained his aim was to fuse high-theory with popular culture. This echoes the viewpoint of Terry Eagleton in his hyper current lecture “Where does culture come from?” (2024) published in The London Review of Books in that: “The aesthetic I think only ever becomes important when it speaks to more than itself”.
My PhD - proposed as ‘wild research’ (I will say more on this at the end of the post) - incorporates the core album/artefact, the 34 track three hour digital album Space Junk (2023), 96-pages of digital liner notes, the EP Blackout Baby (2023) and its one-cut vinyl (2024), live, and durational performance, and audio-visual works.
Alongside the portfolio, run these posts, forming a creative/critical commentary and an interdisciplinary intervention which is also an extension of practice. Accompanying this will be a formal ‘bookmarking’ document, to orientate the examiner, and references. There’s an element of risk involved, naturally, but it is vital to honour the process, and how the work, and the retrospective analysis, has emerged as a ‘living archive’. Blackout Baby is a comparable alias to k-punk and a way of exposing the practice and existing in public space, no matter the limited audience. Furthermore, it became apparent, into thesis-pending, that I could not take what I have written since November, and strait-jacket it into a more conventional form. How it is presented is the only way the work could have been presented.
On TLC
Records embalms a moment in time and immortalise it. As objects, of course, they are fragile, despite being made of plastic, and bad for the environment unless more eco-friendly materials are used. We handle them like we might cash, with some regard. They are historical in their presence. They come in inner sleeves which denote their fragile status via lettering and instructions to that effect. A stray needle can cause damage. They are prone to scratches and scuffle, and can be cleaned with velvet.
The act of putting a record on is a pleasurable ritual. They are relatively heavy, too, mine for Blackout Baby is heavyweight, which felt right in juxtaposition to the lightness of the paper sleeve, whereas digital albums zig zag about in the ether, and are weightless. In the event that they are neither streamed, nor downloaded, these tracks sit on huge servers in warehouses, which are pumping electric 24.7, surrounded by fans. Some are never played.
On receiving the one-cut vinyl for Blackout Baby which I explore symbolically in my performance video essay - The Path of Totality - and effectively completing the practical elements of the project, I reworked the ‘end of spontaneity’ as Cage would call it, by discarding the sub-par gatefold and re-dressing it in a rare black sleeve, with a set of mono photos encased in the inner sleeve. This felt more in keeping with the uniqueness of it, or in Benjaminian terms, its ‘aura’.
I enjoyed this process of ‘tossing’ the gatefold, and leaving the heavyweight vinyl to do the talking. With the gatefold went the printed lyrics, which had been a trial anyhow due to the frequent shift in tenses which occur when doing spontaneous song and inhabiting non-linear temporalities, which do not lend themselves to grammar. There felt no need to print the lyrics. All the longing was contained within the music. That was where the lyrics had emerged, and it was where they should perhaps remain.
‘In here’ and ‘out there’
Fisher’s archive was not just writing on music, but a way of occupying public space, then, which he expressed as a common need born out by the popularity of the likes of ‘X-Factor’ and reality TV shows such as Love Island, yet, he pointed out, under neoliberalism: “…instead of competing for public time and space everyone has retreated into private space, psychic privatisation” (de Selby, 2017: 00:17:00). Apropos such privatisation, the metaverse has possibly already morphed into the ‘mesaverse’ (a going within), or post-individualism.
In to The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (2024), published by The Dark Forest Collective, the post-individual is one who seeks and explores new identities online.6 On the virtual dust-jacket Wired reviewed the book, thus:
The disintegration of the Big Tech-dominated 2010s internet is creating a more balkanized social web experience... where people turn away from big, open mega-platforms in favor of more private or niche digital spaces, from non-public Slack channels to invite-only WeChat groups or special-interest podcasts. — Wired7
Such ontology resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s ‘nomadic subject’ (after Deleuze) which she acknowledges are “split, knotted and complex”8. What is more interesting though is the inversion of ‘IRL’ and the virtual. The co-authors contend that:
…the internet is real life. What we do “in here” matters just as much as — and for some of us, problematically, even more than — what happens “out there.”
What happens in here is real life. Our experiences online are adding up to something bigger than any of us. It’s so early in this geological-like process it’s hard to tell where it’s going, but the changes aren’t going to stop. What lays ahead is a future defined by the web.
Surveys across the generations asked the sample when they ‘most feel themselves’. Gen Z’s results tipped the halfway point, with more respondents reporting online than offline, whereas, Baby Boomers swung the other way.
The side-effects of Gen Z feeling more ‘themselves’ online though is being born out in the quite significant reduction of young men having sex, either in or out of relationships, or who even express a desire for a relationship; negative birth rates worldwide; and reduction in alcohol intake (which for Gen X was essentially how we got into relationships in the first place). They also seem reluctant to answer the phone, which is far too immediate. Apparently, even Tinder placed an advert the other day advising its users to go out and bump into someone IRL.
DIT = DIY + Together
DIY as a concept is crucial to society and culture in an era of troubled institutions, but the conditions of DIY, being autonomous and self-reliant, it disregard class. Fisher, for example, cited Public Service Broadcasting and NME as having introduced him to Baudrillard and Derrida, not the public school system. Nobody can DIY forever though, and who would want to? A more recent or realistic acronym is, of course, DIT = DIY + Together—a natural extension, a reaching out.
Is DIY a compromise of ambition though? According to Fisher, yes. As he illustrates, both Mark Stewart of the Pop Group, and Joy Division wanted to be The Beatles, What Fisher cites as a “lowering of ambitions” can seem part and parcel of DIY, in that, as he puts it, mimicking conversations with bands, “we’ll just release stuff, to our like minds, because we don’t think we can take on mainstream culture, so we’ve retreated from the battlefield” (de Selby, 2017).
The same could be said of the Glaswegian band The Blue Nile who never made the ‘big time’, but nevertheless have a niche and loyal following, beyond Scotland. Besides, they may just have been given a big cash injection via the likes of no less than Taylor Swift, citing them as an influence in the promotional literature around her newly released album The Tortured Poet’s Department (April 19, 2024), causing her fans to ask who they are. The south London pub The Black Dog is also getting a look in.
Swift’s album, as with her others, focuses on her ill-fated romances, and has her following up its release only one day later with The Tortured Poet’s Department Anthology. Having released a messy and unguarded album with mixed reviews she has already toppled Spotify’s record for streaming on a single day, and dwarved Beyoncés sales and streams for Cowboy Carter (2023) (the visualiser to “Texas Hold 'Em” which is quite something causing video producers to joke that they need such briefs). As Swift single-handedly owns the music industry, however, she can do whatever she likes. Perhaps more interesting than either of these events though is that Beyoncé Fans Can't Believe She Took Public Transit in a Sheer Lace Bodysuit.
Our alts, souls, and selves
“…what’s inside – our minds, our souls, our many selves – to interact with the insides of others. The internet is where our alts come alive, out internal monologues become dialogues...” (Strickland, 2024. para. 9)9.
I found that when composing Space Junk (2023) such virtual themes and pre-occupations were embodied in the song lyrics and titles: “Girl Online”, “Stars (Disappearing Messages)”, “One Tick Man”, “Influencer”, “Pneuma/Non-Commodity”, “Cloud Throne”, “Spreadsheets”, and “A Herd of Buffalo Run Across the 60-Inch Flat Screen TV” and “Dead White Men Working on Overtime”. I am a bit of a title obsessive, and so I went to town on this, executing a similar kind of frivolousness as rapper, turned spiritual, André 3000’s brilliant and other-wordly 87-minute debut album, New Blue Sun (2023)10, and its excessive titles, produced by ‘guru’ Carlos Niño, entirely instrumental, and improvised, steered by his flute, it is somehow in excess, yet minimalist. A title can set you on a whole new trajectory, and then there are the titles for albums not yet, or never to be made.
That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther… (and being ‘antennas’)
Indeed, the title of this article is borrowed from one of his tracks on New Blue Sun function like impromptu speech acts, some examples being, “I Really Wanted To Make A "Rap" Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me”;
“That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control ... Sh¥t Was Wild”; “But this is the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time”; and “Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens”.
On being ‘antennas’, he remarks:
As an artist, you got to have really strong antennas. And that's really what it's about. So where I am now is where I'm supposed to be. I couldn't plan it. And here's the cool thing. Yes, we can plan it, our limited human brains can plan it. But it's always greater and more magical when you're surprised by these things... I've seen artists transcend themselves and I get emotional about it.
When I see rappers go to a certain level, I'm sure they didn't know. Because I didn't know. So I know they ain't know. But that's the magic. So y'all just looking at the magic show, and it's nothing special. I'm not special. Everybody has a certain kind of magic show. (2023: para. 47).
Scenario:
When illustrating his divided-brain hypothesis, the psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, refers to observations on brain-damaged patients to highlight the difference between the type of right-brained thinking that is open to being a receptacle, and the left-brained hemisphere which is not.
McGilchrist relays how right-hemisphere brain-damaged patients will reach out with their hand in a grasping manner, as if trying to grab, and control something. Conversely, when the left-hemisphere is reined in, they reach out in an altogether different way. Their hand does not grasp, or grab, instead it explores. It does not want to control.
These type of observations echo Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, overriding Descartes’ cartesian duality, in that the mind could not extend beyond the body. The body, to Spinoza, is not a machine, nor McGilchrist.
In terms of the contemporary peripatetic DIY artist, André 3000 then, is a unique case in point; hanging out in Venice, with his flute, playing on street corners, much to the pleasure of would-be-influencers, but to the chagrin of his fans who just want another rap album. His first album in 17 years, 'New Blue Sun,' seems to find him undergoing a spiritual undoing of sorts. On first impressions, the ecstatic music of Alice Coltrane springs to mind, with her transcendental jazz, devotional recordings, and earlier albums, Journey in Satchidananda (1971) and Eternity (1976) with her beatific harp, (which I learned recently she learned how to play as an act of love for John Coltrane who had ordered it in, and been waiting for months for it to arrive, hoping it would help him re-ignite his approach to harmony and texture—yet it arrived after he died); and with his similarly peripatetic performances, Moondog, the ultimate God of DIY.
When watching André 3000 and his band perform “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control ... Sh*t Was Wild” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from January 24, 2024, the slow-build, as if the music was seeping in, or stirring, purring, under blue lighting, with revelatory yet minimalist tones, put me in mind of the Irish folk band, Lankum’s set at the 2023 Mercury Prize - “Go Dig My Grave”.11
Radie Peat’s ever so slightly strained vocal was utterly arresting on set. She is simply incomparable in the contemporary alt folk scene for conjuring dark winter nights and fires. At 03:06 minutes in though, when the bass drum kicked in, it was like being catapulted in time, even from the safety of my bed, simply spell-binding.
And, as with the crowd watching André 3000, when he winds it up at 9:05 minutes in, and just stands there, the crowd don’t quite know when to clap, they know they have just witnessed something, but are not quite sure what. For music is just music, but not even that.
What are our practices of refusal?
Back tracking to last December, I had 20, 000 words of a linear, scholarly commentary to write, but that did not happen, as explained. What did happen was that I wrote another post, and then another. And I wrote these posts in an analogous way to how I write songs. My titles changed. I had an indicative contents page, and incremental structure, but it grew convoluted, and felt strait-jacketed.
My style is oblique, and storied. Nor do I properly let the reader in, nor may they want me to come in. In turn, these posts are too ‘academic’ for the platform, but unsuitable for peer-review. I am writing in-between spaces, in-between genres, in-between selves. I am also inconsistent - one moment I might be citing the commodification of private space, and the next, over sharing, through my (very human) impulse to share, despite the fact that I am still mostly writing and singing to myself.
Wrangling with such tensions, and thus the PhD was what inspired the first post: “What We Talk About When We Talk To Ourselves”. This is autotelic. We do it anyway.
Moreover, my “content” is exposing, and likely embarrassing, but what of writing that is never embarrassing? Is it really writing, or more blindness, a lack of an inner compass, or worse, an insipid form of self-censorship?
As with the practice, there is the sense of getting lost in the material in order to emerge through it. Emergence being key. An editor who once rejected a piece I wrote, reasoned: “You didn’t return to where you started.”
Well, no, neither did Montaigne.
Terra incognita
The American painter, John Baldessari, being interviewed on the studio as terra incognita, (which applies just as well to any kind of studio, or writer’s office) holds that: “[…] to do art one must choose self-imposed exile” (cited in Hoffman and Kennedy, 2006: 51).12
Such exile, or retreat, would seem to be essential in bringing forth the work. Had I not made Space Junk alone, via intense sessions of solo composition, and subsequently opted to do the mixing myself, learning Logic ‘on the fly’, it would have been an entirely different sonic proposition.
Comparatively, in “The Studio as a Compositional Tool” (2017, cited in Cox and Warner, 2017: 185-188)13 the ambient pioneer and avant-garde musician, Brian Eno, conveys how he does not know what he is about to do, before he does it, and how he similarly enjoys being in that head space, in which the studio is our playground.
Many things get tossed about in these metaphorical playgrounds though. In Feminine Endings, Music, Gender and Sexuality (1991)14, for example, the feminist musicologist, Susan McClary, implies that music is intimately tied to the patterning of forms which represent sexuality. She writes:
It is often received (and not only by the musically untutored) as a mysterious medium within which we seem to encounter our "own" most private feelings. (1991: 53).15
Perhaps such encounters occur through ‘sublimation’. Freud held that unsatisfied impulses and unconscious desires are re-worked into acceptable forms (Freud 1991a; 1991b).16 Such channelling patterns as I have experienced on recording in the vocal booth were similarly uncovered in Middleton’s (2006) attempt to get to grips with the signature style of the poet and punk priestess, Patti Smith; concluding that her song structures - coming in waves - represent the female orgasm.17
Dream Catcher
I recently had an abstract accepted for KISMIF18 2024. This is good for two reasons. 1) I get to go back to Porto. 2) I get some sun. A third reason, though, would be ‘networking’, a word that doesn’t easily fall out of my mouth, but which will be useful, or we could just rephrase it as getting to know people with similar interests.
During my performance paper, I’ll be projecting an audio-visual backdrop of footage from when I released this track over The Atlantic Ocean, whilst walking The Portuguese Way, last October, which was both a piece of durational/endurance art, and an unconventional method of releasing an album effectively by Bluetooth over The Atlantic Ocean. Again, I had the idea.
This stunt, of sorts, created much interest en route, and negated the likelihood of it sinking on release on DSPs. I then repeated this exercise using the same methods and portable gear in various other locations en route, recording myself with my second iPhone.
“Dream Catcher” - track three on the opening piece, Fire Pouring, on Space Junk (2023) - is an experimental composition built up in Logic using Native American drum and chant samples sourced off freesound.org (CC0 License)—a sound library of open-source and non-hierarchical gift exchange.
The full-length version ran on at over 12 minutes, exceeding the 100 MB upload limit even at a lower resolution of 16bit, on Level Music, so it had to be ‘cut off’ at 99 MB, and due to streaming specifications, I now have two versions, the full-length “Dream Catcher” which is only available on Bandcamp, and the cut version.
I moulded my voice around the stems, softening the chanting, and weaving the spoken word in and out, rendering it ambiguous, as it went on, and working with vocalisation in real-time composition, echoing how an artist such as Pamela Z might work in practice.
The idea for the track came from scanning my institutional spam inbox for an email that was not there. I then noticed the amount of repeat emails from the same junk senders, and later on, began to voice them aloud. I then recorded a voice note, reading aloud form the sender names, and leaving some out, alongside the subject headings, perusing, without necessarily opening the emails up. “Dream Catcher” was actually the name of one of the senders. It rang true with the Native American theme, and so became the title.
The rest of the spoken word content compromises LV bags, alerts to crypto currency which will make you rich, ponzi schemes, threats “bearing in mind the nature of your content”, and various illicit provocations.
The word ‘spontaneous’ came up in one subject heading, in which the sender was looking for a “spontaneous woman who likes to act over talking”. Another read, “Do you have any naughty fantasies you’d like to try out? If so, how about we try them out together?” These solicitations and cheap, erotic vignettes leant the track, and as a consequence, the entire album, an ‘E’ rating on DSPs, but not on Bandcamp where there is more freedom. The track has resonances with avant-garde singer-songwriter, Laurie Anderson’s outputs, and in terms of scale, and hybrid form, there are also comparisons between Space Junk and Anderson’s five record, theatrical magnum opus, United States Live (1983).
‘Wild Research’
I wanted to end on this free one-day symposium organised by UoG, GSA, and The Revelator, and the Journal of New Media and Education, which seeks to open a conversation on how academics and artists might reject the straitjackets increasingly imposed on their way of working through theorising what is termed ‘Wild Research’. 19
The CfP states:
In recent years, academics have faced increased demands for their work to be measurably useful, for society, and for the university itself. The image of the solitary scholar burrowing away on their own idiosyncratic concerns has been replaced by that of the pragmatic scholar, working tirelessly to produce outputs which can be measured by their income-generating capacity through scoring well in research assessment exercises, or through identifiable social engagement. This process has been accompanied by a move to further regulate academic research, in form and in content, by an encouragement to work with favoured institutions, or on state-supported research priorities, which increasingly focus on industry and have short-term goals hard-wired into them.
At the same time, art schools, institutions which were developed to train artists, have been increasingly professionalised, forced to operate within the metricised logics of the neoliberal university, and artists increasingly work in conditions marked by significant budgetary cuts and limited curatorial horizons.
This symposium seeks to explore how academics and artists might negotiate these dominant but limited methods of working, methods which close down, rather than open up, possibilities for the production of new knowledge in its broadest sense, by demanding a right to be wild.
The ‘wild’ in this ‘wild research’ can accommodate multiple, perhaps contradictory, perspectives and practices but could include
Research which is unfunded
Research which deliberately operates outwith of the regulatory frameworks of higher education and/or cultural/industrial sectors
Research which knows not what it is doing
Research which seeks to decolonise the academy in form
Research which is interdisciplinary
Research which demands the right to opacity
Research which rejects the Scramble for Impact
Research which refuses to worship at the high altar of the written word
Research which moves to its own beat
Research which is confident of its own interior logic
Research which theorises how we might understand ‘wild’ or ‘wildness’
We are keen to disturb the binary between academic and artistic research; as such we invite academics and artists to submit proposals for short papers, presentations, practices, performances, exhibitions, workshops, panels, both conventional and unconventional, which respond to the symposium’s themes. While the journal has a focus on media practice, we welcome proposals across artistic research in all its wild and varied forms.
News
I’m next performing at The Glad Cafe, w/ GIOdynamics, 24 April, 7:30 p.m. - close. Electric guitar improvisation with harmonica.
25 April, 2024 - 6 p.m. Crit. group sharing/screening at Adriana’s, Romanian vodka included.
Some background on “Crit. Group”
Back in 2019-20, Adriana Minu - a SAGSA funded PhD’er in Music at UoG/RCS, initiated a regular gathering at her place for fellow practice-based PGRs across the School of Culture and Creative Arts.
This grassroots collective then met fortnightly to share work in progress, common issues, and drinks. We then rotated the venue around each other’s flats. During Covid-19, though, we had no choice but to postpone the group, and people’s situations then changed.
Joe White, myself, and another PGR from Creative Writing, the novelist/improviser, Rebecca McKenzie, came on board for an offshoot of our initial group - the Wall of Death collective.
WoD then gained three funding rounds for community building - which we used to put on two events at The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow, the second of which involved us ending with the incendiary cover and unique arrangement of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” performed by myself on lead and backing vocals, Simone Seales on cello, Tom W. Green on keys, Joe White on drums, Robert Turner on lead guitar, and filmmaker Simone Smith as our live VJ. Smith’s projections were then used as cut-outs for the footage in order for our cameraman, Hendo Film, to work with. The resulting documentation of this last set, is thus a hybrid piece, neither straight documentation of the night, nor music video, functioning in an in-between space.
We then brought on guest musicians for the second event, in February, 2023, which featured the live audiovisual extravaganza “Saloon” by Smith and myself. Screenshots from the highlights footage of this wild night are filtered through this post and the documentation was published on Vimeo and YouTube.
WoD were then subsequently awarded the inaugural “Thinking Culture” award from UoG to put on several events outwith the university.
The original Crit. Group were Iain Harvie (of Del Amitri), Paul Michael Henry, myself, Adriana, Simon Whitehead, Tim Cooper, Tim Murray-Brown, Jordan Henderson, and Joe White, with sincere thanks.
Paglia, C. 1990, Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Yale University Press, New Haven. Here, I paraphrase Paglia’s assertion that: “The penis is like eye or hand, an extension of self reaching outward. But a girl is a sealed vessel that must be broken into by force.” (p. 23) These ideas of motioning outward, and transmuting isolation, alienation, and atomisation into power were embodied through the durational, performance art piece, the audiovisual documentation of Dream Catcher, and the Space Junk Album Launch which entailed me walking 300 km from Porto to Santiago de Compostela with an amp on my back, releasing the album via guerrilla performance by The Atlantic Ocean and in the Spanish mountains, as I went.
Fisher, M. 2009, Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? O Books, Ropley, Hants.
The subheading of this article comes from Fisher in conversation with Green Gartside on politics and music at the 2011 Off the Page festival: “...music is just music but not even that” (de Selby, 2017a: 00:15:19-00:15:24).
Green Gartside and Mark Fisher on politics and music (2017) YouTube video, added by De Selby [Online]. Available at: https: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6o7KyxcsPo. [Accessed 20 March, 2024].
Derrida, J. & Prenowitz, E. 1995, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression", Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 9-63.
DIY Conference - Mark Fisher (2017) YouTube video, added by De Selby [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJlhwNMuo6E. [Accessed 20 December, 2021].
Fisher, M., Ambrose, D. & Reynolds, S. 2018, K-punk: the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), Repeater, London.
k-punk. Available at: <k-punk.abstractdynamic.org>. Accessed 20 August, 2021.
Grubbs, D. 2014, Records ruin the landscape: John Cage, the sixties, and sound recording, Duke University Press, Durham.
The Dark Forest Collective (2024), The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet. Available at: <https://darkforest.metalabel.com/>. Accessed 21 April, 2024.
The Wired, cited in 9.
Braidotti, R. 2011, Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory, Second edn, Columbia University Press, New York.
Stricker, Y. (2023). “The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual”. Available at: https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-and-the-post-individual.com. [Accessed 21 April 2024].
Carmichael, R. (2023). “André 3000's first album in 17 years, 'New Blue Sun'", NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/14/1212661071/andre-3000-album. [Accessed 12 February 2024].
André 3000 (2023) New Blue Sun. Epic Records: U.S.
Lankum - Go Dig My Grave (Mercury Music Prize) (2023), YouTube video, added by BBC Music [Online]. Available at: Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwVdcBXgnUU. [Accessed 7 September, 2023].
Hoffman, J. and Kennedy, C. (The Studio, Dublin: Hugh Lane Gallery, 2006: 51).
Eno, B. (2017) “The studio as compositional tool.” pp. 185-188. In Cox, C. & Warner, D. (2017) Audio culture: readings in modern music, Revis edn. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
McClary, S. & American Council of Learned Societies 2002, Feminine endings: music, gender, and sexuality, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Mcclary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings : Music, Gender, and Sexuality, University of Minnesota Press, p. 8.
Freud, S. (1991a) ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),’ in A. Richards (Ed) On Metapsychology: Penguin Freud Library, Vol 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1991b) ‘Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907),’ in A. Dickson (Ed) Art and Literature: Penguin Freud Library, Vol 14. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Middleton, R. (2006) Voicing the popular: on the subjects of popular music, Routledge, New York, NY. Middleton analysed Smith’s landmark debut studio album Horses (1975). (The horse as a symbol being associated with the male libido, a point drawn upon here by Paglia when relaying Sexual Personae.)
KISMIF Conference 2024. Available at: kismifconference.com. [Accessed 20 March, 2024].
Talbot, S. (2024, September, 13-14) Vehicles for Abandon: On Strange, Pointless, Intensely Libidinal Things [audio/performance presentation], Wild Research, The Revelator, Barclay Curle, Glasgow.