All Music is a Kind of Time Travel

RIP FREDRIC JAMESON

A long time ago, probably almost exactly ten years ago, now that I think about it, I started doing a PhD. I am being entirely truthful in saying that it didn't even occur to me that the 'Ph' stood for 'philosophy' until a while after I had begun.

I only ever applied to do one in the first place because it came with a scholarship that provided a great monthly stipend for three years, and that seemed like an infinitely better way of paying the bills while keeping enough time free for 65daysofstatic than getting a job.

I didn't get the scholarship, so I gave up on that idea and moved on with my life. Luckily, that same summer 65days got the gig for doing the No Man's Sky soundtrack. Then September 2014 rolled around and I got an automated email from The University of Huddersfield with a welcome pack, saying that they were looking forward to seeing me next week. I thought it was sent in error so got in touch to ask them to remove me from whatever database they'd put me on, only to discover that I was indeed due to start studying a PhD there the following week. I hadn't gotten the scholarship, but a professor at the uni had seen my proposal and decided it was interesting enough to enroll me as a non-scholarship student, so he did. And nobody thought to tell me.

A lot of emails and a couple of meetings later, I decided that if I could scrape together at least one year's worth of fees, it would give me a year's access to some really great recording studios and synths and that way even if the PhD turned out to be a mistake, it would be pretty good value for money.

The thought that I would be embarking on some grand philosophical adventure didn't even occur to me. I just wanted some quality time with that gorgeous EMS VCS 3 Synth they had sat in one their studios.

I quickly realised that I had zero interest in reading anything about music theory. I'm not classically trained, had given up on all that after grade 1 piano. But I realised that I had to read something, and that it should probably be something 'clever'. How exactly I came to Fredric Jameson as a comically hard-to-read jump-off point I can't remember for sure, but it was presumably because of his many namechecks in Mark Fisher's books.

I spent literal weeks painfully reading two Jameson essays: The End of Temporality and The Aesthetics of Singularity

and together they blew my tiny mind into a million pieces. Here is a quote from the latter that gives you an idea of his style:

I have been arguing that at the very heart of any account of postmodernity or late capitalism, there is to be found the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present—reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere—an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like.

It's juicy stuff!

After digesting these first morsels of Jameson's ideas, I launched myself into the writing of my first essay, a 7000 word juggarnaut of confusion called All Music is a Kind of Time Travel, which was trying to grasp at the glimmer of an idea that, I'll be honest, still eludes even now, but has to some degree shaped all the music I have made over the last decade.

Yesterday I heard that Fredric Jameson died at 90 years old. I have no formal training in how to parse this kind of philosophy, so his work for me has always been very difficult to read, but so immensely rewarding whenever I make the effort to. Although I have finished various essays and chapters, I am pretty sure I haven't managed to make it through a full book from beginning to end. In the summer, I decided to try and I have so far battled my way half way through Archeologies of the Future. It's been gathering dust now for several weeks, my brain feeling heavy whenever I see it lying there, but perhaps this sad news will be the push I need to take on the rest of it. So farewell, Jameson. I barely scratched the surface of your body of work but it changed the way I think forever. Thanks!

THE AUTUMN FLEX

When I kicked off The KNRU back in the spring, I had a stack of things I wanted to write and had planned about 3/4 months worth of weekly posts ahead of launch.

In the last couple of weeks there has been a bit of a spike in new subscribers that have headed this way thanks to the recently re-launched 65 Propaganda Network. (Hi! Thanks for joining.) If you are new here and fancy some more, er, focussed posts from that initial burst of organisation, here's a few older ones that set the tone:

• Releasing (myself from) Music - music as ballast?
• Dialectics, baby! - made an endless music machine then used it as an excuse to quote some Engels
• The Saturn Tape - the story of making one song in particular
• THE MUSIC ABOLITIONIST PROVOCATION - how A.I. is gonna ruin music and what to do about it

Once that initial pile of ideas got whittled down, The KNRU went into slow-motion summer mode, which was fine. In fact, that was a deliberate effort to practice, er, not making music for a bit. Because I love making music and it's the thing I am best at, but undoubtedly it is also an escape, a hiding place, and sometimes I need to remember to leave space in which to live some life so I keep having things to make music about.

As it turns out, summer is a good time to try to spend less time in front of a computer. Who knew! I have barely made any music since June. More or less. Ok maybe just a little bit. But it's not finished so it doesn't count.

Now it is autumn. Here at Studio Komoy, with the sun long gone and the rain tapping out morse code on the windows, noise-making begins in earnest. Fortunately for me but unfortunately for The KNRU, this will mostly take the form of a project that I have just started work on that I am not allowed to talk about. Presumably (hopefully!) this will change somewhere further down the line, but for now it's all wrapped up in a big old non-disclosure agreement.

And so what now for The KNRU? It isn't exactly that I will have no time to write here, but rather it remains to be seen how much the big project soaks up all my energy for making and thinking about music. Will it leave enough for the kinds of weird musical experiments I would tend to write about here? Might it actually need a counterweight? Somewhere for me to sink all the musical ideas that the big project doesn't have any need for, so I can get them out of my head? Who knows! Time will tell.

I'll figure it out. But comments about the direction or possible content for The KNRU remain welcome. In fact, a recent thing I saw on a different blog (can't remember where now) that I thought might be nice is that it highlighted comments from previous posts in future posts and responded to them. Just a neat way of having some little low stakes, asynchronous conversation. So any thoughts or requests then go wild! Just please don't ask me to go too hard on 65days nostalgia trips.

That's it for now. See you next time.