First of all, finally finished “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera and it was the best book I’ve read in years. On to the music.
Starting with Eastern-sounding grooves that I’m betting will make your hips move.
This one is instrumental and lacking the deep vocals of other songs, but the energetic drums, sax and violin make up for it.
I keep coming back to Tindersticks. It’s music condensed, and the vocals seem to be the result of illegal genetic hybridization between Nick Cave and the later David Bowie.
Psychedelic and stoner framed as classic rock.
Well, they don’t beat around the bush, and it’s hard to ignore them! Luckily, I don’t want to.
This one is new to me, thanks @Stijn for the tip.
The original desert rockers:
I published the previous digest a day before the release of “Superwolves”, the sequel (after 16 years) of the legendary collaboration “Superwolf” between Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney. The album is again beautifully weird. The articulated and diverse guitar playing in concordance with the haunting clean vocals of BPB … results in pearls like this:
In a previous post I discussed deepfakes from a hermeneutic perspective, by exploring how “a deepfake mediates how we perceive beings in the world by affording an interpretation of the fake as the real”. There is plenty of attention to the dangers of this effect and I briefly discussed its potential threats to democratic discourse. But last week we saw, to my knowledge, one of the first concrete manifestations of this threat, as European MPs were targeted by deepfake video calls of someone imitating Leonid Volkov, a Russian opposition figure. I don’t know how exactly, but apparently the culprits managed to successfully plan calls with several European members of parliament, posing as Volkov. Perhaps this is a great example of social hacking. The success of the trick can be partly explained by people being used to lower resolution video-calls during the pandemic, and I wonder whether this would have happened without our social fabric being so dependent on digital communications right now. Nevertheless, these awkward events show how deepfakes can explicitly be used to disrupt the type of transparent communication that is needed for a well-functioning democracy.
But if deepfakes can truly make the “fake” appear as the “real”, then what consequences does this have for our conception of the real?
I hypothesized that deepfakes would also have the converse hermeneutic effect of injecting “fakeness” into the real, of making the “real” appear more as “fake”. Sure, sure, that’s a philosopher’s theoretical ramblings. But in the same week of the “Volkov-incident”, something remarkable happened that exemplifies what I was getting at. A Dutch actor posted a video that was recorded by an unknown woman in order to ask him out on a date. He posted this video online because, surprisingly, a deep fake of former Dutch PM Mark Rutte appeared in this video, encouraging this actor to take her up on the offer. Dutch newspaper AD reported a subsequent backlash that prompted the actor to take down the video, with him admitting that deepfakes are “defamatory” and besides, “reality is already crazy enough”. (He could have easily added that it’s simply a dick move to post someone’s date request online. Call me old fashioned.) But another plot twist was added when research of another newspaper, NRC, showed that in fact the video was not a deepfake after all, but actually did feature Rutte. Here, the real was interpreted as fake. Since then, the original AD article has been updated and corrected.
This example is quite innocent, but nevertheless it shows how the subversive technology of deepfakes starts meddling with the interpretative processes by which we take something to be real. Perhaps the bigger picture here is not just simply that deepfakes make the fake seem real, but that they insert themselves in an ongoing historical development where the “real” loses its traditional philosophical vigor. The deepfake disturbs our comfortable conception of an image as a copy of reality (where reality is upheld as the original), instead confronting us with a simulacrum in the sense of Baudrillard: a copy without original. The deepfake gives us access to a reality that does not “exist”; and yet the deepfake obviously has a reality of its own and produces real effects. And one of these effects, I propose, is the hermeneutic subversion by which the real is reinterpreted in terms of the simulacrum. All quite postmodern, really. And granted, all this will only gain in significance the more our access to reality is mediated by (digital) imagery and the internet.
If you encounter more examples relevant to this theme, please let me know!
“Make Worry For Me” is another great collaboration of Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The video clip matches the music: both have their signature weirdness. Their new album ‘Superwolves’ is dropping tomorrow, the 30th of April!
Ok, ok! Top 40 isn’t always bad.
Bluesy and soulful. This song has been on repeat this month!
I haven’t listened to Bushman’s Revenge in years and rediscovered it last month. Jazz meets fuzz in the following track. Also give a song like “Tinnitus Love Poem” some love on your streaming service. It’s not on Youtube and to my surprise only has 8k streams.
This one is a bit longer, but it’s worth the listen. Around the same time that I listened to Bushman’s Revenge, I was really into this. Pure musicianship and an amazing groove.
Thanks to Alex for this tip. I’m a sucker for Eastern music in a Western jacket!
Thick bass in this celebration of a degenerate lifestyle:
Can’t help myself ending on a calmer note, with another collaboration between Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy. The corresponding clip is beautifully melancholic.
Bill Callahan has been releasing a lot of new stuff recently, also together with Bonnie Prince Billy (which is my most listened to artist of all time). Some of it is pretty weird too. Most of it, actually. Of the recent stuff this is one of my favorites:
But mostly, Bill Callahan popping up on the radar again was a great excuse to listen to tried and tested favorites. I particularly love Drover:
Floating Points just dropped an album with Pharaoh Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. Check out Movement 1.
One of my favorite bands produced two back-to-back albums, revisiting their previous microtonal work. Psychedelic grooves meeting the East.
From K.G. (late 2020):
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard finished the series (K.G.L.W.) this year with L.W. which is awesome from beginning to end!
I knew Mark Lanegan from his work with Queens of the Stone Age, but somehow I never listened to his other work. My bad!
Mark Lanegan & Isobel Campbell - Come On Over (Turn Me On)
Chick Corea passed away, so a tribute is in place. Here is a live rendition of Crystal Silence, together with Gary Burton.
When reviewing my top artists from 2020 Yves Tumor popped up in there, even though I didn’t really know this artist. I’m glad I do now, I’m hooked.