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November 2017
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Underground Music in 2017



'People are taking safer choices': six alternative artists on today's musical underground

Thurston Moore, The Black Madonna and other underground musicians discuss how the scene continues to mutate – and why quantum physics is where today’s avant garde truly resides

The Black Madonna, DJ and producer

The first time I ever heard of a rave was in a Big Audio Dynamite record, then I saw them on TV. So the second I heard there was a rave in America I was literally out of the window of the place I had been staying. And that was it, I was gone. I barely remember high school. I quit to work in raves full time the second I realised there was another world that you could go to. The idea of living a second life that other people were not aware of was delicious.

I was in the dance underground as it was going through its birth in the US in 1991. We had no road map at all. Now, it’s easy to link that to a better thing than it was; a lot of things that get gilded in nostalgia are actually really shitty. It meant smiling and nodding while women around me were not getting paid. There were a lot of voices that got squashed. There was this “you’re harshing the mellow of the party” if you talk about the fact that there’s a thousand teenage girls here on ecstasy who are not able to give consent.

Dance music is different now. You can only have a total lack of self-awareness once – now, no matter what, there is at least a nominal reference to history in it. It’s also so much bigger now, and there are places I play that are deeply public. The cops know what we’re doing – there’s transparency there, and surely something is lost in that. Having said that, I do still believe that the act of dance music is in fundamental opposition to acts of war and acts of violence. In this world, you can do a lot worse than taking a whole shit-ton of people and having them dance instead of kill each other.

Thurston Moore, guitarist and co-founder of Sonic Youth 


Sonic Youth in London, with Thurston Moore far right, 1987

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 Sonic Youth in London, with Thurston Moore far right, 1987. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo





Underground music, as a genre, was a way to distinguish artists as genuine and hip in distinction to those with commercial ambitions. We first hear about it in the 1960s in connection with the underground press – International Times, OZ, Rolling Stone et al. The underground press was in opposition to capitalism, racism, sexism and, particularly, the daily horrors of the Vietnam conflict. So was underground music, though hardly without conflicts of interest. Most artists defined as “underground” recorded for mainstream record labels like EMI, Warner Bros and Atlantic, and were seemingly inhibited and potentially censored by the social mores held over from earlier, less progressive generations. Artists desiring total freedom of expression could either self-produce or record for like-minded and independent record labels.

Anathema to anyone working within the framework of underground music was the notion of “selling out” – accepting significant sums of money and the promise of recognition through competitive distribution, in exchange for their self-identity being challenged by management and promotion departments. True underground music did not necessitate such trifle, and it remains this way. Contemporary artists have the privilege of history – where working in any context of music production, whether wholly independent or in some negotiation with a mainstream construct, is entirely possible without “selling out”. I called my band Sonic Youth to be emblematic of underground music, where a playful dialogue with the mainstream could incur. The idea was to be all inclusive yet unwaveringly anti-fascist, -sexist, -racist, -war, -violence, -nuclear energy, -guns and anything personified by the current cesspools of the reigning demagogues of human catastrophe.

Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of Crass

Crass pictured at their Dial House base in North Weald, 2000, with Penny Rimbaud far right
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 Crass pictured at their Dial House base in North Weald, 2000, with Penny Rimbaud far right. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Essentially, the avant garde is about changing the world. It must be, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. But I always think terms like underground and alternative are a bit disingenuous – a way of pushing stuff to the side. That certainly happened in the punk domain, when you had overtly commercial music being made by people like the Clash and the Pistols, and then you had what was called anarcho-punk, which apparently wasn’t a part of that. Well, actually, Crass – as the creators of the anarcho-punk movement – were outselling most people.
Crass were activists with rock’n’roll pretensions. You can’t really expect rock’n’rollers to have activist pretensions – rock’n’roll is just part of the entertainment industry. The scream doesn’t seem to be coming through musically as much as it might have been doing 40 years ago – punk created a new standard of disrule, which will be hard to beat. But people tend to think nothing’s happening because it’s not happening in music. It’s happening in quantum physics. If you want to read the new avant garde, read quantum physics – scientists are just artists of a different kind.

Holly Herndon, electronic musician

Holly Herndon at the Ace Hotel in London
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 Holly Herndon at the Ace Hotel in London. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
In the 90s, underground artists were able to sell hundreds of thousands of records and have their own economic viability, so they could make whatever music they wanted without having to compromise at all. You could have a pretty out-there artist making a middle-class salary, not having to worry about doing brand partnerships or any of that stuff because it was sustained by the public. And that doesn’t exist in the same way. The economics of the situation have shifted so dramatically, it’s like a house on fire.
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When I was in high school, I went to music for ideas and to understand what my identity could be – and I think that’s shifted. I’m not sure music is the place where radical thought is happening any more. I’m interested in the crypto community, people who are interested in radically changing the infrastructure that organises our society. Those kinds of totally out-there ideas and thought processes I don’t really encounter in music quite so much.
Everything is documented and immediately public now, so I don’t feel like people in the underground have the ability to mess up and experiment in the same way they once did, because there’s such scrutiny on people at a really early stage. I’ve had some brutal shows in my life but I needed them to figure out my process, that’s idiosyncratic to me. I see people taking safer choices because they don’t want to fail as they’re being watched from every angle. What you get then is these baby clones, where everyone’s looking really polished but they’re all dressing as each other, and that’s not good for the health of the music community.

Mist, rapper

Rapper Mist
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 ‘I can’t go anywhere without getting noticed’ ... Mist. Photograph: Ashley Verse
The underground scene is basically an A&R system in the streets, which allows the mainstream to know about music. When you make enough noise in the underground scene, the mainstream is bound to hear it. It worked for me through word of mouth – my manager met me through his nephew showing him one of my songs.
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Coming from Birmingham, you’re knocking on the London doors, trying to get on the London radio stations, even the London YouTube channels. SBTV was the first channel outside of Birmingham that I went on. And then the rest just follows: Link Up TV, GRM Daily. Then when you get Fire in the Booth [on BBC 1Xtra], you’re not so underground any more – I can’t go anywhere without getting noticed.
I remember listening to pirate radio growing up, and a lot of the MCs didn’t really get much out of their career. Now with the internet platforms and social media, it’s easy for you to get your music out there for people to listen to it. While I’ve been coming up a lot of social media sites have been coming up as well. Instagram, for instance, wasn’t used as much – when I first started it was just for pictures. Social media plays a big part. I met [producer] Banglez through social media. If I didn’t have it, I don’t know how any of us would have connected with each other.

Dani Filth, frontman of metal band Cradle of Filth

Cradle of Filth in concert at Academy 2, Manchester
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 Cradle of Filth in concert at Academy 2, Manchester earlier this month. Photograph: John Gilleese/REX/Shutterstock
At the time Cradle of Filth started in 1991 you had the onset of grunge, which really killed metal off. It just all became a bit uncool. Grunge was very mainstream, so it drove heavy metal underground, and heavy metal got more extreme. When we began making music, you had to be Don Johnson to own a mobile phone, so people kept in communication via home phone or telephone boxes. And that’s how our underground functioned, by word of mouth and swapping tapes by post. Flyers were very popular. You’d get a thick letter through the post, one tape and the rest would be about a hundred flyers, which you’d then pass on with your next correspondence. At that point I was perpetually drawing fanzine covers to pay for inclusion of the band in fanzines, or just writing letters to penpals and distributors.
I don’t want to sound like an old rocker, but I think people have become a little bit more fickle because of the immediacy of technology. The attention span goes. Metal is exceedingly loyal, but I don’t know how strong people’s commitment to any one band or anything is nowadays.
I have another band called Devilment, and the people I’m in the band with are all from the local music scene in Suffolk. So it’s been like putting your foot back into the waters of the underground. It’s changed quite a bit, I suppose. The metal scene is very crowded because it’s very easy to make music these days as well – after a while, everyone starts sounding the same. When you’ve got thousands and thousands of bands and it’s been going on for 25 years, it’s all going to cross over. The originality is lost.

30 years ago: A powerful video prankster could become Max Jailroom



John Carpenter
On Sunday, Nov. 22, 1987, viewers watching "Doctor Who" on WTTW-TV experienced one of the oddest things ever to cross Chicago televisions: a 90-second hijacking of the airwaves, featuring a person dressed as Max Headroom. This is the Tribune's original report about the prankster, who has never been identified.
An off-color skit starring a bare-bottomed imitator of television character Max Headroom showed up on Chicago-area TV screens Sunday night, evidently the work of a sophisticated video pirate with an unsophisticated sense of humor.
Officials of the Federal Communications Commission were not amused as they searched Monday for clues to the identity of the pirate, who somehow managed to override the signals of two television stations in two hours.
The bizarre 1 1/2-minute skit, which ended with "Max" pulling down his pants and getting paddled with a fly swatter, interrupted a WTTW (Channel 11) broadcast of the British science fiction series "Dr. Who" at 11:10 p.m.










Two hours earlier, the "Max" character made an unauthorized 28-second appearance in the middle of a newscast on WGN (Channel 9), but was zapped by an alert engineer before the imposter could do anything offensive.
Television engineers speculated that the stations had been victimized by a practical joker with an expensive transmitter. They said it would take extremely high-powered equipment to squeeze out the microwave signals that carry the programs from the stations' Northwest Side studios to downtown skyscrapers, where they are retransmitted to television sets throughout the Chicago area.
"You need a significant amount of power to do that," said Robert Strutzel, WGN's director of engineering, who was reluctant to discuss the prank in detail for fear of providing a "how to" guide for others. "The interfering signal has to be quite strong."
"This guy had to have quite a rig," said Larry Inman, chief engineer of an Urbana station, WILL-TV. "Transmitters with Bears game on WGN's newscast. A character wearing a Max Headroom mask gyrated for almost half a minute but did not make audible sounds.






Strutzel said an engineer quickly changed the frequency of the signal that was transmitting the news show to the Hancock building, thus breaking the lock established by the video pirate. Sports reporter Dan Rohn apologized for the interference and continued the sports report.
Two hours later, a "Dr. Who" episode called "Horror of Fang Rock" on Channel 11 was interrupted by wobbling black and white lines.
Then the character in the "Max Headroom" mask appeared and swayed back and forth while saying a number of barely audible words.
Among the words that could be heard were "Chuck Swirsky" (the name of a WGN sportscaster), "TV studio," "great newspaper" and "but it's dirty." "Max" picked up a can of Pepsi-Cola (the real Max Headroom advertises Coca-Cola) and threw it away, then picked up another can and threw it away.
He then put on what looked like a glove.
"Max" bent over, exposed his bare buttocks and was paddled several times by a fly swatter that appeared to be wielded by a woman standing off camera.
"By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over," said Anders Yocum, vice president for corporate communications at Channel 11. "Initially, we checked our internal video sources before thinking about something from the outside.
"We've spent most of today figuring out what we can do to prevent this sort of thing in the future, and we believe we will be able to avoid it," he said.
Channel 9 officials said they, too, were studying ways to improve security over their broadcast signal.
The legitimate Max Headroom, a wisecracking, stuttering, computer-generated character, originated on British television in 1985.
His own American prime-time television show, carried on ABC, was canceled earlier this year.
The original story line for the Max character involved a futuristic world dominated by television, where video piracy-such as what occurred Sunday night-was punishable by death.
Video piracy in the U.S. carries a criminal penalty of up to $10,000 in fines and up to one year in prison, an FCC official said.
"We consider this a serious matter," said Maureen Peratino, the FCC's deputy director for public affairs.
She said she was unaware of any previous thefts of a TV station's signal. The most celebrated case of video piracy occurred in April, 1986, when a pirate calling himself "Captain Midnight" intercepted the satellite transmission of Home Box Office, a cable television programmer, and broadcast a message criticizing the company for scrambling its signal to prevent non-subscribers from receiving it on privately owned satellite dishes.
Captain Midnight later was identified as John R. MacDougall, a satellite dish salesman from Ocala, Fla. He was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a year's probation.
In October, 1985, an electronic bandit overpowered the signal of the popular Wally Phillips show on WGN-AM radio and made sexually explicit comments.

Wolf Eyes' John Olson Tells How He Became the King of Instagram Memes

 

If you're not following @wolf_eyes_psychojazz then you may as well delete your Instagram app


BY JOSIAH HUGHES

[re-edited for HUNK]

In 2015, veteran Detroit noise outfit Wolf Eyes announced plans to release a new album on Jack White's Third Man Records imprint. To celebrate the unlikely alliance, the group did a takeover of Third Man's Instagram account that ultimately ended in some chaotic shitposting. While it was a funny stunt to be sure, it was also merely a prediction for things to come. In 2017, the band's John Olson has become a top Instagram meme aggregator with his account @wolf_eyes_psychojazz.

Chances are you've stumbled across Olson's messy labyrinth of tongue-in-cheek meme reposts, which run the gamut from obscure techno jokes and deep movie references to photos of the man himself making an iconic claw hand in various "squad" group pics. (The hand has since been mimicked by his many adoring fans.) He delivers an unseemly dump of memes on a daily basis, and has undoubtedly developed a web following that usurps his successful and influential noise band.

We reached out to Olson to understand exactly what makes him tick on Instagram. At first he joked that he didn't need to speak to HUNK because he already had a jacket with our name on it (well, sorta). Fortunately, Olson eventually came through with some answers about what it's like to run the most esoteric music joke account on the web — and, ultimately, what memes really mean to him.



When did you first become interested in memes? Do you remember the first meme that spoke to you?


Hah well... I took a long break from Facebook years ago and that's when I first heard of Instagram from my wife Tovah, who does social media for Gannet, and told me to peep this new app that "was just pictures." Figuring it was harmless I dove in in the dark ages of Insta and just begun like everyone else with fam pics, record pictures, shoes, etc. I don't remember the first meme I saw, but it was a stretch after that. If you would have mentioned "meme" in those caveman eras I would have thought you were talking about a "mime" or something like that. Like anything, it takes time to find a "voice." Tovah was who hit me with the first meaning of meme when ish started to get real. At the jump, I thought meme meant "words to an image" but the current meaning of "acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme" is waaaayyyy beyond the original simple meaning, or rather "meme-ing." Don't remember the first image that resonated, but "Anyway brother here's wonderwall" was the first one that got a chuckle. Being from the hardcore handbill era I always thought they looked like simple flyers done on desktop design. Now peeps got PHD's in meme social decoding. Things move fast, trends come and go, nearly daily. Fascinating to watch really.



You post an insane amount of memes. Do you queue them up with some sort of app, or do you just post them all in real time?


It's all formula: Mugs send me images, the funny ones go up. I don't search or lurk, I "like" the ones around the times the thumb hits "post." Lots of friends in there but it's a cold, unromantic process really. All people's choice. I empty my photo folders first thing in the morning and start from scratch. Try to do it Monday to Friday, 9 - 5 like a job. I do it more on the road because of gig time, etc. Cats send a lot of funny images. I really have zero idea how normal people use Instagram and try to interact with everyone who sends in stuff that is not sexist or racist: screw that. Slipped a couple of times because of LSD, etc., but hey it's a learning process. Nearly 90 percent of the time spent is from the inbox a.k.a. the window in the digital inzanity. Have never changed the process from the jump. Besides the Third Man takeover, the longest amount of time someone has lasted when I take over their account is 38 minutes. Mugs can't hang with the rabid spirit. Fine with me, move on always.

For you specifically, what makes for a good meme?

Edgy fun. Should be a ten second experience and forgotten. Should have a sting of some sort. Just anything to have a language to spread or commentary on the pop culture ending in a chuckle. FUN. It's the lunchroom of the mid-quarter of the 21st century. Juvenile AF really.



Do you find that people discover your Instagram page without knowing what Wolf Eyes is? Have you made some new fans through the discover feed?


Hard to tell, seems to be the case. Same with new fans: people are more aware of it, but the Wolf jams are super abstract so it's difficult for 'em to stay within the music. Again: here for the fun/squad pics and nonsense. We hit it hard with Trip Metal and then Psycho Jazz: we got moves planned but the disaster of the recent name change was gnarly. But the platform always has to be challenged and tested like genres themselves. It is a Frankenstein/Golem case, and again, fascinating in how it operates by itself.

There is some debate over ownership of images on the internet. Some people seem very excited to get posted on your page, while others have been critical in the past. How do you feel about memes? Do they belong to their creator, or to everyone?

It's images people send, I don't hunt 'em down. Watermarking seems to cure all bellyaches. I don't own 'em. If other people want to share 'em, go ahead and make other people laugh. There has been a lot of dorks super mad but whatever, it's a ten second or less experience. Like a pop rock pebble in a soda. Lite danger at best. I'm not a digital fighter. It's a total waste of energy compared to getting a laugh within a bottomless sea of narcissism. The "psy stance" hand thing is just a fun language symbol from the squad pics which started from goofing around and gathering people together to get loose. What's better than that?



Are memes art?


Lord no. They have a lifespan of about a day or less. Looking back at old ones is brutal. Social satire at best. Simple modern semantics, nothing else. Lonely peeps looking for a shared language — a family in a sense. Art is Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars, Philip Guston, Billie Holiday or a new instrument or canvas.

What else should we know about you, memes, or Wolf Eyes?

We are Wolf Eyes and our sonic universe sails from the winds of ceaseless lust.


MKRdezign

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