Immaterialism

It's a strange feeling, if you read a lot about the music industry and its impending death-by-downloads, to turn to this piece by Nicholson Baker and read about Jeff Bezos of Amazon and his determination to do the same for publishing.

Bezos and Amazon must believe that e-books, downloaded to a device like the Kindle, are inevitable and that they might as well get in first. They must believe that the earlier they're in, the better their chances of colonizing this new world, setting Amazon up to exploit the pilgrim hordes to come.

This depends on the assumption that technology will make the Kindle or similar e-reader so pleasurable and easy to use that it will supersede the book.

But the same assumption – that ingenuity will find a way – is surely what will prove fatal to them. The Kindle will only work if they can make its DRM work, and no DRM has ever remained uncracked once users reach a certain critical mass. Eventually, readers will have access to an infinite wealth of digital texts for free, and publishing will have exactly the same problem as the music industry: how do you make readers pay for something they can get for free?

Maybe there's a different psychological economy at work in the way people relate to and acquire books, and the way they relate to and acquire music. But it's quite a chance to take.

. . .

I sometimes try to imagine a culture without artefacts – the endpoint of digital in which no-one prints a book, buys a newspaper or magazine, presses a CD (let alone a record), and wonder when it will arrive. And how I will make a living.

Then I remember that in a hundred years' time, humanity will be reduced to small pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers, scraping out an existence on small temperate islands, while the continents become uninhabitable scorched wastelands. Assuming the climate stabilizes and these surviving communities start to send out sorties to the old hubs of civilization (like Ballard's Drowned World), as they gather together relics from the old world there will presumably be a huge lacuna. The cultural fossil record will start to go blank from the turn of the century onwards, and with no internet, no electricity, the migration to digital will appear as a kind of universal amnesia. These survivor-explorer archaeologists from the future will find books, records, magazines, CDs, but they will be decreasing to a trickle as the years go by, while even they if manage to fire a computer up, there will be no distant Google server-farm to supply them.

Errata

After this post, it has been pointed out to me that of course three (not two) of Hot Chip attended Elliott School. Forgot about Owen Clarke. Sorry Owen. Felix Martin did not, but he did go to Pimlico School, which unlike Elliott is out-and-out Brutalism (I’m not going to make much of the fact that Felix now stands at the back jabbing at drum machines). Or at least Pimlico was Brutalist. Also, the underground river nearby is in fact called the Wandle, not the Wendle. For this, I blame Michael de Larrabeiti. I’m going to write about de Larrabeiti sooner or later, but if I do it will probably be too long for this blog. I also have this from an Elliotonian correspondent:

it never gets mentioned anymore that some of So Solid also went to Elliott. One of them once mugged me in MacDonalds as a 14 year old. He got expelled for something else later on. Though he was always very friendly whenever I bumped into him later

With heart-warming happy endings like that, no wonder it was declared Britain’s friendliest school. Also some another small corroboration for Owen H’s suggested sympathy between brutalist architecture/grime sonics.

Finally, I think I was harsh on Bukem here. I liked Logical Progression (and recently got very into Woebot’s ambient jungle mix for Fact). But two moments for me stand out for me when I think about the decline of my initial interest in dnb. Owen Hatherley’s description of it: 'by 1998, a ponderous stonerstep for slovenly, unshaven UCL science students in expensive rainwear', here echoes my own experience almost exactly, with the nadir being a Goldie night in either late ’98 or early ’99, rammed with public schoolboys in body warmers. But a harbinger of that was listening to Earth 2 on one of those HMV listening posts and thinking, this sounds like a waiting room.

pic credit: Pimlico School, RIBA via Twentieth Century Society

(Brutalist) Boy from School

I used to wonder how much the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge affected the mindset of its longterm employees. Living and working amongst those buildings, massive, monumental representations of the institutions’ age, status and venerability… How much might this condition you to think a little more complacently of yourself (as the present-day representative of this heritage) and to think about the world a little more conservatively, than you would otherwise? Similarly, if you went to Eton, then Oxford, then worked in Lincolns Inn Fields, how might such an unbroken succession of film-set dreaming spires subconsciously condition you?



I don’t know how this effect could be tested for or quantified. And anecdotally at least I’ve not found it to be borne out by experience. (My friend and sample-group-of-one in Lincolns Inn volunteered for Obama and runs a Palestinian campaign group.) But I happened to be thinking about it a week ago, when I read this Sophie Heawood piece on The xx. Understandably enough, it picks up on the angle about their school: Elliott, a comprehensive in Putney previously attended by Burial, Fridge (two of whom release solo records as Adem and Fourtet) and two-fifths of Hot Chip. And some Maccabees. (Though arguably the most successful Elliott product is this shredder). I should admit that I know some Elliott alumni very well and can report that Heawood’s description is pretty accurate. They do have a somewhat cult-like insularity: they’re reluctant to associate with outsiders, they wear flowing white robes, and they gather every summer solstice on Putney Heath to worship a huge flaming effigy of a deity they name Victor. But while Elliott has been the subject of plenty of articles already, it's the first I‘ve seen mention it as a built environment. Heawood says the band were affected by ‘the sense of space in the school itself — which itself was “weirdly massive”, according to Sim.’



From images found online (all at elliottonian.com), it looks like a kind of soft brutalism to me: modernist, exposed stairwells and functions, but with glass winning out over concrete expanse or massive bulk. Not quite a 'council estate prison’ as The xx's Madley Croft has it (whatever that would be). No doubt Fantastic Journal, Entschwindet und Vergeht and Sit Down Man can make more of it, tell me what I‘m missing etc. I like the sheer horizontal persistence of the main building and the gym / theatre (?) looks interesting.





In relation to the Elliott discography I can’t see/hear anything as striking as the connection made in Militant Modernism between brutalist social housing and the sonic brutalism of grime. None of the Elliott discography could be described as brutalist, though there are jagged outbreaks in Kieran Hebden’s duo sets with Steve Reid, and some gloriously maximalist aggro in Hot Chip tracks like Shake a Fist. It’s wrong to generalize, but if I had to I would say there’s a kind of collective urban pastoralism at work. Check out these two Fridge covers; Hot Chip are as influenced by the low-key lushness of Hall & Oates, Robert Wyatt and Will Oldham’s Appalachian modes as they are by post-Timbaland electro-futurism; Adem’s records are post-Pro Tools kitchen table Cloth Cuts pillow talk. The xx are obviously in love with the lo-fi pastoral of Young Marble Giants (another Putney connection there, because Domino, whose offices are in Putney, reissued YMG in 2007, when The xx would have been 16/17). The master image of Burial’s first album was London, submerged under a broken-barriered Thames (…and the Wendle, one of London‘s underground rivers, flows nearby). So maybe, if you had to (idiotically) generalize, you could detect a kind of quiet polemic, a naturalization of city life. Because if there is a kind of 'fields beneath’, under-the-pavement-the-beach dynamic, it’s not about alienated hippie anti-urbanism, but a rejection of that rejection. Nor is it situationist denaturalization, a making strange of the concrete city, but instead buried in the background hum of the music, a straightforward celebration of it.