2 TOTAL RECAll. Music and Memory in the Time of YouTube Q;U~ (&l.. +, rj e~ Vg!f'<

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1 that would tun the. wold upside down. On the face of it, eo enactments seem just to feed'intoa backwads-looking cultue that's taking us eve futhe fom the conditions in which such total tansfomations and singula disu,ptions wee possible. But pehaps the atists ae onto something when they talk about failue as the goal: a goad to the audience, simultaneously stiing up and fustating the longing fothe Event. The latte is the philosophe Alain Badiou's tem fo a damatic histoical: beak, a uptue that is also an iuption of newness. It can take political fom (vaious evolutions, May 1968) o be a scientific o cultual beakthough (Schoenbeg's twelve-tone scale), but the Event divides up time into Befoe and Afte, opening towads a futue that pomises to be absolutely diffeent fom the past. Re-enactment at is at once an extension of ahd an invesion of pefomance at, which is event-based by definition. Pefomance is all about the hee and now. Its components include the bodily pesence of the atists, a physical location and its duation: it is. an expeience that you have to sit though. Pefomance at's powe is bound up with its ephemeality: it can't be epoduced, collected o ente the at maket, and any incidental documentation it leaves behind is no substitute fo having seen it in the flesh.. Re-enactment is like a spectal fom of pefomance at: what the viewewitnesses neve,quite achieves full pesence o pesent-ness. The defining quality of pefomance at is that it happens in eal time, but with fe-enactments time is out of joint. Tom McCathy puts it, 'Re-enactment bings about a kind of split within the act itself... on the one hand it's. something you do, andon the othe it's not something you'e actually "doing": it's a citation, a make fo anothe event that this one isn't.' No matte how much eseach and pepaation goes into a e -enactment, it is doomed to be an absud ghost, a tavesty of the oiginal. Yet the e-enactment may still have the powe to emind the audience that Events ae possible, because they've happened befoe. 54.) U'1 0'-\ ({1 hoi Js_<V"Mqhl e"'f ej-t;j'e.. ;'J f\ alf...:.\:-\h +.;. }:. ;, Q;U 4v\' a-j f=o-",\'ilj,.i\ 2..Q \ \, 2 TOTAL RECAll (&l.. +, J e Vg!f'< Music and Memoy in the Time of YouTube Sometimes I think ou cultue has succumbed to Chis Faley Syndome. That's the name of both a chaacte in a egula sketch they used to do on Satuday Night Live and the now deceased. comedian who played the ole. A young man who pesents a cable TV talk show out of his own living oom, 'Chis Faley' has bizaely good luck getting inteviews with eally famous stas (i.e. the weekly guest hosts on SNL). In a typical sketch, a celebity such as Paul McCatney would sit politely' on Faley's sofa, the bumbling amateu inteviewe, flusteed and visibly dipping sweat, stammeed his way though a seies of inane questions, invaiably stating with: 'D'ya emembe...' So in Macca's case, this took the fom of'd'ya emembe, Paul... d'ya emembe... "Eleano Rigby"?' To which Macca would eply, with just the faintest hint of bemusement, 'Why yes, Chis, I do emembe "Eleano Rigby':' Faley then would blut, "Cos that was... that was... so.. cool.' Then, suddenly ealising his own vacuity, he'd stat slapping his own foehead and beating himself: 'Idiot, IDIOT: Only to do it again. And again. All those I Love the [Decade] pogammes wee chonic cases of Chis Fale'y Syndome. Most of the guest commentatos did baely moe than paot the catchphase/song lyic/advetising " up I 0 55

2 slogan unde consideation o emit some vaiant of'that was...? so... cool.' But the tue metastasis of Chis Faley Syndome must be YouTube's indisciminate, chaos of amateu cultual salvage. YouTube's eve-polifeating labyinth of collective ecollection is a pime example of the cisis of ovedocumentation tiggeed by digital technology. When cultual data is demateialised, ou capacity to stoe, sot and access it is vastly inceased and enhanced. The compession of text, images and audio means that issues of space and cost no longe dete us fom keeping anything and eveything that seems emotely inteesting oamusing. Advances in use-fiendly technology (the scanne, the domestic video ecode, the mobile-phone camea) make it iesistibly quick and convenient to shae stuff: photogaphs, songs' and mixtapes, excepts fom television, vintage magazines, book illustations and coves, peiod gaphics, you name it. And once it's up on the Web, a lot of it stews out thee, fo eve. A pofound shift has taken place in whichyoutube seves as both majo playe and potent symbol: the astonomic expansion of humanity's esouces; of memoy. Wehave available to us, as. individuals, but also at the level of civilisation, immensely moe.'space'to fill with memoabilia, documentation, ecodings, evey kind of achival tace of ou existence. And natually, we ae busily filling that space, even as its capacity continues to balloon. Yet thee is no evidence that we have significantly inceased ou ability to pocess o make good use of all that memoy.. Witing about the 'memoy epidemi.c' that's gipped the devel oped wold in the last couple of decades, Andeas Huyssen asked plaintively, 'Total ecall seems to be the goal. Is this an achivist's fantasy gone mad?' But what's eally significant isn't so much the 'total ecall' as the instant access that the Web's cultual databases make possible. In the. pe-intenet ea, thee was aleady way moe infomation and cultue than any individual could digest. But most of this cultue data and cultue 'matte was' stashed 56 out of ou eveyday each, in libaies, museums aid galleies. Nowadays seach engines have obliteated the delays involved in seaching though a libay's muky, maze-like stacks. What this means is that the pesence of the past in ou lives ha.s inceased immeasuably and insidiously. Old stuff eithe diectly pemeates the pesent, o luks just beneath the suface of the,cuent, in the fom of on-sceen windows to othe times. We've become so used to this convenient access that it is a stuggle to ecall that life wasn't always like this; that elatively ecently, one lived most of the time in a cultual pesent tense, With the past confined tospecificones, tapped in paticula objects and locations. The easiest way to convey how things have changed is to com-' pae the pesent with conditions when I was a lad bck in the late seventies; Let's look at music fist. Recod companies deleted ecods fom thei catalogues in those days; I dae say you could find out-of-pint eleases in second-hand stoes o obtain them fom specialist mail-ode companies, but the hole ecodcollecto cultue was in its infancy. I can distinctly emembe the fist few times I noticed eissues getting eviewed in the music papes - Tim Buckley's Geetings fom LA, a pai of Faust albums - because i was a eally unusual occuence. Box sets and deluxe epackagings of classic. atists wee vitually unhead of in the late seventies. Listening to old music was limited to what you could find in shops, what you could affod on.a limited budget.. You coulduso'tape music fom the collections of you fiends, o fom public libaies, but this was limited by what was avail": able and the cost of blank cassettes. Today, any young peson has access to vitually anything that's eve been ecoded, fe of chage, and.anyone can easily bone up on all the histoy and context ofthe music though Wikipedia and a thousand music blogs and fan sites. The situation was simila in othe aeas of popula cultue. TV 57' is j;! :;a

3 epeats wee few and fa between, aely dating back futhe than az:,a few yeas. Thee wee no channels devoted entiely to vintage TV, no DVD collections ofclassic seies, no Netflix o even video stoes. Classic movies and cineaste obscuities would flicke onto. TV schedules, butjf you missed tpem, they wee gone, uttely inaccessible (apat fom fleeting, unpedictable appeaances at 'midnight movie' ""'type cinemas that sceened esote!ic epetoy). Ou elationship to time and space in"this YouTubeWikipedia RapidshaeiTunesSpotify ea has been uttely tansfomed. Distance and delay have been eoded. to nealy nothing. To give you just one example, close at hand: while' I was witing the peceding paagaph,] was.listening tq a paody vesion of Beethoven's Symphony No.6 (the Pastoal Symphony) on a compilation of 'comic' avant-gade music called Smiling Though My Teeth. This made me want to hea the eal thing in un-mangled fom. I could easily have stolled aqoss the apatment to the walk-in closet whee most of my ecod collection is stashed, but athe than beak my wokflow I stayed in font of the compute and headed fo YouTube, whee I found dozens of vesions pefomed by vaious ochestas. (I could equally have listened to it without pictues, via the sound files embedded at the Wikipedia enty on Beethoven's Sixth, o downloaded it in a tice, legally o illegally). I mavelled at how swiftly] could scatch this paticula musical itch. though of couse I gotsucked into compaing the many altenate vesions of the Pastoal juxtaposed on YouTube's scoll-down sideba: poof, if any wee needed, that thee's a downside to access and choice. YouTube is not the only online video upload site, of couse. But as the pionee In,the field and the maket-leade, YouTube's dominance means that it stands in fo the whole industy in the same way that Kleenex and Hoove became geneal tems fo tissue o vacuum cleane. At the time of witing (the summe of 2010), YouTube has passed a majo milestone: it's now. steaming. 58! a staggeing two billion views pe day, making it the thid most d visited website on the planet. Evey minute anothe twenty-fou ;p! - hous' woth of Video gets uploaded, and it would take the indi j; vidual viewe 1,700 yeas to watch all of the hundeds of millions - ofvideos on the site. YouTube isn't just. a website,though, o even a technology, but moe a whole field of cultual pactice. Media theoist Lucas Hildeband uses concepts like 'emediation' and 'postboadcasting' to pinpoint what is innovative about YouTube. The 'e' in emediation indicates that it is lagely, if not completely, dependent on the output of the mainsteam copoateentetamment industy: music pomos made by and paid fo by majo labels, netwok TV pogammes, Hollywood movies. Of couse, thee is a lot of othe stuff 'up thee' that is non-mainsteam and DIY: esoteic and undegound music/at/film/animation, ama,. teu videos of babies and cats doing cute things, teenages goofing aound. in thei bedooms o in the steet, footage of bands playing live documented by fans using cellphones. But a high popotion of the content of YouTube is mainsteam entetainment and news e-pesented, in excepted fom, by its consumes: talk-show snippets, pei6d-piecetv commecials, theme songs, long-lost vintage footage of bands pefoming on Tv, favouite sequences fom movies. As fo 'post-:boadcasting', the 'post' has two connotations: 'post' as in leaving behind the ea of a cultual mainsteam (the dominance of the big TV netwoks) and enteing C\. consllme'7:mpoweed ea of niche-audience naowcasting; and 'post'as in postmoden (at that's based aound pastiche and citation). YouTube teems with fan fiction-style teatments of mainsteam entetainment: paodies, people doing kaaoke' vesions of pop songs, mash-ups and othe foms. of 'cultue jamming' based on the e-editing of footage. These mocking tavesties ecall the sample-based audio panks ofoutfits like theklf, Cultucide and Negativland. 59

4 Looking at YouTube fom a puely musical pespective, two things ae paticulaly stiking about this new (post-)boadcast medium; The fist is the way that YouTubehas become the epos-. itoy of ulta-ae TV appeaances- o bootleg live footage that once upon a time wee teasued and taded by hadcoe fans. Advetising in the back pages of Goldmine. o Recod Collecto, communicating via fanzines and pen-pal netwoks, fans would swap o sell video cassettes, copied and ecopied so many times that the image of Elvis o Bowie could only be dimly peceived though a blizzad of dubbed distotion. Nowadays this stuff lives on YouTube, feely available to anybody who caes enough to click When I think of how useful this would have been to me when witing my post -punk histoy Rip It Up (which was finished about eighteen months befoe YouTube launched in the winte of 2005), Ihaye mixed emotions: etospective fustation offset by a. stange feeling of elief. Fo as much as it would have been a geat esouce, I could easily have lost myself in the endless dips of live footage, ancient pomo videos and TV appeaances. The' othe eally inteesting development affecting music.has been the way that fans. have tansfomed lage swathes of this video achive into a puely audio esouce, uploading songs accompanied by abstact; sceen-save-type moving pattens o a still image.(in many cases, just a still of the ecod cove o label, o. a gainy shot of the ecod playing ona: tuntable). Whole albums ae being put up on' YouTube by fans, with each tack accompanied by the same genetic and desultoy image. YouTube's combination of pomo videos and audio uploads means that it has become a public libay' of ecoded.sound (albeit a disoganised, messy one, with few omissions but plenty of epetition and 'damaged copies'). You can even 'boow' Without etuning, using tools like Dipy to convet YouTube videos into MP3S. YouTube is much easie to consult than my huge and disoganised ec.od collection. On some occasions I've actually downloaded albums off the Web that I aleady own, just to avoid the bothe of ummaging though boxes fo them. No matte that the CD o vinyl will sound so much bette. MP3s ae good enough)f you'e in a huy (in my case, I'm usually looking to check something fo efeence puposes, so effectively teating the music as infomation athe tha:n an immesiv sonic expeience). YouTube itself is an example of this kind of digital cultue tadeoff between quality and convenience. The medium has 'cummy image and sound quality', notes Hildeband, descibing how the toleable quality of the pictue when in small-sceen mode is exposed in all its tue lo-es capness when you dick on 'full sceen'. But just as listenes have accepted the 'lossy', thin-bodied sound of MP3s because of the advantages of compact stoage and ease of exchange,nobodyseems to mind the educed fidelity of television viewing via compute sceen (even though it is unning in the opposite diection elsewhee with high-definition TV, 5. 0 suound-sound home-movie theates, 3D movies, and so foth). In compensation, we have the vastly enhanced access and the quantity-ove-quality volume and ange ofthe online achive. We also have the consume-empoweing convenience of the time display at the bottom of the video, which allows the viewe to dag the scoll ba and jump within the video dip (o song) to get to 'the good bit' soone. YouTube, based aound exceptsis aleady in the business of fagmenting lage naatives (the pogamme, the movie, the album), but this function actually encouages us, as viewes;1:o bak cultual fagments into even smalle subunits, insidiously eoding ou ability to concentate and ou willingness to let something unfold. As with the Intenet as a whole, ou sense of tempoality gows eve moe bittle and inconstant: estlessly snacking on data bytes, we flit fitfully in seach of the next instant suga ush. YouTube encouages this kind of dift though its sideba of videos deemed, often by skewed logic, to be elated to the one d :;! I"" m I"" I"" 60 61

5 you'e watching. It is had not to fall into an inattentive, easily? detached mode of viewing somewhee between bowsing and channel-sufing (except. that you'e always flitting witin one channel, YouTube, itself now a povince of the Google empie, which bought the company in Octobe 2006). This lateaj. dift is not just fom atist to atist o gene to gene but a wandeing acoss time; since video atifacts fom diffeent eas ae jumbled pomiscuously and linked by a latticewok of ciss-cossing associations. This kind of dift stems patly fom the disodely natue of Y6uTube, which is moe like a jumbled attic than an achive, only laxly famed and annotated. But elsewhee on the Web, all kinds of official oganisations and amateu associations ae assembling well-managed cultual databases whose contents ae available to the geneal public. The Bitish Libay, fo instance,ecently made its huge collection of ethnogaphic music available online fee ofchage: appoximately 28,000 ecodings and 2,000 hous of taditional music, anging fom wax-cylind,documentation of aboiginal songs made by the anthopologist Alfed Cot Haddon in 1898 t6 the Decca. West Afica label's mid-twentieth-centuy ecodings of calypso and quickstep. The National Film Boad of Canada opeates a sima steam-fo-fee achive ofits enowned <;tocumentaies, natue show and animations by luminaies such as Noman McLaen. Then thee's UbuWeb, a gold mine of avant-gade cinema, sound poety, music and text administeed by fans but pesented with a scholaly meticulousness. UbuWeb is dedicated to 'making woks that would. othewise languish in the stoage chambes of at museums o the ecesses of univesity collections, pehaps making vey occasional public appeaances at festivals and exhibitions, globally and pemanently available. Beyond oganisations like Ub.uWeb, thee's a teeming hinteland of blogs like The Sound of Eye, BibliOdyssey, 45cat and Found Objects, opeated by individuals o small goups of like-minds, amateu cuatos who ae fenetically huling au manne of esoteic images and sounds up onto the Intenet: cuios and lost classics of twentieth-centuy book illustation, gaphic design and typogaphy; shot avant-gade films and animations; - scanned atides and, inceasingly, entie issues of obscue peiodicals, jounals and fanzines; ancient public-infomation films and the:intos to innumeable long-lost childen's shows; and so faith. If 1 had a second life (one that was.also blessed with a pivate income), I could happily while away my days feasting on all cultue caion. On the Intenet, the past and the pesent comlningle in a way that makes time itself mushy and spongifom. YouTube is quintessentially Web 2.0 in the way that it pomises immotalityto evey video uploaded: theoetically the content could stay up thee fo evet You can flit fom the achaic to the up-to-theminute in a click. The esult, cultually, is a paadoxical combination of speed and standstill. You can see this manifested on evey level of Web 2.0 eality: an incedibly apid tunove of news (cuent-affais and politics blogs updating evey ten minutes, tending topics on Twitte, blog buzz) coexisting with the stubbon pesistence of nostalgic cud. Into the chasm between these two poles dops both the ecent past and what you might call 'the long pesent': tends with staying powe, bands with caees longe than an album, subcultues and movements as opposed to fads and flavous. The ecent past dops away into an amnesiac while 'the lqng pesent gets chiselled down to w<,l.fe-width, simply because of the incedible pace with which the pages of the cuent and the topical'ae efeshed. OUTSELLING THE PRESENT 'Pop music is moe fleeting nowadays: says Ed Chistman, the senio etail edito at Billboad. I contacted Chistman because a. A'( 62 63

6 is I wanted to find out if consumes wee buying moe old music :z these days. He explained that the industy divided eleases up into <cuent' (which spanned fom day one of' elease to fifteen'months late) and 'catalogue' (fom the sixteenth month onwads). But catalogue itself was divided up into two categoies: what was elatively ecent, and what was 'deep catalogue', to which music was assigned thee yeas afte elease. Chistman's sense was that the categoy of elatively ecent catalogue (eleases between fifteen months and thee yeas old) was 'not as stong as it used to be'. And it's tue that bands do seem to have shote caees, with blockbuste debuts followed by flops; the geate ' popotion of bands with eal staying powe seem to be leftoves fom the sixties, seventies and eighties: When it came to my main aea of intigue the elative atio between old-music puchases vesus new-music puchases Chistman dug up some statistics fo me. In the yeat 2000, he said, catalogue sales (including both ecent catalogue and deep) accounted fd 34.4 pe cent of total album sales in Ameica, while cuent stood at 65.6 pe cent; by the yea 2008, catalogue had inceased to 41.7 pe cent, while cuent was T4at didn't, seem such a damatic change, but accoding to Chistman this steady, yea-by-yea shift all though the 2000S towads olde music was vey significant. It contaste.d with an absolutely static atio between cuent and catalogue that was maintained duing the entie nineties (thee ae no figues fo pio to that). What made the incease in catalogue sales even me significant was that it was actually hade fo consumes to get hold of non-cuent eleases thanks to the appalling decline of ecod etail WI the taditional ecod stoes that had deep catalogue, and lots of it have been going out of business,' Chistman said. He added that the ones that suvived had been foced to cay non'-musical poducts (such as games), which meant they dastically educed the numbe ofmusic titles they kept in stock. Fo instance, in 2000, Bodes caied fifty thousand titles; by 2008, d., that figue had gone down to unde ten thousand. ::0 But if the 'taditional beadth of deep catalogue had been disappeaing fom ecod soes, which themselves had been dasti l= cally thinning in numbe, that begged the question: how had sales of old music managed to incease duing the past decade? Pat of the explanation was the ise of online etailes like Amazon, who could maintain vast back stock because of thei economies of scale and waehouses in low-ent zones. You also had specific catalogue titles being eissued as 'new spiffy things', as Chistman put it: annivesay editions and deluxe double CDs that wee packaged and pomoted as if they wee new eleases, and accodingly got pominent display in ecod stoes. Finally, thee was the ise of digital sales: the ipod explosion eawakened a lot of lapsed music fans' adou fo music (some ofwhich would be old music, a catalogue boom simila to the CD-eissuing of classic albums fom the mid-eighties onwads), who wee also abfe fo the fist time to buy tacks athe than whole albums. Chistman told me that 2009 was 'the fist yea that'soundscan sepaated out cuent and catalogue fo its digital figues', and this had evealed that catalogue accounts fo 'the majoity of digital-tack sales, 64.3 pe cent compaed to cuent's 35.7 pe cent: I suspect thee must be a simila heavy slant towads old music in illegal downloads. It stands to eason: the past can't help but outweigh the pesent, not just in shee quantity butalso in quality too. Fo agument's sake, let's assume tha appoximately the same amount of geat music is poduced each yea, (aveaging out the fluctuations within specific genes).. That would mean each new yea's havest of bil, Hance must compete with the past's eve moe mountainous heap of geatness. How many ecods eleased in 2011 will be as wothwhile an acquisition fo a neophyte listene as Rubbet Soul, Astal Weeks, Close, Hatful ofhollow? The concept of back catalogue is a key element of Chis 64 65

7 Andeson's much-discussed, and sometimes disputed, theoy of the Long Tail. The slant of the agument is the familia technoutopian naative we've seen so often in Wied, whee Andeson's oiginal aticle an befoe it was expanded into the best -selling book The Long Tail: Why the Futue of Business Is Selling Jess of Moe. He claimed that the etail envionment ceated by the Intenet shifts the balance in favou of the little guy (the plucky 'individual entepeneu, sm'all independent,publishes andecod labels, minoity-inteest atists), as opposed to copoateentetain11..1ent conglometateswith' thei oientation towads blockbustehits and megastas, big fist-week sales and expensive pomotional campaigns.. The intiguing subtextto the Long Tail theoy is that the newmedia envionment alsq shifts the balce in favou -of the past and to the disadvantage of the cultually cuent. Right at the stat of his olginal Octobe 2004 Wied aticle, Andeson tells the stoy of a cuently best-selling memoi about mountaineeing (Into Thin Ai) whose success diected consumes towads a much olde book on the same subject by a diffeent autho (Joe Simpson's Touching the Void), thanks to Amazon.com's 'If you like that, ty this' algoithm and eades' ecommendations. Simpson's book had only eve been modeately successful and was actually on the vege of going 'out of pint, but thanks to Into Thin Ai it esuged and became a best-selle. Andeson descibes how Amazon 'ceated the Touching the Void phenom- enon by combining infinite shelf space with eal-time infomation about buying tends and public opinion', and_chaacteises the esulting 'ising demand fo ap obscue bool<' asa yictoy of the magins against the mainsteam, of quality against foce-fed, tor-dovvll pap. But when Andeson cows that 'now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Ai moe than two to one', he is actually descibing an instance of the past defeating the (then) pesent: 1988 eclipsing 1999 The cental thesis of the Long Tail s that 'the tyanny of physi o 5;! cal space' has been ovethown by the Intenet. Retailes in the ;;0 pe-net ea wee limited by thenumbet of consumes that could m physically each the stoe. They wee also limited by the amount, of stock they could keep, because the close you ae to densely populated aeas, the moe expensive-stoage space becomes. But the Web allowed companies to locate in emote, low-ent aeas whee they could waehouse huge volumes of back stock, allowing fo unpecedented ange. They could also aggegate geogaphically dispesed niche audiences, ovecoming the poblem of' an audience too thinly spead' being the 'the same as no audience at all'. But the Long Tail syndome also epesents a victoy ove the tyanny of time: the dominance in etailing of the cuent and the band new. In taditional etail, stoage space and display space ae paid fo by a cetaih ate of sale, which is what makes it woth keeping a CD on the acks in a ecod stoe o a DVD on the shelves in a video stoe; at a cetain point, olde stock must be maked down o got id of. When stoage space gets damatically cheape (opeating out oflow-ent, exta:..uban aeas) o infinitesimally small though digitisation (Netflix's online epetoy of films and television seies digital-music companies like itunes and emusic), the esult is that inventoy can expand vastly. If the stoe display aeas ae online and vitual, thee is also absolutely no pessue to get id of olde, slow-selling items to make space fo newe eleases. 'Fom ISVDs'at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo!... to songs the itunes Music Stoe and Rhapsody.. : Andeson exults,, 'people ae going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, fa past what's available at Blockbuste Video, Towe Recods, and Banes & Noble: Going 'fa past' means going fa into the past, as much as it can also mean extending waybeyoj;ld the mainsteam (to esoteic independent-label-cultue eleases and exotic impots). Because small sales ove along peiod count 66 67

8 as pofit when stoage costs ae. infinitesimal, Andeson believes that the Long Tail appoach should entail making available 'huge chunks of theachive' at a budget pice. He specifically instucts the music industy to e-elease 'all the back catalogs as quickly as it can - thoughtlessly, automatically, and at industial scale Which is moe o less what was happening all though the last decade and going back to the nineties,eithe actively instigated by the labels themselves o licensed out to specialist companies who tawl though olde and bigge labels' back catalogues fo Famous Band's Bassist's solo albums, offshoot pojects, befoethey.:.got-famousealy stabs and afte-the-fame-faded-away hasbeen eleases. The esult has been a steady encoachment by past poduction on the window of attention that cuent poduction had hitheto dominated. In a sense, the past has always been in competition with the pesent, cultually speaking. But the teain has gadually shifted to the 'past's dastic advantage, thanks to late-nineties and ealy-2000s developments such as satellite and intenet adio (some of whose huge aay of channels ae fomatted to vintage. genes o geneational cohots) and the intenet,.connected 'infinite jukebox' that allows ba patons to select fom as many as two million tunes. Undelying these ecent innovations is the fundamental switchove fom analogue to digital: fom ecodings based aound analogues of wavefoms (vinyl, magnetic tape) to ecodings that wok though the encoding and decoding of infomation (compact discs, MP3s). This. evolution was pushed to the hilt by the music industy in the eighties, appaently quite oblivious to its Achilles heel: it is so much easie to copy audio and video when it is encoded as data. A vinyl analogue ecoding can only be copied in eal time; the magnetic infomation on an audio cassette o video tape c.an be copied at only slightly sped-up ates (othewise thee's dastic loss of fidelity). Digital encoding enables much faste copying with minimal depeciation of quality. A copy of a copy of a copy is basically the same as the oiginal, 'because it is infomation, the digital code of zeoes and ones, that is being e1?,licated. The implications of this fatal flaw became 'appaent not long afte the launch of softwae fo encoding MP3s in July 1994, fol lowed a yea late by the fist MP3 playe (WinPlaY3). Developed by the Geman eseach institute Faunhofe with the goal of being the woldwide standad medium fo digital audio/video entetainment, the MP3 gadually spead duing the late nineties.. But it only eally toqk off as bandwidth inceased and a succession of pee-to-pee file-shaing netwoks and sevices (Napste, BitTo.ent, Soulseek, etc.) took tuns to flouish and withe. The essence of the MP3 is compession. Space (the sonic depth of a ecoding) is squeezed into a vastly smalle physical aea than a vinyl ecod, an analogue tape cassette o even a lase-inscibed compact disc, while time is similaly compessed in the sense that the time it takes to copy o tansmit though the Intenet a piece of music is much biefe than the actual duation of the musical expeience. Accoding to the music-technology schola Jonathan Stene, Faunhofe developed the MP3 by devising 'a mathematical model of human auditoy peception' to wok out what data they could get away with discading because it would not be head by the aveage listene in the aveage listening situation. The techni calities of this pocess ae complex and somewhat mind-boggling (fo instance, pats of the fequency spectum ae conveted into mono, while othe pats - the stetch of the audio spectum that mqst listenes notice - stay in steeo). Suffice to say that the esult of the pocess is the chaacteistic flatness of sound-pictue and the thin-bodied textues we've all gown accustomed to though. heaing music as MP3s. (Of couse, any sense of diminishment of sonic ichness only eally applies to those of us old enough to d' ;;! ::ti m n l> 68 69

9 have had a histoy of listening to music as vinyl o compact disc;? fo many younge listenes, MP3 and music head though compute speakes and ipods is simply what ecoded sound sounds like). The shee convenience of MP3S, in tems of shaing, acquiing and potability (what the industy calls 'place-shifting', moving you music between playback devices and contexts of use), has encouaged us to adapt to the lowe-quality sound. Besides, mostmusic fans aen't audiophiles hung up on sound epodik;" tion and intangible qualities like 'pesence': Audiophiles ae usuanalogue fanatics, into ISo-gam :vinyl and tuntables that cost thousands of pounds. But the fact is that even within the. ealm of digital music thee's a ponounced diffeence in quality between an MP3 and a pe-ecoded CD. Evey so often I'll get the pope CD vesion of an album I've fallen in love with as a download, and I'll get a ude shock whenonfonted by the sense of dimension and. spatiality of the music's layes, the sculpted foce of the dums, the shee vividness of the sound. The diffeence between CD and MP3 is simila to that between 'not fom concentate' oange juice and juice that's been econstituted fom concentate. (In this analogy, vinyl would be feshly squeezed, pehaps.) Conveting muic tomp3 is a bit like the concentation pocess, and it's done fo much the same eason: it's much cheape to tanspot concentate because without the wate it takes up a lot less volume and it weighs a lot less. Yet we can all taste the diffeence. SURFING AND SKIMMING What the inventos of the MP3 wee banking on was that most of the time most of us ae not listening that closely, and we aen't listening in ideal cicumstances. Accoding to Stene, the ME3 was designed with the assumption that the listene is eithe engaged in othe, activities (wok, socialising) o, if listening immesively, 70 doing so in a noisy envionment (public tanspot, a ca, walking on a busy steet). 'The MP3 is a fom designed fo massive exchange, casual listening and massive accumulation,' he agues. Just as 'concentate' is not a dink to savou, zipped-and-opened sound files ae not music to oll aound you eas. The audio equivalent of fast food, the MP3 is the ideal fomat fo an ea whee cuent music, with its high-tunove. mico-tends anq. endless give-away podcasts and DJ mixes, is inceasingly s'omething you keep up with. So many of the consume-fiendly advances of the digital ea elate to time management: the feedom. to be inattentive o inteupted duing a television pogamme (pause, ewind), to eschedule the viewing of pogammes to when it's moe conve-' nient and to stockpile teevisual time fo a ainy day (ecodabie DVDs, TiVo). The aival ofthe CD playe in the mid-eighties was an ealy glimpse ofhow music would be affected by digitalisation. Unlike ecod playes and most tape decks; the CD'playe usually came with a emote contol. The ecod playe is an unwieldy mechanieal device fo extacting sound waves etched into vinyl gooves; the CD playe is a data-decoding machine, and theefoe much easie to pause and estat, skip to a diffeent tack, and so foth. The CD playe made it vastly moe tempting to disupt the flow of musical time: to answe the doo o go to the toilet, to leap ahead to you favouite tacks o even you favouite bit of a tack. The CD emote, essentially the same device as a TV emote, bought music unde the sway of channel-sfing logic. This was the dawn of a new digital :ea way of expeiencing time, something we've since become totally familia with. And evey gain. in consume-empoweing convenience has come at the cost of dis empoweing the powe of at to dominate ou attention, to induce a state of aesthetic suende. Which means that ou gain is also ou loss. It is also becoming vey clea that the bittle tempoality of netwoked life is not good fo ou 71 a.. AI m.

10 ;: psychological well-being; it makes us estless, eodes ou ability to focus and be in the moment. We ae always inteupting ouselves, disupting the flow of expeience.. It's not just time that is affected, it's space too. The integity of 'hee' is being factued just as much as the integity of 'now'. Reseach by Ofcom, the oganisation with authoity ove Bitain's telecommunications, suggests that families congegate in the living oom to watch TV but ae only patially pesent, because they ae busy textiiig o sufing the Web via laptops and handheld _ devices. They ae plugged into social netwoks even while nestling in the bosom of the family, a syndome that's been dubbed 'connected cocooning'. Just as the Intenet makes the pesent poous with womholes into the past, so the intimate space of the family is contaminated by the outside wold via telemetic steams of infomation. The final yeas of the 2000S saw a spate of hand-winging aticles about the penicious effects of webbed life on one's ability to concentate, along with testimonials fom people who'd tied to. beak thei addiction to the Intenet by going offline pemanently. In his famous 2008 Atlantic essay 'Is Google. Making Us Stupid?',. Nicholas Ca mouned his de-evolution fom 'a scuba dive in the sea of wods' to someone who 'zip[sl along the suface like a guy on a Jet Ski', and quoted the pathologist and medical blogge Buce Fiedman's plaintive admission that his thinking had taken on a 'staccato' quality: 'I can't ead Wa and Peace anymoe, I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of moe than thee o. fou paagaphs is too much to absob. Jskim it: Ca's essay, whioh he developed into the 2010 book The Shallows: What the Intenet Is Doing to Ou Bains, geneated a huge amount of commentay, some pedictably chaacteising him as a Luddite and Gutenbeg thowback, but moe fequently chiming in with a sense of ecognition about the ways in which webbed existence was intefeing with capacity fo focused wok and fully immesed enjoyment. Witing in the webzine Geomete, Matthew.. Cole picked up on Ca's point about hypelinks ;g d ('unlike footnotes... they don't meely point to elated woks; ::0 m they popel you towad them') to chaacteise net life in tems of 'a pepetual state ofalmost-deciding': a vaciliatoy suspension of skipping and skimming that offeed 'the illusion of action and decision' but was eally an insidious fom of paalysis. In lots of ways, though, this flighty state of distaction is the appopiate esponse to the supeabundance of choices. The ho ifying (to a wite) meme 'tl d' (too long, didn't ead) has yet to be joined by 'tl dl' and 'tl dw' (too long, didn't listen; too long didn't watch), but it can only be a matte oftime, because as many of us can attest, we'e aleady at the point of, fo instance, dag ging the scoll ba ahead when checking out a video on YouTube. Attention-deficit disode is the name of this condition, but lil<e so many ailments and dysfunctions unde late capitalism, the souce of the disode is not intenal to the suffee, not his o he fault; it's caused by the envionment, in this case the datascape. Ou attention is dispesed, tantalised, teased. So fa thee is no eal equivalent in music to skim-eading; you can't speed up lis tening itself (although you can skip ahead o beak off midway though and neve pick up whee you left off). But you can listen while doing othe things: eading a book o magazine, o sufingthe Web. Ca's 'shallows' efe to the expeiential thin-ness of music o liteatue consumed in this multitasking fashion, the fainte impmt it leaves on ou minds and heats. The eqangementoftime and space in the Intenet age seems to be mioed by distotions in one's sense of self, which : feels splayed and stuffed. The playwight Richad Foeman used the image of 'pancake people' to descibe what it feels like to be 'spead wide and thin as we connect with that vast netwok of infomation accessed by the mee touch of a button', He contasts this with the ich inteio depths of the educated self shaped

11 s.. by a pedominantly liteay cultue, whee identity is complex!1! and 'cathedal-like'. Cetainly asi sit in font of this compute I feel stetched and stessed by the options available. My self and the sceen ae one; the vaious pages and windows simultaneously open add up to a pictue of 'continuous patial attention' (the tem coined by Micosoft executive Linda Stone to descibe the fagmented consciousness caused by multitasking). It's the 'pesent' I inhabit that eally feels stetched thin, a hee-andnow pieced by potals to innumeable potential elsewhees and elsewhens. A while ago I felt a stange pang of nostalgia foboedom, the kind of absolute emptiness so familia when I was a teenage, o a college student, o a dole-claiming idle in my ealy twenties. Those geat gaping gulfs of time with absoutely nothing to fill them wo1,1ld induce a sensation of tedium so intense it was almost spiitual. This was the pe-digital ea (befoe CDs, befoe pesonal computes, long befoe the Intenet) when in the UK thee wee only thee o fou TV channels; mostly with nothing you'd want to watch; only a couple of just-about-toleable adio stations; no video stoes o DVDs to buy; no , no blogs, no webzines, no social media. To alleviate boedom, you elied on. books, magazines, ecods, all of which wee limited by what you could affod. You might have also esoted to mischief, o dugs,. o ceativity. It was a cultual economy of deaili and delay. As a music fan, you waited fo things to come out o be aied: an album, the new issues of the weekly music papes, John Pees adio show at ten o'clock, Top of the Pops on Thusday. Thee wee long anticipation-stoking gaps, and then thee wee Events, aid if you happened to miss the pogamme, the Peel show o the gig, it was gone.. Boedom, is diffeent nowadays. It's about supe-satuation, distaction, estlessness. I am often boed but it's not fo lack of options: a thousand TV.channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless 74. net adio stations, innumeable.unlistened-to albums, unwatched d DVDs and unead books, the maze-like anachive of YouTube. it ;;0 Today's boedom is not hungy, a esponse to depivation; it is n. a loss of cultual appetite, in esponse to the sufeit of claims on - you attention and time. NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT In one of the most famous scenes in Nicolas Roeg's movie The Man 1IVho Fell to Eath, David Bowie's alien Thomas Jeome Newton is seen watching a dozen televisions stacked on top of each othe at once. That image - the supe-advanced being capable of assimilating all these sepaate yet simultaneous data steams - seems a potent emblem fo whee ou cultue is heading. By the end of the movie, Newton is standed on Eath; pevented by the human authoities fom etuning to his family on the distant home planet. He becomes an alcoholic, btlt also a cult musician, eleasing eeie ecods unde the name The Visito. I'm not sue we actually get to hea what his music sounds like; I've always imagined it might be eminiscent of the second side of Low, melancholy yapous of Satie-esque sound, winty and emaciated. But what would Newton's music have been like jf it had some way paalleled the satuated, oveloaded gaze with which he watched those multiple TVs? It might have foeshadowed some of the music poduced in the late yeas of the 2000S, which suffes fom.:the syndome I call 'glutted/clotted'. Musicians glutted with influences and inputs almost inevitamake dotted music: ich and potent on some levels, but ultimately fatiguing and bewildeing fo most listenes. The poblem is most acute on the hipste finges of music-making: fee of commecial consideations, which push musicians towads accessibility and simplicity, they can exploe the info-cosmos of webbed music, ventuing into emote eaches of histoy and 75

12 . distant cones of the globe alike. 'Two ecent examples of this ;?= hype-eclectic appoach ae Hudson Mohawke's Butte and Flying Lotus's Cosmogamma, fom 2009 and 2010 espectively. Butte is pog ock updatedfothe Po Tools ea, a CGI-like fightmae of gaish and ovewoked sound. Cosmogamma is hip-hop jazz fo the ADD geneation. If it takes time to get to gips with this music, it's because, In some ways, too much time has been squeezed into it. Time in the sense of musical labou: musicians woking in home-studio conditions, using digital-audio wokstation pogams,don't have financial estictions on the amount of man-hous they can lavish on thei wok. But also time in a,cultual sense: each of the musica). styles these atists digitally splice togethe epesents a tadition that evolved and mutated ove decades, that in some sense contains embedded histoical time. Natually it equies many hous of fully attentive listening to unpack its complexities. FLYING LOTUS AND THE WEB OF SOUND Citics concu: thee's something quintessentially webby about the music of Flying Lotus, aka Steve Ellison. The Quietus's Colin McKean, fo instance, descibed Cosmogamma as 'a spawling, post-web 2.0 cacophony.. like hutling though tne digital dakness of Spotify with eveything blaing at once'. FlyLo is at once locally ooted and a post-geogaphical entity. Ellison is the hub of a Los Angeles cene that includes the club Low End Theoy, atists like Gaslamp Kille and Gonjasufi, and Ellison's own Bainfeede label. ButFlyLo ae aiso consideed pat of. an amophous, tanscontinental gene known as wonky (a contovesial tem accepted by few of the atists) that includes UK atists such as Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. Pominent in this music's supe-hybid DNA ae stands of glitchy electonica, expeimental hip hop and spacey seventies jazz fusion. Its off-kilte beat stuctues and mutant. funk gooves ae futhe spiced with day-glo synth tones and snazzy iffs that hak back to eighties electo-funk and video-game music. It's this omnivoousness that makes FlyLo and its gene so chaacteistically Web 2.0. As EllisQn, put it in one inteview, 'Why not just have all these things fom ou past as well as all of the newest technology fom today in one, and just eally come up with the caziest shit we can?' Time, of couse, is the one thmg that most listenes don't have at (j' the'i-disposal these days. $!. Atists and listenes ae in the same boat, a:nd that boat is sinking in 'the mie of options', to use the Zen Buddhist tem. 'Restiction is the mothe of invention: said Holge Czukay of Can, pointedly defining the goup's minimal appoach against the maximalism of thei pog-ock and jazz-fusion contempoaies. But you might also say that 'estiction is the mothe of immesion'. In othe wods, tuly expeiencing music in any kind of intimate depth means econciling oneself to the eality of finitude: you'll neve be able to listen popely to moe than a faction of the toent of music being made today, let alone acoss the span of human histoy. This is one of the big questions of ou ea: can cultue suvive in conditions of limitlessness? Yet as much as the Intenet's instant access ovewhelms, it also pesents oppotunities. Thee. What makes the music timely, then, is not its components (which ae fom eveywhee and eveywhen) but the way it is put togethe ('We have the technology!' exults Ellison) and the sensibility it mios. FlyLo is made by and fo nevous systems moulded by online cultue; this music is difting, distacted, assembling itself-accoding to an additive logic of audio geed. When Nicholas Ca wites in The Shallows about how the 'calm,' focused... linea mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out infomation in shot, disjointed, often ovelapping busts', this could be the opening paagaph of a Cosmogamma eview. FlyLo music seems to contain its own hypeliilrs (multiple stylistic jump-cuts can occu within a single tack) and windows (up to eighty layes in a single Cosmogamma tack). It's the skitteing scattebain sound of netwoked consciousness, epeatedly inteupted by utaway, feeze-fames and zooms in and out of focus. Most listenes find Cosmogamma to be daunting and ovewhelming initially. Pitchfok's Joe Colly descibed the music as 'fustatingly unstable until you hea it a few times and the pieces begin to intelock and congeal'. I hated Cosmogamma at fist. Eventually I found a way into it. But the 'good bits', fo this listene, occu in the idyllic moments of claity and esolution: paticula 76

13 ae atists who. ae navigating the Web's cheppy infe-ecean and, ;?:. specifically, sifting theugh YeuTube's immense flea maket ef memey, finding new pessibilities fe ceativity. Nice Muhly, a ising yeung cempese who. stted as a petege ef Philip Glass, eften daws On souce mateial fem the Web in his wek. Seme of his pieces wee initially spaked by YouTube finds; He might, fe instance, cempese a vielin cencete based aeund Renaissance ideas abeut astenemy, an inteest fisttiggeed by stumbling en eighties educatienal videos abeut the sela system upleaded by seme nameles& nutte ente YeuTube, cemplete with veic,e-eves fem new. vaguely kitschy figues like Cal Sagan. O he'll wek en a piece designed to. accempany bizaely banalyeutube clips, videes ef semeene's backyad e a pesen deing heusewek When I went eund to. Muhly's apatment in Manhattan's Chinatewn to. inteview him eve lunch (an expetly pepaed cauliflewe cheese), he teld me he was weking en an 'intenet epea' inspied by the tue stey of a 'yeunge bey who. invents seven enline identities to. seduce an e\de bey, ana then he gets stabbed in the chest'. On the subject ef theinfluenceofyoutube potions of multisegmented songs, o occasionally whole tacks like 'Mmmhmm', sleepy hollows of melodic epose that offe a haven fom the Koyaanisqatsi-like on-ush.. The paadox of Cosmogamma is that it is a classic 'gowe', that oldfashioned tem fo an album that equies many plays befoe it unfolds its magic. Cosmogamma eflects the dispesed, factued sensibility of digital modenity, but it eally demands a mode of contemplative listening associated with the analogue ea. FlyLo music clealy has spiitual intent, yet it mios and exacebates the kind of jittey mind-state least conducive to meditative consciousness. Cosmogamma, Ellison explains, means 'the studies that map out the univese and the elations of heaven and hell'. Pehaps what he is tying to.'say' with his music is that what seems like hell (the stimuli oveload of the Web, whee eveything becomes pon) could be heaven, if we could just find a way of gooving with and thugh the chaos. 78 and the Web in geneal en his music, Muhly talked abeut hew d he weuld disappea dewn 'Intenet wemheles. The Web is eally scay fe that! Ifyeu stat checking eut peeple who. dess up thei (") l> miniatue penies likeweks ef at, thee's five hunded theusand!= things like that!' The New Yoke pefile that fist beught his name to. Wide attentien made much ef the fact that Muhly was a Web 2.0. gen eatien cempese, witing his music ente a vitual scee in his cempute while eplying to. s, chatting via istant messag ingand paticipating in seveal simultaneeus enline Scabble games. Clealy a high-functiening ceatue ef the multitasking ea, Muhly's appeach to. cempesitien is chaacteistically webby in its asseciatienal dift. He calls it 'penetative naative', but it is eally mee like an anti-naative. And Muhly's mede ef eseach is the same as his mede ef cempesitien: nen-linea.'plunging theugh things in anethe way, like putting a knife though a tele phene beek; is hew he descibes it. 'A paticula aea, like, say astenemy, leads to. semething else, and thatin tutn will lead to. semething else altegethe. This endless thing whee thee's no. beginning and thee's no. end, and the naative ef it is just yeu path though it.' Whee Muhly meves theugh the weld ef Canegie Hall and. the English Natienal Opea, Daniel Lepatin exists in a tetally diffeent milieu ef meden music: the expeimental electenic undegeun ef Beeklyn squat gigs and vinyl/cassette-enly mice-iabels. Yet these two. talents aeespending to. simila mace-cultual shifts: th.e emegence efthe Intenet as a landscape efthe sublime, eccupying a eughly equivalent place to. Natue in the imaginatien ef the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuy cempese, and to. the city fe the twentieth-centuy cempese. In his camped Beeklyn bachele pad, Lepatin'sasenal ef vintage synths and hythm bexes is just an am's each away fem his giant-sceen cempute. He spends mest ef his time indees, 79

14 :i11! eithe doodling on the synths o sufing the Web. The ecodings he's eleased unde thename Oneohtix Point Neve -like 2009'S Rifts, voted the no. 2 album of the yea by Wie magazine - ae Jo the most pat amophously abstact yet hamonically euphonious instumentals ceated using apeggiated synth melodies and pulsating sequence pattens. But the 'echo jams' he did unde aliases like KGB Man and Sunsetcop ae what made the widest. impact: mashups of audio and video mateial he's scavenged on YouTube. In paticula, 'Nobody Hee' - built out of a tiny loop of vocal fom Chis De Bugh's 'The Lady in Red' and a vintage ighties compute-animation gaphic called 'Rainbow Road' became a YouTube hit in its own ight, chalking up ove thity thousand hits ove the couse of seveal months. Not massive compaed to Lady Gaga, but in the context of the undegound scene he comes fom, 'Nob.odyHee' was a Thille-level smash. Pat of its appeal is that listenes accustomed to thinking of. Chis De Bugh's late-eighties chat-toppe as putidly sentimental find themselves movd by the desolate yeaning in the tiny except that Lopatin zooms in on. Combined with 'Rainbow Road' (a colo-spectum amp of fluoescent light that sways back and foth acoss the sceen against a backdop of skyscape;s), the effect is an eeie melancholy. A fan of vintage 'vecto gaphics and cad-cam eighties video at', Lopatin was dawn to this paticula 'found visual' because. the 'Gothic uban skyline' undecut the 'sappy, sentimental associations of ainbows'. It also cystallised his ap.enated feelings about his own life in the city. Hence the aching esonance' of the Chis De Bugh loop: 'Thee's nobody hee: Lopatin has been echo-jamming fo yeas. It stated as a way to bunk off fom his deay day job without actually leaving his office cubicle. 'I was a total 9-to-5e;. so boed, apd this was the kind of music I could make at wok, just ipping stuff fom YouTube. Back then I wasn't doing it to impess anyone, it was just a eally cathatic thing to do while I was doing menial office labou.' An 'echo jam' is not just a staightfowad montage of an audio loop and a video loop. Afte isolating the mico-excepts he finds compelling.:... a splinte oflonging fom an old Kate Bush o Fleetwood Mac song, a heatboken pang fom Janet Jackson o Alexande O'Neal, the deamy vocal-only beakdown of a Euotance anthem -Lopatin coats it with 'a ton of echo'. Because he's 'not a paty animal', he'll also slow the music down, a technique deived fom Houston's legenday DJ Scew, whose 'scewed' mixtapes involved playing gangsta ap at nacotically topid tempos. Lopatin also slows down the video IQops,.which.ae all souced fom YouTube and then conveted and edited using Windows Movie Make. Among his favouite souces ae eighties TV com-. mecialsfom the Fa East o fom the Communist bloc pomoting new video and audio technology. In one.echo jam, a young Soviet couple blissfully shae a 'his and hes' potable cassette playe with twin headphone sockets. Lopatin likes to downplay the ceativity involved, in echo jams. 'It's eally simple. I'm uncomfotable with the idea that I'm an autho of this stuff. I'm just paticipating in stuff that's happening all acoss YouTube, kids doing simila things allove: That may be tue, but the suplus value Lopatinbings is theconcptual famewok to his pojects, which elates to cultual me:p.oy and the buied utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those elated to consume technology in the computing and audio/video entetainment aea. Gatheing togethe hls best echo jams fo the 2009 pvd Memoy Vague, Lopatin agued in the line note that 'no commecial wok is outside of the each of atistic eclamation'. These peoccupations came to fuition with a long piece Lopatin ceated in 2010 fo an exhibition of sound at: a deconstuctive unavellingof a 1994 infomecial he found on YouTube. Sixteen minutes of copoate popaganda fo the Pefoma d i:! ;;0 m 80 81

15 i: ('the family Macintosh fom Apple, with the futue built ight in') is conveted into a thity-minute echo-jam symphony. 'The Matinettis Bing Home a Compute', as both the oiginal info..: mecial and Lopatin's teatment ae titled, captues a moment in the ealy nineties when the infomation. supehighway held out the sam pomise of emancipation and expanded hoizons that' the ceation of the intestate feeway system once did. What oiginally snagged Lopatin's Web-sufing was the high poduction values and Robet Altman-movie-Ievel' acting of the infomecial, pobably deposited on YouTube as an online esume by its diecto (although these days it's pefectly possible that thee ae actually fans of infomecials, auteuist connoisseus assiduously cuating the gene on the Web). Lopatin's deconstucted vesion stats wth snippets of the elegiac music on the oiginal scoe, which heloops into endless wistful-yet-gaseous efain. Gadually, some alaming slitheing and etching sounds. insinuate themselves into the idyll, along with the estless tap tap tap of compute keys. The slimy sounds evealthemselves' to be gotesquely slowed-down dialogue fom the family scenes in the infomecial: 'We wee having,the time ofou lives with the coil1 pute'; 'Thee's a whole othe wold out thee'; 'The funny thing was, the compute fit ight into ou family just like it belonged: Lopatin descibes this section of the piece as 'an exploding mess of cultual noise, all these.voices and desies ovelapping, as the family membes expess thei desie to own this compute and why they want it. The infomecial's angle is that it's a kind of Renaissance machine and it'll make the whole family into this holistic entity. Evey membe will get what they need out ofit. It'll bing them togethe but it'll also bing out the individuality: But what the compute ultimately epesents is.a pew stage in the disintegation of the family: the netwoked family is pomiscuously, intemeshed with extenal systems, plugged into emote steams of data. 'Nil Admiai', a cacophonous tack on Oneohtix Point Neve's 2010 album Retunal, exploes the same idea: it's a sound.,. d painting of a moden household, whee the outside wold's $! - violence pous in though the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic data. 'The mom's sucked into CNN, feaking out about Code Oange teoist shit; says Lopatin. 'Meanwhile, the kid is in the othe oom playing Halo 3, inside that weid Mas envionment killing some James Cameon-type pedato.' If 'The Matinettis Bing Home a Compute' is about the sin iste side of infomation technology, it's also about its seductive ness: the bight futue that a new compute o digital gadget seems heald. Yet the speed of technological advance means that each beloved machine is endeed obsolete with uthless apidity. With individuals and businesses thowing outinfo-tech evey two o thee yeas, obsolete computes ae a huge envionmental poblem. 'I'm supe into fomats, into jillllz, into outmoded technology; says Lopatin. 'I'm supe into the idea that the apid-fie pace of capitalism is destoying ou elationships to objects. All this dives me back, but what dives me is a desie to connect, not to elive things. It's not nostalgia! He agues that the idea of 'pogess' itself is diven by the economic equiements of capitalism as m)-lch.as by science o human ceativity. In a 2009 manifstolike aticle, he decied the fixation onjinea pogess, poposing instead the opening up of 'spaces fo ecstatic egession... We homage the past to moun,to celebate, and to time tavel.' Disappeaing down 'Intenet womholes' - Nico Muhly's quippy desciption of his meandes acoss the Web so contains the idea of time tavel. The subject of endless speculation by physicists and a popula device in science fiction, the 'tavesable womhole' cuts though a fold in the fabic of the space-time contfnuum and ceates a shot cut; theoetically, it could wok as a time tunnel. Muhly's wonphole metapho bings out a quasiastophysical dimension to the Web: this is cybespace, a cosmos of infomation and memoy. Which is also how achives wok 82 83