Pttrns – Body Pressure (electronica)

Simon Reynolds wrote an interesting book about the recycling of culture, particularly mass- and popular culture, particularly music (it’s called Retromania if you want to read it). His central point, that culture is revived and recycled on an every decreasing cycle until it reaches the point at which no new language is possible, a sort of stylistic event horizon, is a valid one. However, underlying this observation is the important understanding that all language, of any kind, has always been concerned with other language; Pttrns make extensive use of established practices and motifs in Body Pressure, but so has every artist in every field. The moments of apparent rupture come in work that is fortunate enough to crest a technological …

Paranoid Android – Paper God (new wave)

Punk was like some kind of natural catastrophe: in terms of the frantic pace of pop-music it happened an eon ago, but the shockwaves that spread outward from its point of impact, like a tsunami, get more powerful the more open ocean they traverse. Our understanding of popular music before punk is now characterised by a growing awareness of its crypto-oppositional qualities; and the narrative of its subsequent history is dominated by its influence on all kinds of rock music, and a lot of electronic music as well.