Sonic warfare

What's happened to Burial’s new album? Since the Mercury-nominated Untrue came out in 2007, only a limited amount of new material has sporadically appeared, most of which has been amazing. My favourite is Untitled Track II, which was played on BBC 1Xtra in 2009.

Burial surfaced in 2006 and maintained a Banksy-style anonymity until he decided that this was detracting from the music and outed himself as South Londoner Will Bevan, alumni of the Elliot School in Putney, also attended by Hot Chip, Four Tet and the XX. Usually lumped in with the dubstep scene,  Burial’s esoteric beats are mesmerisingly haunting and elegiac, setting him apart in a scene which has become increasingly homogeneous.
 
He talks beautifully about his music and the 'dark' aspect of it. In an interview with The Guardian he says:

"When I'm awake all night, sometimes I see the people and the city waking up around me. I feel a little bit moody at them for stepping into my night-time. What I want is that feeling when you're in the rain, or a storm. It's a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it's just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale-song, a cry in the dark, the far cry."

It's difficult to put into words what 'dark' means in terms of dub-influenced electronica, but it usually features a predominance of minor or chromatic keys and resonant, sub-low bass, creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

I’ve always been interested in dark music, which probably started when I first heard the Dr Who theme tune! I remember being into drum and bass about ten years ago and reading somewhere that drum and bass nights in London were banning DJs from playing dark drum and bass because it was causing people to start fighting! I remember being fascinated that music could still have such a chemical and primal effect on people, albeit in a negative way.

I’d love to explore this theme further. Kode9 (AKA Steve Goodman) runs the Hyperdub record label and is the man who discovered Burial. Without trying to make sweeping generalisations, I’m willing to bet he’s the only producer in dubstep to have a PhD in Philosophy. He lectures on sonic culture at the University of East London and he’s published a book called Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. I want this book!

It explores ways in which sound and music have been used to control and affect people. The description on Amazon talks about “the cosmic vibrations left behind by the big bang” and “the politics of frequency”. Intriguing stuff!

Most people are aware of the guards in Gauntanamo Bay subjecting detainees to Metallica at full volume for hours on end to induce them into confessing. The BBC also reported in 2006 that a mobile sonic device was being used in Grimsby to deter teenagers from lingering around shops in target areas by emitting an ultra-high frequency blast (around 19–20 kHz) that teenagers or people under approximately 20 are susceptible to and find uncomfortable.

Sonic weapons are officially classified as Non-Lethal Weapons and are an area of research for the military. In The Men Who Stare at Goats, a 2004 book about paranormal and psychological techniques used in the military, author Jon Ronson cites a leaked US military report titled "Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References" in which 21 acoustic weapons are listed, in various stages of development. Infrasound is described as "Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles... biophysical effects are projected to be: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur".

Pretty frightening stuff, but even more intriguing is a technique called the Psycho-Correction Device, which "involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages". Ronson cites an account from a English Guantanamo Bay detainee called Jamal Al-Harith who described being played at normal volume a Fleetwood Mac CD which may or may not have contained subliminal messages.

Not having read the book, I can't vouch for it's credibility or veracity – maybe the story about Fleetwood Mac is just Rumours...

Back to the future

Recently I was listening to Mark Ronson's single Bang Bang Bang on YouTube and guess what? I actually quite like it! It features Q-Tip and MNDR and displays some nice retro-futurist vibes, which I've been thinking about a lot lately. It also bizarrely appropriates the lyrics of traditional French nursery rhyme Allouette – a song about plucking the feathers from a Skylark!


The song and video evoke a kind of 60s/70s futuristic feel, with the effect that it manages to seem retro and strangely foward-thinking at the same time.

This also struck me about Julian Casablancas' solo album Phrazes for the Young (even the title, actually taken from an Oscar Wilde title, gives off this vibe with the use of the z!). It's all spacey analogue synths and and the artwork is all planets and trippy 80s lazers.

I like this retro-futurist schtick, but I can't help thinking, are these artists (both known for their previous retro-laden work) duping people into thinking that they're making a progression, while simply aping forward-thinking notions of yet another past era?

It's like when, a few years ago, indie bands started ditching their guitars for synthesisers as a reaction to retro guitar music which relied too heavily on the past.

This in itself is pretty meaningless, because no-one's trying to pretend there's anything modern about synthesisers – they've been commercially available since the 60s (Wikipedia claims the synthesiser was actually invented in 1876!) and anyway, the synths they started using were all analogue.

And what does futuristic actually mean now? Does it have connotations separate from it's actual meaning? To me it evokes, among other things, minimalism and a pre-occupation with space travel. In the 50s and 60s I guess space travel was the be-all-and-end-all in terms of the future, but now it seems that people are more concerned with our own planet and how to conserve it! Minimalism seems pretty retro now, too.

And is it just me, or do computers in sci-fi films still seem to operate in DOS?!

Now that the possibilities for the future seem so limitless, maybe the term futuristic itself is a retro concept?

In a nice bit of synchronicity, last week I found a copy of cult 1986 Disney film Flight of the Navigator (in, of all places, a cottage in Cornwall) and the theme tune is eerily similar to Bang Bang Bang! This was one of the defining films of my childhood, but I haven't seen it or thought about it for about 15 years.


The plot bears repeating for it's sheer ludicrousness (the film also features an early performance from Sarah Jessica Parker as a NASA intern!).

Twelve-year-old David is kidnapped by an alien spacecraft which is conducting experiments on different life-forms. Determining that humans only use 10% of their brains (err, hang on a minute...) it fills the other 90% of David's brain with maps. The fruits of this experiment are never revealed. For whatever reason, eight years pass before David is taken back to earth, not having aged (The spaceship believed that humans may not be able to withstand time travel, which is why he wasn't dropped off back at the time he was picked up). His family, who thought he was dead, are delighted and confused to see him, but it is all a bit exhausting for them and after a while his dad and brother go back to bed.

However the spaceship then crashes and is impounded by NASA, who are also studying David to find out why he hasn't aged since his disappearance. David gets aboard the Trimaxian Drone Ship (Max) who reveals that he lost his space maps in the crash and needs to download them from David's brain to get back to his planet, Phaelon. Despite claiming not to know what human emotions or humour are, Max does a good line in camp sardonicism. He downloads the maps and the two fly about pointlessly for a while, with David navigating, before deciding to take David home to Florida. Despite being able to travel through time and space, they consult a standard road map to get there.

Then David decides that actually he wants to go back in time to the point where he was kidnapped and Max agrees to take him, which makes you think, what on earth was the whole point?

I guess I thought this film was pretty futuristic when I was younger, but it seems so dated now. At one point a still frame is used to depict a crowd as a shadow flies over them.

Flight of the Navigator fans – Disney are currently planning a remake!

Anyway, in a nice subversion of retro-futurism (future-retroism?), art project ALT/1977 imagines how modern technological gadgets would have been marketed in the 1970s. My favourite is a re-imagining of the iPod, called the Pocket HiFi, with the strapline "Like a party in your pocket. But not in a weird way"!


There is also the LapTron 64 computer ("Apple II? Seriously?"), the MobileVoxx ("Stop missing calls. Start interrupting movies") and the Microcade 3000 handheld games console ("A child's toy that can literally guide nuclear warheads. Whoops!").

Alt/1977 artist Alex Varanese says: "The irony is I’d gladly trade in my immac­u­lately designed 21st cen­tury gad­gets for these hideously clunky, faux-wood-panelled pieces of über-kitsch. Sorry, Apple."

Is this kosher?

The other week I went to see the "truly terrifying" Ghost Stories at the Duke of York's Theatre on St Martin's Lane (for free London theatre tickets go here if you're under 26!). The play features Nicolas Burns from Nathan Barley and is not that scary!

Anyway, at one point a joke was told to highlight people's differing perceptions of situations to help explain the concept of PAREIDOLIA, the psychological phenomenon where vague/random stimuli are perceived as being significant.

The joke went something like this:

A Frenchman, a Scotsman and a Jew are all in the desert. The Frenchman says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have wine!". The Scotsman says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have Scotch!" and the Jew says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have diabetes!"

Now, in my subsequent retelling of this joke, I was met with a range of reactions.

One friend of Jewish heritage said in an email, "Yeah that's really funny because we're all neurotic and have big noses".

It's difficult to accurately gauge tone from emails, but I read this as world-weary sarcasm, along the lines of "How hilarious, yet another propagation of a crass generalisation about Jewish people". Now, I fully sympathise with this interpretation, but I think that it misses the point of the joke!

Firstly, I want to start by talking about the JEWISH/NEUROSIS stereotype. I know around ten people who would describe themselves as being of Jewish heritage and I wouldn't describe any of them as having the defining characteristic of neurosis. So where does my understanding of this come from?


Almost exclusively from Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the films of Woody Allen.

In this funny interview, Larry David and Ricky Gervais talk about neurosis being one of the hallmarks of Jewish comedy. This is illustrated by a scene from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer says "Don't you see the rest of the country looks on New York like we're left-wing communist Jewish homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here!"


Note that the people I've mentioned are American and, more specifically, from New York City (although Curb Your Enthusiasm is set in LA). I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of this theme, but I'm talking expressly about my own experiences. What I'm trying to say is that I associate the JEWISH/NEUROSIS stereotype specifically with New York Jewish comedians, and as such it is a WEAK stereotype in my mind.

In other words, the propagation of this generalisation is NOT enough to make me laugh, yet I still find this joke really funny. Why?

Because I'm laughing at the absurdity which arises when a base-level joke such as the ENGLISHMAN/IRISHMAN/SCOTSMAN one tries to deal with the relatively complex concept of neurosis.

This joke is usually used in England to portray Irish people as being stupid (a generalisation that PWEI does not reflect!). Interestingly this format of joke is used all around the world – Wikipedia cites combinations such as Dutchman/German/Belgian and Swede/Dane/Norwegian.

When this is replaced by the more subtle idea of portraying Jewish people as neurotic, the joke's limitations are exposed, and it's funny!

Also, I love the contrast brought to mind between STUPIDITY and NEUROSIS. Calling someone a neurotic is really not that much of an insult!

I'm aware that it's not particularly funny to analyse a joke in this way – for more on this, see this article by Charlie Brooker, but I wanted to stand up for this one, because it's just the kind of subtle subversion that makes me laugh.

But even if the premise of the joke isn't racist, that doesn't necessarily mean the joke isn't offensive. You could say that the subversion of humour doesn't excuse the propogation of a crass stereotype, however mild. What do you think? Let's generate debate and maybe we can achieve CULTURAL UNITY...



IN OTHER NEWS, SPOTTED: A youth on St John's Road, SW11, teaming Barbour countrywear with sports-casual tracksuit bottoms. He has GONE BEYOND. Sadly target evaded capture on camera. Send your CULTURECLASH photos to popwilleatitself@live.com!

Fancy that!

CORRECTION: Last week I worried that making fun of Jack Wills would leave me open to charges of INVERSE CULTURAL SNOBBERY. I've since realised that I was merely guilty of INVERSE SNOBBERY.

INVERSE CULTURAL SNOBBERY amounts to a Desert Island Deal viewer being mockingly disparaging about Daniel Defoe's SEMINAL NOVEL.

Today while strolling along the Haymarket in the West End, I came across the tourist gift shop Fancy That of London. (Note the SENTRY OF THE QUEEN'S GUARD to the left – he plays a key role in this tale!)



Fancy That sells the typical array of Union Jack-emblazoned TOURIST TAT,



and (obviously) Marilyn Monroe clocks.



But what really piqued my interest was a group of Asian tourists who were having their photo taken with the aforementioned sentry.



Now, the sharper PWEI readers will have already noted that THIS ISN'T A REAL GRENADIER GUARD! It's a man wearing a costume.

If these guys had walked the mile's distance down Piccadilly and across Green Park to Buckingham Palace, they could have taken a picture of the real thing! (and also burnt 75 calories, according to walkit.com)

This got me thinking, why are people so willing to accept FAKE CULTURE?

These tourists were either too lazy to seek out real culture, preferring to stick to the tourist traps of the west end, or they live in a world where they believe (or choose to believe) that, while not guarding the official royal residences of our sovereign, sentries like to hang out outside gift shops posing for photos with tourists.

Either way, it seems they are refusing to engage with British culture as it stands today.

Now, I too have been guilty of this in the past. Anyone who has backpacked around south-east Asia (or read Alex Garland's 1996 novel The Beach) may be familiar with THE BANANA PANCAKE PHENOMENON.

I am referring to the cafes, hotels and restaurants along the well-trodden tourist routes of Thailand, India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia that serve banana pancakes for breakfast in an attempt to cater for western tastes.

Despite being meant to be native to Western countries, these pancakes actually seem exotic to tourists – in this way they are part of a distinct culture of their own – TRAVELLER CULTURE.

These tourist routes have even been re-named The Banana Pancake Trail, in what Wikipedia refers to as an "affectionate nickname" but which to me sounds slightly derogatory!

When I was teaching in Darjeeling, in West Bengal, India, I used to kick back in a place called Joey's Pub. Here's a bad picture of Joey behind the bar (no I don't think that's his real name):



Despite having upholstered wooden stools and benches, Guinness posters on the walls and serving bangers and mash, Joey's Pub failed to re-create the atmosphere of a TRADITIONAL ENGLISH BOOZER, while remaining clearly distinct from other Indian bars.

This distinction seems to come at the point where TOURIST meets SMALL-TIME ENTERPRISING BUSINESSMAN. But what's interesting is that, just as we are attempting to sell Eastern tourists their own pre-conceived ideas about England, they are attempting to sell us exactly the same! I think that says more about us than it does about them.

Where am I going with this? I like banana pancakes – they're DELICIOUS. And Eastern interpretations of Western culture are fascinating in themselves. But flying half way around the world just to experience BEING A TRAVELLER seems kind of absurd.

I am aware that this topic has probably already been done to death – Alex Garland's novel itself was written as a criticism of backpackers who view south-east Asia as a cultural themepark – I'm just trying to relate it to my own experiences.

Maybe I'm being unfair to the tourists who visit London's tacky gift shops. I am aware from experience how it can sometimes be difficult to make the distinction between REAL CULTURE and FAKE CULTURE. And anyway, maybe Fancy That of London is more representative of modern capitalist London than Buckingham Palace is.

Anyway, lest anyone accuse PWEI of NOT FULLY ENGAGING, here are some photos from my recent travels to, respectively, Bristol (note the sinister pigs' heads in the background),



and Rochester, Kent.