Invasion of The Mole Men!! Crossing over Live to Eliza Day…
Those of you who have joyfully ejected yourselves from reality as we perceive it in yukky flesh and blood and embraced sexy cyberspace will get where this is all going. The sleepy sighs of the music ‘scene’, echoing through the concrete jungles of our world, are lacking in sparkle and devoid of magic. This is because sonic evolution is no longer being conjured up in production the way it once was in our physical environment. Music in all its transient mystery has eluded the real world and moved on into the immersive possibilities of the internet. That’s where it’s at ya’ll. Swag.
In the last couple of years, one of the great visionary, snake-hipped prophets of our time, David Bowie, has had his two-tone, misty-eyed burbling proven, “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within ten years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in ten years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen… ” (June 9, 2002).
The current music movement is a Technicolor dreamboat of themes, memes, mash-ups, sampling and style. Slowing down Screw style and speeding up to super-psychotic acmes of innovation that all takes place on social networks like Facebook, Rateyourmusic and Soundcloud, and secret groups in revolt against mainstream media.
Writing about witch haus, Seapunk, Lolicore and home-spun hip-hop almost goes against the point of this kind of production. In fact some of the most ardent witch house occultists deliberately remove all recognisable information from the internet in order to keep the ‘scene’ pure and avoid being put into a box, or just having to deal with people who don’t know what the ef is up.
Witch haus as an underground music movement is pretty difficult to describe or pin down. It’s not directly related to slowed down beats or horror like it is sometimes referred to by those who are only exposed to the more ‘commercial’ witch haus derivation bands like Salem. How it pretty much works is that a bunch of like-minded internet geeks all over the world spend most of their days online and smoking a lot of pot while their imaginations and DJ skills run wild on scintillating aesthetics and breaking music boundaries.
The most impressive part of this primordial pie in the sky is that the amount of production that is coming out of these online artists is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Due to the close-knit nature of the networks, music is produced all day, every day and then enjoyed by others the same day at parties or even remixing it and putting it on a mixtape for further sharing online.
The chat on the groups is like high school on speed after hitting fast forward on your VCR. Slang and style changes faster than you can send a trend and what was hot on YouTube last week is considered ‘classic listening’ today. You pretty much have to constantly contribute if you want to keep up.
Meme’s the word in the incredible secret society. Music’s also never looked so damn good; these fashionably correct creators really know how to put the swag in drag.
Finally a direct refusal to go down the shallow nasal passage of synthetic pop, ‘Cyber Wave’ is what is going to carry music, at least until the next digital development.
Now for South Africa to join the unreal world and get some serious broadband.
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