Showing posts with label K-Punk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label K-Punk. Show all posts

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Neighbourhood of Infinity

A number of moving tributes coming in, and many worth reading, from friends, fellow writers, students, associates, and contemporaries of Mark Fisher.  Perhaps lost in this shuffle is the wide array of musicians who not only admired Mark's thought, but also saw him as an influence/spiritual guide.  K-Punk's blog was at its most vocal during the 'naughts, an era that Mark often thought was the full realization of neoliberalism's dream of an end to history, where bands and acts mainly became a tabulation of referents with nothing important to offer on the present moment or what the future might bring. (Living through it, yes it really did seem that way for most of the decade).  This made Mark mournful for a lost sense futurism and it was largely music that shared this sentiment- against or desolate about the "slow cancellation of the future"- that he championed during this period.

Then, something incredible happened; Burial began giving a limited series of interviews that sounded like they could have been interviews with K-Punk himself from an alternate dimension. Soon, his ideas began popping up more and more in interviews, until without warning the sonic landscape didn't sound quite so drab anymore.  Though retro-leaning guitar acts still dominated "indie" sales, all the chatter was about artsy weirdoes from working class backgrounds, depressed 1%ers drowning in melancholy synth unable to detox from the desiring mechanism, and projects either steeped in a versatile pop/experimental theoretical framework or conducive to one, being written up with enthusiasm by a new school of eager music writers who'd whet their appetite on the blog community Mark assembled.


Indirectly or directly, it's no exaggeration to say that music sounds much more interesting these days because of the way K-Punk seeped into its aural bloodstream.  For this, we should all be grateful.  We should also note that this all happened at a time when the music press, for all intents and purposes, died.  While many quite literally published their last issues, others sank further into irrelevance as they struggled to find or ignored altogether any semblance of a zeitgeist.    K-Punk and the community he fostered brought back the urgency of music criticism in the late 70s and early 80s, where there seemed to be a direct feed between the journalists and the creators.

Perhaps most impressive though was the two-way roadways he opened up with the icons that inspired him.  Energized by the thrill of postpunk and early synthpop, Mark continued to champion Mark Stewart and John Foxx long after many had forgotten about them. In turn, they both seemed turned on by his ideas about hauntology, renewed modernism, and the like, and it seemed to infiltrate their own late era work.


































































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Saturday, January 14, 2017

Nothing Here Now But the Links

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/
http://k-punk.org/
http://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/mark-fisher
https://frieze.com/contributor/mark-fisher
http://www.thewire.co.uk/about/contributors/mark-fisher
http://www.zero-books.net/authors/mark-fisher
http://www.gonzocircus.com/incubate-special-exclusief-essay-tijdstrijd-door-mark-fisher-k-punk/
http://www.electronicbeats.net/started-from-the-bottom-mark-fisher-on-drakes-nothing-was-the-same/
http://www.electronicbeats.net/mark-fisher-recommends-james-blakes-overgrown/
http://www.electronicbeats.net/mark-fisher-on-dj-rashads-double-cup/
http://www.electronicbeats.net/mark-fisher-on-the-strangers-watching-dead-empires-in-decay/
http://www.electronicbeats.net/psychedelic-urbanism-mark-fisher-recommends-john-foxx-and-the-maths-evidence/
http://www.ccru.net/archive/seduction.htm
http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/fisher.html
http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/345
http://www.riddim.ca/?p=154
weirdly his most controversial article was one about solidarity over pointless infighting and bickering: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299



Too many to list, but there's a good start for the curious. I was late to start on his blog, but at one point in the late aughts I went back and read the whole thing from the beginning,which was one of the best decisions I ever made.


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RIP K-Punk


aka Mark Fisher

A legend and an incredible mind. Can't even describe how much his writings on music, fiction, philosophy, late capitalism, film, PKD, postpunk/synthpop, Ballard, Cronenberg, jungle, and of course cyberpunk have shaped my entire worldview. His blog, as well as writings through CCRU to The Wire to his books, were pivotal in not only directing so much of the conversation, but giving it balance and insight. He also introduced important topics, going so far as to coin key terms like capitalist realism and hauntology ( a term borrowed from Derrida but brought to the world of art/music/film/lit by Mark). In the early days of the blogs, he took the music crit world to places it never could have gone in the old days of print publications and turned it into a new art form, connecting dots hiding in plain sight but no one ever pointed out. He made dense theory accessible and tried to imbue his writing with the energy of the things he was passionate about. His blunt honesty about struggling with mental illness and the effects that "class unconsciousness" labored to reinforce one's own ill sense of health was a comfort at times when I was struggling to find employment and slowly realizing that writing about music was never going to pay the bills, as well as a wake up call to the ways ideology seeped into everyday life.

I've missed his voice as of late as it seemed he had been less public, which I took as a chance to focus on family and his work as a lecturer and teacher. Although it's unclear what caused his passing at this point, his loss is tremendous and will be felt for years to come.

As we enter into an era where it seems like everything is fucked and so little hope seems to creep out, it's perhaps good to re-read some of Mark's writings on depression as a phenomena with political dimensions and intentions:

"Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together – and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics. 
...We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

Though he was often brutally frank about the utter dismal state of life under neoliberalism, he was ultimately an optimist, who saw pockets of resistance everywhere in pop culture, just waiting to manifest as direct action.  There'd be no greater honor to his memory than to make this so.

It didn't heard hurt that his taste in music aligned very close to my own...


















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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Slow Motion Suicide

Perhaps like most of you, I wasn't aware that Daft Punk had released a film two years back. It has just been released on DVD via Vice Records. It's not at all what you might expect, especially had you seen their anime Inter5tella 5555, for reasons detailed in my review here. Quite interesting stuff though, for those willing to brave the desert terrain.



More reviewing here for Grouper's new album, which is a really rare find. Didn't know what I was expecting when this arrived in the post, but I was definitely blown away when it came through the speakers. The unintentional sibling to Belong's fantastic Colorloss Record, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill might just be the perfect pairing for a year-end superlative blowout.

On the non-authored-by-me front, there continues to be a great dearth of textual analysis emerging from the Dubstep scene. Notably in recent weeks, K-Punk's article on 2562 and the convergence of the scene with minimalism. The Quietus also has a nice review of the Bug's new album (a long awaited follow-up that more than lives up to its anticipation, which i will also be weighing in on in a few weeks) which explores the double meaning of the word "Dread", particularly how it pertains to the new school of dub (though it doesn't really talk about the album itself too much).
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