the club and headspace networked
It’s safe to say at this point that house and techno music have taken a neoclassical turn. With mnml techno falling out of favor, house and techno are squarely in an era of reckoning with the canon. With the shift came the questions of provenance and aesthetics. Familiar arguments for authenticity drawn along geographies resurfaced (e.g. Detroit or Europe). 2008/2009 saw a revival in deep house as the next trend.
But if anything, having existed largely subculturally despite being subsumed by the mainstream at times, house and techno’s definitive history — notwithstanding the many efforts to establish such a narrative — is continually questioned. If these questions have always been raised within the music itself (as in Willie Wonka’s “What is House?”) and published as part of the music (see Tim Lawrence’s liner notes of the Can You Jack? compilation, republished here), then with increasing frequency these discussions now take place on the net, initiated by primary sources and every subsequent generation.
It’s clear the blogosphere exists no longer as prosthetic to an underground musical movement, but as an integral space in which it unfolds.
From the mnml ssgs blog:
“And hey, maybe nightclubs are good spaces for these kinds of explorations; I personally think they are also mostly quite hostile to the development of interesting music and social life.
So: we need new venues, new models, new spaces – three (that already exist, but that I feel are full of interesting potentialities) spring to mind.
…this online space, the blogosphere, which, you won’t be surprised to hear from me, I feel has undoubtedly been the 00s’ greatest space of possibility. But it is incredibly delicate, more like the accidental niche created by informational capitalism than the concerted or deliberate outcome of a struggle over space. I really don’t think we appreciate how fragile this space is, how quickly and easily it could be shut down (or just leveraged in to some kind of pay-per-view Murdoch wet dream), and where we’d be left after the death of the chill-out room, the record store, the squat party, or any kind of party held without police permission if it did. “
