Tower of Sleep

markrichardson:

So good. Black Dice, “Things Will Never Be the Same”, from Beaches and Canyons. Beautiful and terrifying. This came out almost 10 years ago. An album ripe for re-discovery. Listening to it now for the first time in quite a while. Play it loud.

WHOA! A thing I used to adore that I haven’t heard in five or six years. I bought this album twice. Definitely a major contribution to my early-20s taste formation. This and Vision Creation Newsun really set the terms for what I hoped for from the future of music back in 2002/3. That early-00s Brooklyn psych did end up being super influential, but not really in the transformative way I wanted when I was 20. But then, ecstatic psychedelic experience is a bit of a dead end, anyway. Taking yourself apart can be healthy and refreshing (and scary!), but it’s what you do after you’re back together that counts.

And the meaning of psych has changed a lot since the 60s, too! In a more rigid social world, blowing your mind seemed like a really transgressive thing to do. Today, I think everybody’s experience of their own subjectivity is already fragmented and dispersed — today’s psych tends so heavily towards drone and New Age because people want therapeutic unification, not explosive convulsion. And that unifying, meditative impulse can seem transgressive or liberating because dominant ideology now doesn’t demand that you become a square or an organization man, it demands that you be willing to adjust to constant change and chaos, that you be infinitely flexible, that you subsume your entire identity and lifestyle within the sphere of exchange.

On the flipside, I think a band like Gang Gang Dance is all about surfing the vicissitudes of this overstimulated, plugged-in pomo lifestream. It’s everything time, the first words on Eye Contact, are a description of what contemporary life can feel like: information and sensory overload. Life is kinda like a bad trip in that way, so you just have to learn how to roll with it — when you get on top and ride the chaos like a wave, it can be exciting. Better to have that intensity than not. So maybe the reason Jen doesn’t like Gang Gang Dance is because, on some subconscious level, their embrace of bad-trip aesthetics can be read as an apology for the dynamics of late capitalism? I’m probably reaching now.