The Trap Internationale

The Face is no more - again.

Which is sad.

But they've also taken down their website, leaving no trace of pieces written in its second incarnation. 

I think I only did the one - but it was one I thought was one of my best in recent years.

So here it is below: a piece about trap and its internationalization. 

They didn't use the "Trap Internationale" headline, which is understandable but I did mourn the loss of the idea of this being a pan-global counter-revolutionary movement. Irresistible to listen to even if it manifested a "principle of hopelessness" (to twist Ernst Bloch's "principle of hope"). 

This is the true musical expression of everything that Mark Fisher critiqued in Capitalist Realism (did he not in fact say something like "hip hop is the problem" - or was that just on the blog?).  

Well, Capitalist Realism does actually more or less kick off from 1996 comments of mine about the neo-Hobbesian ideology of realness and "the Real" in gangsta rap and the darker strains of jungle and drum 'n' bass (techstep etc).

"Principle of hope" is Bloch's term for a subcurrent of utopianism that informs a whole range of human expression, from literature and art to fairy tales to religion to music to...  All of them contain some sense that the world could be different, better, re-enchanted... 

Perhaps the word for trap is not counter-revolutionary but counter-utopian...  although it finds a profane utopia in the privatized dream of fame, glory,  luxury.... a  pornofantasia of excess and dominance... 

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Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music

The Face, November 18, 2019. 

“Cookin’ up dope with a Uzi.” Gangsta gritty yet cartoon-absurd, the image of stirring a crockpot of crack with the butt of a machine gun is just one of the memorable lines racing by in "Bad and Boujee", a song by the Atlanta trio Migos that reached #1 in Billboard in January 2017. The ​“boujee” celebrates a nouveau riche notion of high class: cash flashed on the most flagrant status symbol brands like Porsches and Pateks. But as Migos’s Offset gloats at the start of the song, ​“We ain’t really never had no old money/​We got a whole lotta new money though.” The video shows the group hanging at a fast food place, their girls laden with exquisite finery but dining on KFC and Pot Noodle. The track itself, produced by in-demand Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, sounds simultaneously street spartan and luxuriant. The voices – the loping, forward-tumbling flow that Migos patented – hypnotise and hook the listener. As addictive as the drugs they claim to sell, "Bad and Boujee" has now been streamed around 1.5 billion times on YouTube and Spotify.

The sound is called trap and it has dominated popular music all through the 2010s. Migos and their peers – rappers like Future, 21 Savage, Playboi Carti, 2 Chainz, and Cardi B and producers like Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, Southside, Mike WiLL Made-It – mostly come from either Atlanta or other Southern cities. But their beats and flows and production tricks have proliferated across the globe.

This decade trap has infiltrated pop music, from Katy Perry’s baleful 2013 smash "Dark Horse" to songs on Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz album (executively produced by Mike WiLL) and more recent hits by Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Trap has also inspired mutant underground and street forms, from the EDM substyle (also confusingly called trap) of slamming instrumentals like Baauer’s 2012 viral monster "Harlem Shake", to entire subcultures like drill. The latter, a morose form of trap which peaked as violent crime increased in Chicago, went on to inspire a generation of UK drillers. Mediated by the hallucinatory hellscapes of Chicago drill as pioneered by Chief Keef, the UK version is essentially a South London chapter of trap. But the productions by beatmakers like Carns Hill have a British stamp, with trace elements of jungle and UK garage in the oozy bass and looped piano grandeur (interestingly, the London sound has inspired a burgeoning Brooklyn drill scene, with UK producer 808Melo producing most the tracks by breakout rapper Pop Smoke). The gangster nihilism has a local character too, with lyric after lyric fixated on knives and stabbings. Dripping and splashing in UK drill means blood on pavements, unlike in American trap where it signifies looking incandescent with money.

Trap is a sound, a worldview, a life-stance. But before all that it was a word: the name for the place where drugs are sold. Often an abandoned house, the trap typically has a single entrance/​exit, making it a more secure fortress against attacks by rival gangs. ​“Trap”, because it’s a lure for addicts, but there’s also the submerged implication that the lifestyle of dealing is itself a trap: money simply too good to quit, despite the cumulative costs of paranoia and the subliminal spectre of early death. Trap also sounds like the right name for this sound, its clipped, staccato feel resembling the snappy quality of the genre’s sharp snare and hi-hat patterns.

The term was popularised in the 2000s by Atlanta rappers T.I., Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane – whose 2005 LP Trap House was the first of 13 albums and mixtapes by him to feature the word trap. Like those earlier Southern black sounds that took the world by storm – jazz and blues – it started as a lowdown sound with a disreputable aura: the soundtrack in strip clubs and other places where gangsters go to relax and squander their spoils.

As trap has risen to mainstream dominance, its emphasis has shifted away from ​“work hard” (the grind of drug selling and turf-protecting) to ​“play hard”. According to Alex Tumay, a recording engineer who has worked closely with Metro Boomin and the freakily inventive rapper Young Thug, and was involved with Travis Scott’s early music, this is just a different facet of trap’s obsessive authenticity: ​“The topics in trap have a lot to do with honesty. The more successful they get, the more they rap about where they are right now” – the post-gig all-night hotel party, the top-shelf liquor and drugs and women, rather than the tense monotony of drug selling.

 The sound of trap has evolved too: from the barebones bombast of the 2000s to the sinuous and slinky ooze that, in the hands of artists like Travis Scott, becomes almost a form of ambient music. The abiding cornerstone of trap is the beat. Its roots go far back, all the way to ​‘80s electro and the Roland 808 drum machine. Where New York rap followed the path of sampled and looped breakbeats, the South stuck with programmed rhythms. When the party-oriented, shake-that-ass sounds of Miami bass and New Orleans bounce fused with gangsta rap lyrics, trap was born. You recognise trap as a sound, or an influence, from the hi-hats, which run at double-time (or even faster) to the 75-beats-per-minute of the hard-hitting kick drums. There’s a coiled tension and snake-like hiss to those rapid, intricate hi-hat patterns, while rat-a-tat snares conjure a military, parade-ground feel. Today’s trap producers don’t use hardware drum machines anymore, but they create that same dead-and-dry grid-like sound within their computers. On the most fundamental level of function, the bass-boom, the ear-tickling hi-hats, and the louche swagger of the music make trap the go-to party sound of the 2010s.

 The other crucial component of trap in the 2010s is the lush weave of Auto-Tuned vocals draped over the bass-booming groove. Pitch-correction technology like Auto-Tune has blurred the border between rapping and singing. ​“A lot of people who aren’t inherently singers could explore different melodic patterns,” says Tumay, whose engineering forte is vocal processing. ​“Auto-Tune gave them the confidence to do it. The technology has given us a lot of new melodies, new cadences.” Instead of applying Auto-Tune to their vocals after the fact, MCs like Future use it in real-time; hearing their processed voices through headphones in the studio booth, they’ve learned how to push the effect to extremes. With Young Thug, Travis Scott and Migos’s Quavo, the voice becomes like an instrument, spiralling into blissful trills and moans that sound as ornamented as Arabic music and oddly religious in feeling, at odds with the profane subject matter of the songs.

 Although funny, outrageous images and contagious slang fills these songs, trap is not as oriented around narrative or sustained flights of lyricism as the more self-consciously literate forms of rap – the tradition that runs from Rakim to Kendrick Lamar. The crooning MCs of today are more about texture than text. Some old guard rappers and rap fans bemoan this as a decline from the glorious heights of yesteryear, but it’s more the case that invention and personality have moved into a different area of expression. Take the ad lib, one of the most exciting features in trap. A sort of ​“backing rap”, where a second MC repeats a keyword from each line, interjects a complementary catchphrase, or emits a sound effect or a noise suggestive of exertion or ecstasy, the ad lib has brought an almost choral quality to trap music, an interweaving of vocal parts that in the hands of a trio like Migos can be as swoon-inducing as classic doowop.

 As the selling of drugs has dipped into the background of trap, the drugginess of the sound has come to the fore: hip-hop staples like weed and codeine-laced cough syrup have been joined by prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocet. All of these drugs, and others like Molly (MDMA) are endlessly namechecked by MCs but more crucially they shape the woozy glisten of the sound, whose rippling electronic motifs often recall IDM artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. As Tumay says, it’s the birth of a new kind of psychedelia, but one that’s far bleaker than its ​‘60s predecessor: Xans and Perkys are pain-killing and anxiety-deadening drugs. Lil Uzi Vert’s emo-trap hit "XO Tour Llif3" features the plaintive couplet ​“Xanny, help the pain, yeah /​Please, Xanny, make it go away” and pivots on the catchy hook ​“all my friends are dead /​push me to the edge”. Trap is the supreme manifestation of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called ​“depressive hedonism”, that hollow feeling of numb ennui as you pour expensive liquor down your throat while sporting a mansion’s worth of jewelry on your wrist. Having a spiritual void has become the ultimate status symbol in rap.

 As if to seal trap’s displacement of rock as this era’s preeminent music of rebellion and dissolute excess, in the 2010s rappers hijacked the concept of ​“rockstar” and made it their own, and the fans moshed accordingly. Hence Post Malone’s dirge-like Rockstar, the gloriously impudent Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd and Future calling himself ​“Future Hendrix”. This decade, rap fashion has referenced rock star aesthetics, with artists ditching baggy attire for leather jackets, skinny jeans and merch which features heavy metal graphics. Trap today supplies what the Stones and Led Zep once did: a fantasy of life without constraints. And millions of fans across the world can’t get enough.

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 "Pull Up" is a trap tune that came out in 2018, a few years after Bad and Boujee. But it was made half the way across the globe from Atlanta by the Slovakian rapper Samey, with guest MCs Ego and Yzomandias (from the neighbouring Czech Republic). Released on the leading Central European trap label Fck Them, "Pull Up" has the trap sound down: it bounces irresistibly, and Samey’s chorus hook is a potent earworm. But where American trap videos feature sleek sci-fi cars, flowing champagne, and scantily clad girls at poolside parties, Samey’s video can’t quite match its aspirations. They’ve got hold of a car with the requisite suicide doors, but the backdrop is a grey Bratislava cityscape of flatblocks and road beneath a freeway flyover. Despite gold teeth and chains and lots of ink, the crew’s clothes don’t reach Migos levels of futuristic flash.

 “Yzo is the original /​Yzo is not a remake” asserts the bouncing Czech MC Yzomandias. That is neither completely true nor completely false: the inspiration is overwhelming American and specifically Atlantan, from the flows to the slang (references to ​“guap” or money). Academics have an ugly word, ​“glocal,” to describe this syndrome: globalised entertainment formats colliding with native cultures. Yet simply through the translation process, the cadences of the Slovakian and Czech languages, and the rappers’ reserves of verve, it comes out different. Despite clear intent to emulate and a ravenous desire to pull it off, "Pull Up" is not quite the real thing – and all the better for it.

 A few years ago, I went on a trip that passed through several different European nations, during which I met up with a series of old friends. The conversation invariably turned to our kids and what they were into musically. The answer, no matter the country, was always ​“trap!” And it was during these conversations that I learned that every single territory had its own local version.

 In France, PNL are huge stars with their mournfully sonorous fusion of trap and variété. Reggaeton-trap fusions pervade Latin America. You can hear trap coming out of cars or bazaars from Morocco to the Indian subcontinent. But nowhere is trap stronger than in Central Europe. Poland’s SB MAFFIJA label scored 137 million streams during the first six months of 2019 while the rapper Taco Hemingway partnered with pop singer Dawid Podsiadlo to fill the country’s sixty-thousand-capacity National Stadium. Trap squads like MO฿฿YN and MCs like Szpaku Szpaku and Kaz Balagne bypass the radio and TV to reach hordes of fans direct through YouTube and Instagram.

 In the Czech Republic, the leading label /​trap collective is Milion+. According to music critic Miloš Hroch, their sound is ​“transnational in its nature and core, with no trace of the local in their music videos, just the language of luxury brands and antidepressant pills”. Hroch points to the rural outfit Opak Dissu as an example of Czech rap that is rooted in lived realities rather than ​“straight outta Atlanta” fantasy. Opak’s ASAP Jarda once told Hroch that he believes ​“copying America here is bizarre. Half of Czech rappers live at their mom’s place and the second half is at the University. For me traplife is about going to the factory everyday and my roots in the village. We rob that [Atlanta] sound but we fill it with our stories.”

 There’s also the Roma rapper Dollar Prync, whose lyrics deal with small-time crime – robbery, street scuffles between gangs – and life as a member of a minority treated with prejudice and discrimination. His song Okamura Skap disses the xenophobic Czech politician Tomio Okamura: ​“Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese are sharpening their knives on you – Okamura, die”, he spits, denouncing the stereotypes peddled by far-right politicians that immigrants are parasites sucking up social benefits. ​“Meanwhile you motherfuckers are fucking millions into your own pockets.”

 In Italy, the outfit Dark Polo Gang became the vortex of a debate among rap fans and critics. Decried as a mindless decline from rap’s glory days by some, they are celebrated ironically by others as simulation-trap given unexpected substance thanks to genuinely impressive beats by producer Sick Luke. Dark Polo Gang’s videos for hits like "Cono Gelato" hover in a zone somewhere between mimicry and parody: a miasma of gold grills, SUVs, and hand guns stuck down the elasticated waist of swimming trunks.

 Damir Ivic, a historian of Italian rap, says that his country’s first wave of homegrown hip-hop rap in the ​‘90s, known as the ​“Posse movement”, had a more quirky native character. ​“It was quite different from the rest of Europe, encapsulating reggae, ska, and patchanka – for a few years we felt like there was a cohesive alternative scene.” But he argues that the new breed of trap-inspired rappers like Dark Polo Gang, Sfera Ebbasta, and Young Signorino has ​“nearly zero Italian flavour” and consists of ​“tattooed youngsters moaning about success and/​or drugs and/​or being wasted” just like their emo-tinged, fashion conscious counterparts in Sweden like Yung Lean. As in some other countries, Italian trap has triggered mainstream media concern, especially following the death of six kids at a Sfera Ebbasta concert. Pickpockets used ammonia or other caustic sprays to create panic and make it easier to rob people. An emergency exit collapsed in the stampede. ​“Suddenly a connection between such a tragic accident and the ​‘evil-ish’ soul of trap music has been made,” observes Ivic wryly.

Euro-Trap also gets criticised by fans of conscious hip-hop who bemoan its apolitical hedonism, its sexism and materialism. A raw, non-ideological anti-authority stance can be found here and there: Austria’s Yung Hurn’s "Fick Die Polizei", which needs no translation, comes with a video woven out of hand-held footage of rioting anarchists, burning police cars, and tear gas. But Hurn has also put out more standard trap-themed tunes like "Ferrari", "Stoli", the salacious "Ponny" and "Skrt Skrt", the latter titled after Migos’s famous ​“tires skidding” ad lib.

 “We are speaking the language of today’s youth,” said Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton-trap artist who featured in Cardi B’s huge hit "I Like It". A genre born in black America embraced by young people across the world and a sound that indicates a rebellious attitude, trap has indeed become a kind of pop Esperanto. Esperanto translates as ​“one who hopes” – the language was invented in the hopes of fostering universal brotherhood.

Yet trap, beneath its brash self-confidence, is based on a disillusionment in which hope for collective advancement is not a form of audacity but delusion. Trap sees life as feral – something captured in "Bad and Boujee" when Offset describes his gang as ​“savage, ruthless”. In this war of all against all, you’re either a victor or a victim – and the social odds are stacked against you becoming one of the winning few rather than the ​“losing” many. As visions of life go, it’s bleak and it’s depoliticising. The fact that it resonates so strongly all across the world – particularly in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, those that have adjusted most harshly to American-style free market economics – is revealing.

 If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it’s because it captured the pathologies of our era – the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism – and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It’s fitting that the decade’s dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.

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That's the piece as originally run on the Face website. But there was a different harsher ending originally:

 As Lil Uzi Vert, guesting on “Bad and Boujee”, put it: “You know we winnin' / Yeah, we is not losin’”.  It’s a grim, depoliticizing worldview, and by glamorizing it, trap is helping to make the rest of the world steadily more like America. 

At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”

Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination.  Rae Sremmurd may rap about being  “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” 

The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.”  In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. 

Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso. 

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Around this time, I did three other pieces that summed up the 2010s - one on streaming, another on 'conceptronica', and a third on ambient and New Age. The latter had a paragraph in it about trap that got cut out and adds to the analysis here:

 Beyond the boom in blissed-out soundscapes, the 2010s has seen a sort of ambient-izing of other genres - including some that would seem to be politically and philosophically about as distant from New Age values as imaginable, such as trap and its variants such as UK drill. Lyrically, it’s toxic masculinity a-go-go: the same old shit of egomania, misogyny,  commodity-fetishism, and violence. Yet the music has an ambient quality, draping glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass, with wistful melody-riffs looping endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio. 

You could call it Ambien music, after the sedative-hypnotic prescription drug, given the way that the trap MCs incessantly reference pain-killing, anxiety-deadening drugs like Percoset and Xanax. Although ostensibly taken as illegal highs, you have to wonder why this genre is so thoroughly steeped in affects like numbness and indifference, why its MCs seem so glazed and oddly passive.  Auto-Tune etherializes rappers like Quavo from Migos, Rich the Kid, Playboi Carti (with his famous “baby” voice) and Young Thug to the point where they sometimes seem barely-there:  angelic boy-men whose ego-boundaries are melting in the drug haze.  The generic nature of the beats and the restricted range of timbres… the relative indistinguishability of MCs, which is further exacerbated by Auto-Tune… the repetitious themes and tropes and vocal tricks…  these are not bugs but features. Trap is designed for immersive and inattentive listening, purpose-built to slip back into being background music, a soundtrack to driving or chilling. It achieves its effect  through accumulative homogeneity. 

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On a different post about trap, the commenter Luke had some interesting thoughts about mumble rap and a new male subjectivity in hip hop:

Regarding the dichotomy between 'conscious' hip hop and mumble rap, it is a necessary distinction, but I like to think of mumble rap as 'unconscious' hip hop not because it is anti-woke or anti-progressive, but in the psychoanalytic sense. If conscious hip hop is superego music, and the majority of other hip hop ego music, mumble rap is id music. From all the non-verbal sounds, the adlibs, the mumbling and so on, to those problematic lyrics which often come across as more the product of free association than conscious boasting.

To which, I replied: 

I like the idea about it being 'unconscious' rap, stream of unconsciousness, letting fantasy and the id come out to play.  The ecstastic blurry moans and gurgles and the tourettic ad libs, they seem to release psycholibidinal energy in spurts and spasms, it's very much some Kristeva semiotic material being let loose, strings and blobs of jouissance....  the babyvoice Playboi Carti just makes the regressive tendency manifest

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Even more thoughts on trap here  and here 

idm misc

from the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers, that did, it was like negative catnip for nerds!  I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in) 

Isolée: Rest (2000)

There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term “microhouse” was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.

As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with ’80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through “Beau Mot Plage” like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller’s sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.

“Text,” the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It’s an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that’s deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller’s 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée’s true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. 

and my intro text

Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM

At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.

For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it’s possible to listen to and write about “stupid” forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to “smart” sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the “meat” and becoming pure spirit.

And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM’s half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” tracks like “Real Friends” on The Life of Pablo, even moments on “The Young Pope” soundtrack.

You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the ’90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of “electronic listening music,” along with that same year’s Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.

Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.

The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the “oomph” required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin’ or slammin’. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ’s set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of “eclectronica” clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.

You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy ‘n’ mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM’s history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM’s chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and “Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass.” Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.

Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre’s discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there’s Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you’d have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn’t really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca’s smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I’m constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.

Someone in Italy asked me questions about Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 upon the occasion of its 30th Anniversary. This is what I said: 

There was this moment when some record labels astutely noticed that there was the beginnings of a demand for music that related to rave dancefloor sounds like techno but was designed for home listening – atmospheric, intricately textured, dreamy or pensive in mood. Artists had started to do tracks like that on the B-side of their dancefloor-target singles, or on the fourth track of an EP. Ambient interludes or stuff that had drums but wasn’t as pounding and body- coercive as the kind of techno a DJ would play. The two main labels that really spotted this development and saw that it could be the basis of album-length works – and album-oriented careers - were Warp, in Sheffield, England, and R&S, in Belgium. It was R&S who put out the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and then Richard D. James signed to Warp. He was also doing that kind of thing through the label he co-founded, Rephlex.

If the rave scene of the period was marked by ecstasy, what drug could be associated with IDM?

Cannabis – and for some LSD perhaps. It’s also music that was associated with the after-party and the chill-out room – so music that fit the afterglow of MDMA but not so much the “I got dance like a maniac” phase. But overwhelming it’s cannabis. That’s why the robot on the front of Artificial Intelligence, the Warp compilation of Aphex-type music, is blowing smoke rings and puffing on a fat joint.

Why did IDM strike a chord with Silicon Valley geeks? And what effect did it have on ravers?

Electronic sound fits the aethetic of digital technology – and the musicians are using a lot of the same equipment as the Silicon Valley people. So there’s an affinity there on both levels. Also I think Aphex Twin type music is ideal for people who are working at computers – it’s hypnotic, it’s rhythmic but not “get up dance NOW”, there are patterns in it that are attractive to the ear but you can also tune out if you need to concentrate and it falls back very easily into being background music.

IDM didn’t get a lot of play on the rave dancefloor, it might get some play in side-rooms where people want to chill out after frenzied dancing. But also there developed a scene of chill-out clubs, people sitting around and smoking while listening to ambient and floaty electronic music.

What memories do you have related to the release of the album?

It was probably my favorite album of that year and certainly the one I played the most. I must have played it about a hundred times at least. Because it was a CD I quickly reprogrammed it to my favorite five or six tunes. But the whole album is brilliant.

What are your favorite tracks on the tracklist? And why?

I can’t be getting into reviewing the album, but my favorites are “Tha”, “Pulsewidth”, “We Are the Music Makers” and “Heliosphan”. “Xtal” is really dreamy and conversely "Hedphelym" is a really scary bit of dark electronic music.

What was Aphex Twin trying to tell us with the quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, We Are The Music Makers?

Well, I think it’s simply an honestly arrogant reflection of his self-belief – he knows he’s a genius. So that’s what he literally thinks musicians – the greatest musicians – do. They weave dreams.

In what elements does the album echo Brian Eno's ambient lesson?

Apart from “Xtal” and “Tha”, it’s not really an ambient album. It’s only ambient in comparison to the hardcore techno, jungle and gabber of that time, which was breakneck fast. Most of the tracks have beats and some are pretty propulsive – “Pulsewidth”. It’s music that has a physical element and a relation to dance music, but it pulls at your body gently.

But you can use as background music, something to fill the air like fragrance, so in that sense it can be used like ambient music. It’s a bit too insistent melodically and rhythmically to qualify as Eno’s definition of ambient being “as ignorable as it is interesting”.

What does it feel like to listen to the album again today thirty years later?

I haven’t listened to it.

What distinguishes Aphex Twin from Autechre and Boards of Canada?

Aphex Twin versus Autechre – well, it’s just much better music. It’s not afraid to be beautiful and it connects to actual human emotions that are relatable. Autechre have interesting textures but I don’t hear tunes like Richard D. James. Autechre have commanding rhythms but they’re not groovy, whereas with Aphex Twin there’s more of swing and feel – you can imagine dancing to them.

Aphex Twin versus Boards of Canada. Both are sublime melodists. But Aphex Twin has more interesting rhythms – again, you can imagine dancing to much of his music, whereas BoC is about the headnod. The way they use hip hop beats is very effective but as the brothers would admit, they have very little to do with club music. Aphex music is much more on the edge of rave.

Boards of Canada also have this consistently elegaic, nostalgic, wistful quality – the sense of childhood or a lost future. Aphex will go into that zone but generally sounds more aligned with the idea of the future or outer space, in that sense he’s more of a techno artist. BoC are more like a shoegaze band that when into sampling and loops.

Are some elements of IDM present in the conceptronica today? Or in what music?

Where I hear the textures of IDM is actually in a lot of the last several years trap and mumble rap – Playboi Carti, Rich the Kid, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Young Thug. You get the blurry, idyllic textures and the bittersweet melody-loops. Even the vocal presence, fed through the glittering and glitchy textures of Auto-Tune, sounds very IDM-compatible – dreamy, sparkly, passively swooning. That kind of trapadelic sound is almost the sole bastion of minimalism in modern popular music, which is otherwise overly dramatic and busy. 

Conceptronica has the thoughtfulness of certain kinds of IDM – like Oval or the label Mille Plateaux Fax – but it rarely has the kind of sheer melodic beauty of Aphex and Seefeel and Boards of Canada. Most of today’s conceptual electronic artists are trying to reflect or deal with issues related to contemporary society – whether it’s queer identity, racial injustice, rage against what’s going on politically, or it’s the stresses and distortions of personality caused by living on the internet and social media, that “always on” purgatory of today’s existence. So the sounds they make are often not pretty and they are rarely relaxing in the way that Selected Ambient Works could be. They are often trying to put you through an extreme or challenging experience. Or they are trying to command your full attention. Either way it’s not music – for me – that I can use in everyday life like I did the great Aphex Twin music.

introduction to Valerio Mattioli's book Exmachina: Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → which centers on Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, and is a genius work that someone needs to translate into English

The idea that certain kinds of music have a special relationship with the Future has a long history and continues to make a potent appeal to our imaginations—as listeners and thinkers, and as music-makers too. 

In the early ‘90s, for instance, David Toop – a critic and a musician - wrote evocatively about a sensation of “nostalgia for the future” that wafted vaguely off the recordings of The Black Dog,  a British group associated with an emerging genre briefly identified as “electronic listening music” but later permanently rebranded as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.  

The notion is not limited to professional analysts and champions of music. William Gibson, in his 1996 near-future novel Idoru, ventriloquizes his own insight through the character of Mr. Kuwayama, a Japanese entertainment executive, who observes that pop “is the test-bed of futurity”.   Jacques Attali, in his classic 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, constructed an entire theory of music’s evolution based around the belief that music is prophecy. But his argument is not so much about the formal properties of music (say, increased tolerance for dissonance, as the title Noise might suggest) as the structures and hierarchies that music engenders around itself. Attali’s focus is on the modes of music making, distribution, and  consumption, which he sees as a preview of emerging forms of social organization. 

As someone who’s dedicated his life to magnifying the power and significance of music, this kind of talk is very much to my taste: it stirs my patriotic feelings about music as an area of human existence. Through my personal history of listening and the accident of the era I was born in, I’m wired to seek out and recognize “the future” as it manifests in music, and equally primed to be entranced by arguments and narratives that present music as the herald of a world to come. 

So in many ways I’m an ideal reader for Valerio Mattioli’s extraordinary book. It’s a feat of hyper-interpretation that detects the flexing of the Zeitgeist within the discographies of just three operators, preeminent in a field that is relatively speaking a marginal sidestream of popular music, the aforementioned genre-not-genre known as IDM. To those who know them, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada are gods, whose every last scrap of recorded work warrants decoding by the devotees. But even these cult believers will be taken aback by the intensity of Mattioli’s scrutiny and the scale of the claims he makes. 

Exmachina is an archeology of the future embedded in music made a quarter-century or more ago; a future that is now our present. As with Attali’s theory, that futurity is not so much in the surface trappings of the music – the coldness of synthesized sound, the domineering mechanistic rhythms – nor even in the imagery wrapped around it (often “futuristic” in a way that was even at the time fairly familiar and occasionally bordered on sci-fi kitsch). The futurism resides more in the deeper grammar of the music and the subjectivity that the music proposed, modeled, and elicited; a future that the music in some way trained the listener for, through the molding of perception and instilling of affect.  

Although the subject of Mattioli’s book is the latent future in music some of which is 30 years old now, the future that has come true and is now our digital everyday, in other ways a big part of the pleasure of reading it for me is frankly nostalgic. Exmachina is a kind of time machine: it creates a delicious sensation of being plunged back into the  early ‘90s and immersed in all the wide-eyed excitement about the oncoming future that seemed to be manifesting itself through electronic dance and non-dance music, swept up once again in the fevered intellectual climate of that time. 

In 1992, computers had become widespread at work and in domestic spaces, but they didn’t dominate our existence. Broadband was still many years away; dial-up was cumbersome and time-consuming, and when you got on the internet, there was hardly anything to see (which was just as well given how long it took a page to come up). Almost no one had email; mobile phones were still  in their infancy, in terms of widespread usage and the things you could do with them. None of the commonplace “superpowers” of today – wi-fi, search engines, Siri, social media, etc – existed, and some weren’t even imagined. The digital realm existed in a cordoned-off zone of our existence. Yet precisely because of this, digital technology could then carry with it the scent of the future—an alluring or alarming aroma, depending on your inclinations. 

For most people, the places where you could get the most pungent advance whiff of how things were going to be were music and videogames. They offered the hardest hit of futurity that an ordinary person could access - and even more so if that person happened to make music themselves. As well as the Promethean rush and world-building buzz of grappling with machines and software that by today’s standards are laughably rudimentary and clumsy, electronic musicians in the ‘90s were conceptually stimulated by emergent forms of technology outside of the sonic realm, including things that were then barely more than rumors or pipe dreams. Concepts like virtual reality and surveillance provided imagery for techno and jungle artists long before VR became commercially available or CCTV became omnipresent in some countries.

The polarities represented by VR and CCTV – the artificial pleasuredome  versus the Panopticon – relate to a curious bi-polar quality to the writing about digital culture during the 1990s. The naïve optimism and excessive dread were two sides of the same coin: a euphoria that flipped so easily into dysphoria. Reading theorists like Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Jaron Lanier, Kodwo Eshun (and many of these names pop up in Mattioli’s text), all it took was to tilt your angle of reading slightly and the exultation could be taken as denunciation. The fervor and fever of the prose would be the same in either the utopian or dystopian modalities. With some of these writers, it was never clear whether they were anticipating or flinching from the posthuman future. And some former evangelists have subsequently morphed into Jeremiahs, writing books with titles like You Are Not A Gadget or New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.  

With music in particular, it was an exhilarating time to be a critic. For someone like myself or Kodwo Eshun or the young Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman (both then associated with the para-academic outfit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), you rarely found yourself using reference points from history. You couldn’t resort to coordinates based on existing earlier music because the new music was going right off the map.  The rapidly advancing and mutating tones and beats put pressure on you to generate new tropes and concepts. Hence the proliferation of  neologisms and invented genre terms. And the posthuman feeling of the music, its seeming absence of human touch, also seemed to demand a depersonalized analysis that attributed a purposive sentience to the way that individual tracks unfolded and that entire genres and scenes evolved.  Mattioli reinhabits this mindset, this ecstatically paranoid sense that the music is independent of human designs and has its own dark agenda. Humans didn’t make the music; the music is remaking – and undoing – the human as a category. “We must change for the machines” and “human viewpoint redundant," as the video art / theory collective 0(rphan)d(rift>), put it in a 1995 book called Cyberpositive, a delirious collage-text infused with their experiences of going to techno clubs and being mangled mentally by the combination of loud music and hallucinogens, written in a tone of mystical masochism.   

Mattioli entered a similar kind of mind-state when writing Exmachina. But rather than reach it through immersion in the congested darkness of the rave space, it was the covid lockdown’s enforced isolation that pushed him into a state of creative paranoia in which everything radiated significance and hitherto hidden patterns pulsated into visibility. Decades before wi-fi,  Baudrillard imagined the tele-connected citizen of the future as essentially living inside a satellite, a sealed pod in orbit around the void where society once was. Plugged into networks, this was a new kind of porous self, vibrating in a perpetual  “ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information.”  A desolated self “open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence." That describes how many of us having been living during 2020 and 2021. Mattioli took the pandemic trauma and used it to create an adventure close to home. This is the story of where the music took his mind. 

the trap decade

[alternate ending to this 2010s-surveying piece on the Trap Internationale for The Face]

At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”

Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination.  Rae Sremmurd may rap about being  “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” 

The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.”  In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. 

Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso.

trapadelia

 I did an interview December 2018 with Beatrice Finauro of Dry magazine (Milan) about trap / mumble rap - and why it was my favorite music of recent years. Here it is - resequenced a bit - and with a riff woven in from a separate interview with an Italian journalist that touched on the subject glancingly, and a few other stray thoughts.

Is trap a heresy, a new classic canon or both things at the same time?

On one hand, trap is just rap – the same old, same old. Gangsta rap, part 12. If you listen from a distance, you won’t hear anything you’ve not heard before. But immerse yourself in the music, and you hear a host of micro-innovations. Most of them are in the domain of vocals – the creative use of Auto-tune and other vocal processing, the emergence of ad libs as kind of antiphonal commentary on or reinforcement of the lead vocal, the blurring of rapping with singing so that you can’t distinguish between rhythmic speech and melodic trills. 

Listen to the almost choral weave of voices in Migos - the main rap, the ad libs (often shouted or whooped or gasped nonverbal eruptions of pure jouissance), and then the rippling hyper-Autotuned backing vocals - again, wordless moans of ecstasy that sometimes resemble psalms or monastic chants. This is a new thing in music. And just as striking and interesting, it's a new kind of melting, woozy subjectivity for hip hop masculinity - almost effete at times. 

This new subjectivity and the vocal modes that have emerged alongside it seem to have been produced by changing drug use patterns  - the different vibes  generated by drugs like Xanax and Percocet. Although purple drank has been a southern  hop hop staple for a long while. But these numbing anxiety killers and pain killers have turned rap of the Migos, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Rich the Kid, Travis Scott type into a kind of ambient music - or even Ambien Music.  It exists in a zone between faded and fey. 

Texturally the floaty, wafting, twinkly IDM-ish sounds in the production make trap one of the last remaining bastions of minimalism in modern music, which otherwise tends towards maxed out digitalism. Trap has digimax's hyper-real contoured gloss, but in combination with minimalism - so you get this killer combination of spare and sumptuous. Trap tunes often consist of just a few vaporous sounds looped and these highly repetitive vocal hooks, and often there are a rather small total number of words in the entire lyric. It's a break with the whole tradition of MC lyricism, it's much more about texture and mood, and these sing-songy, rippling hooks. This is music that invites you to trance out, to listen in a semi-attentive stupor. Tracks ooze out of the car speakers to cloud the vehicle's interior - and especially if you're driving at night, it's like you're gliding along inside this futuristic glowing capsule. 

Adam Harper defined the characteristics of Hi-Tech aesthetics Vs Indie aesthetics. I think some of the features of Hi-tech, such as the harsh vision of the future, being decadent, excessive and aggressive, and originally linked by Harper to artists such as James Ferraro, Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, can be also attributed to the trap genre. On the other hand, we have the supposedly warm, benign, archaic and, I’d say, lifeless realm of Indie to which the trap is opposed. In your opinion, which are the main trap’s features and where does trap lie in the contemporary ecosystem?

The supposedly subversive or parodic elements of vaporwave or hi-tech / hi-def – to me they pale next to the reality of what is streaming out of the mainstream airwaves. Which is to say the hyper-reality of it -  a lifestyle that is fantastical, psychotic... What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Rap and R&B, Travis Scott, the Weeknd, Cardi B, Migos: is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence. I call it Weimar n B.

Trap spans from the original formula, such as the one of Gucci Mane, T.I, Young Jeezy, to the Ebenezer’s one, influenced by R&B and Gospel, to London’s Drill and so on… And each country has its own version. Is there a common ground, rule or standards that is cross to the different types of trap?

There are certain beat patterns that recur (yet also a surprising diversity of grooves and feels). You can connect trap back to early 2000s sounds like crunk and New Orleans bounce – the idea of the Dirty South – to labels like Cash Money. 

I suppose if there are two things that define all 21st Century hip hop is that it doesn’t use samples very often and it breaks with the looped breakbeat approach of classic East Coast Hip Hop. The beats are programmed and relate to a longstanding Southern U.S Hip Hop tradition that was rooted in drum machines and 80s Electro. Trap is part of that, as was the related L.A. sound of Ratchet as pioneered by DJ Mustard. But in a larger sense it’s all trap, it’s all gangsta rap, it’s all rap. There’s an absolute continuity, a changing same to quote Amiri Baraka.

Why does trap have such an influence on kids?

Kids want something that feels now and that belongs to them, and trap is the most convincing and intoxicating contender for that role. Most other forms of youth music are static or overly shadowed with heritage and history.

The other thing is that trap is one of the few music around that drips with a disruptive and illicit jouissance. Trap – especially Migos and Young Thug, but all of it – is ecstatic. The performers seems entranced by themselves, in a swirl of ecstasy and glory. Think of the feeling in Rae Sremmurd ‘Black Beatles’ . The fact that their trope for that feeling of excess, triumph and abandon is rock stardom tells you something. This is supplying what kids got from the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin: a fantasy of a life without constraints.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Anonymous Luke said...

It's unfortunate that your point about mumble rap representing a new subjectivity for hip hop masculinity didn't make it into the published interview as it is one of the things that I find most interesting about mumble rap too. Especially when it is contrasted with the typical portrayal of hip hop masculinity which still found a place in the published piece.

Regarding the dichotomy between 'conscious' hip hop and mumble rap, it is a necessary distinction, but i like to think of mumble rap as 'unconscious' hip hop not because it is anti-woke or anti-progressive, but in the psychoanalytic sense. If conscious hip hop is superego music, and the majority of other hip hop ego music, mumble rap is id music. From all the non-verbal sounds, the adlibs, the mumbling and so on, to those problematic lyrics which often come across as more the product of free association than conscious boasting.

SR replies 

I like the idea about it being 'unconscious' rap, stream of unconsciousness, letting fantasy and the id come out to play

The ecstastic blurry moans and gurgles and the Tourettic ad libs, they seem to release psycholibidinal energy in spurts and spasms, it's very much some Kristeva semiotic material being let loose, strings and blobs of jouissance

Reminds me of Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" the track

The babyvoice Playboi Carti just makes the regressive tendency manifest...

Ambien Music - where faded meets fey

I did an interview December 2018 with Beatrice Finauro of Dry magazine (Milan) about trap / mumble rap - and why it was my favorite music of recent years. Here it is - resequenced a bit - and with a riff woven in from a separate interview with an Italian journalist that touched on the subject glancingly, and a few other stray thoughts.

Is trap a heresy, a new classic canon or both things at the same time?

On one hand, trap is just rap – the same old, same old. Gangsta rap, part 12. If you listen from a distance, you won’t hear anything you’ve not heard before. But immerse yourself in the music, and you hear a host of micro-innovations. Most of them are in the domain of vocals – the creative use of auto-tune and other vocal processing, the emergence of ad libs as kind of antiphonal commentary on or reinforcement of the lead vocal, the blurring of rapping with singing so that you can’t distinguish between rhythmic speech and melodic trills. 

Listen to the almost choral weave of voices in Migos - the main rap, the ad libs (often shouted or whooped or gasped nonverbal eruptions of pure jouissance), and then the rippling hyper-Autotuned backing vocals - again, wordless moans of ecstasy that sometimes resemble psalms or monastic chants. This is a new thing in music. And just as striking and interesting, it's a new kind of melting, woozy subjectivity for hip hop masculinity - almost effete at times. 

This new subjectivity and the vocal modes that have emerged alongside it seem to have been produced by changing drug use patterns  - the different vibes  generated by drugs like Xanax and Percocet. Although purple drank has been a southern  hop hop staple for a long while. But these numbing anxiety killers and pain killers have turned rap of the Migos, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Rich the Kid, Travis Scott type into a kind of ambient music - or even Ambien Music.  It exists in a zone between faded and fey. 

Texturally the floaty, wafting, twinkly IDM-ish sounds in the production make trap one of the last remaining bastions of minimalism in modern music, which otherwise tends towards maxed out digitalism. Trap has digimax's hyper-real contoured gloss, but in combination with minimalism - so you get this killer combination of spare and sumptuous. Trap tunes often consist of just a few vaporous sounds looped and these highly repetitive vocal hooks, and often there are a rather small total number of words in the entire lyric. It's a break with the whole tradition of MC lyricism, it's much more about texture and mood, and these sing-songy, rippling hooks. This is music that invites you to trance out, to listen in a semi-attentive stupor. Tracks ooze out of the car speakers to cloud the vehicle's interior - and especially if you're driving at night, it's like you're gliding along inside this futuristic glowing capsule. 

Adam Harper defined the characteristics of Hi-Tech aesthetics Vs Indie aesthetics. I think some of the features of Hi-tech, such as the harsh vision of the future, being decadent, excessive and aggressive, and originally linked by Harper to artists such as James Ferraro, Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, can be also attributed to the trap genre. On the other hand, we have the supposedly warm, benign, archaic and, I’d say, lifeless realm of Indie to which the trap is opposed. In your opinion, which are the main trap’s features and where does trap lie in the contemporary ecosystem?

The supposedly subversive or parodic elements of vaporwave or hi-tech / hi-def – to me they pale next to the reality of what is streaming out of the mainstream airwaves. Which is to say the hyper-reality of it -  a lifestyle that is fantastical, psychotic... What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Rap and R&B, Travis Scott, the Weeknd, Cardi B, Migos: is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence. I call it Weimar n B.

Trap spans from the original formula, such as the one of Gucci Mane, T.I, Young Jeezy, to the Ebenezer’s one, influenced by R&B and Gospel, to London’s Drill and so on… And each country has its own version. Is there a common ground, rule or standards that is cross to the different types of trap?

There are certain beat patterns that recur (yet also a surprising diversity of grooves and feels). You can connect trap back to early 2000s sounds like crunk and New Orleans bounce – the idea of the Dirty South – to labels like Cash Money. 

I suppose if there are two things that define all 21st Century hip hop is that it doesn’t use samples very often and it breaks with the looped breakbeat approach of classic East Coast Hip Hop. The beats are programmed and relate to a longstanding Southern U.S Hip Hop tradition that was rooted in drum machines and 80s Electro. Trap is part of that, as was the related L.A. sound of Ratchet as pioneered by DJ Mustard. But in a larger sense it’s all trap, it’s all gangsta rap, it’s all rap. There’s an absolute continuity, a changing same to quote Amiri Baraka.

Why does trap have such an influence on kids?

Kids want something that feels now and that belongs to them, and trap is the most convincing and intoxicating contender for that role. Most other forms of youth music are static or overly shadowed with heritage and history.

The other thing is that trap is one of the few music around that drips with a disruptive and illicit jouissance. Trap – especially Migos and Young Thug, but all of it – is ecstatic. The performers seems entranced by themselves, in a swirl of ecstasy and glory. Think of the feeling in Rae Sremmurd ‘Black Beatles’ . The fact that their trope for that feeling of excess, triumph and abandon is rock stardom tells you something. This is supplying what kids got from the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin: a fantasy of a life without constraints.