Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures Part 5

I think of Ed Wood as a sort of advanced naive artist. He was among the first to make cut-up movies. He achieved this by using props he came across in warehouses and stock footage he discovered in the film vaults of Hollywood cutting rooms, then he built movies around these fragments.

This is the art of collage and sampling. It is art as found object, as coincidence, as accident, as Surrealism, as Dada, as Situationism. All made possible and motivated also by the dynamo of American opportunism, but with great love and inadequacy and tenderness.

Ed Wood was doing, fifty years ago, what the avant garde are only now beginning to do with film.

(This is also very similar to the way rock 'n' roll often manages to parallel or prefigure avant garde concepts, by arriving at them from a totally different direction. Pop is such a virile mongrel it's capable of effortlessly demonstrating, realising, manifesting, absorbing, remaking any sort of academic intellectual concept. It can do this so well, it often makes any parallel or previous version appear weak or even redundant).

An admiration for that sort of visceral, sensual, opportunistic, native intelligence led to an interest in, and respect for, home video and super-8 very low grade domestic ways of making films I suddenly realised there was a whole other world there, one which hadn't been properly discussed, but as real, in fact more real and potentially at least as powerful, as official cinema.

MF: The film collection you refer to in the sleeve notes to Tiny Colour Movies you write about it very beautifully. Are there any plans for those films to be shown in the UK?

JF: Thanks. I'd like to there are some problems with these fragments, because they're so small. They're physically difficult things, and they're unique irreplaceable and very fragile, so you can only ever show digital copies of them. But it would be interesting to do something like that. I'm beginning to look at some possibilities now, working with Mike Barker, who has acc.u.mulated a marvellous archive, and we're discussing this with some film festivals.

MF: I noticed you thanked Paul Auster in the sleeve notes, why was that?

JF: Paul Auster has is very interesting to me, because I wrote this thing called 'The Quiet Man' years ago, in the 80s, in fact I'm still writing it. Then I read the New York Trilogy, and it struck so many chimes. It was as if I'd written it, or it was the book I should have written. I have to be very careful to find my way around it now.

Such occurrences are simultaneously rewarding and terrifying. They ill.u.s.trate the fact that there is something in the air, which is tremendously heartening after working alone for years, yet they scare you because it feels as if someone has published first, and therefore registered their claim to where you discovered gold.

I simply wanted to acknowledge the effect, and the odd sort of encouragement of recognised themes, as well as a continuing parallel interest in the idea of lost movies and fragments MF: There's a certain kind of London affect that's interesting, of stillness, and the city being overgrown, which is sort of recurrent in your work where's that come from do you think?

JF: When I first came to London it seemed a great deal like Lancas.h.i.+re, where I'd come from. But Lancas.h.i.+re had fallen into ruin. The factories had closed, the economy had faltered. We felt like the Incas after the Spaniards had pa.s.sed. Helpless, nostalgic savages adrift in the ruins.

I grew up playing in empty factories, huge places which were overgrown. I remember trees growing out of the buildings. I remember a certain moments of looking at it all and thinking what it would have been like when it was all working. What life might be like, if it were all working still.

All of my family worked in mills and factories and mines. And all this was gently subsiding, spinning away.

Coming to London, I couldn't help but wonder if it might also fall into dissolution. Then I saw a picture a friend had. It was a realistic painting of what appeared to be a view over a jungle from a high place. Gradually you came to realise that it was a view of an overgrown city from a tower, then you realised that this panorama was from a ruined Centre Point and you could see Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, Charing Cross road in the undergrowth. It felt like a revelation. It manifested so perfectly this vision I'd had of everything becoming overgrown, an overgrown London. A vision of longing and nostalgia tinged with fear.

I would often experience a feeling of stillness and wonder as I walked through certain parts of London. I often walked through empty buildings and neglected, overlooked places and they would replay that sensation very strongly.

I went to Sh.o.r.editch, in 1982, and made a studio there. When we first went into the studio building it had trees growing out of the windows on the upper stories. It was very like Lancas.h.i.+re, that whole area was derelict, had been abandoned, because that had been the industrial bit of the East End. Now there was no-one there, it was empty. It gave me that calm drifting feeling of recognition.

There was some kind of collective image of overgrown and abandoned cities at that time. Perhaps it's always there. Such images were present in Ballard, Burroughs, Philip K d.i.c.k. In those science fiction authors writing about the near future conducting thought experiments, exploring likely consequences and views of the unrecognised present, which I think is very valuable. They offer perspectives and meditations on our vanity and endeavours. As such they maintain continuity with a long line of imagery, from religious myths and folk stories to science fiction.

MF: It seems to have a real unconscious resonance, this idea of overgrown cities, it's obviously there in surrealist paintings, which seem to be a constant reference, especially in your early work JF: Yes, there's that side of it too. In science fiction films you often get those recurrent images, which I think are very beautiful, of someone walking through an abandoned city.

We have acc.u.mulated a range of such images all along the line, from folk and fairytales, to the actual construction of follies and romantic overgrown gardens, to the truly dislocated, such as Piranesi's ruins and prisons, to Max Ernst's paintings, or Breughel's Tower of Babel, or the background urban locations in Bosch, as well as De Chirico's townscapes and shadows.

Planet of the Apes has one of the most shocking and resonant the end of original movie, where we see the Statue of Liberty tilted in the sand. A real jolt, the first time you see it. A modern take on Sh.e.l.ley's Ozymandias.

The radiance I sometimes refer to occupies this sort of area. I often see people as if in a frozen moment and they seem to have an internal glow inside them. Their skin seems translucent and they carry their own time. I feel calm and distant and warm from this. It can happen in an instant. In very mundane urban situations. You realise you are not looking at a single person, but at a sort of stream or cascade.

It happened yesterday in a supermarket. I happened to glance at a young woman who looked like a transfigured hidden Madonna. She wore jeans and a tees.h.i.+rt, an ordinary woman. But equally, she was a continuity, a lovely genetic physical thread to other times, both previous and ahead and still unformed. She simply glowed. Quietly and unknowingly luminous. The Eternal Woman.

MF: The sort of feelings you deal with are more abstract; it's like you go to those states without reference to the way they've traditionally been coded, really. You often use the word 'angelic', or 'angel'...

JF: Yes, very perilous territory, especially since these terms have since been co-opted by New Agers. I'll put on the grey suit to dispel all that.

Many of these spring from what I think of as 'thought experiments' things I employ all the time, as a tool to get at half buried or emerging realisations. If you're at all interested, I'll try to outline a few.

Firstly, the idea interested me still does of parallel evolutions imagine something that may have evolved alongside us, something we're not quite aware of yet, that we haven't yet discovered.

That may include things which exist in other planes or by other means, or things which resemble human beings so well that we a.s.sume them to be human, but they may not be. Yet they live among us undetected the possibility that other forms of life may have evolved alongside us, but invisible because of their proximity.

'Hiding in plain sight' is a great idea, something that's very interesting in itself on one level connected with sleight of hand and parlour tricks and conmen, but on the other hand, very subtle, intuition led perceptions. It could give rise to situations that are tremendously moving, fragile, tender. Metaphorically very resonant.

Another one I'm also very interested in the concept of a singularity. An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million years.

There may be rhythms which extend over tens of millions of years and are therefore unrecognisable to us, except as single unconnectable and unexplainable events.

But the fact that we have no context to fit them into doesn't mean they don't happen.

Yet another thought experiments posits the concept of Angels as a connection between things. An ent.i.ty that only exists between. A sort of web or connection. They arise purely as an intrinsic, invisible and unsuspected component of the evolution of the ecology that supports whatever they exist between. They cannot exist on their own.

Many of us have these little incidents everything from coincidences onward things that we can't explain using the references we commonly employ.

I'm very interested in those things, always have been. Through those odd things, we glimpse something that's outside the way we usually look at the world, and realise there might be another way of looking at it, an alternate perception to the one we have, and I think that's a very valuable possibility to keep hold of. The awareness that maybe there are gaps in our perception that we aren't able to fill yet.

MF: Yes, because I think one of the most powerful things which comes out in Tiny Colour Movies but in retrospect has always been there is that you're able to deal with positive, affirmatory feelings that are eerie and uncanny, and possess a certain kind of calm serenity.

JF: Good, somehow that's always been a vital component of that sort of experience, for me. A sensation of utter calm and stillness. Miles away from any agitation. It seems deeply positive.

It's an opposite to the excitement you get from, say, rock and roll...I think in general we like to stir ourselves up in various ways, using art or using media or whatever, and I think it's just as valid to move against the norm, and the norm at the moment is to speed everything up.

I mean, that's what we're trying to attain, aren't we, through media? That awful maximisation of time and efficient transmission of 'information'. Some of this is economic time equals money and some is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned convention.

If you could time-jump to show the average TV ad of today to someone 20 or 30 years ago, they wouldn't understand it. The ad would depend on the viewer's perception speed and also on a series of recent references. Our parents simply weren't fast enough, they hadn't been accelerated as we have been by media and the pace of modern life, and they also don't have the inculcated, busy reference chain.

Acceleration is also kind of exciting and interesting, I mean I really enjoy it, sometimes but it equally leads you to think 'what happens if you do the opposite?'it might be just as pleasurable and just as valid to do that.

So, one of the things I want to try to do is work on the other end of this spectrum see what happens when you slow things down.

I was surprised when I was doing the first music for Cathedral Oceans, using echoes that were 30 seconds long, so the rhythms were 30 seconds between the beats.

It was very interesting slowing down enough to work with that intuitively. You had to do it, you had to synchronise with the track in order to be able to work with it. And it's very interesting what kind of state you get into intense, yet calm and tranquil. A sort of trance state.

MF: I think it's particularly on the LPs with Harold Budd, where you get that sort of aching plateau, where you slow down so much that any peturbation has a ma.s.sive effect really.

Harold was one of the first people who got that right, I think. One of the very first to have sufficient courage to leave enough s.p.a.ce in the music and not fill s.p.a.ces unnecessarily. Not decorate. Takes an awful lot of quiet courage to do that.

When this is done, it allows an alternative ecology to emerge one based on events that are much less frequent. And that, of course, affects their significance. You are drawn to them in a sort of smiling fascination, rather than the usual pop music method of lapel grabbing bombardment.

MF: It seems to be something similar to what you get in Tarkovsky films where either people say 'oh, this is too slow I can't stand it', or they enter into the slow time of the film and anything that happens almost becomes too much.

JF: Exactly, you can concentrate on any event very thoroughly, when that mode of perception is made available. Events become stately and welcome and valued and significant, and their arrival and departure can be fully experienced. The lack of jostling allows that sort of elegant notional s.p.a.ce to open up.

It functions at the other end of the spectrum from commercial TV and cinema, and of rock & roll. Both ends can be equally interesting, I think.

MF: It seems to me that you've always imposed the stillness and calmness of painting and photography or a certain type of film onto the agitation of rock, really. Certain kind of dreams - the dreams we're most familiar with are hyper-agitated, full of urgency etc, but there's another type of dream quality you seem to get to where those urgencies are suspended and you're out of that everyday life push-and-pull, really. I wondered - there seems to be a certain aching, or longing quality - these are words you seem to use a lot in your music...

JF: Well, dreams are a very important component. I realised that it is not simply the image you present yourself with, in a dream, which is important it's also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense of dread, and it is that accompaniment which determines its meaning.

The employment of these images and tones are some of the things that everyone shares, aren't they? They're composed of bits of unique personal events and references and memories, such as longings that you might have had when you're a child.

When your parents are away even for an hour it feel as though it goes on forever and you really deeply miss them and the abstraction, the tone component of that just carries on through life. Gets applied to different situations. These longings and all other emotional parts of the spectrum join the repertoire of tones we carry and apply. Some moments last forever.

MF: But there's almost a positive side, almost an enjoyment of longing and ache.

JF: Oh yes, where the observer part of you acknowledges an emotional connection with the rest. Simultaneously you feel as though you are very integrated, yet you are being gently pulled away from yourself. Gently disengaged.

MF: Isn't the 'emotionless' quality of your music more to do with a certain kind of calm?

JF: Yes, it's quite a complex thing, a compound. There are states where there's a sensation of time pa.s.sing, things changing, knowing the world is changing, falling in on itself, and reforming. And you may even be in the process of doing just that yourself.

But there are moments where you just stand by and watch it all, where you're aware of it, in a moment that seems to go on forever. So it's something of standing in a still place and watching the patterns in pa.s.sing crowds and even in your own life. It can be a very powerful experience.

That stillness, and the maintenance of a quiet dignity in the face of insurmountable circ.u.mstances can be immensely moving to witness.

It can be much more effective and moving if someone tells the story in an unemotional or undramatic way. You find that in Is.h.i.+guro. Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go are good examples of that kind of writing, where the most important components remain unstated. The Leopard is suffused with, and is dependent on a variant of this.

It's also allied to a device used in different ways by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Cary Grant. An archetypical figure attempts to retain dignity in the face of the worldly chaos while remaining ever hopeful of romance.

And with Ballard and Burroughs, you get an almost gentlemanly, middle cla.s.s version of a similar sort of stance mayhem of all kinds observed from a disengaged viewpoint.

Another Grey World: Darkstar.

James Blake, Kanye West, Drake and.

'Party Hauntology'

'It's a really grey-sounding synth, really organic and grainy. We call them "swells" where synthesisers start quite minimal and then develop into a huge chord, before progressing. I felt like it wouldn't be right if we just carried on with that dayglo Hyperdub sound of a couple of years ago. I mean I love those songs, but it already feels like a lifetime away.' I felt vindicated when I read these remarks of Darkstar's James Young in an interview with Dan Hanc.o.x. When I first heard the alb.u.m about which Young is talking 2010's North the phrase that came to my mind was 'Another Grey World'. The landscape of North felt like the verdant Max Ernst forest of Eno's Another Green World become ash.

...with winter ahead of us.

The depressive's world is black and/ or white, (you only have to remember the covers of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Closer), but North does not (yet) project a cold world entirely swathed in snow. North is the direction that the alb.u.m is heading towards, not a destination it has reached. Its landscape is colourless rather than black, its mood tentative it is grey as in unresolved, a grey area. This is an alb.u.m defined by its negative capability of remaining in doubts, disquiet and dissatisfactions that it unable to name. It is grey as in The Cure's 'All Cats Are Grey' from Faith, a record that stood between the spidery psychedelia of Seventeen Seconds and the unrelieved darkness of p.o.r.nography. Yet North is ultimately too jittery to muster the glacial fatalism of Faith but what North has in common with The Cure's great records is the sense of total immersion in a mood. It is a work that came out of method immersion: Young told Dan Hanc.o.x that, as they recorded North, the group had listened obsessively to Radiohead, Burial, the Human League and the first alb.u.m by Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark. The record demands the same kind of involvement, which is perhaps why some found it unengaging. On a casual listen, the very unresolved quality of the tracks could seem simply undercooked. James b.u.t.tery's vocals could come off as limp, anaemic. In addition, many were disappointed by Darkstar's failure to provide an alb.u.m full of the 'robotic 2-step' that they had invented on 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer'. In fact, they made the robotic 2-step alb.u.m but ditched it, dissatisfied with its lack of ambition. (This wholly completed alb.u.m that was never released is one of several parallels with Burial.) 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer' apart, if you heard North without knowing the history, you wouldn't a.s.sume any connection with dubstep. At the same time, North isn't straightforwardly a return to a predance sound. It is more a continuation of a certain mode of electronic pop that was prematurely terminated sometime in the mid-80s: like New Order if they hadn't abandoned the sleek cybernetic mausoleum that Martin Hannett built for them on Movement.

Except, of course, that it is not possible to simply continue that trajectory as if nothing had happened. Darkstar acknowledge the present only negatively. It impinges on their music in perhaps the only way it can, as a failure of the future, as a temporal disorder that has infected the voice, causing it to stutter and sibilate, to fragment into strange slithering shards. Part of what separates Darkstar from their synthpop forebears is the fact that the synthesiser no longer connotes futurity. But Darkstar are not retreating from a vivid sense of futurity because there is no such futurity from which they could retreat. This becomes clear when you compare the Darkstar cover of 'Gold' to the Human League original. It's not just that one is no more futuristic than the other; it's that neither are futuristic. The Human League track is clearly a superseded futurism, while the Darkstar track seems to come after the future.

It's this sense of living in an interregnum, that makes North so (un)timely. Where Burial made contact with the secret sadness underlying the boom, Darkstar articulate the sense of foreboding that is everywhere after the economic crash of 2008. North is certainly full of references to lost companions.h.i.+p: the alb.u.m can be read as an oblique take on a love affair gone wrong.

Our fate's not to share....

The connection between us gone....

But the very focus on the love couple rather than the rave ma.s.sive is itself symptomatic of a turn inward. In a discussion that Simon Reynolds and I had about North shortly after it was released, Reynolds argued that it was a mistake to talk as if rave was bereft of emotion. Rave was a music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn't a.s.sociated with romance or introspection The introspective turn in 21st century (post)dance music was therefore not a turn towards emotion, it was a s.h.i.+ft from collectively experienced affect to privatised emotions. There was an intrinsic and inevitable sadness to this inward turn, regardless of whether the music was officially sad or not. The twinning of romance and introspection, love and its disappointments, runs through 20th century pop. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another kind of emotional palette, based in a different model of escape from the miseries of individual selfhood.

The 21st century has often felt like the comedown after a speed binge, or the exile back into privatised selfhood, and the songs on North have the jittery clarity of Prozac withdrawal.

It's significant that most of the digital interference on North is applied to James b.u.t.tery's voice. Much of the vocal sounds as if it has been recorded on a shaky mobile phone connection. I'm reminded of Franco Berardi's arguments about the relations.h.i.+p between informational overload and depression. Berardi's argument is not that the dot.com crash caused depression, but the reverse: the crash was caused by the excessive strain put on people's nervous systems by new informational technologies. Now, more than a decade after the dot.com crash and the density of data has ma.s.sively increased. The paradigmatic labourer is now the call centre worker the ba.n.a.l cyborg, punished whenever they unplug from the communicative matrix. On North, James b.u.t.tery, afflicted by all manner of digital palsies, sounds like a cyborg whose implants and interfaces have come loose, learning to be a man again, and not liking it very much.

North is like Kanye West's 2008 alb.u.m 808s and Heartbreak with all the gloss removed. There is the same method melancholia, the same anchoring in early 80s synthpop, explicitly flagged in 808's case by the cover design's echo of Peter Saville's sleeves for New Order's Blue Monday and Power, Corruption and Lies. The opening track 'Say You Will' sounds like it has been worked up out of the crisp synthetic chill of Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' and the funereal drum tattoo of New Order's 'In A Lonely Place'. As with North, though, the 80s parallels are disrupted by the digital effects used on the voice. 808s and Heartbreak pioneered the use of AutoTune, which would subsequently come to dominate R&B and hip-hop from the late 00s onwards. In a sense, the conspicuous use of Auto-Tune that is to say, its use as an effect, as opposed to its official purpose as a device to correct a singer's pitch was a 90s throwback, since this was popularised by Cher on her 1998 single 'Believe'. Auto-Tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital airbrus.h.i.+ng, and the (over) use of the two technologies (alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, is this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality a perverse yet ultra-ba.n.a.l normality, from which all flaws have been erased.

On 808s and Heartbreak, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st century pleasuredome. Kanye's lachrymose android shtick reaches its maudlin depths on the astonis.h.i.+ng 'Pinocchio Story'. This is the kind of Auto-Tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-Oedipus David from Spielberg's AI (2001) to sing; a little like Britney Spears's 'Piece Of Me', you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves selfconsciousness, or when a human realises he or she has become a commodity. It's the soured sound at the end of the rainbow, an electro as desolated as Suicide's infernal synth-opera 'Frankie Teardrop'.

A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century's forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it's no surprise that it is in hip-hop a genre that has become increasingly aligned with consumerist pleasure over the past 20-odd years that this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop's drive to conspicuously consume they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. This hedonist's sadness a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, 'we threw a party/ yeah, we threw a party,' on Take Care's 'Marvin's Room'.

It's no surprise to learn that Kanye West is an admirer of James Blake. There's an affective as well as sonic affinity between parts of Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Blake's two alb.u.ms. You might say that Blake's whole MO is a partial re-naturalisation of the digitally manipulated melancholy Kanye auditioned on 808s: soul music after the Auto-Tune cyborg. But liberated from the penthouse-prison of West's ego, unsure of itself, caught up in all kinds of impa.s.ses, the disaffection languishes listlessly, not always even capable of recognizing itself as sadness.

You might go so far as to say that the introspective turn reached a kind of conclusion with Blake's 2013 alb.u.m Overgrown. In his transformation from dubstep to pop, Blake had gone from digitally manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing tracks to writing songs. The initial motivation for Blake's approach to the song no doubt came from Burial, whose combination of jittery 2-step beats and R&B vocal samples pointed the way to a possible vision of 21st century pop. It was as if Burial had produced the dub versions; now the task was to construct the originals, and that entailed replacing the samples with an actual vocalist.

Listening back to Blake's records in chronological sequence is like hearing a ghost gradually a.s.sume material form; or it's like hearing the song form (re)coalescing out of digital ether. A track such as 'I Only Know (What I Know Now)' from the Klavierwerke EP is gorgeously insubstantial it's the merest ache, Blake's voice a series of sighs and unintelligible pitch-s.h.i.+fted hooks, the production mottled and waterlogged, the arrangement intricate and fragile, conspicuously inorganic in the way that it makes no attempt to smooth out the elements of the montage. The voice is a smattering of traces and tics, a spectral special effect scattered across the mix. But with Blake's self-t.i.tled debut alb.u.m, something like traditional sonic priorities were restored. The reinvention of pop that his early releases promised was now seemingly given up, as Blake's de-fragmented voice moved to the front of the mix, and implied or partially disa.s.sembled songs became 'proper' songs, complete with un-deconstructed piano and organ. Electronics and some vocal manipulation remained, but they were now a.s.signed a decorative function. Blake's blue-eyed soul vocals, and the way that his tracks combined organ (or organ-like sounds) with electronica, made him reminiscent of a half-speed Steve Winwood.

Just as with Darkstar's North, Blake's turn to songs met with a mixed response. Many who were enthusiastic about the early EPs were disappointed or mildly dismayed by James Blake. Veiling and implying an object is the surest route to producing the impression of sublimity. Removing the veils and bringing that object to the fore risks de-sublimation, and some found Blake's actual songs unequal to the virtual ones his early records had induced them into hallucinating. Blake's voice was as cloyingly overpowering as it was non-specific in its feeling. The result was a quavering, tremulous vagueness, which was by no means clarified by lyrics that were similarly allusive/elusive. The alb.u.m came over as if it were earnestly entreating us to feel, without really telling us what is was we were supposed to be feeling. Perhaps it's this emotional obliqueness that contributes to what Angus Finlayson, in his review of Overgrown for FACT, characterised as the strangeness of the songs on James Blake. They seemed, Finlayson said, like 'half-songs, skeletal place-markers for some fuller arrangement yet to come.' The journey into 'proper' songs was not as complete as it first appeared. It was like Blake had tried to reconstruct the song form with only dub versions or dance mixes as his guide. The result was something scrambled, garbled, solipsistic, a bleary version of the song form that was as frustrating as it was fascinating. The delicate insubstantiality of the early EPs had given way to something that felt overfull. It was like drowning in a warm bath (perhaps with your wrists cut).

On Blake's alb.u.ms, there is a simultaneous feeling that the tracks are both congested and unfinished, and that incompleteness the sketchy melodies, the half-hooks, the repeated lines that play like clues to some emotional event never disclosed in the songs themselves may be why they eventually get under your skin. The oddly indeterminate irresolute and unresolved character of Blake's music gives it the quality of gospel music for those who have lost their faith so completely that they have forgotten they ever had it. What survives is only a quavering longing, without object or context, Blake coming off like an amnesiac holding on to images from a life and a narrative that he cannot recover. This negative capability means that Overgrown is like an inversion of the oversaturated high-gloss emotional stridency of chart and reality TV pop, which is always perfectly certain of what it is feeling.

Yet there's an unconvincing or perhaps unconvinced quality to so much of mainstream culture's hedonism now. Oddly, this is most evident in the annexing of R&B by club music. When former R&B producers and performers embraced dance music, you might have expected an increase in euphoria, an influx of ecstasy. But the reverse has happened, and it's as if many of the dancefloor tracks are pulled down by a hidden gravity, a disowned sadness. The digitallyenhanced uplift in the records by producers such as Flo-Rida, Pitbull and will.i.am is like a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we've hammered so much we've become immune to its effects. It's hard not to hear these records' demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.

In a brilliant essay on The Quietus website, Dan Barrow a.n.a.lysed the tendency in a slew of chartpop over the past few years including Jay-Z and Alicia Keys's 'Empire State of Mind' Kesha's 'Tik Tok', Flo Rida's 'Club Can't Even Handle Me Yet' 'to give the listener the payoff, the sonic money-shot, as soon and as obviously as possible'. Pop has always delivered sugar-sweet pleasure, of course, but, Barrow argues, there's a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn't seduce; it tyrannises. This, Barrow argues, is 'a crude, overdetermined excess, as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics chorus hooks, melody, "accessibility" and blowing them up to cartoonish size.' There's an a.n.a.logy to be drawn between this artificially inflated pop and Berardi's discussion of internet p.o.r.nography and drugs such as v.i.a.g.r.a, which, similarly, dispense with seduction and aim directly at pleasure. According to Berardi, remember, we are so overwhelmed by the incessant demands of digital communications, we are simply too busy to engage in arts of enjoyment highs have to come in a no-fuss, hyperbolic form so that we can quickly return to checking email or updates on social networking sites. Berardi's remarks can give us an angle on the pressures that dance music has been subject to over the last decade. Whereas the digital technology of the 80s and 90s fed the collective experience of the dancefloor, the communicative technology of the 21st century has undermined it, with even clubbers obsessively checking their smartphones. (Beyonce and Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' which sees the pair begging a caller to stop bugging them so they can dance now seems like a last failed attempt to keep the dancefloor free of communicational intrusion.) Even the most apparently uncomplicated calls to enjoyment can't fully suppress a certain sadness. Take Katy Perry's 'Last Friday Night'. On the face of it, the track is a simple celebration of pleasure ('Last Friday night/ Yeah we maxed our credit cards/ And got kicked out of the bar'). Yet it's not hard to hear something Sisyphean, something purgatorial, in the song's evocation of a (not so) merry-go-round of pleasure that Perry and her friends can never get off: 'Always say we're gonna stop/ This Friday night/ Do it all again...' Played at half-speed, this would sound as bleak as early Swans. David Guetta's 'Play Hard' calls up a similarly interminable repet.i.tion. Pleasure becomes an obligation that will never let up 'us hustler's work is never through/ We work hard, play hard' and hedonism is explicitly paralleled with work: 'Keep partyin' like it's your job'. It's the perfect anthem for an era in which the boundaries between work and non-work are eroded by the requirement that we are always-on (that, for instance, we will answer emails at any hour of the day), and that we never lose an opportunity to marketise our own subjectivity. In a (not at all trivial) sense, partying is now a job. Images of hedonistic excess provide much of the content on Facebook, uploaded by users who are effectively unpaid workers, creating value for the site without being remunerated for it. Partying is a job in another sense in conditions of objective immiseration and economic downturn, making up the affective deficit is outsourced to us.

Sometimes, a free-floating sadness seeps into the grain of the music itself. On their blog No Good Advice, the blogger J describes the use of a sample from Kaoma's 1989 track 'Lambada' on Jennifer Lopez's 2011 hit 'On The Floor': 'The s.n.a.t.c.h of 'Lambada' functions as a buried-memory trigger, a sort of party hauntology that lends the song a slight edge of wistful, nostalgic sadness.' There is no reference to sadness in the official text of the track, which is a simple exhortation to dance. So it's as if the sorrow comes from outside, like traces of the waking world incorporated into a dream, or like the grief which creeps into all the embedded worlds in Inception (2010).

'Party hauntology' might even be the best name for the dominant 21st century form of pop, the transnational club music produced by Guetta, Flo-Rida, Calvin Harris and will.i.am. But the debts to the past, the failure of the future are repressed here, meaning that the hauntology takes a disavowed form. Take a track like the Black Eyed Peas' immensely popular 'I Gotta Feeling'. Although 'I Gotta Feeling' is ostensibly an optimistic record, there's something forlorn about it. Perhaps that's because of will.i.am's use of Auto-Tune there seems to be Sparky's Magic Piano-like machinic melancholy intrinsic to the technology itself, something which Kanye drew out rather than invented on 808s and Heartbreak. In spite of the track's declamatory repet.i.tions, there's a fragile, fugitive quality about the pleasures 'I Gotta Feeling' so confidently expects. That's partly because 'I Gotta Feeling' comes off more like a memory of a past pleasure than an antic.i.p.ation of a pleasure that is yet to be felt. The alb.u.m from which the track comes, The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies) was like its predecessor, The Beginning so immersed in Rave that it effectively operated as an act of homage to the genre. The Beginning's 'Time (Dirty Bit)' could have actually pa.s.sed for a Rave track from the early 90s the crudeness of its cut and paste montage recalls the ruff 'n' ready textures that samplers would construct at that time, and its borrowing from Dirty Dancing's '(I've Had) The Time of my Life' was just the kind of subversion/sublimation of cheesy source material that Rave producers delighted in. Yet, the Black Eyed Peas' Rave-appropri-ations didn't function so much as revivals of Rave as denials that the genre had ever happened in the first place. If Rave hasn't yet happened, then there is no need to mourn it. We can act as if we're experiencing all this for the first time, that the future is still ahead of us. The sadness ceases to be something we feel, and instead consists in our temporal predicament itself, and we are like Jack in the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel, dancing to ghost songs, convincing ourselves that the music of yesteryear is really the music of today.

03: THE STAIN OF PLACE.

'Always Yearning For The Time That Just.

Eluded Us' Introduction to Laura Oldfield.