First post

Gear Fetishism

”By 2005 or so, it was becoming clear that

electronic music could no longer deliver sounds that were

‘‘futuristic.” Mark Fisher writes in his essay ”What is Hauntology?”. 

Fisher, here, is not merely talking about the sonic qualities of sound- and music production, but electronic music’s failure, in the 21st century, to deliver what it previously could: an imagined future that is different from our current state, a social imagination that inspired hope and promise.

Quite materially, everything recorded today could’ve been recorded in the 1990s. Every knob and wire and bleeping device has really only transformed aesthetically; the designs are adapted to 2020s minimalist taste, both physically and digitally, the functionalities streamlined with the, apparently, all-important UX/UI in mind. 

The ”futurism”, if I’m to make a general assessment, resides today in the spectacle of the visual, the tidbit formats we see daily in social media, in its content and posts. Where in the last century a bleeping synth promised a subversion of society, something ”new”, the visual spectacle of, for example, an impressive set of analog synths today, promises that you can sound exactly like the soundtrack of Stranger Things, or you can install this or that plugin in order to tackle a kick drum’s transients; ie, a gradual shift in perspective, from the macroscopic to the microscopic. 

Welcome to the first entry. This was a spastic and incomplete first post haha more will come.