Mohammad SalemyPLAYBACK 1
In recent years we have seen a revival of the mid-to-late 2000s, much of it driven by nostalgia for the early years of social media. Corporations had yet to see the commercial potential of these platforms, and we, as users, were far less aware of their mechanisms or of the symbolic capital attached to everything we lived, made and posted. The revival expresses a longing for authenticity, for a moment when the symbolic had not yet been fully quantified and capitalised. It also carries a nostalgia for the blind optimism of those years, when neoliberalism went largely unquestioned and history seemed to improve on its own, a belief that has become hard to sustain amid the uncertainty and overlapping crises of the present.
The same machinery this nostalgia looks back on has quickly absorbed it. Online music journalism and platform algorithms have turned it into microtrends like indie sleaze and laptop twee. A microtrend is simply a trend intensified at speed, and these categories exist because only what has been named and packaged can circulate as a commodity.
Mohammad Salemy and Dean Kissick open PLAYBACK 1 with a conversation on this return to the 2000s. They ask how the platforms at the centre of this recent nostalgia came to sell the past back to their users, and what remains possible for music once every earnest gesture is packaged, aimed at producing a new trend.
The evening continues with live sets by Shoplifting and DAT Politics, followed by the headlining act 300SkullsAndCounting, and closes with a DJ set by Bartolome.
Both 300SkullsAndCounting and Shoplifting are regularly filed under those tags. We think their music moves beyond those moulds and resists the flattening the tags impose.
The two projects share a sound inherited from video games and a link to the internet culture of 2000s emo, where chiptune, electro and synthesisers first met songs shared online with strangers on MySpace. Both also carry the heritage of a UK music culture deeply shaped by bass. 300SkullsAndCounting makes something close to Undertale-crunkcore, pairing the wholesome soundtracks of 2010s Newgrounds indie Flash games with the loud, bouncing energy of crunk, UK bass and white boy rap. Shoplifting follows the chiptune tradition of turning gaming hardware into an instrument. He recorded All the Things We Lost Last Year entirely on a Nintendo DS, where guitars sampled into the console sit alongside pitched-up voices and bitcrushed melodies.
DAT Politics comes in the lineup by way of sharing the bitcrushed textures with the other artists. In the early 2000s glitch was one of the most theoretical currents in electronic music. Releasing on labels like Tigerbeat6, Kid 606’s home for irreverent laptop music, DAT Politics pulled this tendency toward playfulness and pop sensibilities, mixing its errors with console sounds and catchy melodies, a gesture close to what 300SkullsAndCounting and Shoplifting are doing today.
Against a postmodern approach to music consisting of discursivity and irony, the PLAYBACK 2 artists base their aesthetics on sincerity and directness. They inherit chiptune, emo, UK bass culture and glitch the way one inherits a language through learning, speaking through them instead of quoting them. This is why their music avoids both the cacophony of references and the cultural pressure to sound new.
18:00 – 1:00, Bar in Studiofoyer
18:30 – 19:15, MOHAMMAD SALEMY IN CONVERSATION WITH DEAN KISSICK
19:15 – 19:30 Bar in Studiofoyer
19:30 – 20:30, SHOPLIFTING
20:30 – 21:15, DAT POLITICS
21:30 – 22:30, 300SKULLSANDCOUNTING
22:45 – 12:30, BARTOLOME DJSET