FRI., NOVEMBER 06, 2009
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eMusic Yearbook: 2000
by Hua Hsu
It started with a note of relief.
Our computers had survived; we had made it. The clocks had passed midnight into the year 2000, not 1900, and all those tanks of propane and fresh water cached in the garage became souvenirs of an instantly-embarrassing paranoia.
Perhaps the year 2000 was the last time many would regard a computer with suspicion. Fears of the machine-chaos that would ensue as computer clocks the world over tried in vain to rollover from 1999 to 2000 had been exaggerated. With Y2K — the very name musty and primitive-sounding to modern ears — out of the way: the future, our sturdiest muse, was here. Few new years arrived with such readymade heft, that haunting ribbon of zeroes suggestive of the brave new worlds to come.
Though our digital infrastructure had not succumbed, it was still possible to question technology's promise. Crashing hard drives, the static dirge of dial-up, the impertinent whirr of a disk drive: these were the raw materials of the late 1990s glitch scene, a noisy and inward turn for electronic dance music. The mood was perfectly captured by Uwe Schmidt (using his Geeez'n'Gosh moniker) and his 2000 masterpiece My Life With Jesus, a gospel house record translated into the language of nervous, distorted bass-lines, bubbly rhythms and shards of twitchy synths. Whatever communion Schmidt was imagining was one forged within the casing of a computer. On "Gotta Pray," the playfully heretical Schmidt diced up the cries of true believers and buried them under a gurgle of tones and pulses. Where then to deposit one's faith?
The sound of an eternally hiccupping CD could become its own kind of pop music; texture became its own kind of narrative. In the Bay Area, a bratty, showman producer named Kid606 and his Tigerbeat6 collective began issuing bruised, spastic and abrasive electronic records that made a mockery of previous standards of punk aggression. There was a texture to his howls, a bi-polar energy unimaginable without the aid of hacked electronics. Where Kid606, Cex and Matmos came across as surgical machine-pranksters, others seemed more anxious. A millennial tension shaded the works of Schmidt and fellow visionaries like Wolfgang Voigt (the pop ambient mastermind behind Gas' Pop) and Sasu Ripatti (as Luomo, his 2000 microhouse masterwork Vocalcity remains one of the decade's masterpieces), each of whom seemed to celebrate the possibilities of a laptop or software, all while drawing attention to the devices' potential for malfunction.
All of these artists, separated by style and geography, shared something else in common: that year, they all released records on Mille Plateaux, a Frankfurt-based label that had borrowed its name from a 1980 book of the same name about "capitalism and schizophrenia" by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Snobbish affectations aside, the rise of Mille Plateaux-the-label was itself a strange, digital echo of something else: Mille Plateaux-the-book was making a comeback of sorts as well, having inspired Michael Hardt and Antonio Negiri's Empire, one of the year's truly unexpected literary successes.
Empire offered a dystopian view of world forces that were reordering themselves without our consent. Hardt and Negiri placed their faith in the multitude, a new vision of the collective that could become the true embodiment of democratic possibility.
New communities were emerging, made possible by quantum leaps in Internet connectivity. By the end of 2000, digital technology was outpacing our ability to think about it. Napster — a different expression of the multitude — had emerged the year before and, without benefit of traditional advertising strategies, had become the kind of effortless and ubiquitous success story that makes business school seem like a joke. It was started for want of free music, but it gradually threatened to erode the very foundations of the entertainment industry. Soon, fans were getting sued by heroes, and Metallica would never seem transgressive again.
In place of the old heroes, new ones emerged. Sigur Ros and godspeed you! black emperor released captivating albums, as though the tides of history could be frozen in these magnificently heavy, heaving bursts of slow motion sound. In October, two of the decade's most important and paradigm-shifting records were released: Radiohead's Kid A and Outkast's Stankonia. From the post-guitar arena electronica of "Idioteque" to the free-associative jungle riot of "Bombs Over Baghdad," each album represented a break from their own histories as well as the histories of their preferred genres. These albums felt futuristic; they attested to the possibilities of more data, more information, more technology and more inputs, even as they lusted after moments of intimate reprieve.
The following year, something terrible would happen. Reflecting on the year 2000 now, it is difficult not to read our memories as an anticipation of 9/11 and the world that would follow. Eventually, the glitches and bugs would be vanquished: technology would soon become a seemingly neutral world of faces and spaces, pods and diaries. The multitude started blogs and shopped online. I mis-remember Outkast's "Gasoline Dreams" as a post-9/11 screed against George Bush, even if it was recorded in a blissful state of spring 2000 ignorance, back when Al Gore seemed like a Presidential shoo-in. It was the stroke before a decade-long midnight, when the future seemed to hang on a chad, hole-punched debris dangling from a slip of paper.
A reason to distrust old technology, too.
Our computers had survived; we had made it. The clocks had passed midnight into the year 2000, not 1900, and all those tanks of propane and fresh water cached in the garage became souvenirs of an instantly-embarrassing paranoia.
Perhaps the year 2000 was the last time many would regard a computer with suspicion. Fears of the machine-chaos that would ensue as computer clocks the world over tried in vain to rollover from 1999 to 2000 had been exaggerated. With Y2K — the very name musty and primitive-sounding to modern ears — out of the way: the future, our sturdiest muse, was here. Few new years arrived with such readymade heft, that haunting ribbon of zeroes suggestive of the brave new worlds to come.
Though our digital infrastructure had not succumbed, it was still possible to question technology's promise. Crashing hard drives, the static dirge of dial-up, the impertinent whirr of a disk drive: these were the raw materials of the late 1990s glitch scene, a noisy and inward turn for electronic dance music. The mood was perfectly captured by Uwe Schmidt (using his Geeez'n'Gosh moniker) and his 2000 masterpiece My Life With Jesus, a gospel house record translated into the language of nervous, distorted bass-lines, bubbly rhythms and shards of twitchy synths. Whatever communion Schmidt was imagining was one forged within the casing of a computer. On "Gotta Pray," the playfully heretical Schmidt diced up the cries of true believers and buried them under a gurgle of tones and pulses. Where then to deposit one's faith?
The sound of an eternally hiccupping CD could become its own kind of pop music; texture became its own kind of narrative. In the Bay Area, a bratty, showman producer named Kid606 and his Tigerbeat6 collective began issuing bruised, spastic and abrasive electronic records that made a mockery of previous standards of punk aggression. There was a texture to his howls, a bi-polar energy unimaginable without the aid of hacked electronics. Where Kid606, Cex and Matmos came across as surgical machine-pranksters, others seemed more anxious. A millennial tension shaded the works of Schmidt and fellow visionaries like Wolfgang Voigt (the pop ambient mastermind behind Gas' Pop) and Sasu Ripatti (as Luomo, his 2000 microhouse masterwork Vocalcity remains one of the decade's masterpieces), each of whom seemed to celebrate the possibilities of a laptop or software, all while drawing attention to the devices' potential for malfunction.
All of these artists, separated by style and geography, shared something else in common: that year, they all released records on Mille Plateaux, a Frankfurt-based label that had borrowed its name from a 1980 book of the same name about "capitalism and schizophrenia" by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Snobbish affectations aside, the rise of Mille Plateaux-the-label was itself a strange, digital echo of something else: Mille Plateaux-the-book was making a comeback of sorts as well, having inspired Michael Hardt and Antonio Negiri's Empire, one of the year's truly unexpected literary successes.
Empire offered a dystopian view of world forces that were reordering themselves without our consent. Hardt and Negiri placed their faith in the multitude, a new vision of the collective that could become the true embodiment of democratic possibility.
New communities were emerging, made possible by quantum leaps in Internet connectivity. By the end of 2000, digital technology was outpacing our ability to think about it. Napster — a different expression of the multitude — had emerged the year before and, without benefit of traditional advertising strategies, had become the kind of effortless and ubiquitous success story that makes business school seem like a joke. It was started for want of free music, but it gradually threatened to erode the very foundations of the entertainment industry. Soon, fans were getting sued by heroes, and Metallica would never seem transgressive again.
In place of the old heroes, new ones emerged. Sigur Ros and godspeed you! black emperor released captivating albums, as though the tides of history could be frozen in these magnificently heavy, heaving bursts of slow motion sound. In October, two of the decade's most important and paradigm-shifting records were released: Radiohead's Kid A and Outkast's Stankonia. From the post-guitar arena electronica of "Idioteque" to the free-associative jungle riot of "Bombs Over Baghdad," each album represented a break from their own histories as well as the histories of their preferred genres. These albums felt futuristic; they attested to the possibilities of more data, more information, more technology and more inputs, even as they lusted after moments of intimate reprieve.
The following year, something terrible would happen. Reflecting on the year 2000 now, it is difficult not to read our memories as an anticipation of 9/11 and the world that would follow. Eventually, the glitches and bugs would be vanquished: technology would soon become a seemingly neutral world of faces and spaces, pods and diaries. The multitude started blogs and shopped online. I mis-remember Outkast's "Gasoline Dreams" as a post-9/11 screed against George Bush, even if it was recorded in a blissful state of spring 2000 ignorance, back when Al Gore seemed like a Presidential shoo-in. It was the stroke before a decade-long midnight, when the future seemed to hang on a chad, hole-punched debris dangling from a slip of paper.
A reason to distrust old technology, too.
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