004
space; glitch
As in Chungking Express, the aesthetic language of -CORE can also be identified by its artificial treatment of space in which “the sonic depth of the recording is squeezed into a vastly smaller physical area than an [analog] medium” (Reynolds, 2011). This is a sonic quality of -CORE output.
drain story, Bladee, 2020
The reverb-wasted aesthetic of Drain Gang’s output is coupled with the closeness of the trap-hat stutter. The spatial dislocation is further reflected in the way that music is listened to: the shift from an embodied sense of time and place afforded by hifi-systems - your distance from the object determining audibility - to wireless headphones creating an always there bubble: weightless, wireless and noise cancelling, which collapses the space between you and the mp3. In the realm of recorded sound, the dislocated hypothetical space of production acts as a sort of
non-place,
As defined by in ‘Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ by Marc Augé, 2009.
its artificiality not corresponding to any actual circumstance. The interpolation of synchronicity - oscillating between absolute presence and delay - is perceived in music video aesthetics and audio output. In particular,
Bladee
‘CEO of Drain Gang’.
, decisively plays with this wavering dislocation. Identified by tight cuts and audio-reactive edits, his music videos mimic a kind of fantasy zoom-in/zoom-out algorithm diving web experience - a hyper-synchronous
Synchronicity can be described as the symbiotic relationship between sound and image which ties them together, however there is a deliberate deviation through the hyperfixation on synchronicity which side-steps conventional modes (Korsgaard, 2017).
hapticity. This contrasts with the out-of-joint performance of lip syncing in the videos, drawing attention to itself in its nonchalant, non-committal modality. A strange parody of music video conventions which fictionalises live-ness and embodiment radiating an aura of almost. There is further a deliberate obscuring of lyrics through vocal processing and whispering.egobaby, Bladee, 2020
With the ever advancing sophistication of these virtual production places
falling out of time
for example, Ableton’s ‘warp’ function automatically synchronises the track-in-progress to a malleable BPM
- the temporal glitch - is a decisive aesthetic action. Legacy Russell’s ‘glitch’ framework highlights this fissure as a moment in which we recognise the separation of the physical self from the body-in-online-fantasy, providing a terrain for analysing this separation - both from its physicality, but further from its location in a particular chronology (Russell, 2013). Indeed, “the slipping across, beyond and through the stereotypical materiality of the corpus”, can expand further to locate the dwelling place of -CORE music: the common usage of the term ‘corpus’ as a dataset in computer science (Russell, 2013).