005
the cloud; disembodied distribution
Cloud
This is not as new as we might assume with the mainstream cloud of Google Drive, iCloud etc. introduced in 2011/2012, but can be dated to 1996, shortly after the release of Chungking Express where MIT Technology Review cites a reference to a patent for ‘cloud computing’, an unrealised model (Hu, 2015).
servers such as Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud facilitate astronomic expansion of memory which elongates the present outside of a physical location - “distance and delay have been eroded to nearly nothing” (Reynolds, 2011). As of February 2020, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute - this equates to approximately 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour (Statista, 2022). Our sense of temporality is increasingly inconstant - a model that is facilitated by the time-display bar, allowing visitors to make-present a particular moment; and the algorithmic sidebar - a lateral drift across time in which everything can enter your personal
timezone
Users can also automatically link a certain timecode or comment on a fragment of a song in order to direct others to a particular moment.
(Reynolds, 2011). Moreover, I would suggest that the genre-mashing -CORE is itself related to this algorithmically defined experience. Just as “one’s data trail grows with each website visit and each packet one sends through the cloud”, a particular online sub-scene accumulates references from the web ocean (Hu, 2015). This analysis of the temporal effect of listening to music online - “you can flit from the archaic to the up-to-the-minute in a click” - has a similar effect as the one achieved through Wong Kar-Wai’s use of step printing - the paradoxical combination of speed and standstill that locates the aesthetics of lingering as a feeling of stuckness (Reynolds, 2011). This is also explored lyrically. nowhere fast, meatcomputer, 2020
The vastness of accessible content does not, however, provide an adequate archive for music scenes that originate online. Labyrinthine internet scenes - spread across myriad forums and platforms - are dotted with elisions, breaks, lost moments (Press-Reynolds, 2022). The chronology is consequently impossible to define; this is something which is deliberately mythologized by Drainers and becomes a kind of ‘true-fan’ signifier. In the instance of Bladee’s Icedancer Mixtape, this fictional chronology or ‘drain story’ is used as a distribution strategy in which albums are dropped and
