Tuesday 3 May 2011

E&V - Driven Home Wasted

Driven Home Wasted by entschwindet und vergeht
Isn't it strange how the last few years have proven Mark and Simon right to a level I'm sure even they didn't expect? Hauntology has become such a significant part of the pop landscape that it's strange to think that it was less than five years ago that they first started to identify the ghostly tendency. The method, exemplified along one axis by Burial and along the other by Ariel Pink has gone on to spawn such a massive proportion of the phantasmagorical pop that currently dominates the critical consensus.

One of the more significant poles of the current state of the tendency is Tri-Angle records, whose artists mostly delve into woozy memories of a certain branch of eighties synth pop, drowning in the usual dreamy half-recollections, although now it seems to be bad Simpson/Bruckheimer movies that are providing the material for twisted reminiscence.

On the one hand, it feels as if people are finally, finally making good postmodern pastiche rather than kitsch, but then at the same time it's as if there really isn't a single crack in culture that would allow anything 'new' to break through, as everyone just wrings the last drips of aesthetic satisfaction out of old forms, desperately not trying to look the future in the face.

With that in mind, and in conversation with my flatmate, (who it must be said keeps abreast of all of the latest shit, going to all the clubs etc, perhaps not quite sharing my despairing outlook), I decided to get back in on the act. So I made an example of your typical melancholy hypnagogic pop song. It's not so hard!

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