Dec 24, 2017

2017... best of

The Moonlandingz - Interplanetary Class Classics (2017)
King Krule - The OOZ (2017)
Lone Taxidermist - Trifle (2017)
Slowdive - Slowdive (2017)
LCD Soundsystem - American Dream (2017)
Peter Perrett - How The West Was Won (Domino,2017)
John Maus - Screen Memories (2017)
Colleen — A flame my love, a frequency (Thrill Jockey)
Fever Ray - Plunge (2017)
Nezni Dalibor - U slojevima [Odlican hrcak, 2017]

Liima - 1982 (2017)
Lali Puna - Two Windows (2017)
The Horrors - V (2017)
The Raveonettes – 2016 Atomized (2017)
Four Tet - New Energy (2017)
Blonde Redhead - 3 O'Clock (EP,2017)
Hercules & Love Affair – Omnion (2017)
Otto A. Totland - The Lost (2017)
Peter Broderick - All Together Again (Erased Tapes,2017)
Piano Magic - Closure (2017)
Kevin Morby - City Music (2017)
Woods - Love Is Love (Woodsist,2017)
Methyl Ethel - Everything Is Forgotten (2017)
!!! - Shake The Shudder (2017)
Tim Darcy - Saturday Night (Jagjaguwar,2017)

Sep 24, 2017

Morrissey - Spent the Day in Bed



From the forthcoming album 'Low In High School' out November 17th.

Apr 19, 2017

The Moonlandingz



The Moonlandingz ft Rebecca Lucy Taylor 

Official video for the new single by The Moonlandingz.

TAKEN FROM THE DEBUT ALBUM: INTERPLANETARY CLASS CLASSICS (Out March 24th 2017) on Transgressive Records (UK/EU)

 

Slowdive - Slowdive (Dead Oceans,2017)



‘Sugar for the Pill’ from Slowdive, out May 5th on Dead Oceans


Kevin Morby "Aboard My Train," from his forthcoming album, 'City Music', out 6/16 on Dead Oceans

WOODS – Love Is Love (2017)

Woodsist 090
Release Date: May 19, 2017



"Wisdom comes with age, so it’s no surprise that Woods have grown more sage in the twelve years since they formed, expanding from sylvan drum circles into increasingly elaborate, transcendent psychedelia."- Pitchfork

"We walked down streets and crammed onto trains, our faces masks of fear. Unsure how to react, we, collectively, did not react. We grieved for a country and an ideal we never thought would die. We grieved for a loss of certainty. We argued about what we thought would happen. We preached understanding. We advocated for anger. Some people said that we’d at least get some incredible art, other people said that was a small view of a world we were quickly realizing we’d misunderstood. Everyone was right. Everyone was wrong. Art made in precarious times matters as much as we let it matter. But what are we looking for from the art we enjoy? Escapism? A reckoning with harsh reality? A temporary shared hallucination? Music can heal because it presents the pain of being human as universal. Love is Love was written and recorded in the two months immediately following the election, but it’s not a record borne entirely of angry, knee-jerk reaction to what America is becoming. Instead, it’s a meditation on love, and on what life means now. Taking cues from last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light, it feels very much like a record made from living, shoulder to shoulder, in a major city: weaving psychedelic swirls of guitar between languid horns reminiscent of the best Ethiopian jazz—Love is Love is a distinctly New York record. It is a document of protest in uncertain times and an open-hearted rejection of cynicism in favor of emotional honesty. It is bright, and then, unexpectedly, a little dark sometimes too. There will be parts of life where we will watch as events unfold and we will feel helpless. We will not be sure of the future. On good days, we’ll have each other. On the bad ones, we’ll turn to the art that helps us feel something. Love is Love is a document of the new world we live in, proof that light can come from despair and hope is still possible. We just need a little help remembering it exists."- Sam Hockley-Smith

Mar 19, 2017

Nedelja popodne...


Track 10 of the album named "Music to the films of Andrzej Wajda" (mainly composed by Andrzej Korzynski). It has been use for a 1976 movie named "Man of Marble".

Feb 23, 2017

Jens Lekman - Life Will See You Now (Secretly Canadian,2017)


















“…he’s made the journey from spindly, insular indiepop to glorious, primary-coloured music, explicitly referencing 80s chart hits, soul, funk and disco. The contrast with Lekman.s mordant lyrics “How I prayed that I could stop the pain / When the pain needed more than ibuprofen,” he sings on “Evening Prayer,” a joyous disco stomper about a tumour makes it, at times, desperately moving.” – The Guardian


Feb 18, 2017

Tim Darcy - Saturday Night (Jagjaguwar,2017)

















Tim Darcy is no stranger to introspection. As the singer/guitarist of exuberant Montréal-based art-punk quartet Ought, he’s wrought thoughtful lyrics that delve into the nature of creativity and cast a critical eye on the mundane. These traits persist on his first solo effort, even as the songwriter jettisons his band’s jittery rhythms for a more laidback approach.
In fact, Darcy feels more like an easygoing troubadour than an anxious David Byrne acolyte on Saturday Night‘s early tracks. His limited instrumentation usually consists of wiry rhythm guitar, rudimentary drums and non-insistent bass.




This conventional approach works when Darcy’s songs have a direction. “You Felt Comfort” lends the album a little bit of garage-rock grit and “Still Waking Up” is tranquil without feeling stagnant. Unfortunately, “Tall Glass of Water” and “Joan Pt. 1, 2” linger on a single verse before slowly transitioning into new sections that, despite their rollicking rhythms, fall quickly into a monotonous groove that the lyrics are too cryptic to escape.

The album hits its stride when Darcy’s self-conscious streak seeps in. He trades his choppy strumming for a shrill bowed guitar on the title track, and his doubtful intonations have all the sweet vulnerability of a Roy Orbison performance. “Found My Limit” hinges on repetition, but his spare arrangements render his uneasy mantras striking.

Saturday Night is a confident debut from a creator who’s best when he seems uncomfortable. So long as he keeps evading his comfort zone, Darcy’s songwriting should remain potent for years to come.

Cabbage

From: Manchester
Sounds Like: The icons of old Manchester being torn down
For Fans Of: Fat White Family, Sleaford Mods, Happy Mondays


“The simple fact is that we don’t like anything dull or boring, we always want to be entertaining,” says Cabbage guitarist/vocalist Joe Martin. “There’s a lot of mundanity and routine in modern life. If you can bring some black humour into that, it’s a really effective way of getting your message across.”
From their “anti-band name” band name to their lyrics about wanking into quiche in the name of class warfare and wishing death upon the US president-elect, no-one could ever accuse Cabbage of being dull. Martin likens his band to a Frankie Boyle standup show – the four EPs they’ve released thus far might strain the boundaries of good taste, but they also have a lot to say about the state of the world we live in. “We’ve come out of the traps with songs about necrophilia, war and capitalism,” he explains, as if reading from a checklist of well-trodden paths to pop stardom. “When David Cameron called Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser, we took a stab at that, too. Those kind of talking points come naturally to us. But we don’t want to be pigeonholed as a political band. It’s already happened, just because we sing about relatively serious issues, but we want to move onto something else, socially, musically and politically. We’re keen to explore different realms as soon as possible.”
It’s that desire to do things differently that originally brought Cabbage to prominence in their native Manchester, where they emerged from beneath the “Britpop ash-cloud the city’s still choking under,” and has seen them feted as rock ’n’ roll’s great white hope for 2017, not least by the BBC, who included them (somewhat incongruously) in their annual Sound Of… poll. For good or ill, they’re not the sort of band you can ignore, and however their debut album – due later this year – turns out, you can bet it won’t be boring.

Jan 31, 2017

Best new band in Britain : The Moonlandingz


Best new band in Britain : Goat Girl


Live at The Windmill, Brixton. Goat Girl round off Independent Venue Week, revving themselves up through the set to unleash their psychedelic country crowd-pleasers You're the Man and Country Sleaze.

Max Richter - Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works



Max Richter explores time and memory in his latest Deutsche Grammophon album, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works

Virginia Woolf’s sharp eye for the detail of life guided her work as a writer, its presence felt in everything from pioneering novels and perceptive essays to compelling letters and diaries. The author’s gift for expressing fluid states of mind in lyrical prose and her ability to draw readers into the mindscapes of fictional characters and capture the peculiar meanderings of consciousness have influenced generations of artists since her death seventy-five years ago. Max Richter is the latest to evoke memories of Virginia. Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works recalls her art’s vitality and the tragedy of a life scarred by mental illness and ended by suicide.

Richter’s album stems from his longer score for Woolf Works, choreographer Wayne McGregor’s first full-length creation for London’s Royal Ballet. Richter read several of Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway and Orlando among them, when he was in his early twenties. While their language and imagery left lasting impressions, he discovered fresh perspectives on reading them again as part of the preparation for Woolf Works.

Three Worlds includes orchestral and solo instrumental sounds, music for wordless soprano, electronic compositions, and recordings from nature and the built environment. Its multi-layered collage of sounds and styles speaks of transformation and the impermanence of all things.


'Ubu' by Methyl Ethel.

New album 'Everything Is Forgotten' is released 3rd March 2017

“Darling” from Real Estate's album, In Mind, out March 17, 2017 on Domino


Father John Misty's album Pure Comedy will be released April 7th, 2017





Jan 28, 2017

Mark Fisher’s K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation

The activist writer, who has died aged 48, bridged aesthetics and politics and had struggled with depression




Last week the writer Mark Fisher took his own life. His on/off struggle with depression was something he wrote about with courageous candour in articles and in his landmark book Capitalist Realism: is There No Alternative? Fisher argued that the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals. Rather, it was the symptom of a heartless and hopeless politics: precarious employment and flexible work patterns, the erosion of class solidarity and its institutions such as unions, and the relentless message from mainstream political parties and media alike that “there is no alternative” to managerial capitalism. That this is as good as it gets – so deal with it.

Finally the depression that Fisher, 48, had dissected acutely and fought against doggedly got the better of him. He left behind a wife and young son, a close-knit network of friends, allies, colleagues and students, and an ever-widening readership, all of whom were waiting always to hear what he had to say next.

Waiting for what Fisher had to say is a sensation I recall only too vividly. I remember the electric anticipation of those early-to-mid 2000s mornings when the first thing I would do after making some tea was check whether K-punk had posted. K-punk, Fisher’s online alter-ego, was the hub of a blog circuit in which I took part, and which for a glorious moment brought back the intellectual fervour of the postpunk music press.

“It wasn’t only about music and music wasn’t only about music,” Fisher once said of weekly papers such as the NME. “It was a medium that made demands on you.” More than any other blog of that time, K-punk reanimated the polymath, autodidact spirit of the golden-age rock press, where music held a privileged status – but film, TV, fiction and politics were in the mix too.
te obsessively, and with unparalleled penetration, about his totems.’

At the time, I commented that K-punk was a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain. The elegance and reach of Fisher’s writing, the evangelical urgency and caustic critique that seared through his rapid-fire communiques, demanded a response. And just as fellow bloggers picked up his baton, Fisher was always building on other writers’ arguments, pushing things further than you’d thought possible.


K-punk had its canon. Fisher wrote obsessively, and with unparalleled penetration, about his totems: Kubrick’s films; the glam artpop of Roxy Music, Japan, and Grace Jones; the eldritch visions of Joy Division and the Fall; darkside jungle pioneers such as Rufige Kru and more recent post-rave touchstones including ghostly dubstep genius Burial. But Fisher could always surprise you. K-punk fans fondly recall his unexpected glowing appreciation of Dido. Drawn to the bleak and uncompromising, Fisher was too sharp to fall into knee-jerk opposition to pop, and celebrated Rihanna, Girls Aloud, Róisín Murphy and other chart stars.

K-punk actually doubled as the hub of two separate blog circuits: the music-focused constellation to which I belonged and another network of philosophy blogs. That connection came from Fisher’s late-90s involvement in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Nominally attached to Warwick University but increasingly rogue in its research, the CCRU’s ideas were pretty far out. Even then, music – specifically jungle – was a core mind-fuel for Fisher and comrades. Among the CCRU’s legacy is the accelerationist school of political philosophy (nutshell: things will only get better after they’ve got worse, so let’s make things worse).

Back in the 90s, Fisher shared the CCRU’s exultant exaltation of the border-dissolving flows of capital and scorned socialism as a decrepit early 20th-century relic. But by the time he launched K-punk, he’d drifted back leftwards and for a while identified as a communist. More recently, Fisher sounded pragmatic notes, talking about working within existing institutions such as Labour (a prescient notion that arguably came true with Corbynism). Running through everything that Fisher did from the 90s onwards was his passion for the collective. CCRU had a commune-like intensity, while K-punk hosted an exuberant and frequently fractious comments box, whose participants generated many times more heated words than Fisher’s own often lengthy essays.

One byproduct of this collaborative and communal impulse was Fisher’s co-founding of the message board Dissensus. Another was Zero Books, for which Fisher worked as commissioning editor alongside founder Tariq Goddard, and which was conceived as a way of nurturing the talent that had emerged on the popcult and theory blogs that encircled K-punk. The result was a spate of sharply designed monographs that introduced the wider world to writers like Owen Hatherley, Nina Power, Laurie Penny and others. The work continued with the breakaway successor imprint Repeater.

Fisher’s 2009 debut, Capitalist Realism, was Zero’s smash hit. It was followed by Ghosts of My Life, a collection themed around the concept of hauntology: a rubric for analysing syndromes of cultural entropy and retroparalysis, notions of “lost futures” and the uncanny. A third book, The Weird and the Eerie, published this month, builds on these preoccupations.

At the time of his death, Fisher was working on the intriguingly titled Acid Communism. Judging by its introduction, the book would have involved a reckoning with the countercultural ideas of the Sixties, a decade that glam-fanatic Fisher had rather disdained in the K-punk days for its stranglehold on popular memory.

A new appreciation of the lost potentials of the 60s would make sense, though. From formative passions such as Roxy and the Jam, through to his later enthusiasms for The Hunger Games and Russell Brand, Fisher was always drawn to those moments when radical ideas broke through into mass consciousness via pop culture. He filed many of the things he loved – like Sapphire & Steel, a TV series he could convince you was mindblowingly innovative and profound – under the concept “pulp modernism”.

He loved unsettling television and disruptive pop because these – along with the music press – had served as his education as a working-class boy cut off from high culture. Fisher’s enduring faith was that irruptions of the culturally new and alien could instil the confidence that change was possible in other areas of life. Such disturbances proved that the structures and strictures of the status quo were not immutable. Possibly overestimating slightly, in his characteristic and endearing way, Fisher hailed Brand’s Messiah Complex performances as a tour de force showcase of politics as “the psychedelic dismantling of reality”.

Building a bridge between aesthetics and politics, critique and activism, with incomparable rigour and eloquence, Fisher was an exemplary engaged intellectual, a sort of post-rave John Berger perhaps. In recent years he settled into his role as a public figure, a charismatic speaker at countless events. His books, journalism and recorded appearances are one lasting legacy.

Less measurable but just as vital and fertile is his work as teacher (most recently at Goldsmiths) and as mentor to young writers. After years of waiting to hear what Fisher had to say on anything and everything, it hurts that what follows now is silence. The current crisis-time needs his mind, for its clear vision and for the optimism of the will that sought and found cracks of possibility in the seemingly impregnable wall of a deadlocked present. A consoling thought is that young minds influenced and inspired by his work will soon fill that silence.

Mark Fisher obituary: a thrillingly creative critic

Challenging his readers to see the world in entirely new terms, Mark Fisher wrote exceptional criticism rooted in his scrutiny of high and low culture, his anti-capitalist politics and his dream of popular modernism. Sam Davies pays tribute to his late colleague.
11 July 1968–13 January 2017.

Sam Davies 
Sight & Sound magazine 

Web exclusive
Mark Fisher, writer, critic and cultural theorist
Mark Fisher, writer, critic and cultural theorist

I first met Mark Fisher online. I can’t remember exactly when, but I do know how: through the rapid-fire exchange of ideas and theories that flourished between music blogs like Matt Ingram’s Woebot and Simon Reynolds’ Blissblog, around 2005-06. It feels strange that I can’t pinpoint a date, a specific piece – but perhaps it’s because encountering Fisher’s blog, K-punk, was like a slow-detonating shock, a challenge that required decoding. Reading most writers, you look for flashes of insight or a different angle on a world you’d largely pre-agreed and mutually understood. Fisher was one of the few contemporary critics I can think of who had his own unique arrangement for the world – his own constellation of its contents. He was a creative critic, someone whose world you found yourself stepping into; and when you stepped out, you never saw the tired, conventional world in quite the same way.
His critical co-ordinates included (and this is only a selection) David Sylvian, The Parallax View, Metalheadz, Spinoza, John Foxx, M.R. James, The Terminator, Brian Clough, Philip K. Dick, The Caretaker, Deleuze, The Pop Group, Patricia Highsmith, Burial, Tarkovsky, Frederic Jameson, Tricky, Ligotti, Zizek, Junior Boys, H.P. Lovecraft, Sapphire & Steel, Roxy Music, David Peace. And K-punk was the lens through which Fisher focused these disparate elements into a coherent vision. He wrote across film, music, literature, high and low culture. He could illustrate J.G. Ballard and Bataille using Basic Instinct 2, but also find the philosophical implications of The Fall’s Spectre vs Rector. For Fisher – crucially – none of this existed on some flat plane of postmodern equivalence. Criticism was not a low-stakes distraction, and the casual clubbability of much cultural discussion was anathema to him.
The Red Riding trilogy: the ‘TV event of the decade’ 
The Red Riding trilogy: the ‘TV event of the decade’ 

Fisher once told me there were always two questions whenever he spoke to his parents on the phone: what are you having for tea? What are you watching tonight? In recent years he had become TV critic for New Humanist, writing perceptively on Westworld, Broadchurch, Benefits Street, The Americans. At one point, his Saturday night routine involved livetweeting commentary on The X Factor. Tony Grisoni’s Channel 4 adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding trilogy (2009-10) – exorbitant, apocalyptic, and eerily prophetic of later revelations regarding Yorkshire police – could have been written for K-punk, and was his “TV event of the decade”.
But film was no less important to Fisher’s worldview. In 2009, Zero Books, an imprint Fisher set up with publisher Tariq Goddard, published his first book. A slim volume called Capitalist Realism, arriving in the aftermath of the financial crisis and in time for the student protests of 2010, it went on to sell over 10,000 copies. It argued against the way that capitalism had become baked into cultural thinking as the absolute ground on which all political possibilities could be imagined, and diagnosed the way in which mental health had been ‘privatised’, conceived as the individual’s fault. But turn to its very first page, and Capitalist Realism opens with a reflection on Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006), and the eerie plausibility of its managerial dystopia, brought about not by external disaster but liberal democracy’s limitations. Film recurs throughout the book: Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), the Bourne films, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). Fisher’s earliest articulations of the concept came from his reflections on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins on K-punk. His most recent book The Weird and the Eerie – published in January by Repeater Books – discusses Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Nolan’s Interstellar (2014).
Children of Men (2006)
Children of Men (2006)

Cinema, this complex negotiation of corporate capital and audience expectations, provided fertile ground for Fisher’s ability to decrypt political conspiracy and diagnose cultural symptoms. His readings could be thrillingly against-the-grain: X-Men: Last Stand (2006) for example, “dares to take itself seriously, avoiding the bad reflexivity of Po-Mo in favour of an unscreened exploration of a mythos”. Its comic-book unreality, versus the pompous maturity of the rebooted Batman, is its strength: “This is not a film that tries to be ‘psychologically realistic’. No, it is a film about the Real, that which we flee from when we awake from a dream.” Fisher might have been expected to champion Wall-E (2008), a dystopian depiction of an Earth literally choked by mountains of garbage with an unmistakable critique of corporate power. But he used it to draw out the limits of ethical consumerism, and the way in which it turns dissent into product, arguing that Hollywood’s persistent anti-corporate theme was merely an escape valve for political pressure; capital profiting from its own critics, while sending audiences home with their consciences sated.
Writing for Sight & Sound in 2011 on Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald), Fisher couldn’t hide his frustration with W.G. Sebald as a figure of mild, enervated resignation, exiled by nostalgia from the thrilling modernism of post-war culture. Perhaps he also took it personally: Sebald depicted Fisher’s beloved Suffolk – his childhood holiday destination, and home in later life – as a drab, belated place, drained of life and possibility. For Fisher it was a numinous place, charged with eerie energy, as depicted in his favourite M.R. James stories. But Sebald was also too mild stylistically for Fisher, whose preferred mode was polemic; so much of his work was charged with political animus. The pressure of the political was inescapable; as he wrote of Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins for Sight & Sound in November 2010, “in England, a claustrophobic country that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape outside politics.” Fisher was haunted by the dream of a kind of popular, public modernism that he felt had been steadily enclosed and privatised.
Patience (After Sebald) (2011)
Patience (After Sebald) (2011)

This intensity and this pressure could make Fisher seem a fearsome figure online. But when he joined the staff of the Wire magazine in 2007 I got to know him as a gentle, warm and very funny friend. For a critic, Fisher had profoundly creative instincts: not just in the way that he dreamt up neologisms, and made K-punk a project in world-building. He wanted to build networks and connections all the time: a positive conspiracy, an interventionist nexus formed from writers, bloggers, academics, critics and anyone else with the time to send him an email. As a graduate student at Warwick in the late 1990s, Fisher had become a catalysing figure at the university’s Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, an unofficial formation of academics such as Nick Land, Sadie Plant and Kodwo Eshun theorising the wilder possibilities offered by new technologies, drugs and media. He literally built a network in 2004, founding an online forum called Dissensus with Matthew Ingram. But he also directly encouraged countless other writers, including many of those who challenged him most fiercely. Zero published the first books by Owen Hatherley, Nina Power, Carl Neville, Agata Pyzik and dozens more. I can still remember the urgency of his texts and emails when we put together a Zero collection of Michael Jackson essays in 2009, or set up a group blog for thoughts on the 2010 World Cup, which quickly spiralled, attracting contributors and links from all over the world.
Mark always had plans and projects. A book on England’s football culture (he was in the Nottingham Forest end during the Hillsborough disaster); a reckoning with the 1960s counter-culture he had always rejected, to be titled Acid Communism; a Soundings column for Sight & Sound. Action clearly, was one of his defences against the depression which eventually overwhelmed him in January this year. In February 2006 he wrote on K-punk of the “optimism of the act”: “In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognised that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless. But ‘going through the motions’ of the act is an essential pre-requisite to the growth of belief ‘in the heart’. Much as Pascal famously argued in his Wager, belief follows from behaviour rather than the reverse. Similarly, the only way out of cultural depression like now is to act as if things can be different.”

Samoubistvo Marka Fišera

Samoubistvo Marka Fišera

* Depresija je vera u kapitalistički realizam, koju prožima zapovest: "Nema alternative!" Ona se danas uzima u obzir (i obzor) kao prva Božja zapovest

U petak, trinaestog januara, ubio se Mark Fišer. Čovek koji je uspostavio najprecizniju dijagnozu sveta u koji smo zapali i, istovremeno, dijagnozu samoga sebe.

Piše: Zlatko Paković
Danas, 27. januar 2017.

Prva je 'kapitalistički realizam', druga - 'depresija'. One su sistem spojenih sudova, naličje i lice - nadindividualna struktura i njena interiorizacija.

Bivati u kapitalističkom realizmu kao svesno, kritičko biće, znači voditi neprestanu, kritičnu borbu protiv depresije, tačnije, neprestanu borbu protiv svih antidepresiva što ih nudi industrija koja ima dijagnozu 'kapitalistički realizam'... borbu protiv realnosti koja negira ono realno... O tome je Mark Fišer (Mark Fisher), teoretičar kibernetičke kulture, uz tekstove na svom blogu "k-punk", ostavio za sobom, i za svetom, i dve znamenite knjige: "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?" ("Kapitalistički realizam: Nema li alternative?", 2009), "Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures" ("Duhovi mog života - spisi o depresiji, nauci o utvarama i izgubljenim budućnostima", 2014). Jer, šta je to depresija ako ne sveprožimajuće osećanje bezalternativnosti?

Depresija je vera u kapitalistički realizam, koju prožima zapovest: "Nema alternative!" Ona se danas uzima u obzir (i obzor) kao prva Božja zapovest: "Ja sam Gospod Bog tvoj i nemoj imati drugih bogova uza me!" Prorok ove zapovesti nekadašnja je britanska premijerka Margaret Tačer. Izgovorila ju je rudarima u štrajku 1985. godine, potvrdivši neopozivost svoje odluke o njihovom otpuštanju: "Nema alternative!"

Supruga Marka Fišera, povodom njegove smrti, napisala je da je on izgubio bitku sa depresijom, dakle, bitku sa kapitalističkim realizmom. Grozomorna je to bitka. U njoj protivnik koristi vašu pobedu za sticanje profita i moralnog kapitala u korist svoje demokratičnosti, otvorenosti za raspravu, za drukčije, alternativno mišljenje, jednom rečju, za svoj "liberalni komunizam", kako je govorio Mark Fišer. Nelagodna je istina da je, recimo, Slavoj Žižek, taj teoretičar antikapitalizma - najluksuzniji proizvod kapitalističkog realizma.

U prvom poglavlju knjige "Kapitalistički realizam" - "Lakše je zamisliti kraj sveta nego kraj kapitalizma" - Fišer piše da je došlo do transformacije kulture u muzejske eksponate: "Moć kapitalističkog realizma izvodi se delom iz načina na koji kapitalizam obuhvata i proždire svu prethodnu istoriju: to je jedan od rezultata njegovog 'sistema jednakosti' koji svim kulturnim objektima, bili oni religiozna ikonografija, pornografija ili Marksov 'Kapital', može da prida monetarnu vrednost. Prošetajte Britanskim muzejem, u kojem su objekti istrgnuti iz svojih životnih svetova, poslagani kao da se nalaze na palubi neke predatorske svemirske letelice, i dobićete moćnu sliku i priliku tog procesa na delu. Tokom pretvaranja praksi i rituala u puke estetske objekte, uverenja prethodnih kultura objektivno se ironizuju, transformišu se u artefakte."

Sam čovek je postao artefakt sopstvenog nadzora. Radnik je postao artefakt sopstvenog nadzora unutar pretpostavljene perspektive nadzora svog poslodavca. To Fišer precizno naziva "tržišnim staljinizmom".

Fišer veli: "Realizam je ovde analogan deflacijskoj perspektivi depresivca koji veruje da je svako pozitivno stanje, svaka nada, opasna iluzija."

Marku Fišeru koji je znao šta treba činiti, to nije pošlo za rukom. O razlozima tog neuspeha ostavio je pre dve godine potresan tekst "Good for Nothing" ("Dobar ni za šta", theoccupiedtimes.org, 14. mart 2014). Tu upozorava na ključnu stvar, koja uvek izmiče stručnjacima za politiku i psihologiju, a to je da su depresija i politika u neraskidivoj vezi. Depresija, taj samooptužujući glas, u stvari je pounutrašnjen iskaz strukture društvene moći. Zakon te strukture danas je u tome da je sloboda postala roba.

Sloboda je pretvorena u vrednost koja se može izraziti monetarno. To je bit kapitalističkog realizma iz kojeg je izbačeno samo realno. A šta je, uistinu, ono realno?

To je ključno pitanje korenite alternative kapitalističkom realizmu. Na njega se ne može odgovoriti pozitivno, naime, definitivno. U suštini, to je negacija kapitalističkog realizma kao same realnosti, jer je ovde posredi kulturalni, ideološki konstrukt koji se nameće kao realnost, naime, kao prirodna ili kulturna nužnost.

Za početak, potrebno je radikalno, donkihotovsko izokretanje perspektive. A u kritiku kapitalizma neophodno je uvesti i ludičku duhovitost, kako bi se u toj borbi suzbila verovatnoća povratka na stare oblike borbe protiv kapitalizma, koji su, u svom sentimentalizmu i rigidnosti, urađali nehumanošću.

Samoubistvo Marka Fišera

* Depresija je vera u kapitalistički realizam, koju prožima zapovest: "Nema alternative!" Ona se danas uzima u obzir (i obzor) kao prva Božja zapovest

U petak, trinaestog januara, ubio se Mark Fišer. Čovek koji je uspostavio najprecizniju dijagnozu sveta u koji smo zapali i, istovremeno, dijagnozu samoga sebe.
- See more at: http://www.danas.rs/dijalog/kolumnisti.1079.html?news_id=337400&title=Samoubistvo+Marka+Fi%c5%a1era#sthash.QXEHJaNK.dpuf

Samoubistvo Marka Fišera

* Depresija je vera u kapitalistički realizam, koju prožima zapovest: "Nema alternative!" Ona se danas uzima u obzir (i obzor) kao prva Božja zapovest

U petak, trinaestog januara, ubio se Mark Fišer. Čovek koji je uspostavio najprecizniju dijagnozu sveta u koji smo zapali i, istovremeno, dijagnozu samoga sebe.
- See more at: http://www.danas.rs/dijalog/kolumnisti.1079.html?news_id=337400&title=Samoubistvo+Marka+Fi%c5%a1era#sthash.QXEHJaNK.dpuf

Jan 23, 2017

PIANO MAGIC - Closure (2017)


















'Closure,' out Jan 20th 2017 on Second Language Music.

AFTER TWENTY YEARS, PIANO MAGIC ANNOUNCE FINAL ‘CLOSURE’
Piano Magic’s final album, ‘Closure,’ will be formally released by Second Language Music.
Recorded in London between April and August of 2016, ‘Closure,’ features guest appearances from Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments, Audrey Riley (go-to cellist for The Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, Virginia Astley and many more), Josh Hight (Irons) and Oliver Cherer (Dollboy). For this final album, the nucleus of Piano Magic was Glen Johnson, Jerome Tcherneyan, Franck Alba, Alasdair Steer and Paul Tornbohm.

“The group’s final album ranks with their best” 4 stars – Mojo
“….recalls the art-rock of 4AD acts such as Pale Saints…There’s also Go-Betweens-style melancholy…intricate guitar lines recall Television’s…”  8/10 – Uncut
“Smooth, finely crafted and very songwriterly affair (with echoes of Talk Talk, The Auteurs and Roy Harper)”The Wire
“Closure is undoubtedly a reliably contrarian, brutally honest and uncompromisingly human album for a great band to – at least try – calling it quits on.” – Delusions Of Adequacy
“…as fitting endings go, it’s absolutely the kittens’ whiskers.” – Terrascope
“These masters of dark wave have certainly left an indelible mark”- 4 stars – Songwriting Magazine
“Their final album finds them in rude artistic health. If you want to know what you’ve missed, Closure provides an excellent hint.” Shindig!