Episode 2 - 20 October 2021

Hello, you're tuned to Resonance. This is Midnight Echoes, a show about making new connections through twilight music and internet ephemera. I'm Ilya Rogachevsky. Coming up we have David Foster Wallace talking about David Lynch, a little bit of Mark Fisher talking about the cancellation of the future, and Eliane Redig talking about transistors all mixed under ambient drones and scones. Right now we're listening to the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble with the song I Will Lead The Way. Keep it locked in for the next 60 minutes. I'll be back with some more rambles in about 30 minutes or so. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. 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I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I will lead the way, I will lead the way. I want to talk about David Lynch. After I read your piece in Esquire. Was it Esquire? No, Premier. Premier. I interviewed David Lynch. You never got to interview David Lynch. Well, I said from the outset, it's the reason they let me on the side of all the other journalists. I was the only one who said he didn't ask Will Packford to interview David Lynch. Why did you want to go observe David Lynch? I found... You mean, why did I not want to interview him? Well, why was David Lynch interesting to you as the subject of a magazine piece? For me, the number of film directors who get national distribution in this country who are truly interesting as artists is very, very small. And Lynch was one of them for me. I've been interested in Lynch's films for a long time and actually in grad school. I think there's a thing about this in the essay. Blue Velvet came at a time for me when I really needed to see it. And it helped me a lot in my own work. And then after that, I went and found Eraserhead and had sort of followed this guy's career. And I find him instructive and useful to think about. Did you like the movie Lost Highway? I've not seen the movie Lost Highway. I've seen the rough cut of Lost Highway or scenes. They let me go in and sit in what I believe to be David Lynch's personal editing chair and look at that on the little monitor and see which was the thrill of my life. But I've been on this tour and even though I'm in big cities, I have not yet gotten to see it. And I'm kind of terrified because there's a big part of the essay that talks about what the movie is about. If indeed the movie is nothing like that, I wouldn't know. When he was here, I asked him about what was Lynchian. And I took that right out of your piece. And I'm sure he just looked at you and blinked. Well, he didn't have a great answer because I don't think he thinks that way. He obviously doesn't think that way. There was, I mean, yeah, there's a part of the essay that kind of does this academic, let's unpack the idea of Lynchian and what Lynchian means is something about the unbelievably grotesque existing in us kind of union with the unbelievably banal. And then it gives a series of scenarios about what is and isn't Lynchian. Jeffrey Dahmer was borderline Lynchian. Borderline. Well, the refrigerator. And actually what was Lynchian was having actual food products next to the disembodied bits of the corpse. I guess the big one is, you know, a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the man, if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and the woman, let's see, the woman's 50-spoon font is undisturbed and the man and the cops have a conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy, say, for instance, Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy and how very, very important that is. And if the cops found themselves agreeing that there were major differences between the brain as a little wife who didn't recognize those differences were sufficient and her wife would do these, that that would be Lynchian. This weird confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell banal American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while, at least since Lubella. You think the failure of Dune was good for his career? I... Because it made him understand a system that he didn't want to be part of. What happened to Lynch with Dune, and now I'm getting a lot of this from my research, which is published stuff, it's not like, you know, Mr. Lynch and I had coffee and he told me this stuff, but Lynch's career for a while had a kind of Richard Rodriguez arc to it. Eraserhead, like El Mariachi, this enormously cool independent film, and it attracts the attention of people with money. The first one is Mel Brooks, and Brooks hires him to do The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is a fantastic, fantastic film, and it's lighting and atmospherics, nothing else. So anyway, because of that, you know, De Laurentiis hires him to do Dune, and now this is, Dune at the time is equivalent to what, like, Twister or The Rock would be now. It's this enormous, this is a product, and there's all this money at stake, and Dune itself, the novel, I don't know if people read it anymore, but it's a tremendously complicated science fiction novel. Anyway, so you don't need an hour-long narrative of this, but Lynch does the thing and doesn't do it all that well, but what really happens is the money men come in and they cut, like, I think 35 minutes out of the movie, and it renders the movie incoherent. I mean, literally incoherent, and it was a huge flop, and I think Lynch ate the flop and decided that what he wanted to do is he wanted to, you know, ruble over small films rather than serve large corporate ones. He was really one of the first, we see a lot of them now, the, you know, Cinemax and Fineline directors, these kind of independents who are doing stuff a little out of the mainstream but still getting national distribution. As far as I can tell, Lynch really pioneered that brand. He was really the first one. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Lynch. Welcome back. You're tuned to Resonance, and this is Midnight Echoes. We kick things off with a 15-minute piece of Turkish folk by Osgur Baba. It was called Dertli Dolap. It was recorded outside, so that's why you could hear chickens and incidental noise in the background. Wind, gunshots, mountains growing. That was followed by a graphic very speed, by this heat, played at 33 and a third, with a turntable drive turned all the way down. We then heard David Foster Wallace talking about the films of David Lynch. That interview was from 1997 and conducted by Charlie Rose. The interview was followed by a track called A Very Important Portal, by Eber, from the 2020 release, Ear of the Heart. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is, of course, Angelo Badalamenti with the Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks theme tune. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. This is my teddy bear. I've always worked with a stopwatch to keep track of the times. Jameson's theorisations of the postmodern which developed in the 80s, I think, now look increasingly prophetic. And what Jameson was theorising in the 80s, still a somewhat marginal phenomenon, still an emergent phenomenon, is now ubiquitous to almost the point of invisibility, I would suggest. But I'll come back to that. What is the bad news that you already know? Well, it's that the future has disappeared. The second aspect of this temporal malaise is the experience of time itself, the phenomenological sense of time in everyday life. And I think, I guess my big thesis of relationship between the two then, the more that our everyday life is taken over by the urgencies of what Jody Dean calls communicative capitalism, what Franco Berardi Bifo calls Samuel Capitalism, the more that the rhythms and the dispersed attentional economies of communicative capitalism take over our life, the more that there is this difficulty in grasping a sense of the historical moment in which we live. So what is the bad news that we already know? It's that the dimension of the future has disappeared. That in some way is that we're marooned, we're trapped in the 20th century still. That what is it to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on higher definition screens. Or 20th century culture distributed by high speed internet, actually. So there's a strange, I mean, what ought to be a strange sense of repetition, of a clotted or blocked time, a time that in many respects slowed down or flattened or retired or gone backwards. Where the sense of a forward momentum of culture, which isn't the same as a progress, I'm not arguing that what has disappeared is a sense of the progressive in culture that somehow, you know, 90s jungle has progressed above Robert Johnson, I'm not arguing that. What I'm arguing is that the thing that's disappeared is a sense of difference or a sense of specificity, a sense of culture belonging to a specific moment, that is what has disappeared in the 21st century. So there's now a feeling that nothing ever really dies, but that's not good. That means that we are assailed on all sides by kind of zombie forms, which persist forever, by revivals, anything can come back. Anything can come back. There's a kind of, what you might say, excessive tolerance for the archaic. But part of the problem is, in the sense that the sense of historicity has waned, has declined, it's difficult to characterize anything as archaic anymore. What does it mean to say something's archaic? In a situation when practically everything feels old. The phrase that captured this for me, and which I use at the start of Ghost of My Life from Franco Berardi, is the slow cancellation of the future. The slow cancellation of the future, I think, which captures not only that sense of termination, but the gradual nature of it. Of course it's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. It withers. It drains away. But at least in terms of music culture, and in the UK context, I think, we can say that this waning, this disappearance, this cancellation of the future, started to become evident about a decade ago, and has intensified since then. I think in that time, our expectations of music, which I'm treating as, as I say, symptomatic, symptomatic as the most obvious example of this, but it's not, it's only a point in time. Our expectations have declined, and this flattening out of time has become more naturalized. I don't think we anymore expect music to sound like a radical break from the past. We expect music now, and culture more broadly, to be a, you know, quite subtle, if it's different, it'll be a subtle remodulation, a subtle reconfiguration, that is available and understandable, accessible, only to initiates and aficionados largely. It won't be some gross sensational shift, which is readily apparent to anybody. Saberati, the slow cancellation of the future, clearly is not just a cultural thing, it's also a political thing, of course, the sense of the disappearance of a political future, the sense of a future which would be radically different in political terms from today, is also part of this. But it's also about the disappearance then of a certain linear sense of time, I think, a certain narrative of time. Hello, this is Midnight Echoes on Resonance, I'm Ilya Robachevsky. We're almost at the end of the show now, and in the second half, we listen to some Ilya and Rudig with Kiema, Intermediate States, with a little interview excerpt from the 2006 film Portrait. The whole thing can be viewed on UbuWeb, if you so desire. We followed that up with Focus Object by Lack, again played at the wrong speed, mixed in with The Slow Cancellation of the Future, a lecture by the late Mark Fisher. After that, we had a little bit of Theodore Wild Ride, which is a new trio featuring Christine Ott, Mathieu Garbrie, and Ophir Levy. The track is called Paora, and it's from their latest eponymous album. I'm going to play out with Elephant, by Loki Rabic and Frederic Valentin. And I just want to say thank you for listening, if you got all the way to the end. You're a star. Make sure to check out our new Instagram account, it's called Echoes Midnight. It has great album artwork on there, as well as things that I listen to that I don't play on the show. If you'd like to hear all the tracks that have been played on this show, and previous shows, head over to that Instagram, click the link in the bio, and it'll take you to Spotify Playlist, where all the tracks, at least most of them, will be there for your enjoyment. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.