Hey all!
I went pretty heavy into music this week. It's been a lot of fun.
What's happening?
You can't get less 'right now' right now than club culture. And what's more right now than that?
A lot of all that pent up clubber energy is going into live-streaming.
I first caught up with this via DJ Premier & RZA's beat battle which kicks off in a very homely style with a combo of low angles and brutal ~15 second audio delays. The interaction between them really makes you feel how much they love the music, but the audio quality makes you really feel like a middle class couple buying into the neighbourhood without checking the late music licenses. I found myself listening to the spotify playlist and loving it but wishing I could still get the chat.
On the other side of the spectrum:
For those of you who aren’t fluent in Scratchanese (that’s literally what he calls it), the joke here is a reference to London’s famed Fabric nightclub. Room 3 often featured some of the club’s most adventurous DJs, but was also notoriously empty half the time. A niche joke perhaps, but one that absolutely makes sense in the context of all the livestreams we’ve seen popping up over the past month. Based on the enthusiastic response to his tweet, I feel confident in saying that Scratcha and I aren’t the only ones who’ve quickly exited a stream after logging in and noticing that hardly anyone is watching.
From Shawn Reynaldo's letter on the state of livestreaming. Inspired by this I went to check out some of the new MixCloud live channels — chief amongst them a dj who had decided to put up a pretty realistic live background of a semi-busy club, and so had to endure the chat endlessly calling them all out for not doing social distancing.
The fascinating part for me is where this intersects with the tech. Streaming has been built to prioritise liveness rather than fidelity and so it will, for instance, drop a few milliseconds — or in the case of Zoom, even extend them. This totally fucks the rhythm of dance music. In fact, if you watch the beat battle you can see RZA fighting this by switching a few times between high quality low latency and low quality high latency.
Radio seems to solve this, so why do we have these problems? I suspect there's some fundamental driving this here, maybe democratisation? But I am very excited to see what tech does with this.
What else?
Ableton has extended their trial to 90 days (even if you've used their trial before!)
Resident Advisor has put together a busy calendar of streaming events , including a 24 hour club hosted on Minecraft and a Virtual Sauna. They call it a digital island so that's nice.
Boiler Room has their own series called Streaming From Isolation with a mix of recording, films, and streams. As I type this I'm having a great time with Ellen Allien's set, which somehow feels like the clubbiest experience I've had from home yet.
EXCEPT... for a film later in this newsletter!
OK what else?
Lotta island chat at the moment isn't there? Elijah Wood visiting your private island might previously have been an indication you'd truly made it — or you were Sauron — but now it's just a nice time:
Meanwhile, the Shetland island of Linga is being flogged for less than half the buying price of my London 1 bed. The twist? It's been on sale for 5 years (oh, and it comes with a boat).
So no reason for The Sun to pick it up now right? Unless we're finding islands a bit more psychologically relevant, for some reason...
In which case, whatever your feelings about Richard Branson, he is tuning in. Perhaps he'll take on Linga as a doer-upper?
What's on my mind?
In space no one can hear you stream. Someone must be able to find a use for this line? Do let me know.
Anyone else feeling like lockdown has perhaps finally given them the space they always needed? I'm starting to wonder if there might be a thing called social distancing therapy. A lot of trauma arises and repeats itself socially, so it's really hard to heal from when every day it's being reinforced. I feel like lockdown, which effectively enables me to press pause on any social situation, might be giving me the distance needed to recover. I feel much more emotionally sound after the last few weeks.
Might be useful when many essential workers are currently living the exact opposite.
What's telling?
From the New England Journal of Medicine's COVID19 Notes section:
The story of a hospital executive trying to acquire PPE and getting raided by the feds.
A very moving account of the difficulties of not being able to let families visit their loved ones in hospital.
A personal account of a doctor navigating the risks and feelings of getting infected.
Stories of how the system is responding for patients without COVID19, but who still need treatment.
This bit stuck out to me from the last one:
Yeh and his colleagues plan to attempt to answer some of these questions empirically, but as we await epidemiologic data, he cautioned against dismissing anecdotes emerging from around the world in the name of scientific purity. Right now, he emphasized, “the sum total of what we hear from our colleagues at other institutions is the best data we have.”
Feels like we’re going to have to iterate science a bit.
What's on?
Perfect Sense — a film about a pandemic that causes people to lose their sense of smell, amongst other things. I really enjoy the thread of how the restaurant responds to the new scentless world as a microcosm of how society adapts. Watch Euan be surprised at seeing people wearing masks for a burst of nostalgia! Probably the cheesiest film I've ever cried at.
There are no signs or banners, and from the street Shakedown’s building is very plain. By word of mouth the club is known to be a place that one could go to for their first experience in gay nightlife.
So begins the synopsis of Leilah Weinraub's Shakedown, a doc about a black lesbian strip club in LA circa 2002. It's a fantastic film and it's free to watch all of April. It's one of those rare things that genuinely feels like it gives you a brush with what it might have been like to really be there. Funny, charming, sexy — watch it while you can.
What's cool?
You know vegetables? Turns out they're plants and sometimes you can grow them!
Finger Drumming by Dok Brass. It sounds like an obvious term when you see it but it's still still great fun to watch. One for the tappers in your life. Or the aliens.
For some reason google has added a feature where if you google certain animals you can put them in your house. Great! Here's a list of the ones you can try.
What's next?
I've had some early good times with Houseparty this week — but it still doesn't feel quite there. Facebook have made their own version (already) so I feel like this concept is going to go somewhere. The dream is reproducing that feeling of noticing a group of your pals talking in a group and being like hey what's up! Doesn't feel impossible (anymore), so I'm excited. Add me!
Oh, and we're perched on the precipice of some truly tired North Korean takes so you might want to consider preemptively blocking those terms. You're welcome.
See you next week!