12 hour party people
Mark Fisher
Uber Germanist
Owen weighs into the debate on minimal:
This perhaps makes sense of the link between minimal and hedonism
that Philip Sherburne often insists upon. On the face of it,
minimal is an extremely unlikely candidate to be considered a
pleasure seekers' music. It's worth noting at this juncture, that,
as Derek pointed out after my last post, there is very little
'tasteful' about a Villalobos, Luciano or Hawtin set – what appears
tasteful at normal volume becomes something different when put
through a club PA. Nevertheless, even at high volume, there is a
certain restraint at work here – or perhaps it is better construed
as an avoidance (of hooks, big riffs etc.) It could be that this
avoidance of the hedonic spikes, the pleasure peaks, of music is
the libidinal cost of distending pleasure over the course of a
twelve hour party.
Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized
culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is
indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon
the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs,
for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect
that underlies minimal might be characterised as
nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club
or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be
anywhere.
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