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Exploring Post-Internet Music

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Post-modernism, post-structuralism,
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A 101 on the net-aware

post-rock... to everymovement
movement there
music
3 years ago by Pieter Defraene # Share to Twitter " Share to Facebook

seems to be a 'post' and the online era is

no exception. In this article we explore
the post-Internet generation of
musicians who use the virtual world like
no one else.

What does Post- HumanHuman

Exploring Post-Internet Mu…

Internet mean?
Reading the term post-
Internet superficially, it
would seem to imply that it
comes after the Internet; an
evolution past the Internet to
a new field. It is quite the
16
TRACKS
contrary in fact. Just as with
_troe - Holly Herndon- Chorus
post-modernism, post-rock
PAN - Visionist — Victim (PAN 67)
or post-everything the use of TriAngleRecords - Lotic - Heterocetera

‘post’ entails a critical

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framework around the

concept that is being, well… post-ed. ‘Post’ not only means
that it comes after, but implies an awareness of its medium,
sources, audience and its limits. The movement then takes
this self-awareness as its new subject. The result is a
metastate of looking and is sometimes criticised for being
disconnected, too difficult for the general public to
understand, and maybe even be too devoid of actual
meaning due to its excessive self-contemplation.

As an art movement Post-Internet follows up on the

concept of Internet art or ‘net.art’ which was more of an
exploration of internet technology. Through (mainly) the
second half of the nineties the internet was slowly, say
56Kb slowly at first, finding its way into our daily life and
eventually began altering our perception of reality. In the
post-Internet era, being online has become so much of our
daily life, that it is impossible to think of how we would
interact, gather information, work or play without it. Post-
Internet art is not about the Internet as a medium anymore,
but more of an examination of this virtual world and its
impact and relation to the real world.To put it simply: not
merely made on the net, but about the net. Influenced by
art movements of the past like Dadaism and Fluxus, net-
aware art is not to be seen as a solid structured group, but
more of a playful, fluid and conceptual form of art.

The advent, rise and eventual ubiquity of wireless

technology, means that we’re always online, always looking,
always sharing. Our eyes locked on the blue light screen
where the virtual surpasses the real in terms of meaning.
This new condition has an impact on the way we consume
media.

What about the music?

In the last couple of years there has been a surge of
musicians whose creative output could be seen as post-
Internet. The one thing that runs as a thread through all of
these artists is their relationship to the Internet. They
regard it as a source of inspiration and at the same time a
quarry. The fact that the Internet has allowed for artists to
find an audience on a global scale has definitely had an
impact on the music they produce or the commercial value
of it. As information is only a few clicks away the Internet
has also offered them the opportunity to feed off of things
happening across the globe.

There’s a duality embedded

in this kind of music, as a lot
of these artists came up
through club culture, be it in
New York, London or Berlin
and so are influenced by
genres like techno, house,
juke, grime, hip-hop, R&B or
even hardstyle. Building on the legacy of the likes of Aphex
Twin, Autechre, Fennesz and others who trail-blazed
experimental electronic music from the nineties onward,
this new generation of iconoclasts have created something
intricate and well designed, so that their music is more like
an artwork than a consumption piece.

So, what do all these post-Internet aesthetics sound like?

To say it is not an easy listen could be an understatement
to some: it can be abrasive, unnerving and at times chaotic
or uncentered. The feel of it is very technological; as if the
beats and textures are a direct audible translation of
electronic pulses passing through a bunch of network
cables all twisted and bundled together. Below you’ll find a
selection of artists who are associated with this scene to
give you an idea of what post-Internet music could sound
like. It is by no means an exhaustive list but more of an
introduction, a 101 if you will.

Arca
One artist who took the lead in this field, especially in
terms of achieving mainstream exposure, is Arca (AKA
Alejandro Ghersi). Noted for working with Kanye West on
several tracks of Yeezus, producing Björk’s latest album
Vulnicura and collaborating with futuristic pop queen FKA
twigs. While living in New York he became part of the
GHE20G0TH1K scene. Spearheaded by Venus X, these
underground parties were arca

「DOEP」
about breaking boundaries,
tearing down walls between
all kinds of genres, about
embracing queerness and
liberty and leaving prejudice
at the door.

Ghersi has released two full

length albums under the
name Arca so far. Both of
them are rather different
than his previous EPs, Cookie policy

trading in R&B style

influences for more abstract soundscapes. He has
seemingly left behind vocals to become machine-like whilst
encapsulating a form of sensuality and softness. This
interaction and juxtaposition of the hard and cold tech
beats and glitches in contrast with softer more melodic
lines is very typical to Arca’s sonic imprint.
A characterizing trope within the post-Internet movement
is the use of samples, or better yet micro samples. These
sound bits are highly distorted and hardly recognizable
after being been passed through all kinds of filters and
effects. It is this excess of distortion that brings to the
foreground the use of the technique itself as a way of
processing the real to make it more virtual. What
Photoshop is to our visual culture, Ableton is to
contemporary electronic music. Similar to how PC Music
turned the volume on the visual codes and strategies
employed in pop and advertising imagery to show its own
bubblegum fakeness, you could say post-Internet musicians
employ Ableton (and other software) to make their own
kind of hyper-saturated music, laying bare that what you
eventually hear is miles away from its origin.

Holly Herndon
Another post-Internet forerunner is Holly Herndon. Her
approach is a little more intellectual, ‘cleaner’ and less
dystopian than most of the other artists that we’ll be
discussing here. Currently a doctoral candidate at
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics, Herndon fuses her
classical music upbringing
with a harder tech-based
sound design. Herndon’s
work revolves around
humanness and technology,
providing social commentary
on the way in which we
communicate and interact
with each other over the net
and how it is inherently
different from the IRL
experience. Not only is the
medium different, but the language, the expectations and
the interactions themselves are literally framed and
mediated through our screens. Herndon challenges the
idea that online life is of less value than real life in the same
way she opposes the notion that the laptop is of less value
as an instrument than say the contrabass or piano,
something she explains via Pitchfork.

Seeing this artist perform live proves that the laptop really
is a viable instrument. By watching the video below, you’ll
see that Herndon is actively engaging with her instrument.
There’s a direct correlation between the visual and audible,
what you hear is what you see her do, just as with a
traditional instrument. For Herndon the laptop is the most
personal instrument there is, it has everything related to
her on there; her contacts, her (un)finished projects, her
emails...

Her sophomore album Platform explores different ideas of

community (like the ASMR community on Youtube),
communication, identity and information gathering and is
characterized by the juxtaposition of beats, clicks and
glitches against the human voice. The vocals are
reminiscent of choral music and often sound very angelic
even though the lyrics themselves can be very mundane or
politically and socially engaged. The song Home is a direct
response to the NSA saga. “I can feel you in my room. Why
was I assigned to you? I feel like I'm home on my own. And it
feels like you see me.” The anonymity of the Internet is not
what we thought it was, there are eyes watching us,
monitoring us, our personal data is being collected and
stored somewhere. It would have been easy to translate this
idea into something dystopian, but Home feels more like a
love note to her NSA agent.

“Now that experimental music is in the

club, what does that mean politically?”
Holly Herndon asks herself. “Will we
just hear weird sounds and then get
drunk and dance, or are we now able to
discuss the values that experimental
music can conjure up in those
scenarios as well?”
— Holly Herndon on Pitchfork

Amnesia Scanner
One of the acts Holly Herndon collaborated with for her
second album is Amnesia Scanner. There’s not a lot of
information to be found on the Internet about this name.
(Oh, the irony). Their Last.fm bio states they have worked as
a producer for Mykki Blanco, and that’s about it. However,
as Angels Rig Hook is one of the most interesting things I’ve
heard - ever - I couldn’t help but share this track/mixtape.
The little over 14 minutes track is a collage of stereo
sounds, with lyrics written by internet persona poet/visual
artist Jaakko Pallasvuo, amounts to a jarring exploration of
the limits of what to some would still be deemed
pleasurable.

Amnesia Scanner
AS ANGELS RIG HOOK

102K
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M.E.S.H.
M.E.S.H. is another one of those artists whose influence
within the community of netaware artists is not to be
underestimated. Hailing from Santa Barbara, he moved to
New York and later to Berlin where he became part of the
Janus collective, which offered a platform for musician-
producers to test out their music in a club atmosphere,
linking them with like-minded people and fostering talent
such as Lotic, Renaissance Man and KABLAM.

selftitledmag
Piteous Gate

7.9K
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M.E.S.H.’s sonic world sounds very much like a skewed and
dragged collage; shattered glass, broken beats and ominous
disruptive melodies joining in from afar. The result is a
dense immersive angular soundscape, pulling inspiration
from a wide range of genres including noise, grime,
hardstyle, Musique Concrète and even Baroque and
Renaissance music. Even though there are many references
to the past, the result sounds very cyber-eclectic and could
easily be called futuristic, a notion which he told The Fader
he had rejected.

His approach to music is very much about sourcing sounds

on the internet and has a distinctive use of postproduction
techniques. Duality is never far away for this one, be it the
foreground-background dichotomy, the antithesis of a clear
production over the use of dronelike soundscapes, or the
pairing of two divergent patterns playing against each
other. Talking about the song Epithet with FACT he notes:

“[...] made from two very different

rhythmic speeds played on the same
grid and made to fit together through
syncopation, [...] I wanted to create a
sense of focus that can come from
following two divergent lines of
thought that eventually converge again
in unexpected ways.”
— M.E.S.H. on FACT

Even though M.E.S.H.’s musical patterns come across as

those Ableton rectangles, they’re mostly hand played,
which to the fine tuned ear will make these elements sound
‘sloppy’ as he puts it in the Fader. For this artists, it is a way
to bring the humanness back into the machine or the
computer generated.

Lotic
Similar in terms of style to
M.E.S.H. is the Houston-born
but Berlin-based J'Kerian
Morgan aka Lotic. Equally
disruptive and skewed as
M.E.S.H. but tends to be
more aggressive at times and
more reliant on R&B, house
and IDM patterns. Listening
to Heterocetera EP, you’ll
hear Lotic’s signature
balancing act between the
aggressive turbulence and
anchor points referencing
the known. Once again, a tension of chaos and the familiar
is present here: a carefully constructed visceral cycle
through raw assaulting rhythms that tend to fall apart to
become something new again. It is this dynamic and fluid
soundscape that gives the feeling of ever pushing forward
to the boundaries of the now towards the future that is
characteristic for post-Internet music.

His EP Agitations, released on Janus reads more like a

mixtape than a collection of separate tracks, and therefore
defies the bite-size ready-to-consume commodification
prevalent in our Internet culture. When we encounter
unconventional examples like this, we have to wonder, is
the post-Internet movement also contra-Internet?

Janus Berlin
Lotic - Agitations (JANUS004)

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Rabit
Taking aggressiveness to even further is TriAngle signee
Rabit. According to a press release from the label, his album
Communion is “inspired by issues relating to sexuality,
gender, ownership of our natural bodies, societal and
governmental injustices, and media manipulations.”
Album track “Pandemic” is as TriAngleRecords

Rabit - Pandemic
unnerving as it is
cataclysmic. Throughout the
record, Rabit’s genre hops as
he turns to grime for 808
kicks and shattered glass,
looks towards industrial for
granular drone tones, and
video games provide
machinegun beats.
Particularly unsettling is the
pairing of gunshot salvos
with the abstruse sound of
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children in distress, adding a

human aspect to the harshness of the composition.

As mentioned before, this movement is more of a

conceptual fluid current within experimental electronic
music. There’s no manifesto, no rules, no checklist. It would
therefore be dangerous to call post-Internet a genre. Sure,
there are idiosyncrasies between the artists associated with
this movement but that might be pointing more to a
symptom of our time or culture.

There’s no denying the Internet has had a profound impact

on these musicians. The global network allowed them to
push boundaries more than ever before with a vast
audience just a few clicks away. Cross-pollination across
space and time has led to forms of music which are
saturated with references ranging from high art to pop
culture, from clubscenes to intellectual music, from
gunshots to Renaissance instruments. The songs are
collages pulling inspiration and elements from everywhere
and anywhere.

The dramatic pleasure derived from these auditory post-

Internet tales comes from the immersive effect they have.
From divergent to convergent, from tension to relief and
the dynamic interplay of all these different familiar and
unfamiliar patterns and references challenge the expected.
There are elements to it that sound familiar: riffs that
transport you to a club scene to sound effects reminiscent
of anime coupled against a nonstop feeling of
disorientation. There’s no telling where we’ll end up. From
divergent to convergent, from tension to relief and the
dynamic interplay of all these different patterns and
references challenge the expected.

This article is written by Pieter Defraene and was published 3 years ago.
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