positions and postures

It's always an uphill battle against recuperation and cooptation, right? There are just so many avenues along which transgressive or radical ideas are evacuated of their urgency and reduced to empty aesthetics, or to anachronistic dogma, or to neoliberal identity games. S0 I tell myself it’s because I’m protective of the things I hold dear that I feel such trepidation about naming them, watching them slip away as they become captured in/as language. Obviously, though, you've still got to figure out how to stake out positions in all the chaos. Iterative and provisional and contingent ones, no doubt – as will be any apprehension of one’s proximity to various forms of power – but it’s still incumbent upon each of us to take all of that fluctuation into account and nonetheless still decide where we’re going to plant our feet. That’s just what it takes to be a human, I think: you learn to accept a necessary decay between thought and its expression and get on with things. But when it comes time to go out and intervene in the world – to stand up to all that unknowability and say, "Yes, I am an agent" – what does it take for a human to declare themselves genuinely qualified? Who can say they possess the knowledge and wisdom and experience to feel so confident?

For years I’ve been trying to triage the mess of guilt and impostor syndrome that’s strewn about the inside of my head into something like actionable chunks of critical self-regard, and one of the key observations that’s emerged for me – and I’ve said this to many of you IRL, I know – is that I’m just full of opinions and outrage, much less so of the actual knowledge you’d expect would be required to back these up. Whether or not that’s really true, I’ve been imagining myself trying to remedy this since at least the last decade or so; one of the carrots dangling at the end of this whole PhD trajectory, for example, is that when it’s over there’ll at least be empirical evidence that I am, in fact, fairly well read (though of course we’ll see what my brain decides to do with that information when the time comes). All of that's a bit of a red herring, though: it’s not about lack of knowledge as much as it is lack of resolve (or faith, perhaps?). I've landed on a kind of agnosticism in terms of identifying with particular sets of politics: my partiality to the occasional “I’m literally a communist, you idiot” notwithstanding, I’m much more likely to talk about myself as “coming from” anarchism, as “adjacent to” contemporary Marxism, but rarely as though I’m of either of those communities. In practice, when I’m around most anarchists I feel like a wheezing, book-thumping dinosaur; around good materialists I feel like a hapless postmodern; around liberals I feel like a snotty, romanticist insurrectionary – and most of the time I think that’s a good thing! Stay humble and be open to change, right?

But lately every conversation seems to be about the size of the tent, and what kind of mobilization it’s capable of animating, and I'm thinking about what we sacrifice along the way in order to fit more people in. In the present, it’s obviously true that the need for urgent action takes precedence over the desire to identify allegiance with a particular tendency – we don’t need to agree on what kind of anti-capitalists we are to organize for Palestine, for example, and honestly what’s more beautiful than these bespoke coalitions of weirdos we find ourselves part of? That’s basically the logic I’ve been operating under for the last decade or two. But on the other hand, how deep are the fissures our pragmatism papers over, and how will the calculus need to change if we started actually winning? What happens when we start to actually wield something genuine and have to figure out how to share it, as communist parties sell us out for scraps of power, or as one-time casseroles comrades vote for the Charte des valeurs? I guess what I’m feeling bothered by is that shying away from firm identification or committed affiliation to something, from actually trying to formulate answers, feels like another kind of hedging. We allow ourselves to dwell in questions while kicking the can forward to some undefined future when it’ll finally be the right time to drop a pin – a time that, naturally, just never seems to arrive. Parts of me want to describe this as retreat-to-theory bourgeois quietism, or as a symptom of a fairly standard postmodern malaise or whatever (and maybe they’re the same thing, in fact), but in any case it feels to me like resignation: we don’t need to answer these questions because we’re simply too far from a place where they might begin to make a difference. Granted, this may well be a fairly realistic assessment of the current state of things, but states can change much more quickly than we expect them to, and I, for one, sure don't feel prepared.

Anyways, here’s some songs for helping to hammer out some of the difficult shit. Fair warning, things get a little more bleak here than they might usually, but these are desperate times.

Things get moving with "Breakup By The Sea," a harp-driven passage from the great Nadah El-Shazly's score for The Damned Don't Cry, set for release on Radwan and Amelie's Asadun Alay label in March. Like a lot of El-Shazly's work, there's a palpable intimacy to the space it creates, which sort of belies a deeper fracturing tension in the foundations; it's like being led somewhere dangerous, only half-convinced you'll be alright. It's followed up by French sound artist Hélène Vogelsänge with "Opa," remixed from Pepo Galán and Karen Vogt's The Sweet Wait LP. This crossed my path a week or two ago courtesy of Foxy Digitalis and I'm still digging into it, but the swirl of anxiety and melodic resolution here makes me want to spend a lot more time doing so. Then it's ever-evolving Paris-based avant-garde postrock collective Oiseux-Tempête, like a train picking up momentum as it leaves the station, graced here by some glorious distorted buzuk riffage from Radwan. Suivant, "Anuar 5" is a sort of concept sketch by Dane Law & Chants, a London–Wisconsin long-distance collaboration project producing textured and slightly fragile cut-and-paste drums-and-guitar jams. This slides into Big|Brave's latest, the stunning "I felt a funeral." It's the lead from their forthcoming LP A Chaos of Flowers (out in April), just barely containing the maelstrom they're singularly capable of unleashing as Robin's aching vocals steer through the choppy waters; I think it's my first favourite song of the year.

Staying with the static, next is "Trepdiation," from Concepción Huerta's brand-new LP The Earth Has Memory. Huerta is part of a prolific crew of experimental and improvisational artists based out of Mexico City – including among its ranks Mabe Fratti and Microhm, two other favourites of mine – who have been producing bucketloads of gritty, grainy, humanistic sound explorations over the past few years, much of it shining a really brilliant light on the way sound moves through various kinds of space. Then we're into “Resurgence,” a miles-wide volcano of a song courtesy of Aho Ssan & KMRU. Aho Ssan is the sharp-edged and shape-shifting electronic work of Paris-based producer Niamké Désiré; you may recall a highlight from his complex and unsettling Rhizomes album + book project from a mixtape a few months ago (it was released October 6?!), and I’d once again recommend giving that a listen if you’re feeling adventurous. Here he’s joined up with Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, Kenya-via-Berlin shooting star of ambient/field recording world – much gratitude to Anna T for introducing me to his 2020 LP Peel, sort of a distillation of his gentle and mostly formlessly melodic work up to that point. For their intense 2022 collaborative LP Limen, the pair embrace the void, offering up a roiling, blackened soundscape out of which peaks of harsh noise and bowels-of-the-earth bass stabs rise to signpost the sonic narrative. It's a bit more violent than what I've found myself going for over the past several years, but at this moment in time it feels like precisely the kind of catharsis that's called for. It's really worth the price of the ticket, I think.

Emerging out of the chaos we have Saba Alizadeh, Iranian sound sculptor and master of the kamanche (that's a Persian string instrument he compares to a violin or a fiddle) with the fittingly-titled, though painfully brief, "Only Hope Breaks the Dark Waves." His last proper album, from which this is drawn, released in 2021 though it's new to me, not having checked in since his 2019 ambient and found-sound banger Scattered Memories; I'd strongly recommend both. Next is another Iranian: Tehran-based pianist and composer Ava Rasti, whose track "Eight Night" was released last year as part of Intended Consequences, a compilation of electronic and experimental sound art made by Iranian women. "What began as active protests in the streets," the label heads explain, "has now transformed into a daily struggle for women in Iran, who protest by defying the mandatory hijab as they go about their daily activities, despite great risk...Through this release, we aim to emphasise that beneath the seemingly calmer surface, the fight continues to thrive in Iran." Boom.

Next, it's the latest from Beirut's Youmna Saba, academic, composer and experimental oud player. Wishah deploys bespoke modifications to the oud that bring out a range of auxiliary sounds and trigger electronic interventions, and it's a proper narrative, album-length exploration of these possibilities in conversation with her own voice as instrument. It's really, really rich stuff. Finally, there's "I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS" from Kristin Michael Hayter's 2023 LP Saved!. Though it's honestly a little difficult to find the right context in which to take it in, she's been making some of the most compelling work I've come across over the last bunch of years: always deeply studied, thematically well-developed, utterly crushing in its intensity; as Pitchfork succinctly put it, "The voice of Kristin Hayter is a conduit for extreme pain." 2019's CALIGULA was a black-metal adjacent, operatic neoclassical exorcism of pain and rage from a history of sexual violence, while 2021's SINNER GET READY moved the scene to a rural Pennsylvania revival tent and towards doomy Appalachian folk idioms. With Saved! she digs into the paranoid-ecstatic mode, more fully assuming the role the reformed sinner in the throes of testifying. It's a feverish, anxious listen, daring the listener to consider what really distinguishes a demon from an angel.

Okay that's it!

MP3s: positions and postures.zip

Mixcloud: positions and postures

Thanks for reading, everyone. As always, I'm really pumped to hear what folks think of any of this stuff, so please don't be shy if you've got any thoughts to share. Otherwise fkn free Palestine and I'll see you around?

xo, graham