future perfect
Soon it will have been a year. Of course, it had already been sixteen, and seventy five, and one hundred, and neither had those accretions crossed the threshold we’ve all nonetheless been holding out for – that elusive enough, khalas, ya basta that could finally turn the tide. We'll keep saying we didn't think we could be shocked any further, before finding ever deeper parts of ourselves not yet singed by the terrifying images populating our timelines. “For many of us," writes Hana Aylan, "this has been the reality of the last months: waiting for the image that will shake complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so staggering it’ll be non-negotiable. An amputated toddler. A blown-apart body. A girl hanging from the side of a building. We are still waiting."
We know this from Sontag: there's really no such thing as a non-negotiable image. And yet soon it will have been a year of waiting, and I still can't seem to steer this part of my heart away from believing that somehow force of argument, that ethical or moral suasion, can put an end to the horror. It's so difficult to dislodge the faith that the power of words and images – the strength of righteous ideas, the incontrovertibility of evidence – may yet carry the day, cognizant as we may be of the utter absence of any mechanism for making that possible. And now tanks are destroying Jenin (again), and bombs keep dropping on cities of tents, and we’ve all seen that study in The Lancet: the death toll is likely to be greater than 200,000 – 10% of the total population of Gaza. What debate is there to be had in the face of such figures? We've already won the argument, and it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough because there's no one on the other side of the table. It wasn't enough because the social contract upon which the expectation for such a negotiation might rest is a fiction. It wasn't enough because this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Of course, this is not to say that nothing has changed. Soon it will have been a year of galvanization, of mobilizations not seen at such scale for decades, outpourings of staggeringly brilliant and articulate rage. As Tariq Ali and Rashid Khalidi recently discussed in an interview for New Left Review, no other moment in the long line of atrocities carried out against the Palestinians has so profoundly shifted the discourse as what's been happening since October 7th, 2023. There are framings on the table now that would've been unthinkable a decade ago, and we're ever more clearly seeing liberal boot-licking as the poison it is. This is no small thing. And often enough I'll be the Foucault-thumper in the room, arguing that yes, discourse matters: the limits to what's thinkable and sayable produce the limits to what's subsequently actionable, right?
But is it only via abstraction that we're ever able to construct such a field of significance, wherein discursive shifts in the global public sphere make a rat's fuck of a difference to the people catching what bombers release? There's really only the one lever, and it's the United States' investment in the imperialist geopolitical project that is the state of Israel. And soon it will have been a year of arguing about what constitutes a "direct" action or a "material" impact, what it means to "escalate," what difference we can possibly make from our silly little colonial outpost, in the shadow of the real enemy.
As a dear friend reminded me upon giving this a read-through, though, maybe it's just not for us to know – that's the silver lining of "thinking historically," I guess, which is what I tell myself I'm committed to in lieu of, say, faith. The ground of our present was laid by the decisions and actions taken by generations of human beings before us, schlubby ignorant motherfuckers living, just like us, under conditions not of their own choosing. The structures we live within and struggle against have taken centuries or more to gather their present strengths, but when water turns to steam it happens in an instant, historically speaking. Per Thomas Sugrue, "The relationship between structure and agency is dialectical and history is the synthesis." That might as well be faith, no?
Anyways, here's some songs. It's another very beats-centric expedition this time, the middle section of which a trusted test listener described as "kind of unrelenting," so... strap in, I guess?
The opening passage starts with a somewhat downcast and gently propulsive amble down a dark hallway courtesy of prolific Beirut-based producer Jawad Nawfal, from February's Transient Organ (it's on Ruptured, of course). It slides into the brooding "Rehuman," a cut from longtime minimalist sound designer Alva Noto's latest, HYBR:ID III, which accompanies a series of postmodern ballet works by American choreographer Robert Siegal. Then it's Paris-based producer HiriHara (formerly known as XJ, if that rings any bells), with "Exes," from Khayin, released in the Spring, its autonomic bass pulses leading us up the ramp to the menacing, gritty, busted house of Andy Stott's "Posers," from his 2011 LP We Stay Together.
Then out of the murk comes London's Karen Nyame KG with "Manigua’s Groove," which came out in July with her Rhythm Vol. 1 EP. It's a seductive if also perhaps a little anxiety-inducing tune, pairing a stadium-sized amapiano-adjacent bass throb with close-up, fine-grained polyrhythmic percussive detail, and feeling a bit like walking the wrong way up an escalator. Next it's Montreal techno brutalist Nahash with the title track from 2023's A Snake In Your House, its muscular, pounding beat wreathed in an undulating chaos of found sound and twisted horn samples. Liliane Chlela keeps up the intensity with "Bison," the opener to her Anatomy of a Jerk LP (released earlier this year), all sharp metallic edges and unyielding staccato bass stabs.
After that it's "Dark Lavis," a sweaty blast of frenetic paranoia from Bristol producer Ploy's 2021 EP Rayhana, with this sort of skronky fire-alarm synth line that just rattles around in my brain all day. Then it's NYC-based beatmaker Emsho with the athletic, fist-pumping "Down Time," taken from last year's Intended Consequence, a compilation of Iranian women electronic artists put together by Apranik Records. Next its "()," a lumbering techno stomper from Buông, released this year by Berlin-based producer Anh Phi, one of the folks behind Ho Chi Minh City's Nhac Gãy collective (who put out this compilation of bonkers Vietnamese electronic music a few years ago). I really love this EP: it pulls from all over the place, both geographically and stylistically, with absolutely huge beats and impeccably precise production, a bit of nihilism and a lot of libidinal swagger. "()" is then overtaken by "Indiferencia," an industrial reggaeton banger from Venezuelan powerhouse (and frequent Arca collaborator) Safety Trance / Cardopusher, pulled from the 2022 dembow compilation no pare, sigue sigue from Colombia's TraTraTrax label.
Okay now, coming down the other side, London-based globe-trotter Manuka Honey slows it down a bit with the hazy late-night tryst "When Oracles Watch," from February's 3Eternities Beneath You EP, followed up by the ghostly, screwed-down hip-hop of Tadleeh's "Barefoot," from her album Lone (released in April). Then it's Palestine-via-Mexico City producer Loris with "Lulua," a sort of low-key electro dabke meditation on pearl-hunting in the Gulf, and then Montreal's own Priori, whose work straddles a broad ambient/electronica spectrum, and here lets a swirl of synth and impressionistic strings carry things out.
And finally, to finish I've included a clip of English actress Maxine Peake reading martyred Gazan poet Hiba Abu Nada's "I Grant You Refuge" (I ripped the audio from Comma Press' YouTube channel). It's an incredible poem, which made my heart skip a few beats when I first read it in November via Protean Magazine, who published it a few weeks after it was written, which was a few days before Adu Nada was killed by an Israeli raid. It's a heavy way to end a techno mixtape, I know, but it's worth sitting with, and I hope you'll appreciate it.
Okay that's it!
• Mixcloud: future perfect (sept 2024)
• MP3: 24/09 - future perfect.zip
NB: Same as last time, I've included a single hour-long MP3 of the whole mix in the zip file linked above (along with the individual MP3s).
Thanks friends.
xo, graham