Four Things #31
Welcome to Four Things #31. First of all, a warm welcome to my newest subscribers, and thank you so much for the nice responses to my piece about André3000’s ‘New Blue Sun’ album. It was the first time I wrote a slightly longer piece here on Substack and I’m definitely encouraged to do that more often. Also, I hope it made you listen to that record again, perhaps with more intent or with a different sense of enjoyment.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to quit Twitter/X and instead I spent more time reading Substacks than ever before! I like this platform’s space for longform and depth but as I am adding more subscriptions to my feed I also notice there’s a lot of echo chambering going on, particularly in the Music & Tech segment. So many pieces about the same subject (AI, Spotify, etc) and a lot of quoting other writers inside the same bubble. Anyway, I have been following a couple Substacks outside my own field of interest and it’s so refreshing, there’s a great Pokémon one (!), that interviews people who used to run oldskool Pokémon forums and IRC groups. At the end of the day there’s dedication, community building and nurturing to be found in every niche. It’s worth the read. If you have any oddball recommends I’d love to hear them.
A couple links for you to keep you busy during the festive season: A recording of my set at the Dekmantel Festival was just put online, we also have a new 3024 merch drop with some nice t-shirts and (for the first time) caps, and don’t forget to check out Otik’s debut album on the label, available as digi and on vinyl.
Let’s get to the things, I always appreciate your comments and ideas, feel free to pass on the link to friends as well. And for those who quit Twitter too and don’t know what to do with your time, you can always check out my newsletter archive. Wishing you love and health..
Martyn
Dec 20th, 2023
FIRST THING: ABOUT PIZZA
Great ideas often come from a period of drastic transformation; someone leaves everything behind and moves to a new place, experiences a serious health adversity, or a sudden change in career or familial situation. Transformation makes you rethink your old ways and approach to things, forcing you to come up with solutions for new problems, and that’s exactly the space in which creativity happens. When your craft also happens to involve a similar transformative process, from a set of ingredients to a beautiful plate of food, there’s a beautiful synergy. The Netflix series “Chef’s Table - Pizza” builds on that synergy, profiling six highly innovative pizzamakers, their personal struggles with the craft and the bursts of creativity that stemmed from them.
What I love about the series is that cooking has so many parallels with other forms of art. The meticulously detailed obsession with every single step in the process of making pizza is very similar to how musicians are always looking to improve sound, processing and reprocessing, shaping and reshaping. Regardless of whether the listener or patron is able to even recognize what exactly goes into that process, it is still of vital importance for the artist and what’s being created. This is perfectly summed up Italian master chef Gabriele Bonci in episode 2: "In every one of my pizzas, there are several hectares of farmland". Worth checking out!
SECOND THING: THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME
As you have probably noticed, we are currently at the height of ‘List Season’. Every other email and social media post is a Best Of.. list, littered with superlatives. The writer / film maker Nelson George knows a thing or two about who’s the best, having made a v good Showtime documentary about Michael Jackson called “Thriller 40”. On his regular mini-podcast “The Nelson George Mixtape” he talks about the overuse of terms like ‘The Best’ and ‘the GOAT’. Not just in music but in all aspects of the culture people feel compelled to announce who they think is the greatest of all time, whether it’s Beyonce or Taylor, Messi or CR7 (it’s not CR7 by the way). Besides there being no accurate measure of who’s the best in art across different eras, I think the overuse of the GOAT jargon has also to do with the space we use it in. Two of the most effective ways of using social media are to rid an opinion of any form of nuance, and to have your opinion overtake the last one in engagement. By using this language, people imply that their opinion takes precedence over someone else’s. Listen to Nelson’s take here and subscribe to his brilliant Substack:
THIRD THING: DOPPELGANGER
Books like “No Logo”, “The Shock Doctrine”, and “This Changes Everything” by the Canadian writer Naomi Klein thoroughly impacted the way Generation X (and later) looked at the world by helping them identify the mechanisms behind marketing and branding, disaster capitalism and environmental issues. The same can be argued for Klein’s new book “Doppelganger”, with the big distinction that this book comes from a much more personal place.
Over the last decade or so, Klein’s online persona has often been mixed up with that of another Jewish female writer of books about big ideas, Naomi Wolf. Whereas Naomi Klein’s writing covers a more leftist anti-capitalist perspective, Wolf is quite comfortable co-hosting Steve Bannon’s podcast, is a convinced anti-vaxer and enjoys posting pictures of herself with her new rifle on Truth Social. Klein and Wolf are doppelgangers but also mirror images of each other. The book uses this metaphor to regard our increasingly confusing world, where left and right are not what they seem anymore, where anti-capitalists use iPhones and Meta products to organize and where populist voters fight for gay rights (like in the Dutch election recently, if only to then demonize Muslims). Klein uses the term ‘diagonalists’ a lot, to identify how politics are much less binary, and more like a left and a right pole that attract attention by doing the exact opposite of each other.
The book is a really great read even though it meanders quite a bit and covers maybe a little too much ground. But with some fascinating insights. There’s a good interview with Klein in Another Magazine where she addresses the genocide in Gaza (also mentioned in the book), and a good interview with Jon Favreau for his Offline podcast .. Would love to hear your thoughts about the book!
FOURTH THING: LA-4A
Bandcamp collections are in my opinion a highly underrated feature of the platform. I find it incredibly interesting to see what people are actually buying on Bandcamp, it’s a great source for discovery of new music, almost like spying on the coolest kid in the record shop and then buying the same records after they leave. There was a fun interview on First Floor with SVEBBE, a Norwegian music fan who is gaining some notoriety as tastemaker/commenter/collector/campfluencer?? which is worth a read. Feel free to follow my own Collection by the way, I love seeing people buy stuff from it.
One record you will find there is the brand new absolutely awesome album by Kevin McHugh also known as LA-4A. ‘Apparitiana’ comes exactly 10 years after Kevin started releasing music under the LA-4A name (to break with the ‘minimal techno’ stigma of his earlier Ambivalent moniker). While firmly rooted in techno on a sonic level, this album shows how large his musical scope is and what is possible in modern electronic music with classic tools. Check out below.. Thanks so much for reading and see you on the next Four Things!
I'm here for the pizza, books, and bangers. Keep it up!
Enjoying that LA-4A album. Great drum sounds.