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September 30, 2007
Clubbin
I've heard my share of dud music but Ibiza took it to a whole new level. I've always been more of an audio than visuals kind of gal, and I love the notion of diversity, but somebody tell me please... why do these weird mainstream type people seem to care so little about goes in their ears on a night out?
Big
In the interest of research, a bunch of us ventured out to "the world's biggest nightclub". Blah. We stayed thirty minutes. Around midnight the place was vast, empty, and soulless. For most of the visit the DJ, suspended over a swimming pool in his "God is a DJ" style pulpit, rewarded us with the sound of someone playing the first level of Sony Playstation Portable's hit music rhythm game Lumines. Great game. Audio kinda poo on its own if you're not pushing buttons. I guess the myth that it's "all about the music" is thinner. If that's possible. I'm all up for being challenged by new music. When I tagged what I was hearing I did pause to wonder why I thought it was so cynical. Perhaps I'm just getting too old to appreciate new art. But no.. It was pants. It was filler. Whatever context you could think of. Fun? Interesting? Danceable? Atmospheric? The atmosphere was clearly "How far can we take the piss?" Wherever you go, the superclub experience is deeply cynical. Unless you bought into it. Cause no one wants to look stupid. Or feel they're groovin' to the lowest common denominator.
Little
Last night was much better. We lasted at least an hour back in London in a tiny bar club thing. Some unnamed below-stairs place in Fulham. Two dodgy house DJs battle it out for supremacy. At the same time. Two DJs. Two sets of speakers. One small room... The sound of a hostile takeover in play. It was how I imagine having worms in your head must feel. The most disturbing aspect was the reaction of the crowd or lack of. Nada... It was fairly early. Alcohol and party favours couldn't have totally been responsible. People were nodding along to the beat(s). I'd like to think they were rooting for their preferred audio layers, taking sides in the mix, willing one of mixes onto victory. But that's being more positive than I feel right now. My guess is that they were just trying to make the best of the pumpin' porridge. The human mind is a wonderful thing.
Now I'm the first to welcome diversity and experimentation but this wasn't either. They were just playing chicken with decks. Eventually one of the DJs was paid to stop playing and things stabilised. But not for quite a while. And while there were two DJs, no one left. The place was packed. No one looked particularly disturbed. Everyone was cool. Conversations continued. The things we can filter out are amazing. I must be overly sensitive.
Painfully bad
It's no coincidence that I'm thinking about the sound design of information warfare elements in Sanctuary at the moment. Clearly the task of developing sounds that club you over the head, that convey pain to a mainstream audience, and simulate futuristic information overload, is going to be a bit tricky. The flip side of being sophisticated consumers is that we sure know how to process gloop. Especially when we consider the gloop's context acceptable. Last night's context - a party... with tunes. What else do you want?!
Of course the same is true of any successful formula. Once we buy into things, that faith thing is hard to shift. I'm a bit of a fan when it comes to that mother of all media brands, the BBC, and not just because it paid my rent this year. But while working there, off and on the last nine years, I discovered that reputable media organisations like the Beeb are perhaps the one place in life where you can indeed polish a turd, proving the old adage wrong. You can slap the BBC brand on just about anything, no matter what the subject or quality level is, and pretty much guarantee extraordinarily large audiences, global visibility and some good press. Which goes some way to explain why people feel like they wuz robbed when rubbish, scandal and trust issues emerge. We really just want a good time without thinking too much about it. And we're prepared to put up with a lot for that.
So perhaps the mainstream clubber punter of the future would benefit from the sonic equivalent to Soylent Green - a uniform audio soup filtered through through the stereotypes of popular music and DJ culture. Perhaps a sound wave is around the corner that we can all be subjected to 24/7. Imagine Internet mailing lists and discussion groups merged into one noise channel - the raw emotional state of our society amplified and packaged in such a way that we absorb it without noticing.
Too extreme for Ibiza in the Noughties? Probably. It's probably more lucrative to keep the lads on the desk churning out pap and charging the punters 15 euros for water. But how low do you have to go before people vote with their ears and feet? And now I'm wondering what visuals I'm putting up with.
Posted by .M. at September 30, 2007 02:53 PM
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