Being of a vaguely scientific mindset, or possibly because I'm incorrigibly cynical, I try to ignore two occurrences of any phenomena on the basis it's no doubt co-incidence; only when I see three do I start to suspect a pattern. Even then, I wonder.
So, maybe this is nothing, or it may shine a light on the zeitgeist. Probably the former, but hey, it's a while since I offered any light philosophising here, so I'd appreciate some slack.
My first, meaningless on its own, data point was my stumbling upon the music of the band Kosmischer Läufer, an alias for the East German composer Martin Zeichnete, recorded as warm-up and cool-down accompaniment for Cold War-era East German athletes. Spotify has five volumes of Krautrock-style ambient noodling. It's rather good.
My second data point, inspired by the soundtrack to Shane Meadows' Gallows Pole, was my discovery of the band Goat, who would be on hard rotation, if my laptop the sort of memory that rotates, but my limited understanding of solid state drives suggests something more akin to Harry Potter's pensieve or the Snow White's stepmother's mirror.
My third, triangulating the first two, was also inspired by the visual, this time Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall: the Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band whose take on 50 Cent's PIMP covers the fall that the movie goes on to anatomise - or do I mean pathologise? Like the first two, highly recommended.
Spotify's artist biographies describes BRSB as "shrouded in mystery" and says "not much is known about the mysterious masked band" Goat. And Kosmischer Läufer? It may actually be the cosmic joke of a Scottish bloke called Drew who I doubt was even in primary school when the Wall fell. But he swears blind he picked Martin Z hitch-hiking, so who am I to say?
The connection is manufactured and sought-out anonymity in a world barraged by social media, FOMO, information-sharing, information-thrusting-in-your-face, and a general screaming me-me-me-ness.
I have more than a nagging sympathy with this approach. Whilst I don't seek anonymity - I write under my own name, and you can find out quite a lot about me, particularly the non-authorial parts of my life, if you Google hard enough - I'm not one of the jump-up-and-wavers on social media. I'd rather write, and if you stumble across me and like what you read, great, but if you don't, no matter, it doesn't make what I write any the less because of that. (Full disclosure: this approach does not lead to me being stopped in the street and asked for my autograph.)
I can't see how there could be anything subliminal in the music that leads me towards artists such as these three, but it does make me wonder whether I've unwittingly gravitated towards them because they gently push the spotlight away with their fingertips and let their wares do the talking for them? And, regardless of the answer, does it say anything about the world in 2024?
We've always had Harper Lees and Thomas Pynchons - but theirs are more cases of reclusiveness than sought out anonymity. After all, neither adopted noms de plume, they just didn't like interviews and didn't return calls from strangers. And let's not forget all the Frank Sidebottoms, performing their schtick from within papier-mâché heads, or equivalent thereof. Same mindset, different millennia?
There still seems something categorically different about this artistic approach in 2024, and I think it's all about context. With the all-pervasive glare of social media, blanket online coverage, and the expectation of everything being curated for consumption, not giving your name and avoiding photographs becomes so much more of a positive act. It takes effort.
In the same way that you only see who's swimming naked when the tide is out, you only see who wants to remain incognito when the floodlights come on and they seek the shadows. But the floodlights are on all the time and there are no shadows, which, in an odd way simply highlights the anonymous and reclusive. Catch 22.
I suggest giving World Music a spin whilst pondering that.
My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).
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