After his recent passing, I stumbled across the music of wifiskeleton and was pretty excited about his music and that of the people around him (exxtape etc.). It reminded me a little of Dean Blunt’s approach: take a guitar loop from a Duster song or something and mumble rap over it (or do some indie style vocals on top of it in the case of skel). Very rough and unpretentious. And somehow it occurred to me that I can only imagine this kind of music coming from the US (or possibly the UK). Certainly not from Germany. Or take Dariacore as another example, or any other SoundCloud microgenre, and I find it hard to imagine anything cool like that being a thing in Germany.
Not that I’ll be misunderstood as completely pessimistic: we have cool stuff here, for sure: the (garage) punk underground is thriving, there are interesting contemporary rap artists and metal bands and so on. However, I rarely come across acts that are somehow more ambiguous in terms of genre. And I also rarely come across those who release their music with a similar nonchalance as in these SC microgenres. Instead, releases, say in electronic or rap music here are always sort of a big deal and it’s all about labels etc., and before someone drops a new remix, it’s turned into a social media thing. In punk, on the other hand, folks orient themselves towards established genre conventions – which I don’t think is wrong, and which I don’t want to exclude myself from. But I miss the weirdness and spontaneity, and I wonder why there is little to no practice of rapid release like there is with guys like skel. Or say, the whole culture of noisy Brazilian baile funk on SC, where people drop tracks daily.
Maybe what I’m getting at is that making music here in GER is very much associated with a kind of professional standard or a certain movement toward professionalization. That’s not to say that the music made by the artists I have in mind is necessarily unprofessional. (Although this may apply to various releases on Dismiss Yourself, where the amount of nonchalance and roughness is sometimes a bit too much for me.) When I think of internet culture artists like Lucy Bedroque or leroy, I find their productions quite crafty. But the whole pop-cultural product they create around it exudes a certain lightness and positive indifference — perhaps in the sense that they go beyond the conventions of their respective genres and create new musical connections in a seemingly effortless way. Which I think there was a time for that in GER, too. Yung Hurn might be an example for that. Or in the case of more experimental rock music, a good fifteen years ago there was some proper weird music coming out round the corner from labels like I Love Marbach Records or Discorporate Records. Case in point, the pretty great latest don vito album is also turning ten years old in a couple of weeks.