New Environments 17: Sad Grownups
Lit mags, environmental music, beautiful drone, and more!
The other night at the Heavy Traffic release party/reading (standing room only! Literature is BACK!) I was standing in the hall outside the venue directly under a spotlight trying to hear the readers, but mostly eavesdropping on the 20-something lit kids who were there to party. I heard a lot of mutterings about pants and also about John Sayles? Presumably because he just released a book, hot on the heels of his previous book? I’ve actually never read Sayles. Should I read Sayles? Anyway—none of this is a new observation if you are the kind of person who cares if the kids care about books these days. Here in LA, the lit scene is not dire like some people might say it is, it’s just diffuse. Seeing all these people in this city come together to celebrate writing or at least party in the general vicinity of writing felt good. Highlight of the night: Amie Barrodale. Hilarious! How have I not read Trip yet? Lowlight: not really being able to hear Ottessa Moshfegh read from her WIP new novel. The half-sentences I clocked sounded good though. Anyway, I was glad to support Heavy Traffic, which is an NY-based lit mag with a hypertextual focus. As it’s gone on, images have become less and less a part of the whole thing, instead the text of each story bleeds together, runs off the page, grows, shrinks, and generally treats margins as suggestions. I can imagine a future where the magazine is an entirely gnostic object, self-referential and arcane. I doubt that’s the goal, because that would be unreadable to everyone but the most devoted, but in its current form it does puncture holes in the writing world hierarchy, with newer writers given equal space and consideration next to more than a few living legends. Heavy Traffic has a strong sense of what it wants to be as a lit mag, and that’s increasingly valuable.
Being at the reading got me thinking about short stories, which made me think about one of my favorite short story collections of recent memory: Amy Stuber’s Sad Grownups, which employs similar narrative twists to the best Lorrie Moore stories, but keeps everything in this sort of devastated register occupied by characters who have really Seen Some Shit. It also got me thinking about the great Katherine Dunn, who I would argue is a singularly influential writer at this moment, for the way her style seems to have crawled into the very foundations of young writers’ work, even if they don’t acknowledge it or don’t realize it. Dunn’s got a posthumous short story collection out right now, which I own but have not yet read. Prior to that, her previously-unreleased novel Toad was (posthumously) published. It’s my favorite work of hers. It’s not as gross and world-engulfing as Geek Love, but its raw and rough and features characters making some of the worst decisions of all time, largely regarding their own health and the health of a baby in ways that are increasingly relevant, to America’s mass psychosis around vaccines and avoiding curable diseases.
Every once in awhile ambient drone breaks containment and becomes the engine for a viral news story. A few years ago it happened when Robert Pattinson talked about being stuck in that Batman costume, barely able to move, so he’d make ambient music in his trailer since his arms were the only parts of his body that had any mobility. That story inexplicably went viral again somewhat recently. I can only assume that there’s a huge appetite for gorgeous drones made by Batman.
About a week ago, another ambient story spread around the internet. This time, it was about a freezer shelf from a co-op in Sheffield, which emitted a fuzzy hum that, the more you dive into its sonic nooks, sounds like a glacier cleaving from itself, melting and collapsing. After one person posted a short link the (very appealing) sound of the freezer, someone else looped it for TEN HOURS, which I’m inclined to say is far too long of a listening experience, but I’m on hour two and it still sounds good.
If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about how the key to ambient music and drone music is to understand the story behind it—whether it’s made up, or a set of artistic constraints or whatever. This lends some depth and heft to music that doesn’t otherwise offer an easy way in, and it’s the reason this ten hour recording got so much traction at, like, Time Out Worldwide, which I didn’t even know existed. It also taps into an extremely not-American lineage of purpose-driven ambient music. This was, at times, a major thing in Japan. One of my favorite artifacts from the sub-sub-sub-genre of commercial ambient music for a specific purpose is Takashi Kokubo’s Get at the Wave, which was commissioned by the Sanyo air conditioning company in the glory days of 1987 as a way of getting people prepared for the extremely relaxing vibe of being cooled off by an at-home air conditioner (it sounds like a tropical island! It also sounds like the music from the beginning of Waterworld, which I rewatched recently and is, I feel comfortable saying, the most new age action movie ever made). Notably, it doesn’t actually feature the sound of an AC, putting it in the tradition of Japanese environmental music, which is in the midst of an ongoing resurgence thanks to Light in the Attic’s now seminal compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990.
You guys, there are soooo many ambient albums in the world. If you read this newsletter, or even if you just sort of pay attention to music, you’re probably aware of this—but a short journey through any streaming service in existence will yield a staggering amount of drone, new age, experimental, environmental, background music that could be classified as ambient. You could, I guess, also classify OHYUNG’s staggering IOWA as ambient, but there’s a real demand for attention here—a reckoning with our shitty world instead of an escape from it. IOWA is loosely modeled after Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, not in any obvious way, but more in the way it uses a sense of place as a grounding to explore universal themes of American living. There are some other commonalities: desolate landscapes, empty space, finding beauty in a world seemingly designed to work against you…but IOWA works best because it so strongly evokes a sense of place, set against the backdrop of glacial pieces that refract and echo like memory. I’ve listened to IOWA once a day (at least!) since it came out, and it never fails at stopping me in my tracks.