✘Fragments in Ecstacy
Let’s use our shattered digital world to make meaning.
Hi, there! Tristra here, waxing all poetic about tech and filling in for Maarten as he boogies his way through ADE.
Not too long ago, Maarten considered the tensions of creation and inspiration in our troubling, thrilling AI-soaked age. It feels like it’s something we’re all considering right now.
There’s much hand wringing about everything from our descent into algo-induced mid to our destruction of children’s psyches. We bemoan the failure of music to connect us to or via a monoculture and wonder if this is all leading to the imminent collapse of culture as we know it. The culprit is the fragmented, churning nature of media and entertainment, one that, some feel, deeply threatens art.
Or does it? What if we flip the script, and turn our short attention spans and bits and pieces of media into a strength, not a pathology? What if fragments are the units of expression of our times, not a problem, but a solution that reflects how we experience our internet- and tech-mediated worlds?
Indulge me in a little side quest for a second. I want to bring Arthur Machen into the conversation, a surreal Welsh author and mystic writing in English in the early 20th century. He’s a writer’s writer, especially among horror and supernatural writers. (Stephen King’s a fan.) His tales tend to find the weird, eerie, and otherworldly in the ordinary, purposefully so, as he explains in some of his (strange and beautiful) work on aesthetics and literature (like this book).
Machen wrestled gently with mass-market printing and advertising in ways that resonate with our current conversations about fractured attention, ever shorter bites of media, and alleged cultural collapse. He didn’t despair or capitulate when looking at a sea of miserable newsprint and ad circulars, however. He found a cheat code we can use.
That cheat code is ecstacy. This is the element, Machen believes, that differentiates between mass-produced slop and art. Ecstasy in this case has a specific vibe, if not a closely defined meaning. It’s that transcendent thread that weaves together seen and unseen, the shattered and banal, the scattered and pointless, into a meaningful, overwhelming, often supernatural whole that utterly transforms us. Ecstasy is a thought, a feeling, a sensation in our bodies, and a suggestion of an imminent future, all at once. Ecstasy connects the banal bits to something bigger the way sinews connect the bones of the hand. It links and by linking, creates a threshold that the meaningless churn of illegible bits can cross into meaning.
I bring Machen up, because I sense we need to transform our own ideas of what constitutes a work of art, a moving piece of music, a well-executed work, and to believe in the meaning-making capacity of fragments. We need to place fragments in ecstasy, executing a partial break with past aesthetic criteria, to reach a deeper understanding of our current cultural state and perhaps make something good out of it.
Fragments add up, you see, and make something that conveys meaning. They are not as flimsy and insubstantial as many cultural critics seem to think. They don’t cause brain rot. They don’t necessarily signal the end of our deep-thinking minds. We just need to adjust our frame to understand them (unless we’re ten and then this is all kinda obvious).
Fragments can suggest and tease. They can conceal while revealing, capturing a bit of our ambivalence and indecision in the face of impossibly abundant images and sounds. They can unsettle our definitions. They can express feelings and ideas that can never be whole, which never end or hold steady, especially when fragments are assembled in non-linear ways. They can help us create new spaces to explore the replacement of grand narratives, the Truth that dominated the imagination of past generations of artists yet can’t seem to hold steady anymore.
A quick-and-dirty look at how people, in particular very young people, use content online is enough to know that fragments are an accepted currency of meaning-making. Meme references grasped in a flash that don’t demand full exposition; mad jump cuts; generative AI’s hallucinatory juxtapositions; video edits that imply one thing, even while the viewer knows the person on screen meant another: These techniques all contribute to the frenetic and fragmentary experience of short-form video. They are also an emergent visual/audio/aesthetic language.
You could argue that this is like samples or sound packs for audio, but the difference between Grandmaster Flash or Terminator X’s tracks and what’s going on now is that what’s up now feels far more structurally shredded. The breaks and pauses and sudden endings or beginnings are even more part of the process. The fragments aren’t building something bigger to emulate, say, a studio packed with awesome session players. They are it. They are all. The fragments are the track.
With music as with video, you can pile up fragments, sequence them deliberately, chop and repeat them, do all sorts of things to them that musicians and songwriters and folk oddballs have done forever. Yet now you don’t have to do as much to make them cohere. You can leave the fissures, the disruptions, the seeming errors. The listener will create the connections, and perhaps make their own version or expression out of the fragments, trained as we all are by interacting with platforms and feeds that prompt us to shred our lived experience into snippets and outbursts.
This loose assemblage process shapes many hyperpop tracks (basically 100 Gecs’ MO). On the tenderer side, this parade of fragments approach informs lovely moments like Shabaka’s “I’ll Do Whatever You Want” or the progmetal explosion of Devon Townsend’s “Heartbreaker,” both compositions that slide from place to place, piece by piece, and never really come back around. They don't need to.
Some meanings, some feelings can only be expressed in fragments; that is part of their nature. I’m thinking of grief, which has a thousand facets but never really feels complete. An album that comes to mind and captures this beautifully is Ulver’s Shadows of the Sun, which breaks from meditation to meditation, never settling or reaching a conclusion about true loss.
This approach is not new, I hear fans of avant and experimental music shouting, and that’s true, but it feels like it’s never been this widespread, accessible—and underestimated.
The lack of cohesion and closure bothers those of us inculcated to seek out wholeness in artworks, a completion of the cycle, a Gestalt loop that must close. Yet if we listen for the potential, for the ecstasy that takes us out of our present moment into a sequence of moments and expressions piled up over time like fallen leaves on the forest floor, we start to hear something else: a new language emerging from a shredded, infinitely hacked and chopped past world that has barely formed and that has no solid grammar or inflection yet. That will come, if we take the fragments for what they are, the shards of the past that are seeding a chaotic new beginning.
Tristra Newyear Yeager is a writer, artist, and Chief Strategy Officer at Rock Paper Scissors, as well as co-host of the Music Tectonics Podcast. Shout out to the online-mysterious Matt Rice, whose rainbow Croc alchemy helped guide this piece.
LINKS
📷Memories of the present (Julian Stallabrass / New Left Review)
“Alien, deeply unknowable computational operations meet a society in which there are strong pressures toward conformity and cliché, holding up a fairground mirror with which to inspect capitalist culture. It is the image of a culture endlessly reflecting and consuming itself, governed by algorithms to boost engagement, with subjects ceaselessly urged to tailor their behaviour to satisfy the systems.”
✘Stallabrass, a British art historian, goes into the connections between AI and nostalgia, cliche, and informational entropy to take a provocative view of how generative AI creations reflect and reenforce our current cultural state. It’s refreshing to read a take that doesn’t try to judge AI as good or bad art, but weaves its position into the broader cloth of the history of the arts, market forces, and mass culture.
🚰Stop drinking from the toilet! (Judy Estrin / Coda)
“Digital platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, don’t differentiate between types of content coming into their systems and they lack the equivalent of effective water filters, purification systems, or valves to stop pollution and flooding. We are both the consumers and the sources of this ‘digital water’ flowing through and shaping our minds and lives. Whether we want to learn, laugh, share, or zone-out, we open our phones and drink from that well. The data we generate fuels increasingly dangerous ad targeting and surveillance of our online movements. Reality, entertainment, satire, facts, opinion, and misinformation all blend together in our feeds.”
✘Estrin asks how we can balance growth and convenience to keep our sources of information from poisoning us. It’s not just big tech and algos, however; it’s us, and we need to consider what we’re doing as we gulp down content.
😵Your mind needs chaos (Oshan Jarow / Vox)
“…[U]ncertainty can help us snap out of harmful loops, like depression or addiction. And in general, it turns out that one of the best ways to become healthier, more adaptive creatures is to regularly expose ourselves to different kinds of uncertainty.”
✘Sometimes making peace with chaos and not knowing is the best creative approach. In an age of obsession with predictive systems, it’s good to remember that uncertainty helps us stay engaged and excited.
🍏Still “brat summer:” Why album cycles are longer than ever (Axios)
“In the streaming era, huge raw listening numbers can grant you Billboard dominance and favor from Spotify's algorithm. That feedback loop of success can win the war for consumers' attention and cash, greatly extending an album's release cycle.”
✘Deluxe, remix, extra-long albums and alternative variants are increasingly part of artists’ release strategy. That first drop is just the start, giving folks many bites at the apple and turning what used to be a do-or-die moment (release day) into months of potential traction-building activity. This trend also plays into the “never finished” ethos that’s bubbling up in recorded music. An album isn’t a set, unchanging thing anymore.
👩🏾🎤Does live music need an upgrade? (Sean Adams / Drowned in Sound)
“The more I've thought about it, I don't think going to a gig is much different to my first ever gig in the early 90s…”
✘There’s been a lot of talk over the years about expanding in-person experiences via tech, but Sean is right: not much has changed. What could make live shows more enjoyable and meaningful, without feeling like a gimmick or distraction?
MUSIC
I recently stumbled across Latvian singer/performance artist ELIZABETE BALČUS and her exquisitely well arranged electronic-dotted chamber pop. While this track isn’t new, it’s a good example of why you might want to dive into her work. She has soul, but she’s also weird af… and if anyone can appreciate that, it’s this newsletter’s readers!
As always, this is fantastic and a must read, Tristra!
Your argument that the increasingly fragmented nature of culture represents a new and exciting aesthetic development (rather than, as some of the discourse suggests, a crumbling of everything we know into ‘slop’ without meaning) nails it, and as usual you makes the case in a pretty damn convincing way!
I’d add one extension to your arguments — I’d think that much of the hesitancy to embrace the ’chaos’ of fragmented culture actually might originate from the fear of not being able monetize and scale it in the same - arguably more straightforward - ways that were available to the the previous eras shared ‘monoCulture’.
To this point, I love your recognition that “This approach is not new, I hear fans of avant and experimental music shouting, and that’s true, but it feels like it’s never been this widespread, accessible—and underestimated.”
Experimental and avant music has always had this fragmentary nature and has always succeeded in its aesthetic and cultural purpose in incredible ways. At the same time, the monetization paths for this type of work have sometimes been fraught — It’s easy to see how this links to why folks might be hesitant about ongoing fragmentation of popular culture - it’s the money!
Part of what’s exciting about this fragmentation, to me, is both the forward-thinking aesthetics and approaches of the works being produced, but also how folks are working to embrace the uncertainty and figure out how to make these fragmented models sustainable (in an economic sense) for artists and culture-makers — and also the opening it provides for rethinking the financial models around culture to be more equitable.
And again, looking to avant and experimental models might be useful here — where the focus is on achieving sustainability at smaller scale, and not chasing growth for growths sake (maybe then fragmentation can actually lead to a more healthy industry, with many more folks able to make good livings via sustainable, small scale models, rather than wealth being channeled to a few consolidated businesses/individuals).
Thanks for this great writing, Tristra!
Lovely and graceful writing. ❤️ Thank you.