In a buzzy glow of lo-fi warmth comes Slow Blink’s Time Constant. Released last week on April 1st, 2022, Time Constant is the 4th full-length album by Chattanooga, TN’s Amanda Haswell through their Ambient project Slow Blink.
Performed live at Stove Works in Chattanooga on March 18th, and while less doom-laden than their former live album Pangea, Time Constant manages to enchant and haunt the listener in a doom spell of earthly contemplation.
The warmth of the analog tape loops mimic the environmental noise that one comes across in nature- be it deep in the woods, up in the mountains, by the ocean, or standing in a median of a parking lot looking at little strands of grass. Chords warp and swell past. Live instrumentation atop tape loops, like glockenspiel on the titular closing track Time Constant, is classic Haswell modus operandi.
In its exploration of time, Time Constant displays an absolutely mature, haunting beauty. If you enjoy lo-fi Ambient, you absolutely need to hear this album.
Remixed film tracks in the days of Witch House, these wonkified reworks of Angelo Badalamenti and Ennio Morricone are representative of a time, a brief moment, standing on the edge of Twin Peaks’ new-found cultural ubiquity, when the previously cult show of the early 90s was only starting to be reworked into contemporary culture. While Twin Peaks’ influence on the Doom Jazz genre cannot go understated, it’s here, at the beginning of television streaming in the early teens, that we begin to see Twin Peaks looked to en mass.
Opening track Audrey’s Trance is a warped and wistful refashioning of Badalamenti’s Audrey’s Dance from one of many iconic R&R diner scenes. The EP as a whole serves as a reminder of the early 2010s’ click-clacky percussion and penchant for side-chaining. The fledgling embrace of a purely-digital tonality may now feel primitive (or video game-esque), but delights in the eerie and off-kilter soothing quality similar to that of Twin Peaks.
I Saw Her Die, a reworking of Ennio Morricone’s theme from the Giallo film Chi L’ha Vista Morire? (1972), ramps up in intensity. Its chopped and warped choir samples fitting for the gnostic aesthetics of a genre like Witch House- the track’s energetic uptick decidedly something out of the world of video games.
At 7 minutes 49 seconds in duration, the EP’s closing track Your Melancholick Touch is a decent Dark Ambient work to close out the album. A dark drag of digital noise stretched out in all its low bit-rate glory. The song’s singular refrain repeats until entropy and eventual unceremonious cut-off. This almost depiction of ‘non-time’ remains fettered to the medium’s boundaries- with Ambient recordings of any kind we may imagine we ‘get lost’, but we’re always brought back. There is a definitive, inevitable end to this which attempts to capture the infinite. Your Melancholick Touch, like most worthwhile Dark Ambient, attempts to depict angst-undefinable.
Witch House was in a lot of ways a digital fashion trend, a commercial quicksilver in our narcissistic consumer culture. But looking back, there can still be pleasant or even worthwhile gems. I would say The Tleilaxu Music Machine (now releasing work under Pink Abduction Ray) has produced one of these gems. But what emotional urgency captured here remains relevant today? By going backward, do we find ourselves? Or do we simply find something to be mined? Perhaps that can only be self-interrogated by the individual listener.
For fans of: Pink Abduction Ray, Sidewalks and Skeletons, Blank Banshee
Funeral for A Friend is the 2021 EP release by Belarusian Dark Ambient and Doom Jazz project Unseeing. Funeral for A Friend is an incredibly dreary and visceral album, “[a] story to tell in the dark” as described on the album’s Bandcamp page.
Not for the squeamish, Funeral for A Friend’s opening track My Suicide is an incredibly gory audio play of final moments and self-inflicted death by knife. Accompanied by light and clean Post-Rock guitars, My Suicide is foley straight out of a horror film. The track’s minor dialogue may push My Suicide’s imagery a step too close to cheesy, but ultimately remains the visceral opener this album needs.
The band’s use of sound design is reminiscent of Krypto Grotesk’s Post Urban Exotica, exploring the man-made’s relationship to the human. A notable example is third track Death Coming, which incorporates distant sirens (an ominous warning peaking our biological nature) and hospital monitoring sounds as transitioning fills in the track.
Enacting a Post-Rock approach to Doom Jazz’s solemn sound, Unseeing substitutes Doom Jazz’s more sleazy qualities for pure romantic-nihilism. The jazz aesthetics integral to Doom Jazz are subdued. Lightly brushed drums and MIDI ‘standup’ bass are only a light skeletal structure which Unseeing builds off of with lush synth strings and Post-Rock guitar tones. It’s a sonic distinction from the Doom Jazz milieu which sets the band apart and allows Unseeing to achieve their compositions’ greatest potential on the album.
For fans of: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mount Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Nortt
The long-lost genre of tropical ersatz haunts on in the reverberations of the past. Exotica’s problematic past, a colonialist fantasy involving ‘savages’ and drenched in Orientalism, have permanently marred it. But while Exotica and its racist overtones have long given way to (what I would like to think of as) societal progress, the Hollywood-esque cinema of the mind echoes on in both eerie and campy appeal.
Post-Exotica is this very aesthetic reverberation intertwined with contemporary societal attitudes, recording techniques, and accessibility afforded to us by the internet. Post-Exotica, as an aesthetic mode within music, lacks any unifying subculture or definitive sonic palette.
Records of the ‘post-exotic’ can range from exploring the sociopolitical to the existential, the atavistic to the alchemical, or simply act as a pining for ye olden days of ‘classy’ Hi-Fi bachelor pad music.
Without further hesitation, let’s explore these selected offerings from a genre even Bandcamp has yet to recognize. This is Resident Sound’s Guide to Post-Exotica…
Early Rumblings: JG Thirlwell, Steroid Maximus, and the post-Post-Punk of The 1990s
Around the mid-1990s, revived interest in Lounge, Surf, and Exotica music were in full swing. But it wasn’t all CD reissues and copies of the Swingers soundtrack. Artists like Southern Culture on The Skids and (dare I say…) Richard Cheese were creating new work upon recently old genres. So it’s not surprising we can look back to the 1990s as some of the earliest examples of Exotica music re-envisioned. And while retro acts made Exotica’s contemporary scene, no one else embodied the ‘re-envisioning’ aspect of Post-Exotica music better than JG Thirlwell.
You may not know him by name, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard his music. He’s the composer for famed adult animated shows Venture Bros and Archer (since Season 5), has worked with Marc Almond, Lydia Lunch, Nurse With Wound, Zola Jesus and more, and has released nearly a dozen full length studio albums under his most infamous project: Foetus.
That in mind, it’s not too surprising that his name (or one of dozens of pseudonyms) would show up on a list like this.
By the end of the 80s and into the early 90s, the more ‘artistically-inclined’ members of the Punk and Post-Punk movements were looking to expand past their genre’s established sonic templates. It’s around this time we see the formation of Virginia’s experimental Hardcore outfit Men’s Recovery Project, Germany’s Doom Jazz godfathers Bohren & der Club of Gore, and JG Thirlwell’s expansion into more cinematic, Big Band and Exotica influenced compositions with his project Steroid Maximus.
“…by 1990 I felt that I needed to shift gears and do something that was a little more challenging to me and that’s how I started Steroid Maximus, to create instrumental music that was cinematic and all the sources hadn’t been in my music before. … Since then, I explored doing large scale groups like an 18-piece version of Steroid Maximus which I’ve done in Europe and New York.”
The first Steroid Maximus album ¡Quilombo! was released in 1991 and breaks all conventions. There is no pastiche, only impressions of a former sonic era. The easiest way to describe ¡Quilombo! is to make comparisons to the varied works of Jerry Van Rooyen, Raymond Scott, and Robert Drasnin, though no singular example is particularly accurate. Often lauded for his more violent overtones, Thirlwell achieves work of a greater depth, utilizing the many exotic shades of darkness often overlooked for pure black.
It’s a record that needs to be heard to understand the distance a Post-Exotica record can go. So before you go, I recommend spending a little time ¡Quilombo!
Kava Kon – Virgin Lava (2016)
At times coming across more pastiche than ‘Post’, Kava Kon’s 2016 EP release Virgin Lava is a dark and divine dive into the sonic palette of Exotica music. Not letting 50+ years of audio engineering developments go to waste, Kava Kon have brought the sultry sounds of Exotica into the days of DAW.
When asked about overlooked elements in an interview for Gravedigger’s Local 16, Kava Kon’s Nels Truesdell said:
“A lot of the percussion done on the albums Departure Exotica and Tiki for the Atomic Age was beatboxing. For example 90% of all güiro sounds were done by my mouth. Then we processed it using EQs and compressors on the recordings to give them a more realistic tone. There are so many more examples of unconventional recording techniques used on our albums.”
Featuring two remixes of Doom Jazz icons The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Virgin Lava touches on the parallels of hyper-aestheticized niche genres, namely that of Post-Exotica and Doom Jazz.
Similarities include an exemplification of Hollywood cinematic themes, ‘extreme’ music genre traits (such as doom metal or noise) crossed with mid-century adult music genres, and nostalgia for periods outside of living memory. But while retro is inherently regressive, both Post-Exotica and Doom Jazz carry with them innovation, distinct sonic palettes, stylistic variants, and great potential.
Iosu Vakerizzo – Forbidden Island (2020)
Iosu Vakerizzo’s Forbidden Island is an excellent work of would-be film score. Hearkening back to pop Exotica’s ornamental novelty, Forbidden Island‘s use of sampling creates sonic depictions of a sea-side land while the album’s minimalist instrumentation creates eerie impressions of an outside world.
The site HipWax described the pop Exotica of the 1950s as “[filling] a niche curiously left open by Afro-Cuban, Hawaiian, and other related music. It is the mood music of place, but no place familiar. …One conjures a torrential rain in the tropics, a jungle safari, or the desert at night. And that is precisely the stuff of exotica: an odd combination of the soothing and stimulating, like nature itself.”
The Post-Exotica work of Iosu Vakerizzo delivers both the stimulating and soothing effect given to us by 1950s Exotica, while building off of its predecessor with the possibilities afforded by Dark Ambient music.
Resident Sound’s first view into the world of Post-Exotica was a review of Iosu Vakerizzo’s previous album The Temple. If you like Forbidden Island, we highly recommend checking out his other work here.
Strange Cousin – Knifes And Smothers (2021)
Released in February of 2021 by American music artist Strange Cousin, the single Knifes And Smothers and its b-side track Houdini Whodon’t’he are a dual approach to Post-Exotica’s sonic possibilities. The titular Knifes And Smothers is a melancholic Dark Ambient work consisting of reversed piano chords and news coverage of an unsolved 1997 homicide. Countering Knifes And Smothers is b-side track Houdini Whodon’t’he, a pummeling cinematic horror show of double kick triplets and wailing horn sections. Real ‘run through the jungle’ energy, an unsettling churning sensation.
German Army – Animals Remember Human (2020)
Animals Remember Human is one of five releases in the year 2020 by the hyper-prolific project Germany Army. GeAr, as they’re sometimes known, is the musique concrete project of Peter Kris and collaborator Norm Heston.
Inspired by the works of Paulo Freire and Sydney Possuelo, the Post-Exotica work of GeAr confronts the colonialist lens of 1950s pop Exotica which we are well familiar with.
When asked about the name German Army in an interview with Stereo Embers Magazine, Peter Kris said:
“I figured it was perfect because one can’t help but notice that at the time there seemed to be a rise in intolerance across the globe. I thought it would be a good name to take and use to actually document language and cultural extinction. Further, I wanted to critique all nationalism and focus on the actions of U.S. imperialism. You could just not bother to pay attention to the name or the message, but if you do, it is very clearly one of anti-imperialism, pro-ecology and for the cultural preservation of those disappeared or who presently have a vanishing language, culture, flora and fauna.”
If Post-Exotica were ever to develop into a fully fledged school of work, we ought to expect the hauntological humanitarian attitudes set forth by German Army to become prototypical.
Chick Vekters – Silicon Island (2021)
Perhaps now the go-to medium of escapist fantasy, video games allow us to fully immerse ourselves in a foreign world. What’s more exotic than that?
Using the retro video game aesthetic genre of Chiptune, Chick Vekters’s 2021 release Silicon Island is rightfully self-described as “an eclectic cocktail of aural adventures!” Heavily rooted in the Chiptune’s 8-bit sound, Silicon Island still delivers the escapist fantasy of island adventure, albeit just a wee bit pixelated.
With songs like Bionic Garden, Neon Forest, and Cathode Ray Reef, Silicon Island plays to the spirit of 1950s pop Exotica, while moving past Exotica’s colonialist past.
If you’re interested in learning more about colonialism’s intersection with video games, check Folding Idea’s video Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism.
A E S T H E T I C S: Post-Exotica, Vaporwave and Aesthetic Niches
‘Post-Exotica’ is a term that has made brief appearances in the Vaporwave world over the past decade, but is Vaporwave the missing link to the development of Post-Exotica?
Vaporwave itself is a genre heavily invested in aesthetic offshoots. From iconic aesthetic-concept albums such as Frasierwave, to the more or less visual genre Simpsonswave. While built across the internet as opposed to regionally, Vaporwave, unlike Post-Exotica has managed to establish a shared set of artifacts, sonic and aesthetic identifiers, and language norms (albeit meme oriented) associated with subcultures.
Both the ability to retrofetishize and simultaneously criticize glory days of existing power structures are traits of both genres, but as a dual mode only particularly integral to Vaporwave.
Vaporwave has shown us that both the micro-genre and aesthetic genre is a place of sonic exploration, even if just as a brief layover on an artist’s greater developmental journey. Will Post-Exotica ever bridge this gap and become a fully fledged subculture and genre? Only time will tell.
Pangea is the 2021 full-length single by Chattanooga, TN based artist Amanda Haswell under the alias Slow Blink. Self described as “tape loop weather patterns,” there’s never been a more appropriately titled release for such a monolithic work.
Originally performed at Electric Arcadia Festival IV in Sewanee, TN earlier this year, Pangea towers above all live deconstructed musical performances. Hearing Slow Blink embrace longer, more struggling work only fuels the richly saturated, meditative states which they craft so well.
Is it a dirge? A death knell? Pangea’s engulfing state feels beyond the funeral status of their Doom Metal contemporaries. This is grief! This is reckoning! And at times, we find ourselves adrift in a state of incomprehensible aura.
You could call it an emotional or spiritual truth. I call that good art.
For fans of: Chelsea Wolfe, Grouper, Susumu Yokota
Iosu Vakerizzo’s The Temple is a post-exotica ambient terror show in which the exploits of Exotica have since turned over to the horrors of postcolonial reality. Memories of the deceased have now turned aggressor, a classic zombie-infested haunting in which the presence of the dead become apparent in the living’s absence. This is dark ambient music at its finest.
The Temple’s deathly eerie ambience straddles the line between ambient music and soundscape, creating a faux film score element or cinéma de l’esprit. The album’s focus first and foremost is on crafting its eerie aura, which it thrives in. Second to this is the album’s textural feel, and lastly, if ever relevant here, comes musical structure and rhythm. But it is this very ‘lack of presence’ (the presence of more traditional music qualities) which is utilized so effectively.
Vakerizzo’s crafted something particularly special in sonic-miniature. Iosu Vakerizzo’s work is similar to the short films of Jiří Barta, both in their aura and potency. The listener is left wanting more, but it is The Temple’s 16-minute run time which leaves the work both impactful and fulfilling.
The first 4 of 5 songs on the album could be considered the stumbling upon and exploration of the lost world of 1950s Exotica in its present state: resorts now dilapidated, villages abandoned. Exotica’s sonic luxury has since caved way to the unhindered passage of time and ensuing decay. It is the base of the mountain on which the inevitable reckoning of Exotica’s prior colonial approach will take place.
5th and final track Sacrifice To The God of The Mountain is this very mountain. The howling of wind intensifies as tension builds. The drum’s beating is now more present than ever. And before long, a doom wave of layered strings crash and crush down upon us. It’s incredibly heavy in a still way, reminiscent of early Doom Jazz. But it is this new instrumental presence, the weird to Mark Fisher’s eerie, which brings the outside back home.
Sacrifice To The God of The Mountain may quickly ratchet up the album’s previously slow growing tension, but doesn’t lose The Temple’s eerie touch with unwanted answers. The song stops, and the listener is left in deathly silence and grisly terror. In the end, it never quite does. The Temple haunts, lingers, and destroys any perceived innocence of the past.
Iosu Vakerizzo’s The Temple is a must listen for those looking for a new breed of ambient terror, doom, and sonic tension.
Original Soundtrack is a 42 minute ambient behemoth played on 20 DVD players across 20 TVs. At the helm, multimedia artist Brian J Davis with a customized mixer, fading in and out endlessly looping DVD menu audio.
Original Soundtrack captures so well the liminal, undefined space and cold dreamlike quality of televisual media within an audio format. Nothing is quite real. Sonic statements and aesthetics endlessly peel away at each other. Original Soundtrack is where the show is between the channels. It is the under lit lobby in the movie theatre of the mind. What are movies and television other than cold concrete dreams?
Reverb drafts out of the album’s cold and spacious chamber. A uneasy dream of tension and floating rhythms. Relief is ever undercut with the rising unease of another DVD. If you’ve ever wanted to experience a dozen or so movies scrambled into one coherent and beautiful work, Original Soundtrack is for you.
Taken from the Bandcamp listing, Davis comments on the album’s origins:
“In 2008 I was inspired by my partner’s unique cure for insomnia—falling asleep to endlessly looping Werner Herzog DVD menus. Original Soundtrack grew from there into a one hour piece for an orchestra of TVs and looping DVD menus from across genres and film history and was performed live in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles. A graphic score was used to make it semi-repeatable. but syncing was random, or at best done with stop/start on remote controls.”
The album was remastered in 2020 by JD Davis and released on May 24th, 2020 on Bandcamp where you can listen or purchase it now.
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with Disengaged, an appropriately titled grief-riddled song popular to certain streaming algorithms. Every note is obscured in muddied overdrive and cavernous reverb. Unlike the music it serves so well, it’s an artistic choice that is far from subtle.
By synth or silence, tracks flow seamlessly into the next. After Disengaged, the listener is treated to a suite of dreamy acoustic guitar oriented songs, layers upon layers of delicate vocal tracks serve more as a chorus than self-backing. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill is a floral tapestry of ethereal agony. It’s psychedelic doom channeled through folk and singer/songwriter sensibilities.
Grouper is Liz Harris, an American musician born in 1980 and raised in a Fourth Way commune in the Bay Area of California. This, and how she chose the name Grouper (members of the commune were called “groupers”) is an oft echoed anecdote of her life in which the greater story of Grouper’s work is generally affixed to by fans and reporters alike.
Pulled from a 2008 article by Cary Clarke for the Portland Mercury, a quote from Harris: “I guess this album partly ended up being me thinking about the past, and the way we carry around the dead festering weight of it for a long time, or I did anyway, and how maybe we have to leave it off somewhere at some point, even if the ghosts of its carcass come back to haunt and talk to us at night.”
The album crashes to a close with engulfing waves of delay on track Tidal Wave before drifting away on the outgoing tide that is We’ve All Gone To Sleep.
For fans of: Chelsea Wolfe, Cocteau Twins, Snail Mail
A creepy voice pronounces the word “prologue” in a way I’ve never quite heard it pronounced before. Maybe it’s British, maybe they’re born with it. No time for such sociolinguistical mysteries! Suddenly we’re off under waves of heavy but simple organ. Suddenly there it is again. A voice not entirely unlike Noel Fielding as the goth Richmond Avenal on sitcom The IT Crowd.
At times goofy, there is a level of showmanship that shouldn’t go unappreciated. A few motifs make up the entire work, differentiated by various keyboard settings. But even with the goofy lyrical speech of tracks such as Wormsong and National Ændthem (the latter of which being an intensely melodramatic reworking of The Star-Spangled Banner), Funeral The Musical is a genuinely spooky and haunting adventure in grief and death.
Funeral The Musical may not be such foreign territory for those in puppetry and carnival/freak show revivalist circles, but to those who haven’t lived in one of the hundreds of cities with a ‘Keep ____ Weird’ sticker, well, it may actually be pretty ground breaking stuff.
For fans of: Nurse With Wound, Cornbugs, the videos of David Firth
Suffocating the listener in a liminal world drenched in fog, the dampened sound of a pumpjack groans on under a layer of reverb. Rarely about what is, almost entirely about what isn’t, the doom jazz genre has been the go-to for our inner Agent Dale Coopers since Twin Peaks first went off the air in the summer of 1991. Without further ado, here is Resident Sound’s Guide to Doom Jazz…
In many ways, it is anything but jazz. Post-rock at its lightest, doom jazz is a post-metal, dark ambient blend of avant-garde and film-score influences, with jazz aesthetics and associated instruments. Brushed drums and stand-up bass drag us slowly into a shadow in which the only recognizable feature may be the occasional saxophone drudgery. The rare vocal not sung in giallo horror tongues speak is a rare find. So where do we get started?
Bohren & der Club of Gore
An early influence and common theme within doom jazz is composer Angelo Badalamenti’s score for David Lynch’s cult-classic turned pop culture phenomenon Twin Peaks. Debuting in August of 1990, Twin Peaks had only gone off the air the previous year when Bohren & der Club of Gore was founded in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany in 1992. For a long time its members, former hardcore punk musicians, were seemingly the only individuals of this dark ethereal genre-to-be. There was no fashion, no statement pieces, no major-label deals or infamous underground record collecting stories. In a decade defined by x-treme cool ranch and Limp Bizkit, doom jazz’s shadowy grip on dark music would grow slowly over the coming decades.
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble
TKDE, initially a duo, formed in Utrecht, Netherlands in 2000 as a project for scoring silent films. By 2007, the ensemble had grown to seven members with instrumentation consisting of cello, violin, guitar, trombone, and more. Unlike their peers, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble would have a sparse discography, culminating in the 2011 crowd-funded From The Stairwell LP and a live album that same year before quietly disbanding in 2014.
Denovali Records
Being the fractured scene that it is, it can seem as if these groups are destined to return to the shadows from which they once came.
Since the dissolution of The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble there’s been no word of them returning, but in 2016, Denovali Records (the closest thing to a scene anchoring point) began to release the TKDE discography on their digital label, allowing for greater accessibility through Bandcamp.
Denovali Records may be the closest we see to a subcultural anchor anytime soon. Started in 2005, the independent label has seen itself curate and release a roster as sonically diverse as ambient, electronica, drone, jazz, and sound art. Thanks to them, doom jazz has become accessible to those who wish to get involved. Denovali is now home to The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, and one of my favorite groups; The Dale Cooper Quartet.
Dale Cooper Quartet
Formed in 2002 at a jazz improvisation night, The Dale Cooper Quartet (occasionally styled as DC4tet) came together over a love of Angelo Badalamenti and doom jazz predecessors Bohren & der Club of Gore. Their first and perhaps most recognizable release came in 2006 with Parole de Navarre on French electronic label Diesel Combustible. DC4tet’s explicit Twin Peaks reference and the accessibility afforded to ambient music and Twin Peaks fans alike in the second half of the naughts helped put them at the forefront of what is now a somewhat-google-able genre.
You can read an interview with DC4tet at Welcome to Twin Peaks, a Twin Peaks fan site.
The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation
Described by Denovali Records as the “much-noticed free-form, drone metal / jazz alter-ego of The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble,” The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation is the improvisational spin-off of TKDE. Started in 2007 only as a live project, their early performances were recorded and eventually released as Doomjazz Future Corpses! in 2007 on the Ad Noiseam record label. This was followed up in 2009 by Succubus, arguably the most visually recognizable album in the genre, then three more albums. Mount Fuji disbanded in 2012 having put out more work than the original Kilimanjaro ensemble.
Is that all there is…?
Maybe doom jazz has reached a logical conclusion. An early pioneer of the metamodernist practice of oscillation between modernist and postmodernist ideology; doom jazz oscillates between many of theorist Jonathan Kramer’s proposed characteristics of postmodernist music and the modernist techniques and styles proposed by musicologist Daniel Albright, such as expressionism, abstractionism, and hyperrealism. As more metamodernist approaches to music are explored, doom jazz has a chance to be reignited by newer groups, but perhaps it will be left alone as new styles emerge from the same school of thought.
In a time when nearly all artistic ideas can be easily shared, the legitimacy of an idea isn’t held hostage to any regional scene’s ability to create the cultural cohesion previously necessary (think of the social climates that lead to the formation of punk, grunge, or even free jazz) to catapult a band into any degree of national attention or audience. Neither immediately positive or negative, the loss of this necessity mixed with the hyper commercialization of all niches has lead us to a post-subcultural way of living. In a world increasingly focused on quantitative consumption of content oriented media and a lowered barrier of entry (lower stigmatization, higher accessibility), it could be said we live in a niche-aesthetics cultural society, no longer held together by subcultural community ties.
So in keeping with its metamodernist leanings, where does doom jazz go from here? For a genre whose first wave rose and crashed as slow as its tempo, what will it take for second wave to distinguish itself? It may be another 20 years before we see it in full swing. But now as we speak, the 2030s/40s are already doomed.
The Resident Sound 