Netlabel culture

Re-reading Ed's (not really) recent posts on shitcore got me thinking about a related topic that I cultivated quite an interest for a few years back.  As the internet proved itself to be a a) game-changing outlet for people of all types, backgrounds, interests, and skills to exhibit said backgrounds, interests, skills and b) an (arguably) truly libertarian and anarchic playground for self-expression, easy distribution and subculture-breeding, lots of new paradigms cropped up.  New avenues for business, for publishing, for networking, for computer games began to breed rapidly.  We all know the story.

Netlabels are one of many stories that make up the annals of fringe internet culture.  Let's assume they first came into existence in the late 1990s.  In essence, they release music for free in completely digital formats.  This means no costs other than a modest amount of server space.  Pair this with all manners of "difficult" electronic music, and you have a match made in heaven.  It's a way for a small group of like-minded individuals to bond over a common interest (aka, what the vast majority of the non-commercial entities on the internet are all about).  You see similar paradigms in other media: independent video game developers, amateur photographers, DeviantArt, SoundCloud, the blogosphere in general.  People not only want to make their art, but they want to share it and not necessarily for profit.  They just want to share it.  And they want to be part of a community.  That's what forums are for.  That's what social media is about.

The biggest difference here isn't that it's a self-selecting community, or that it's a fringe interest because it hasn't picked up steam.  It's definitely both of those.  The biggest difference is the afore-mentioned nature of the music: difficult.  It's abstract, often obscene, often with low fidelity sound, highly repetitive, grating, annoying, silly, offensive.  It already draws from the most abrasive and fringe styles of music: breakcore, grindcore, industrial, noise, power electronics, 8-bit, chiptune, death metal, black metal, drone.  It's a community that never ever wants to be popular or well known.  It's even a community that often will deny it's affiliations with any of the aforementioned styles/genres (especially that of breakcore, which I'll get to).  It's a community without a center, without a cohesive style-guide.  You can "distill" it because then you'd just get something that sounded like a better-known artist of one of the styles many of these artists freely and playfully draw from.  You can't take gabber-infused 8-bit noise and make it sound good.  I guess if you really wanted to and really wanted to force the public at large to accept these strange noises, you'd really have to get some really polished producers and some A-level vocal talent to make some really catchy hooks over what would have to be really dumbed-down, antithetically stripped netlabel music.  That said, one of the joys of the "style," if we can call it that, is that there is no style.

There are moments of incredible bliss, of melodic and stylistic perfection scattered throughout these badly tagged (often the ID3 tags for genre read "Blues"), perversely sarcastic albums.  Smack in the middle of an album of hectic, chopped up, fuzzed out breakbeats set over pornographically guttural pitch-shifted vocals, there can be moments of shockingly thoughtful and complex beats and/or melody/harmony.  It's these joys alongside the hilarious ridiculousness of the totally spastic gabber-fuzz-bullshit and absurdist song titles/album covers that make these artists worthwhile.  That, and my belief that no artist isn't worthwhile, they're just worthless to me or to you or to whomever.  So you do end up with moments that really could be even minor underground hits if they were distributed in "real" or "legitimate" or "normal" avenues.  But they're not.  They're released in hard-to-find, intentionally badly-designed and visually grating websites reminiscent of something a fourth grader would have made using nothing but HTML back in 1997.

Two things to consider at this point in this...essay...rant...piece of writing...let's go with that: Two things to consider at this point in this piece of writing: a) didn't Ed already write this a few months back and isn't all of this just shitcore? and b) who gives a crap, most of the music sucks.

To the askers of the first question: yes, it basically is shitcore.  But shitcore tends to have less emphasis on harsh noise and power electronics and more emphasis on speed and sheer strangeness.  But if you want to call a spade a spade, go ahead, I won't stop you.  Sonically speaking there is very little difference between the average output on say Shitwank (Australian shitcore artist Passenger of Shit's label) and say...Trashfuck Net, among the more well-known of netlabels.  And there are a million labels in between that do a combination of free digital releases and purchasable physical releases in styles similar to either of the aforementioned labels.

As for the second part, I'm not really sure.  The people who make it are in a spectrum from those who genuinely care about their craft and see their work as part of a sociological, musicological, political trajectory or chronologically-evolving network and those who make it to piss people off and laugh about it:  the musical equivalent of Youtube trolls.  And then, there are plenty of people who just suck at making weird and/or bad music and their output can't even be listened to by so-called enthusiasts of the style.  And this happens in every genre all the time.  And then finally there are those who simply don't have an ear for this type of music and wouldn't or couldn't understand it's merits if they hit them in the face.  Like any type of art.

At some point, I'll put a list of my favorite netlabel releases

For more:

http://trashfuck.blogspot.com/

http://dramacore.com/

http://www.sickmode.org/

http://lovetorturerecords.tk/

http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels

Nine Inch Nails - 1992 - Broken [EP]

Released about three years after Reznor's first album Pretty Hate Machine, Broken is a radical break from the previous release's synthpop sensibilities and really opens up ground for what would become the sounds so reminiscent of his later work. Really angry stuff here. My favs are "Wish," "Happiness in Slavery," and "Last." Also a really strange release in that in some version there are actually 99 songs (the last two tracks are called "Track 98" and "Track 99" respectively) and each track not labeled in the tracklisting is a single second of silence. We see his use of silence, out bursts of anger and a huge emphasis on swear words, violence, sexual deviance, etc. Truly first in line in his "industrial" work (though from a purely technical standpoint, his music never becomes actually "industrial" until Ghosts I-IV--nothing really implements the requisite ambient and minimalist and noise for true industrial music until then (almost 20 years after his first release)).

download: Nine Inch Nails - 1992 - Broken [EP].zip

Tusk - 2007 - The Resisting Dreamer

So if you're gonna download one thing by Tusk, get this. Really intense grind/experimental/noise/electronic rock. Feels like being ripped apart by a helicopter only to be pieced together again like a puzzle. From jazzy to punky to noisy and synthy. If you like Genghis Tron, you'll enjoy them. Slightly different (less synths, more grind, more bass and drums).

download: Tusk - 2005 - The Resisting Dreamer.zip

Scratch Acid - 1984 - Scratch Acid [EP]

Classic '80s noise-rock. Kurt Cobain was a big fan. Really buzzy and fuzzy and weird and punky. Angry as shit.

download: Scratch Acid - 1984 - Scratch Acid [EP].zip

Rosetta - 2007 - Wake/Lift

Unlike The Galilean Satellites, Rosetta has learned to fine-tine their formula, making for a more well-structured and well-organized, and thus more monumental, album. "Red In Tooth and Claw" is a massive tower of a song that provides an awesome first exposure to the organically evolving soundscapes constructed through the rest of the album. As a whole, the album really is huge. Even in it's quietest, most intimate and serene moments, there's this towering sense of cosmic, emotional drama. In the ambient piece, "Tenet Nosce" (something like 'find yourself' in Latin), there is this emotional and heavy sense of self-discovery. Though it never really builds up, there is this forceful spinning sensation of blind, unconscious grasping for meaning. It really works very well as a whole because it creates a sensation of up and down, big and small, loud and quiet, atmospheric and monumental, ambient and thrash. It's an album of polar opposites. It's much more well-crafted and well thought out than their first album (though Tenet Nosce gets a bit boring) and it's an album that you might actually want to put on over and over again. Little details come out upon repeated listens that are very rewarding and thought-provoking (and, moreover, just really damn cool to listen to, let's get honest). "Monument" is hands-down the best album on the track, but all three parts of "Lift" make for one spectacular listen.

Rosetta might have an uphill battle to gain dominance of the Neurosis/Isis universe, but if anyone can do it, it's these guys. I've invested so much heart to these guys over the last year and a half, I just hope they keep at it and don't lose their touch for immaculate, spacey, atmospheric metal or whatever you wanna call it. I think these guys are one of the most interesting and defining bands of the current decade and I can't wait until their next album comes out...whenever it does.

download: Rosetta - 2007 - Wake/Lift.zip

ps, I don't think I've ever put so many labels on one album. I just really don't know what to classify it as.

Nine Inch Nails - 1996 - Quake Soundtrack

I don't know how many of you played Quake, but I fucking loved that game. It was scary as hell, really fun and really long with one awesome and freaky level after another. I remember how awesome it was when you realized you had to teleport into the final boss in order to kill her. Or when it would rain with blood after you killed a bunch of people with a single grenade. Or when I first got the thunderbolt which just shoots pure lightning. Fucking awesome! Fucking HARDCORE! ARGHHHH!! ARGHHH!!!! GRRR!!!! ARGGHHH!!! well, enough of that...the album is okay. It's hard to listen to because it's really very repetitive. But it does fit well with the game. It's clanky and gritty and industrial (it really does sound like a machine at points) and droning and spooky and provides a good background to your steady prowl through hell and back. But it's kinda hard to listen to. Truly recommended if you like Quake, NIN, or ambient music. It's also nice if you're just looking for wacky, scary music. It's also good for sleeping. No really. I actually put it on quite regularly with the sole intention of listening to the first song (which I actually really like) and passing out before it ends.

download: Nine Inch Nails - 1996 - Quake Soundtrack.zip

Rosetta - 2005 - The Galilean Satellites

Okay this is the best (or at least the most promising) new band I've found in a little while. They do this awesome, trippy space-metal tinged with sludge, ambient, noise, industrial--there's really no good description of it. But it's freaking sweet. The lyrics are ridiculously hard to decipher but they're really cool (there's this plot about an astronaut going to space and doing all this crazy stuff--haven't really delved too much into the lyrics). Another cool thing about this album is that the first disc is the main music while the second disc has 5 songs of equal length to those on the first disc and are meant to accompany the first disc with extra sound effects, spoken word and other ambient samples.

What really gets me are the elaborate and precisely timed drumlines, the beauty of the slowed-down, almost ethereal chords and the Sunn O)))-esque ambient interludes and background effects. The combined effect is an amazing, soap-operatic masterpiece. I'm not sure if it's because I've listened to this album too much or whether I think the second album is actually better, but the second album (Wake/Lift) is a much more polished, well crafted effort. Galilean Satellites is a bit scattered and a bit repetitive, but then again, that's kinda the desired effect. Plus it's beautiful, so it doesn't really matter.

download: Rosetta - 2005 - The Galilean Satellites [Disc 1].zip
download: Rosetta - 2005 - The Galilean Satellites [Disc 2].zip

Pink Floyd - 1970 - Meddle

My favorite Pink Floyd album. A really spacey, wacky album yet very groovy and fun. Has a nice warpy feel to it.

An incredible album that combines a lot of different elements from noise to rock and roll, weird ambient interludes and typical Pink Floydian sampling. The first half of the album serves as a primer for the epic second half and is incredibly absorbing. It opens with the driving, nearly psychotic bass line of “One of These Days,” firmly establishing a number of the core aspects of the album: its wackiness and psychological depth, its predominant rock undertones and a significant step away from much of the earlier material that had been alluded to in Atom Heart Mother (over the orchestral and operatic nature of much of their work to come and the crazy psychedelia of their first two albums). Unlike Dark Side of the Moon, this album is heavily based on its two sides as distinct entities, the first side mostly being a collection of shorter songs and the second side dedicated entirely to the mammoth “Echoes,” a 23-minute epic chock full of Beatles’ lyric references (“inviting and inciting me”; “across the sky…..”; a submarine is referenced in the first stanza. The lyrics are vaguely evocative of much of the Beatles’ trippiest songs, “Across the Universe,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Yellow Submarine”) and built around a single ‘ping’ heard consistently throughout the song.

In many ways the album is a lovely exercise in duality, with each half presenting a slightly different, yet equally crucial role in establishing the tenor of the album. The first side houses a more complex set of themes, styles and sonic vocabulary but only because the second side is simply a single massive song, though it effectively combines many of these original themes from the first side and expands upon them. In a way, the first side acts as an album-in-mini in which the band explores new ground, showing off its developing stylistic upheaval from a spacey, brilliant but rather untethered psychedelic rock band into a firmly rooted progressive rock band. That said, the band’s flair for the goofy (the sweeping guitar flanges of “San Tropez”), offbeat (the recording of the crowd in “Fearless”) and scary (the psychosis of the ‘protagonist’ of “One of These Days”) never subsides. I find that the first half really seems like a cohesive larger piece, where the listener (or maybe it’s just me) hears the songs as eliding into one another to the extent that I often can’t tell the difference between them unless I give it a bit of thought. Similar ideas are explored in Dark Side of the Moon, though in that album each song is so drastically different from one another and its really the borders of the songs that crossover and fade into one another rather than the general textural guidelines.

In Meddle, the songs aren’t really connected or linked thematically, but each one is generally built around similar underlying principles: lots of repetitive guitar work; a slowly developing and unfolding structure; an exploration of minimal AND orchestral rock arrangements; noise sampling and ambient loops. Though the sounds are vastly different, the songs are vaguely reminiscent of one another and work quite well hand-in-hand. It shows the band exploring a lot of new material and really establishing itself as a progressive rock band. What’s more, a lot of the sonic images and themes touched on in the first half reemerge and evolve within the second half. It’s almost like the band is showcasing its newest achievements in the first half in order to highlight how they can best be implemented in the second.

“Echoes” itself is ridiculous. Ridiculously long, ridiculously good, ridiculously prophetical (of both later Pink Floyd albums and future developments in progressive, experimental and largely instrumental rock). It’s also very simple (I mean it’s got a lot of complexities and intricacies, but the core is simple), built around a single “pinging” sound and the titular theme. It constantly seems to fade in and out, thematically departing, yet always “echoing” back. And in many ways it seems to be a echo of the first half of the album, yet in a more evolved (or, for lack of wanting to sound belittling of the first half, grandiose). “Echoes” itself is a masterpiece of complex instrumentation and one of Pink Floyd’s most ambitious pieces at any given period of their career. Like the first side it is heavily based on strange ambient loops and heavy repetition of almost every part. The whole album thus becomes an echo of itself on every level of structure, detail, texture and lyrical themes.

Basically if you’re going to have a Pink Floyd other than Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall (neither of which are even in my top three, I only mention them because EVERYONE has them), just fucking download it. Actually, go out and buy it. Always buy albums. Especially this one. It’s a masterpiece

Pink Floyd - 1971 - Meddle.zip