Infinity Mirrors
We like the word "progressive" in music. There's chord progression, and Prog as a genre. Music is all about one event progressing to the next in a sequence. This has some analogy to the idea of progress as a society.
We assume that progress is continuous and uninterrupted, but that isn't necessarily etched in. What is etched in stone is the opposite: fragmentation, ambiguity, confusion and a sense of impermanence. This is not to suggest that world history should directly mirror art, but in fact since the 1990s and before it was exactly this: a shift from the metaphor of a Window looking out to the horizon, to the infinite Mirror, recursively reflecting back the reality of where we are, not unlike video feedback and Revox tape looping.
Rhythm now essentially emerges from the sound file or sample, rather than the playing of a rhythm on a tangible object. The result is a complete abstraction of rhythm into Beat, made possible almost completely from software and computer files. In some ways this is like the video feedback loop that has no direct connection between digital (manual, using the hands) and as data that can't be physically "handled". The only real instruments now are software and hardware.
The idea of continuous progress has led us to this moment in the cybernetic world, in retrospect a wish perhaps uncarefully fulfilled. My feeling is we're good at creating feedback loops, but it isn't progressive enough, or is progressive just for the sake of keeping the label alive. It's a fun experimental space but seems infinitely unfinished. That's perfectly logical in that things are left unfinished in order to be infinitely progressive, but is in reality, only a small feedback loop of technologies in a 50-year range. Why not expand it further to 1000 years? The answer might be we were always both short-sighted and infinitely progressive.
In the draft, a typo came up "pregressive", which I now realize is the perfect neologism to describe a state of future music that isn't just moving in one direction, or pejoratively regressing, but rather keeping larger swaths of history in the loop--just by changing one letter in a word, and letting that suggest a new way of thinking about it.
[12/22/2024: David Rowell’s recent book The Endless Refrain sees our current preference for musical nostalgia as a threat to new music. But if everything we’ve ever created in the last century is now accessible in some way as one big data set, couldn’t this be a new way for artists to “play along with records” and find their own voice in the process? Yes and no. Yes in the sense of discovery of new things to listen to, and no, because making music with just a guitar or piano is a different animal, and I’m not sure once that you have the jukebox there’s a desire to make one of the records in it from scratch by recording tracks in a studio with instruments and microphones. The internet is now the instrument, so it stands to reason that nostalgia is in everything. What Rowell misses is that there is always innovation, but it was typically through experimentation, as it was in the 60s and 70s. That’s where the new work would come from, but I don’t see that anyone would want to do that at this point with AI as the replacement for the cassette portastudio from the 80s. What someone would do now is create the effect of it with a plugin or something].
