New issue of Loops out now – whither the musical avant garde?

Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and, forthcoming with Verso this Autumn, The New Ruins of Great Britain (watch this space for details), discusses the Situationists, psychogeography and Manchester in the new issue of Loops.

See our new collection of key Situationist texts, The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough.

Also, Mark Fisher asks ‘Why Don’t Groups Split Up Any More?’ and discusses Timothy Brennan’s Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz and an avant garde (such as the Fall and Sonic Youth) that just keeps chugging on (except with little of the ‘avant’).

See also great pieces by Simon Reynolds on science fiction and music and Dan Franklin on the extraordinary Napalm Death.

To guide yourself round the complexities of avant garde music (including the Fall and Sonic Youth) see The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music.

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Simon Reynolds on Fredric Jameson

In the first issue of Loops, Faber’s new music magazine, Simon Reynolds, the renowned blogger and author of Energy Flash, Rip it Up and Start Again, Bring the Noise and Totally Wired, looks at the attempts to imagine the music of the future in science fiction films, and finds they often can’t escape the past:

As theorised in his masterwork Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson’s ‘nostalgia mode’ is not to be confused with either the nostalgia felt by an individual for his own past or veneration and longing inspired by a remote-in-time antiquity that seems superior to the present. Rather it’s a symptom of artistic and cultural malaise, an inability to innovate forms of narrative and modes of expression capable of representing the present let alone projecting the future.

Talking of nostalgia, remember when the broadsheets reviewed serious cultural theory? See Simon Reynolds’ review of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism from the Observer in 1991.

Simon Reynolds is contributing an article on Grime to the forthcoming The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music.

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