Guardian angels post-RSI

“Smart dust” could organize and reorganize like robotic angels or servants of God.

—Mitchell Heisman

Satellites watch over me like guardian angels

—Ecco2k, guardianAngels((natu)) 

Word vomit about band I like

Most bands have, at most, a casual relationship with locality. Maybe they have songs specifically about their city, and of course most/all artists general aesthetics and approaches are shaped by their environment (ex. the urban associations with lots of electronic music styles, midwest emo's innate suburbanity) but generally its more incidental than intentional; music is usually not deliberately attached to a specific sense of location. You can imagine the environment if you want, but the focus of most music is the people or situations the songs are about, and the scenery exists in reference to them and not the other way around. The British rock band Hood has a strange approach with regards to the sense of location in their music - an obsessive, almost monomaniacal fixation with marginal, uninhabited places defined by a vague desolation and mundanity. Almost all of their covers showcase this interest (empty fields, sparse sections of cityscape, out of the way incidental locations,) their titles often invoke them ("The Fields are Divided," "Boer Farmstead," "The Weather Side of Stone Mill Tower,") and their videos usually consist of carefully curated collages of footage of these non-places.

There's a constant interplay between their music and their persistent fixation on these spaces - the end of railroad lines, abandoned rusted machinery, trees standing at the edges of fields, unnotable stretches of road, drab suburban homes, radio towers and power lines. Existing in the state of melancholy which Hood's music tends to address places oneself in the same emotional position these spaces occupy; disconnected from the goings-on the world, isolated, and still. Everything goes by but the actual bulk of existence carries the same atmosphere of softly-melancholic flat affect as the rural and industrial locations Hood returns to again and again. The bustle of everything tends to dull to an omnipresent but distant hum. There is also a focus on time as well as space in Hood's work - most bands may carry some autumnal or summery or whatever feeling in their songs, but its rarely so direct and so monothematic as it is here, where Hood seems to take every chance they get to mention autumn or winter. The bands work seems to come from a world that exclusively exists between September and February. This seems to serve the same general purpose; the emotional connotations of the colder months are in alignment with Hood's ambient melancholia.

In 2018, there was a release on a throwaway online-dada netlabel titled "living in places mostly driven through" (JDBL, Летпав.) It was an unremarkable field recording, less than a minute long and likely listened to by less than 20 people including myself, but it stuck with me for all these years for some reason. The title seems to put to words what Hood's unspoken ethos is. Aesthetically, they seek to occupy and make their home in spaces that are by their very nature marginal, transitory, or ignored by almost everyone who interacts with them, either being neglected or purely functional. It shifts the focus to the frame of the painting, or the white space outside the text, and makes the nullity of these spaces and their disconnect with the world the focus of the work.

The only other artists that I know of who seem to be doing something along similar aesthetic lines are the label Wayside and Woodland Recordings and some of Silver Dove’s releases (although that’s clearly very different genre-wise, I think there's tonal similarities - the titles here could pass for a Hood tracklist easily.)

All my photos from Anthrocon weekend that are not actually of Anthrocon