Capital Under Quarantine

After Quarantine comes Capital Crunch & the Austerity Blues. Financial flows wither and excess labor competes for smaller resource pools. Temporary reprieve from constant labor is interrupted by the creep of Capital, growing and exploiting its position to the detriment of labor. We will be asked again to fall under the spell of the market, so have your CV ready.


I had been working on this arrangement for some time. This didn’t come out as ordered as I wanted to. I realized about two weeks into this project that it had two distinct characters, and maybe that reflects a changing mood RE quarantine. I suppose this sort of plays with the crazed enthusiasm I have in watching the economy blow up and the state evaporate around us.

Funny enough, the architecture for this came about after producing an error in some statistical software, which created these really weird, inter-crossing trend lines. I thought the pattern was sort of interesting and dropped into a synthesizer to see what would come out. The rest of the instrumentation was built around it.

I hadn’t realized it until someone pointed it out, but I’m realizing that a lot of this style sounds a lot like old-school synth weirdos like Dominique Guiot, Mort Garson (the “music for plants” dude), and acid crazed Japanese synth artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura or Yellow Magic Orchestra. I hadn’t thought of them for sometime and I’m realizing that those sort of simple arrangements have a big impression on me.

It may be their sort of amateurish, frenetic style that I like the most. There’s something audacious and bold about their music – it feels inhuman in someways, like a computer trying to talk to you but it only knows how to speak in Javascript. What does this say about them, and what does this say about me?