Send "Various Artists " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 As a compilation and mix concept, Fuck Dance, Let's Art sounds hazy before you even begin discussing the music. Theories crumble, according to the compilation's own description, when trying explain the current wave of lo-fi, synth-heavy nostalgic bedroom production. And attempting a timely, authoritative statement about a decentralized, Internet-driven scene seems bound to be frustrating. It doesn't help when some acts are less-than SEO friendly and self-applied genre tags like shitgaze mock the whole genre concept in itself. The "escapist music from the youth of a crumbling superpower" angle even gets a passing reference on the comp's microsite. After everything this country has been through in the last decade, chillwave is not the soundtrack of American decline.Where's the definitive narrative in music built in part from obscured samples and dance rhythms, evocative of a gauzy nostalgia and often decorated with deliberately unpolished cover art? Fuck Dance, Let's Art doesn't quite spell it out, if it is there to be spelled out, or offer anything new. Exploring how tools and trends have conspired to bestow authenticity to homespun productions of digital detritus seems beside the point. But its roster-- notable omissions such as Neon Indian and Salem non-withstanding-- does provide a crash course on this ill-defined movement. The inclusion of a Phenomenal Handclap Band song and HEALTH remix of Crystal Castles provide some broader context and Animal Collective's glittering "My Girls" touches on a future tribal sound (though the song's direct embrace of adult pressures seems contrary to the album's escapist threads). Boundaries are left undefined when you have chillwave acts like Washed Out next to a newer class of artists like Slava and Peter's House Music....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| I recently checked out a performance by oOoOO, an avatar of the much-debated witch house sound, at a Haight St. bar. Not coming on until after midnight, oOoOO performed a 20-minute set on his laptop, witnessed by two dozen mostly unmoved goths, before silently ceding the stage back to the workaday darkwave DJ set that had preceded his. This music was not watered-down industrial music, as detractors have claimed. It was both familiar and unidentifiable — the outrageously slowed-down samples and clattering dub percussion, the mostly beatless stretches of sampled voices, the swaggering Southern hip-hop snare rolls — still developing, bratty, and ahistorical, but enthralling nonetheless. !K7, best known for the DJ-Kicks series (which brought something of DJ club-culture to the living rooms of indie rock listeners), has turned its sights on these “sounds from a new American underground” with the compilation Fuck Dance, Let’s Art. It investigates the sounds of an underground that exists primarily on the web, on a network of blogs, MySpace pages, and mixtape clouds: an underground that seems to exist only secondarily as a physical scene, one that's confined mostly to rooftop parties in Brooklyn. (Animal Collective really grew out of another decade and another underground, although their current incarnation as blissed-out synthpop deconstructors fits in well on this compilation.) The layouts of these artists' MySpace pages, self-edited art videos for each song, and never-ending mixtapes seem as much a part of the titular Art as the songs on the compilation are. Slow-motion videos, which combine everything from Twin Peaks clips, to images of faded 80s fashion models and tacky luxury goods, to sinisterly altered contemporary handbag advertisements, are filtered through scrims of dated video-editing software effects into drugged, dissociated loops. Any textual meaning is concealed in a thicket of dingbats, and the names that do emerge are un-Googleable, even untypable; they can only be linked to. In a way, links are the very medium of this underground; free association, the mechanism of the subconscious, the promiscuous play of half-remembered childhood artifacts in a dream: these are both the raw materials for these songs and their compositional logic. The strongest tracks on this compilation are surreal, then, but not in any one particular way. CREEP’s remix of Baghdaddy’s “Hot Shit” is basically a ringtone-rap song — the entire song is a repeated chorus — that is somehow also a flawless recreation of the sound of an 80s-vintage dreampop band. The genres’ meeting is not so much as beautiful as "the chance encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" as it is a détournement, one that makes both genres seem strange and unreal. Toro Y Moi’s “Fax Shadow,” made of glitched-out samples of R&B jams, repeats the line “I’m sorry I couldn’t name the color of your eyes,” and this lyric could describe the way the best of these songs are unnamable, de-personalized, and impossible to pin down. They partake in numerous genres at the same time, and either through heavy processing or a lo-fi recording process, the human producer is made uncanny, chopped, and screwed. The songs enter into the consciousness of the listener as if they are coming not from outside your head, but from your failing memory of the very same song. They are a dub version of the postmodern mainstream; they rely on familiar elements that peal up out of a fog....full text |
| Patricksisson |
| As a compilation and mix concept, Fuck Dance, Let’s Art sounds hazy before you even begin discussing the music. Theories crumble, according to the compilation’s own description, when trying explain the current wave of lo-fi, synth-heavy nostalgic bedroom production. And attempting a timely, authoritative statement about a decentralized, Internet-driven scene seems bound to be frustrating. It doesn’t help when some acts are less-than SEO friendly and self-applied genre tags like shitgaze mock the whole genre concept in itself. The “escapist music from the youth of a crumbling superpower” angle even gets a passing reference on the comp’s microsite. After everything this country has been through in the last decade, chillwave is not the soundtrack of American decline. Where’s the definitive narrative in music built in part from obscured samples and dance rhythms, evocative of a gauzy nostalgia and often decorated with deliberately unpolished cover art? Fuck Dance, Let’s Art doesn’t quite spell it out, if it is there to be spelled out, or offer anything new. Exploring how tools and trends have conspired to bestow authenticity to homespun productions of digital detritus seems beside the point. But its roster– notable omissions such as Neon Indian and Salem non-withstanding– does provide a crash course on this ill-defined movement. The inclusion of a Phenomenal Handclap Band song and HEALTH remix of Crystal Castles provide some broader context and Animal Collective’s glittering “My Girls” touches on a future tribal sound (though the song’s direct embrace of adult pressures seems contrary to the album’s escapist threads). Boundaries are left undefined when you have chillwave acts like Washed Out next to a newer class of artists like Slava and Peter’s House Music....full text |
Various Artists lyrics
