Is Topographical Photography Noise Rock?
The intimidating, insolent chatter of niche Facebook Groups, a walking tour…
I hadn’t until recently bothered much with groups, and maybe for good reason. Somehow, inevitably to do with Covid boredom, I joined a couple. Then facebook suggested more. At first glance, these groups looked uncannily aligned with my interests. At closer inspection, they seemed somewhat hermetically locked in a conversation I didn’t qualify to be a part of. They had the insular attraction of a hundred ego-crazed introverts showing off down an ethernet connection in a digital basement room. Abnormal Music seemed privy to the cult of insider elitist bravado and one-upmanship that unfortunately I had witnessed and even briefly been party to in my brief foray on Discord forums. Having not properly scoured said forums, any knowledge about music garnered from record loving friends or the music press, I was not equipped with the cheat sheet for how to get by in these groups. It is not sufficient apparently to just like something. I joined simply to hear new sounds, but turns out like in more apparently cliquey indie circles, there’s the right sounds and the wrong sounds. And one album is considered “their best by far” usually one that’s wrongly “underappreciated” by those whose taste does not match up to the bar set by the Abnormal Music standards authority. This self-generated authority is self-regulating and frighteningly Foucaltian in-so-far-as like the panopticon, there is no authority at the top, except perhaps a self-generated cult god projection of fans of niche music. Perhaps it’s a digital effigy of Skip Spence or someone, that they pray to with scented cigarettes lit watching a record player.
Having lurked a while in the Abnormal Music forum, a suggestion came up to join Noise Rock Now “a community dedicated to Noise Rock, Raw Punk and Math Rock”. It sounded promising, and I suspected advocates of these lively music genres would be more fun that the stuck-up nerds (like me) in the Abnormal Music group. It turns out, their main in-joke/obsession is debating whether songs posted are ‘noise rock’ or ‘not noise rock’, a perhaps frivolous discussion for a genre that barely exists, like Britpop never did. It’s more an umbrella term for things that are noisy, like Britpop meant “music made in Britain that the music press was interested in pushing”. While they often did this in earnest, they also did in jest, with people asking if the sound of dial up internet was noise rock etc. Kind of funny really. However I don’t bother playing any of the songs because they sound crap on my little laptop speakers, and I barely know who the Melvins are, so really there’s no point lurking there either.
BTW, these groups have a joining procedure that you have to answer questions three to permit entry, like some kind of genie or leprechaun or something. On Abnormal Films I had to think of three favourite abnormal filmmakers to permit entry. I came up with David Lynch, Jodorovsky and because I couldn’t think of a third one at that point, I said “me” for the last answer which probably sounded very vain but I couldn’t think of anyone else and had come on there to find more about it, so what was I supposed to do? Besides, I had made a surrealist film with my friends a few days prior and some days I even like myself or bits of myself at least. They let me in. This I suppose is to weed out troublemakers who just want to start what we used to call ‘flame wars’ in comments threads and shitpost. Nothing wrong with shitposting, may I add, even if it signifies a potential rift with culture. Given I rarely watch a film all the way through, this group wasn’t much use either.. I guess I’m into weird films still, I certainly used to be, but my attention span is whacked. I still think of myself as a reader, but my actual weekly literature reading hours are quite measly. Maybe this is why the Asemic writing/new post-literate pages appeal. They’re comprised of paintings that look like words but aren’t (or they’re things that are words that get shot down, but more gently here usually). I like scribbling indecipherable language on pieces of paper and my paintings. It reflects a need to express the inexpressible and a need to be heard but remain hidden, without resorting to the cold, hard language of specifics, which never quite hit the mark and are easily misunderstood. You can then have fun reading into said “language” but there is no singular interpretation because there was no conscious intention. The asemic pages led to being suggested ‘involuntary sculpture’ where apparently banal and poorly composed photographs of mildly unusual objects plonked places abound. This led to the algorithm suggesting New Topographic Photography. My psyche is gradually being assimilated into the machine.
The New Topographic Photography group represents perhaps one of the longer-running threads in my art practice. Taking photos of objects in the world, with idiosyncratic consideration of light and composition, usually uninhabited by people, portraying a beguiling stillness beyond ordinary time. This comes from a practice influenced first by William Egglestone, who was using colour process when every art photographer was shooting in monochrome. This form of photography still persists. To keep the group on topic, like any of these groups, the moderators have insisted on no street photography (different kettle of negatives). Somehow this group has managed to keep fairly on track as far as I have seen without too many posts about “is this new topographic photography?” but it remains to be seen. The real photography is on the film photographer forums, where technical expertise and a keen eye for composition abound in a luxurious, beautiful array of pictures in the threads.
