Anodic dance music
A middle-aged man is playing live techno to the last few dozen passengers remaining, before the ship’s captain, having earlier attempted suicide, gives his address. It’s a bombed-out, site-specific armchair techno, all clicks and caverns with no melody or sentiment — no one is sentimental about reverb. He is trying to play celebratory music for an anniversary no one wanted to celebrate: ten years prior, the Aniara, a flying megafortress-cum-shopping-mall with a few thousand middle-class emigrants, left a brown and desolate Earth for Mars, also brown and desolate but unburdened by generations of failure. When space debris threw the ship off course and threatened a nuclear meltdown, the Captain ejected all its fuel, dooming the Aniara to careen meaninglessly into space. At first they thought it’d take two years to slingshot home around another gravitational body. Ten years later, most of the passengers are dead by suicide. The musician can’t bring himself to perform his role of Musician, to placate and divert. The only performative gesture he makes is a helpless, despondent gaze. The music trails off with an unceremonious fade-out. The survivors clap maybe ten times apiece, and he leaves the stage without any acknowledgement or deviation of his gaze.
The scene, which only lasts about thirty seconds, is funny if you’ve seen any experimental music performances. Aniara is a Swedish film released in 2018, at the zenith of cosmopolitanism in spite of arts funding collapsing across the world. If you once had careerist ambitions in experimental music, a good way to pad your CV might’ve been to visit Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), the Burj Al Arab of music residencies. For a not-insignificant fee, you’d have access to one of several studios with some nice synthesisers that make for a good selfie backdrop. Everyone who spends time at EMS makes an EMS record. Many residents would find some gigs to play while they’re there, ensuring a steady influx of experimental musicians with an Uncompromising Aesthetic giving public castigations around Stockholm and Uppsala. The directors of Aniara must have been to some of these shows and felt that familiar descent: the gig starts with piqued curiosity, which becomes puzzlement, then fatigue, possibly anger, and then the bittersweet release of microsleep. There is a gauze and soft focus throughout the scene. The protagonist, the Mimarobe, is in the audience. She is struggling to stay awake like everyone else.
Music onboard the Aniara functions like music on a cruise ship: a prophylactic against contemplating the void in spite of being surrounded by the void; enabling and intensifying closed systems of togetherness in an environment hostile to their existence. There’s a nightclub on the Aniara, where dancing becomes more ritualistic and choreographed the further the Aniara travels. At some point it devolves into a very Sverige, Boss Metal Zone sex cult. Otherwise, there’s not much music — music is only one technique for distracting its passengers from the void. The Mimarobe’s initial job on the ship was to manage the Mima, a sentient room that puts occupants to sleep and gives them pleasant dreams of a verdant Earth. After three years the Mima self-destructs when it can no longer cope with the unrelenting hopelessness of its occupants. Aniara is an uneven film in part because it only ever responds to existential grief with denial, suicide, or murdering those who accept neither.
Poor techno guy, who is put on stage to enact a musical tradition — a prelude to a speech — at the literal end of tradition. He can’t bring himself to lie about the state they are all in. Maybe he figures himself to be making a statement on the futility of the performative gesture at the end of the world. This statement would be only to himself, in a time and culture when that kind of gestalt would be received as such, when dying cold and alone wasn’t so forthcoming. Maybe he’s uncomfortable being looked at as a spokesperson, the way the most visible musicians are looked up to for moral support. But he probably likes the attention to his performative angst while it lasts. Visible cultural producers don’t usually choose their visibility; some will deny that that entails a responsibility. Techno guy declines both. The audience is unimpressed, indifferent or asleep. As they all float to their deaths, the musician who can’t help but be a critic, the yeoman of his little aesthetic project, is deprived of his craving for undivided attention, and dispensed with by ten claps apiece. It’s pretty funny.
Acele, warmed by amphetamines, is outside of town, holding a contact mic on the ice, trying to make a field recording of it cracking beneath her and, she thinks, the two cops walking up to her, which she might have heard in the mic if her boyfriend hadn’t pawned her headphones. Acele is trying to make music. The cool musicians in the neighbouring city are making the best music, she says, with found sounds, tape collages, and noise, arranged into what she charmingly calls anodic dance music — anodic like the copper anode that fizzes under electrochemical reaction. When she explains what she’s doing to the cops, one of them, the protagonist, uses the opportunity to lecture her about the great heavyweight boxer, Contact Mike.
Disco Elysium is dense speculative fiction packaged as a game. The overarching premise: a world that may not be spherical comprises several continents separated by the pale, a non-physical entity where matter and thermodynamics break down. The pale is slowly growing and consuming land in a shimmery disco inferno. In a rough allegory of Baltic geopolitical history, communists, fascists, religious zealots and ultraliberals scrap for power amid the inevitable dissolution of everything. The protagonist, a detective, arrives in Martinaise, a neglected working-class district to investigate a lynching, but an unprecedented bender has given him total amnesia. As you investigate, you get experience from talking to people and piecing together your life and the sociopolitical climate, leveling up the voices in your head: composure, empathy, hand-eye coordination, conceptualisation, etc.. The world is rich with addenda and self-aware artistic pretension.
The game’s score is by the band British Sea Power, who weren’t a great choice. The opening title piece is a perfect, nondescript shimmer between worlds and instruments, like an unrelenting and glistening smog. It’s very promising, but for the most part, the score is indie vignettes played through a foghorn. When given the perfect opportunity to make anodic dance music, they just make dance music. The game makes fun of me and my little critiques. In Disco Elysium you can boost your character traits by meditating on a trail of thought spurred by an event. After reciting some unsolicited slam poetry to a truck driver stuck in traffic, a thought appears in the protagonist’s head: the world needs an Art Cop, and that Art Cop is you. The thought cajoles you. “Really flex that critical muscle,” it beckons, “until the vocabulary for PUNISHING mediocrity becomes second nature.” If you sit with the thought for 90 minutes, you lose one point in hand-eye coordination because your “hands shake from anger at how shit it all is.”
Talking to Acele made me feel squeamish in the way that teachers and art cops sometimes get when duty calls for making a moral, as opposed to aesthetic or academic, case for unusual art, to students who are equally confused and angry that we are the collective lutist at the end of the danse macabre. You pick up Acele’s tape recorder from the ice. “The people who built this world intended for it to be better for you, but they failed,” you say after a random number generator decides that you have enough empathy to mansplain the world to her. “It is easier for you to live in their failure with this by your side. It’s not a childish fantasy. It can be a real weapon against what’s coming for you now.”
“What is…?”
At this point you can choose to say either “Nothing, as long as you’ve got this by your side,” or “The dark,” which I choose with a finely-wrought eyeroll, first because I recently named a band after pale and the dark (it comes from this essay), then with renewed awareness that the way I rolled my eyes at a harmless and sincere expression of self-validation is peak art cop. “I know,” Acele says, a little warmed by the solidarity. “I’ll stick to it.” Afterward, I head back into town and paint “Fuck the police” on a wall.
