Nattymari presents Br1ng 0n th3 n00b1l3z by Nattymari

Futurism is a fickle mistress. What seems modern is quickly neutered by our crass society. Emasculated by the engines of globalization and clever marketing. The Fullerian equation of technological exponentiality has leaked into the thin tapestry of art and expression. In short... time is moving entirely too fast.

One thing can be divined from past example. We forge our tepid theories of modernism out of the incidental sights and sounds that stimulate us subliminally. Eno and McLuhan were correct in theorizing that the medium is indeed the message. The wet sounds of rockabilly, rife with the reverb, were birthed by the fact that its teenage creators were forced to listen to rhythm and blues from the outside of clubs, being far too young to enter. The dj's obsession with vinyl pop is organic and not a conceit. If one listens to hours of crackle and hiss, it not only becomes natural, but appealing.

The most obvious example is the sound of Sheffield. A chunking electrodisco that mirrored the machinery and blast furnaces of its industrial Bethlehem. So what can be of today's new breed of modernists? Like their predecessors, they revel in their respective environment. Streaming media has rendered the ear immune to the stut-stutter of buffering, the glitching of compressed files. Commercial music has found itself over-processed to make it sound richer and fuller over the cheap speakers of mobile devices. Eyes no longer register the pixels and blur associated with computer generated imagery.

It would be easy to rage against this deterioration of sound and vision, yet that would be counterproductive. Instead, history shows us that a progressive civilization embraces its weakness and turns it into strength.