Kill it Before it Dies
On KAVARI and technology's relationship with creativity
In late May of this year, the Scottish DJ, producer and artist KAVARI checked herself into hospital. She had given herself severe auditory damage, and required invasive surgery and a night’s stay on the ward. She had been listening to I want you to breathe – Asphyxiation Mix with her headphones at full volume. Repeated exposure to the track’s strange alchemy of night-black bass, fleshy breakbeats and swelling vocal samples has proved too much. Her body had started to fail. Like the smothering effect of track’s title, the music had overwhelmed her organic functions to the point of breakdown.
Asphyxiation Mix frontloads the bodily experience of too much. The pop of the eardrums, the bleaching of the synapses. Hers is an extreme sound, both sonically and in the felt experience of her live shows. Speakers rattle and shake, walls of sound undulate through the dance floor in a way that makes your throat close up. But unlike the sounds of other noise extremists like Merzbow, KAVARI pulls back from what would be the sound of oblivion. Something inhibits the noise; something like melody emerges from the dark. The extremity of her soundscapes, self-reflexively depicted in her explicit play of the human sensorium, is the distinctive mark of KAVARI’s sound. It’s what Aphex Twin declared as ‘some of the most brilliant, most interesting kicking electronic music’ to come out of the underground in the past few years. But is a co-sign from Richard D. James enough to demonstrate KAVARI’s noteworthiness? What is it about her music that makes it really different from the other producers that release just as extreme ‘kicking electronic music’?
The primary thing to note is that her integration of destructive bodily processes stands out against the flat synthetic beauty of a majority of British dance music. Instead of a sharpened breakbeat in Asphyxiation Mix we get a black inky morass of bass, only just distinguishable as a percussive element through its contrast with the snare, which itself sounds like wood hitting flesh. Voices stretch and glide through the track, but they become unchained from its rhythmic percussive impetus, inverting traditional rave music’s treatment of vocal samples. But still KAVARI maintains those core dance tenets: 4x4 breakbeats, large bassy rumbles, a creative use of sampling and so on. Far from an anomalous entity in British dance music, KAVARI’s is a sound embedded within the creative logic of rave as a techno-musical enterprise. Hers is a direct extension of rave culture, even if aesthetically it seems more to do with hard rock and metal.
However, her centring of the body is crucial. It is the mark of her difference. KAVARI’s multimedia project plays with different configurations of ameliorated bodily experience – from the muffled screams of sexual assault simulated in her latest ambient album Against the Wood, Opposed to Flesh, to the paintings she creates by slicing herself open and bleeding onto the canvas. In her use of death and bodily reconfiguration, KAVARI demarcates an original space against the contemporary crisis of newness that afflicts a majority of both dance and mainstream music culture. But, in doing so, in frontloading destruction and death as a creative core in her work, she perhaps also reveals the central problem inhibiting the contemporary emergence of the new. Her newness is linked inherently to the very critical failure that afflicts originality in the contemporary music landscape.
My idea here is that KAVARI’s use of death as the creative impetus in her work reveals something structurally integral to creativity in general and the musical culture of digitality specifically. Put simply, today’s crisis of the new is that there exists too much death. Death not as a site of annihilation or nothingness, but instead as a generative well from which creativity springs. What is at play is not necessarily the capital-mediated crisis of imagination propounded by a lot of neo-Marxists, but that which generates imagination: a philosophical crisis occurring at the interaction between newness, death and technology. I will explain this in a moment, but it is perhaps worth providing a brief sketch of the contemporary situation. What is meant by the crisis of the ‘new’?
In a talk entitled Death of Rave in 2013, the theorist Alex Williams remarked that where once ‘dance music was able to conjure entire new genres, as well as generating entirely unheard sonic effects . . . its openness to radical change and transformation . . . had become markedly sclerotic’. Something in the culture, in other words, had slowed down. Those large musical generic leaps of the 20th century had become inhibited: ‘imagine playing a piece of mid-nineties jungle to someone from the 1970s, and they would be absolutely astounded. But play a piece of current bass music to someone from the early 1990s . . . and there would be no such reaction’.[1] 10 years after this talk it is clear that this cultural malfeasance is perhaps overstated. Playing Death Grips’ Hot Head to someone from 1996 would hardly conjure feelings of familiarity. But what Willims does successfully get at is that those mainstream generic bursts that cause music culture to significantly shift in the 20th century – from Elvis to the Beatles to then punk and onto jungle – have slowed significantly.
What has occurred instead is a generalised dissolving of genre as traditionally conceived. In the age of the internet, music’s generic configurations are defined by this absence. Genre as such has been liquidated in favour of a smorgasbord of various influences, memetic resonances and ironic attachments. This is seen clearly at the level of both mainstream Pop, where an artist like Charli XCX creates bombastic 2000s-era club throwback music with demented autotune flourishes, and left-field experimentalists like the hip-hop/RnB/glitch-punk of JPEGMAFIA or the dubstep-pleasure-doom of 100 gecs. While this situation provides fertile ground for interesting experimentation, the dissolving of genre also afflicts the concept of the ‘new’. The kind of gross generic shifts of the 20th century become difficult to conceptualise when the bedrock of those shifts – the ground of generic distinction – is itself removed.
This generic dissolution has its roots in the digital turn in both socio-economics and cultural production. Digital production techniques increase the speed and efficiency of music making. No longer does the artist need a studio: all that is required is a sound knowledge of production techniques, a computer, some software, maybe some instruments. Conversely, it has never been easier to consume music, which provides a telling problematic for those artists labouring in a digital music industry. The compensatory mechanisms of a ubiquitous corporatised streaming culture mean that artists often don’t see adequate pay for their output, and are often prohibited from the kind of large-scale touring and distributive traditions that once allowed the emergence of the underground to reconfigure the social body in the 20th century. Cultures like punk and hip-hop in the 1970s and ‘90s burgeoned, in part, because artists were not automatically thousands of pounds in the hole just for carrying on a small tour.[2] In this way, digital mechanisms favour the consumption side of musical creation as opposed to production: ‘The rise of digital technologies has created certain efficiencies, which are exploited by those employing musicians and music production companies’.[3] This means that cross-pollinations of new subcultures into the mainstream are blocked. Touring, independent distribution, the maintenance of small venues – all of these crucial elements in musical emergence become prohibitively expensive when adequate compensation is not provided for musical output. The effect of this unbalanced distribution of efficiency is that while digitality produces ‘new’ music with its ease of experimentation, this music falls into a cultural stratum whereby the new is cordoned off in specific spaces, both on and offline. The mutative core of culture – its twists, turns, and breakthroughs – rest upon economic and material structures that, if removed, profoundly change where new music comes from, and how new music intervenes in broader cultural formations.
But is this division between production and consumption the whole story when we talk about newness in music? Is it simply that there are loads of geniuses out there, creating immensely consequential and incredible music, only for their art to be lost in an industry that refuses to support them? Here we come to the affective dimension of the contemporary situation: how it interacts with the complicated internal lives of those that live under it. Theorists like Frederic Jameson, Franco Berardi and Robert Hassan bemoan a philosophical dimension to contemporary society that inhibits collective cultural imagination. These theories have dramatic names – from the cultural logic of late capitalism (postmodernism), to the slow cancellation of the future, to the condition of digitality. They are best summed up in the statement ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. The crisis of imagination, for these theorists, reaches its apex in a post-Cold War world where the only viable system that is presented and argued for by politicians, and that is reflected back and portrayed in cultural artefacts, is neoliberal capitalism. With this stultified political and economic situation emerges a cultural layer of society that is inherently stuck in a form of nostalgia, looking back upon itself for inspiration as opposed to out, through and into the unknown. Bands like Fontaines D.C., Black Country, New Road and black midi – all heralded as emergent originals by the musical commentariat – produce guitar music that fails to mark them out as any different from a large bulk of ‘80s and ‘90s post-punk. And in the mainstream, an artist like Dua Lipa has found her most successful record to date to be a disco throwback LP. This line of thinking argues that the new is afflicted by an all-pervasive situation that affects every subject under capitalism. The pessimistic implication is that there cannot be new cultural forms in a socio-economic system obsessed with replicating itself. The new, therefore, has died.
Hence there has been a canonisation in music circles around ‘90s-era rave as the last gasp of the new in British music culture. There is certainly a pre- and post-rave break in the sonic timeline when it comes to understanding British musical culture. While the Gallagher brothers dominated the charts with their poor Beatles impression, rave provided a strange and sweaty alternative. What KAVARI does is wrest the core of what made rave so new to reveal something structurally integral to what made that musical aesthetic so enticing. There is a certain logic to KAVARI that reflects how digital technology specifically intervenes within the process of artistic emergence, and how this logic became manifest in rave. I’d like to think that digitality actually affects musical production on the level of ontological structure – and that thinking philosophically we can locate the crisis of the new not just within the artist-scalping tendencies of greedy capitalist firms, or the affective tendency of an all-pervasive late capitalist realism, but actually within the way that digital techniques alter the structure of creativity itself.
This structure is to do in the main with death, and it is a technique that KAVARI utilises expertly. A return to Asphyxiation Mix is warranted here. Amidst its barrelling drums and speaker-shattering mix exists a human element that starts to escape from the track’s digitised inorganics and enter the fleshy realm of biological fragility. It emerges from the black ink of KAVARI’s bassline. The broken and filtered voice whispering ‘It makes it so much easier, I want you to breathe’, as well as the sample of light breathing, are initially positioned so that they are in time with the drums. The vocals are cut off at vital points so that they sit as a percussive element within the track. But as the track goes on the voice begins to writhe free. It begins to dictate the pace of the track. The countdown that occurs just after the minute mark is the turning point, with the percussion falling away and the vocals moving to the centre. Above the wall of bass that follows KAVARI places the sample, leaving it relatively untouched except for the end where ‘breathe’ is repeated. What comes next has the vocal samples dominate the track irrespective of where they sit in regards to the tracks percussion. They swell and twirl and come in from all sides. While the sonic emphasis may have these voices dominate the track, the fragility of the human breath always belongs beside it. Against that inhuman digitised soundscape emerges a figural human body gasping for air.
In short, what KAVARI does is establish a throughline of bodily function that sits beside instead of in the track’s rhythmic assemblage. Unlike the tradition of vocal samples in rave that often stay rhythmically sutured to the ensemble of the piece, the human voice does not try and integrate itself back within the track’s percussion. As the track continues the breath becomes more ragged and pained, ending with the implication of death: the voice whispering ‘you might go lightheaded but it’s all part of the game’. This deliberate contrast of light breath and digitised vocal manipulation frontloads death in two senses. The first is that very digital manipulation, the divorce of vocals from vocal cords and its the enmeshment of the organic and inorganic. The second is the airy fragility of the breath in itself, a reminder of the woman’s slowing lungs that ends with the invocation of demise. The track may sound like you’re being smothered, but it is not the sound of something dying. It is instead the integration of death as a function of musical creation.
While this might all sound a bit Emo, death’s function as a key element of the creative process is fairly clear. In religion death is the passage between one reality and another plane existing outside of the limits of the body, while in biology it is often the transference of life-giving energy from one organism to another through complex scientific processes. In this way ‘Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible’.[4] It is important in this case, then, to view death not as the absence of vitality, movement, or action, but instead a generative function where the new begins. Death is not the endpoint; it is an end. ‘It’s the failure to repeat things . . . The failure adequately to repeat things properly’.[5] It is the end of a certain organisation – of an organism, of a structure, of a society, of a genre – to continue without fundamentally changing the nature of that organisation. ‘Dismantling the organism has never meant killing oneself, but rather opening the body to connections’.[6] Death is the moment where a stratified reality breaks down, and must open itself up to something not yet conceptualised. Death is an endpoint and a beginning; it is the passage to a necessary reformation.
KAVARI’s focus on the use of samples is important. What made rave culture new on a technical level was its emphasis on digital sampling, and this emphasis hyper-charged the creative relationship with death. Sampling had been popularised by hip-hop artists in the late ‘70s, but the digital turn in sampling had created new and interesting affordances. A genre like jungle’s amalgam of reggae, hip-hop, jazz and whatever else could not have occurred without both the glorious exogamy of non-white culture to post-war Britain and the ease of chopping and changing allowed by digital technology. ‘Jungle is an early example of how processes of composition or songwriting . . . could begin to be available to everyone with access to digital technologies’.[7] Jungle – and rave more generally – implemented a form of sampling that was more extreme and harsh than that of the hip-hop heads. Where the sampling of hip-hop developed beats and hooks out of previously released music, rave’s sampling distorted these original sounds beyond recognition. In Tribe’s Can I Kick it? the sound of Lou Reed’s Walk On the Wild Side is immediate. Joe Chambers’ piano line in Mind Rain was left virtually untouched when sampled by DJ Premier for Nas’ NY State of Mind. In contrast, an album like Photek’s Modus Operandi, which samples Stomu Yamash’ta’s 33 1/3 across several tracks, stretches the original to the point of complete disjunction. The samples become amputated from their source material such that, in the sonic palette of rave, the original withers and dies. In this way, rave strips its influences to the point of killing them. The newness of rave, then, was down to its relationship with the originals from which it sampled. It was a relationship that privileged removal and death over the archival reworkings of the hip-hop tradition. Rave coincides with the destruction of generic distinction in earnest, both aesthetically in its sound and technically in its production.
Rave privileges the unalive nature of the sounds it produces. You do not hear drums in rave, but the murdered breakbeat of a track from the mid-20th century: a Frankensteinian reconstitution. Even the organic becomes instrumentalised such that it exceeds its limits. Take, for example, the human voice. It has nothing to do with the mouth or the lungs, but the percussive potential of its reintegration: ‘Voices are molecularized into chattering, gibbering textures . . . new textures standing on the borders between solid and liquid’.[8] Goldie’s Timeless is a great example of this. As Simon Reynolds wrote in 1994, Goldie’s technique of timestretching ‘made it possible to stretch a sample (vocal, whatever) so that it fits any beats per minute ratio, without changing its pitch’.[9] The voice is subordinated to the machinic ensemble within which is sits. Far from being the front and centre of the Junglist musical enterprise, it becomes another feature within its rhythmic assemblage. You do not get a lead singer or backing vocals, but the regeared sonics of someone that once sang flattened against the track’s canopy. Hence KAVARI’s inversion that we see in Asphyxiation Mix: KAVARI rescues human sounds and elevates them above the rhythmic engine of rave music and in doing so exposes the relationship to death that lies at the heart of rave as a productive technique. The central generative feature of rave as a new form was the supercharging of death as a vector of newness.
Here lies the awkwardness in the melancholic worship of ‘90s-era rave as somehow anathema to capitalist culture. The dismantling of organisation is what capitalism does incredibly well. It is very good at decoding and reforming, at sampling and reproducing, of entering new territories and reproducing them in its own image: ‘the more it breaks down, the more it schizo-phrenizes, the better it works, the American way’.[10] Capitalism instrumentalises death, because it means it can develop new spaces and structures to plunder and exploit. In this way, far from being an antithetical product in the capitalist cultural market, rave is the maturation of a cultural tendency within capitalism towards reconstitution, remixing and change. However, there is always an inhibition. There has to be a limit. ‘Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. It is by refusing their death that they are made into slaves and condemned to an infinite abjection to a life of labour’.[11] Death can never allow itself to be fully realised in a system of exploitation – physically or philosophically – because it would turn upon itself. The line between the rave moment in the ‘90s and the situation now where experimentation is encouraged technically by digital technology but inhibited materially by the location of that technology in the broader musical industrial landscape is not the co-option of that technology’s potential by greedy capitalists. Instead, it is simply a development in capitalism’s generative relationship with death and becoming. That culture of tax-free tickets, underground dubplates and eschewing of intellectual property may create the superficial sense of an enclave against the broader forces of commodification and reification, but is better understood as the moment where the creative death-function becomes technologically supercharged.
This is not to say that death is the ultimate core of creative work and imagination. But it is to say that this generative creative element is one that is readily instrumentalised. The structure of creativity, and its relationship to death, has been injected with the steroid of digital production and sampling. The tendency within these techniques towards reorganization and dissolution affects both broad generic configurations and individual artistic enterprises. KAVARI’s fleshy, pummelled soundscapes and elevation of human sounds paradoxically reveals this tendency by inverting the form of rave as a musical enterprise. The human is not dissolved into the machine but it is the machine that is made human – subordinating both to a process of death and destruction. Today’s crisis of the new, then, is not down to a generalised lack of imagination where the only thing left to do is turn to pastiche and parody in that oft-derided postmodern form. It is instead down to a limiting inhibition underneath that supercharged experimentative creativity induced by digital technology.
Could KAVARI’s be a music of post-capitalism, where her elevation of the death-function is a symptom of a fundamental reworking of cultural and political economy? Maybe there is something telling in the nakedness of her creative relationship with a digitally mediated death: a kind of break with the melancholia of past newness into the annihilation of pure black sounds. Sometimes it is just nice to enjoy new things. But it is important to enjoy them with an eye to where they’re coming from. In the words of one of KAVARI’s many voices: the more you scream, the more he likes it.
[1] Xenogothic, “The Death of Rave” Revisited
[2] Daniel Dylan Wray, “The working class can’t afford it”, The Guardian, April 2024
[3] Timothy D. Taylor, Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present, 2016, p. 145.
[4] Alex Basdel, ‘The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’, The Guardian, April 2024
[5] Xenogothic, “The Death of Rave” Revisited
[6] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980, p. 185 – 186
[7] Taylor, p. 123
[8] Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than The Sun, 1998, p. 15
[9] Simon Reynolds, “Above the Treeline”, The Wire, September 1994
[10] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, p. 177.
[11] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976, p. 61.
