Credits, clockwise from top left: Daniel Christensen, Ruskig, Ragnar Persson, Emma Ekstam, Daniel Christensen, Karla Marie Bentzen.
A few hours after I interviewed Holly Herndon about her recent album Platform, she emailed me with a few discussion points that she felt she had neglected to mention during our talk. Chief among these was how important the group around her had been to the genesis and final outcome of the album, from the Dutch design studio Metahaven to the theorists Benedict Singleton and Suhail Malik to her partner and frequent collaborator Mat Dryhurst. She had already broached that topic in our conversation when she argued against the myth of the artist as "this single, solo icon" and stressed the importance of collaborative and collective work. "I'm really serious about not presenting myself as this lone auteur," she said, "and part of the hope for Platform is that we might all be able to acknowledge each other without somehow breaking an illusion or taking away from the work of individuals."
Collaborative work is already well established as the norm in pop music—or at least it's accepted that a pop track may have multiple writers and another producer or two. (The full extent of pop music's film-studio-style idea-factory model—one including vocal producers and A&R executives and engineers and, why not, agents and project managers—remains largely undeveloped.) But Herndon's idea of a kind of radically open creative action is becoming more prevalent in experimental electronic music, and it runs through a number of recent projects that emphasize the collective over the individual.
Decon/Recon #1, part compilation and part collaboration, is the first in a new series of records from Paula Temple's Noise Manifesto label that aims to shift the focus from the individual to the collective. The artists involved represent a cross-section of the fringes of Berlin's dance-music scene: there's Oni Ayhun, aka the Knife's Olof Dreijer; rRoxymore, a playful producer and DJ with ties to the Huntleys & Palmers and Cómeme labels; Aquarian Jugs, a new alias of Planningtorock's Jam Rostron; and Temple herself, recording as Jaguar Woman. The four artists each recorded a track based on sounds and samples they had pooled in a shared directory, and although they all made their respective contributions working alone, all four tracks are credited simply to the collective. A press release explains the project in terms like "put[ting] identity into a crisis," deconstructing the status of the "artist," and "letting all hierarchies collapse"—presumably, into a jellied heap on the floor, because these are all, first and foremost, sweaty, ecstatic club jams.
And the proof is in the pudding. If, upon first listen, you might be tempted to play detective—sussing out which metallic synth lead sounds most like Oni Ayhun, and which cavernous techno throb is likely to be Temple's work—you quickly find yourself not really caring who did what, even though all four tracks are plenty different in character. The spirit of the project wins out; scenius trumps genius.
A new project called Terepa offers an even more unusual approach to collective composition. On August 8, 2014, at a predetermined hour, seven artists around the world—Rashad Becker, Charlotte Collin, Lucrecia Dalt, Laurel Halo, Julia Holter, Grégoire Simon, and Kohei Matsunaga (aka NHK'Koyxen)—sat down in their studios and recorded 20 minutes of audio. The session constituted a kind of ensemble, but there were no cables to connect them, no cloud-based apps, no Skype, not even email—only their own telepathic abilities, or the lack thereof. They did it again on October 28, and afterwards, the seven individual recordings from each session were merged and layered into two session-specific tracks, one 15 minutes long and the other just over 20. (The press release doesn't note who did the mixing, though the method was apparently developed by Matsunaga out of a desire to collaborate with distant artists.) The results, to be released on July 18 on Nicolas Jaar's Other People label, are drifting but not entirely directionless, ambient but not aimless. Scrapes and small sounds abound; I'm reminded of much of the so-called "microsound" of the early '00s, as well as the homespun investigations of Alejandra and Aeron, but informed by the philosophies of Cornelius Cardew and Scratch Orchestra.
Erasing the self can be a theoretical stance—the kind of thing you learn from reading John Cage and experimenting with chance operations—but it can also be simpler than that. Sometimes, it's just a lot of fun. That's partly the point of MDMA, at least in theory, and it seems to be a prime motivator for R-Zone, an offshoot of the Netherlands' Crème Organization label, which takes as its primary inspiration the rough-and-ready sonics and garish computer design of rave culture circa 1992. The introductory text to the label's first release pays homage to the idealized, utopian space of the rave, "where for one brief moment it didn't matter who you are and what you do and how you look or how many scene-points you have"; making good on that idea, the contributors to R-Zone remain anonymous, even though many of them are fairly major figures within the underground. (On at least a few of the records, the contributing artists are listed on the label, but only by first initial and last name, and only in minuscule type.)
One of the most interesting things about R-Zone is how unified its aesthetic is; whatever brief its contributors have been given, they all zero in on similar sounds and ideas. Maybe that's part of the reason that you don't see a lot of discussion about who's responsible for the records. Part of following the project is to buy into the idea; it's the record-label equivalent of walking into a party where it's too dark to make out who the DJ is, and simply allowing yourself to get swept up in the energy of the room. Of course, labels whose profiles eclipse those of their individual artists are nothing new—just ask anyone who's got a fist-sized chunk of black-and-white-and-yellow-sleeved Perlon 12-inches on the shelf—but R-Zone elevates the idea of an overarching label aesthetic to the level of fetish; to record for the label amounts to a kind of performance of identity.
Finally, there's Sweden's SELF label, which, contrary to what the name might seem to indicate, is all about community. The name is short for "Swedish Electronic Liberation Front." That may sound militant, but theirs is actually a strikingly open-ended attempt to bridge the divide between dance music's physical culture—specifically, 12-inch records—and its digital manifestations. As the label's founders explain of their white-label releases and plain white sleeves, "This round disc may be white, but it is not empty. It is filled with our creativity. Our time. And now we would like you to fill this plain, white sleeve with your creativity and your time. We want you to share this with us. To be a part of this release. To be apart of our SELF." To that end, fans are invited to create their own, one-of-a-kind sleeves and upload them to the label's website, where they are all showcased in a surprisingly extensive, and growing, gallery. The results encompass a wide range of techniques, from ink drawings to paintings to collage (?) to what would seem to be photographic shadow-play; some look like children's drawings, while others take a back-to-nature approach. Some of them are way more punk than you might expect for a label dedicated to techno and electro, but that's just part of the fun. In any case, the whole project is kind of punk, in the most utopian sense of the term—as a DIY enterprise in which anyone and everyone is invited to participate. As the label organizers write, "All of you will be a part of the movement. A movement against the one-sidedness of the producer-consumer relationship. A movement against the hurried Zeitgeist. A movement against the grain."