swandive swansong #1: latent burbling moods
the zoomer enigma revival; decisive pink; coin locker kid
housekeeping
So! It’s 2023, and it’s about time I got started on my pile of outstanding, longstanding resolutions, one of which is to do something with the newsletter that’s sat claimed but dormant for entirely too much time.
I’m Katherine St. Asaph, a freelance music writer for publications including Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin and the Village Voice back in the day (RIP). I also wrote for a long-running blog called the Singles Jukebox, now sadly defunct. They were among the few music-writing outlets that not only allowed but embraced footnotes, digressions, and fascinations, all of which I endorse, and all of which I miss.
Here, then, is an outlet for that. There will be footnotes. There will be digressions. There will be many fascinations. There will be recurring features, including but not limited to the following:
thinkpiece fragment: A column, or notes on a column.
the pulse of nowish: Reviews of new music.
the vaults: Reviews of older music.
apropos of nothing: The sort of thing that’d be printed in the back of a music magazine. Memes, probably. Fun, hopefully.
shameless aggregation: Things I did or wrote besides here.
This newsletter will, for the foreseeable future, be cross-posted on my Cohost and perhaps elsewhere. It may or may not remain on Substack, since I’m not quite sure which newsletter site is farther these days in the hedge maze of drawbacks.
I make no promises to keep to any sort of schedule. In particular, expect things to go blank around this summer.
The newsletter is named for a Throwing Muses song.
thinkpiece fragment: the zoomer enigma revival
For about two years I’ve run a Twitter bot inspired by the accounts @DiscoComments and @EnyaComments. The bot, as bots do, exists for one purpose: to tweet comments posted online about the music of the new-age band Enigma, long considered deeply uncool. (Twitter, of course, is now itself considered deeply uncool, so I’ve ported the bot to Cohost. It now has pretty pictures!)
Most of my motivation for making this profoundly silly bot was coding-related: learning how to roll a Twitter bot more from scratch than I’d done before, getting more experience with Python, getting any experience with the Twitter API. Part of the motivation was the utter lack of irony in online comments about Enigma; amid today’s irony-poisoned Internet, these sectors of the web have become oases. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the motivation for this silly, silly bot was some deeply-buried salt. A tiny, petty part of me got into music writing because I had read one too many florid, truly weird reviews of various Enigma tracks by Gen X Internet Tickletexts, feeling Emotions all over the screen in near-masturbatory gushes[1]. I was 16, high on teenage Dunning-Krugerism and other millennial dumbshit, and so I decided that this, of all things, was what I could do better at.
That sort of comment—low-irony, gushing freely—was what I expected the bot to post. There’s plenty of material to draw from: YouTube, of course, but also MySpace, last.fm, Usenet threads, GeoCities guestbooks, as far back as archive.org allows. The ‘90s comments absorbed the earnest techno-optimism that brought about late-1990s internet forums. The ‘00s comments often have a guileless charm, artifacts from the YouTube era of camcorder recordings, AMVs, and the sort of fanvids that the major labels would eventually rebrand and monetize as “lyric videos.”
Most of the comments came from Gen X, because Enigma is a Gen X yuppie/hippie band. Younger listeners did exist, but they usually came from niche communities for nerdy reasons: the dubiously titled “Modern Crusaders”[2] being used in an ending sequence from the anime JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure[3]; “Gravity of Love” being used in approximately 500 AMVs, most prominently a Warrior Cats tribute by one AlliKatNya; “The Eyes of Truth” being the background music to the PS3 hacking tool Multiman.[4] Generally, these listeners only cared about the one song — with the exception, surprisingly, of the JoJos — and certainly weren’t, in the parlance of our time, Enigma stans.
But beneath the surface of the zeitgeist were some shifting vibes, some latent burbling moods. Pure moods, even, like the ones on the New Age compilation Pure Moods, which blew up on TikTok a year or two ago. (If you haven’t read Mina Tavakoli’s retrospective on the comp in Pitchfork, please do that because it rules.) Video after trend-hopping video found people twirling around with coffee, blissing out by a wind machine, or interpretive dancemoshing.
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Each of these TikToks unlocked, in the parlance of our times, the core memories of a generation — memories that, apparently, heavily featured Enigma’s “Return to Innocence.” If it wasn’t the late-night Nickelodeon ads, perhaps it was the wedding scene from the Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Chevy Chase vehicle Man of the House[5]. Maybe it was the listening stations at Walmart, or the kitsch kiosks at the mall, or the tanning bed. Maybe your 5th grade art teacher played it, or your 8th grade algebra teacher, or your junior year homeroom. Many commenters recalled being introduced to Enigma by their parents; more than a few commenters realized, to their horror, that their parents’ introduction likely involved sex and drugs. If there was a common thread, it was — well, just that: the commonality, the discovery that this memories of theirs was shared.
Of course, these aren’t the cultural touchstones of young people, but of millennials — who, as I am reminded every damn day, no longer count as "the kids,” and are rapidly aging out of the coveted 18-35 demographic. And though “Return to Innocence” was the lead track on the Pure Moods commercial, and thus the leadoff mood in most of those TikToks, this wasn’t really an Enigma revival, so much as a collective nostalgia sesh. If they brought any artist back into vogue, to be stylishly namedropped by your musical faves, it would probably be Enya[6].
Enigma’s turn would come later that year, when “Sadeness” was used in a bleary club scene from episode 1 of Netflix’s series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. For anybody who knows the song, and the sort of media where it appeared[7], this is thoroughly unsurprising. People whose first exposure to Enigma was Dahmer, however? They were surprised. Even in the genre-omnivorous 2020s, the particular combination of genres that “Sadeness” gobbled up was genuinely new to them: actual monks doing actual chanting, breathy lust pants, shakuhachi presets, minor-key New Age sonics, and the beat from “Keep On Movin’.” Where the judgment of history heard a regrettable one-hit wonder, the kids these days heard a vaporwave fever dream. And since the Dahmer series was accompanied by plenty of Dahmer Discourse—endless true-crime videos and slow-dance memes, followed by arguments over whether people should even be making Jeffrey Dahmer memes[8], many of which were soundtracked by Enigma—they heard it a lot.
I don’t want to overstate this too much as a trend, let alone a Thing of the scale that gave Kate Bush a No. 1 hit in 2022. TikTok’s feed algorithm is designed to make every microtrend resemble monoculture. But I do find the multi-generational context collapse fascinating. This is a column fragment, not a column, so I won’t even try to build any kind of grand unified theory. Instead, here's some stray observations, some spitballing:
Time isn’t real.
I’ve seen it suggested that the fact that teenagers online talk about genres, and ask what genre songs are to find more music like it, is a sign that the younger generation is poisoned by streaming or tropes or whatever, and is Listening To Music Wrong. But I can attest that there are thousands of emails on Usenet, when the closest thing to streaming was RealPlayer and MIDI, of people asking what genre Enigma is, or how to find more music like it—and getting extremely combative over whether the band is new age, ambient, electronic, chillout, or trip-hop. I read an argument on TikTok arguing over whether Enigma qualified as trip-hop and wondered whether I had fallen into a time portal.
Sex dissipates.
I think the whole “puriteen” panic is kind of overblown—like most supposed generational trends, it describes a small sliver of an extremely online cohort, which itself is a tiny sliver of the generation. But there’s something to the fact that a song about begging the Marquis de Sade for release, taken to its natural conclusion in ‘90s dorm rooms everywhere, has settled down and become lo-fi beats to study to. Those moods were pure, after all, no matter how longingly model Kati Tastet stared at the camera in the clip reel.
Of course, it wasn’t the younger generations who recontextualized the song, but boomer/Gen X record executives who rebranded the album to capitalize on the viable-seeming New Age and infomercial markets, and Gen X/Millennial purchasers longing for and buying toward that Zen-X lifestyle. It’s not that modern listeners don’t recognize the sexual overtones, especially not with Dahmer taking a blacklight to the sleaze. But for them, they’re something to be creeped out by, or rib their parents over conceiving them to, or liken to Hudson Mohawke’s now-infamous “Cbat”—and under no circumstances to take seriously, or embrace.[9]
Trends aren’t real.
The Dahmer fad wasn’t even the first time “Sadeness” was a TikTok trend. A few years ago the song was used in a mini-fad where people filtered videos of themselves to look like stock-photo statues — which coincidentally mimics a special effect from Enigma’s video, and is about as authentic.
Meanwhile, you can search any deeper Enigma album cut—“Mea Culpa” is a good test case—or scroll past the videos of the hits, and what you’ll find is what you’d have found before: various New Age/The Secret/inspirational messages; women gazing as seductively as their lust can muster into the camera (including Britney Spears, apparently); quotes in Cyrillic languages superimposed upon goth girls; the general vibe of the fan clips in Placebo’s video for “Running Up That Hill.”[10] Trends aren’t real![11]
the pulse of nowish
decisive pink, “haffmilch holiday”
Spotify has this song credited individually to Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV, who’ve started recording together as Decisive Pink. I know the actual reason for this is to maximize on-platform clicks by people who have never heard of a “Decisive Pink” in their life but adored Room for the Moon and also listened to Find the Sun. (In other words, my clicks. Shit, it worked on me.) But “Haffmilch Holiday,” written amid a few cappuccino sojourns in Cologne, really does sound like two artists bringing their own separate things, even if that clean delineation is only in my head.
Half the song (the Deradoorian-sounding half) sounds like cocooning in a soundproofed chrysalis with noise-canceling headphones, a foam-pillowed mug, and an old Broadcast CD, and muffling out the complicated world. (Not to go into details, but the instant I heard “I just want silence” sung, I felt that on a cellular level.) The other half, the Kate-sounding half, is where the complicated world shoves its way back in: antennae extended, signals pinging, dissonant sounds somehow perky. The two halves — the hermetic bubble of chill, the digital birdsong and half-formed chatter — don’t come together exactly, But they coexist via barging into one another’s space (the breakdown at 2:22 is frenetic from the get-go; the synth at 2:53 sounds exasperated), and both so delightful, it kind of works anyway. Holidays can be like that!
the vaults
coin locker kid, the holy
There’s an embarrassing (for me) story about how and when I heard this album, which I’ll leave in the footnotes[12]. But the gist: The artist, Devyn Smith, sent me a link to The Holy after reading my One Week One Band writeup about Stina Nordenstam. This is an almost foolproof way to make me listen to your record.[13] And there’s indeed plenty of The World Is Saved and Memories of a Colour here, in the fuzzed-out strings of “Eat In” and warped jazz and vocal approach to “Is This the Fall?” This is a channel of influence one I almost never encounter, and it’s as much a sound as a sensibility: diffidence, insularity even when the arrangements are lush, near-silences that speak louder than sound. “Outside” is a guitar pastoral complete with birdsong, and “Birch Trees” is a meditation with a hymnlike refrain and organ, but each phases into something less placid, with the mood of cellos and feel of rain-dank peat.
There’s a lot more, too. “All Our Life” is a spacious ballad that waltzes from K-Ci and JoJo to metallic ambience. “Meet Thy Baker” begins as lo-fi synthpop then jams out much bigger and weirder — the breakdown, and especially the anxious percussion twitch throughout, reminds me of Irish experimentalist Patrick Kelleher’s debut. “Every Day’s a Learning Curve” is a laid-back soul track that gets interesting when the wobbly arrangement and blunt lyrics, far more self-critical than the title, don’t quite fold into the good vibes. And “Mna” is a 14-minute multi-parter unlike anything else here: arcade-game guitars, ASMR-gone-weaponized vocals by Natasha McCurly, applause, children’s book readings amid horror ambience, more applause, poetry about rituals and umbilical cords.
If you liked this, there’s a lot more from the last year on SoundCloud, and a few videos on YouTube, both of which are equally expansive, and if anything more.
apropos of nothing
Please enjoy this 2023 banger by electropop group Daughters of Noise:
shameless aggregation
Last month I wrote about one un-Christmassy Christmas song per day, from eurobeat to netlabels, from experimental Dutch tracks to Willa Ford, from Mantovani to “Goop on Ya Grinch.” Really happy about how this turned out!
TSJ clawed itself out of retirement to do its annual year-end Amnesty Week feature, meaning I got to write about a monolith of a track by Maelstrom and Louisahhh, “If I Could Hold”:
“Maelstrom and Louisahhh’s label, RAAR, describes itself as “punk for techno heads, techno for punks“; to this, I’d add EBM and, especially, electroclash. These are not subtle genres, and “If I Could Hold” hits huge from the start. Then comes a hook carved intact, massive and perfect out of a cliff of self-destructive and self-propulsive lust: “If I could hold light in my hand, I’d give it to you, you’d outshine it; if I could hold your love in my mouth, I’d never think what I’m living without.” In a less healthy but more electric world, this would be immortal.”
That “people are getting tired of the TikTok music formula” featurette from NBC News keeps going around, I wish it wouldn’t, and so I went way too long on why I wish it wouldn’t. This was meant for the newsletter, but the newsletter didn’t get finished in time, so think of it as Thinkpiece Fragment #0:
“Most of this piece's criticism of viral music TikToks comes, itself, from viral TikToks: a reaction video by "callinallgamers," some snackable lessons by online songwriting teachers. These, themselves, are prime examples of viral pandering -- probably more so than the music. Jumping on a pre-existing TikTok trend by pulling a few faces and picking the same few low-hanging lolz other users did is pandering to virality. Giving MasterClass-level advice that flatters people's people's pre-existing ideas about authenticity and hard work is pandering to virality. Much of this is valueless; none of it is original.”
footnotes
[1] I retained very little from my 18th century English novel class, but one thing I did retain was the fact that the intro to Henry Fielding’s Shamela is one long sex joke.
[2] The lyrics are vague enough (“we are the fighters, just fighting for our rights”) that they could refer to just about anything. But that title, yikes. Surprisingly, the kind of terrible people such a title might appeal to do not seem to have found it.
[3] JoJo does that EarthBound thing where the creator is clearly a huge music nerd who pulls out relatively deep cuts for its soundtrack, at least by #rememberthe90s standards — before “Modern Crusaders” was Jodeci’s “Freek’N You.” What deep cuts? Don’t worry, the fans will tell you. That, or mash them up with Quad City DJs.
[4] Which forces the vocalists doing Instagram promo to make their tags pretty weird.
[5] It is a perennial, yet always weird experience to encounter a supposed generational childhood touchstone of your own generation that you have literally never heard of. Especially when it sounds awful. Sorry!
[6] There’s another good piece in Pitchfork about Enya’s return to musical vogue via ambient-inspired artists like Julianna Barwick. Which is true, but Enya trickling into the general pop culture au jus is most likely due to Vine. And, unfortunately, Filthy Frank.
[7] Including: crime drama Cold Case; the Jennifer Lynch erotic thriller Boxing Helena, starring Sherilyn Fenn, which so far has avoided cult reappraisal but give it like a year; enough softcore Skinemax porn and actual porn that you will occasionally read YouTube comments happily telling you which specific porn. It was also used in Tropic Thunder and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as a joke, where the song’s appearance is the punchline.
[8] In retrospect it was kinda weird how many 2010s pop songs casually mentioned Jeffrey Dahmer! People always get their reactionary cancel culture freakout on when this sort of thing is mentioned, but it's still weird.
[9] Enigma’s original vibe was not unlike the vibe of perfume commercials—I don’t know whether any Enigma songs were in perfume commercials, but you’d think so, right?—so what comes to mind here is a quote from long-missed perfume newsletter The Dry Down: “Sex is objectively embarrassing, and always uncool. Sex disallows both the formal patina of manicured small talk and the cynical, frictionless, lol-nothing-matters pose of carelessness. Something has to matter; someone has to care. The most joyless, nameless, one-hour-stand is still unavoidably sincere, a split-second of buoyant willingness to believe entirely in something, to give yourself over to something, to want, and therefore be vulnerable.”
So yes, by extension, Enigma is the Carner Rose and Dragon of music.
[10] I am so lucky I was not old enough to submit one back them, because I definitely recorded some. And you will have to personally dig up my grave and autopsy my dead body if you want to ever see them.
[11] Note: On at least one other Enigma track you’ll also find a graphic video of someone removing a toenail growth. So, uh, be warned.
[12] Putting this in a footnote because it’s embarrassing: This was in 2018, the year the album came out. I didn’t see the email until 2022—yes, four years later—when the decade’s worth of PR agency promos in my inbox finally overflowed my Google Drive, and I spent several days going in and deleting the redundant, non-musical, or bland ones. Several days for two reasons: 1) When you go through your past decade of emails, you also recall the past decade of your life, which is grueling as fuck; and 2) When you delete enough emails at once — even if Gmail has specifically requested that you delete a lot of emails at once if you ever want to receive email again — Gmail puts you in Gjail, and you can’t interact with your inbox for a few hours. This is presumably a security measure to prevent people from wiping or exfiltrating stuff, although considering all the site credentials, backchannel gossip, and saucy dirt that most inboxes have, I’m not sure why a malicious actor would choose the press releases on Cults.
Anyway, one of the outstanding, longstanding resolutions on the pile is to respond to emails in fewer than four literal goddamn years.
[13] Unless you are a PR flak; a pretty common PR-email tactic is to claim they read my piece on [ARTIST] at [PUBLICATION] and were just moved, deep in their deepest soul, to ask me to post about their client. (I’ve seen at least one person forget to swap the brackets out.) We can tell when an email is genuine!