Work Soft, Play Soft - The Pleasurable Horror of Lofi Beat-Playlists - Norient

Work Soft, Play Soft – The Pleasurable Horror of Lofi Beat-Playlists | norient.com13 Oct 2021 20:56:01

    Work Soft, Play Soft – The
    Pleasurable Horror of Lofi
    Beat-Playlists
    C O L U M N by Malte Pelleter

    Even prior to the current retreat into the home office, life
    with screens has flattened one’s experience of time and
    space – but also of work and leisure. In the fourth episode of
    the Sonic Vignettes series, Malte Pelleter investigates lofi
    beat streams and their utilization for self-regulation.
    The currently prevalent (and still: privileged) retreat into the home office
    marks an overlap of the private and the profitable (not to mention:
    exploitable) in the spatial but also in the temporal dimension. It is these newly
    warped spatio-temporalities that I want to briefly listen for in the soundtracks
    that currently spill through so many noise-cancelling bluetooth headphones.

    Holger Schulze has already delved deep into the halting soundscapes of
    today’s endless video calls in his first contribution to this series. However,
    there is also a peculiar sonic tapestry to these isolated office spaces that
    people still call home at some point: The deliberate utilization of ambient
    sound and music to either fill the sonic gaps of actual isolation or to find
    isolation from noisy surroundings (for recent examples look here or listen
    here). This phenomenon is as current as it is drowning in sonic history.
    Annahid Kassabian’s 2001 example of her students, leaving on the sound of

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    different media devices in different rooms, feels uncannily contemporary
    twenty years later: «They say it fills the house, makes the emptiness less
    frightening» (Kassabian 2001, 5).

    While typing these lines, I put on my own pair of headphones, plunging into
    the seclusion of my all-too-homey quest for productivity. The counter-phase
    signals of the noise-cancelling soothingly blending out all remaining sonic
    traces of a world that once existed outside the cramped confines of my place.
    I am not in the mood for mere splashes of noise though. Instead, I am opting
    for another mainstay of sonic laborious loneliness: The notorious, never-
    ending YouTube-livestream «beats to relax/study to».

    Wavering Rhodes piano chords are now gradually filling up every corner of
    the artificial silence of my earpieces. In the midst of this an acoustic guitar
    line is trailing long shadows of noisy reverb. Somewhere in the background
    rain is pouring behind a curtain of pitched-down tape hiss. Everything floats,
    slowly sloshes back and forth, but never overflows the upper frequency range
    of my hearing spectrum. The obvious harmonic functionality sounds almost
    silly in all its calming effect. Finally, a slowly plodding drum loop squashes
    everything aside in heavy waves of side-chain compression, with a muffled
    kick drum weightily modulating the amplitude of all other layers. Viscous
    swells of bittersweet sound keep surging up to my eardrums.

    While I am writing this, the YouTube channel responsible for this stream lists
    more than seven million subscribers with about 40,000 people listening at
    the moment. Are these people relaxing? Or studying? The internet is bursting
    with similar streams. There is much to be said about these so-called «Lofi-
    beats», but for now I am struck by how self-evidently their sound underlines
    the present temporal ambiguities. In their recent study, Emma Winston and
    Laurence Saywood (2019, 49) state that «Lofi hip hop streams might […] be
    read as one means to navigate collapsed boundaries and the expectation of
    self-regulation in a control society». It is especially about navigating (and
    coping with) collapsed spatiotemporal boundaries, one might add. The mere
    title gives it away: Relaxing and studying, work and leisure, are only separated
    by a rather arbitrary slash.

    In their sampling politics then, all these pitched-down, warped piano chords,
    and guitar loops function more like faint, detuned echoes of Burial’s
    temporally ambiguous post-rave melancholia. There is a specific longing in
    its sound for an «imagined past, not only unreachable in the present, but
    never experienced in the first instance» (Winston/Saywood 2019, 45). These
    kinds of hauntological time-pathologies are widely discussed in recent sound
    studies (see e.g. Schulze 2020, 105–7). Lofi beats, in their seemingly banal
    affirmation of the current indistinguishability of the capitalist spheres of work
    and leisure, haunt as anew. Is there a more adequate sonic sign of the times
    than this almost pleasurable drowning in a temporally complex kind of
    Gleichzeitigkeit, in which past and present get swirled once again?

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    → List of References
    Fisher, Mark. 2013. «The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology». dancecult
       5 (2): 42–55. (https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/378).
    Harper, Adam. 2009. «The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator».
       Rouge’s Foam Blog. (http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/12/premature-burial-
       burial-pallbearer-vs.html).
    Kassabian, Anahid. 2001. «Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity». ECHO. A
       Music Centered Journal 3 (1). (http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3-
       issue2/kassabian/index.html).
    Schulze, Holger. 2020. Sonic Fiction: The Study of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury.
    Winston, Emma, and Laurence Saywood. 2019. «Beats to Relax/Study to: Contradiction and
       Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop». IASPM Journal 9 (2): 40–54.
       (https://iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/view/949/pdf_1).

    «Sonic Vignettes» is a new Norient Special discussing sound: one fragment,
    one experience, recording, one viral video, stream, one monograph or encounter
    at a time – in all its depth, its historical and affective ramifications, with the
    finest expertise in Sound Studies. Initiated by Holger Schulze, Rolf Großmann,
    Carla J. Maier, and Malte Pelleter, published as a monthly column.

    → Published on February 06, 2021

    → Last updated on July 01, 2021

    Malte Pelleter is a sound culture researcher working at the intersection of popular
    music and sound studies, as well as cultural and media theory. He is a post-doc at
    «((audio)) Ästhetische Strategien», Leuphana University Luneburg. In 2021 he
    published his first book «Futurhythmaschinen. Drum-Machines und die Zukünfte
    auditiver Kulturen».

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