Quality Time by Quality Time

VINYL WILL BE AVAILABLE AT https://lacerbashop.bandcamp.com/
DISTRIBUTED BY AUDIOGLOBE AND CLONE https://clone.nl/item67147.html https://www.audioglobe.it/314947/bottin/quality-time/lp

Quality Times asks what it means to release music in a world continually bathed in the digital flow of thought and expression. This overabundance risks polarizing the reception of popular culture rather than encouraging open and inclusive critical dialogue. Despite its history as the vessel and voice of the cultural restlessness from the 1950s onward, pop music and the discourse surrounding it has declined in the digital age as it becomes lost in the proliferation of commentary. The accessibility and shareability of media –the commodification of the sound file– removes the creative product from the realm of public expression and rhetorical value to a “private consumer bliss”, a personal cocoon of sound.(1)

In the eighties we hailed the birth of video music as the necessary complement to a creativity that overflowed from pop music –ultimate symbol of belonging to a social tribe– while today we account pop songs as the soundtrack of an increasingly sophisticated but far from real visual culture which we all share. Definitely, video killed the radio star. Furthermore, since the connective digital technology was installed in our lives the re-examination of the past is always within reach. While the internet manages increasingly important data flows and hard disks increase their terabytes, either the individual and collective past memory become more and more firmly stored in the present of our daily life, leaving no space for the future. Or better, for the projection of our present into the future. So, pop music proliferates through archetypes - genres and sub-genres - in a sort of natural cloning of the past accepted by a generation born into an anti-mnemonic blip culture–a generation for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices (1). Pop music is just a formal exercise barely bowing to an elusive Zeitgeist that does not include it as the subject. We should not be surprised by the amount of record releases that washes over us daily, and this brings us back to the initial question.

Searching for a virginal sound rolling back to the zero degree in contemporary pop, Quality Time offers us an interesting perspective: Bottin (born 1977) tackles this job exploring the proto-electronic Casiotone keyboard as is, and no filters or additional parts will modify its sound aesthetics. It's an exercise in synthesis where the reduced plasticity of sound limited by the preset sounds, makes him imagine a functionalist guise of the music. Beyond the intentionality in its relationship with memory this work could be more influenced by Derrida's ghosts than by Moroder's clicks, as it's not a critique of the times–nostalgic or perhaps hauntological–which pushes Bottin into assembling these instrumental tracks, but rather an 'a posteriori' analysis of the nature of sound.
It's Library Music made out of sheer intellectual honesty, opposed to the more common purpose –always cynical, or in any case pragmatic and non-authorial– of producing music as a commodity.

There’s an innocent quality to Quality Time: the vacuum of commission that makes the music imaginary abstractly shapes the moods evoked by the vintage nature of the medium itself. The Casiotone alphabet allows Bottin to assemble seductive instrumental tracks marked by alphanumeric acronyms and interspersed with sourced fragments of dialogues. He projects the music into an aesthetic operation that transforms the composer into an anonymous 'concept employee' for whom the interludes between tracks recall the contemporary realm. The coupling of existential alienation and postmodern idleness birth a statement: I was looking for happiness but I got lost.

(1) excerpt from Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism”, 0 Books, London 2009.

Bottin (1977) is an artist and producer based in Venice, Italy.

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