Well, it’s happened again. We received another massive document drop through IWTP, once again including, among several dozen noteworthy items, a pdf of an article from the Antwerp-based PLOOI Magazine, once again showcasing the life and work of a regular Hinternet author — this time, namely, our resident music critic Mary Cadwalladr (see PLOOI’s recent profile of JSR, or at least of one of JSR’s near-world counterparts).
Mary, like JSR before her, denies having had contact with anyone claiming to write for PLOOI, and as before when we search the relevant databases of high-end Low Countries glossies, we find no such title listed. And yet, as before, we admit we do experience the arrival in our inboxes of documents sent through Inter-World Transfer Protocol as a free gift from, so to speak, the Empire of Possibilia (though a dissenting minority at our offices continues to warn that no gift is free).
“I didn’t say any of these things, exactly,” Mary tells us. “But I could have. I really could have.”
Her interview, or her counterpart’s interview, is presented in its entirety, in English translation, with added links where possible to the artists and songs mentioned, below. —The Editors
PLOOI: Mary. You’ve been busy, girl. Chief music critic at The Hinternet. New book coming out. Catch us up.
Mary Cadwalladr: That’s right. I’ve been with The Hinternet for about two years now. And yeah, I’ve got a new book out this fall, Afro/Beat: Post-War Atlantic Vernaculars and the Fates of Rock and Roll, with Pneuma Press in the UK. It’s an essay defending neo-Pythagoreanism, so, like, the view that at bottom the structure of reality is itself musical. The case is made largely on the basis of a phenomenological analysis of my own late-night headphone sessions in the company of Cyril Diaz, John Coltrane, Fela Kuti, André Toussaint, Ebo Taylor, Lola Martin. Some others.
PLOOI: We’ll get to that. A lot to talk about. I mean you give us so much. You’ve been around a long time, but you weren’t always the undisputed doyenne of music writing. You started out as a singer yourself. Tell us a bit about, you know, the whole grand arc of your life and work.
MC: That’s right. In the 1990s I played with a band called Shoo-Fly Complex. I hear us described these days as all sorts of things — “hypo-twee”, “Cymric shoegaze”, who knows what else. But we were just part of the Cardiff scene, we weren’t thinking about metadata labels back then. Genesis P-Orridge once told us we sounded like “depressed cocklemongers in the harbor fog”. I think they meant that as praise.
PLOOI: I’d say you’ve come a long way since back when you were hanging out with Psychic TV! Your recent writing focuses almost exclusively on African and African Diasporic musics. How do you account for this evolution?
MC: Well first of all as a neo-Pythagorean I have to insist that it’s all just music, and to that extent it is, as they say, “all good”. I often think of what the classicist M. L. West wrote in his book Greek Metre (1982), speculating on the archaic origins of poetic chant and epic recitation: “One of the principal springs of song is obsession with a given idea.” That’s all it is, man. Some dimension of human existence, most typically love or death, presents its mystery to the mind and heart of the singer, who then rolls it around, turns it over and over, through pitch modulation, timbre, rhythmic repetition, and so on. That’s it, that’s music: the temporal structure of reality as ideal object of our own “obsession”, to speak with West, though I would prefer to articulate this rather in the crypto-Heideggerian terms, refined and softened by Bruno Latour, of souci. Music is the form reality takes as disclosed in the experience, by time-bound creatures like us, of utmost care.
PLOOI: Heavy stuff! We might get back to some of this later, though I probably won’t understand it any better the next time around [laughs]. Let’s bring it back down to earth, sister. What are you listening to these days? What’s got you most excited?
MC: I’m so glad you asked! …
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