🔵 My article for The Quietus

A follow-up on Chaotic Good, and some overdue music and book recommendations

I have taken a small break from writing Network Notes to instead pen an article for my favourite music website, The Quietus.

So, rather than deliver the article here, I would instead urge you to click through and read my article for them: “How Big Tech Co-Opted DIY and How to Fight Back.”

Furthermore, if you are over there and it’s not your first time, then why not consider a subscription? I appreciate this might feel like a naked sales pitch, but I’ve hit a point where I simply feel we have to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to supporting great things. The Quietus has been around for a little bit longer than Motive Unknown, maybe sixteen years if I was to guess. At points, though, they have barely scraped by, but I feel they now occupy a slot as one of the last great repositories of phenomenal music writing. That is something we should all preserve, as losing it would be unthinkable.

I know a lot of you reading this are professionals, and so I will also point out that a subscription for you and your company at least feels a bit cheaper because it’s pre-tax, deducted against Corporation Tax and all that jazz. Therefore, the cost of even a basic subscription to The Quietus is surely within reach.

Sermon over. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this opportunity to post some updates on what I’ve been reading and listening to and generally enjoying, as well as some thoughts on this Chaotic Good story that appears to have really crossed over into the mainstream press. That is all below. Hope you enjoy.

Have a great day,

D.

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A quick followup on the Chaotic Good debacle

Since publishing my last piece, which focused on the Chaotic Good agency and their methods of pushing viral marketing for various artist clients, it would appear that the world has really gone wild about covering this story.

Wired picked up on it with a piece that I was quoted in, but which featured a particularly ridiculous headline referring to the buzz around the band Geese as one big psyop. (Full disclosure, Geese are signed to Partisan Records, who are a client of Motive Unknown.) It strikes me that anyone with eyes and ears on the music scene was aware that Geese were blowing up long before Chaotic Good were engaged to work with them, which I also note is a critical detail that almost everybody has failed to ask about when writing about the band. Bending any kind of story to suggest that the band are some entirely manufactured or manipulated presence is, in my view, completely ridiculous.

The most sane piece of writing I have read on the topic came from Ryan Broderick and his Garbage Day newsletter. In it, Broderick asked arguably the question that nobody (myself included) has, namely: “what accounts were Chaotic Good using, and are they even effective?”

He writes:

Social media analyst Rachel Karten managed to find three TikTok accounts that appear to be affiliated with Chaotic Good and, uh, lol, they’re so bad I’m not even sure how to describe them. The biggest one, @.andrewdd, has around 64,000 followers and has had a couple big hits, but some of their videos have a few hundred views. The other two, @chalanttwin47 and @iholdyourwarmth, both have a few thousand followers. All three make the same kind of videos: a young person staring into a camera with A Softer World-style relatable text written over their faces and a popular song set as the audio. Another X user found more TikTok accounts that appear to be associated with Chaotic Good posting the same kind of videos with similarly low view counts.

It is quite plausible that there is another story to write about Chaotic Good, namely that these accounts they were running were broadly ineffective, if we are to believe the findings of the Garbage Day team. I’m not quite sure I’m prepared to go out on a limb and say that all of this amounts to nothing, but I would certainly believe that the impact of Chaotic Good’s marketing is being wildly overhyped.

Read Ryan’s full piece here - I’d argue it is the most incisive take on this whole moment that I have seen yet.

What I also find interesting about this whole tale is the extent to which it feels like everyone is looking for reasons to shit on any band that is doing well. Admittedly, we are in the Depravity Culture era, but I still find it quite sad that so much energy is spent taking bands down and hyping negativity rather than celebrating the great and the good. Which is not to suggest that the Chaotic Good moment isn’t something we should be covering, but by the same token, it bothers me that so many band names are being thrown out there as if this makes for an explanation as to their fame, which I simply don’t believe is the case.

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Books I should have raved about ages ago:

• Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves by Chris Dalla Riva.

  Chris sent me an advance copy of his book last year when I happened to be over in Berlin. I gleefully hoovered the book up in about two evenings. It is nothing short of magnificent, and when I went back to Chris raving about it, I promised him I would do a dedicated post here. The plan was to pick a few points from the book for a kind of “what we can learn about the future by looking at the past” piece, but as time wore on, life massively got in the way. Work swallowed me whole, and on the personal front we were beginning to care for my mother-in-law who is slowly being lost to Alzheimer’s. Ergo, the piece became that thing I was kicking down the road all the time, and it has never been published. I could rave about this book for days; it analyses music via the charts from the inception of modern recorded music through to the present day. The insights it provides are nothing short of astonishing at points. Equally though, this is a crucial review of a huge span of time that in turn provides a sense of perspective on where we find ourselves now. Aspects of history are arguably repeating, but I choose to view that in positive terms. Honestly, just buy the book, it’s a wonder.

• Body of Work: How the album outplayed the algorithm and survived playlist culture by Keith Jopling

  This is another book I was sent an advance copy of, only to thank the author for by utterly failing to write about it. In Body of Work, Jopling creates a love song to the album as a format. As music is devalued all the more, and the album is arguably under constant attack thanks to playlists and per-track purchases, I would argue this book makes for another positive, loving appreciation not just for the album format itself, but the delight one finds in enjoying long-form music listening. Admittedly, you might be the type of reader who feels they do not need to be sold on the album as a format, but I would argue this book goes beyond that and just allows you to really appreciate what wonders these bodies of work can be.

• Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture by Fred Brathwaite AKA Fab 5 Freddy

  I will confess that I have struggled of late with autobiographies. I think the main reason is that so many have become a rather boring round-robin of drug addiction tales amid success, and frankly it gets quite tedious. This book, on the other hand, is a wonderful gem of a thing, taking in a vivid history of New York’s art and music scenes through the decades, from the 60s to the present, from a man who seemed to occupy multiple lifetimes as a figure of influence. The style of writing is free, easy, and positive, and I’ve found nothing but pleasure in reading it. Highly recommended.

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Music I’ve been loving lately:

• Paperclip Minimiser - Topology Transform

  I became a fan of John Howe’s work after meeting him at the Superbooth exhibition in Berlin a few years ago. John was there demoing an app he’d made called Strokes, which is a phenomenal piece of music creation software. John himself is a fiercely clever man who would likely be a NASA scientist if he wasn’t so blessed with music in his DNA.

  This latest EP is a precise combination of dub techno and bass elements, ambience, twisted rhythms, and the kind of immersion that the likes of Deepchord deliver so well. I’d consider it an essential purchase.

• Polygonia - Ceaseless Motion

  Shoutout to NN reader Oli who hooked me up with this gem of an EP. I think what really caught me about this was the rhythmic approach the artist takes. Most techno runs on a 4/4 kick drum basis, and yet this seems to do anything but, something it shares arguably with the topology transform EP above. Either way, for me it was a really refreshing approach to techno that I’ve been playing over and over ever since.

• Andy Knight - various tracks

  Andy was formerly one half of Emperors New Clothes, whose final, unreleased album reappeared in not one but two versions a couple of years ago. I won’t recount the story of how that came to pass, but in short, the two camps that ENC split into both issued their own versions of the record. Both are amazing, though I suspect either camp would be irritated to read that as each considers their own version to be the definitive one. I am fiercely avoiding getting involved on that front, but it’s a testament to the quality of the raw tracks that both are so wonderful. Anyway, Andy was kind enough to send me some unreleased material, and all of it is incredible. It takes the same eclectic approach, touching on jazz, dub and space vibes in general, and I love it all. I only hope an album sees the light of day. If he posts them publicly online, I’ll make a point of sharing it all here. perhaps in the meantime, check out Sleepjunk, which is Andy’s version of that final ENC album and is genuinely one of the best things I’ve heard in the last few years. I really miss this kind of eclecticism within one album

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Gleefully accepting music recommendations!

I do really enjoy getting suggestions for either existing music or forthcoming releases to check out. So, if there’s something you think I might like, do feel free to get in touch. Always keen to hear the weird and wonderful things going on out there. And, with 6000+ subscribers, I’m happy to spread word on things I’m loving too.

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