NEURAL Artikel "Underground music blogs"

In der Printausgabe des kommenden NEURAL Magazins wird ein Artikel des Medienwissenschaftlers Florian Cramer mit dem Titel „A Kind Rewind – Underground music blogs and the rebirth of cassette tape music“ erscheinen. Einen kompletten Absatz widmet der Autor unserem Aachener Untergrund Blog. Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors habe ich die große Freude, den uns betreffenden Absatz, hier vorab veröffentlichen zu dürfen:

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A Kind Rewind – Underground music blogs and the rebirth of cassette tape music
by Florian Cramer

As with the original analog cassettes, this would not only be the loss or transformation of musical practices, but also of a social culture. No longer forgotten music, for example, receives substantial contributions by other experts of the Dutch underground experimental music scene, some of whom met at Tape Treff. A peculiar case of a collective psychoarcheology of a local culture can be found on the blog “Aachener Untergrund” allopach.blogspot.com. Launched in summer 2009 by two pseudonymous authors who seem to be associated to the former label DOM Records of the group HNAS, it initially followed the standard tape blog format and resurrected 1980s audio cassettes and fanzines produced in the Western German town Aachen, including those of the obscure but brilliant Dada-absurdist project Neros tanzende Elektropäpste. Shortly after, the blog gained collective momentum. It thrives on the enthusiasm of a growing group of contributors who not only reconstruct the town’s musical underground history, but also perished hippie record shops and electro stores, strange fast food restaurants, 1970s SciFi architectural cafés, locally produced grotesque carnival song seven inches, b-movie theaters, public toilets, semi-famous heavy metal bands, once-controversial high school hangouts, in short “underground” in its broadest yet most literal sense. It remains to be seen how intrinsically such social dynamics are tied, as a recherche des temps perdu, to tangible artifacts and memories. Future underground archeologies might just as just well develop nostalgia for earlier quirks of the Web. There is, no doubt, a massive cultural movement towards pre-digital media technologies, in a time where the Internet is more and more perceived as the corporate machine that has perverted the notions of sharing, community and participation. Today, a festival or an art school program called analog media would safely attract more people than its “new media” equivalent – but with the twist that the former is framed by the latter. We are, indeed, reading the Cassette Mythos on the screen.
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Meinen herzlichsten Dank dafür lieber Florian!