Zombie Ambient
For a while now there's been a discourse in the visual art world around so-called "zombie formalism", coined as far as I know in this 2014 article by artist and critic Walter Robinson. Since we have a decade of to-and-fro about this phenomenon it might be interesting to ask what we can learn about analogous phenomena in the music world.
This thought was occasioned by a Venus Theory video about the rise of timbre (as opposed to melody) in mainstream music -- I don't agree with all of it but that means it's at least somewhat interesting:
I don't want to get into everything this video throws up but to focus on the genre of "Instagram ambient" that he describes at around 21:10. This is very recognizable to anyone who visits social media (including YouTube) looking for new and interesting music. It has a codependent relationship with "the algorithm" and therefore with advertising and capital; it often seems like disposable sludge; it eschews melody, harmony and conventional technique for "sonic landscapes" and "vibes"; and of course it bears a superficial resemblance to some of what I do.
The connection with Robinson's term is that both name a kind of creative work that is a bit insipid and lifeless, although it uses the same methods as much more radical work from previous generations. Music that uses noise and texture rather than a tune you can whistle or a beat to tap your foot to is superficially the "weird stuff" -- angular and difficult, wilfully obscure, challenging, sometimes even shocking. By contrast, its contemporary incarnation is decorative and appealing in a middle-brow sort of way. Oh no, we've lost the authenticity of how things were done in the past! Everything feels like a simulacrum now! What can possibly be happening?
To take this a bit more seriously, though, we should first note that music and painting have very different economies. Painters get paid primarily by selling individual, physical objects to well-off collectors. Zombie Formalism was originally described as as a way to "hack" this market -- churning out low-effort, decorative, superficially edgy pieces that look hip in the right sort of way but won't make the owner or their house-guests too uncomfortable.
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Instagram Ambient, on the other hand, attempts to hack the attention economy of social media. The music is framed by aspirational visuals: expensive music hardware, exposed wood and brickwork, a casually-positioned kitsch collectible, the edge of an artisanal sweater, glo-fi post-processing. In fact, it's tempting to see the music as just the soundtrack to yet another little display of lifestyle consumerism and GAS.
It's almost always short-form content so we join the musician in the middle of what they're doing and leave before the end; it's like a doorway to something something much cooler and more fulfilling than our own aimless scrolling but we drift past rather than going in. That means there's no need to wrestle with formal problems -- how to start something, sustain it, develop it and end it in a satisfying way.
As it happens, then, the term "formalism" in this case would be misplaced -- among other things, this sort of thing is a cowardly way to hide from the most challenging parts of music-making, which are the things formalists bring into the foreground. They're the reason why everyone with a synthesizer can make 30 seconds that sound good but can't finish a track and release it. Instagram ambient -- as described by Venus theory -- is a recognizable phenomenon that appears to occupy the same place in music as zombie formalism does (or did) in visual art, but there are important differences. I think these point to differences in the two media and also shortcomings in the analysis that led to "zombie formalism" being a term in the first place.
Simplifying a good bit, in the mid-twentieth century critics like Clement Greenberg thought this problem was a key driving force of abstract painting. The problem is a bit different with visual art, which takes up space, versus music which takes up time; problems of formalism are about how the artist subdivides the canvas, works with colour and light and deploys different materials and techniques. Abstract painters like Pollock, Rothko and Still set aside the representation of any subject (such as a bowl of fruit) in order to put those elements in the spotlight.
Robinson explicitly did not like this kind of art, either the original kind or its contemporary version. He was mostly a figurative painter in the Pop Art style whose paintings sell for a small fraction of what many abstracts go for. It's hard not to see a little bit of the embittered creator whose preferred style is just not what anyone wants right now and a lot of his writing comes off as culturally conservative, sometimes even anti-intellectual.
We've seen plenty of that in the music world too, and maybe I'll do a post about that in the future. It would be easy to imagine an analogous figure -- A Rick Beato type, perhaps -- who invents and excoriates something like "Instagram ambient" simply because he'd rather his own music got wider applause. (Venus Theory, by the way, isn't doing that: a lot of his music is ambient-adjacent in the same way mine is.)
[ASIDE: No images for a while. The artists who bore the brunt of Robinson's ire have been bullied enough and I can't see the point in ridiculing anyone else.]
The fine art world can be famously, gloriously pretentious and while musicians are amateurs in that field by comparison we can still be pretty insufferable. I can understand anyone's exhaustion at creators being obsessed with the formal to the exclusion of their work being "about" anything else. If I say my latest piece is "an interrogation of the liminal space between noise and silence" or "a rhizomatic intervention into the dialectic of the sonic/aural self" you could be forgiven for hurling a ride cymbal at my head.
But secretly a lot of musicians are overwhelmingly concerned with fundamental questions about sound, and those of us who don't work with traditional pop-song formats are constantly having to worry about what form is in music. A fair few of the pieces we make are in some sense "studies" designed to explore something more or less formal. Most musicians are just too salt-of-the-earth to say it out loud.
I think Robinson's rather bullying caricature is interesting mostly because it manifests a fear most creative people have: that our work isn't just poorly-done, it's in some sense ridiculous because it panders to a zeitgeist or fashion that everyone else is chasing too but at the same time is tired and anachronistic. That it's gauche or cynical and not good the way stuff from the past was, even if that old stuff used similar methods and ideas to ours. That someone else more legit than you is, right now, doing serious work that's nothing like the slop you're shovelling. And worst of all that your music has become this way in a craven attempt to get money or access or (most pathetic of all) likes. Some of this, I imagine, is what keeps us all up at night sometimes. At least I hope it's not just me.
The key with something like this is that it's not supposed to make you depressed, it's supposed to send you scurrying off to sharpen your tools, critically assess what you're doing and work with greater determination and energy than before. So let's make a little manifesto for not being a zombie in 2025.
- Don't make gobbets of short-form content; make complete pieces that start and end.
- Don't chase the algorithm. The easiest way to achieve this is simply: don't look at your stats.
- In fact, if you feel the reward system of the territory you work in pushing you one way, see what happens when you do the opposite.
- Make music offline; the internet is dying and the world your music exists in was never there anyway. Your audience is and always was real flesh and blood people.
- Don't be a people-pleaser; make music that a lot of people won't get. Nobody should be trying to make music for everyone, that's what gen AI does and why it's failing even now.
- Pay attention to formal issues in your work; just don't drone on about them as a form of self-justification.
- Know your history but don't make an ersatz copy of an older style -- bring something contemporary to it.
- I do mean contemporary, not "new" -- make music that could only be made now but don't chase novelty.
- Similarly, be aware of what your peers are doing, be interested (be obsessed!) but don't try to copy whatever seems to be "doing well" at the moment.
- Figure out what "technique" means in your music and work on it relentlessly; I don't know what that is for you but what it ain't is "showing off".
- Push deeper beyond the obvious; don't reject your first thought but don't let it also be your final one.
- Don't talk down to your audience, build a bridge to them.
- Never, ever talk about your gear.
It's possible that you hate this list. Good! Make your own!
