Sign Value

Loraine James - Gentle Confrontation (2023)

Loraine James is an electronic producer from North London who has been putting out a steady stream of releases since her exceptional debut For You and I (2019). While she also works under the loosely ambient moniker Whatever the Weather, the Loraine James sound palette is defined by abstraction: off-kilter sampling, glitching, and a loose rhythmic phrasing that places her out-of-step with any electronic producers working exclusively in the confines of the digital grid.

Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine put forward the argument that major music streaming services of today — especially Spotify — prioritise an anodyne version of ambient music, a far cry from its 20th century radical roots, while simultaneously making all music a kind of ambient, background experience. In response to the book, I wrote a blog post about Loraine James, highlighting her as an artist deliberately putting a kind of messiness or bricolage sound into her ambient productions, directly in opposition to the direction in which a particular version of “ambient music” more broadly, is going.

So it’s a real thrill to have Loraine James’ music now streaming on Cantilever after bringing the Hyperdub record label onboard as our latest partner. Hyperdub label manager Marcus Scott was kind enough to provide some generous personal reflections on Gentle Confrontation, available to read now on the Cantilever app.

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Followers of the Cantilever blog will know it would frequently reference cultural critic Mark Fisher, who himself was a huge fan of the future-oriented sound of Hyperdub (in fact, they released a very intriguing audio documentary curated by him called On Vanishing Land, on the Flatlines sub-label).

I was pleased to find a short blog post from Fisher from 2003, where he discussed the value (or lack thereof) inherent to MP3s with Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman aka Kode9, which feels increasingly prescient in the streaming era.

Fisher begins by referring to the idea of “sign value” – not how much something costs, nor it’s use value – but, perhaps more mysteriously, the prestige that we give to a particular object.

“Does the mp3 have sign value?” Fisher asks, “My conjecture is that, lacking the allegedly supplementary features of the record or the CD (the cover, even the materiality of the disc itself), reduced to pure functionality, the mp3 lacks those elements in which sign value could be invested.”

The “sign value” Fisher was referring here is summarised by the CD or record collection: “show me your record collection, and I’ll tell you who you really are”, goes one aphorism. The physical objects — immediately recognisable — instantly say something about your identity, something lost when a music collection was concealed on iTunes, or a digital screen, not on display in your house. The digital collection is merely useful then, it doesn’t say anything about you as an individual, it doesn’t signify anything, so the argument goes.

Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman, on the other hand, disagreed. He suggested that the MP3 could have “sign value”. As Fisher explains: “Steve pointed out that the mp3 is an audio object, and that there is no reason to assume that only visual objects have sign value.”

I agree with Steve. That is to say: under the right conditions, MP3s and digital music more broadly can mean more than just what they cost or their usefulness. Often, though — and I would say that this is what Liz Pelly is arguing — these conditions aren’t met, or are even deliberately not optimised for.

The conditions to prestige digital music, regardless of its usefulness or monetary value, and maybe — though of course it’s in the ear of the beholder — give it a kind of “sign value”, are exactly what we have set out to achieve with Cantilever.

https://www.cantilever-music.com/

I spoke at length with the brilliant Darren Hemmings about new approaches to music streaming, why we made a standalone app (as opposed to just a monetised substack) and independent record labels. You can read the full interview below (it’s in two parts).

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