Dub’s emptying-out produces flatness unless voices under erasure remain present

Evidence

Burial’s mourning and melancholia sets it apart from dubstep’s emotional autism and austerity. My problem with dubstep has been that in constituting dub as a positive entity, with no relation to the Song or to pop, it has too often missed the spectrality wrought by dub’s subtraction-in-process. The emptying out has tended to produce not space but an oppressive, claustrophobic flatness. If, by contrast, Burial’s schizophonic hauntology has a 3D depth of field it is in part because of the way it grants a privileged role to voices under erasure, returning to dub’s phono-decentrism. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 214

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Identifying with the alien powered 20th century popular music’s political charge — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 103; Degrading music into audio-fog makes it more evocative rather than less — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 264; Dub’s acousmatic detaching of sound from body is necromantic politics — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 306 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Dub blues evokes phantom-slave continuities rather than merely nostalgic sound #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 297