If you’re a deep-thinker or you’ve had a few good bong hits, you might really get into this guest blog by The Ocean members singer and sampler Robin Staps and visual artist Nils Lindenhayn. In their essay, the deep sea divers of The Ocean address the drawbacks of labeling music and the need to categorize art, deconstruct the post-metal category and try to figure out just what the heck to call themselves. Breathe deep and read on.
Are we “Teutonic metalcore,” “nihilistic post-prog” or “ambient math-metal?” Sometimes it’s not easy to avoid an identity crisis as a musician when you’re confronted with the vast abundance of silly terms that people use to tag you. I have kind of an ambiguous relationship to the labels we‘re given, or to being labeled at all.
Being called or named something is a strange thing, not just for a band, but for everyone at the individual level, too. See, we all get named (sometimes even before birth) long before we‘re capable of understanding or even using language. Someone else has chosen the name for us; sometimes we‘re named after dead people; we don‘t have a say in that process, which is often ritualized (even outside the Christian world) and, in modern society, has its materiality in an officially signed and stamped birth certificate with our name on it.
Funnily (but maybe not surprisingly), our name, if nothing else, is also the only part of us that remains after we die – often cast in stone, but at least on a death certificate, which, of course, gets archived by some official institution, and of course it lives on through other people carrying a name we once had, too.
Long story short: Our names are never custom-made for us; they stay with us for all our lives (changing them is virtually impossible); and they outlive us by generations, maybe into all eternity. I don‘t want to go into too much linguistic or psychoanalytical detail here, but the reason I think this can shed some light onto the old topic (which you can find in pretty much every music-related interview) is that being given a label, say “symphonic post-grind,” kind of repeats that very paradigm.
If, as a musician, your work gets labeled, that label, at least in its basic elements, has been around in the general discourse for some time (otherwise, what purpose would it serve for people unfamiliar with the music being labeled?). Also, the label is usually given to you by someone you don‘t know (yet) — someone who is in a somewhat higher and more influential position that carries a certain authority (often that of his or her institution’s name (”Wow, he‘s a writer for Kerrang Magazine”), but always that of the written word). What sucks is that you don‘t have the slightest chance of saying something in favor of or against the label that was chosen for you. Even if you give yourself a label, as we did when we started the band (”ambient soundtrack doomrock”), people will ignore, if not ridicule it and come up with something they find more appropriate. Keep in mind it’s impossible to change a label once it has been established. And whether you like it or not, the label will always take on a material form, be it on paper, as a category in a record store, on a website, or stored for all eternity in the cemetery of the Turing Galaxy: almighty Google’s cache.
Now, on the other side of the coin, even though I don‘t feel comfortable being labeled by other people, I acknowledge man‘s need to give things names. To paraphrase C.S. Peirce, we‘re just unable to think without signs, or let’s say, words –- which is why, as I am convinced, there are words before there are thoughts, or maybe there are no thoughts at all, only words, but that’s a different story. In our case, the words we’re dealing with are musical labels. And maybe there’s just no way to think about music without the proper vocabulary. I mean, what would listening to music be like if the music at hand was one you didn’t have a word for, or one that you couldn’t connect to one that you did have a word for? I would argue that it would be impossible for us to even think of it as music.
I know that nowadays, for people with access to (and love for) a wide range of music, it’s hard to imagine such a thing because for us, there is hardly anything truly new, and pretty much everything that makes a sound, even if it‘s plain white noise or mere silence, can be recorded and be called music (just think of Whitehouse or John Cage). So, if you‘re sufficiently open-minded, you get to the point where you‘ve heard everything, meaning you understand the language of music and always have a point of reference for new things you hear. But that just proves my point (that, unfortunately, we can‘t do without labels), and after all, I can imagine there‘s still lots of people who would be incapable of making any sense of our music because they‘ve never even heard anything remotely similar.
For example, Robin‘s father’s first reaction to our music was something like “sounds kinda like Pink Floyd.” We had never thought of our music being anything like Pink Floyd, but for him, that was the closest point of reference available. As Robin‘s father is far from being a cultural hermit, but still comes up with that somewhat odd comparison, it’s easy to imagine people who entirely lack these points of reference or even words for our music – and therefore would probably reject the idea of our stuff being music at all.
In a nutshell, in order to write, or even properly think about music as music, I’m afraid you just need things like these labels that reviewers, promoters, and fans alike so happily attach to what we do. I might not always like the labels we‘re given, but that insight into the very necessity of it makes it easier for me to forgive people for at least the less stupid ones they come up with.
As for the real obviously stupid tags, we extremely dislike being labeled something like “metalcore” or even “Teutonic metalcore.” Not only do we have nothing to do with that genre called “metalcore, we also have hardly any ties to the German scene associated with that music.
And then there is this whole darn “post” thing that has been prefixed to pretty much every kind of music during the past fifteen years. And to me, that‘s where the problem lies – it’s not the word itself, but the use that has been made of it. To me, “post-whatever” stands for a building upon, but at the same time questioning, and going beyond something. With that in mind, it’s absolutely conceivable to me why, for example, the term “post-rock” was coined to accommodate such great, pioneering bands like Tortoise who really crossed borders or closed gaps between between styles, between genres, between entire worlds. But even though we’re on a similar mission, I don‘t feel comfortable with that term because if almost everything or everyone is “post-rock,” “post-metal,” “post-prog,” as seems to be the case nowadays, it’s merely an empty word devoid of reference to something real.
And of course, there‘s always that big “post-modern” looming large behind every other “post-something.” To me, “post-rock” and post-modernity are almost inseparable, for post rock’s main characteristics all apply to the post-modern as well. Now, if someone calls our music, say, “post-metal,” it always triggers that huge chain of associations I have with the post-modern – a lot of which, I think, do apply to our music big time, but some others totally miss the point. On the one hand, to me, our music is extremely post-modern for example in terms of its eclecticism, its transgression of boundaries, and the way it relates form and content. There are no limits as to what can be quoted or borrowed or stolen from whom. A melodic surf guitar can stand amidst a brutal blast beat attack, just like a calm sax solo can develop into a chaotic hardcore orgy. Whereas ornaments are a crime in modern art and everything that doesn’t serve the intended purpose is excluded (as if there was the purpose in music), our music, just like our optical appearance, embraces the ornament. Whereas the modern celebrates reason, abstraction, and enlightenment, our music represents dislocation, chaos, and physical confrontation with the outside world, leaving lots of room for empty signifiers free to be filled and made sense of by the listener.
On the other hand, our music represents construction rather than fragmentation – and that’s not just because it’s composed music all the way. We‘re not trying to taking things apart, we’re on a mission to construct something, using of the pieces of a deconstructed world. We’re trying to create something original, perfectly aware of the fact that in this world there is no such thing as true originality. But then again, that should not be seen as taking a stance in favor of the modern. As a matter of fact, it’s the values of the modern world that we’re at war with’ as expressed, for example, throughout the whole Fluxion album. You see, the question of The Ocean being modern or post-modern doesn’t really lead us anywhere. If anything, I’d say we‘re kind of a-modern – much in the way Sal Paradise or Tyler Durden are.
