Double positive: thoughts on an overflow aesthetic

[Tenuous thoughts about the last two Low albums and (post)digital aesthetics…]

I think Low’s Double Negative (2018) is a legit masterpiece, a shocking right-angle for a band in their fourth active decade. Probably my favourite album of the century so far.

To describe the album’s sound, I’d have to reach for a word like ‘disintegration’. The songs are corroded, like they’re washed in acid, or a block of sandstone crumbling apart to reveal the form underneath. The obvious forefather is Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, which uses an analogue technology (tape and playhead) to create slow sonic degradation.

Double Negative’s vocals aren’t spared this erosion: they’re tarnished and warped to the point of frequent illegibility:

Reviewers pointed out Double Negative is the perfect sonic fit for its age. Organic, foreboding, polluted: as a metaphor for the dread and looming collapse we felt in the deepest Trump years, it’s on fucking point.

Hey What, released this month, is no masterpiece. But it’s still a great album, and like Double Negative I feel it’s also suited to its time. While the music is still heavily distorted, Hey What’s distortion is tellingly different. Rather than the sound being eroded, pushed below its original envelope, Hey What’s distortions come from excess, from overflow.

The idea of too much sound/too much information is how fuzz and overdrive pedals work, but this overflow is distinctly digital, not analogue. It’s not just amps turned up to 11 – it’s acute digital clipping, a virtual mixing desk studded with red warning lights, and millions of spare electrons sloshing around. More double positive than double negative. And unlike its predecessor, Hey What spares its vocals from this treatment, letting them soar as Low vocals historically do:

Brian Eno famously said ‘Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.’ So yes, artists were always going to mess around with digital distortion and overflow once digital recording & DAWs became mainstream. I hear some of this experimentation in hyperpop, say, while autotune is arguably in the same conceptual ballpark. Although I’m no expert in contemporary visual culture, it seems clear to me the overflow vibe also crops up in digital art, supported by the NFT crowd in particular.

‘Something is happening here’ isn’t itself an exciting thesis, but I’ve found it interesting to poke at the connotations and associations of overflow. While Double Negative is all dread and collapse, Hey What is tonally bright. The world may not have changed all that much in three years, but the sound is nevertheless that of a band that’s come to terms with dread and chooses to meet it head-on: an equal and opposite reaction.

Hey What is still messy, challenging, and ambivalent, but to me, its overflow aesthetic evokes post-scarcity, a future of digitised abundance, in which every variation is algorithmically exploited, but with the human voice always audible above the grey goo. It suggests, dare I say, that we could live in (a bit of) hope.

So I guess I’m wondering… are Low solarpunk now?