![PC Music]()
PC Music Volume 1 is anti-physical music for an anti-physical time. Like everything that A. G. Cook’s London-based label’s released since 2013, these 10 songs are invocations of the hyperreal, created to meet the anxieties of an age where bodies are rarely written about as sites of joy or authenticity, and more frequently discussed as zones of inequity, violence, embarrassment and pain. The desire to exist as a well-tended garden of pixels fuels many of our culture’s dominant systems: the databases of altered thoughts, distorted images, the avatars that demonstrate reaction or stand in for action. Like all of these networks and products, PC Music answers our desire to escape the burden of physical presence — and in the process ends up sharpening and perpetuating the desire even further.
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Both a label and a self-contained genre, PC Music is constructed from deep abstractions of pop and experimental electronic music; its building blocks are the musical equivalent of emoji, symbols that replace words that replace voices. It’s an airbrushed articulation of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality; it has an avant-garde surface but is reactionary in its bones. Sonically, it’s a response to today’s alarmingly easy production glosses, the intense plurality of sub-subgenres that flourish online. If pop’s basic work is to grab you by the heart, PC Music flips and disses that aim completely. The label’s sound resembles what aliens would produce if they sunk a jukebox in acid and then tried, from the randomized wreckage, to communicate some version of love. Instead of affection, they’ll give you a heart-shaped simulacrum—and maybe, as suggests PC Music, that’s what you wanted after all. When physical presence is a source of so much complication, sometimes an abstraction is the only thing a person can bear.
A test of the boundaries, possibilities and limitations of this ultra-focused aesthetic, PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of work into a half-hour. Taken together, the rapturous, nightmarish cartoon corpus is maddeningly effective; it solidifies PC Music’s ability to only produce strong reactions, whether starry-eyed captivation or powerful revulsion or a nauseating juxtaposition of both poles. There’s a meaningful spectrum of approaches within the PC Music ethos—classical composer Danny L Harle’s “In My Dreams” has a heartbreakingly soft, sweet, harmonic gravity, while A. G. Cook’s alter ego Lipgloss Twins’ “Wannabe” is a chopped-up, anti-melodic spatter of brand names and robot garble—but there’s a relentless logical consistency to the sound. Every track feels almost auto-generated, scrambled, which makes the human precision in each arrangement even more eerie: PC Music sounds chaotic but is sneakily minimalist, deliberate to the last distorted note.
The calculation behind this effect is a large part of what makes it monstrous: it’s the sound of whimsy without spontaneity, lightness without joy, longing without knowledge, aggression with no object. It’s a dollhouse universe, for female voices and female figures only. The male producers and artists are controllingly invisible in PC Music, and it’s hard to say whether that’s a real aesthetic constraint or a deliberate large-scale perpetuation of the idea of women as powerless, squeaky, sweet. The genre, anyway, has been slapped with labels of “gender appropriation,” and the sound does feel awkwardly, distinctly male sometimes, in its “South Park”-ish warehouse artlessness. But, if anyone’s really in drag here, it’s humans pretending to be avatars—the total elision of soul.
Like a Kardashian, PC Music cannot be insulted by the word “contrived.” PC Music is deeply contrived; it’s fake as hell, that’s the point, that’s the entire energy. But this ethos, of course, has its limits. PC Music only works when its theoretical intention lines up with its physical effect: when you listen to it and become instantly depersonalized, blissfully and bubbly, more pixel than flesh. The best route to this end naturally centers on pleasure. In Volume 1, the pastel jelly-bean melodies and baby-girl anime coos of Hannah Diamond’s “Every Night” and A. G. Cook’s “Beautiful” reach this synthetic liftoff; the two pair up again for “Keri Baby”, a maniacally playful track with a stormy bassline, a bubble noise vamping, a refrain of “Give it to the girl/ Give it to the girl/ Give it to the cutest girl.” The closing track, easyFun’s “Laplander”, is transcendent: all simulated mechanical longing, synth squeaks and stilted voices reaching for ecstasy. In tracks that are less joyful—GFOTY’s “Don’t Wanna / Let’s Do It”, for example—the self-perpetuating darkness and denial that PC Music draws on gets a little too clear for comfort.
PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album—the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span—the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling. You wish you didn’t live in a world that produced PC Music, but you do—and because you do, thank the god in the machine for PC Music. It’ll come whispering and screaming in an absolute vacuum; it’s a party reconstituted long after anyone’s been there to laugh. It’s empty, and yet somehow the stakes are monumental. Can you chip your way to the real through this pixelated thicket? Well, you can, and worse, you have to.
Between 1968 and 1970, some of the finest, most obscure British psychedelic pop singles of the era escaped on the Spark label, the newly-inaugurated recording arm of long-established publishers Southern Music. Recorded in the basement studio of the company’s Denmark Street premises, these tracks often featured the same cabal of musicians and songwriters, leading to a homogenous in-house style that perfectly encapsulates the late 1960s British pop-psych studio sound.
