The tools we use are inherently political, not least the ones we use to produce music. Michael Terren addresses financialization and rentierism in the world of digital audio workstation (DAW) plug-ins. What emerges is a trend towards digital instruments as services, and, in response, the necessity of seizing the means of music production.
The ‘general intellect’ is one of Marx’s most fraught, misunderstood concepts. What accounts for its reemergence in discourses around fully automated luxury communism and blockchain technology? And can the ‘general intellect’ be salvaged from its presumed base in the development of Western capitalist technology?
Thea Ballard interrogates the pop song, specifically Jimmy Eat World’s ‘A Praise Chorus’, from the dual positions of composer and listener. Fundamentally ambivalent to the song’s ability to escape from, or transgress on, its commodity status, Ballard mines the form through the lenses of ‘thin’ composition and ‘emotional’ listening in order to articulate its affective potential.
Bellona Magazine is a biannual journal and publishing collective.
We are a group of artists, culture workers and writers who seek a new paradigm for critical expression. Against the “creative” forms of mass consumption and instrumentalized social relations that predominate in the culture industries today, Bellona is our attempt to resituate criticism as a site of contemplation and contestation. Our primary object of critique is music, specifically its circumscription in the commodity-form, but our interests also range to film, literature and the visual arts, all undergirded by a broad political economic critique. At this conjuncture, it is difficult to imagine a music or a criticism unbound from contemporary exploitation, extraction and subsumption, but Bellona Magazine aims to collectivize the tools currently at hand so as to build towards that future.
