“Everything that was once directly experienced has become a mere representation.” Sentences as harsh as this are those signed by the French philosopher Guy Debord when he wrote his essay The Society of the Spectacle. In the same way, while respecting his original French title, Squaric has named his latest EP.
La société du spectacle is made up of five original tracks by Squaric and five remixes by like-minded artists: Marcelus, Makaton, Paul Birken, Perm and Voidloss. The five remixes are from “La marchandise comme spectacle”, which is the second original track on the EP.
Squaric is a young Argentinean producer and DJ living in Barcelona and creator of the music and experimental art festival Teorema and Diffuse Reality Records, a label and producer of techno music also based in Barcelona. Squaric has been working on the La société du spectacle EP since 2017. It was in 2019 when he decided that he had finished the project, always inspired by Guy Debord’s work published in 1967:
Debord traces the development of a modern society in which “everything that was once directly experienced has become a mere representation”. Debord argues that history of social life can be understood as “the decline from being to having and from having to simply appearing”. This condition, in which authentic social life has been replaced, according to Debord, by its represented image, in which “the historical moment shows how the commodity completes its colonization of social life”. The spectacle is the inverted image of society, in which the relations between commodities have supplanted the relations between people, in whom the passive identification with the spectacle supplants the genuine activity. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes. “Instead, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
It is important to send a message when music is featured. I read a lot of Debord and his idea of how society is manipulated in a consumerist system led by the mass media fits in well with mine. With this album, I’m trying to wake up even more people against this system.
Squaric combined digital methods with analogue material in the production of the EP. Ableton Live was the base software. His main tools, the ARP Odyssey, the MicroKorg XL and the 808. All this, without forgetting the many FX pedals (effects) he always uses when creating music: DOD FX 53 Classic Tube, Nobels DT-XN Distortion Xtreme, Maxon FX Pedals and Boss RV-6.
The La société du spectacle EP will be released on March 5th in CD format, within the DREACD 18 catalogue. Today, we listen exclusively on Xceed Night Mag “Unité et division dans l’apparence”, the third of Squaric’s five original tracks. A slight introduction already makes us glimpse rough sounds from the first second. The drums corroborate this as soon as they appear half a minute later. The drops barely get longer. A few claps accompany the few seconds that lack drums. The intensity is high and constant.
Tracklist:
1. Squaric – La séparation achevée
2. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle
3. Squaric – Unité et division dans l’apparence
4. Squaric – Le prolétariat comme sujet et comme représentation
5. Squaric – L’aménagement du territoire
6. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle (Marcelus Remix)
7. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle (Makaton Remix)
8. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle (Paul Birken Remix)
9. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle (Perm Remix)
10. Squaric – La marchandise comme spectacle (Voidloss Remix)
(Cover Image: © Yvonne Cilia)
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