"What was once underground is now coming to the surface"
About this Quote
A composer doesn’t need to name the thing in order to make you hear it. “What was once underground is now coming to the surface” works because it’s both a cultural diagnosis and a compositional instruction: pay attention to what’s been muffled, and listen for the moment it breaks into audibility.
Bryars, whose work often prizes the overlooked and the durational (music that seems to hover at the edge of perception), frames change as emergence rather than rupture. “Underground” implies not just obscurity but pressure: scenes, ideas, and identities pushed out of polite institutions, surviving in basements, pirate frequencies, marginal venues, small-label ecosystems. The phrase “coming to the surface” keeps the motion slow and physical, like a submerged motif rising through texture. It’s a reminder that cultural shifts aren’t always revolutions; sometimes they’re long crescendos that finally become impossible to ignore.
The subtext is ambivalent. Surface can mean recognition, resources, safety. It can also mean assimilation, sanitization, the inevitable moment when the market arrives to “discover” what communities already built. Bryars’ line sidesteps moral victory laps. It suggests a cycle: the underground isn’t inherently purer; it’s simply where experimentation hides when official taste hardens.
Contextually, it reads like a post-1960s artist surveying how avant-garde techniques, once coded as forbidding, seep into film scores, ambient playlists, and institutional programming. The sentence is quiet, but it’s not passive. It’s a cue to track what’s rising now - and to ask who benefits when it finally hits daylight.
Bryars, whose work often prizes the overlooked and the durational (music that seems to hover at the edge of perception), frames change as emergence rather than rupture. “Underground” implies not just obscurity but pressure: scenes, ideas, and identities pushed out of polite institutions, surviving in basements, pirate frequencies, marginal venues, small-label ecosystems. The phrase “coming to the surface” keeps the motion slow and physical, like a submerged motif rising through texture. It’s a reminder that cultural shifts aren’t always revolutions; sometimes they’re long crescendos that finally become impossible to ignore.
The subtext is ambivalent. Surface can mean recognition, resources, safety. It can also mean assimilation, sanitization, the inevitable moment when the market arrives to “discover” what communities already built. Bryars’ line sidesteps moral victory laps. It suggests a cycle: the underground isn’t inherently purer; it’s simply where experimentation hides when official taste hardens.
Contextually, it reads like a post-1960s artist surveying how avant-garde techniques, once coded as forbidding, seep into film scores, ambient playlists, and institutional programming. The sentence is quiet, but it’s not passive. It’s a cue to track what’s rising now - and to ask who benefits when it finally hits daylight.
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