Just got tickets to Prince; ridiculously excited. I didn't even know he had a track called "Pop Life" either, how stupid is that.

I wonder what the consensus is on why Prince became rubbish. Was it house or hiphop which left him outflanked? I guess there's a case to be made that house's rhythmic invention and mantric power left his songs feeling a little inconsequential. For me, the wonder of Prince can be summed up in the opening bars of "1999", where other members of the group sing the opening lines (perhaps before the man himself even takes to the stage in live performance), before his ludicrously reverbed voice wraps around the track (he really does almost make love to the track, doesn't he?). This kind of orgiastic pandrogeny seemed both decadent and feminine in the rock-hard era of the 90s, and particularly, hiphop. Strange how the era of the new man coincided, musically, with markedly less pansexuality in pop. As if masculinity had to protect itself, to retract...

Listening to recent hauntological releases by the likes of Rolan Vega and Mordant Music, it's surprising how fun they are, how much a sense of play there is. And I wonder what this means. Vega's Documentary and Mordant's Carrion Squared are both composed of numerous short, playful overtures. Each track is like a new spin of the wheel; define new parameters and letting the experiment roll. Often, the starting points of each track seem more interesting to the artists than elaborations on these themes.

Mordant have a particularly strange taste as sometimes it there's a perverse sense of humour there (it should be admitted that Carrion Squared started as made-to-order library music). They love their dread-inducing synth wooshes, as if trapping themselves in some particularly twisted corner of prog-tronica. But to me this doesn't sound haunted so much as play with illusion, a magic trick, sleight of hand. The feel of these two releases is of being locked in a capsule at the end of the world, your dreams haunted by the ersatz reality of a TV screen. Above all, there's not the feeling of peeling back layers of time that one feels looking at old photographs, unearthing old diaries and letters. That feeling is, above all, the feeling of being confronted by internal memories instantiated in objective, external form, also analogous to looking at oneself in a mirror. Whereas the presence of the composer, of human agency is the overiding impression of these recent releases. Strange to think, but by entering into this kind of rewriting of memories, the end result ends up further than ever from conveying the passive, imutable trajectory of time's passage.