‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’ and Youtube’s War on Danish Music

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. This is a damage-control disclaimer because tech-giants are lawsuit-happy parasites who will happily bankrupt normal people to add another few thousand to their trillions in capital.

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No-Wave recently received an email from Danish musician SØS Gunver Ryberg. It contained her powerful new track, ‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’ (review below). But in the same email, Ryberg stated Youtube may take her track down, as they are removing all Danish music from their website. Yes, all.

Since 2013, Denmark’s music has lived on Youtube according to an agreement between the site and Danish copyright collective KODA. But recently that’s changed. Copyright collectives like KODA (a U.K. example being PRS for Music) are organisations who license and manage copyrighted works. Royalties are delivered to the copyright holders. The amount recieved is determined by the artists' foothold in the industry, and the popularity of their work. Such collectives are either union-style opt-in organisations, or NGOs established by statute. Pocket-lining notwithstanding, the aim of these collectives is to ensure the fairest possible payment to copyright holders for their work.

It comes as no surprise that some collectives have histories of documented corruption, delayed payments, and dishonest distribution of revenue. In serving out slices of the pie, organisations labour under the self-deception that they themselves baked it, glutting before feeding others. To some, they're self-appointed moneymen and bully-boys who operate legally-sanctioned shakedowns. Others see them as a welcome security net; preventing piracy, thievery, and the hosting of non-attributed work. Denmark’s KODA seem to fall into the second camp, with no high-profile controversy to their name. Denmark's lively and experimental music scene doesn't feel like it could be made by the discouraged.

So what’s changed since 2013? In April of this year, KODA’s licensing agreement with Youtube expired. Polaris Nordic, a sort of pan-Scandi alliance between KODA and Finnish/Norwegian collectives TONO and Teosto, have since been negotiating a replacement.

In the interim, Youtube offered a temporary extension to its deal with KODA. The trouble is, according to KODA, Youtube proposed a new condition which required a seventy per cent reduction in payment to KODA’s clients. KODA assert that Youtube were already pretty miserly before this move. Youtube pay out out far less on average than any other streaming service, and KODA have rejected their deal. As a result, all Danish music has been pulled from Youtube in Denmark. This blanket ban has even affected Danish musicians unaffiliated with KODA. Amidst a global pandemic, and resultant dearth of live performance, this move threatens further financial instability to an industry already on its knees.

It’s hard to see Youtube’s actions as anything other than the latest example of twenty-first century tech giants’ monopolistic power. Complaints of copyright collectives’ stranglehold on art funding seem antiquated and quaint. Now we contend with shameless, nauseatingly corporate one-upmanship and power-play; the multi-billionaires’ version of “this is a knife”.

Youtube now positions itself as a music streaming platform—something it never did in 2013. The site even flogs its own ‘Youtube Music’ service through useless self-serving spam every time you visit it. In 2018, the IFPI’s Music Consumer Insight Report found that forty-seven per cent of music consumption now streams via Youtube. This is marginally shy of anything warranting investigation by a monopoly commission. The question is: can the arts afford to allow its most dominant representative to withhold funding, globally centralise copyright policy, and dictate artists’ royalty payments? Because that’s the way it’s going—greedy guts wants the entire pie.

For these reasons, No-Wave will host Vimeo and Bandcamp links to SØS’s music video below. We decline to host links to any Youtube content going forward. We also maintain that fans of music should—wherever possible—support their favourite artists through Bandcamp or physical purchases instead of streaming.

With that said, here is a review of SØS’ track:

SØS Gunver Ryberg—‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’

AD 93, Aug. 2020

Earlier in the year, SØS Gunver Ryberg released a surprise EP on the label formerly known as Whities (now AD 93). Whities 030 was a clear standout among the label’s already-stellar catalogue. According to our review, the release “[reaffirmed] Ryberg as one of the best producers about”. This month, she releases a bonus track, ‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’, and its accompanying music video.

A natural extension of her work on Whities 030, the track tempers techno sensibilities with modern edge. Unlike than its 90s antecedents, which mined an imagined future apocalypse for drama, ‘Doing Our Best…’ occupies the apocalyptic now. This thing sounds like Greta Thunberg piloting an attack helicopter. How fitting that it releases the same week we discover Greenland is past the point of no return. The kitschy cool of the apocalypse has evaporated in the heat, and “anthropocene” has entered public lexicon. The problem is now so immediate we’ve invented a way to say it fast.

The track's panicked urgency extends into its video, a Weirdcore-style electronic amalgam from Push 1 stop’s Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules. The video depicts a globe, which disintegrates to reveal its core flickering like a dying flashlight. It continues to centre on various dissolutions and disintegrations of this globe, iterating and reiterating the world’s final dying gasps.

The music’s form follows; a garbled and muscular gut-punch of chaos in the style of late Autechre. It’s the full-body experience that Ryberg excels in, this time inducing a fight-or-flight response to a crisis in which it’s futile to do either. Climate change is a massive and horrifying subject. As a species we coast on the idea that “we haven’t gone extinct yet, so we probably never will”. We aren’t hardwired to examine our own mortality, and doing so takes courage and conviction. It’s commendable that Ryberg could even stand to create a track this immediate.

You can’t drop the ball with subject matter this intense—and ‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’ knows that. It’s a track of enormous power that feels like it could shake ice floes loose and rattle the Earth in its cage. While not easy listening, this track has a fair claim to contextualising the impending apocalypse better than any others. Try ignoring it after this.

Whities 030 is available for purchase and download here. Watch the video for ‘Doing Our Best Is No Longer Good Enough’ below.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Music: SØS Gunver Ryberg (https://sosgunverryberg.com/) Video: Push 1 stop (push1stop.com/) Mastering: Joel Krozer, Six Bit Deep 'Doing our best is no longer good enough’ appears courtesy of AD 93 on Whities 030. https://sosgunverryberg.bandcamp.com/album/whities-030 Video is commissioned by Strøm for Strøm Festival 2020. strm.dk Thanks to: Statens Kunstfond, Ekko Festival, Norberg Festival, Radar and Intonal festival.

тпсб—Whities 031

тпсб provide Whities’ swansong with this three-track EP. The label will rename to AD 93 from their next release onwards, shedding an identity which had become cumbersome under the yoke of recently-transformed conversations and social attitudes. A kind of musical ecdysis, Whities 031 doesn’t disappoint—it’s as transitional and transformative for тпсб as it is for AD 93. Those familiar with тпсб’s Sekundenschlaf will have been anticipating Whities 031 eagerly. The happy surprise is that it spits in the face of these expectations to carve an entirely new path.

Sekundenschlaf felt like unattributed, authorless tracks recovered from an Eastern European tar pit. The album was dark, mysterious, sludgy and partially-decayed; the jungle equivalent of a snuff film. тпсб’s full-length Blackest Ever Black release was a microcosm of that label’s whole vibe.

Since Blackest Ever Black’s death, тпсб have burst from their cocoon with a far brighter collection of tracks. There’s still an endemic spookiness, but drums are crisp and luminous; treble-heavy and loaded with feather-light snares. The EP has a clean, spacious mix. It's the polar opposite to the “through-next-door’s-wall” muddiness of Sekundenschlaf. We’re hearing the same beast, using one of its other heads; as vigorous and inventive but with a rejigged vocabulary. It’s neat that тпсб’s two releases come from labels whose names contrast each other so absolutely, in what feels like a case of art imitating life.

Whities 031, in some sense, feels like a descendant of Orbital’s In Sides or Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions. Its sound is not only organic but interior. The EP has a peculiar wetness. In its delays, and echoes which pan from left to right, 031 sounds like blood flowing through ears. The cellular chatter that livens veins. It provokes a journey within oneself, inspecting the mechanical status of the human body; oscillating and oily.

‘If This Is I Don’t Know What Isn’t’ is the apex of this exploration, wisely situated slap-bang in the EP’s centre. The track breathes a soft fluidity into its own very angular and geometric landscape—it’s both the dock and the waves. Burial infamously sampled bullet casings and excerpts of the soundtrack of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 on Untrue. тпсб here suggest that game’s setting, the Big Shell, with a quasi-ambient industrial beat that’s sure to remind many listeners of happy hours spend slipping on bird shit and soaking up the pale PS2 sun.

The nostalgia doesn’t end there, though, courtesy of тпсб’s confrontational old-schoolism. This was present on their last release, too. But where Sekundenschlaf felt like an exercise in nostalgia—an almost sardonic resurrection of long-dead aesthetics—Whities 031 is a joyous remixing of the glory days of jungle and footwork.

Whities 031 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

SØS Gunver Ryberg—Whities 030

Last year’s Entangled saw SØS Gunver Ryberg straddling the frontier between techno and noise. The release marked her expansion from transcendent noisemaker to something more rounded, incorporating melody and moments of yawning space. Ryberg's music was both more complex and accessible than ever. Her latest release, Whities 030, sees an even more comprehensive engagment with this mode. Intended to explore “the connection between destruction and creation”, Ryberg makes a graceful arc from order into chaos and dissolution, before hoiking us back by the end.

Opener ‘In The Core’ expands and compresses like a biomechanical lung. Its title and timbre suggest a gaping cavern with oil-slicked and artificial walls. Ryberg has soundtracked projects in the past (most famously for Playdead’s platform game Inside), but it’s still surprising just how visual her work can feel. Synthwork on Whities 030 feels in the tradition of 1980s horror maestros. Its sound carries video-nasty nostalgia, and a tension which suggests things may explode into violence at any second.

‘Solar Flare’ is even more oppressive; doused by foggy, thunderous washes of bass. A bright melodic lead eventually swoops in to puncture holes in the texture, but is itself doomy and heavy-legged. The air thickens, and path darkens, the track’s voice is fortified but forbidden to form words. By the end of ‘Solar Flare’, structure is so oblique as to seem absent.

Ryberg runs with this obliqueness in ‘Mirage of Spiral Wavelengths’. We experience further dismantlement and disintegration. To paraphrase Daniel Lopatin, we could be seeing the last known image of a song. Limping and injured, hissing steam from its fissures, the track stutters slowly through a post-apocalypse. Comprising dissolute, fragmentary elements, ‘Mirage…’ is just that—a mirage. Warping in heat haze, the track disappears before our eyes, and eludes understanding. But that makes it no less enticing.

‘Flux’ sees the return of the arrhythmic beats last heard in ‘In The Core’. It consequently can’t help but feel like some kind of return to baseline. With that said, we still walk in disordered territory. Ryberg’s drums are like Autechre procedural generations attempted on a decaying punch-card computer. They grab impotently for coherence but instead abandon to decay. The effect is unique and captivating. ‘Flux’ not only impresses on a visceral level, but is a technical stumper, too. It’s true: any sufficiently advanced music production is indistinguishable from magic.

Given its predecessors, ‘Velvet Dome Of Becoming’ is a curious closer. It’s anchored by a gorgeous drone—what sounds like the best didgeridoo simulation since Richard D. James went by ‘The’ Aphex Twin—and has one foot planted in a verdant organic world. After the toil of this depressive set of tracks, it’s a welcome surprise to end with contemplation, mystery and hope.

Those who recognise SØS Gunver Ryberg’s name won’t need a recommendation for Whities 030. They will already know her as an artist in a state of constant exploration—of sound, of the self, and world that huddles around our bodies. Her every release is outstanding in quality. Each builds on, and often subverts, what came before. Whities 030 does nothing to buck the trend, and reaffirms Ryberg as one of the best producers about. This is another worthy addition to her tremendous catalogue.

Whities 030 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Hanni El Khatib—FLIGHT

Hanni El Khatib’s FLIGHT is ostensibly a dance album. It’s driven throughout by beats which recall the best of classic Detroit techno (one track’s title even doffs a cap to the city). But, at the same time, it’s oddly compressed and murky, with bass that trades clarity for lo-fi fogginess. This style is by no means bad—there’s intentionality to it. In the spirit of Liars’ Mess and T.F.C.F., this album has no floor—so the listening experience is frantic and anxiety-inducing, like struggling to stand up in the deep end of a pool.

Once acclimated to this production, you’ll be able to pick out little cracks of brightness, like the piano solo in pop banger ‘ALIVE’, or the tight snares that punctuate ‘STRESSY’. Such moments of hope enliven and enrich the album’s more fraught sections—and when FLIGHT opens out like this, it’s really gratifying to hear.

The anxiety is deepened by the album’s inability to settle—at just over half an hour, it manages to jam in over a dozen compositions, whose tones all veer wildly apart. The effect is a colourful collage of ideas that don’t really try to coalesce. This album doesn’t have one unifying statement of intent—it has about ten contradictory ones—but they all provide a thrill.   

A real standout is ‘LEADER’, which works its theme into its composition with a call-and-response that sounds like Fear of Music-era Talking Heads. In fact, while they may not appear to share much DNA on the surface, Hanni El Khatib and David Byrne both reflect fairly similar aspects of the world in their work. Everything’s a coiled spring—tightly-wound and quietly aggressive. You feel, with FLIGHT, on the precipice of something that’s out of control; you’re at a party which is about to erupt into violence; watching a trapeze artist hang in the air, certain they’re about to fatll. But you know you’re going to watch, mesmerised, no matter how ugly things get.

FLIGHT is available for pre-order and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Deena Abdelwahed—Dhakar

Deena Abdelwahed’s Dhakar finds complexity through a stacking of simple beats and phrases. This EP follows the massive Khonnar, and continues that album’s tendency towards polyrhythms and atonality, which rumble beneath beefy lines of instantly gratifying club ecstasy. ‘Ah’na Hakkeka’, which opens this release, luxuriates in allowing its faces to coalesce—but when they do, it’s transportive; the same rush as a brostep drop. Abdelwahed achieves, through restraint, what has driven many producers to excess.

Two more coalescent pieces of Abdelwahed’s music are its contemporary and traditional methods. ‘Insaniyiti’ makes a spectacle of darkness; a compact cousin to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘Mladic’ which similarly hijacked the grandeur of traditional Arabic music and twisted it into something sinister. Abdelwahed does not deliver an insincere “fusion” that waters down the essence of traditional music for a global audience—she repurposes, recontextualises and transforms her samples, as any producer worth their salt should.

A separation between the two elements is maintained through some ingenious production. Bright drums, handclaps, and synths buzz like midges over a swamp of murky low frequencies. Dhakar is crisp, intricate and precise as a machine but keeps some of that handmade sloppiness that accompanies live performance. Where the boundary between these two styles sits is unclear; timbres blur in an inscrutable haze. But the overall effect is one of cloistered unity—like two rooms separated by glass, two yards separated by chain-link. The boundary is present but porous.

A growing portfolio of studio work and some stellar mixes have quickly established Abdelwahed as a pioneer in her field. She has a keen understanding of what makes a good set. But she also has a desire to expand far beyond that, stretching towards a future that she tightens focus on with every release.

Dhakar is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe