WHAT IS SUBTLE ANTIMUSIC?

The music of Lugubrious 78 has been released intermittently and randomly for many years, drawing on a DIY aesthetic. This seems popular when situated in the evolving music world and stuck in the artistic traditions of the twentieth century. SUBTLE ANTIMUSIC is the evolution of a creative process. It is a three-volume series. It is a faux-genre. It is an obfuscated amalgamation of the (artistic, methodological, philosophical, political, psychological) underpinnings of a non-genre, the pretentious anti-art of SUBTLE ANTIMUSIC and Lugubrious 78. It is circular, incomplete, and never to be believed. It is the current evolution of these ideas, created over the last thirty years, to distil the origins, essence, and potential for the invented micro-genre. Some of these endure, some have been lost. Others have been destroyed. Art dies. Music. Neither ever existed. It is a metaphor for the mind. It begins with a grammatical error.

Lugubrious 78 is a morbidly ecstatic, capricious experimental music project, at the crossroads of the world and the self. It evolved from a series of musical activities dating back to the early 90s. Someone once said (whilst reflecting on the volatility of SUBTLE ANTIMUSIC and Lugubrious 78):

“… reveals music that is abandoned to the rhythms and temperament of the modern world. Striving for consistency, it is constantly undulating; characterised by overlapping, transitional and fluctuating moments lost within the rhythm of cycles and perpetual noise. It can be intrusively loud, uncomfortable and painful, but also strangely reassuring. It is mercurial, impulsive, irritable, turbulent, suspicious and full of fear. It is compelling and contagious yet provokes (and reflects) ambivalence and a dichotomy of emotion that is also profoundly personal...”

It is still not clear why.