Parish Bracha

This paper examines the ongoing formation of a cultural era that is defined by a process of techno-economic consolidation and algorithmic fragmentation. This is contrasted with the purely fragmentary cultural response to the postmodern deconstruction that defined the latter-half of the 20th century and engendered distinct musical counter-cultures. Without the monoculture necessary for these traditional forms of rebellion to function, the musical counter-culture of this nascent era must be radically less fixed in step.

Power and culture are in a contradictory process of becoming simultaneously diffuse and concentrated. As power becomes filtered through a singular techno-economic process, yet survives on a mechanism of granular segmentation, culture is increasingly mediated through monolithic online platforms while being expressed through increasingly fragmented microscenes. AI has an algorithmically-driven teleological imperative to segment and classify artistic production and cultural identities into data-commodities, driving this process further.

The result of these processes is a culture in the West that presents as a diffuse granular flow of micro-identities which manifest too transiently to grasp and reform. These conditions render traditional strategies of détournement obsolete. As systems of control become entrenched in transient and highly-subdivided cultural mechanisms, new forms of subversion become necessary.

Music's interoperability and resistance to fixation make it uniquely suited for navigating these fractured territories by forming unclassifiable assemblages as models for resistance. Performance emerges as a critical space where these assemblages can be constructed, deconstructed, and experienced in their necessary immediacy. Resistance is proposed as an adoption of tactical incoherence by selectively embracing cultural and sonic contradictions that cannot be resolved through traditional frameworks. Rather than seeking retreat or continuing exhausted deconstruction, this positive engagement with cultural breakdown finds opportunities within incoherence itself, suggesting new possibilities for human expression and connection in this rapidly forming era.

About the Artist

Parish is a composer, producer, and sound artist currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has been pseudonymously releasing music since 2012, and his music has been used in film, television, documentary, video games, and theatre.

Constructed from a composite of acoustic instruments, bespoke electronics, field recordings, physical modelling, extended techniques, and heavy digital signal processing, Parish’s work lies somewhere in the indefinite space between acoustic and electronic and is beholden to neither.

His performances explore the relationship between sound, body, artifice, religious ecstasy, and atonement, and include the use of custom-made wearable devices, electroacoustic instruments, and explosive movement.

Parish’s study of sound is also informed by his previous work as a neurobiologist and computational geneticist where he researched human hearing loss and bioacoustics.