From Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo
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RIS BIB ENDNOTEFrom Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo
Publication date: 03.2023
Arts & Cultural Studies Review, 2023, Issue 1 (55) Kulturowe emancypacje i transgresje, pp. 53 - 68
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.23.004.17847Authors
From Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo
In 2016, Kanye West released his highly anticipated eight album, The Life of Pablo, on a streaming platform Deezer, where it remained exclusively available for over a month. This prevented audiences from several countries, where the service has not yet launched, from accessing it. As a result, Japanese electronic music producer, Toyomu, created his own version of the album, without hearing the original. Browsing the internet, he tracked every sample and every lyric that West used, and assembled them into an original work, comprising an “imagining” of how The Life of Pablo could have sounded. His endeavor, while ingrained in the cultural logic of remix, goes beyond it, comprising a unique musical entity that eludes easy categorization. Therefore, the paper employs Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to account for its specificity. This entails a shift from a relational and processual understanding of the musical album, already implied in West’s work, to mapping the topological structure of possibilities, defined by invariants and attractors, that hints at real but not actual vectors of its becoming. As such, Toyomu’s undertaking provides an opportunity to further rethink the concept of the musical album in a time when it was already decentered by the transition from material objects to digital data.
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Information: Arts & Cultural Studies Review, 2023, Issue 1 (55) Kulturowe emancypacje i transgresje, pp. 53 - 68
Article type: Original article
Titles:
From Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo
From Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
Poland
Published at: 03.2023
Article status: Open
Licence: CC BY
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EnglishView count: 431
Number of downloads: 219