The Urgency of Ephemerality

Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz (2025)

I still find myself thinking about Sheldon Pearce’s use of “ephemerality” in his dazzling “Goings On: Digicore” (May 5, 2025):

The hyperpop microgenre digicore—a chaotic, internet-forward mashup of music styles born on Discord servers for use in the video game Minecraft—might have vanished into the ether if not for the explosive artist Jane Remover. Inspired primarily by E.D.M. producers such as Skrillex and Porter Robinson and the rappers Tyler, the Creator and Trippie Redd, the Newark-born musician débuted at seventeen, as dltzk, with the EP “Teen Week” (2021), helping to define an obscure anti-pop scene moving at warp speed. Their music’s wide bandwidth now spans the pitched-up sampling of the album “dariacore” (under the alias Leroy) and the emo-leaning work of the side project Venturing. This all-devouring approach culminates in the ecstatic thrasher album “Revengeseekerz,” a maximalist tour de force that makes ephemerality feel urgent.

What does that mean – “makes ephemerality feel urgent”? Is ephemerality something that’s felt? You can feel the urgency of a moment, especially if there’s an emergency – something that calls for an immediate response. Does ephemerality call for an immediate response? Yes, absolutely. If you don’t capture it now now now! – it’s gone forever. That’s my interpretation, anyway. I love the phrase. The music is horrible.

I remember my first encounter with “ephemeral.” I was reading a dance review by Arlene Croce called “Hello Posterity, Goodbye Now” (The New Yorker, July 10, 1978; included in her Going to the Dance, 1982). In her opening line, Croce wrote, “Dance, the ephemeral art, is rebelling against its condition. Like mayflies who want to be cast in bronze, dancers are putting their dances into retrieval systems.” 

My most recent encounter with the word happened yesterday, in a wonderful London Review of Books piece by Dani Garavelli, titled “At the Whisky Bond.” It’s about an archive in Glasgow devoted to the preservation of Alasdair Gray’s legacy. Garavelli writes, “In the mid-2000s Gray’s visual work was still neglected, undermined by its ephemerality (his murals around the city were often just one step ahead of the wrecking ball); its ubiquity (he would draw pen portraits for almost anyone who asked); and what some saw as his ‘parochialism.’ ” 

Another word for “ephemerality” is “transience.” “For inherent in the magic moment is its transience” – one of my favorite lines. It’s by Hugh Kenner. He’s writing about Hemingway – Hemingway’s desire to perpetuate the perfect moment (A Homemade World, 1975). Transience is the key to Hemingway’s aesthetic, Kenner says. I agree. It’s the key to mine, too. Time is pouring through us, an unstanchable flow, and what memory and art and writing try to capture is the brief being of what never again will be.