Prog-tronica

I didn't get to finish asking the question, because Suzy needed her puter, but now I've been and gone and forgotten where my thoughtforms were going with it. I hate that...

Why is so much of electronica so disco-based? Even the so called IDM dance music you can't dance to, it still very much seems to come from a rhythmic approach, rather than a melodic, or textural or RAWK approach. Or is that just the stuff that becomes popular, because people who want music that RAWKS will always go for a guitar first?

But Air = fuck no, because they do not RAWK. I suppose that's different than being prog-tronica, but no. No thank you.

Now I have got to get my ass in gear and WRITE these articles because I've been procrasturbating all day...

but progtronica doesn't make me think of that stuff at all, progtronica makes me think of artists brought up on c64 game tunes and who spent 94-99 making chiptune demomuzak (if you don't know what i mean by that then don't worry cuz i bet you'd hate it all, kate, heh) or, i dunno, eu's "warm math" which maybe doesn't really count as proggy but the melodies just annoy me in the same way that a lot of prog does, or pluxus, whose 11-minute epic "pluxembourg" i love and it's pretty much tangerine dream vs lowfish to my ears... so much so that i worry about whether i should like it or not, then i think, "no, keep up, the only thing you're not allowed to do any more is not like stuff because of the genre's bad reputation," then i remember that the only prog i really like is king crimson's "red" and the rest seems ok for two minutes but then has me writhing on the floor screaming, "no! NO! not the children's choir! not the flute solo! AAARGH!" and then i go to put on some pronk or mathrock to feel better about the whole lots of notes thing and then i remember that worrying about whether it's hipster-approved and then listening to bands like that makes no sense... so uh yeah capitol k is teh r0x and i've forgotten my point again, duh.

that was unreadable. if your eyes grew tired of it and fell here instead then that's fine, it wasn't worth it. if you got here the hard way then, uh, sorry. hey, i am one of about three people on this board not paid to think about self-editing ever, if that's any excuse. (no.)

i should warn you that i have a fantastically bad record with such things though so i suspect it's probably unlikely. i hate saying that outright but it makes a change from going "yes! i'll do it tomorrow!" for three years...

i misspelt "pluxemburg" too.

Apologies to anyone who finds these shameless plugs offensive. Just thought it might be interesting to some to find where these discussions end up leading...

Serf, why is it that the people who one suggests would make the best mix tapes never actually get around to making them?

perfectionism and wanting it to be the best damn mixtape ever which it never will be, or getting 7th rate indie dj syndrome and finding that whenever they press pause-record previously loved tracks suddenly make them think, "hm, not enough bass, sloppy drumming, ooh, that lyric's a bit duff, god, I bet x will hate this after all"?

wanting to fit a track from almost every one of the hundreds/thousands of records they own on it?

thinking that they must must MUST include that kickarse track by an unsigned or stupidly obscure band they've never heard of before that they just got on 128kbps mp3 but thinking that the low quality might make it blatantly from mp3 and they'd be laughed at, or wanting to hear more of their stuff first so they can pretend to know lots about the band, or at least not find out three months later that all their other tracks sound like ocean colour scene b-sides? (i still hate sly and robbie for working with simply red mere months after i put some of their old dub tracks on mixtapes, GAH, i feel even mumbling "but their older stuff was much better" a few hundred times did nothing to rescue my indie cred)

being too busy hunting down new audio thrills online to search their pigsty of an actual physical home to find the right lead to copy anything?

cough.

i do not make good mixtapes, alas, but i would really like to in my quest to become the exact indie stereotype. i suppose that involves practice. and at least if i made thousands of mixtapes every year i wouldn't feel compelled to include everything i've ever liked.

and i STILL don't hear much progginess, not even in schneider tm's "reality check" which if memory serves is also 7/4. i mean, point me at prog that sounds like that and i may consider stopping being so rude about most of the rest of it. :) if anyone can do it they're on this board, cf "don cab are just king crimson instrumentals" [me: "what?! oh my! i see the point. r0x0r..."] threads past.

i have a horrible feeling that with this post i might anyone else posting anything ontopic to the thread, which would be a shame, but then maybe it had gone that way anyway. sigh.

actually, what is the "rawk approach"? i thought i saw what you meant until i thought that it did apply to a lot of pure electronic stuff i like (eg drillnbreakscore stuff) and then i decided it didn't but i couldn't work out why it would or wouldn't. this might be related to the fact that my favourite music of most genres may be retrofetishistic but it DOES do so in, well, maybe not a dystopic steampunk way most of the time, but at least a nod to the fact that the future isn't pristine and shiny and perfect and won't feel any better than (and probably not that much worse) than the present? that's all projection and therefore probably bollocks, mind.

i talk too much per post, maybe this is a hint that i should start a livejournal or similar, but that is a bad idea in so many ways. "today was boring, feel sorry for me, my head hurts, ps i heard some new mp3s which i will now shout YES or SUCK about without backing up my opinion in any way" x 1000

Serf, writing long posts = LOVELY! It makes me feel like less of a freak for posing complicated questions and/or writing long explanations myself. I'm going to eat dinner now, but I'm going to have a think on what makes a RAWK approach a RAWK approach, because it's obviously not just the use of guitars etc. Mmmmm, burritos... hang on...

rawk approach = spontaneity but still, like, RARGH? spontaneity seems verrrry hard to do with electronic stuff without getting into arty beatless 13-minute reaktor/audiomulch drone/noise pieces making minute tweaks in realtime and probably inducing snores in the listeners until accidentally putting the wrong virtual fader at -127 or being barraged by a "windows is low on virtual memory" messagebox popup attack causes eardrum-bursting white noise burst at 7:46?

a lot of the stuff i like (squarepusher in full-on breaksmangling mode, max tundra) sounds so vibrant that i get sucked into thinking, "wow, i bet this was all just one instant flash of inspiration and somehow he has the best gear in the world and knows his way round it so well that he could just get it straight down like that," but at the same time i know (partly from reading interviews with them, partly from messing around a bit with similar kit and slowly realising that it really doesn't work like that, although i'd suspect it's a bit more true for more experienced and imaginative people than me, partly from the sheer intricacy) that it can't be like that, that they must have spent hours over every chord change or snare hit or minute change in panning or resonance that i won't even notice.

i don't know how much this is different in rock and how much i'm just romanticising the "real bandmates and real instrument with real random quirks and sensitivity to fractalishly unpredictable outside factors" thing (rockist!) but that kind of spontaneity would seem a whole lot easier in that kind of setup.

this is garbled and probably mistaken but it was only meant to be a quick addendum so no fleshing out for now...

it has that "melodic, or textural or RAWK approach" your after, many people have commented that sounds/melodies on the album are akin to The Cocteau Twins.

But that ability to tweak, to muck around, to have a selection of players so aquainted with each others' quirks that they can adapt live (make the same mistake twice, and you're "jamming"), the way that no two performances are ever the same twice... that is often something that seems to get lost in electronics, maybe due to technological constraints or lack of more than two arms to twiddle knobs with... dunno. Or maybe that's because I lack the experience of much *live* electronica.

Even some of the most rockist of music was written purely as dance music (a lot of the early mod stuff I adore), so it's not even the "was it written as a dance track" question, so I've just contradicted myself.

SHITE, I've left myself an hour and a half. None of the rest of these articles are going to be in on time...

capitol K remind me of early DAF actually (last time I heard was a while back and from Kate's description, the could have changed a bit).

wow. what's up?

Shityeah - search "Pillow", I think that's what it's called - the one that goes "I'll give you a ring in the morning/to see how you're doing".

Also: Air are *not* progtronica, even though I think I might've descrided that awful last album as such elsewhere - they're just pure prog, man. This brings up the whole "is prog rock actually rock?" argument again, but hey, that's not my problem right now...

Note to self: start dancing ASAP.

Haha, THE ORB!