Electro and Asperger's syndrome

For electroclash and ghetto-tech I would disagree. Ghetto-tech is musically austere, but the lyrical obbession with big booty ho's humanises.
Elecroclash, despite the images bought to mind by the lyrics, is possibly the most human form of dance music I can think of. It sticks to a song based format, they're stand alone tracks like rock, pop, indie etc. They move away from the music as DJ tool aspect of a lot of dance music. They quite often have narrative (see Avenue D's "Do I Look Like A Slut' and Golden Boy and Miss Kittin's "Rippin' Kittin" off the top of my head.)
From personal experince: most electro artists are more out going, funny and better dressed than other dance music producers. This is a sweeping generalisation though.

Interesting question.

Colin, I would think that individuals with Asperger's may have an affinity with electronic-based music for many reasons, the strongest related to the element of isolation somewhat unique to the creation of electronic music. If you're sequestered in your bedroom or basement pouring over some Apple G4's for hours per day, you'll obviously experience a moderate to high level of social isolation; of course, I'm not suggesting that electronic music causes isolation, but rather that an individual with Asperger's would have a predilection for more individualistic expressions in the creation of artistic works, and this can be found readily -- and cheaply, thanks to technological advances -- in the electronic music genre. I hadn't really considered the idea that Numan and other electronic-based musicians might have Asperger's, but the pieces seem to fit pretty well together, don't they? A further exploration of that idea would have "Master's Thesis" or "Doctoral Dissertation" written all over it.

re: electroclash vs. other types of computer-related music in how "asperghery" are they: i would agree with anna and say not very. the best fit would be the experimental classical/academic types, in my opinion. while many of them are perfectly well adjusted and sociable, and are interested in the effect of their music on others - which is the key delineator i would say, think of the idm kids who are obsessed with cobbling together pretty widdles of noise to share with each other - many of the weird ambient noise types who are on the fringes of the academic classical music system [your friend of a friend who builds microtonal synths] have their own inner world agenda and could give a f*ck about whether they get props, whether anyone else even hears it. this resembles the real video gamer / recreational math problem mentality: problem solving for itself. these are also the types of people who have not just the patience to lay out long series of gates and sequences and patches on a synth but can keep track of it in their head.

love the question but i would say the big problem with it is that aspergher's is trendy [wired magazine article about a.s. in silicon valley] but are we really looking at anything different from syd barret/skip spence syndrome? in the 60s the trendy affliction was philip k dick esque paranoid delusional, nowadays its gibson aspergher, but in the arts community their penetration may be nil apart from affectation and general zeitgeist/style... [playing devils ad here]

erick, the thing that strikes me is how the true autistics will hold their hands in front of their face as they walkd down the street going about their business, and wiggle fingers in order to create rhythmic filters of light. this is almost identical to the bleeping computer soothing.

I think you can tell a lot about a robotic-leaning dance track from the inflection of the vocals; electroclash seems to rarely use the vocoder vocals we now associate with Daft Punk and disco-house, which strike me as implying the existence of robots infused with humanity (love and other emotions etc.). The vocals in electroclash seem to sound more like humans drained by the sex-technology interface.

jeremy gilbert-rolfe has this idea of the techno-sublime. he posits that the blank areas of modernity (vocodered voices, static channels, clean surfaces, etc.) are empty of meaning in a sense roughly equal to the terrifying voids the 19c romantics saw in things like waterfalls and whirpools. so these areas match up to sex and violence in the 20c the way untamed nature did in the 19c.

more later, w/ exact quotes.

Tim, have you heard Swyzack's 'Car Crash'? JG Ballard and David Cronenburg were all I could think about whilst playing it.

The retreat from human interaction, which of course includes sexual interaction, the latter perhaps the most intense form of human interaction; the inevitable failure of that retreat and its consumation through mediated forms such as robots, telephone sex, internet sex, and so on (I'm thinking particularly of Ralph Hutter et al here); the flat, monotone vocals; the highly visual thinking present in the lyrics and the production values; the obsession with numbers; the minimalism and repetition of motifs, lines and verses, extreme by pop music standards (many examples to cite); the recurrent obsession with returning to safety inside enclosed impersonal spaces; the listing of facts; the pushing away of people, and attendant paranoia; drifting in/drifting out of social realities; all these are fully evident in a great deal of electro, and they are practically diagnostic of Asperger's. And yet, and yet... there's Peaches, Avenue D et al, who seem to depose the whole system of electro rules mentioned above, practically standing the whole thing on its head. It's like their are two kinds of electro now, and they're radically opposed.

singing in monotone: when i listen to the singers, they are very expressive, but the melodies are monotone [as you note, repetition of motives ["motifs"?]]. this is very true of both the old school - berlin's metro seems on first listen to be very monotone-flat-vocaled but once you know the song and sing along, you realize she's totally shangri-las over the top but just compressed a bit so it sounds like she's in another room. gary numan of course, totally expressive. laurie anderson. you're not going to tell me that just because grace jones barked with little variance of tone that she smacks of asperghers? and it really begins with bowie, now, doesn't it, and the berlin artists he was listening to?

really the old school were parodying robot voices by singing totally one-note melodies as much as they could get away with; it's an arty mimicry of a very trendy hal voice which was all over the place in pop culture [such as arcade games: "insert coin" on gorf was oneupped by berzerk's "i detect a coin in your pocket"... the robovoice path ends humorously in terminator [germanic brute force "kraft"=robot]] now the new school are referencing the old school and our memories, and not robot voices in our environment, right?

also, the dynamic today is much more often instrumentalist [dj/programmer/kbdist] + girl singer. what we could easily look at with peaches, chix on speed, and the others who most obviously reject robot voice is are they rejecting passive girl-controlling guy dynamic and instead playing raunchy frontwoman / just one of the guys?

it's a clever link, this aspergher's-electro, but i stand by my various arguments against it. instead, i say, asperghers is a notable trend that is explored today for certain zeitgeist reasons that also influence our music. asperghers in the wired article is painted as a dystopian result of silicon valley, and so is electroclash a dystopian reductio of electronic music: these dystopian readings appeal to us today because of the bad tech economy. asperghers had plenty of diagnoses before but it just makes sense to re-read it as a techno-illness.

and that's my ultimate point. to what extent does electroclash really exhibit a technological basis? you say they are, as an example, given to including numbers in their lyrics - very true [mark smith began doing this during the fall's techno phase as well]. but it's so contrived!

we are re-reading electroclash as a techno-illness.

(Surely the Ballard / Cronenburg connection with electro is largely deliberate? New electro that exploits it seems to mostly just be taking a cue from "Warm Leatherette." At the turn of the 70s/80s, well yeah, surely it was more organic, a general attraction/repulsion to technology and the body that expressed itself all over the world in a lot of forms.)

By the way, I think the great underexplored electro, synth-pop, and new-wave obsession is with the Cold War -- specifically the ideas of Eastern-bloc communism having the same soulless + mechanical vibe as technology and Japan having something of the same (only pictured, sort of disturbingly, as cute little land of weirdo techy elves). (You could practically do a Top 200 of "new wave albums' obligatory songs about Japan.")

name's mitch g.

still looking for a good handle after being smacked by mitchlastname and i thought skinny jet name would be horrorshow.

Nabisco. If what you say is true, in virtue of what does an artist feel compelled to depict such a state of mind? What could their inner impulse be, the biological or animal drive, to lead one to paint the android/alien world of efficient machinery so obsessively and lovingly?

If everyone, these days, finds Aspberger's such a fascinating syndrome -- largely because of how it seems to reflect western cultural developments as a whole -- it shouldn't be surprising that some artists would find a similar artistic aesthetic sort of fascinating, should it?

yes yes yes

What could their inner impulse be, the biological or animal drive, to lead one to paint the android/alien world of efficient machinery so obsessively and lovingly?

because it's lovely. pure sine tones are lovely. nightengales imitate car alarms not car horns or the booming bass thuds coming from trunks.

because sci fi is a natural for adaptation to pop music the same way it's a natural fit for comics and cheap paperbacks. there's kid interest, and violence interest.

but on a deeper level rock / dance is fundamentally scifi because it's based on electrification of instruments, technological recording and playback of sound, wave transmissions, etc. certain forward-thinkers in rock/pop lean towards organic stuff cos they're hippies; others lean towards electro stuff cos they're geeks. the first synth on a top 40 record [that sounds like a synth, and not as a sound effect] was by pete townshend on won't get fooled again, which is the british invasion's ubergeek writing about the cyclical nature of revolutions.

F84.5 Asperger's Syndrome

A disorder of uncertain nosological validity, characterized by the same kind of qualitative abnormalities of reciprocal social interaction that typify autism, together with a restricted, stereotyped, repetitive repertoire of interests and activities. The disorder differs from autism primarily in that there is no general delay or retardation in language or in cognitive development. Most individuals are of normal general intelligence but it is common for them to be markedly clumsy; the condition occurs predominately in boys (in a ratio of about eight boys to one girl). It seems highly likely that at least some cases represent mild varieties of autism, but it is uncertain whether or not that is so for all. There is a strong tendency for the abnormalities to persist into adolescence and adult life and it seems that they represent individual characteristics that are not greatly affected by environmental influences. Psychotic episodes occasionally occur in early adult life.

Diagnostic Guidelines

Diagnosis is based on the combination of a lack of any clinically significant general delay in language or cognitive development plus, as with autism, the presence of qualitative deficiencies in reciprocal social interaction and restricted, repetitive, stereotyped patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities. There may or may not be problems in communication similar to those associated with autism, but significant language retardation would rule out the diagnosis.

a restricted, stereotyped, repetitive repertoire of interests

Off nabisco's comment that Asperger's aesthetics are not necessarily prodced by Asperger's-afflicted people (in the same way that, say, Hitchcock's shower doesn't necessarily always have a stabbist in it), I see the behaviors listed above more often in critics than in musicians.

Recently also, another very talented electronic music artist (electro, robots, the whole thing was in his music) said to me, "What do you do when conflict arises? I always pretend it's not happening, but it doesn't seem to work any more". His favurite topic of conversation with me is describing his new plug-ins on his PC. He is quite unaware that I haven't the slightest interest, even though I openly tell him I haven't a clue what he's talking about.

My musician friends often ask my advice on psychological/mental matters because I'm a psychologist by training, although I reached the point where I quit academia once I realised I'd never understand human behaviour, I was no genius, just an average kinda guy. However, I don't share the resistance to psychological analysis and behavioural causation that some of you have. On the contrary, it's utterly fascinating to me, my main reason for following an artist's musical development - or the development of a musical movement.

What a magazine like The Wire lacks, to my understanding, is any conception of the depth motivation behind artistic creation. Gimme someone like Anton Ehrenzweig any day. The Wire: no understanding of depth psychology and the array of biological motivations in the artist, all little, busy causal chains that artists produce... to think causally about the creative process is to understand one's self; and to face all manner of embarassment about one's true motives. Without any such training in music journalists today, about all they can come up with is increasingly elaborate ways of saying, 'wow! Mad sound, that!'. Tiresome to read. Err, how did I get here? Oh yeah, I was agreeing with Sasha about critics I think. But I think there's a tendency in this thread to completely deny some very obvious links between the characteristics of Asperger's and the musicaL and lyrical content of some electro.

My opinion is that some of the earliest electro artists, especially at least one core member of Kraftwerk, were high functioning autists (Aspergers'). Those that came after to a great extent parodied or parroted the autistic content of Kraftwerk's music and lyrics, but were not themselves autistic.

Go on, have a piece of me then! Who's hard enough? (Passes out)

It lacks, to me, an understanding of passionate listening as well, which should ideally be an extension of the same impulse.

Can I quote this again?

"I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between."

--Francois Truffaut

Er, I think I may have got that last bit wrong, about followers of Kraftwerk parroting or parodying an Asperger's view of life on the modern world. I do think that Kraftwerk's Ralph Hutter is definitely a high functioning, super-intelligent mathematical kind of human being by nature, somewhat removed from what the normal run of society would regard as conventional social inetraction. He's happier with machines and computations. I'm sticking with that. However, it's not that subsequent electro artists are all copying Kraftwerk necessarily. It's more that electro (in its scientific, robotic, futuristic manifestation, leaving out booty bass and other earthier spinoffs) is intinsically Apserger's friendly. That is to say, if you have an Apserger's oriented personality (and let's leave out the specious assumption that this orientation is pathological), then the causal chain from watching TV as a child, to working alone on computers as an adolescent, to writing computer music, is a natural path for a talented Apserger's individual. And what sort of music is likely to both appeal to such an individual, and to inspire them? Well, surely, it has to be this kind of electro. The painstaking techniques, the opportunity to communicate with likeminded individuals through emotional buffer zones like computers, low affect vocals, the love of technology for its own sake, the irrelevance of physical co--ordination, the importance of mathematical approaches, and iterative repetition, the comforting circular rhythms, the extremely detailed and precise production techniques, the invention of fascinating imaginary worlds (hello, Drexciya). If I were Asperger's individual discovering electro (and maybe I am, haha), it might come as an epiphany and a communion.

However I am not saying all, or even most electro artists are this way. Only the ones who make the most unearthly, uncanny and perfect machine music.

Unlike schizophrenia, where the individual's connection to most facets of reality becomes disconnected and disorganized, those that suffer from autism -- and to a lesser extent, Asperger's -- never properly orient to the world around them, which forces a retreat into an inner world partially defined by repetition across major functional areas.

Since Asperger's is sort of "autism lite" -- my term, nobody else's -- individuals have some element of connection with reality, usually with respect to cognitive and spatial abilities, but there is a paucity of emotional orientation, which is deleterious to overall social functioning.

However, if a certain artist chooses a field of expression that insures no small degree of social isolation and a repetitious narrowing of focus -- plug-ins, software, etc. -- then that artist may present a lifestyle that is similar to a diagnosis without having that particular problem, be it Asperger's or ADD/ADHD or what have you. Of course, if you've poured over the ICD-10 or the DSM-IVr, then you'd find lots of possibilites for the diagnosis of somewhat normative phenomena as "abnormal" in the proper context, so in my mind, it's always important to look at all the relevant factors in an individual case before rushing to diagnose, no matter how attractive such a diagnosis may be.

So far, this thread has been what I came to ILM looking for, so thank you for making me think...and for making me pull out "The Pleasure Principle" and listening to it in a completely different light.

Which is a stupid, stupid thing to do, mainly because it destroys the whole idea of art and aesthetics: the whole thing rests on the idea that no one could possibly just create anything interesting or have a fascinating idea on his or her own -- it must have been hard-wired into everyone's brains to begin with. Which also doesn't explain why artists can react to one another and move in trends and fashions; impressionism surely can't be the result of a bunch of freaks suddenly seeing everything all wavy. It reduces art to some weird form of aesthetic Darwinism, at which point art becomes completely useless -- except as some sort of weird diagnostic tool to tell what's wrong with whom.

Anyway. Your descriptions of "talented electronic musicians," as it turns out, are just as applicable to musicians in just about any genre: music production in general is always going to be a more appealing pursuit to someone who can sit alone and listen in fascination to the same sound over and over, whether it's a dub melodica or a sine wave. Obviously the electronic format -- which is more about "production" and doesn't need to involve other people as much -- is even more friendly to the type of person who's as happy sitting alone tweaking an oscillator as he or she might be out at a bar with a bunch of other people. I'm just wary of picking up on a clinical syndrom that -- so far as I know -- doesn't actually afflict that many people and pinning a whole long-running genre of music on it.

Beyond which we get into the whole modern tendency to try and reduce every single personality trait a person can have to some sort of clinical disorder. Smash the world down to brain chemistry! There has to be a point at which we acknowledge that people actually spend their lives living in a world, with other people, and that some portion of their behavior is actually based on responding to that world and to those people.

I've been hooked on this stuff since mid 1997. I started producing in 98 and I still do it off and on even right now. So far I have about 7 completed acid techno and hard trance tracks, I had those on mp3.com for a while, and I just finished my first complete dark jungle track about a month ago (I have probably 100 incomplete tracks just because I'm real anal about their depth and quality).

The reason I personally like electronic music - it definitely has a certain something that you don't get much of in other styles. Even when I was a kid I was all about darker sounds, I loved real deep muddy shredd guitar (I was listening to Pantera by 7th grade), and when I did find a track by someone that 'make you think' sort of feel I was all about it. Same goes for hip-hop, I've always loved the stuff that has the real sharp, clever, hi-intellect, science-and-theory sort of rhymes (Dilated Peoples, stuff off Methodman's Tical 2000), etc. What I love about electronic music - especially dark jungle, acid techno, and somber edged progessive trance - is it has all of that stuff amplified a lot more. Especially jungle - the reason it wierds people out is it's got hip-hop's slippiness with the tricks and stunts but multiplied and made electronic to where the stuff almost sounds alien. I like dark jungle especially just because the beats are straight dope, the basslines are almost like heavy guitarriff but have so much more fullness and texture, and then you mix that with hip-hop mentality as a backbone for the attitude mixed with futuristic science and theory, some rasta jamaicen guy flowing over it - lol..what's their not to like about it.

I think Ericks got a point in that I can make the stuff also from beginnin gto end by myself. With me though I never had AS bad enough to where I couldn't get a band together. I used to play guitar, did that for 6 years, and I did try to start a band with some people at one point but it was way too much effort for me to try baby sitting all these guys and making sure practice didn't end up being a big joke (then again with the way AS wore down my energy back in highschool, I almost needed to be pushed myself). Also, I could never find people who wanted to do things the way I wanted to. For example I wanted to start a hardcore band but wanted to add a lot of that depth, intelligence, that make you think style that I was talking about, and even some UK trip-hoppy sounds here and there for effect. All the guys I was running into were just straight headbangers and I had no problem with that, just that I couldn't find anyone who was on page with me in terms of seeing or feeling the same things in music.
That's my other point - I've talked to a lot of people with AS and we're real anal with our tastes in music. Being that we usually have unique tastes as well, we do our best sticking with styles where we can do everything on our own without having to get go-ahead from a bunch of bandmembers or have them pick it apart to where it doesn't even sound the way you wanted it to anymore.

I spent a lot of time as I was finishing highschool just trying to pick it apart, analyse it, figure out what the bottom line of reality was, and hoping of course that it could help me break myself out of it. Overall I don't think it's disconnection but the fact that even if we're totally on top of reality or totally on-point we still tend to come in at things from the left whereas someone else would come in at it from the right.

One of the reasons I've kind of withdrawn is I've noticed that just having a different thought construct, not matter how "with reality", socially on top of things, or on point I am isn't enough. To be honest what I've noticed about myself is it's like most other people are on a certain frame of thought where they instinctively react to things, they'll only understand things if they're phrased a certain way, if they see some things will occur to them while other things wouldn't, etc. THat probably sounds like I don't have a clue but to be honest my problem is that I pick up on way too many things, have to selectively dumb everything down because I've found that saying stuff that's over people's heads is real grating, and then at that point I realise I still can't accurately guess half the time what people will understand and what they wont. All too often I still overrate other people's intelligence and that's just a small part of it. The other two problems are my way of putting things (I'm not using big words either, just that I'm going original and not following what I'd think of as society's "Easy script") and the other problem - I do have a mild look about myself that has people already deciding - before they even know me - who they think I am. Not that it would bother me that much, but I have that real innocent, dorky, Toby McGwire kind of look going on, I have a real wired and puppet-like look to my walk, I look pretty creepy IMO if I'm standing still somewhere (though knowing I look that way scaes me a lot more), and if people think someone with AS is kind of creepy - just imagine what it's like being that person, knowing what you look like, knowing your messing withother peoples heads in some real bad ways, and not being able to fix the way you look or move wth any ammout of discipline because even when you put in 200% a day for years you end up realising that it keeps comming back. Even if you don't entertain it, even if your hellbent on beating AS, you find out pretty quick just how physiological it is.

Lol, sorry if I wrote a full length article there. As far as all the other people with AS I've talked to, we agree on one thing. AS is one of those things where all the social-skills knowhow and knowledge an only do so much good and prevent so much damage when it's your feedback and sommunication (verbal and nonverbal) abilities that are a bit mesed up. If anything, the more you know and the more seriously you take other people and their value the more self conscious you end up getting. It's like being shy, we're so painfully self conscious abouthow messd up we are that we just can't have a good time, sad thing is we have to be as well just to stay in chack and not embarass the heck out of ourselves.