Technology and electronic music

Listen to (K)Cluster, Eno, Residents, Heldon, Conrad Schnitzler and of course Kraftwerk for evidence of an entirely different relationship to the machine than that of a lot of modern practitioners. There's a few contemporary folks (Autechre, Boards of Canda, and Mouse on Mars come to mind) who seem to favor this approach as well.

elvis?

Is his about people "Embracing" technology...?
autechre are extremely over-rated.

there is a video work by Michal Levy "Giant Steps" Maya software, 2001 that i was only recently introduced to which i think manages to step beyond the software that was used to create it.

when art consumes technology

In the sense that people seem to work best when working in a limited environment - when they have to think of inventive ways to make the sounds or moods they want to make, with limited equipment, or within narrow genre constraints. Most people can't cope with complete freedom of expression - they get weighted down with the possiblities. It's much easier to be creative within boundaries, whether those boundaries are set by equipment, time or genre.

qv anyone who builds their own studio will immediately start producing crap, also - any album that has scads of money and time chucked at it will end up being awful.

see also: why 'experimental' music is usually terrible and why rock musicians should never be allowed anywhere near an orchestra.

IDM, sadly. While I think it's great to be able to produce any kind of sound you can think of (that was the dream the first electronic musicians had in the forties and the fifties), some folks seem get to lost in the infinite possibilities, so they do nothing but tweak and twiddle their sounds ad nauseam. Autechre and Aphex Twin are the most notorious examples of this; I think both made better music in the early nineties, when they were still limited by the technology (and, in Aphex' case, more commited to the dancefloor).

When you have infinite possibilities, you also need a lot of constraint. I think sound innovations are still the greatest thing in electronic music, but if your tracks are all about playing with the sound, then that will become the focus of your music instead of the sounds themselves. The greatest electronic tracks are those where the producers have found a great new sound and sticked with it (remember "Acid Trax"?). That's why I often find dance tracks more inspirational than "electronic listening music"; because, when you produce a track for the dancefloor, it can't be too complex, so you need to focus on a limited array of sounds. But I don't want too be too harsh towards non-dancefloor electronic music; there are obviously lots of "intelligent" producers (like Pole or Monolake or Kit Clayton) who show both the innovation and the constraint.

To sum it up: limitless options can and will, obviously, make electronic music richer, but there are more pitfalls too.

Maybe many albums, but not all. Loveless took a couple of years in the studio and something like half a million dollars to produce.

Electronic music used to be (partly) about straining against the limits of technology -- is it safe to say that the there are no limits now in terms of what sounds can be produced? What happens when anything is possible?
Didn't Pink Floyd say exactly the same thing in the early 70s? We'll never reach the finishign line of technology or development. things might seem limitless now, but I'd wager that in another 20 years we'll look back at Fennesz or Four Tet or Susumu Yokota or whoever and say "doens't this sound quaint and old-fashioned".

There is a complicating factor, however, and it is that, with a lot of technology and gear, commercial imperatives and techniques come into play: this is designed to sell, and will sell. Therefore, it's very hard, if not impossible, to persuade someone who's gone down this path that they're doing the wrong thing. After all, it's probably selling more than your stuff! And they're making money and consorting with other successful people - so the music must be a success too, right? This is their implicit veiw, until they get to a strange point where their creativity dries up. It's as if the gods have deemed that there should be no more of this annoying music from this annoying person. All that gear, and nothing sonic coming out of the studio. Down the road, however, is a kid with one drum machine, a Tandy microphone and one synthesizer, recording on cassette tape, and he or she is making three special, unique tracks a day.

this and various other similar comments upthread sound almost exactly like what brian eno was saying at least 25 years ago

(and i don't want to divert back to the early twas-ever-thus stuff either, but i do wonder did this ideology 'first' appear at any point - were there 18th/19th century composers turning their backs on the 'new technology' of eg latest orchestral instruments/piano/etc as a source of difficulty-through-too-much-choice, or dismissing them as some 'tech-pseudosolution' to their 'artistic problems' ?
i suspect related stuff may have been around for a long while - but has worsened with the move from music-as-physical-craft => music as algorithm-with-nr-infinite-instantiations, allied with the harnessing of the Invisible Forces of electricity to 'do our work for us')

haha yes the re-classification of what was once the 'cold' & 'soul-less' synthetic as more warm and squelchy and 'feeling' has been going on for at least 10 years - old analogue tech being re-heard in retrospect after the shift to S&S-based preset-festooned tech during the late 80's
but i think it is understandable and justifiable:

i - notwithstanding 'blind-listening' tests (which i think would actually fool almost everyone by now) there were physical/tech reasons why what mike calls 'feel' would be more present - microvariations in timbre/timing that some might hear (hi-fi oxygen-free-power-cable mentalists to thread)
(i believe the virtual-analogues have to add small amounts of instability and noise to their replications to make them sound more real)

ii - tech gets perceived in relation to what preceded it - noisy old engines can be seen as full of primal life compared to electronically-managed sleeker quieter cleaner more efficient ones

iii - technology has its own aesthetic: viewing it as some kind of displacement or fetishisation(?) is a disservice - it can be a valid dimension of appreciation -> i think to an extent it overlaps with the appreciation of 'technique' in other forms of music
eg knowing that certain albums involved 34,562.5 hours of monosynth-overdubbing and tapesplicing to do what might now be done digitally in 12 hours might validly make a difference to how one perceives the work

Stasis it seems. When possibilities approach the infinite the truly talented musician becomes ever more important and ever rarer.

This seems possible, re today's music seeming dated, but in that case wouldn't it have more to do w/ trends than actual measurable limitations in the gear? What I'm wondering is, are electronic musicians right now dreaming of sounds that they can't produce because the technology isn't there, like they did for 50 years prior?

The best answer than this I can think of is that the next revolution will be in interface. One of Eno's better observations is that the mouse casts aside 10 million years of body evolution in favor of a single finger to the detriment of music. At the moment we can't get our bodies to interact with computers the way they can "real" instruments (maybe not even as much as old electronic hardware?)

maybe one of good things about decoupling the sound from 'the body' is how it brings 'the brain' back on-line: reflexive-semi-autopilot-behavioural routines or physical-jerk-exuberances are at least temporarily prevented (though cognitive habits and tunnels may well manifest)
the awkward, fragmented, iterative 'non-physical' nature of limited-interface intstruments might be seen as the biggest change in the entire nature of making music since, well, it started...
(ha - on the other hand, compare with trying to 'play' a symphony orchestra)

still, when it was also finally happening outside of the academic and avant-garde institutions, agreement to actually play along with electronic technology's strengths of 'inhuman' strangeness and disengagement in its world-connotations and its relationship to musical-craft, instead of trying to make it fit the standard old mould or use it as some wacky/kitsch/retrofuturist gimmick, was what set some electronics-heavy music alight for a time

(but since the nature of tech is to become invisible, almost by definition that can't last - unless certain other aesthetics lock on to certain phases)

Re: Electronic "listening music" being less interesting then dance music due to lack of focus, I disagree. It depends on what listening mood I'm in. Late at night, I like to listen to something that Aphex Twin/Four Tet/Autechre/etc. did, that has a hundred million layers, all tweaked and re-tweated; I just let my mind wander and follow different parts.

http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/

Snowy Man, my entire studio is digital and very modern. However, it is full of frutiful limitations! I don't avocate old gear. In fact, I advocate new gear, as old gear is too warm, and I think coldness is allied with progression. But that's another topic.

The problem to which I was referring derives from excessive amounts of gear, and therefore too few limitations. but excessive amounts of gear. For example, studios where people try to cover all bases by having a bit of everything. Brian Eno did say this 25 years ago; but Chuang Tzu said it more than two thousand years ago. It's a musical principle. No, it's an artistic principle and a principle of living.

I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.

Re what the future holds, the most frustrating thing I find about being an electronic musician is that sometimes as I am walking home from work entire tracks just compose themselves, layer by layer, in my head. I can separate the bits and play with them and change what they're doing, and what needs to happen next gradually solidifies out of the mind-ether and takes its place in the track. (It happens when I'm working at the computer less often, but when it does they're usually my most productive nights.)

With the coming of wetware (direct brain-computer interfaces) I hope the ability to capture what's happening in my mind, in whatever format, will, I hope, aid the creation of even better musical stuff.

Re too much gear: that's one of the reasons I don't like Reason. Using Cubase with no softsynths except a sampler, my MS2000, and a microphone, I feel I'm quite nicely limited, without being stifled.

I can't remember who it was that said todays laptop producers are less musicians than composers. The computer interface is like the score. Classical composers might write something & never heard it (Charles Ives) because they could never get the musicians together; in the same way a laptop person needs his computer to realize his ideas. So it's more about composing than playing.

I'm not sure people are entirely interested in what's going on in your mind at all moments. The thing that distinguishes artists is their ability to synthesize emotion, not just feel it.

I'm not saying record my emotions. I'm saying record what sounds I'm hearing in my head, which may or may not reflect my emotions. I mean, it's what I try to do when I'm writing normally.

I mean, Jesus, GET OUT OF MY MIND!

You can't? I must have dreamt every occasion on which I've done this...

I've imagined some future-rave scenario where the DJ sits in front of the audience with electrodes strapped to his skull, thinking the music into existence. The degree of complexity that could be achieved would be phenomenal, and I think we'd see an amazing amount of emotion communicated in this way.

If you're in Melbourne towards the end of August you should be able to see a friend and I perform at Melbourne University as part of their Discovery Day. Our performance will be completely improvised, and feature a large computer-based component.

I just never considered using it for live improv.

- these were the working-practice problems eno was talking about - problems i think all of us who have worked/played in this area must have encountered?
(i didn't mean that because eno's comment was made a while ago that it was only applicable to tech back then - though it seems to me that since more tech => more choices/possibilities AND also more presets for businesslike fast-solution time-to-market model importation (instrs/music also for initial-approx work or as bolt-on part of other-media application eg TV/adverts/film/dance perf/corporate stuff) then both those (in a way opposite) effects are exacerbated

BUT all the +ves are too: the idea that limiting oneself to simple but hearty fare is the path to get you to more rewarding places is also redolent to me of a kind of back-to-basics & it-ain't-real-unless-you-can-play-it-on-an-acoustic-guitar mentality, or some rockisty notions about how a live'n'indie setup is more 'valid' than layers of pop-production-artifice....may be odd parallel within the parameters of what we're taling about here, but there are schematic similarities
(things like 'Cupid & Psyche 85' or 'A Perfect Wish' necessitated racks & racks of hi-tech craft and are all the better for it)
there are no golden rules - just some tinpot ones

Chuang Tzu said it more than two thousand years ago. It's a musical principle. No, it's an artistic principle and a principle of living

ok that answers my wondering about whether it 'first' appeared !

'wetware' - i can hardly imagine anything worse
(don't think it is feasible either, fortunately)

haven't got time to check out KK's link yet but from past experience the human interface research stuff has some desperate attempt to make it like
LOOK ITS OK AFTER ALL WE CAN GET IT TO RESPOND TO YOUR BIOLOGY DIRECTLY AND MAKE IT BEHAVE JUST LIKE YOU - THERES NO CAUSE FOR ALARM

Ned - one of my cousins was a Queen fan & i can recall arguing with her in the mid 70's about remarks on Queen album covers like 'no synthesizers were used on this album!' - is it something like that you're referring to?
(ha it took me a long time to realise that 'radio gaga' was perhaps them indicating that the proof of the pudding was in the throwing...)

re laptop improv: fenn o'berg to thread.

Also, earlier someone mentioned Cluster, Eno, etc in conjunction with people like MoM and Autechre today. I took this to mean the way they seemingly effortlessly (or at least willingly) integrate electronic sounds/structures/environments into their otherwise "natural" pieces. In that case, I could not agree more -- even in the 70s, the artists mentioned seemed less about grappling with the limitations of technology than using what was available to help them blast off into a region theretofore unknown. The difference between the old and new artists being perhaps that there is more temptation to ignore the natural world entirely today (where it was probably impossible in the 70s).

No, I was talking about this absurd, wonderful picture -- I'm pretty sure it's in Jazz -- that shows the bandmembers in this HUGE AS FUCK studio, seriously the biggest one I've ever seen, dwarfed by an insane amount of instruments.

Why not? (in terms of timbre only here.)

if it were possible to draw a map of all potential timbres, i think our current technology would be found to have colonised it partially with tremendous depth, partially merely tentatively and some areas not at all yet => "might as well be everything because it's such a lot" is possibly fair enough BUT i think awareness of the non-totality yet (ever?) — despite the promo material of 40 years — is still important

(i realise "nature of human hearing" is a bit "when a tree falls in the forest" but actually the machinery for analysis of sound converts it to visuals where distinctions can be made which are not perhaps audible... the nature and organisation of this analysis probably also ensures some overlooked gaps in the totality...)

But yeah, everything isn't possible. You can't yet make a song that can give the illusion that someone is sneaking up behind you and then running away (we can get close with stereo effects I'm sure, but not to good enough!), and I doubt we can yet produce all the timbre and depth of a sonic boom.

SONIC BOOM!

That quote has stuck with me for many many years.

(I have not seen Nate in over two years, and he just randomly googled in here.)

you see, we live in a far smaller universe than one would imagine, Grasshopper.

-- David Allen

This is interesting (and a great thread too). I've dipped not even a nail of a toe into this area, but on some other thread I saw recently there was a discussion about some avant-garde musician who apparently uses some kind of sound design which inverts the usual sensation of music being received and instead the music when heard feels literally like it is coming OUT OF YOUR EARS!!

That, plus Pauline Oliveros' gently penetrating sine-wave stuff which feels like a ear-bath, and some Ryoji Ikeda I heard the other day off 'Dataplex' (completely bizzare! haven't ordered the cd yet) gave me an incredibly odd feeling, like I had a piece of cinder toffee bubbling & stuck in my throat.

I can't help but wonder if this kind of directed musical-bodily interaction isn't something that technology (and massively improved acoustic environments, not particularly 5.1 or anything like) will be able to enable as some kind of significant future movement/gimmick in electronic music. I mean sub-bass was great for a while, but fairly crude you know?

Or maybe the noize board, or Evelyn Glennie understands this better than I do.