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Of 'em all, Oval seem to me to be timless, beyond genre - those early recs that sounded like cds skipping, a sound never heard before, the more recent noisy stuff that recasts 'Metal Machine Music' as a kind of glitchy systems music.

And in our decentered present, isn't everything "an interesting byway"?

No comments on the American indie kid acceptance, although I am curious if this really is the case.

Definitely not "the future" of anything, just a cool byway.

The penetration for American indie rock fans, if that is really the case, has a lot to do with the U.S. labels that have embraced glitch. Really, if you get down to it, you could credit (or blame) the spread of glitch in the U.S. to Thrill Jockey, licensing titles on Mille Plateaux, Sonig, etc. Because of Thrill Jockey, the exposure is there, and then some people dig it.

Seriously, I'm looking forward to Melissa's response.

Short answer: glitch music is to dance music as indie music is to rock music.

Long answer:

(a) Tom -- your fear-and-groins comment re: Pitchfork and Rooty is a good start to explaining why American indie kids haven't embraced dance music with a passion. A more historical reason would be that American indie has its very roots in fundamentalist opposition to two things: glitzy hair-metal and fluffy dance music. This history -- the vehement dismissal of, say, Jody Watley that I imagine you'd have gotten from any indie listener in the late 80s -- has left indie listeners with a lingering suspicion of anything that seems to want to make you dance.

(b) Glitch does not share this quality; it is abstracted beyond the immediate likeability of "I can dance to it" in a way that tells the indie listener straight-off that he/she is listening to something "artistic." (This is not to imply that the rest of dance is not abstracted or artistic; the problem, rather, is that the indie kids never developed enough of a background in the area to be confident in their ability to tell the difference.) More importantly, the type of listening that glitch requires is, in a lot of ways, similar to the type of listening that post-rock or shoegazer bands require.

(c) All that said, I'm not sure how fair it is to say that American indie kids don't like a good deal of different electronica -- we should probably beware of the assumption, tempting as it is semantically, that "indie kids" = "kids who listen to indie." The glitch or semi-glitch artists mentioned above constitute the vast majority of the crossover -- Daft Punk and Mouse on Mars in particular might be considered the ultimate electronic-acts-for-indie- fans. Anything classified as "IDM" tends to fall into plenty of indie- grubbing hands as well. As of a few years ago, you probably wouldn't have even been considered an "indie kid" in this city if you weren't thoroughly interested in jungle, drum'n'bass, or trip-hop. And I was surprised to notice, while working at a very indie Chicago store, that almost everyone supplemented his/her purchases of, say, Modest Mouse, Quasi, and Ida with at least one disc from some dance genre.

Moral of the story: the only thing indie kids flat-out Do Not Like is straight-up, no-nonsense house music. (Or, let's say, anything that they'd perceive as such.) This probably shouldn't surprise us too much, given the short answer above.

First may I note with slight petulance that I'm sick of you guys tempting me into posting my (somewhat small collection of) blog ideas on here instead. But anyway... I think what I find appealing about glitch/clicks & cuts etc. beyond or despite all the future rhetoric is actually its sheer onomatopoeic obviousness. Glitch, like 2-step or jungle, is rhythmically mnemonic to the extent that you can smear the sounds on anything and it becomes glitch. The focus is on the glitches, so producers are free to combine them with whatever they like

The advantage of this - beyond the fact that glitch rhythms are, when done well, endlessly listenable - is that it suddenly makes everything that was old (temporarily) new again. Or rather, under the umbrella of glitch producers can re-explore ideas that, done in another fashion, would seem old hat. So you get Luomo, which is basically very deep vocal house, but is an absolutely awesome listen from start to finish precisely because it's so weird and wonderful to hear the smooth glide and steady pulse of house housed within such shudderingly unstable arrangements (see also Herbert and some Matmos). Likewise Takeshi Muto's "Muto Love", which does to glitch what Omni Trio and LTJ Bukem did to jungle; the catch is that without the distinctive genre-based attack, the gorgeously evocative melodies might not catch your ear.

Meanwhile Bjork's Vespertine demonstrates how easily glitch assimilates itself into "proper" song structures, again resurrecting the latter by giving them a fresh face. I'm thinking that it's the co-dependent dialectic that's important here, and its a dialectic that can be spun out in any number of variations - Pole for dub, Jan Jelinek for jazz, Phoenecia for Miami Bass etc. etc.

The other thing I like about glitch - and this revelation hit me while listening to Bjork's "Hidden Place" - is that for all the talk of it being hyper-digital, there's often something very organic sounding about glitch rhythms, their clusters and spaces and hiccups forming in what sounds like a spontaneous matter according to unperceivable but harmonious biological laws. In the case of the wispery beats on "Hidden Place" I always think of a river rushing through the branches of an overhanging willow tree for some reason.

WHY I SOMETIMES DON'T LIKE GLITCH by tim finney

1) a lot of it often sounds like it's been done for its own sake 2) a lot is also just not very good.

I should note that these two rules apply to any style, really.

P.S Tom, I thought you had Kid 606's P.S. I Love You album?

seriously, aside from the obviousness of "worship the glitch" as latter day rosetta stone...industrial = excommunicated cousin of the electronic music family tree?

i think they have been listening to loads of garage tunes. in fact them and kieron hebdon seem to be the only ones doing so in the ol' electronica world (recents failures: manitoba)

Ah Yes! Most people laugh at industrial, especially dance industrial (skinny puppy, NIN, etc.) because of it cheesy "gloom 'n' doom i'm a cyborg" aesthetics, plus the whole embarrassing industrial-metal episode. But in reality, there were all kinds of crazy sonics done in the industrial genre long before the IDMers ever did it. A few years back the "bouncing ball" synth effect was all the rage in IDM. I was listening to some old Einsturzende Neubauten, and I heard the "bouncing ball" sound. Of course, they produced it by physically bouncing some object. Good old analogue technology.

I'm attracted to the neat and the pretty. I'm also attracted to the extreme and the stupid. Glitchy-pop sags badly between these two posts, but shines at either end. Farben and Curd Duca are for sighing, Cyclo and Stilluppstepya for screaming. I like the way my fancy stereo actually *shuts down* during certain tracks by the latter artists - as if the pre-amp is saying "that's a mistake - nothing in nature can make that noise/has that contrast/leaps that dynamic, so I'll save you the trouble of hearing it". It's very satisfying texturally and, in the case of Carsten Nicolai, he's daring you to dance. You know he is. Go on, flutter a sinew.

What if Roland, Korg, Yamaha or whoever went out on a limb and came up with equiptment specifically for "glitch" artists? Machines that purposely malfunction or maybe glitch presets to choose how they malfunction. A complete engineering nightmare of loose ends fucking up constantly without the user's consent. And as a result, glorious glitch in its most natural form.

The next Oval or Autechre would be the one who kicks and bangs their equiptment the hardest, maybe?

I haven't noticed this music having any special following amongst Amerindie kids. AFAICT, Mo' Wax and Ninja Tune, even Third Eye Foundation maybe, are much bigger. (Or do they release glitch records too?)

I saw Oval last year. He struck me as one of the less interesting artists working in this area.

I heard some Alva Noto (sp?) today. It was fantastic.

np: Maryanne Amacher - Sound Characters

The interesting thing about glitch is it's willingness to synthesize disperate musical genres. For example there's glitch-hop, glitch soul glitch downtempo, even glitch house. A trip to the local 'indie' record stores reveals scads of albums with reveiws to the effect of 'IDM that's still fun to get down to.'

It seems the last thing anyone wants is for their particular genre of music to be termed 'serious' or overly 'artistic,' because that=boring.

I also don't think such hard and fast dsitinctions can be drawn between glitch and non-glitch listeners being either indie or non-indie kids. Equally as many kids are drawn to glitch through their love for hip-hop (Okay, mostly underground hip hop but still) and various electronica as are drawn from the shoegazer post-rock scene.

This glitch stuff sounds interesting. Any recommendations for a beginner? I kind of lost touch with music in 1992 after getting married, and I'm anxious to catch up.

For a long time I think IDM has been defined predominantly by its ill-suitedness to the dancefloor (see for example the fact that Warp initially favoured the idea of "home listening" techno, while "armchair techno" still has quite a bit of currency as a term) resulting in the IDM community being limited to a certain number of styles and sounds. Glitch meanwhile wraps up all of the ideas and values that make up IDM into a neat little effect, and is quite conducive to hybridisation with any number of different sounds, allowing it to be reincorporated into dance music proper. Whereas I'd argue that the previous IDM paradigm - drill & bass - was limited to being an "intelligent" spin on drum & bass, and was generally not particularly dance-friendly anyway... though Gareth might argue that point.

So I reckon it's not the associated coolness of the club that's drawing IDM artists to house/soul/hip hop/whatever but rather a collective sigh of relief that those avenues are now open to them. Not surprisingly the returns have already been very high, precisely because this interzone area is not (yet) so glutted with artists and personal stylistic derivations as both "real" IDM and "real" dance music are.

Right, exactly. In a sense glitch can be seen as a reaction away from the fallbacks of 'headphone' or as you put it, 'armchair techno.' IDM is often stigmatized as being 'overly serious.' Glitch seems to be moving, as a whole, toward not only more dancefloor freindly stuff, but an assimilation of what was great about IDM. My favorite 'glitch' LPs are ones that encompass the full scope of dance/headphone.

Thing is, I'm not convinced by the argument that it is a more dancefloor orientated style. I still describe my taste in this side of music as "dance music you can't dance to", and I think it fits this just as well (unless you want to add the qualifier- "...without looking extremely odd"). Most scuffs and hops are pretty hard to dance through, let alone with, and I think that's part of the beauty of it...

See, I'm not too good at this articulation lark, but I hope you get what I mean...

I'm intrigued by this, because before I read it I was mentally formulating a post asserting (in response to Tom's "interesting by- way or toolkit but not in itself the future of music" point) exactly the opposite, i.e. that glitch and drum'n'bass rhythms only make sense as glitch and drum'n'bass if they're kept minimal and stick to the stylistic traits of that genre instead of borrowing from other genres, and that if you combine them with other forms the glitches/breaks get lost and are no longer recognisable as such.

I can't really explain what I mean, but if you take an Amen breakbeat and stick a guitar over it then you'll have to do some pretty fancy breaks-cutting and production work and thrown in a whole load of other jungle tricks before it'd make you think, "Oh, dnb with guitars," instead of, "Oh, another rock guitar track, nothing especially dancey about this," and I imagine glitch is the same. Perhaps my mistake is that I've been trying to combine the dance genres I enjoy with guitars and more, uh, "rockist" (sorry) vocals, since rock was my first and is arguably still my main musical love; I suppose the rhythmic styles wouldn't be drowned so much if you were to staple them to (for example) trancey synth lines, but I think you'd still be treading a remarkably fine line.

At least, I was previously sure of this. As usual, once I've typed it into Lusenet it sounds like total bollocks even to me. I'll just stick on Who Needs Alice Anyway? by Fun Tourist, which is an awesome hybrid of anthemic trancebag and stuttering retrig-crazy breakscore, and ponder whether you could do the same for glitch. (Although even here the breaks-mashing and the trancebag don't so much coexist as knock each other out and take over from each other throughout the track...)

(I have more thoughts on other aspects of the question, but they too are failing to sound coherent or convincing, and more to the point I smell nearly-cooked samosas, so I'll see if I can batter 'em into shape and post them later. The thoughts, that is, not my samosas. Mmm.)

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Haven't you ever thought that the best part of an old film is the 'silent' part between the titles and the first dialogue, when it's just the acoustic rumble and pop of a dirty sound band? A lot of glitch (Thomas Brinkmann's 'Klick', Rechenzentrum, Pole) has that warm electro-acoustic sound.

For me, these clicks replace drumkits, whose sounds are by now boringly known. If you sample them, it's hard not to think of the low pops as kicks, the sharp midrange ones snares, the high ones hats and cymbals. But you should resist that. These sounds are part of a new landscape where random microscopic events are the new musical instruments. It's sound dust, a flea circus orchestra, an amoeba beat boom.

I've bought a lot of these records, and their tiny oddness consoles me. There's a huge range of quality; Pole and Oval are one-trick ponies. Karsten Nicolai is unlistenable but a genius. I personally think the future belongs to francophones like Scratch Pet Land and DAT Politics. Le petit labo electro-acousto qui pousse!

For the record, good examples of rock-jungle hybrids would be Photek's remix of Therapy?'s "Loose" and Exocet's "Demon Seed". Glitch-rock: Radiohead's "Packt Like Sardines...", no?

As a note of interest, one song that is impossibly-but-clearly glitch is Happy Rhodes' "Many Worlds Are Born Tonight" from '98. Happy Rhodes is a standard Kate Bush acolyte usually, but the arrangement/rhythm of "Many Words..." is constructed entirely out of minute rhythmic vocal sounds, consequently sounding like it was produced by Matmos. Pretty interesting, and in retrospect way ahead of its time in terms of the glitch-pop equation.

Now, of course, it looks like the most obvious thing in the world. Doink.

I still remain unswayed by Ronan's convinction that Aphex and the tigerbeat6 crowd take themselves too seriously (this is not to say that there aren't any idm artists who fit his descriptions of elitist, chin-stroking pseudo-intellectuals, as quite frankly there are, I just think some of the names he cites as typifying this attitude are actually the artists I consider least guilty of this), but I suspect we will never agree on this, so anyway...

Re Honda's post about glitch hardware: from what little I've seen and read, most glitch producers seem to use software almost exclusively anyway. I don't know vast amounts about what VST plugins and so on are out there, but certainly granular (re)synthesis seems to be taking off a lot more in the software world than in the hardware world. My audio package of choice has a random click'n'pop generator, but a lot of people regard using that as "cheating" (right or wrong? not for me to say, really, but you do get more flexibility if you try longer ways of doing things). And it's only in the past couple of years that sophisticated realtime audio DSP has been possible on home computers, so we're still at the stage where clicks, pops, stuttering and random noisebursts happen fairly commonly anyway (when your CPU can't keep up, when your sound buffer is set wrong, when Windows 9x decides to swap your sound drivers out of its memory cache GRRRR...). Did glitch start by people trying to cover up the inevitable but unintended artefacts with obviously deliberate clicking? I don't know, but it's a handy trick.

On the other hand, while glitch is based on exploring the aesthetics of unintentional mistakes, I don't think it's fair to imagine that it's a question of telling a glitch-making unit to spew out tiny random noisebursts with x probability every y milliseconds. I was looking at The Light 3000 at 1:1 in my audio editor the other day and damn, there's some intricate stuff going on with those beats. So I'm not sure that it is actually a case of actually wanting unreliable gear as much as a case of not being afraid to use things - microsound glitches, heavy synth aliasing - which sound like mistakes. (This statement makes me feel like everything I type on IL* does, i.e. it is either completely obvious or completely wrong.)

Ack, this is so long and most probably so stupid. I'm sorry. I'd offer to send a samosa to anyone who actually inflicted all this clueless rambling upon their poor brains, but I don't think sending samosas through the post works very well. And I still have some half- formed thoughts on danceability, drill'n'bass, and why I like glitch (and whether/how it's related to why I like indie), but again I'll spare you for now. I wish I didn't always go on for so damned long when everyone else here says actual interesting things and still manages brevity; I'm sorry.

This mistakes thing seems to be at the heart of it - but how much of glitch is dealing with intentionality that is made to "sound like mistakes" and how much is working round actual mistakes?

Anyways, as to what you said I do agree with you to a large extent - and my hypothesis is based on a very small list of stuff, the most prominent example being the Luomo album - but I think my take on glitch might seem more credible in relation to IDM specifically. For example, glitch has already undergone more hybridisation than drill & bass dub-techno both of which pre-date it in terms of being an established style.

Maybe a better angle: in terms of hybridising, glitch's satisfying element is its obviousness - its characteristics are largely positive (as in positively identifiable) rather than negative (see minimal techno, defined almost by what it leaves out). Consequently, whereas most dance hybrids recently seem to sound like a greyscale blending of two styles (tech-house, progressive breaks, hard nrg, breakbeat garage) that takes out the conflicting elements of those styles, glitch hybrids can actually be at once definitely glitch and definitely another style by a combination of positive elements.

An example might be the glitch-aligned take on tech-house you get on Matthew Herbert's Let's All Make Mistakes mix-cd, where the hybrid - what Reynolds calls "house-tech" - takes the extreme center point of the two given styles and jams them together in a really exciting and unexpected fashion, rather than merely blurring the borders between them.

This reminds me of those fun Markus Popp interviews. He says that what he does is not art but "file management."

How come nobody ever mentiones Christian Marclay when they talk about glitch? Is the difference between analog and digital really so great here? I have his Records comp., and it seems to me like it's coming from a place similar to Oval.

i think the name has gone far beyond the idea of a 'glitch' in the system or whatever.

what is it with this term anyway? ive only ever seen it on ILM and its seems a bit........er....i dunno just doesnt sound very good.

nothing though, is as bad as the awful awful IDM moniker. please never ever use this as a description for anything, unless you mean the term to be part of slagging off an artist, like using 'triphop'.

who the fuck thought up that little IDM git?