on texture and rhythm and ambient music

also i don't why you pack these two things together.

The White Stripes have a guitarist who sings and a drummer. They make rock'n'roll in some kind of grrrr sense. It's not just rock'n'roll, it's rock'n'bloody(grr)roll.

Luomo's not just glitchy house music, it's music built on a couple of strong principles - a) hot, breathy, steaminess; b) everything's about texture. It's like he sat down and drew up a brief on making music that was hot and breathy and steamy and textural and to hell with all your genre assumptions.

Manitoba's Up In Flames is being as intense and crazy and as full-on and psychadelic as it can possibly be. (It doesn't matter whether he knew exactly what he was doing or didn't have a clue, because the intention seems to be the same either way.)

Aphex Twin - Logon Rock Witch, need I say more? Ok, I will. Be as weird and strange as possible. (Try and convince me that track wasn't

Sutekh - Incest and loads of Detroit techno - Look, we're making motherfucking funkyassed rhythms; we don't need melody, we don't need ABACA, we just want rhythm.

Purity of intention. Unless you want to ascribe another label to it, or explain it some other way. I'm interested for sure because if I'm wrong somehow or making some fundamental assumption which isn't true I want to find that out.

xpost - Barry, yeah, that's /exactly/ what I mean. Chilled without being still. Background music. Muzac rather than music. (Not that there's anything wrong with muzac, I love it but far more so when it's done wilfully (eg lounge covers of Hendrix songs or something) than when it's labelled as some kind of cutting edge cool.)

vahid - interest was a bad choice of word. Mystery in the sense of it's mysterious because you don't know what it is but it draws your attention, like the feeling you get when you listen to a new type of music that you've never ever heard before. As opposed to mystery in the gloves trenchcoat hat golly gosh I wonder whodunnit sense, or mystery in the sneaky suspicious morally suspect international espionage sense.

Fuck language bites. We need something like Babel-17 for real.

i always wondered why gescom (for example) bothered with putting the most boring straight boom-bap hiphop beats on their tracks (see also chocolate industries, ai, boomkat.com, whatever). but yeah, some people actually do play this stuff out as dance music, just like there's apparently djs that play ninja tunes out.

and again, we come back to the fact that you don't like "cleanly sampled" although you could easily argue that a clean beat has as much texture and detail as any fuzzed-out boards of canada beat, just not the sort that you find interesting. personally i'd rather hear something like "rock your body" than wu-tang over a really loud system, the clean production just makes it bearable when you're standing in front of the speaker.

there's exactly zero mystery about what luke skyywalker is up to but that doesn't make them not great.

if the question is better phrased "why are they fucking up my ambient music with canned drum samples" then i'd say probably to appeal to a broader audience / shift more units / because what ryan said.

It just reeks of a lack of creativity, like you could not think of anything better. There is such a rediculous amount of sound in the world, couldn't the producer think of anything a bit more unusual?

x-post vahid

It comes down to different ways of listening. I somehow managed to avoid ever getting into music with guitars in until about a year or two ago. I just didn't know how to listen to it.

When I'm listening to what-i-call good ambient-electronic stuff, it draws me in.. um, you know that feeling when you're wasted and the washing machine sounds incredible? I get basically that exact feeling when completely sober listening to ambient which follows this purity of vision idea, and it's to do with the way I listen to it. I can't listen to rock like this, it's an exclusively electronic music thing; I think it's something to do with the precision of the timing meaning it sets up some kind of rhythm in brainwaves so that some kind of resonance happens and the feeling intensifies itself, like a feedback loop...

But as soon as you throw a beat which hasn't been written from that perspective over it it loses that sense of stoned amazingness.

Radio Boy started life as Wishmountain, a project I started at university which set specific parameters of composition and then attempted to frame concrete sounds in a rhythmic context. As John Cage said in 1939:

"Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to nineteenth-century music. Today we are fighting emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.

Instead of giving us new sounds, the nineteenth-century composers have given us endless arrangements of the old sounds. We have turned on radios and always known when we were tuned to a symphony. The sound has always been the same, and there has not been even a hint of curiosity as to the possibilities of rhythm. For interesting rhythms we have listened to jazz.

At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything- tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes- anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, smashing, making sound in every possible way. In short, we must explore the materials of music. What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines and electrical instruments we will invent."

Considering he wrote that over 70 years ago, you'd have thought that more people would realise the potential of the technology. I would be curious to know what Cage would be doing now were he still alive. He once spent 3 months splicing together tape for 12 hours a day. If he could have done that with a computer in under an hour today, what would he have done instead?

The basis of Wishmountain was the sampling of everyday objects and placing them in structures and rhythmic patterns normally associated with club music. Having been introduced to electronic music for wider appeal through house music in the early 90s, it seemed a logical scene in which to place my music also since techno then professed to experiment with technologies as part of the definition of a new sound for a new generation. Recently, techno seems to have become a solidified genre in the same way that rock has and even when I started it was beginning to lose its way. It was with 'Radio', the first release, that the music made sense. Big German DJs like Sven Vath and Westbam were playing it. If 2000 German kids wanted to dance to eight sounds I took from a broken radio then things were getting interesting. The live show continued to be a place in which to try out these new sounds and patterns, often abstracting the idea of a house rhythm to one or two elements. For the live show, I would take the object that I made the track with: i.e. a pepper pot or packet of crisps then deconstruct it and re-present the sounds in such a way that the audience would hopefully understand a little more of what they were hearing. Recently the track 'Bottle' has been ripped off by amongst others, a Belgian artist that missed the point entirely and added some nasty drum machine presets and a trance bassline.

I read that and it made me go 'fuck yeah, this man knows what he's talking about.'

I'm convinced that when the attitude is consistent ('purity of intention') and said attitude is actually making a difference to the noises of the music (as opposed to the meaning (whatever that means, how on earth can ambient music ever have 'meaning' in any useful sense of the word?) or the ideas expressed by the music) much more interesting (with some reasonabe amount of objectivity granted to the term, being why 'everyone thinks' Manitoba has crafted something unique or Aphex Twin is a nutcase or the Detroit sound was groundbreaking) music tends to be made.

That's what it is, that's why the Bonobo beat expresses more purity of intention than a Boards of Canada beat... Boards of Canada's modus operandi is to make rhythms out of fuzzed-out weird sounds, be they rhythmical or melodic. Bonobo's modus operandi is to lay chilled (they're very chilled in a good way, to be sure) standard been-done-before sounding beats over fuzzed-out weird sounds.

Because ultimately, music is sound, right? I mean, the important bits, the bits you can't give yourself just by thinking, the part of music that makes you want to listen to the song again even though you know all the lyrics, you can hum the melody, you can feel all the rhythms and you can imagine all the backing tracks, so why should you bother actually listening? So you can hear the sound of it.

I ought to point out that really like some of the other tracks from that album, so it does work as in it is enjoyable to listen to, but I don't think it's breaking any new ground as in it doesn't present or rely on any new ways of listening.

It's not mystery as in what are they up to, it's mystery as in how does it make you feel when you listen to it. The oh-my-god-the-washing-machine-sound-is-the-most-incredible-thing-ever feeling.

All trippy states of mind to do with perceiving the world (as opposed to hallucinating) that one can access while under the influence of anything are states of mind one can access while completely sober, it's just a metter of practise.

i can completely relate to this, it's why i spend so much of my time listening to ambient techno. it has that same sparkling high-end attack that, say, 2step garage has. sounds so bright and clear it makes you feel tingly and hyperalert and narcotized at the same time. there's an album by urban tribe, every single track has this effect on me so strongly that i've basically stopped telling people about it, it's like this religious experience that i want to keep for myself.

the thing is i have a hard time connecting this to any "purity of vision". it seems likely to me that what gets this mindstate going in me isn't what does it to everybody else. i think you can sort of get some sort of odd essentialist argument going here that only makes sense because you and i (and mike and barry and everyone else) are coming to the music from a similar set of listening experiences.

but you can also look at some sort of middle ground case like cinematic orchestra. look at a track like "ode to the big sea", there's a drum break in there that's sampled i think off the s/t coltrane album on impulse, it sounds exactly like every other elvin jones drum break. but something about the way he stitches it together creates an interesting texturology. so here i can't say it's entirely about the sound or the way it's deployed against the other elements. or you could even look at maurizio's remix of "Lyot". here's a 4/4 beat EVERYONE had heard before, the standard kicks and hats certainly weren't EQ'd any differently than ordinary, but the usage and the context somehow make it mesmerizing, mind-blowing even.

i just mean to say there's not even a straight-line continuum between IDM crazy scratches noises as beats and same-old-same-old drum patches, or between unconventional and conventional rhythms, or even a cartesian plane made from these two (nonexistent) axes! because somewhere out there somebody's getting the same high we're getting off detroit techno from dave matthews band!!

what is this prog rock analysis? Some music is lame and some is good.
"Purity of vision" sounds a little too high falutin for my taste.

"somebody's getting the same high we're getting off detroit techno from dave matthews band!!"

this is too true

i'll grant that sound is sound and it can do odd things to our heads when properly modulated but for lots of people music is lyrics, music is a party beat, music is personality, etc.

But I'm going to be stubborn about this:

> somebody's getting the same high we're getting off detroit techno from dave matthews band

I disagree. They're getting an equally high high for sure but the nature of the experience of the high will be different by simple virtue of the fact that the things triggering the high are different.

The problem, and the reason this question comes up for me so often, is that I want to experience other people's highs as well as I experience my own. There's a potential high in every experience you have every day, it's just a case of how you perceive the world and your perception is based on subconscious decisions about what to pay attention to that, like every other instinct, you can learn to control. I want to feel the Dave Matthew's Band high, I really do. I currently don't, but I want to.

So I wish that people who listen to music for these highs we're talking about (as opposed to lyrics etc) talk about how it feels to listen to music, by pointing out little bits, rather than by talking about what the music means/how it relates to other things/what it has to do with other stuff in the world. Or how it feels to listen to a great lyric. I don't know what that feels like, because I don't know how to listen to lyrics, and I want to know, because people obviously love it.

I had similar problems getting into Ulrich Shnauss - some friends kept telling me how good his (first) album was, and as I listened, I would really get into the washed out melodies, but then these really predictable over-syncopated soft break beats would come in. It totally grounded the ethereal beauty of the piece into- like transferring this textural entity that was constantly moving and changing into a grounded geometric shape that restricts interpretations to a variation of popular western music.. I think sometimes this style can still be successful - I like Schnauss' newer stuff and some BOC, but for different reasons than the really ethereal ambient techno stuff like SAW, some Chain Reaction stuff, Pub/Ampoule,.. These tracks generally stick to a simple 4/4 beat that just adds an element of time/drive, but still manages to fuction as a texture rather than a heavily grounding element.