Top myths about "electronic music"

actually, that one's true...

Someone said this to me once, then used Moby as an example since he wasn't really familiar with any "electronic" music. Opinions about the music aside, mentioning someone who has a moderately sized touring band was the worst example he could give.

(xpost x 5)

You might want to talk about vinyl's role in "electronic music" and explain why some people prefer vinyl to CD.

Yes, it isn't *required* to be on drugs when you're listening to this stuff. Really!

also:

http://www.rockcritics.com/features/discocritics1.html

Just to clarify, the knob turning thing was a joke. I spend a good amount of my free time knob twisting (man, that sounds wrong) and twidling around with software. Of course most good live electronic acts are doing something much more detailed and interesting and usually have something else to their show. I was being facetious earlier.

I've always thought that someone should do an EP of house or techno and call it "The Sounds Of Last Week... Today" just to offset all this "music of the future" nonsense. Techno and house have always been the sound of Right Now, and, truth be told, have both been around long enough to have a sonic canon...

One of the surprising ones, maybe: that all "electronic" music is made by DJs. I think DJ Shadow's album confused a lot of people; they assumed, after him, that any sample-based music must have been made exclusively with turntables. Just yesterday, on another list I'm on, someone asked for DJ recommendations, because he needed to commission a remix.

Yeah, I'm disheartened that this still gets trotted out - the second that I tell people I make house / dance / techno / whatevah, it's always "Oh, cool! Where do you spin?" Meanwhile, I can't beatmatch to save my life. I've even contemplated BECOMING a DJ just for the alleged street cred. Sigh.

xpost

I dunno if this is true anymore but when I've seen him he's usually jumping around so much it hardly matters whether he's playing anything or not--he does anything BUT "stare." (until that stupid "Thousand" standing-on-the-keyboard thing at least, which I hope he doesn't do anymore.)

Escape Artists

By Michiko Kakutani (NYT) 988 words
In a 1987 novel called ''little heroes,'' Norman Spinrad created a sinister portrait of a huge corporation named Muzik Inc., which manufactures megahits by replacing ''bands, orchestras and even backup vocalists'' with high-tech machines and ''a black box full of wizard-ware.'' The company has ''turned hit-making into a science'' and is now in the process of making real, live musicians obsolete.

Only a decade later, Spinrad's dark vision of the future seems weirdly prophetic. Techno -- the electronic dance music that has been around for years but is now being pushed as the next big thing by MTV and record labels eager to find a successor to alternative rock -- relies on computers, synthesizers, drum machines and samplers to purvey a cold, distinctly antihumanistic agenda. Many of its practitioners are key punchers, not guitar players; deejays and computer geeks, not musicians.

The names of techno groups conjure up a chilly world of science and technology -- the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Orbital, Model 500, Altern 8, Program 2 -- and so does most of the music: a relentless, synthetic drum beat mixed with dissonant, computer-generated blips and screeches. On the rare occasion that a human voice can be heard, it's the robotic chanting of one or two numbing phrases: ''Baby got an atom bomb, baby got an atom bomb. ...''; ''sick to death, sick to death, sick to death. ...''

The accompanying video images similarly celebrate man's obsolescence. There are lots of trippy pictures of sexualized machine parts and strobe-lighted montages of computer-generated graphics. When people appear, they are zombielike creatures or bionic Frankensteins, half human, half machine. Techno, as the liner notes to one CD reads, is ''music made by machines for people who can't stand the way things are.''

Whereas earlier counterculture figures like Allen Ginsberg railed against the military-industrial complex -- in ''Howl,'' he denounced post-atomic America, ''whose mind is pure machinery,'' whose ''breast is a cannibal dynamo'' -- techno-heads celebrate what the writer Mark Dery calls ''the convergence of human and machine.'' Hippies flocked to Woodstock to practice free love and protest the Vietnam war; techno-heads flock to raves -- all-night dance parties that, in one raver's words, are ''about forgetting who's going to be President and having a good time.'' Techno has little to do with cultural politics, messy human emotions or even sex. It's about trancing out to a metronomic beat, obliterating all feeling and thought. Grunge and alternative rock rebelled against the status quo with dark, despairing songs about death and alienation. Techno (also known as electronica) spurns the human world altogether, embracing a brave new millennial world in which technology promises transcendence and the body is shrugged off as dead ''meat.'' Many practitioners don't even crave renown as artists -- they pride themselves on their anonymity, their subservience to the digital muse. The old counterculture marched to a different drummer; the new one zones out to a drum machine.

Techno is the most visible part of a digital subculture with a willfully hedonistic credo that's cynical about politics, social change and just about everything in the here and now. As Dery writes in his book ''Escape Velocity,'' the digital life-styles magazine ''Mondo 2000'' is dedicated to ''social irresponsibility'' and ''highjacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games'' -- an outlook that weds New Age narcissism with the messianic futurism of Alvin Toffler. It is an outlook echoed by a glossy new book called ''Techno Style,'' which declares that ''partying is the be-all and end-all of techno.

At first glance, techno seems an entirely fitting sound for the ''whatever'' generation, a generation that has turned affectlessness into a fashion statement and detachment into a life style. While ambient techno creates a bland, New Agey mood, the more hard-core trance genre has a coldly compulsive feel to it -- like disco without the humor or sex. Its numbing pace celebrates a society reeling from information overload, just as its repudiation of conventional melodies and lyrics reflects a world increasingly skeptical of linear narratives and accessible truths.

There are more distressing aspects to the techno revolution, however, that underscore how far the rest of our culture has gone toward repudiating the basic tenets of humanism -- namely, a belief in social responsibility, individualism and the uses of sympathy and the imagination. Four decades ago, Lewis Mumford warned that America's worship of the machine would make life increasingly ''overmechanized, standardized, homogenized.'' All ''inner waywardness'' in man, he warned, was being ''brought into conformity by hypnotics and sedatives.''

Today, the very things that struck Mumford as dangers are being cheerfully embraced by many techno-heads. Just as Andy Warhol -- who famously declared, ''I want to be a machine'' -- left a legacy of hip commercialism and mass reproduction, so techno-heads embrace a future in which the authentic gives way to the synthetic, the idiosyncratic voice to the noise and glut of the mass mind. Just as the rave aims to submerge individual consciousness in group bliss (or the ''hive mind''), so techno aims to make its listeners submit to the beat of a tireless machine.

Yet despite all the recent buzz about techno, there are signs that American audiences aren't ready to renounce rock-and-roll -- or become ghosts in the machine. So far, the heavily promoted new album by techno's most heavily hyped act, the Chemical Brothers, hasn't even cracked Billboard's Top 10; it's far behind albums by the Wallflowers, Paul McCartney and even the Bee Gees.

STOP RIGHT THERE.

(Spinrad had his points but Little Heroes was his attempt to go cyberpunk that failed because you couldn't imagine ANYTHING more rockist. Apparently the only good thing musically after the sixties was Springsteen and the rest was plastic. DIE DIE DIE.)

!!!!!

this was my first question too, it scans very out of date...

still to this day i get told 'but you have to be on drugs to enjoy electronic music' or that 'it's not real music'. when the piano was invented many people thought that machine was an aberration.

Actually, wasn't there a UK union ban on synths around 1970 just for this very reason?

like: certain kinds of electronic music sound "dated."

or:

"people who don't care about innovative electronic beats are rockist"

or the almost too obvious:

"certain kinds of electronic dance music are intelligent"

or whatever.

"people who listen to the kind of electronic music that calls itself intelligent obviously have pointy heads and don't enjoy dancing."

or, again, almost too obviously:

"most electronic dance music isn't mindless, but trance sure is."

Drew, the article was from July 7, 1997; I think it ran in the NYT Magazine, actually -- the header from the web archive is "Magazine Desk."

I'm definitely eager to include plenty of myths from "within" the canon (jesus, my fingers are going to get tired, doing all these scare quotes on stage). My years of IDM-list subscription have definitely turned up plenty; in fact, just today someone claimed that "experimental" electronic music isn't, or can't be, pop music, because it's not "popular." No matter that it incorporates pop structures, follows a pop market logic, etc. It may not be pop in the way that Kylie is pop, but it seems to me that it's a question of *types* of pop, not mutual exclusivity.

Anyway, that's the IDM-list for you. I subscribe so you don't have to.

-- philip sherburne (psherburn...), February 16th, 2005.

*shudder*

I was on there for awhile, but people kept saying boneheaded stuff about women in electronic music that made me steamed and provoked me into getting on my high horse and going into Feminism 101 lecture mode, tedious for all involved. Glad it still exists though, for some reason . . . .

Chuck you are OTM about there being internal myths too to electronic music making, frequently the rhetoric around it reminds me weirdly of the language poetry scene.

moral: hatred

the thing is most of the time the 2ms isn't gonna make or break you --------- there's something to be said for working fast, or at least alternating between periods of spontaneity and obsessiveness ---- you don't HAVE to calibrate your decision-making to the fullest extent of granularity offered by the software to come up with something cool ------ accidents are fine! in fact i think that's why I prefer hardware most of the time --- all those fucking menus will def. sap your will to live ---- and in the end, thats AUDIBLE!!!!

But general point being that man, electronic can be way harder. I mean, talk about "pushing a button" -- if I want vibrato on a guitar note, I just wiggle my finger a little! If I want a touch of vibrato on a synth note, I spend 15 minutes setting up an LFO modulation and automating it to hit the right notes.

ha ha! very true, but this also depends on whether you can play an instrument. i know plenty of amazing producers who can't play any instruments to save their lives. i had an interesting conversation with justus k. from kompakt once where he told me he couldn't play any instruments at all--couldn't even strum a chord on a guitar if you asked him to. all he knows is synth programming. i found this surprising, judging by some of the records he's made, but yeah!

sounds cooler than some old landscape!

Geeta, I can totally believe that about Justus! I mean, that's actually the traditional position of the composer w/r/t a symphony, right -- he's intimately familiar with each instrument's capabilities, and can easily notate directions for what each instrument should do, but he wouldn't necessarily be able to hop down there and play the bassoon himself. Slightly different in that composers traditionally play something -- piano -- but otherwise the relationship is similar. The composer knows "how" each instrument is played -- he just doesn't necessarily have the physical ability to actually play it! And I'd guess that after enough synth programming, Justus has developed a decent sense of "how" one plays the piano.

yeah!! it's funny. yesterday i listened to a recording of jeff mills playing 'the bells' with a full orchestra--the montpelier philharmonic orchestra i believe. it just sounded totally WRONG to my ears, to have the song so fully fleshed out and "organic" sounding like that. i actually vastly prefer the chilly synth timbres in his original techno anthem to this huge, expensive, expansive version. but i think i prefer synthesized sounds to "real" sounds in general, which is part of the reason why i fear i'm becoming more kraftwerk with each passing day.

drnt drnt drnt drnt

The graphical interfaces for sequencing often represent a piano keyboard -- so no matter how you're programming them, you pick up at least a little sense of which notes are where, what different keys look like, what shapes the chords fall into, etc.

Old hardware would often give you a little two-octave keyboard to input through; new software often represents a full keyboard. The most rudimentary would be stuff like the Roland 303 (image), which has that super-basic one-octave button system. There was definitely a brief era of tracker software that just had you input note names like chess moves (B3, E4), but I imagine those would have been damn hard to use for melodic arrangements without knowing how to work out the notes on a regular instrument first. There are also computery ways where you could notate a musical score and produce your sequencing that way.

Where this gets tricker is with things like arpeggiators and other MIDI/sequencer tools, which actually do semi-"automatically" create musical effects. You can pick up interesting things learning those, too, though it tends to be theory/composition stuff more so than how-to-play stuff.

Yeah, I've seen those and that's the sort of thing that mystifies me as far as usability goes.

I do know at least one composer/electronics who doesn't "really" play any instrument, but he's such a conceptual genius and has such good musical instincts (coming from the composer direction) that he can fake it anyway.

gearpedants.com

the man lies. he's great. i would YSI one of his tunes but he'd probably kill me.

Or why pulling a metal string is more real than pressing a plastic button.

Or how listening to a CD can ever *NOT* be electronic music. Vinyl too for that matter.

Or why a 4 second loop is bad.

Or how The Rolling Stones didn't sample Howling Wolf.

Or why people seem to have some vested, personal interest where their music comes from; who makes it, using which equipment in which way and are offended on an individual level when this standard is not met.

Or how sampling could "kill music as an artform" and why this would be a bad thing.

(Never actually seen this explicitly refuted in print - just something I wanted to put out there.)