new Electronic music

this sounds very much like bodenstandig 2000....

who are well good

Last night I caught the Kid606 show, which was essentially gabba beats glitched up a bit with Missy Elliot and Outkast vocals on top. Some stood and stared, some headbanged frantically, and the rest covered their ears. It still boiled down to a guy and his laptops, but the scene changes when people have some invested belief in their stage icon. The laptop is basically IDM's 1200. It's not any more or less problematic as a performance tool, besides the fact that it's much more accessible (hence the abundance of IDM/glitch bedroom artists).

New sounds, such as the glitch, have been perceived as so inherently impressive, that a measure of quality has perhaps dwindled down a bit. I don't really need more melodies necessarily, but I'd like to see more artists developing their sound as a craft rather than the same knob-twiddling experimentation.

In the next 5 years it is all going to go back to songs because the 90's were all about timbral progression and that is just about played out. Personally, I am so burnt on all this shit after following it for 7 years. I don't care how super glitch micro-tech-step-house teh current electronic hype of the month is. I just want to hear SONGS, you know like SONGS, chord progressions, diatonic melodies, counter point...

the genre is complete shit because there are too many people with laptops who can't write songs glutting the distributors and retailers. Autechre and Aphex know music, they did not stumble into their records, they knew what they were doing. The problem now is the the economic bar is so low that you do not have to be dedicated or proficent in order to release product now. If the was a law that said that producers had to work on piano and learn theory for two years before they could made records, the entire genre would be so much better. Not because you need theory to make good music, but because it would weed out all the people who are half-assing it.

The technology makes it so much easier to make a track that sounds sorta-alright rather than good. There are tons of people making music that is alright, but hardly anybody is making gems. The reason is that everybody is so concerned withh the technology thhat they never bother to write decent music.

Is it so hard to make a case that this is "lazy artist" not bothering to cover cracks? or worse, is a new vocabulary being forced ? OK maybe laptop (esp. real-time) music is hard, but it'd be nice to get beyond demarking the digital domain or pretending there is _always_ humour or context information in these oft-spotted noises. Electric guitarists get into the frame w/out having to remind us they are plugged in. This context setting stuff to me further destroys an illusion of "music" in a lot of cases, that ever-illusory music being formally a large part of the fun (for me). Nobody is acknowledging what i've written here whether "media commentary" or "state of the art" or whatever it is can be comparable to the creation of music, are they ?

In a simpler music as music view these noises could be replaced with the presumably almost infinite array of sound available to digital musicians. At the moment it seems a lot of this music references in some way past electronic practises and patterns that were simply the result of the limitations of the then current technology. The technology is beyond including any of these hallmarks of process or progress -- is an umbilical cord really necessary ? Does "newness" or "progress" have to be spelt out, have to be baldy and blandly a part of the "currency" ? And are digital artists really making this music for us or for each other ?

I know where you are coming from with democratic music and to an extent I agree with you. Everyone should have the right to be creative and express themselves. If you want to release a record, it is your right to do so.

The problem that I have with the ease of releasing music these days is that it massively decreases the signal to noise ratio of any given genre of music, in this case IDM. I honestly believe that there is a finite amount of quality musical talent on the planet at any given time. The problem with having 9 million IDM labels is that it streaches that talent damn thin. It also wears out the idea. I think I would have a lot more respect for IDM as a genre if it were not for all the wanker me-too records that are coming out all the time. If all IDM were half as good as Aphex Twin the genre would be great, but the VAST majority of it is just third-rate me-too records.

I will put it to you this way, how many of those records will be remembered and cherished in 5 years? How many of them are just status symbols for people who associate themselves with the genre? How much electronic music is simply disposable, and is even intended to be disposable?

The flip side of it is, what if it is difficult and expensive to release music? The knee-jerk reaction is: well only rich people and major labels will do it, and ideas will not evolve as quickly...

I think what will actually happen is that people will work a lot harder on their music. I think that it will concentrate quality in the genre, because if you want to release a record, it will have to be much stronger. I see it happening in Detroit at this very moment. Now that Submerge is not distributing records as easily as they once did the quality is going up. What is happening is that the guys who were second rate are getting cut out of the game and the first-tier artists are really working harder to make sure that their records are the best they can be. Tightening the reigns of quality control never hurt any scene. What happens is that there are fewer records of a higher quality that can be promoted better, you wind up selling 10,000 of one release rather than 5,000 split between five releases. At the end of the day, you made a better record and you made more money too.

The other thing is that if you are a label owner, you are going to be very picky about what you release. You are also going to make sure that your artists are making the best records possible. It forces everyone to make the best possible product, because you cannot afford to make mistakes. You are also going to make it a point to be as informed as possible, and run your label as best you can. Detroit does as well as it does because we are always on the ropes and we are always fighting. When you are some 20-something IT guy who runs a label to be cool, you are not going to do as good a job.

The upshot isn't a bad situation really - I know that if I want to hear a new IDM record I can just download the next thing I see and like it just as much as the thing I'll see after that. But, you know, what do people into IDM find to talk about?

I hope not. I hated those sounds then. I still hate them. And I suspect I always will. Modules like the Roland D110 were just shit basically. The freedom to use any sound you want (affordable samplers with decent amounts of memory, then viable digital recording on the PC) liberated us from those terrible machines.

The better angle might be: what questions does IDM have left to ask? Perilously few in its pure form I suspect. You get a rush of micro-activity every time the recording technique creates new room for movement (eg. glitch) but horizon for innovation is that much smaller because the routes of progression are now so clearly demarcated.

This is the result of IDM's peculiar confluence of sensibility and recording technique (which act like the x and y scales determining out the genres borders), and now that progressions in technique occur upon a minute scale the only way that IDM artists can distinguish themselves is by breaking out or severely bending the rules sensibility-wise. Thus you get Kid 606, and perhaps more importantly (in the long run) the relatively new 'transgressive' flirtations with other dance genres that adopts the genre's sensibilities as well as stylistic markers - most obviously, microhouse. It's notable, I think, that microhouse resists the IDM-association in a way that drill & bass never did, probably because the latter more closely adhered to the IDM- spirit whereas microhouse is house recorded with IDM-style- complexity. (to follow further down this line of inquiry: are Horsepower Productions IDM? If so, what separates them from other UK Garage producers? If not, what separates them from "My Red Hot Car"?)

Also, what has happened, perhaps, is the earlier generations of twiddling and weirdness have leveled off, so that IDM is no longer a reaction to something, but a stable pool in itself (a neutral set of "cool noises"). At this point, it becomes a free market aesthetic for Radiohead or Antipop Consortium or Bjork (outside genres) to appropriate. The ends of the bridge have begun to meet now as who's influencing who becomes a blurrier issue.

The idea that Aphex Twin and Autechre strode through the genre like giants is pure canon- reductionism.

Granted, and yet they were the characters I seemed to read about the most at the time, though admittedly in a wider musical press arena instead of exclusive electronic/dance music coverage. So they were certainly *seen* to be giants in many ways, which determines a lot of reactions after the fact. Aphex was going to be the cover story in MM when SAWII came out, except one Kurt C. had to do a suicide attempt in Rome...

One thing that I think sets the best apart from the rest in electronic music is the use of analog equipment. Every Minimoog, Korg MS20, and Arp 2600 has its own personality, qualities, and beneficial idiosyncracies. My faves, the Boards of Canada, incorporate older gear into their work and I like earlier RDJ much more. Then again, digital samplers have been necessary to extend the music beyond what Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream did in the pre- sampler era. Just as the Rolling Stones interpreted American blues artists to develop a new sound, the Boards of Canada succeed in their interpretation of 70's electronic music and by their "swerve" towards originality. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the best music (IDM included) is usually a synthesis of old and new.

As it's increasingly difficult to create new forms, call it the curse of "belatedness," new forms will inevitably emerge due to many factors, internal(imagination) and external(technology). To sound literary critic like Harold Bloom, the term "anxiety of influence" applies to music as well as literature and visual arts and no matter how experimental, very few can claim to be truly original.

It's always difficult to define the state of things contemporary, but I am confident that now we are (as always) creating new vocabularies and sensibilities we have not begun to fully grasp yet. There has always been too much of anything. In another generation,tubes and analog gear may be close to extinct as we become digital beings and someone may compile something akin to Harry Smith's Anthology of Folk Music on a medium incomprehensible to us, but the complitation may contain the early pioneers of what we call IDM. But humans have never faced such information and sensory overload, which will only become more pervasive in the future.

yeah, but i'd like the new music to have pitch elements as well as sound elements. it's still music, not just ("curated sound effects" == art somehow automatically) surely ? I'd like to see laps taken beyond sound effect-ish wank. Oh, wank ? well musically please, but the current noise as art is too much like the old electronic as strange or novel music.
(shock of the new -- let's see what we have apart from the sheer surprise or shock)

a lap is a new instrument. don't throw out so many good things about music for the sake of shock noise/ new unheard noise/ (boils down to new novel sounds in worst case)

i grant you there are obvious quality exceptions to my very general suspicions, where music that includes some norms or pitch and rhythm merges with new vocabulary, but i think extending that vocabulary to the exclusion of good conventional music merging (PLUS++) new processing, sounds and composing techniques, to me it's a baby/ bathwater overkill into lurch.

the finnesse of fennesz please, but screw the "this is my machinery malfunctioning" novelty of some other mego "artists"

tell me about microhouse i might like that does this please. Hey, in the two years since this thread, have the glitch/noise people proved anything new ?

and btw, what's new ?

ok it's settled... we're calling it lap music (lap, for short)