herbert's pccom: c or d

There's been a thread on this manifesto before. I think jess started it, but I can't find it at the moment. By the way, Herbert reads ILM - my friend Robbie forwarded to me a reply he got from MH to a (not very complimentary) post he made on my recent Radio Boy thread.

Second Hand Sounds was a nice crowd pleaser but what did people make of The Mechanics of Destruction? Can you 'hear' the high anti-corporate concept in it or is it really just Matmos without a sense of humor?

Matmos has a sense of humor?

The idea that anyone else should be restricted from programmed beats or sampling other stuff is, of course, preposterous.

Well.... A Chance to Cut... sure feels a lot funnier than The Mechanics of Destruction (yes, perhaps due to quirky liposuction sounds). Also, I'm pretty sure something like "Spondee" was supposed to be a joke about house music.

I really do love his music, though. I think he demonstrates something about the future of electronic music -- as possibilities for sound continue to expand, choosing a set of limitations will become a more important part of composition. Otherwise it all sounds like the weaker stuff on Tigerbeat6 or Schematic.

Herbert's manifesto only shows just how much he cares about the sounds themselves in his music - he walks the walk, and his records sound great for it. Like Tim said, it works for him, and that's what's important. And despite how wonderful the sounds themselves are, I love the fact that he doesn't just let them "speak for themselves" (like so many academic composers would do if they made such sounds), but rather builds well-constructed songs out of them - tracks with an impeccable sense of tension and release.

Re: "he's still just making house music" - don't ignore the groove- dissonance that permeates his work. If you listen, it's never just *boom-tss-boom-tss" - there are always elements rubbing against each other awkwardly amidst the steady pulse (one of the things I love about Farben, too.), and concentrating on certain elements one time and others another time can make it seem like two completely different grooves - a sort of perspectival openness that a lot of dance music lacks (or, at least, contains to a far lesser extent).

Sorry, Tim -- based on the above line alone, Clarke is now going to be your rival for Them Pithy Comments. :-)

Why not just say 'house producer'?

is that interview a joke? it's always hard to tell when it's not funny.

xp fake but not funny or illuminating - i wonder what the point is then?

(ps: the interview's real)

Jed, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here, but I didn't mean to imply any sort of anything!!! There's a lot of reading into things on this thread!

Also, Jena may have been reacting to these statements:

maybe because he's not just a house producer.
and
House producer seems maybe more limiting than musique concrete artist

...which seem to place house music under musique concrete in a hierarchy.

Also for the record, I've been listening to house music basically since it's inception. I mean, I wasn't in Chicago in 1985, but I certainly started loving it by 1986. < /losingmyedge>

Hilarious! I'm glad to see we've come full circle so quickly on this.

House is food and you need it
If I feed it you should eat it
Let your mind be free
Relax your body
jump, jump, a little higher
jump, jump until you get tired

say what
HOUSE MUSIC ALL NIGHT LONG
say what
HOUSE MUSIC ALL NIGHT LONG

In my humble opinion . . .

On the musique-concrete vs. house tip, I think you could make an argument for a minimal definition of musique-concrete as "making music through cut and paste decisions rather than melodic composition" ie. building your music out of sound rather than writing a chord sequence and then fleshing it out. Under that definition, a lot of pop music, and hip hop, and RnB, and house, at the level of PRODUCTION is musique-concrete. In terms of cultural capital, musique concrete is a dead horse in the academy (it was disowned by its founder Schaeffer) and has a weird spectral afterlife in electronic music making; it wouldn't necessarily be about how high or low do you want to pitch things but about how far you care to go back historically about the relationship between how the music is made and what form it takes once you've made it (technique vs outcome- they're both ways of carving up genre). But Herbert thinks and writes melodically from the get-go, so he's always a bit hybrid (which is part of why he's interesting, I think).

that theo parrish album is called "first floor", drew, and i think it's out of print.

there's a good theo thread here: theo parrish s/d

hi... yes, I was reacting to jed's phrasing a bit, which to me implied that 'house producer' was not as as valid of a form of musical expressison since it limits the artist. i'll agree with that statement to some extent, and i can see what you're saying, but i wouldn't resort to undermine it's potential in a good pair of hands. to me, herbert sounds like house music, and very good at that. although intriguing in theory (i.e. dropping phonebook instead of sampled kick), herbert's end result is a great house gem. i don't really buy the manifesto, it's rather pretentious, and i agree with drew on the fact that most electronic music today is essentially musique concrete. i also find herbert's ways of protesting war dismal and hopelessly post-modern.