What you say is not "heresy," certainly, but still, I think there is another
way to look at this, and as one of the resident old farts on the list, I
can't allow it to go un-addressed. ;)
I guess it greatly depends on what you call "advanced," and "advancement,"
and maybe even what you call "the art of electronic music."
We're certainly not in universal agreement that electronic music has
advanced recently. Not by a looooong shot. Certainly some nice music is
being made, but if you ask me, Wendy Carlos' 15-year-old "Beauty in the
Beast" was about the last thing I've heard that made me think that anyone
was truly advancing the frontiers of the art.
But then again, what exactly "electronic music" ∗is∗ seems to be wide open
to interpretation, and that alone makes me bristle. When I was a wee lad, EM
was its own idiom, a very experimental form of sound creation. You would
hear some weird sweeping Krell music and know, "THAT is electronic music!"
It wasn't just popular music made with a lot of synthesizers (we called that
'Progressive Music' back in medieval times, another term that has been
recently warped out of shape); electronic music was its own "thing," a form
of music uniquely suited to the strange new machines that created it, and to
ears that were open enough to hear and appreciate sounds that weren't
necessarily imitations of acoustic instruments in the key of C, 4/4 time
signature. In fact, keys and time signatures were originally often foreign
concepts in EM, so radical was it at the time.
To make Krell music, you NEED a modular. That's all there is to it. It's the
right tool for the job.
Today... well let's just say that the music that tends to be called
"electronic" is not what it used to be, while what I personally would call
"electronic music" is found either in the "classical" bins, "new age," or
most likely, nowhere at all. Look up Tomita or Carlos in the CDDB and you'll
see what I mean. Why someone couldn't think up a new term for this new stuff
is beyond me.
So has EM really advanced? It has been ∗usurped∗.
From what I hear, a lot of so-called modern electronic music is little more
than in-your-face production techniques. It really doesn't affect the roots
of the composition, the "music," but just adds some "I wonder how they did
that" gloss to a bed of the same-old-thing.
For my money, the analog sound and techniques of the 'last century' (gawd!)
were not nearly explored enough. It's exploration was cut short by the
parallel development of digital electronics, which bled over (for obvious
reasons) into electronic instrument development in the 80's, first in terms
of MIDI keyboard control (Damoclean enough on its own, certainly), patch
memorization, and soon after replacing most discrete sound shaping
electronics with cheap, mass-market digital. (Am I complaining? Yes and
∗no∗-without these lower-cost boxes, I would never have been able to afford
to do the things I've done over the past twenty years. Only ∗now∗ can I
afford the modular I've really wanted, but I wouldn't want to have never
done the pieces that I created using Mirages, Proteuses (Proteii?), and so
on.)
However, I think that decades of music, music that would have been much
different from what we actually got, were lost because digital electronics
were so fast in coming.
It's like developing a fast new warp engine, exploring Mars for about a
week, moving onto the next star, and then ten years later snickering at the
guys still back there exploring Mars (hey, maybe there are huge diamond
deposits there that got overlooked because farther stars were suddenly in
reach!).
That's why many of us are interested in analog modulars. Not because we
can't adjust to the tremendously-advancing digital and software technology,
but because we're going back to find something that was lost, tragically
lost, by the wayside. At the very least, a superior user interface. In some
alternate universe, where the development of LSI took a little longer, they
must be enjoying a lot more great music than we ever got our hands on. Of
course, the poor saps are listening to it on vinyl, because the CD player
never got invented...
-----Original Message-----
From: Cap'n F.M. Bleep [mailto:
bleep@...]
Sent:Thursday, 01 March, 2001 3:19 PM
To:
motm@yahoogroups.comSubject:Re: [motm] Re: art of synthesis
> All of this probably explains why music technology has advanced
tremendously
> but the music hasn't.
i disagree... look at ppl like autechre, u-ziq, haujobb, boards of canada,
aphex twin, etc... these people are really advancing electronic music IMO.
and they're "only" pop musicians. but the thing is, most of them are using
their computers to do it... most of the music hardware these days is doing
one of two things, refining rompler/sampler tech or trying to achieve that
"vintage" sound... i mean, we of all people shouldn't be talking about
advancing music technology... heck, we're still using patchcords! ∗laugh∗
this may be heresy to say here, but the sound ∗we're∗ chasing has very
little to do with advancements in music. i ∗love∗ my MOTM, and i can make
some seriously "advanced" sounds with it... but if i wanted to make
autechre/haujobb-level "advanced" music, only things like csound and
max/msp would do...
okay... sorry, this is getting way off topic.
<flamesuit="on">
bleep.
out.