version

Well-known member
The playing with time that goes on when you start messing with recordings and tape loops is really cool too. Just the thought that you can do things like take hours of recordings of huge spaces and compress them into a few seconds or completely remove sections and pull them out of context gets stranger and stranger the more you think about it. Almost a form of time travel.
 
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version

Well-known member
I don't think they do, I think they're just working from what they know about eyes. A dog has two types of photoreceptor and can't recognise certain colours that a human - which has three types - can. A mantis shrimp has twelve to sixteen types which suggests that they can see even more.
 

chava

Well-known member
almost all music electronic music now is built around a beat. boards of canada pioneered the art of finding strange, beautiful sonic materials and looping them over pseudo-hip hop beats. this approach can seem like a crutch, in the sense that they would never explore compositional strategies that might hold your interest in the absence of a steady pulse.

but at the same time, haven’t we all thought about making a techno remix of this stuff? it seems like a good idea. if electroacoustic is “head music” and techno / drill / dancehall / whatever is “body music”, surely it would be the best of both worlds. this reasoning is probably why so many producers always stick with beats, no matter how interesting their sonic choices are otherwise.

tl;dr adding a beat don’t always make music better

Has been done before. Wolfgang Voigt with Gas and several other projects.

Boards of Canadas beats are terrible, destroys everything that could (perhaps) have been interesting. Really an act that is on par with Autechre being overrated.
 

luka

Well-known member
What do you want us to do with it? Should we be thinking about other compositional ideas? Other ways to structure a composition? Where do you want us to take it?
 

luka

Well-known member
Barty do this playlist like mvuent does your ones please


Loads of great stuff on it.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232450135_Cognitive_Constraints_on_Compositional_Systems

i know the title doesn't exactly grab you by the lapels but this is pretty interesting. it concerns the question raised earlier of whether or not all the complex theory behind this stuff amounts to anything intelligible from a listener’s pov. investigating (well, asserting) the rules that shape how we perceive music.

the idea that i’ve inadvertently been sort of obsessed with for while that it touches on is “discretization”. in order to get your head around something complex, you need to be able to mentally break it down into small, easier to understand, defined parts. when you do that, the music becomes comprehensible.

personally i think this criterion is very insightful. i get way less out of music when i can’t pull it apart in this way, i.e. can’t decide where one phrase or “thought” ends and another begins.

it’s also probably somewhat applicable to other forms of art. for example it might relate to what luka was saying earlier in this thread about prynne, how in his poetry the frame of reference constantly changes. same thing of needing to figure out how to break something very complex and confusing into manageable parts.

of course the paper seems to have generated some predictably snarky responses, accusing lerdahl of pulling these “rules” out of his ass, and of being a reactionary sneakily trying to dismiss everything that isn’t mozart. both of which are probably true, but i still think it’s a good read.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
i've decided that the germans were by far the best during the early years of this stuff (50s). the italians were basically like the germans but worse (see boulez's comments on scambi) while the french were undisciplined bullshitters as usual. the east coast americans were ok too.

i mean, even these very early pieces by eimert are good. audibly well organized and with good taste in sound design, and also quite imaginative.


 

mvuent

Void Dweller
@padraig (u.s.) you mentioned in another thread that xenakis is a hero of yours. and maybe that you were into a few other similar people in an older thread? i’d be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have on this stuff

@WashYourHands you posted that econtact article a while ago in the other electroacoustic thread. likewise, very interested to hear any of your thoughts on this stuff, if you ever feel like it

(not to put you guys on the spot, feel totally free to ignore this)

so far with xenakis i've only listened to a few of his earliest electronic works. diamorphoses, ph, orient occident, bohor. they're all really unique and good. bohor is the one i'd consider great. the rest i'd still describe more as "promising". get the sense it's the 70s when xenakis really went for it and achieved GOAT status, as far as electoacoustic music.

20 minute field recording of a vast, haunted mythical treasure room.

near the end it dissolves out of existence like a mirage and you're left in a wasteland decorated with sheets of plastic roaring in the wind.


interesting how, imo, bohor mostly resists attempts at "discretization"--yet i still really like it. but maybe it's fitting that i find the specific events hard to track and mentally organize, since the work is supposed to evoke a descent into madness.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
i’d be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have on this stuff
a lot of strict electroacoustic and early electronic biz in general I find difficult to get thru tbh

I like a lot of avant whatever noise bullshit, but my taste in modern classical runs toward drone and minimalism

so I've dabbled but I don't have a deep knowledge of it by any means

if woebot (@Matthew, I think? can't remember) reads the board these days, I'm pretty sure he's a serious electroacoustic head, Prospective 21e Siècle LPs and the like

Xenakis is a personal hero more for his amazing life - Greek Resistance war hero, exiled for being a leftist, showed up in Paris as an illegal immigrant and somehow parleyed that into studying architecture under Le Corbusier AND becoming an electronic music pioneer - than just his music, tho I do like his early works. I've never heard his 70s stuff. I tried listening to some of his later computer music once and it was a solid no thanks for me.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I feel like a lot of canonical electracoustic biz is supposed to be deeply powerful but it just doesn't do it for me

could be I just haven't heard the right things, but I've given it a pretty fair run

otoh I've happily gotten into to all kinds of other early 70s improv nonsense you'd also find on the Nurse With Wound list, so who knows

idk if this is strictly "electroacoustic" but it's a cool record
 
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