shiels
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Stupid. I would gladly forgo any lads whatsapp event to make experiments for sasha to sing over
Was This Song Good & Important?
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
Stupid. I would gladly forgo any lads whatsapp event to make experiments for sasha to sing over
shiels
_
I met arca and bjork with my mate who was making music with them a few ears back, both really lovely soft kind people. i terms of the music, there was one ambient one i really liked but the music hasn't really hit me, i don't think i've given it a chance though. the whole show is interesting, lots of disturbing and grotesque playing at the boundaries. and like sophie, the gender shift while in in the artistic spotlight, how that corresponds to the sight and sound
linebaugh
Well-known member
I took AG Cooks recent 7G album to be a self aware admittance of this.
This is what Robin urbanomic has to say on the matter:
"Again I’d come back to saying that it’s not something that only happens with ‘experimental’ music. A.G. Cook (PC Music) is an great example.
You could just listen to it as pop music, and some people—I find this weird—seem to regard it as pastiche; but it’s obviously doing something new. When you try to work out what edges it’s pushing at, what elements the production is intensifying or fragmenting, it becomes really interesting. These tracks maintain an astonishing level of sonic bounce, energy, brightness and overcompression, and an overt synthetic feel, but there’s also a cheap guerilla aspect to it that I like—Happy Shopper accelerationism. There’s something specifically British about what you can hear in there. There’s a meticulous handling of precision and saturation and colour in every element, heightening them to the extreme through contrast, separation, and compression. Then that’s mixed with quite sentimental melodic lines that could have come out of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, but they’re pulled apart and made staccato and punctuated so that your brain has to do more work to piece the tune together. In the QT project there’s a drift toward synaesthesia, where a totally artificial ‘artist’ is expanded into a speculative hypermedia product (maybe the drink’s real, I’m not sure…).
It was a revelation when I heard Cook talking about his obsession with Conlon Nancarrow. I thought, yes, of course…! Because what Nancarrow’s experiments really do is to intensify a musical affect that belongs to a whole lineage of mechanised popular music. Even today if you look at a music sequencing application you can see the continuity with the rolls of paper used to ‘program’ a pianola, and moreover you can hear that historical continuity—just listen to a fairground organ and some happy hardcore back-to-back! And PC Music extends this tendency where the nature of the recording/programming medium, and the stringency of its mechanised temporality, is allowed to assert itself and to become a part of the message, demanding new modes of listening and creating new possibilities for unknown pleasures.
On the level of sound alone I find myself trying to conceptualise what it is that I’m hearing and ‘what is it that makes today’s pop so different, so appealing’…. As with the 303, or timestretching, it’s often to do with intensifying or tweaking something into a state that you’d think was totally too much, or just plain comical (like when grime producers started using those cheap plasticky Playstation sounds), but then managing to integrate it, fold it back into the framework of a genre. Often I find the producers who manage to operate that reintegration more interesting than someone doing weird shit for people who want weird shit. I see all of this in relation to what Mark Fisher, brilliantly I think, has called ‘pulp modernism’, designating a whole range of cultural phenomena in which formal violence is experimented with, enacted, and enjoyed within popular forms. I believe AG Cook and Danny L. Harle who do PC Music are graduates in music composition, so that clashing of high and low is very much a conscious thing."
"Again I’d come back to saying that it’s not something that only happens with ‘experimental’ music. A.G. Cook (PC Music) is an great example.
You could just listen to it as pop music, and some people—I find this weird—seem to regard it as pastiche; but it’s obviously doing something new. When you try to work out what edges it’s pushing at, what elements the production is intensifying or fragmenting, it becomes really interesting. These tracks maintain an astonishing level of sonic bounce, energy, brightness and overcompression, and an overt synthetic feel, but there’s also a cheap guerilla aspect to it that I like—Happy Shopper accelerationism. There’s something specifically British about what you can hear in there. There’s a meticulous handling of precision and saturation and colour in every element, heightening them to the extreme through contrast, separation, and compression. Then that’s mixed with quite sentimental melodic lines that could have come out of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, but they’re pulled apart and made staccato and punctuated so that your brain has to do more work to piece the tune together. In the QT project there’s a drift toward synaesthesia, where a totally artificial ‘artist’ is expanded into a speculative hypermedia product (maybe the drink’s real, I’m not sure…).
It was a revelation when I heard Cook talking about his obsession with Conlon Nancarrow. I thought, yes, of course…! Because what Nancarrow’s experiments really do is to intensify a musical affect that belongs to a whole lineage of mechanised popular music. Even today if you look at a music sequencing application you can see the continuity with the rolls of paper used to ‘program’ a pianola, and moreover you can hear that historical continuity—just listen to a fairground organ and some happy hardcore back-to-back! And PC Music extends this tendency where the nature of the recording/programming medium, and the stringency of its mechanised temporality, is allowed to assert itself and to become a part of the message, demanding new modes of listening and creating new possibilities for unknown pleasures.
On the level of sound alone I find myself trying to conceptualise what it is that I’m hearing and ‘what is it that makes today’s pop so different, so appealing’…. As with the 303, or timestretching, it’s often to do with intensifying or tweaking something into a state that you’d think was totally too much, or just plain comical (like when grime producers started using those cheap plasticky Playstation sounds), but then managing to integrate it, fold it back into the framework of a genre. Often I find the producers who manage to operate that reintegration more interesting than someone doing weird shit for people who want weird shit. I see all of this in relation to what Mark Fisher, brilliantly I think, has called ‘pulp modernism’, designating a whole range of cultural phenomena in which formal violence is experimented with, enacted, and enjoyed within popular forms. I believe AG Cook and Danny L. Harle who do PC Music are graduates in music composition, so that clashing of high and low is very much a conscious thing."
This is the general rub with anything experimental isn't it? You really have to give yourself over to it, give it more attention, then it might send you, but some of the time, you can feel like they are taking the piss. Particularly true of the noise/weird electronics scene up north, where someone thinks a funny haircut and leather trousers makes for a groundbreaking act
