luka
Well-known member
Yeah I was just trying to find a way to explain the appeal of techno, concrete, electroacoustic stuff etc a sexy way to frame it essentially.
Who's the Best Artist Since 2000?
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
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Yeah I was just trying to find a way to explain the appeal of techno, concrete, electroacoustic stuff etc a sexy way to frame it essentially.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
version. do you like pop music?
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
have you ever experienced unconditional love?
sit down version. im gonna give you a tune to study then you will understand it. hang on, let me quickly dash over to discogs...
not only that. pop music is the most technologically excellent music produced in the world. that is its inherent mechanism. anything less than excellence is implausible. a lot of the music i like really does sound crap from both a musical and even a production perspective. this was Adorno's criticism of dance-based jazz (the more abstract forms we know today didn't exist when he was moving to the states.) you have to outcompete others in the race for dominance and that makes you strive to make it more and more perfect. this is what i was trying to say with djs killing dance music. not because they are educators and that's somehow condescending, but the dj is the filter for technical supremacy. every producer competes to impress the dj, daddy issues.
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mvuent
Void Dweller
could you elaborate? are imagination and material process antithetical? pls this is the closest I've come to getting it
the thing is i do like a lot of proper music bollocks but this attitude of mine is solely an electronic one. I don't understand why you would use the machine to make soul (even hyper-soul) in the 21st century. here soul meaning warmth and comfort as opposed to the black rnb tradition and its descendents...
oh fucking protestantism. if i gave you a clear cut definition it would cease to work wouldn't it now. like there is a religious element here, in that god or the absolute is a totalised emanation. in that sense we are also talking about a spiritual concept that goes beyond the petty desires of survival within class society for the need of hierarchies and laws.
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we are talking about tendancies here. there elements in coltrane for instance where it feels like his body is no longer there. it is pure mechanism, and art is of course nothing but technology, that's why they called it tekné. it is between science and politics, not above or below it.
think about how the industrial revolution has changed music. think about how stateliness and courtly music is nonexistent now apart from a specialist pursuit. think about how even cerebral music has been inextricably influenced by the assembly line. bebop, math rock. very few people highly melodic music with unforegrounded brute force and attack. machines changed music even before they were *deployed* in music overtly.
That's the anti-human tendancy. now when machines become the dominant creatorof music we can argue which is reflecting not *the soul* but the essence of the machine. I'm not really into using the synth as a musical instrument unless done really well.
For instance if barty argued yesterday that darbuka rhythms sound organic and biological I would totally agree with him. this is why I gave up on trying to figure out how to create electronic music like that. it's not meant to be done, or more rather there's literally no point.
That's the anti-human tendancy. now when machines become the dominant creatorof music we can argue which is reflecting not *the soul* but the essence of the machine. I'm not really into using the synth as a musical instrument unless done really well.
For instance if barty argued yesterday that darbuka rhythms sound organic and biological I would totally agree with him. this is why I gave up on trying to figure out how to create electronic music like that. it's not meant to be done, or more rather there's literally no point.
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luka
Well-known member
I got a letter from JH Prynne, which I'm very proud of naturally, and there is a line in there
"At the very margin of discovery; where the adamant fixed zones of matter resist the pressures of imagination."
That's what crystallised the idea for me.
but even if I write an algorithm to generate specific beat patterns or melodic content it's totally a human creation. I am (mathematically) saying do this in this set of rules, you have these chances, i haven't specified so and so, etc etc.
And music is fundamentally mathematics after all.
luka
Well-known member
Industrial revolution.
advent of steam power seems to be a good bet. mass production. disappearance of hand crafted instruments.
mvuent
Void Dweller
oh well, I'll get it one day. (I mean, I have really similar taste to this idea I think.) great quote.
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luka
Well-known member
Is what third is saying clarifying anything for you? Where else have you Encountered the phrase? How is it resisting you?
mvuent
Void Dweller
I guess I just don't see how we can separate ourselves from any music, regardless of what conditions it reflects. it makes total sense to me that the advent of synths, etc. might better enable us to hear 'soundscapes' outside an individual personality rather than as 'songs' performed by humans but is there a fundamental difference between them?
I think there's a nancarrow interview where he's asked (about his insane 10920248/4533 polyrhythms or whatever) something like 'do you prefer music as it really is or as we hear it?' and he says the former. maybe that's related?
I think there's a nancarrow interview where he's asked (about his insane 10920248/4533 polyrhythms or whatever) something like 'do you prefer music as it really is or as we hear it?' and he says the former. maybe that's related?
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