Neon Screams!

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
thirdform said:
classic, but how is that neon screams territory? I like that era of Kartel as well but that's very much in the 00s dancehall lineage.
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Well, it's the autotune basically. The 1st chapter is about how Kartel triumphed in the Gully vs Gaza war, and was the first artist to channel rage and mania through autotune to turn himself into a Godlike figure. It sets up the whole book.

This particular track gets mentioned as an example of Vybz presenting himself as the voice of the People, but I could have picked loads out.

I really just meant that after reading the book i found myself listening to this era of Kartel, and lots of other music described in the book, with new ears and a deeper appreciation cos of how great the writing is throughout.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The autotune which he started using in 2007 or thereabouts make his voice very different from the earlier up to di time era stuff (which I love too), so thats more where the big development is from earlier 2000s dancehall rather than with the riddims.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
That era of kartel is not using these globalised trap beats. It's still very much 00s dancehall production. theres a hardness, a concrete bump and grind that you don't get in later dancehall, which is fluid, more oceanic. Even if you include the autotune.

I tbf butted heads with Barty over this. My issue is not with autotune, which is a cool piece of software but has been used for nigh on 20 years now, but with drift and float. There's no sex in ambient, there's no physicality and actually very little violence. It's the triumph of frictionlessness.

Which like is part of the appeal right? Bedroom, iphone/laptop screen, the perfect kind of music. I just already want to rip that value set up and start again. I want to go even deeper into data, and space, not in the tangerine dream sense, but in the head, psychoacoustically.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm actually quite furious (jk) at @pattycakes for this. All that time in morocco and he wasn't able to open his ears to some of the most innovative rhythmic autotune pop music in the entire world.

Just think. We could have had a top 100 avant lumpen moroccan pop nuggets list to really consummate the islamic age of Dissensus.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this is orite but it's too slow. Maybe I should collaborate with Time Cow to make dembo idle chatter at 786BPM. And allah knows best.


It also is very limited in pitch range. Too sterile and too academic. But microautotune speedcore should be sick.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
anyway enough shitposting. here's some reading. Whitney the avant-garde auteur.

pitchfork.com

The Link Between Whitney Houston and the Rise of Auto-Tune in North Africa

In this excerpt from Jace Clayton's new book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, an unlikely connection between Houston's “I Will Always Love You” and the Maghreb region’s embrace of Auto-Tune emerges.
pitchfork.com pitchfork.com

These effects flow from her masterful use of a technique called melisma. Technically speaking, melisma occurs when vocalists use melodic embellishment to extend a single syllable. Emotionally, it’s something else entirely, a mode of expression that bucks against the very limits of language. Indeed, the crushing power of “I Will Always Love You,” its meaning in sound, results from how Houston’s melisma activates a mysterious, even mystical relationship between overflowing emotion, life’s vicissitudes, and ultra precise self-control. Rather than simply sing about the bittersweet conflicts involved in saying goodbye to a lover, Houston deploys melisma to enact in sound a heart-felt struggle between holding on and letting go. Like life as it unfurls, each moment is un-anticipatable until it happens, whereupon we can’t possibly imagine it any other way.
Such is the power of melisma. The technique breathes life-flow into fixed text. Melisma is vocal embellishment’s purest form, almost always improvised and therefore rarely written down. Melisma locates meaning in the instant. It reveals to us the risk and control of a singer at her most unpredictably alive.
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Melisma straddles genres and singers and nation-states. I knew it first in black American music such as R&B and gospel. It’s positively huge across the Maghreb. Bawdy folk singers, throats burned by a lifetime of whiskey. Honey-voiced Koranic reciters who “sing” the Koran magnificently yet consider all music to be sinful. It doesn’t matter who you are or what scene you’re in, you’re gonna have a tough time if your voice can’t flutter around those notes with the grace of a bird and the hairpin turns of a butterfly. Maghreb audiences of all stripes are keyed in, listening to precisely those moments when the voice glides through notes.
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Melismatic vocals have formed an integral part of the sonic landscape across huge swaths of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East for centuries—public recitation of the Koran and the five-times-daily call to prayer rely heavily on the technique. If melismatic styles weren’t already widespread, they ended up that way when Islam swept in 600 years after the birth of Christ. Several musicologists assume that it’s what ushered melisma into black American church music and eventually into the bloodstream of an eleven-year-old junior gospel choir soloist named Whitney in the first place.

What does the computer think of this weightless technique of vocal gymnastics whose touch of the divine spans religions? Auto-Tune hates it. For all its algorithmic fineries, Auto-Tune cannot distinguish between world-class melismatic pitch control and off-key drunken shouting. To fix the problem of “out-of-tune vocals,” [Auto-Tune inventor] Dr. [Andy] Hildebrand had to encode into the software his beliefs about what constituted appropriate singing. Auto-Tune hears the opening section of “I Will Always Love You” as one long error in need of digital correction. And it’s not just her.
Melisma’s swoops and dives are exactly the type of melodic movement that provokes Auto-Tune into extreme corrective mode, thereby producing its most unusual sounds. This, I believe, explains the software’s mind-boggling success in North Africa. The region embraced Auto-Tune so early and so heartily because for more than a millennium audiences have been listening to—and for—those gorgeous, subtly rising and falling pitches. And they sound especially startling when processed through Auto-Tune. The familiar pitch slide gets activated by bizarre effects. A weird electronic warble embeds itself in rich, throaty glissandi. The struggle of human nuance versus digital correction is made audible, dramatized in a zone of heightened attention. Listening habits from the dawn of Islam helped Auto-Tune mean so much here.
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