I suppose by this point I should quit occasionally popping up to say "please pardon my absence," as I've been doing more often than anything else (here) in many months. But I only recently discovered that this blog had been knocked out by a tech glitch. It seems google did some sort of update and the tweaking rendered some html meta-tag coding on the blog's template unparsable, thus taking this thing off the air. Which has since been remedied.
At any rate, a belated RIP is in order for e-music pioneer extraordinaire Pauline Oliveros. Admittedly, I don't own nearly enough of her work (although, if I had the money to spare, I imagine this collection from a few years back would've done nicely). But back when I used to do the free-mixing session for an experimental music radio show that aired late in the Chicago p.m. , what I did have of her work often filled the bill for providing one element or another to an hour-long multilayered mix.
So, with that in mind, here (link below) is one such mix that dates back to about a decade ago, with Oliveros taking the lead...
Flotsam on the Ocean of Sound(Radio mix no. 12)
Primary material includes:
Pauline Oliveros - “Something Else” (Pogus) Brutum Fulmen - “Spore” (Crippled Intellect) Miko Vaino - “Vaihtuja” (Wavetrap) Robert Normandeau - “Tangram” (Empreintes Digitalis) John Wall - “Construction III” (Utterpsalm) Joji Yuasa - “Projection Esemplastic for White Noise” (Neuma) Douglas Quin - “Canada Glacier/Wind Harps of Taylor Valley" (Miramar) Merzbow - “Tatara" (Manifold) Pimmon - “Bettler Kempt” (Fat Cat) Stillupsteypa - “Nice Things to File Away Forever” (Mille Plateaux)
At his his “Energy Flash” blog, Simon points to an online piece via New York magazine that offers a brief oral history of the NY shop Liquid Sky, the rave-culture boutique/record store operated by DJ Soul Slinger and his partner Rey back in the 1990s, which quickly became an anchor for the experimental electronic music scene in the five boroughs. The magazine's main angle being not that it was a pioneering presence on the NYC underground scene, but rather that Chloe Sevigny used to work there.
I mainly remember the label that grew out of the venture. Firstly, there being Jungle Sky, which aimed to provide an imprint and/or means of distro for Stateside/NYC junglists like Carlos Soulslinger and his confrères, by way of a series of 12”s and compilations...
After which came the Home Entertainment sister label, which devoted to the illbient scene that was brewing over in Brooklyn at the time, but mostly ended up issuing a lot of releases by a handful of German acts. There had, in the early ‘90s, been a scene brewing in Cologne; many of its participants being in some way or another associated with the techno act Air Liquide, all of whom performed under a variety of solo and collaborative monikers. Two of whom -- Thomas Thorn and Ingmar Koch (aka Dr. Walker) -- owned and operated music clubs in Cologne, thus having been central to nurturing the scene in question. Koch’s club was Liquid Sky Cologne, which may or may not have taken its name after the Deutsch-Amerikanische freundschaft between Carlos Soul Slinger and the Cologne artists...
Much of this has long since receded into the fog of obscurity and marginalia. Koch/Walker would later opened a club in -- if I recall correctly -- Greece before more recently transplanting the Liquid Sky club in Berlin As far as the Cologne scene was concerned: before the 90s were over, it would be exclusively be associated with another sound -- the sound of moody, minimal tech-house stylings of Wolfgang Voigt’s Kompakt label.
Some 6 years I uploaded a mix of the Liquid Sky/Electro Bunker Cologne material on oe of my prior blogs, under the titled “Things You Probably Missed.” Have since thought of doing a similar one here, devoted to the NYC illbient scene of the mid ‘90s. (When was the last time I uploaded a mix? S'been at least a couple of year sat least, I think. Does anyone give an isht anymore?)
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Anyway, discographic tangents aside: Simon makes the comment that “The oral history thing is getting a little bit of hand, don't you think?” Although I haven’t noticed any uptick in the format, one might expect as much,. It’s easy work for the writer -- in that one relinquishes the role of writing for recording, transcribing, and editing. More curatorial than creative, because you’ve largely outsourced the content-generating part of the process to outside parties; thus rendering the process something of a cakewalk towards a deadline.
But the oral history, as a participant’s retelling, frequently lends itself to nostalgia, or at least to to some “those were different times”-type narrative. Case in point, a quick googling of the Liquid Sky topic reveals that Carlos Soul Slinger’s former partner Remy made an amateur doco about the NYC underground in the ‘90s, intermixing footage she’d taken back in the day with interviews she made on a return visit (years afer she & Carlos had split up and she’d returned to Brazil).
And over the past year or so I’ve heard or read a fair number of interviews from artists, of various stripes, in which the topic of old-vs-present NYC surfaces at some point -- about how the city no longer resembles the place that it once was. It has, I’ll admit, become a trope or refrain, of late. Plenty of it to be had in the above. Hence the appeal of the nostalgia/oral history angle. But as far as New York is concerned, it long ago became the economic trailblazer for what's become common in other major metropoles. As a friend wrote to me last year, commenting on a return to take up residence in his hometown: “As for San Francisco, I think we can officially pronounce it dead. It's a good city if you’ve loads of money for consuming culture, but at the same time it’s become a place that is very inhospitable to those who produce it.”
But reason enough to finally poke my head up is to pass long that that Mount Maxwell Radio has posted a new podcast mix. Music and miscellaneous audio, amounting to fifty-two minutes of hauntological hypnagogia, as transmitted from the scenic shores of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Not every electronic composer can boast of having learned his chops while editing and composing for "Tom & Jerry" cartoons.
Re, as with what I stated earlier about Richard Maxfield. It seems like saying that the music of Tod Dockstader has been unfairly neglected or undocumented is akin to sending the USS Cliché to run aground on the Shores of Redundancy. At least in Dockstaer’s case, there’s actually a few discs of the collected early work, plus that spate of recent productivity that was released about a decade ago, executed shortly before his faculties started to sadly decline.
Watching the clip from the proposed documentary above, I can’t help but be struck by how Dockstader seems so much as he did in that series of b&w photographs taken in 1966, during the recording sessions for Omniphony. A tall figure towering over the equipment, the hairless head gleaming under the overheard lights, and - in many of the images - some sort of smile across his mug, as if there were nothing else in the world he’d rather be doing than pushing sounds around, exploring new sonic syntaxes. One can’t help but wondering if his early jobbing as a film editor didn’t have something to do with why it is his pieces - when stacked alongside those of his then-contemporaries - moved with such brisk fluidity.
"I'd done quite a lot of music in a relatively short time. I'd almost lived in that studio for six, seven years, engineering by day and doing my music in down-time, nights, and weekends there. Concrete and electronic music was an expensive music to make, then; it cost a lot in time and money - too much money, in those days, for some one working alone. And time... l was pushing those studio machines hard, and they were always breaking down and I had to stop and fix them right then, no waiting, so they'd be ready the next working day. A regular composer, what's the worst will happen? He breaks a pencil, he loses a few seconds. l break a big Ampex and you lose most of a day, or, in my case, your job if you can't get it working again. And the heat... The decks would get so hot you couldn't touch them and you'd have to turn them off to cool down for a while. It really was like a kitchen. I read, much later, where someone from those days - maybe Berio - said he couldn't believe he put in all that physical work that tape-music demanded. Of course, he had another way to make music: he went back to writing, as Stockhausen and most others did around that time, late 'Sixties, 'Seventies. I suspect many of them turned away with a sigh of relief. But, as I've said, I wanted to make music out of sound, not the other way around, even if I could have. And then, things were changing even while I was still at it. The 'Glorious Junkshop,' as someone called it, of [musique] concrète was closing. And it did."
And at a later point in the same interview:
"TD: I remember I got a couple of 'phone calls in the 'Eighties from someone, I don't remember his name, who said he was working in a group, composing, or trying to, and they were all listening to my LPs, and could I tell him what to do. I didn't know what to say to him, except, don't worry it, just do it. Because, I'd always worked alone, not even listening to other people's music then, let alone working in a group. So, what were they hearing in my music? I don't know; maybe - it's the hands. CC: 'Hands'? TD: Well - in painting, which I studied, seriously, in school, we used to say a painter we liked had 'good hands.' You could see his hand in the work, in the brush-work. This was early 'Fifties, with painters like DeKooning and Bacon; they had great hands. And, for me, like painting, making music was always a very physical thing, very tactile. I played those tape machines like a DJ plays turntables, rocking reels back and forth, pulling the tape through by hand. The only time I sat down was to edit - more hand-work - otherwise I was always in motion. ..."
I'm not so sure about the doco. But at the very least, maybe there should be a Kickstarter campaign to liberate and market the musical contents of Dockstader's hard drive.
Had somehow missed this previously. Looks like Domino reissued it on an anthology a few years ago, in the wake -- one would guess -- of the accolades that (rightfully) swarmed around Comicopera.
Falling somewhere in the quarter-century span between the soundtrack for vintage things like this and it's revival by these fellows, you can't help but figure that these sounds were anything other than bafflingly retardaire (if not off-putting abrasive, ugly) in 1982. And bearing "Solar Flares Burn For You" in mind, one wonders: How many times did Wyatt provide scores over the years? Enough to make up a "Music for Films" collection? Doubtful.
"An ordinary life; a dull life even, yet the polyphony of emotions and sensations is hallucinatory in its measured precision and accumulation of bliss: 'The lecturing voice was far away, irrelevant and unintelligible. Peace flooded her.' Why do we have to spatialise time, sound and thought, reducing all three to a manageable linearity and locus that has nothing to do with the way we think or hear? Because they are elusive, everywhere and nowhere. The pouring of thoughts, thoughts under thoughts and other inexplicable murmurings of consciousness may take place in a dark room of the imagination within the body as if a kind of ectoplasm gushing out of some hidden spring and dispersing into nothingness, into the blood or becoming a sound recognisable as audible words, the marks of writing or some other signs on or from the body."
- David Toop, with some of his own stray thoughts about the recent passing of Robert Ashley.
More about the history of electronic music in Russia:
"Arseny Avraamov, however, planned to destroy pianos on a much more dramatic scale than Liszt. Avraamov reviled the piano because he thought that the traditional Western musical scale was irrational and even harmful. By restricting themselves to only twelve pitches out of a whole continuum of possible frequencies, Avraamov believed that musicians had dulled the perceptual capabilities of entire populations, preventing them from fulfilling their human potential. After the October Revolution, he made a proposal to Anatoly Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Public Enlightenment, that all pianos in the country should be gathered up and burned. The proposal was fortunately unsuccessful, but Avraamov did go on to conduct extensive research on novel possibilities for microtonal music, devising his own 'Ultrachromatic' tone system and inventing instruments to perform it."
At n+1, Colin McSwiggen reviews the recent title Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia by Andrey Smirnov, a book that developed out of the research Smirnov conducted for the 2008 exhibition of the same name.
The site 99% Invisible posted an article about Avraamov's famed "Symphony of Sirens" this past May. Preservation Sound has a few words to say about the book, as well; mostly concetrationg of Avraamov and Evgeny Sholpo's hand-painted graphic scores. More about all of this cane be found at the the site 120 Years of Electronic Music, which lately has been making heavy use Smirnov's book as primary source for various articles on the topic.
See also Miguel Molina Alarcón 2008 publication Symphony of Sirens, via Monoskop.
Curious. First I've heard of it, and very intrigued. Apparently out -- in Austria, at least -- since this past April, having also been screened at this year's Mutek Festival held in Mexico City.
A write-up of the film at The Hollywood Reporter describes the span and focus of the film, highlighting the peculiar and esoteric development of Russian electronic music history, which evolved by its own logic and means, mainly due to its isolation from the rest of the world during the many decades of the Soviet era. Which would explain why many Russians at the time may never have heard of the work of, say, David Tudor or Otto Luening; which is also why many of us elsewhere probably know little of Russian electronic music beyond Léon Theremin or Eduard Artemiev.
But I do recall hearing some electronic music from Russia back just shortly before the turn of the millennium. Back around that time, I was listening to a lot of experimental electronic and IDM-type fare, recording by a slew of emerging artists who very much in the thrall of Autechre-esque sound-twisting and sonic abstraction. Eventually you began to see similar artists of that type popping up in non-English-speaking countries. Amongst the lot, roughly around 1999, were a number of Russian acts whose music began circulate via compilations or the odd European release.
I was probably among a small number of people of people took much notice at the time. In some way, I was a little fascinated by it. Something about this type of experimental music transcending borders, language barriers, and cultural peculiarities; being taken up and created by musicians in a variety of countries. In a way, it was almost like the spread of certain types of abstract art & design in the early portion of the 20th century -- post-Kandinsky modes of "pure abstraction" in painting, or intentionally international styles like those connected with the Bauhaus or De Stijl schools. Or so I would've liked to have thought.
Simon has some words, as well as a relay of those by Keith Fullerton Whitman. Simon also has a playlist that features many pieces that I also would have selected. To which I might only add checking out De Natura Sonorum in full, if you don't know it already. And then there's this recent clip of his Violostories, as performed live at V22 by Aisha Orazbayeva.
A throwback jawn, yeah. One that's been nagging me, lately.
Returning to the previously-mentioned matter of affixing a record’s feet to "the floor of a certain era." At one point in the 1990s, talk of the future had to be consigned to the past. So often was it invoked or attached to this e-music thing or another that it quickly became a snigger-inducing cliché – as if the most trite thing you could do was to describe something as "future music" or, worse still, the “future sound of.” A hackneyed marketing slogan, that’s all it was. And yes, it seemed kind of silly because the music in question had been around for almost a decade, had been developing on the margins, already had a history behind it. Meaning that, for anyone who had had their ears turned in that direction during those years, it was really more the music of the Present -- the Now Sound or whatever.*
The first one to my ears sounds like it could be the missing link between On The Corner, Head Hunters, and TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Of which there are probably a number of such things, and this is one of them. The second? The beat and its placement in the mix definitely dates it, but it sports some proto-wobble. Not unlike if Bill Laswell's Material (with Bernie Worrell on board for the session) had inadvertently stumbled over drill'n'bass some 15 years before the fact.
At numerous times, I'd intended to make and upload a mix (or two) of electronic stuff from the 1990s, but never got around to it. In lieu of that, there's these throwback-themed mixes that have popped up in the past couple weeks instead...
First, via Nightvision, Moon Wiring Club offers his "Midnight in Europe" mix, a selection of early '90s "ambient" material that manages to avoid the expected "chill out" cliches and tilts more toward proto-IDM abstract angularity. Then for the latest edition of the "Secret Thirteen" mix series, Biosphere/Geir Jenssen turns the dial back another decade by spotlighting sounds from the 1979-1982 vintage.
And this year finds Coldcut celebrating 25 years on the air with the "Solid Steel" broadcast. For the occasion, they're planning on having a array of guest DJs and artists on the program. Past weeks have sported guest mix sessions with The Orb and Luke Vibert, but perhaps the most intriguing one so far was last week's session with Kirk Digiorgio. In the second half of the show, Degiorgio breaks from his usual jazz-funk-fusion modus and instead offers an hour of vintage electronic sounds of a more experimental variety, in the end serving up what may be the most beatless and noisy set in the show's history. (Enough so, that it prompted one Soundcloud listener to comment, "Worst mix ever." Heh.)
Writing in his book Ocean of Sound some years ago, David Toop observed: "If Richard Maxfield had not committed suicide in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to hear, then our idea of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five years might be very different." Toop penned those remarks back in 1994; and, even at this much later date, the thought still holds true. Before jumping to his death from a hotel window ledge in Los Angeles at the age of 42, Maxfield could be considered one the chief pioneers of electronic music on American shores.
Despite the archival cornucopia that it offers, Reissue Culture has had its share of oversights, and Maxfield has been one of them. Only a few of his compositions have seen digital reissue over the years, with works like the three-minute "Amazing Grace" or 1963's "Pastoral Symphony" turning up on a few scattered compilations. Depending on which account you go with, when he left New York for the West Coast, Maxfield entrusted his tapes to artists Walter De Maria; who passed them along to La Monte Young, who in turn reputedly entrusted them to the Dia Arts Foundation.
Terry Riley, being interviewed in the course of a game of "Invisible Jukebox" in The Wire back in 1999 shed some light on Maxfield's neglected legacy. Maxfield, he asserted, was one of the most brilliant yechnicians in American electronic music. Aside from reputedly having built much of his own equipment, Maxfield was also reputedly something of a wizard at tape-splicing -- stoically patient, exacting and precise when it came to the task of taking things apart and putting them together viz the yarns and reels of magnetic tape. La Monte Young similarly testified to the artist's skills:
"He was an incredible electronic music teacher and master engineer. I used to go up to his mixing studio when he worked at Westminster Records in 1960-61 and observe him editing those old reel-to-reel tapes. He was the most amazingly adept tape handler I have ever seen. He worked so fast his hands and the tape were a constant blur... He really understood electronics; he was very creative and experimental. He taught electronics and composition at the highest level."
Much of Maxfield's technical expertise came from his workaday duties for the classical music division of CBS Records. Aside from tightening up the performances of various symphonies and the like, this also routinely meant cutting out whatever intrusive noises might've issued from the audience that night, such as the interludinal coughs and throat-clearings from season ticket holders. One piece Riley spoke of in the interview was "Cough Music," in which Maxfield took these extracts (from the performance of a Christian Wolff piece) from the cutting-room floor and spliced them together in the order his choosing, subjecting the sounds to varying degrees of processing and manipulation. I'd long been curious about this piece, and was only recently finally able to hear it...
In the same Wire piece, Terry Riley also said of Maxfield:
"He had a fantastic ear for different kinds of sounds, just using sine wave generators he did great work. Later he did a lot more concrète stuff; one year he brought this piece out to play called 'Dishes.' He was washing dishes one night and turned his tape recorder on, so he was making found object pieces, too."
Which I suppose makes his a precursor to concrète-variety "microhouse" in a way, anticipating Matthew Herbert's Around the House by some thirty-plus years. But Richard Maxfield released only a handful of recordings during his lifetime, and only a few have been reissued over the intervening years.
A few years after having read about Maxfield's work, I acquired this item, done as a one-off, sampling-based collaborative project by a trio of East Coast electronic doodlers, released in 2002 via the Pittsburgh-based Kracfive label. It went largely unnoticed at the time, by I liked the album very much. One track in particular grabbed my interest, making me wonder if it wasn't conceived as a tribute to Maxfield's "Cough Music" by way of Kraftwerk's "Tour de France"...
Occasionally mid-grade mp3 bootleg collections of Richard Maxfield's known recorded works have appeared on the internet in recent years. Just how what and how many works Maxfield composed and committed to tape is mainly a matter of conjecture. Some compositions exist only in the form of rumor and anecdote, the recollections of his colleagues. This webpage offers what's thought to be a comprehensive inventory; but as the frequent appearance of blanks and question marks indicate, the accounting involves a fair amount of guesswork. Of these, one wonders how many have survived -- considering the shelf-life of magnetic tape and its rate of disintegration. At some point, one figures, a multi-disc anthology of the composer's work -- complete with an accompanying book on his life, work, influence on and contributions to the formative years of electronic music in the United States -- might've already seen the light of day.
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And on a related note: Continuo bids farewell. But last time I checked, there was no similar cross-post on Continuo's Documents tumblr as of this morning.
Confluential cross-posting. I stumbled upon this clip last week and been meaning to post it. And Simon pops up with a posting of the a related BBC 1979 program, "The New Sound of Music," which I happened across at the same time as the above.
Simon points out that BBC Radiophonic Workshop is about to be relaunched. According to a statement by Matthew Herbert, who's now the Workshop's Creative Director:
"Instead of being confined to rooms full of equipment in Maida Vale studios in London, the new radiophonic workshop will instead be a virtual institution, visibly manifested as an online portal and forum for discussion around the challenges of creating new sounds in a world saturated in innovative music technology but lacklustre in terms of actual original output. we will primarily bring together two key disciplines: music composition and software design and as such its members will be drawn from the cutting edge of both."
Between that and Mordant Music's current reissues of two LPs of library music by Tod Dockstader (originally done for the music publishing firm Boosey & Hawkes back in 1979-81), it looks like previously elusive histories and legacies are perpetually being maintained and rediscovered.
Intriguing little film, circa 1964 by British filmmaker David Gladwell. David Gladwell was apparently known in the UK primarily as a film editor and a maker of many documentary shorts. In the former role, his most notable work was serving as editor on Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973). In 1975, he directed the feature-length Requiem for a Village. The above was reputedly shot at 250 frames per second, and featured an electronic score by Ernest Berk.
"My father (whom I have never known as I was barely one year old when he died) had wanted me to grow up with music. There was a phonograph in our house and a number of records. Those were my only toys. Records of opera arias, operetta tunes, classical pieces, among others. I was also hearing music that the environment was offering me, music that I regarded rather anodyne and I began to say to myself that there ought to be more to music than all that. Indeed there was."
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"My interest in electronic music was reactivated when...a couple of discs arrived from France. They contained the initial compositions of what we termed musique concrète: works by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. A new epoch in music history had begun, I thought, one that could even be regarded as the beginning of music history proper, all that preceded being only a sort of pre-history. We were in the early '50s and I was in Ankara, Turkey. Lacking proper tools, I couldn't do whatever I would have wanted to do in this new field. Later I learned that with improper tools, too, one could compose electronic music but, by then, I had only the proper tools."
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"Applying to the INS some years ago, for a Re-Entry Permit. Form completed, I handed the man in charge a 20-dollar bill required as application fee. He gave me a suspicious look and said, 'On the application it says Profession: Composer. If you're a composer, how come you have 20 dollars in your pocket?'"
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"My association with the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center ended in 1989... The reason for the termination: smoking was prohibited in all areas of the building. Some years later...the equipment of the 'classical' studio -- tape recorders and all -- was discarded, replaced by computers, which would have terminated my association anyway."
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"Occasionally Ussachevsky would ask me at the last minute to take over the electronic music class. I would be totally unprepared, so I would start my address by asking, 'Any questions?' and proceed from there."
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"During my earliest days of in the electronic music studio, I became aware of a parallel between the tools and the process of filmmaking and those of composing electronic music (on tape). Often I am asked how I composed this or that piece of electronic music, and as often my answer refers to a cartoon I saw somewhere, some years ago. The first expedition to Mars returns and journalists are eager to know all about it. Says the chief of the expedition: 'We were all so full of wonder that we forgot to take notes.'"
excerpts from an untitled autobiography, by İlhan Mimaroğlu.
Printed in Bananafish, issue 13, c. 1999
The above presents a fairly thorough rundown of your average club/mobile DJ's list of routine annoyances. Which is why I stuck with radio and never really pursued club or mobile DJing; because over the years I had too many friends who did it and I was used to hearing their complaints, which deterred me from venturing down that path. While number 21 is a new one for me, many of them are very familiar; especially the ones having to do with birthdays, and the various requests a DJ has to field. (One friend in particular started taking cellphone snaps of clubbers who came up to him in the course of an evening, and on a couple of occasions posted the pics & requests on his blog.)*
At any rate, here's more than you could ask for: Via Ubuweb, an extensive "History of Electronic & Electroacoustic Music," in the form of nearly 500 MP3s. As the caveat at the bottom of the page, the collection came from a torrent that was making the rounds some time ago, so some of the selections might be a bit dodgey. Nonetheless, there's more there than one could wade through -- from the whole of Schaeffer and Henry's "Symphonie pour un homme suel," and lots of other stuff, including healthy portions of Stockhausen, Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, et al. The notes also take issue with the collection's omissions and inclusions, which (yes) once I look them over do seem to be heavily Franco-centric -- leaving the like of Cage and Luening a bit underrepresented. (And, yeah...where's Pauline Oliveros?) Still, the cornucopia overfloweth.
A tip of the topper to BLCKGRD for the heads-up on both of the above.
* There is another -- longer and far more aggravating -- list of common DJ complaints; which includes the various ins & outs of dealing with shady or apathetic venue management, dealing with dickhead bouncers, the hassles of getting paid for services rendered, etc.
Today was Robert Moog's birthday, born something 78 years ago today. Anyway, here's to perverting & misusing technology, using it in ways it wasn't meant to be used. And all the wonders such stuff affords us. And that there's way more to Tha Dee than so-called ruin porn. Even tho' the above could've used with a few fewer shots of dudes slapping wax on turntables, and maybe more of some vintage clips like this and this.
I remember an interview with Derrick May from about a decade ago in which the topic of Kraftwerk came up. The interviewer asked what May thought about the common complaint that Kraftwerk had, many years previously, build their own expensive, supposedly state-of-the-art studio yet had failed to issue any new music in the years since. May rolled his eyes and replied, "What, are people starving?"
But yeah, as Simon recently pointed out, they've been something of "heritage act" for some time now.
Airport Through The Treeschimes in on the running debate about EDM (Electronic Dance Music) that's been making the rounds these past few weeks.
Dunno...as far as the "underground" vs. "overground" dialectic is concerned, I don't have a dog in that race. But yeah, certain aspects -- certain sounds, at least -- of dance culture have gone mainstream in a big way recently; what, with the ascent of "the soar" via the flood of euro-trance cliches that have become such a staple in mainstream pop.* Add to that the coinciding emergence of "brostep." The latter turns up on my local college station a fair amount, all of it of the "WWE anthem boner wobble" sort -- stuff that's more or less in the same vein as Shrillex, which is the exact sound that fills up the format of what purports to be the station's drum'n'bass show. Since I've avoided all of this dross the past couple of years, I'd missed Shrillex and Guetta. Reading Chris's post on the topic at mnml ssgs last week, I quite frankly couldn't imagine that Shrillex must be as godawful as Chris described, but then when I played the clip...fuckin' hell if it isn't actually worse than the description. O, but if ears could puke.
At any rate, a couple of people commented at mnml ssgs that this is nothing new and I'm inclined to agree. Yeah sure, there was the business with Justice and all that similar Ed Banger revved-up electro that was so de riguer with the Vice magazine, urban hipster clubrat set some 4-5 years ago. But I remember this going back far further than that. But at least one commenter at mnml ssgs seconded what I was already thinking, which is there were similar things in the offing as far back as the mid-late '90s. Among a number of things, there was the "Big Beat" craze; which sounded to me at the time as electronic/breaks & beats type fare designed to appeal to listeners in the "rock" camp -- people who otherwise didn't listen to/bother with electronic music. Around 1997 it was as all over the place for a season or two, only to find all those Chemical Brothers and Propellerheads and Fatboy Slim CDs started piling up in the 'USED' bins about 18 months later. And then was DJ Keoki and the string of shite "superstar" DJs that followed in his wake -- always promenently featured/promoted in the pages of URB magazine, when word had it that a good many of them spun the most calculatedly pandering of sets while consistently trainwrecking the transitions between tracks.
But ultimately I guess you could blame all this on Daft Punk.
At any rate, the big difference this time around -- as the NYT article makes clear -- is that it's got far more appeal and that there's much, much more lucre getting behind it than any time before. And the complaints from the subcultural side of the matter runs the expected spectrum -- chiefly that the "gentrification" and bastardization of a particular form of music/lifestyle as corporatized mega-buck pile on to get a piece of the action. But the concerns are not (for some) strictly about music but also about the social dynamics that are often connected with it. More specifically, that the EDM boom -- as a mass-appeal, moneyed-up popular phenomenon -- destroying the club/rave communal ritual by turning it into an arena-friendly, face-forward spectacle.** Not that I'd disagree, but I can't help but wonder if it has an upside. For instance, I can't count how many times in the past I've been out clubbing and the dancefloor was being cluttered-up and obstructed by dullards who just stood around the entire time, locked in place watching a DJ that they could only see from the shoulders up. So maybe this EDM craze means that that sort of person can now fuck off to other venues that're more suited to that sort of thing, leaving more space on the dancefloor for those who are there to put it to proper use.
* Yes, I actually do partially subscribe to the polemic that the mainstream often has a parasitic/piggybacking relation with the so-called underground, and that the latter often defines itself via its opposition to the former. But I also think that its far more complicated than that, and that it involves too many contextual-specific variables to discuss in such pat, either/or terms. ** Is it just me, or does the Deadmau5 concert pic that heads the Times article look it might've been revised & updated after something found in one of Albert Speer's sketchbooks?
Headspillage, tangents, fragments & ruminative riffing. Guaranteed to sustain a low level of interest, intelligibility, or lucidity for most outside parties.
