Complete lack of perspective is a problem for many people. They should probably be going out and making some cool shit.
Then again, there is a lot to just throw your hands up at, so much that sometimes you feel like stabbing people or something equally socially unacceptable just to see the lack of normalcy reflected on others' faces.
IDM as a term is definitely dead, but the spirit of innovation is there, although from my perspective, it's hiding 80% of the time. I'm trying to think of a band / person that gave me a similar feeling of novelty, like "whoa, nobody fucking thought of this yet", and the only band I can come up with is the Books, who I can take or leave on most days. I listen to some records I hear good things about, and most of them are pretty good, but a lot of them are just "eh" (including that one). Good, but nothing super special.
I guess I'm stuck in a period where I'm trying to listen to as many different kinds of music as possible, maybe to catch something I've missed, with very few preconditions. The only preconditions are like "no Barbra Streisand". Elliott Smith I never really listened to a whole lot, but Brian was the one who first discovered him among my friends, and Faye likes the shit out of his music. old David Bowie I haven't heard in decades (and maybe never). Rest Proof Clockwork and Not For Threes (both of which I had never bought, and haven't listened to probably since the 219 days). Muslimgauze, which led me to discover that the "rarity" of this guy's releases and their attendant exorbitant prices are, imho, way way WAY out of fucking proportion to the quality of the music. Yeah, he uses a bunch of Middle Eastern samples and stuff, and it's vaguely critical of the Western stance regarding the Middle East in general. Yippee. Too bad the songs are like 8 or 12 minutes of the same hand-drum loop with 2 or 3 variations and little bits of static or dialogue (or really vanilla electro-type shit, in the later records).
There are some encouraging things out there, but I guess what I'm saying is: are you guys seeing them? Where the hell are they? Ned, were you gripped by a similar feeling and chose to approach it by getting rid of your gear?
This is all excepting the new TWH, of course. That stuff is the jizzam.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
it took me about 30 minutes to read through all that because the links were all so dank. how does that diy sequencer work...does each knob represent a step and a value? maybe like the sequencer on reason's thor that i'm too dumb to use? i can't say i've got the killer case of musical apathy you're experiencing right now, and maybe none of these albums will really get you wet, but you should at least bit torrent some of this:
ReplyDelete1. zomby - the zomby ep
2. kid 606 - shout at the doner
3. aleksi perala - project v
i think these three have some of the coolest, most flourescent sounds i've heard in a while. and the new twh? eh.
Three oddities I turn to gain perspective-
ReplyDeleteAlice Coltrane "Universal Consciousness" - doing abstract ethnic right
Astor Piazzolla- "Encuentro"- may not be the name of an album (saw a dance/ballet with this as the music)- art nueva latin jams
Shostakovich "Concerto in A minor for Violin and Orchestra" a good pallate cleanser, stranger than Ludwig VB, but produces the same step back perspective I need from the usual shit
muslimgauze comment- I love the idea behind this shit, but the end product aint hyped up (shit is mad old though, didn't he die in 1994 or something?). I have tried to mess in the ethic electronic genre, but it usually turns out cheesed out. MG is like how I wanted to hear a jamiroquai type group that did that jamiroquai type disco funk right.
the new TWH? not eh, it's pretty tasty.
Just read "Theory of Everything" all the way through. I would call it encouraging.
ReplyDeleteIDM as a term has really stuck in my throat these last few years... For me it really died when I stopped be unequivocally excited about every new Warp release, and no other label could fill the void, when it stopped being a catch-all term for any complex or innovative work in disparate pre-existing genres of electronic music, and became a genre unto itself.
None of the best punk was made by 'punks.'
But I like how you bring in The Books (also a take-or-leave for me), because they seem emblematic of where the old-IDM spirit of innovation went, about the time we were all trying to figure out if we liked "Ultravisitor" or not. Seems like all independent popular music, in the earlier part of this decade, began to swing more towards acoustic/organic textures, and the Chapel Hill Indie Rock type crowd that spent the 90's sweatin' guitar feedback suddenly had a giant boner for Will Oldham. Same thing happened in electronic music- suddenly, all I heard about was Four Tet and Animal Collective. This, weirdly at the time but wholly unsurprisingly in retrospect, is also about the time that Boards of Canada really blew up critically. When I hear older Manitoba/Caribou or Múm stuff, it has this very familiar, turn-of-the century IDM quality that both groups eventually really bent into something else (actually can't much speak to Múm-kinda boring).
So I think what we would've naively liked to classify as IDM to be different in highschool really has more to do with a warped, psychedelically-inclined sensibility that colonizes different genres of pop music every few years and moves on- in '93, acid, in '99, drum'n'bass, and, seemingly, in '03, folk? I bet Richard D. James has more in common with Steve Albini or Mark Mothersbaugh, or even Frank Zappa, than with 3/4 of the current Planet µ roster.
I told andrew I wasn't going to sweat IDM until somebody comes up with some intelligent dances, really. There is definitely a wall I hit when i couldn't really see stuff performed in a strict sense.. only re-triggered or cued and replayed live... most of the time it looked like someone finishing a history paper on stage.
ReplyDeletethat's kind of why i'm so into djing right now.. I don't feel like a musician really, more an editor/curator of a sweaty, drunk sound installation... maybe like a flashmob organizer, but not an artist. it's great. liberating. cheesey, but satisfying to be able to "play" electronic music AND perform as an entertainer. add a little tambourine... be cheeky about sequencing... take requests... try and make a connection somehow.
I guess my take home is, at some point a lot of the people I was interested in as artists forgot that part of the job they were trying to do involved being an entertainer as well...
who is still innovative as a musician and an entertainer? shit... i don't know... ya'll know i like that dumb rave shit anyway, so most of my favorites right now are going to smack of novelty, but whatever.
Dubstep is pretty rad sometimes.. the bloody beetroots have neat synth sounds, beyond the wizards' sleeve has been making some very thoughtful refixes of stuff. dj rupture is still the shit (CUMBIA!)... i dunno...
party more.
the rest should be obvious.
spirit o 93