When I was watching the Fischli/Weiss piece, two elements of the sound really stuck out to me, texture and pacing. With the wide variety of sounds present in the machine, from dripping, scientific bubbling and foaming, to the shrieks of fireworks, and the gentle tap of tires knocking together, I found the pallet of sounds they used to be very dense. While it's minimalism didn't quite constitute the fullness of the potential noise orchestras we've read about, I feel like the breadth of the sound pallet was exactly the type of thing that Attali was thinking about. Indeed, much of the elements that were overtly scientific in nature (the various foaming, bubbling reactions that propelled the machine forward) gave me a boarderline acoustmatic listening experience - simply marveling in the sounds themselves.
The pacing I also felt was quite compelling. While the addition of a video element was helpful to me in reaching this conclusion, I felt that the length was spot on, even at half an hour. The various "instruments" all had a real chance to play themselves out and juxtapose between each other, while still allowing each to shine in a "solo" setting. I especially liked the use of tires and flames, and liked some of the structural elements of the piece, such as returning to the spinning bags which opened the machine later in the piece. The addition of the video element gave a great sense of suspense and expectation to the procession, especially with some of the slower pieces, like the swinging pendulum or the spinning bags. Seeing the next step plainly, while still being forced to wait for it to actually occur gave an interesting effect. I also felt like it spoke to the intention put into each individual component, with the bags being spun so tightly it would take a long time for them to fall, or setting the pendulum on a canted angle and forcing it to work its way around to cue the next piece. It gave a sense of composition to the noise.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Monday, February 16, 2015
Post-Industrial Music
I think one can make an argument for EDM as being a post-industrial style of music. If industrial music was a last breath from the "chemical reactions" of society's decaying corpse, EDM is that angst co-opted, absorbed into mainstream society.
Personally, when I listen to EDM, I hear what I've long referred to as "fucking computer noises." And I feel like that's a fair assessment. Where Industrial music had a strong emphasis on the visceral - percussive pieces based on the banging, scratching, rending of metals, live performance of the overtly sexual and/or violent - EDM is deeply internalized within a laptop. Excluding artists such as Pretty Lights or Daft Punk, who sample existing songs, or record their own instrumental samples, EDM is largely the layered oscillators in FruityLoops. Outside of the studio, the performance aspects of EDM are focused on automated lights shows or laser effects, rather than the actual execution of the music being performed (if it is even being performed). Distribution is also mostly ephemeral for EDM, with Nielsen Music reporting that EDM made up 6.8% of total streaming purchases compared to EDM's 3.4% total market share. All of this points to the sociological shift in a society going from an industrial to post-industrial economy. Where our economy is now information-based, it makes sense that our music should be composed in 0s and 1s, and that our primary means of acquiring it should be over the internet. The rebirth of vinyl I think supports this; with our focus on the cloud and data, physical objects now have the fetish value we associate with LPs.
EDM does share some similarities with Industrial music's angst, though interacts with them differently. EDM culture embraces the sex and violence of Industrial through its fashion (have you seen what people wear to these things?) and the raw volume/power/violence of "the drop," and treats these elements as positives, as opposed to boundaries or buttons to push and alienate the audience (or perhaps its more a matter of the sex and violence moving from the stage to the audience). Further, there's an interesting divide between performer and audience that industrial musicians played with that's also present in EDM. As I mentioned before, some of the main performance aspects of a EDM concert are the lights/lasers, members of the audience doing light gloves/hula-hoops/etc., and of course the music being played, but not the performance of that music. A DJ hunched over a laptop or beat pad, stuck behind a table isn't the point of the show. There's no camera shooting down at them so you can see what the performer is doing to create the music. The performer is largely alienated from the audience. Certain performers challenge this such as Daft Punk or deadmau5, with distinctive styles the performers don in live settings, but even in those cases their personas act as more of a master of ceremonies than as live artist.
Essentially, I feel as though EDM is emblematic of the ephemeral post-industrial society. A society built on information, and distributed through the internet, and a culture more focused on itself than what's going on in front of it.
Personally, when I listen to EDM, I hear what I've long referred to as "fucking computer noises." And I feel like that's a fair assessment. Where Industrial music had a strong emphasis on the visceral - percussive pieces based on the banging, scratching, rending of metals, live performance of the overtly sexual and/or violent - EDM is deeply internalized within a laptop. Excluding artists such as Pretty Lights or Daft Punk, who sample existing songs, or record their own instrumental samples, EDM is largely the layered oscillators in FruityLoops. Outside of the studio, the performance aspects of EDM are focused on automated lights shows or laser effects, rather than the actual execution of the music being performed (if it is even being performed). Distribution is also mostly ephemeral for EDM, with Nielsen Music reporting that EDM made up 6.8% of total streaming purchases compared to EDM's 3.4% total market share. All of this points to the sociological shift in a society going from an industrial to post-industrial economy. Where our economy is now information-based, it makes sense that our music should be composed in 0s and 1s, and that our primary means of acquiring it should be over the internet. The rebirth of vinyl I think supports this; with our focus on the cloud and data, physical objects now have the fetish value we associate with LPs.
EDM does share some similarities with Industrial music's angst, though interacts with them differently. EDM culture embraces the sex and violence of Industrial through its fashion (have you seen what people wear to these things?) and the raw volume/power/violence of "the drop," and treats these elements as positives, as opposed to boundaries or buttons to push and alienate the audience (or perhaps its more a matter of the sex and violence moving from the stage to the audience). Further, there's an interesting divide between performer and audience that industrial musicians played with that's also present in EDM. As I mentioned before, some of the main performance aspects of a EDM concert are the lights/lasers, members of the audience doing light gloves/hula-hoops/etc., and of course the music being played, but not the performance of that music. A DJ hunched over a laptop or beat pad, stuck behind a table isn't the point of the show. There's no camera shooting down at them so you can see what the performer is doing to create the music. The performer is largely alienated from the audience. Certain performers challenge this such as Daft Punk or deadmau5, with distinctive styles the performers don in live settings, but even in those cases their personas act as more of a master of ceremonies than as live artist.
Essentially, I feel as though EDM is emblematic of the ephemeral post-industrial society. A society built on information, and distributed through the internet, and a culture more focused on itself than what's going on in front of it.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Improvisation and Composition
I tend to go back and forth on the importance I place on improvisation in music. On one hand, my first great musical love was The Grateful Dead, but on the other hand Progressive rock has been a huge influence to me as well. Ultimately, in considering where and how I value improvisation over composition, especially comparing my experiences within Jam and Prog scenes, I find I land somewhere in the middle.
The Grateful Dead have some shining moments of virtuosity, especially in their first 10-odd years of playing, and their most impressive jams range a variety of structural stabilities - from the relatively straightforward "St. Stephen", to the ambient, mellow, feedback laced "Dark Star" that so often preceded it. It's fair to say that The Dead never limited themselves from total anarchy or generally strict guidelines in their playing, which was part of what made them such a well rounded group. An experience with a version of "Eyes of the World" I had once surprised me however. On The Grateful Dead Movie, there's a 13 minute version of "Eyes" that to me is far and away the best version of that song The Dead ever recorded, if not one of their best live tracks ever. After listening to the song for a few years I came across another version, about five minutes longer, that after two listens (a roughly 18-minute double take) I realized to be an unedited version of the same performance. The extra five minutes are far weaker than the rest of the take, and objectively hurts the track. After doing some research, I found that Jerry was looking to make The Grateful Dead Movie a perfect artifact, and likely cut the offending sections (with surprising seamlessness) in an effort to secure that. For all my love of The Dead, I have to concede that by and large, they were a band of occasional, even frequent, genius that spent much of it's time wallowing in the mediocrity afforded to them by their oft easy to please audience and the supreme difficulty of living up to tracks as incredible as that "Eyes of the World" from 1974. Cutting the track, something that wouldn't have been done without Jerry's approval, feels wrong for the fetishising of improvisation; that the premier jam band would choose post-production perfection over the honesty of an uncut performance always struck me as a cop out and self-conscious mistake, and somehow felt sad - as though Jerry didn't really believe in all that The Deadhead culture made him to be. The track discussed is below in its uncut form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ_0mQLt4jo
On the other hand, I was particularly titillated by the discussion of Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans, another band I spend much time with, and an album I actually liked, but never figured I would get to talk about. For all its excess and ignorance ("half-digested extracts from Swami Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi" comes to mind) it still strikes me as a towering achievement musically, the scope of which still boggles me as much as it did when I was 14 listening to it. The opening chant sends shivers down my spine, which is only increased by the two minutes of quiet wooshing and Steve Howe volume swells that precedes it on the extended version I hunted down in the bowels of the internet. I was happy to see a somewhat favorable (or at least compared to the usual vitriol the album receives) review by Hegarty. It is monumental, for all its faults as much as in spite of them. I think it even gains credibility from being the follow up to the infinitely superior Close to the Edge because they pushed the boundaries even further. Granted, they almost definitely went too far, but I have to give them credit for trying. After all, where would we be if Rush hadn't pushed past Caress of Steel (which I also think is great) to do the even more bold 2112? Returning to the point somewhat, the emphasis on composition cannibalizes Yes in the same way an obsession with improvisation hurt The Dead. Yes's composition fetish led to the excess of Tales, and in some ways the departure of Bill Bruford who just couldn't take the endless debate of compositional masturbation.
The real shame is that when either group focused in the other direction even briefly the results were incredible. Yes, Yes's first album (granted with a vastly different lineup than the progressive Yes) had some raucous Jazz-Rock tracks like the Beatles cover "I See You" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPKp4lLLMu4) or the groove based outro of "Starship Trooper." Likewise The Dead's Blues For Allah features some great tracks with involved structure and complex changes, and Bob Weir's "Weather Report Suite" or "Terrapin Station" entered the realm of Progressive rock with strong results. In the end, the answer, as always, is everything in moderation. While improvisation can have the flair of technical superiority, composition can be just as difficult and impressive (if deemed try-hard by critics and the general public). And both disciplines can hurt a group's output if the other is ignored, as was the case with Yes and The Dead.
The Grateful Dead have some shining moments of virtuosity, especially in their first 10-odd years of playing, and their most impressive jams range a variety of structural stabilities - from the relatively straightforward "St. Stephen", to the ambient, mellow, feedback laced "Dark Star" that so often preceded it. It's fair to say that The Dead never limited themselves from total anarchy or generally strict guidelines in their playing, which was part of what made them such a well rounded group. An experience with a version of "Eyes of the World" I had once surprised me however. On The Grateful Dead Movie, there's a 13 minute version of "Eyes" that to me is far and away the best version of that song The Dead ever recorded, if not one of their best live tracks ever. After listening to the song for a few years I came across another version, about five minutes longer, that after two listens (a roughly 18-minute double take) I realized to be an unedited version of the same performance. The extra five minutes are far weaker than the rest of the take, and objectively hurts the track. After doing some research, I found that Jerry was looking to make The Grateful Dead Movie a perfect artifact, and likely cut the offending sections (with surprising seamlessness) in an effort to secure that. For all my love of The Dead, I have to concede that by and large, they were a band of occasional, even frequent, genius that spent much of it's time wallowing in the mediocrity afforded to them by their oft easy to please audience and the supreme difficulty of living up to tracks as incredible as that "Eyes of the World" from 1974. Cutting the track, something that wouldn't have been done without Jerry's approval, feels wrong for the fetishising of improvisation; that the premier jam band would choose post-production perfection over the honesty of an uncut performance always struck me as a cop out and self-conscious mistake, and somehow felt sad - as though Jerry didn't really believe in all that The Deadhead culture made him to be. The track discussed is below in its uncut form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ_0mQLt4jo
On the other hand, I was particularly titillated by the discussion of Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans, another band I spend much time with, and an album I actually liked, but never figured I would get to talk about. For all its excess and ignorance ("half-digested extracts from Swami Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi" comes to mind) it still strikes me as a towering achievement musically, the scope of which still boggles me as much as it did when I was 14 listening to it. The opening chant sends shivers down my spine, which is only increased by the two minutes of quiet wooshing and Steve Howe volume swells that precedes it on the extended version I hunted down in the bowels of the internet. I was happy to see a somewhat favorable (or at least compared to the usual vitriol the album receives) review by Hegarty. It is monumental, for all its faults as much as in spite of them. I think it even gains credibility from being the follow up to the infinitely superior Close to the Edge because they pushed the boundaries even further. Granted, they almost definitely went too far, but I have to give them credit for trying. After all, where would we be if Rush hadn't pushed past Caress of Steel (which I also think is great) to do the even more bold 2112? Returning to the point somewhat, the emphasis on composition cannibalizes Yes in the same way an obsession with improvisation hurt The Dead. Yes's composition fetish led to the excess of Tales, and in some ways the departure of Bill Bruford who just couldn't take the endless debate of compositional masturbation.
The real shame is that when either group focused in the other direction even briefly the results were incredible. Yes, Yes's first album (granted with a vastly different lineup than the progressive Yes) had some raucous Jazz-Rock tracks like the Beatles cover "I See You" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPKp4lLLMu4) or the groove based outro of "Starship Trooper." Likewise The Dead's Blues For Allah features some great tracks with involved structure and complex changes, and Bob Weir's "Weather Report Suite" or "Terrapin Station" entered the realm of Progressive rock with strong results. In the end, the answer, as always, is everything in moderation. While improvisation can have the flair of technical superiority, composition can be just as difficult and impressive (if deemed try-hard by critics and the general public). And both disciplines can hurt a group's output if the other is ignored, as was the case with Yes and The Dead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)