I hope this means we won't be able to hear Britney or Christina as much as we already do...
-- I am the breaker of Chairs!
what's it take to get a decent name?
by
Em+Emalb
·
· Score: 3, Funny
uhm, yeah...dude takes a frigging mixing board, jacks it back into itself and calls it music? Sure. plenty of silence in between beats. Guess I am just not artistic, but if this qualifies as art, then me drinking a bottle of water is worth millions. Ok troll time over, but this is a little silly. If this is designed to keep people calm and on focus (coding, problem solving, what-have-you) then I personally feel they are barking up the wrong tree...ok, well, not barking, but whispering. As anyone who has listened to Pink Floyd albums can tell you, if you listen hard enough, you can hear some crazy sounds in the background. Which is all this music would do, force me to listen intently for that back ground noise.
Kids these days;)
-- Sent from your iPad.
Re:what's it take to get a decent name?
by
Planesdragon
·
· Score: 2
You don't like it, or it doesn't sound like music you like, so it isn't music or even art. How nice.
Remove "you like" and place in "to you", and you've got the only real judge of what constitutes art.
Art is, really, a creative activity that is belived to be art. What is art for me is probably not art for you, and vice versa. Such is life--and such is the abyssmal status of national funding for the arts.
Evil plot, that's what it actually is!
by
EvilNTUser
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all."
The RIAA strikes again!
-- My Sig: SEGV
Re:Evil plot, that's what it actually is!
by
unitron
·
· Score: 2
"Think of it as: The emporer's new groove.
Trust us...it's music. If you disagree, you must be stupid"
Even funnier than the parent post.
Although I think it's supposed to be spelled emperor.
--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
For a live show, he will take samples of himself breaking stuff and do all sorts of things with the noises. Lately he has taken to ripping up bits of corporate branding (soda cans, mcdonald's fries, etc.)
Actually, I hear a lot of talk about him on techno and house mailing lists. I personally most of these labels except for the most general ones are a load of tripe anyway. (and i thought microsound was something different but oh well)
nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
discogravy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
cage did this, as the article points out. one of the main points behind his "silent" compositions -- aside from the obvious tongue in cheek 'let's mess with the critics' attitude it had -- was the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room. the ultra-quietness of these recordings reminds me of heavy metal guitarists trying to out-"heavy" each other. these guys are just trying to out-"quiet" each other.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
discogravy
·
· Score: 2
some bands do this with their live music -- unfortunately it's almost always one of the many jam bands, (like phish, medeski martin & wood, et al) but some other bands -- including electronic acts, like Coil vary their live performances of pieces GREATLY -- to the point where it might even be called a different song.
Frank Zappa did something quite similar with is bands: he would use hand signals to change a performance of a piece and make a rock song into a reggae song or a jazzier piece or what-have-you. In some ways, John Zorn's "game pieces" use this same method of improvisation (although Zorn's "games" really are games: there is a competition and winners are picked at the end of the performance.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
CharlieG
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· Score: 2
That was my thought
sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"
-- --
73 de KG2V
For the Children - RKBA!
"You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
rnturn
·
· Score: 2
``the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first
non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room.''
The recording you're thinking of was Discreet Music released in 1975 on the Obscure Label (Eno's label). If memory serves, the event you are referring to was either from the liner notes or the back of the album; can't recall just now. Music for Airports was released in 1978.
But, as you said, Eno wasn't the first to get involved in this sort of music. Check out http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/. It has some pages that go into a lot of the background, thoughts, etc. about ambient.
-- CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
AtaruMoroboshi
·
· Score: 2
Um, I'd have to say you are wrong about the variability.
Consider how much of this music is made, often with Powerbooks running Max/MSP or Reaktor, or Logic Audio with a lot of VST instruments. Now, with Max/MSP and Reaktor, creating algorythmic music that does in fact change from playback to playback is relatively simple.
Max and Reaktor are both modular environments for music. Max is fully extendable, if you need an object that doesn't already exist, you can write your own in C++. Br00tal. It's the environment of choice for artists like Autechre and Tetsu Innoue.
Reaktor is less powerful, but is nearly as cool, and I use it because it doesn't get quite as low level as Max and I don't have my brain wrapped around Max just yet. (There are 1200 pages of documentation for Max/MSP for a reason.) Taylor Deupree uses Reaktor and I went to a roundtable discussion on Loops in music at Pier 1, NYC, a few months ago, and he played for us one second of sound, looped, but with a random start point on the sample. The sound evolved but did not repeat, at least not in a way that we could understand. Very cool to listen to.
If you are really interested in computer music that evolves, I highly recommend Autechre - Confield. It's not microsound, though there are micro-elements, but it's a mindblowingly different album, made by a pair of guys who have been pushing the edge of techno for over ten years and have finally fallen off the deep end into territory that is just paradigm shattering. For an equally complex but much more traditionally listener friendly release, check out Autechre's also recently released Peel Sessions 2.
(Peel Sessions 2 has the best minimalist cover art ever. It's white text on white background; you can only read it by angling the cover so that the difference in gloss shines at you.)
Autechre play live using two powerbooks, two Nord Modulars, and heavily custom max/msp patches. The recent live sets I've downloaded off of *soulseek* are generally comprised of 4 15 to 20 minute songs that are definitely evolving and changing.
The microsounders do this too. In my experience, there are two kinds of post-techno musicians:
1) those that improvise and "jam" with their machines
2) those that hyperedit and plan everything with extreme precision.
I tend to be in catagory 2, spending 8 hours on sequencing constantly changing drums for a 2 minute song. But many of the microsounders in question build libraries of sound files, and libraries of audio environments and when they play live, it is improvised.
With all that said, I figure I might as well continue:
Anyone intersted in what's going on in computer music should look into these software packages: max/msp, reaktor, supercollider, melodyne, ableton live, absynth, Audiomulch. While I also use stuff like Reason, these programs are more "forward thinking" and non-traditional.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
Asprin
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· Score: 2
brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports"
Ahhh, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. He produced several records for the Talking Heads and others.
obTrivia: Didn't he composes the now-famous Windows 95 start-up sound?
-- "Lawyers are for sucks." - Doug McKenzie
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
fingal
·
· Score: 2
Anyone intersted in what's going on in computer music should look into these software packages: max/msp, reaktor, supercollider, melodyne, ableton live, absynth, Audiomulch. While I also use stuff like Reason, these programs are more "forward thinking" and non-traditional.
I'll just drop another one into the list, namely PD. PD (or Pure Data if you prefer) is written by Miller Puckette who worked on Max, and has since re-written it as PD. Can be downloaded from here and there is a very useful site here.
PD is particularly nice because as well as letting midi + audio flow between the blocks in a particular patch, it will also let you handle 3d graphics primitives thereby letting you create generative video as well as sound.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
by
symbolic
·
· Score: 2
As a music theory & comp major when I entered college, I'd never heard of Cage. I can still remember the day I sat in the newly-remodeled music library, listening to one of Cage's work that consisted of a bunch of chirps, squawks, bangs, and whatnot - what you'd hear of an orchestra *before* the performance. I could hardly keep from breaking out in laughter.
Although I've never had a reason to listen to Cage since then, I applaud his different "wavelength". Another artist, not nearly as odd-sounding, was Steve Reich - he's a long way from "quiet", but his minimalist style is quite intriguing. After I left the university, one of his works stuck with me..."Music for Mallet Instruments, Voice, and Organ." It was about 10 years later than I finally found the CD- an import. So, while you have minimal sound with these guys (cited in the article), you have minimal change with Reich (at least with some of his work, anyway).
What about sound quality?
by
pheph
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While the idea of very quiet sound may appeal to some listeners, one cannot deny the concept that since this is recorded at a lower volume it is actually of lower representative quality. Why not record it at resonable volumes and play it at your desired listening volume level?
In example, instead of your sample range range being from 0-65535 it is 0-4096, it may be 'lowercase music', but it could also be represented in just 12 bits instead of 16. The vinyl enthusiats must HATE these guys!
Re:What about sound quality?
by
ObviousGuy
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· Score: 2, Funny
They just ship blanks to vinyl enthusiasts. Those releases sound better than the CD version.
-- I have been pwned because my/. password was too easy to guess.
This is bullshit
by
uebernewby
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This music has been around for quite some time. For a short while two years ago, it was called 'glitch' and it was the 'in' thing of the week - heck, 'Clicks and Cuts 2' got reviewed in Playboy magazine.
It got to the point were everyone and their third rate techno musician was spicing up tracks with 'lowercase' sounds.
Before the 'glitch' revolution, there was already a large scene of musicians who used computers to create tracks out of supposedly non-musical sounds. They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.
It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys, but it's hardly new and I also dare say the scene of people who like this kind of stuff is quite a bit larger than '10.000 people world wide'.
This sort of music can actually be made very well with Csound. Kim Cascone has done some pieces in this style using Csound.
The article left out the Raster-Noton folks, like N0t0, and musicians like Ryoji Ikeda, Gas, and some of the Mille-Plateaux artists who really got "laptop music" (the term I've always heard) off the ground. Still, a good start.
I was most definitely *not* referring to IDM (that has to be the worst, most conceited and downright stupid name to be given to a genre of music ever).
'Clicks and Cuts', 'Micromusic' or whatever the hell has more in common with techno. In fact, I personally call it 'experimental techno', for good reason, too. Check out some stuff by Taylor Deupree (mentioned in the article) for instance, that's techno with Cool Sounds (tm).
A quick history lesson: apart from musique concrete and its offspring, in 1999-2000 there was a subgenre of techno called 'heroin house', on labels like Chain Reaction (a Basic Channel offshoot) that, also in fact, put out the first releases by people like Vladislav Delay, who later got lumped in with the glitch crowd, then, when he did a cheeky house-ish album, with 'microhouse'.
At the same time, there was a strong 'experimental electronics' scene, with imprints such as Raster-Noton (home of the only true glitch meister Carsten 'alva.noto' Nicolai) that started to take pointers from popular dance music. Some clever Wire journalist then figured these two movements ('experimental techno' and 'experimental electronics') yielded similar sounding result and called the 'movement' Glitch.
Over in the US, a similar convergence between academic experimentalism and techno was produced by people like Taylor Deupree, Kit Clayton and Sutekh.
None of this has anything to do with IDM. In fact, most of my IDM loving friends *hate* this experimental electronica, because to them it's boring and repetitive (to me, IDM is convoluted and tiring, but then that's just me).
Anyway, this is a rant. Mod me as such. The point is, I wasn't referring to IDM at all.
My computer's fan sounds louder.
by
slumpie
·
· Score: 2, Funny
cat/vmlinuz >/dev/dsp sounds better:-D
Re:My computer's fan sounds louder.
by
uebernewby
·
· Score: 2
Aahh... but what you *really* want to do is open vmlinuz in an audio editor (in 'raw pcm' mode) and snip the best bits from it to work into a composition using a regular sample sequencer. Or maybe some kernel modules. The USB module, for instance, sounds fairly pleasing but it has a certain crude, unpolished feel to it that reminds one of early punk records. *Very* nice.
You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player. I did that once (by accident), with a magazine cover disk. I couldn't hear anything so I kept turning up the volume. Just as I got to max, I got an extremely loud bang, followed by more silence. I thought I'd blown something up, but it all seemed OK afterwards (except for my ear). I don't recommend it.
You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player.
Worse: I went to a screening of The Matrix on an IMAX screen, where the audio was farked up. They stopped the film to fix the sound system. Something went extra wrong, and they pumped digital noise (maybe the PCM audio stream directly into audio in) at full 50,000 watts volume. AAAAAAAAA!!!! All the tweeters blew out; not sure about my hearing.
If these people are happy making this, and other people enjoy listening to it: good for them! In my book however, this doesn't qualify as music. For me music has structure, meaning and most importantly emotion, and contains almost nothing but non-randomness. For me this only qualifies as sound. Definately not my cup of tea! (come to think of it, the sound of a cup of tea cooling down could make a nice record!).
Re:I didnt like them.
by
ObviousGuy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just went back and listened to them. One problem I had was that the computer was louder than any sound being played. The noise of the cheap speakers drowned out anything but the loudest clicks and taps.
I've always thought that electronica was one of the closest relatives to traditional classical music where the meter and timing and beat were very similar in both styles of music. But this new electronica doesn't seem to have any of that. It's more like... random recordings of random sounds, no better than the background noise of your room.
This fad will hopefully pass quickly.
It one is really interested in some interesting electronica, there's a really great sound coming out of India or at least is based on Indian music. Very cool. I wish I could remember the term off the top of my head.
-- I have been pwned because my/. password was too easy to guess.
The body of this comment follows the genre
by
jukal
·
· Score: 2
The Indian flavored music you're talking is often called "Bhangra" or "Asian Underground". It's mostly coming from the UK.
There is always more than one "fad" going through what you call "electronica" and I call TECHNO.
You can easily choose to ignore the ones you don't like, unless you get all your music news from Slashdot.
If you liked the sample clips. . .
by
BitHive
·
· Score: 2, Funny
. ..then get ready for my upcoming album "The Sound of One Hand Clapping", and my new hit single "Average Global Rate of Trees Falling in the Forest When Nobody is Around to Hear Them in 2001".
Before you all jump on the hate-them bandwagon. .
by
freakpower
·
· Score: 3, Funny
. . . you should consider that an artist deserves some respect for being consistently unlistenable. How many of you out there like Aphex Twin? You have to admit that, though brilliant, tracks like "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" probably wouldn't go over well with the average listener.
Electronic music is the new outlet for kids who ten years ago would have sat in a garage with a bunch of friends and a guitar. It offers a sometimes cheap and always flexible way to release your musical boognish.
That being said, these people probably shouldn't have been written up anywhere outside of their best friends' websites. Any movement for which "there may be 10,000. . . fans around the world" probably isn't worth paying much attention to. The article seems to be more focused on the fact that the musicians use Macs. Surprise, nobody!
I'm not making a "you don't know what the next big thing is" speech, because, quite frankly, this is far from it. People still prefer 4/4 beats and sound samples with the word "booty" in them. But I wonder how many of those out there ridiculing these guys now are going to be the same ones that whine to their friends two years down the road when their favorite minimalist techno band sells a song for a car commercial.
The future of commercial music
by
spektr
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· Score: 5, Funny
I think this is an experiment by the RIAA to test whether they can leave out the music around their audio watermarks and sell them standalone. If the market reacts positive, their profit will skyrocket up to 100.05%, because they don't have to pay those greedy musicians anymore.
Re:The future of commercial music
by
symbolic
·
· Score: 2
The ultimate in satire. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. : )
Re:Electronica as a whole can benefit
by
uebernewby
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, you *could* of course try to find some non-goth/death/I hate everyone electronica yourself. It's not exactly rare, you know. Pay a visit to a good record store near you that imports European electronica. I dare say you'll be in for a little surprise.
In fact, in the US (I'm assuming you're in the US on the basis of what you say - no European would ever make the statement you did), Nothing records (of NIN fame) does quite a good job releasing the more popular Warp-esque artists.
You could also fire up Audio Galaxy and download tracks by (off the top of my head) Plaid, Squarepusher, Wagonchrist, Jaga Jazzist, Kim Hiorthoy, Tipper, Four Tet, Akufen, Daedelus, Andrew Pekler, Pole, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, EU, Arovane, Mouse on Mars, etc, etc (this list is completely random - pls don't flame me for leaving out your favorite artist).
I can't believe you guys are posting links to websites that obviously hold illegal copies of the works I recorded somewhere in the 70's called 'Silence'.
You'd better get ready for my RIAA lawyer, because everytime a moment of 'Silence' is heard, royalties are due! So the next time you hear nothing but 'Silence' think of me, the poor artist, who should be compensated for this (lengthy) piece of work, but who's work instead got stolen just because the compression ratios of the piece turned out to be particularly favorable.
We've always had this sort of thing.
by
Chardish
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've always been into the whole techno thing. If anyone ever wanted downtempo, beatless music, there are a variety of options. This hasn't ever been called "lowercase", it's simply been referred to as "ambient" or "downtempo".
The internet radio station Cryosleep is a great example. It's "100% No Beat Guaranteed." Listen at www.bluemars.org.
A lot of Underworld music is very downtempo and quiet. Try listening to:
Underworld - Stagger
Underworld - Thing in a book
Underworld - Tounge
Underworld - Skym
Or you could always try the sounds of Autechre or Brothomstates. It may have somewhat of a beat but it's often extraordinarily quiet. Try:
Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24
Brothomstates - We kill da enemy
Finally, there's a lot of old-school pre-Everything Is Wrong Moby out there that's really "lowercase." Try:
Moby - House Of Blue Leaves
Moby - Slight Return
(Yes, I've been a Moby fan before he got popular.;P)
Hope this helps in your quest for fine music.
-Evan
Re:We've always had this sort of thing.
by
zephc
·
· Score: 2
I was also thinking of posting about Cryosleep, which i have playing while I sleep and when I want to just really chill.
iTunes users can go to Radio Tuner > Ambient > Cryosleep
--
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Re:We've always had this sort of thing.
by
zephc
·
· Score: 2
oh, i was also going to say, that my absolute favorite Moby song appeared in the XFiles episode where Mulder finds the truth about his sister's death. The song is called "My Weakness", and it with that scene from the XFiles just made me weep.
--
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Distribution source.
by
fingal
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hum, well the whole lowercase or glitch or click or whatever you want to call it seems to be getting a bit of a slagging in the comments above. Fair enough 'cos it is definately towards one of the extremes of musical genres and therefore will statistically attract less folk who actually like it.
However, if you decide that you do actually like what is going on with this and want to track down recordings of this nature then I would recommend that you go and check out smallfish records (or even better drop in if you around the Shoreditch area of London). They've got about 18,000 records on-line at the moment with short reviews and (albeit very low quality) sound samples of them all and they specialise in the more obscure electronica. Also there is a mailing list available that automatically drops off details of the new releases on a weekly basis (~150/week).
this isn't about glitch.
by
netsrek
·
· Score: 3, Informative
this isn't glitch.
this is lowercase, or microsound.
it might seem like an academic distinction, but glitch can be quite noisy and abrasive, and generally people lumped in this lowercase catchall aren't.
This isn't revolutionary though. Kind of behind the times if you ask me... Weird that Wired chose to pick up on it now, next thing you know they'll be interviewing Kid606 and talking abou the rise of laptop punk
--
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Re:this isn't about glitch.
by
extra88
·
· Score: 2
Wired has all their issues online. Kid06 is only mentioned in one article, from May 2002.
Kids these days...yeesh. We used to call this sort of stuff the "voice of God"...And used it as a crude diagnostic tool to determine if hardware was alive or not. You can get the same effect by holding an AM radio near a computer, and tuning the radio to a clear portion of the dial.
Infact, I diagnosed a bad power supply in an SGI Indigo 2 a few years back using this method.
What I would really like to see is a formal explanation of the faint warblegoogly noise produced by idle analog synthesizers with ring modulation.
Cheers,
-- Bowie J. Poag
Re:Nothing new here.....
by
Bowie+J.+Poag
·
· Score: 2
Thats not it at all -- Its an inherent property of all analog synthesizers with ring oscillators, that they have this curious random noise when idle. Its not interference.
-- Bowie J. Poag
Heard this before somewhere :).
by
gusnz
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· Score: 2
Re:Heard this before somewhere :).
by
uebernewby
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I know you're joking, but....
These tracks, like all 'noisy' tracks, compress like shit, actually. MP3 encoders completely destroys them, as (I'm guessing) they figure it's unwanted noise or something. Even at 256k, some 'glitch', 'micromusic', 'lowercase' or whatever the hell it's called today, gets mangled beyond repair.
Which is just one reason why experimental musicians don't need to worry about losing sales to file sharing.
Re:Heard this before somewhere :).
by
Dr.+Awktagon
·
· Score: 2
Heh, think of MP3 defects as an unintended remix. It's mostly noise anyway, so what's the problem with changing it around. There have been artists who distributed their (vinyl) records without sleeves, in the hopes that the inevitable scratches and so forth would add a little "character".
I believe some of these glitchy folks have already played with encoding something over and over again until it becomes unrecognizable. MP3 decay does have a unique and recognizable effect on sounds (kinda like how JPG artifacts are recognizable).
Of course the artists could just distribute PROGRAMS instead of audio files. I've seen a lot of that lately. For instance this CD by Kim Cascone that comes with some of the software used to generate the CD. I played with that shit for hours!
front 242 is still my favorite all time band (and skinny puppy) but i still listen to industrial cds from the late 80's early 90's over and over. the music is so well put together it never gets old.
actually my best friend owns a record label [lotek] and we sample some ofthe sounds out of old industrial for hardNRG uk hard house - from bands like coil, 242, skinny puppy etc...
at one point skinny puppy was the band that held the record for the most samples in their music - then 242 took the lead. love these guys...
My Compaq Evo Laptop makes chittering noises with network traffic and clicks on HD access in addition to the usual background of interference hiss.
My favourite track is sharing files from the HD on a peer-to-peer service while a VNC terminal makes rythmic use of the spare network bandwith.
But I guess it's too loud and intruding to be real low-key, so I've only got the slow oscillation in the flow of water through my apartements radiators - which only makes me sleepy at best.
koan pro (was Re:nothing particularly ground...)
by
fingal
·
· Score: 2
One thing that Cage's performances had that lowercase music doesn't, however, is variability. Each Cage performance was slightly different. I would really welcome a movement such as this in popular music, where songs have variability of notes, measures, keys, or whatever an artist would like. It would make listening to the same song over and over on the radio much more interesting. And it's completely possible with today's technology.
You should go and check out Koan Pro from sseyo which describes itself as "the award winning vector audio, interactive audio and generative music authoring system".
You jest but...
by
alistair
·
· Score: 4, Informative
John Lennon did actually record a track called "Two minutes of Silence", which has been covered by several bands including Soundgarden.
17 years earlier John Cage wrote "433", a work for no instruments which required the performer to walk onstage and do nothing for 4 minutes 33 seconds, there is an excellent introduction to Cage's work in this field in this Washington Post Article.
Re:artical is really about
by
diesel_jackass
·
· Score: 2
oh, it was an article? i thought it was a Mac advertisement.
Re:I didnt like them.
by
ScumBiker
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As a musician, I completely agree about the state of classical music between '25 and '65. There where some great pieces done, think Copeland, but most of the rest was forgetable. I understand that composers are attempting to write in the style of the masters again. I recently heard a piece called "Loon" which was most certainly not pops, click and random noise and ideed got the feel of being in a marsh and hearing loons. Wonderful piece. Anyway, the lowercase music I've heard and been fiddling with on my Mac is pretty cool, although the extreme pieces that feature lot's of silence are in my opinion just plain silly. Does anyone remeber the radio program "Hearts of Space"? That is the kind of music I think of when I hear this lowercase stuff. I really do like most of it.
Thanx everyone for al of the great electronica tips!
-- --- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Re:I didnt like them.
by
mskfisher
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I was confused about the different genres inside electronica until I read this:
Re:I didnt like them.
by
GutBomb
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
pretty sad that you don't realize it's music until you have already studied music. and then the only reson you recognize it as music is because your instructors told you "even though it does not sound like music, it is music"
Ah, a little content, and a lot of non-content
by
pyramid+termite
·
· Score: 2
I suggest Ishkur's site for a similar primer. Just make sure your sense of humor is activated:)
TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
acidfast7
·
· Score: 4, Informative
TECHNO is not a genre, it's a subgenre within electronic music as a whole. Unfortunately, most people consider any electronic music "techno". The use of "techno" is usually accompanied with the famous line of "How can you listen to this TECHNO stuff."
The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music should straighten you out a little. While I don't like Ishkur's attitude that he can classify music better than anyone else, it does serve as a goode exposure to what's available in the electronic genre. Also, the music samples are the BOMB.
Techno is one of the major classes of electronic music along with breakbeat, house, jungle, and drum and bass.
As far as ambient, or illbient for that matter, being considered the same as downtempo and lowrecase, that's crazy.
I'd have to disagree with you that a lot of Moby's early works are really "lowercase." Most of his works are ambient and house(rave):
Autechre, IMHO, should be considered Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) and it's not very "lowercase". I thought my head was going to explode listening to it and processing all of the sounds.
On a final note, I'd use Shoutcast radio as a source of Internet Radio within the electronic genre. Highly Recommended:
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
radish
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· Score: 2
First off - thanks for underlining the techno thing. I find real techno very hard to listen to but when I try to explain to people the kind of music I play (as a DJ) they often go "oh like techno?". Jeez...:)
But those categories you list seem a little iffy. You differentiate between "Jungle" and "D&B" (which IMHO is a fairly subtle distinction) but lump everything else into "House"? Hmmm.... what happened to Trance? Prog? Breaks? hell even HipHop & Rap are missing. I think you need to get some new categories:)
One thing which also annoys me is the made-up word "electronica". I mean it's so meaningless - kind of a catch-all word for "all that stuff we don't really understand". How can one category cover everything from Moby to Scooter to Timo Maas and back to Eno? There's way more variation in there than even words like "Rock" can cover. For instance, I would liken the Prodigy to a metal band, just with no guitars. Yet that's "electronica". Yuck!
Oh and DI is pretty good if you like cheesy euro-trance:)
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Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
Syllepsis
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· Score: 2
You differentiate between "Jungle" and "D&B" (which IMHO is a fairly subtle distinction) but lump everything else into "House"?
I know it is unorthodox, but I like to view "Jungle" as not a genre but a flavor of D&B.
D&B is a genre, it is anything that leans more on the rhythm of the drum, uses the heavy bass for the "melody", and has that specific syncopation on every other beat that the rythmic structure is architected around.
There are "flavors" you can mix in:
Jungle - loose dirty breaks, ragga sounds, stratching and high pitched bleeps.
Jump-Up - Simple, repeated rhythm. Rounded repeated bass melody. Gangsta rap, get up and dance.
Atmospheric - Slowed down, relaxing bass. A few jazz or trance elements usually thrown in.
Intelligent - Complicated non-repeating breaks to make your mind reel. DJ Unfriendly, who cares if you can dance to it.
Most good D&B is a mix of these styles, and other styles that I don't know much about. Subgenrefication of electronic music is really more for giving people adjectives to talk about music in terms of style than for categorization. Each of these subgenres is a mix of things that go well together and produce a really nice feel in combination.
Unfortunately, alot of people are so attached to "the new sound" that they only listen and dance to very specific styles/subgenres
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
radish
·
· Score: 2
That's what I love about dance music...so many genres, sub genres, sub sub genres. Your flavors make sense. I was listening to the new Kosheen album the other day. Great stuff, some of it laid back d&b, almost Roni Size style. Other stuff (some wicked prog remixes) going right back into 4/4 trance territory.
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Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
radish
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· Score: 2
I wish I could point you to some good stations, but being a european who only just got broadband, they're all a bit new to me:) You could try MoS (www.ministryofsound.com) who have a radio channel. It varies wildly, but they publish a schedule and have some very big name DJs spin exclusive sets. Prepare for popup hell though!
In your quest for tunes pick up some of the Tranceport series, they have been getting progressivly more progressive (!), the first (Oakenfold) is straight up 1999/2000 melodic trance, the most recent (Quivver) is moody and dark, with some occasional (fantastic) melodic moments. Highly recommended.
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Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
The+Raven
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· Score: 2
The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.
Someone can be 'into' a type of music, yet still label it incorrectly, because they are not into the 'scene' surrounding the music. For example, I could care less whether Smashing Pumpkins are Rock, Alternative, or Pop of some various sort... if I said 'Starting with Smashing Pumpkins, I've been into this Rock thing for a while' a lot of purists would leap down my gullet because I get the f***ing label wrong.
Don't be so tightassed. Techno is what made 'Electronica' popular, before Techno it was fringe. Now a lot of people refer to all Electronica by referring to the first sub-genre that boomed. So what. A person does not have to read magazines, websites, and cd liners obsessively to like a genre of music. Telling someone 'they are not a real fan because they get a term wrong' is stupid, IMO.
Raven
-- "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it."
Hello Alphabet.
Aged Hippie #1: Dude is this lowercase music? Well Crank It UP!
Aged Hippie #2: Yeah man.
Aged Hippie #1: No dude really, Ministry '94 really fucked up my hearing, you have to cank it up.
Aged Hippie #2:(whispers)It is up.
Ronco Announcer: This is lowercase music! Hear tea kettles as they cool off. Listen to the air inside a snare drum when no one is playing it or how about this classic; Mixer Feeding Back With No Inputs. Yeah, lowercase music rocks... (emphasized whisper)gently like a leaf on still water!
-- This.sig is fake but accurate.
You Have got to be joking.
by
Nobody's+Hero
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is not music.
Anyone who has bought this crap...you've been duped.
I mean think about it this is no more music then me listening intently to my CPU fan. If I wanted to relax to the "sweet sounds" of a teakettle, I'd make some damn TEA! I can't believe people have actually spent money on buying these albums!!
And as far as it being "art", I can tell you right now that this is simply going to be another thing for the "art people" to be pretentious about. So you can call it "art" and tell me that obviously I don't understand because I can't comprehend it's true beauty. But obviously you people are only intent on listening to the sound of your own heads up your arses.
-- The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
I find all this genre nonsense...
by
amarodeeps
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...really frustrating. I mean, what's with all the people getting on each other's cases about "this isn't ambient, how could you confuse it with glitch..." etc. Why are we incapable of listening to music as it is rather than dividing it all into little categories?
Okay, before you give me a response, I've heard these things before:
Point- It helps us understand what other music we'd be interested in and find it. Rebuttal- Why don't we compare musicians to other musicians? That's more accurate and would probably get us closer to something we'd like. Frankly, there are more similarities between say, some Aphex Twin and Stockhausen than Aphex Twin and Moby, but they are lumped together and you are less likely to find out about Stockhausen than Moby because of that. That's a shame, because Moby sucks balls;). You are going to enjoy music more if you throw those categories out the window and just listen.
Point- By putting things in genres, you can understand the lineage of music. Rebuttal- This is true only to a point. Unfortunately I think it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we've had these categories people have started classifying themselves and putting themselves willingly into little boxes. Remember though that the great musicians didn't give a shit about these categories...Coltrane, Coleman, Mingus, etc. weren't out to create 'Free Jazz,' they were just bringing in aspects of their culture and other cultures together. That's a much more broad-minded grasp of music. The really funny thing to me that people do today is take little bits and pieces of different genres very consciously and try to call it something new, they categorize it before it's even out there. "Yeah, it's my new Funk/Jungle/Experimental Digital Hardcore/Polka band!" Why not just play some fucking music??
Anyways, this is a brief digression for a nerd site like this, but thought it'd be interesting to get some REAL discussion going about musical styles.
BTW, I have to ditto the poster above who said that the article was little more than an ad for Macs. I guess more generally it was an illustration that Wired probably shouldn't be doing pieces on music. Or they should realize that the technology is just a tool, no matter how much it has empowered people to create new music. For real music coverage, instead check out The Wire.
I think it's very interesting to note how the slashdot crowd doesn't have nearly as much trouble accepting this as music or art as they do accepting artists like eminem. The discussion about the early releases of his new album quickly degenerated into a discussion, or really a rant about the evils of eminem, and how what he doesn't music or art. But here's something that has no tune, is barely audible, and rather than blasting it for trying to corrupt/ruin/depress the children with it's emptyness and blank space or some other made up psychology, the slashdot crowd embraces as being a "nice break" from regular techno, and having lots of aura and a positive ambient quality. That to me is somewhat of a double standard...
If you really want to talk about electronic music made with itty-bitty quiet sounds, then you should check out this web site designed by a friend of mine:
He creates music made out of itty bitty bits of music - 20ms samples (grains of sound), and just creates textures and sonic landscapes using these bits. It's all based on an old synthesis method called granular synthesis.
It is mostly computer generated, although some composers have been known to use this method on analogue audio tapes with a razor blade and sticky tape!
-- Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
the other name for the genre is MICROSOUND
by
AtaruMoroboshi
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· Score: 3, Informative
I wish I'd seen this topic earlier...
The other name for the genre is MICROSOUND, I would know, I'm on a mailing list by that name, that Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, and other "big name" microsounders are on. The name of the list, by the way, is Microsound.
Microsound is often a stark beautiful experience, akin to minimalist painting. I am very fond of Tetsu Innoue's "cuts and clicks" album, for it's ever shifting sound, and Bernhard Gunter's "Monochrome White / Polychrome w/ Neon Nails" double cd, which is a dense texture of sounds that are just outside the range of human hearing. The first disc is higher in pitch than the second disc, but it is the second disc that sounds higher, simply because you can hear it. Very moving, at least to me, despite all lack of melody.
Another great record, one that took me about 2 years to appreciate is Otomo Yoshihide & Sackhio M's "Filament". Yeah, this involves one of those "no input mixer" people. It really sounds liek the private conversation of two computers, not meant for human ears. At the time I got it as a birthday present from a friend of mine (who shares my interest in fringe experimental music) I was listening to a lot of Merzbow, who is the "god of Japanese noise music", which is a great deal denser and louder than any of this stuff, and I didn't know what to make of it.
A few years later, it clicked and now I love it, and even create some myself!
What's next? Laptoppers are really into glitches? Will the life and times of Jan Jelinek and kid606 make the front page of Wired? Because I sure hope so! If this barely-there variation on minimalist techno is all the rage, it's high time that I auctioned off my microstoria CD. The bugger's so goddamned quiet I can't make much out of it even with my headphones on. Infintely more aggravating than even the power electronics that I've got. Speaking of which, Wired should slap together an article on MSBR and Government Alpha. At any rate, since Mouse on Mars' brilliant _Iaora Tahiti_, glitch and its variants (looking at you, Vladislav Delay) has been downhill with few exceptions.
-- Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
More great music
by
jcsehak
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· Score: 3, Informative
As another poster mentioned, be sure to check out the original masters of this stuff: John Cage and Brian Eno. I tend to prefer Cage's piano work (his "In a Landscape" is unbelievable), but Eno's ambient music is some of the best of any kind of music out there. I'm listening to his "Ambient 4: On Land" right now. Others of his to check out are "Discreet Music" and "Atmospheres and Soundscapes." Some more:
Boards of Canada: In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. This somehow manages to be ambient and melodic at the same time. I never get sick of listening to it. It's a 4-song single, so it should only be 5 or 6 bucks in a store (I got the vinyl for $6, and was pleasantly suprised to find a beautiful marbled light blue record). If you're into this kind of music, you need to buy this right now.
There's a great 3-disc set called "Ohm" which has a huge cross-section of music spanning the history of experimental electronica (for lack of a better term). Some of it is kinda annoying, but some really gets under your skin, in a good way. I sometimes find myself hitting "repeat" on a song that doesn't even have one chord change in the first place.
I don't like it as much as Eno's stuff, but if you're a King Crimson fan, you might want to check out Robert Fripp's "The Gates of Paradise." He experimented with some ambient stuff in "Exposure," and with this album has gone full blown.
I picked up this great german LP at a records store in Minneapolis for $2 called Gas Pop. One of those might be the name of something, I don't know. It's wonderfully anonymous. I later saw it in a store in western Montana (albeit for $17), so chances are good that it wasn't just a, like, 10-record pressing. Very nice to listen to. Wait, there's a URL listed. Apparently the band/guy's name is Gas and the release is Pop.
It isn't quite ambient, but William Orbit's "Pieces in a Modern Style" evokes the same mood. It's basically a bunch of classical pieces that are arranged, performed and programmed by him with in electronic means. It effectively raised the ante for electronic music everywhere. I like his version of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" better than any symphonic version I've heard, and his take on Gorecki's "Piece in the Old Style 3" is likely to sit in your head the whole day. Yet, instead of being annoyed with it, like a jingle, you find that humming the melody actually calms you.
My own music falls right around here. It's somewhere between ambient and downtempo, maybe a cross between William Orbit and Moby. Plus it's open source!
If you haven't gotten into the downtempo scene, now's the time. I've been addicted ever since I heard Thievery Corporation's "Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi." Chances are, you've heard it too (tracks have been in a lot of movies), but I get more out of it with every listen. Gorgeously complex drum beats. After the Thievery, get:
Peace Orchestra "Peace Orchestra" when Kruder and Dorfmeister split up, Peter Kruder made this album under the Peace Orchestra moniker. I think it's genius. If you give it a listen, go straight to the song "Shining" and you'll be hooked.
Nightmares on Wax "Carboot Soul" Contrary to the title, this album is the opposite of freaky. It's sort of a cross-over from hip-hop into downtempo, but it's its own thing and can't be pigeonholed. There are a few of the songs where there's a female voice that's either sampled or recorded, but whatever it is, he makes it so that the sound of the voice (and really the sound of every instrument on the album), hmm, let me put it this way: I can't think of anything more pleasant to listen to.
another slashdot article about electronic music!
by
Dr.+Awktagon
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· Score: 2
Hmm, another/. article about music I've been listening to for years. I hope some of you folks check this stuff and other electronic music out, there's so much cool non-RIAA stuff out there, and so much stuff that will challange pre-conceived notions, etc., etc.
Though I always called this type of music "MINIMAL" (written in all uppercase for irony;-) and it's been around longer than "Macs" (true, most electronic musicians use Macs but that's not important).
Part of the appeal of this minimal electronic music for me is that it takes machine/electronic sounds and "places them with intent". Usually we are surrounded by noise that we have no control over, but what if you could control it. For example your P4 on your desk is making a bunch of noise, mostly fan noise. What if you could take that noise and chop it up and play with rhythms and so forth? Maybe make a short beep into a beat, make the hard drive access noise into another beat, etc.
My favorite stuff is from Taylor Deupree's 12k label and mille plateaux.. I like to play it on the computer while working, just barely mixing with the sounds of the fans and the keyboard, and adding in a little rhythm or unpredictability to take away the monotony of the usual machine sounds. Was that little beep from the OS or the CD? Has my fan speed suddenly changed? Etc.
My CD recommendation at the moment would be Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree: Balance on Mille Pleateaux. It really isn't a pure minimal CD, it has a techno beat, but the sound is very clicky and micro, with static and beeps, etc. It's an awesome CD, very listenable, and comes with a video for one of the pieces consisting of pulsating white square on a blue background that visually represents the music.
Old Art, New Name, New Fad
by
greygent
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· Score: 3, Informative
This has been around for decades. At various points its been labeled in the realms of ambient, glitch, discrete and others.
I've done tons of experimenting in this area for probably 15 years, so have a lot of other people.
If you want to join in this "new" fad, buy one of those nice PZM ambient sound microphones from Radio Shack. They're the small mics on the square metal plates, and they work well for picking up discrete sounds ("discrete" was always the term I used for this type of work).
Gold mines of sounds I've found: - Water running in my metal sink - Hum of refrigerators and other appliances - Chopping up a fresh potato (especially the audio whilst knife is still slicing through potato) - Sound in underground tunnels under busy city streets - The sound in my front bathroom at work (great creepy ambient stuff there) - The sound of the air flow in the attic of a building near here - Socked feet walking on carpet - Sound inside a Pepsi can while blasting "Master of Puppets". (Resulting recordings don't sound even a hint like Metallica. Serious resonating going on here, the whole album is great for resonating soda cans, and other pieces of thin metal.)
microsound and lowercase are not necessarily the same thing, though they can be. they both focus on the details of sound. microsound tends towards a 'digital aesthetic' (ref. kim cascone, microsound.org) and fine manipulation of very small particles of sound... i personally think the aesthetic is due in large part to people getting proficient with granular synthesis. lowercase can be different, in that the emphasis is on testing the limits of perception... though that's often not the artistic aim.
that could sound lame (and i'm sure it often is - that's art for you), but think about it this way: it takes advantage of a much greater dynamic range, in much the same way classical music can (or any other typically uncompressed sound). it gets closer to what we actually hear, not what sounds 'best' (ie loudest) on the radio. and the really cool thing is that in many cases it gives us super-hearing, whether that's through contact-mic'ed field recordings or just very meticulous technique in the production environment.
aside from my personal efforts in similar areas, i think this is a great development. people forget that hearing is a full-fledged sense. people forget to listen to what they're hearing, and they miss a lot. and i'm really, incredibly sick of everything being compressed to within an inch of its life. if we hadn't been conditioned to it, we'd realize how much more it doesn't add to the music.
if you're in san francisco, check out quietamerican.org and see when the next "field effects" will happen. at #3, aaron brought steve roden up from LA (his personal hero). the space is wonderful and the atmosphere perfect, filled with peple that listen. highly recommended. not too pretentious, either. (!)
Frank Zappa did a cover of 4'33" which was actually just a little over 5' long. I guess it was the extended dance remix.
monty python
by
prockcore
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Monty python wanted to do something like that, but the BBC wouldn't let them.
They would start the show normally.. but throughout the show, they'd slowly turn down the volume.. causing the viewer slowly turn it up.. then at the very end they'd crank the volume.
Re:The Shit They Call "Art"
by
Chris+Johnson
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· Score: 2
Hang on a second there. It's not my type either, but possibly unlike you I've done serious musical work in a genre just as 'shit' and seen the results.
I've been playing guitar, building gear, fooling with synthesizers etc. for years and years (see URL link), and after doing music on the Net for a little while, I stumbled across something unexpected. It was called 'Noise'. I went, "hey, really? I bet when I was a stoned teenager I did better 'noise' than that", and then I looked into it a little. And wow! One guy was putting wireless mics in a clothes dryer with bricks. Someone else had written a passionate statement of what NOISE, true NOISE really was. It was uncompromising- no beat, no melody, you had to be getting into producing a blast of brutal sound or you weren't Noise... and I realised, hey, that was part of MY musical background. There were other people into that. It didn't matter that any sane person would turn the result off with a spastic lunge at the 'OFF DEAR GOD TURN IT OFF' button. What mattered was, there were people who WANTED what I used to do with sound.
Result: Hard Vacuum. Knowing there were people who were hardcore fans, I took some of my gear (a three-band compressor I'd built and a shortwave radio) and, in just one long intense session, recorded a whole CD's worth of noise performances, making heavy use of shortwave interference, satellite noises and circuit disruption. For one of the tracks I pulled the plug on the equipment to stop it, resulting in a classic 'weeeeoooooooSNRK' dying electronics noise. It was great! I drew on all the twisted teenager delight in abrasive unmusical noise, combined with a lot of years of musical development telling me when to change it up, keep it moving, go for different effects and results.
That album has been one of my most successful albums. There's stuff I've done where I spent days laboring over detailed little sequenced parts or played until my fingers were blistered, that still hasn't been as popular as this crazed noise crap that was seemingly effortless and talentless.
Why is this? Because there are people for whom raw noise expresses their feelings, their selves- seemingly normal people whose inner 'music' is like RAARRRRRRSSSJJJKKKKKFFTTTTZZZZZBK and most people can't do that, not sincerely, not with understanding. You get people trying to do 'noise' by making little techno ditties using noises for beats, and it is like comparing a wolf with a poodle- somehow even insulting, you want to go 'do you even understand this?'. And with me, it's the wild breed of Noise in its purest form, and anyone into Noise instantly gets a hit off of that and instantly KNOWS 'yeah, this guy gets it'. And I keep meeting people like that. One guy wanted me to come out to do live gigs with him. You'd think there wouldn't be many people into this, but the ones that are, are seriously into it.
And that's what this 'lowercase' stuff is about. It's not the same genre (though I bet they'd understand my noise work, even if it's way too loud for them), but it's the same deal. If you don't like it, well congratulations, join the majority, and you forfeit any possible claim that you understand what's going on here. It's not being done for you. It's never gonna be done for you. If they wanted to make music for YOU, they'd be doing something completely different.
Re:Before you all jump on the hate-them bandwagon.
by
greygent
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· Score: 2
No, 10-15 years ago, we sat in our bedrooms with large numbers of cassette recorders with variable speed knobs, and cheap casio synths creating & looping stuff and getting yelled at by our parents for wasting our time with such drivel.
I believe he wrote a composition that is being performed in Germany that begins with 16 months of silence, followed by a single note in January 2003, then 8 more months of silence, and another note.... It sounds rockin!!
Re:and furthermore (found sounds)...
by
uebernewby
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· Score: 2
One of the coolest Einstuerzende Neubauten tracks featured them flicking the master power switch of their studio on and off.
Slashdot Mirror
ha ha, get it? tunah
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I hope this means we won't be able to hear Britney or Christina as much as we already do...
I am the breaker of Chairs!
uhm, yeah...dude takes a frigging mixing board, jacks it back into itself and calls it music? Sure. plenty of silence in between beats. Guess I am just not artistic, but if this qualifies as art, then me drinking a bottle of water is worth millions. Ok troll time over, but this is a little silly. If this is designed to keep people calm and on focus (coding, problem solving, what-have-you) then I personally feel they are barking up the wrong tree...ok, well, not barking, but whispering. As anyone who has listened to Pink Floyd albums can tell you, if you listen hard enough, you can hear some crazy sounds in the background. Which is all this music would do, force me to listen intently for that back ground noise.
;)
Kids these days
Sent from your iPad.
"One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all."
The RIAA strikes again!
My Sig: SEGV
itty-bitty quiet sounds.
I've been listening to this for quite a while, and I must say it's been a good change from the usual stuff labelled 'electronic'.
thats what I thought anyway, until I realised my headphones were broken...
fran
holding my overclocked TI-85 within 3 ft of a walkman? =] *remembers playing TI-85 asm games in high school*
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I've got a tape by these guys called "Head Cleaner". It's very quiet. I've got their video as well.
The Day Today - Game Warden to the Events Rhino
Reminds of Matthew Herbert does.
For a live show, he will take samples of himself breaking stuff and do all sorts of things with the noises. Lately he has taken to ripping up bits of corporate branding (soda cans, mcdonald's fries, etc.)
cage did this, as the article points out. one of the main points behind his "silent" compositions -- aside from the obvious tongue in cheek 'let's mess with the critics' attitude it had -- was the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room. the ultra-quietness of these recordings reminds me of heavy metal guitarists trying to out-"heavy" each other. these guys are just trying to out-"quiet" each other.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
In example, instead of your sample range range being from 0-65535 it is 0-4096, it may be 'lowercase music', but it could also be represented in just 12 bits instead of 16. The vinyl enthusiats must HATE these guys!
This music has been around for quite some time. For a short while two years ago, it was called 'glitch' and it was the 'in' thing of the week - heck, 'Clicks and Cuts 2' got reviewed in Playboy magazine.
It got to the point were everyone and their third rate techno musician was spicing up tracks with 'lowercase' sounds.
Before the 'glitch' revolution, there was already a large scene of musicians who used computers to create tracks out of supposedly non-musical sounds. They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.
It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys, but it's hardly new and I also dare say the scene of people who like this kind of stuff is quite a bit larger than '10.000 people world wide'.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
cat /vmlinuz > /dev/dsp sounds better :-D
It'll be great until some smartass makes a track that's 45 minutes of near-silence followed by A LOUD BANG! One more fad bites the dust.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
If these people are happy making this, and other people enjoy listening to it: good for them! In my book however, this doesn't qualify as music. For me music has structure, meaning and most importantly emotion, and contains almost nothing but non-randomness. For me this only qualifies as sound. Definately not my cup of tea! (come to think of it, the sound of a cup of tea cooling down could make a nice record!).
I just went back and listened to them. One problem I had was that the computer was louder than any sound being played. The noise of the cheap speakers drowned out anything but the loudest clicks and taps.
I've always thought that electronica was one of the closest relatives to traditional classical music where the meter and timing and beat were very similar in both styles of music. But this new electronica doesn't seem to have any of that. It's more like... random recordings of random sounds, no better than the background noise of your room.
This fad will hopefully pass quickly.
It one is really interested in some interesting electronica, there's a really great sound coming out of India or at least is based on Indian music. Very cool. I wish I could remember the term off the top of my head.
I have been pwned because my
0 1
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The Indian flavored music you're talking is often called "Bhangra" or "Asian Underground". It's mostly coming from the UK.
There is always more than one "fad" going through what you call "electronica" and I call TECHNO.
You can easily choose to ignore the ones you don't like, unless you get all your music news from Slashdot.
. . .then get ready for my upcoming album "The Sound of One Hand Clapping", and my new hit single "Average Global Rate of Trees Falling in the Forest When Nobody is Around to Hear Them in 2001".
. . . you should consider that an artist deserves some respect for being consistently unlistenable. How many of you out there like Aphex Twin? You have to admit that, though brilliant, tracks like "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" probably wouldn't go over well with the average listener.
Electronic music is the new outlet for kids who ten years ago would have sat in a garage with a bunch of friends and a guitar. It offers a sometimes cheap and always flexible way to release your musical boognish.
That being said, these people probably shouldn't have been written up anywhere outside of their best friends' websites. Any movement for which "there may be 10,000. . . fans around the world" probably isn't worth paying much attention to. The article seems to be more focused on the fact that the musicians use Macs. Surprise, nobody!
I'm not making a "you don't know what the next big thing is" speech, because, quite frankly, this is far from it. People still prefer 4/4 beats and sound samples with the word "booty" in them. But I wonder how many of those out there ridiculing these guys now are going to be the same ones that whine to their friends two years down the road when their favorite minimalist techno band sells a song for a car commercial.
I think this is an experiment by the RIAA to test whether they can leave out the music around their audio watermarks and sell them standalone. If the market reacts positive, their profit will skyrocket up to 100.05%, because they don't have to pay those greedy musicians anymore.
Well, you *could* of course try to find some non-goth/death/I hate everyone electronica yourself. It's not exactly rare, you know. Pay a visit to a good record store near you that imports European electronica. I dare say you'll be in for a little surprise.
In fact, in the US (I'm assuming you're in the US on the basis of what you say - no European would ever make the statement you did), Nothing records (of NIN fame) does quite a good job releasing the more popular Warp-esque artists.
You could also fire up Audio Galaxy and download tracks by (off the top of my head) Plaid, Squarepusher, Wagonchrist, Jaga Jazzist, Kim Hiorthoy, Tipper, Four Tet, Akufen, Daedelus, Andrew Pekler, Pole, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, EU, Arovane, Mouse on Mars, etc, etc (this list is completely random - pls don't flame me for leaving out your favorite artist).
Just to get you started.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I can't believe you guys are posting links to websites that obviously hold illegal copies of the works I recorded somewhere in the 70's called 'Silence'.
You'd better get ready for my RIAA lawyer, because everytime a moment of 'Silence' is heard, royalties are due! So the next time you hear nothing but 'Silence' think of me, the poor artist, who should be compensated for this (lengthy) piece of work, but who's work instead got stolen just because the compression ratios of the piece turned out to be particularly favorable.
I've always been into the whole techno thing. If anyone ever wanted downtempo, beatless music, there are a variety of options. This hasn't ever been called "lowercase", it's simply been referred to as "ambient" or "downtempo".
;P)
The internet radio station Cryosleep is a great example. It's "100% No Beat Guaranteed." Listen at www.bluemars.org.
A lot of Underworld music is very downtempo and quiet. Try listening to:
Underworld - Stagger
Underworld - Thing in a book
Underworld - Tounge
Underworld - Skym
Or you could always try the sounds of Autechre or Brothomstates. It may have somewhat of a beat but it's often extraordinarily quiet. Try:
Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24
Brothomstates - We kill da enemy
Finally, there's a lot of old-school pre-Everything Is Wrong Moby out there that's really "lowercase." Try:
Moby - House Of Blue Leaves
Moby - Slight Return
(Yes, I've been a Moby fan before he got popular.
Hope this helps in your quest for fine music.
-Evan
However, if you decide that you do actually like what is going on with this and want to track down recordings of this nature then I would recommend that you go and check out smallfish records (or even better drop in if you around the Shoreditch area of London). They've got about 18,000 records on-line at the moment with short reviews and (albeit very low quality) sound samples of them all and they specialise in the more obscure electronica. Also there is a mailing list available that automatically drops off details of the new releases on a weekly basis (~150/week).
The only Good System is a Sound System
this isn't glitch.
this is lowercase, or microsound.
it might seem like an academic distinction, but glitch can be quite noisy and abrasive, and generally people lumped in this lowercase catchall aren't.
This isn't revolutionary though. Kind of behind the times if you ask me... Weird that Wired chose to pick up on it now, next thing you know they'll be interviewing Kid606 and talking abou the rise of laptop punk
i don't read slashdot anymore.
AND I SUPPOSE THESE ARE FORTISSIMO LETTERS?
Head up arse syndrome strikes again...
But then, this was found on Wired.
"Information wants to be paid"
Kids these days...yeesh. We used to call this sort of stuff the "voice of God"...And used it as a crude diagnostic tool to determine if hardware was alive or not. You can get the same effect by holding an AM radio near a computer, and tuning the radio to a clear portion of the dial.
Infact, I diagnosed a bad power supply in an SGI Indigo 2 a few years back using this method.
What I would really like to see is a formal explanation of the faint warblegoogly noise produced by idle analog synthesizers with ring modulation.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
One one hand, it makes for great copy protection.
:)
On the other, they'd compress wickedly well for distribution...
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
The last band I knew with a song called Headcleaner was Front242. And that song REALLY was a headcleaner! I think it was called "upper case" music...
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
My Compaq Evo Laptop makes chittering noises with network traffic and clicks on HD access in addition to the usual background of interference hiss.
My favourite track is sharing files from the HD on a peer-to-peer service while a VNC terminal makes rythmic use of the spare network bandwith.
But I guess it's too loud and intruding to be real low-key, so I've only got the slow oscillation in the flow of water through my apartements radiators - which only makes me sleepy at best.
You should go and check out Koan Pro from sseyo which describes itself as "the award winning vector audio, interactive audio and generative music authoring system".
The only Good System is a Sound System
John Lennon did actually record a track called "Two minutes of Silence", which has been covered by several bands including Soundgarden.
17 years earlier John Cage wrote "433", a work for no instruments which required the performer to walk onstage and do nothing for 4 minutes 33 seconds, there is an excellent introduction to Cage's work in this field in this Washington Post Article.
oh, it was an article?
i thought it was a Mac advertisement.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
As a musician, I completely agree about the state of classical music between '25 and '65. There where some great pieces done, think Copeland, but most of the rest was forgetable. I understand that composers are attempting to write in the style of the masters again. I recently heard a piece called "Loon" which was most certainly not pops, click and random noise and ideed got the feel of being in a marsh and hearing loons. Wonderful piece.
Anyway, the lowercase music I've heard and been fiddling with on my Mac is pretty cool, although the extreme pieces that feature lot's of silence are in my opinion just plain silly.
Does anyone remeber the radio program "Hearts of Space"? That is the kind of music I think of when I hear this lowercase stuff. I really do like most of it.
Thanx everyone for al of the great electronica tips!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I was confused about the different genres inside electronica until I read this:
http://phobos.plato.nl/e-primer/
VERY helpful, complete with sound samples.
0x0D 0x0A
pretty sad that you don't realize it's music until you have already studied music. and then the only reson you recognize it as music is because your instructors told you "even though it does not sound like music, it is music"
Reminds me of Slashdot.
actually it reminded me alot of the stuff NIN did for quake 1. except trent did not record it at low volume. same kind of sound though.
I suggest Ishkur's site for a similar primer. Just make sure your sense of humor is activated :)
TECHNO is not a genre, it's a subgenre within electronic music as a whole. Unfortunately, most people consider any electronic music "techno". The use of "techno" is usually accompanied with the famous line of "How can you listen to this TECHNO stuff."
The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music should straighten you out a little. While I don't like Ishkur's attitude that he can classify music better than anyone else, it does serve as a goode exposure to what's available in the electronic genre. Also, the music samples are the BOMB.
Techno is one of the major classes of electronic music along with breakbeat, house, jungle, and drum and bass.
As far as ambient, or illbient for that matter, being considered the same as downtempo and lowrecase, that's crazy.
I'd have to disagree with you that a lot of Moby's early works are really "lowercase." Most of his works are ambient and house(rave):
Moby - Ambient
Moby - Early Underground
Moby - Collected B-Sides
being three examples.
Autechre, IMHO, should be considered Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) and it's not very "lowercase". I thought my head was going to explode listening to it and processing all of the sounds.
On a final note, I'd use Shoutcast radio as a source of Internet Radio within the electronic genre. Highly Recommended:
Digitally Imported
Do I turn it down?
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
And to think I was on the edge of a musical revolution back in 99. I think I invented this music. http://www.sexcowairlines.com/sept2999-cd.php3
Aged Hippie #1: Dude is this lowercase music? Well Crank It UP!
Aged Hippie #2: Yeah man.
Aged Hippie #1: No dude really, Ministry '94 really fucked up my hearing, you have to cank it up.
Aged Hippie #2: (whispers)It is up.
Ronco Announcer: This is lowercase music! Hear tea kettles as they cool off. Listen to the air inside a snare drum when no one is playing it or how about this classic; Mixer Feeding Back With No Inputs. Yeah, lowercase music rocks... (emphasized whisper)gently like a leaf on still water!
This
This is not music.
Anyone who has bought this crap...you've been duped.
I mean think about it this is no more music then me listening intently to my CPU fan. If I wanted to relax to the "sweet sounds" of a teakettle, I'd make some damn TEA! I can't believe people have actually spent money on buying these albums!!
And as far as it being "art", I can tell you right now that this is simply going to be another thing for the "art people" to be pretentious about. So you can call it "art" and tell me that obviously I don't understand because I can't comprehend it's true beauty. But obviously you people are only intent on listening to the sound of your own heads up your arses.
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
Okay, before you give me a response, I've heard these things before:
Point- It helps us understand what other music we'd be interested in and find it. ;). You are going to enjoy music more if you throw those categories out the window and just listen.
Rebuttal- Why don't we compare musicians to other musicians? That's more accurate and would probably get us closer to something we'd like. Frankly, there are more similarities between say, some Aphex Twin and Stockhausen than Aphex Twin and Moby, but they are lumped together and you are less likely to find out about Stockhausen than Moby because of that. That's a shame, because Moby sucks balls
Point- By putting things in genres, you can understand the lineage of music.
Rebuttal- This is true only to a point. Unfortunately I think it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we've had these categories people have started classifying themselves and putting themselves willingly into little boxes. Remember though that the great musicians didn't give a shit about these categories...Coltrane, Coleman, Mingus, etc. weren't out to create 'Free Jazz,' they were just bringing in aspects of their culture and other cultures together. That's a much more broad-minded grasp of music. The really funny thing to me that people do today is take little bits and pieces of different genres very consciously and try to call it something new, they categorize it before it's even out there. "Yeah, it's my new Funk/Jungle/Experimental Digital Hardcore/Polka band!" Why not just play some fucking music??
Anyways, this is a brief digression for a nerd site like this, but thought it'd be interesting to get some REAL discussion going about musical styles.
BTW, I have to ditto the poster above who said that the article was little more than an ad for Macs. I guess more generally it was an illustration that Wired probably shouldn't be doing pieces on music. Or they should realize that the technology is just a tool, no matter how much it has empowered people to create new music. For real music coverage, instead check out The Wire.
I think it's very interesting to note how the slashdot crowd doesn't have nearly as much trouble accepting this as music or art as they do accepting artists like eminem. The discussion about the early releases of his new album quickly degenerated into a discussion, or really a rant about the evils of eminem, and how what he doesn't music or art. But here's something that has no tune, is barely audible, and rather than blasting it for trying to corrupt/ruin/depress the children with it's emptyness and blank space or some other made up psychology, the slashdot crowd embraces as being a "nice break" from regular techno, and having lots of aura and a positive ambient quality. That to me is somewhat of a double standard...
Once upon a time...
http://zor.org/synthesis
or
http://www.granularsynthesis.live.com.au
He creates music made out of itty bitty bits of music - 20ms samples (grains of sound), and just creates textures and sonic landscapes using these bits. It's all based on an old synthesis method called granular synthesis.
It is mostly computer generated, although some composers have been known to use this method on analogue audio tapes with a razor blade and sticky tape!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
I wish I'd seen this topic earlier...
The other name for the genre is MICROSOUND, I would know, I'm on a mailing list by that name, that Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, and other "big name" microsounders are on. The name of the list, by the way, is Microsound.
Microsound is often a stark beautiful experience, akin to minimalist painting. I am very fond of Tetsu Innoue's "cuts and clicks" album, for it's ever shifting sound, and Bernhard Gunter's "Monochrome White / Polychrome w/ Neon Nails" double cd, which is a dense texture of sounds that are just outside the range of human hearing. The first disc is higher in pitch than the second disc, but it is the second disc that sounds higher, simply because you can hear it. Very moving, at least to me, despite all lack of melody.
Another great record, one that took me about 2 years to appreciate is Otomo Yoshihide & Sackhio M's "Filament". Yeah, this involves one of those "no input mixer" people. It really sounds liek the private conversation of two computers, not meant for human ears. At the time I got it as a birthday present from a friend of mine (who shares my interest in fringe experimental music) I was listening to a lot of Merzbow, who is the "god of Japanese noise music", which is a great deal denser and louder than any of this stuff, and I didn't know what to make of it.
A few years later, it clicked and now I love it, and even create some myself!
What's next? Laptoppers are really into glitches? Will the life and times of Jan Jelinek and kid606 make the front page of Wired? Because I sure hope so!
If this barely-there variation on minimalist techno is all the rage, it's high time that I auctioned off my microstoria CD. The bugger's so goddamned quiet I can't make much out of it even with my headphones on. Infintely more aggravating than even the power electronics that I've got. Speaking of which, Wired should slap together an article on MSBR and Government Alpha.
At any rate, since Mouse on Mars' brilliant _Iaora Tahiti_, glitch and its variants (looking at you, Vladislav Delay) has been downhill with few exceptions.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
As another poster mentioned, be sure to check out the original masters of this stuff: John Cage and Brian Eno. I tend to prefer Cage's piano work (his "In a Landscape" is unbelievable), but Eno's ambient music is some of the best of any kind of music out there. I'm listening to his "Ambient 4: On Land" right now. Others of his to check out are "Discreet Music" and "Atmospheres and Soundscapes." Some more:
Boards of Canada: In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. This somehow manages to be ambient and melodic at the same time. I never get sick of listening to it. It's a 4-song single, so it should only be 5 or 6 bucks in a store (I got the vinyl for $6, and was pleasantly suprised to find a beautiful marbled light blue record). If you're into this kind of music, you need to buy this right now.
There's a great 3-disc set called "Ohm" which has a huge cross-section of music spanning the history of experimental electronica (for lack of a better term). Some of it is kinda annoying, but some really gets under your skin, in a good way. I sometimes find myself hitting "repeat" on a song that doesn't even have one chord change in the first place.
I don't like it as much as Eno's stuff, but if you're a King Crimson fan, you might want to check out Robert Fripp's "The Gates of Paradise." He experimented with some ambient stuff in "Exposure," and with this album has gone full blown.
I picked up this great german LP at a records store in Minneapolis for $2 called Gas Pop. One of those might be the name of something, I don't know. It's wonderfully anonymous. I later saw it in a store in western Montana (albeit for $17), so chances are good that it wasn't just a, like, 10-record pressing. Very nice to listen to. Wait, there's a URL listed. Apparently the band/guy's name is Gas and the release is Pop.
It isn't quite ambient, but William Orbit's "Pieces in a Modern Style" evokes the same mood. It's basically a bunch of classical pieces that are arranged, performed and programmed by him with in electronic means. It effectively raised the ante for electronic music everywhere. I like his version of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" better than any symphonic version I've heard, and his take on Gorecki's "Piece in the Old Style 3" is likely to sit in your head the whole day. Yet, instead of being annoyed with it, like a jingle, you find that humming the melody actually calms you.
My own music falls right around here. It's somewhere between ambient and downtempo, maybe a cross between William Orbit and Moby. Plus it's open source!
If you haven't gotten into the downtempo scene, now's the time. I've been addicted ever since I heard Thievery Corporation's "Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi." Chances are, you've heard it too (tracks have been in a lot of movies), but I get more out of it with every listen. Gorgeously complex drum beats. After the Thievery, get:
Peace Orchestra "Peace Orchestra" when Kruder and Dorfmeister split up, Peter Kruder made this album under the Peace Orchestra moniker. I think it's genius. If you give it a listen, go straight to the song "Shining" and you'll be hooked.
Nightmares on Wax "Carboot Soul" Contrary to the title, this album is the opposite of freaky. It's sort of a cross-over from hip-hop into downtempo, but it's its own thing and can't be pigeonholed. There are a few of the songs where there's a female voice that's either sampled or recorded, but whatever it is, he makes it so that the sound of the voice (and really the sound of every instrument on the album), hmm, let me put it this way: I can't think of anything more pleasant to listen to.
c-hack.com |
Hmm, another /. article about music I've been listening to for years. I hope some of you folks check this stuff and other electronic music out, there's so much cool non-RIAA stuff out there, and so much stuff that will challange pre-conceived notions, etc., etc.
Though I always called this type of music "MINIMAL" (written in all uppercase for irony ;-) and it's been around longer than "Macs" (true, most electronic musicians use Macs but that's not important).
Part of the appeal of this minimal electronic music for me is that it takes machine/electronic sounds and "places them with intent". Usually we are surrounded by noise that we have no control over, but what if you could control it. For example your P4 on your desk is making a bunch of noise, mostly fan noise. What if you could take that noise and chop it up and play with rhythms and so forth? Maybe make a short beep into a beat, make the hard drive access noise into another beat, etc.
My favorite stuff is from Taylor Deupree's 12k label and mille plateaux.. I like to play it on the computer while working, just barely mixing with the sounds of the fans and the keyboard, and adding in a little rhythm or unpredictability to take away the monotony of the usual machine sounds. Was that little beep from the OS or the CD? Has my fan speed suddenly changed? Etc.
My CD recommendation at the moment would be Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree: Balance on Mille Pleateaux. It really isn't a pure minimal CD, it has a techno beat, but the sound is very clicky and micro, with static and beeps, etc. It's an awesome CD, very listenable, and comes with a video for one of the pieces consisting of pulsating white square on a blue background that visually represents the music.
This has been around for decades. At various points its been labeled in the realms of ambient, glitch, discrete and others.
I've done tons of experimenting in this area for probably 15 years, so have a lot of other people.
If you want to join in this "new" fad, buy one of those nice PZM ambient sound microphones from Radio Shack. They're the small mics on the square metal plates, and they work well for picking up discrete sounds ("discrete" was always the term I used for this type of work).
Gold mines of sounds I've found:
- Water running in my metal sink
- Hum of refrigerators and other appliances
- Chopping up a fresh potato (especially the audio whilst knife is still slicing through potato)
- Sound in underground tunnels under busy city streets
- The sound in my front bathroom at work (great creepy ambient stuff there)
- The sound of the air flow in the attic of a building near here
- Socked feet walking on carpet
- Sound inside a Pepsi can while blasting "Master of Puppets". (Resulting recordings don't sound even a hint like Metallica. Serious resonating going on here, the whole album is great for resonating soda cans, and other pieces of thin metal.)
Nothing new, move along. Eno is god.
that could sound lame (and i'm sure it often is - that's art for you), but think about it this way: it takes advantage of a much greater dynamic range, in much the same way classical music can (or any other typically uncompressed sound). it gets closer to what we actually hear, not what sounds 'best' (ie loudest) on the radio. and the really cool thing is that in many cases it gives us super-hearing, whether that's through contact-mic'ed field recordings or just very meticulous technique in the production environment.
aside from my personal efforts in similar areas, i think this is a great development. people forget that hearing is a full-fledged sense. people forget to listen to what they're hearing, and they miss a lot. and i'm really, incredibly sick of everything being compressed to within an inch of its life. if we hadn't been conditioned to it, we'd realize how much more it doesn't add to the music.
if you're in san francisco, check out quietamerican.org and see when the next "field effects" will happen. at #3, aaron brought steve roden up from LA (his personal hero). the space is wonderful and the atmosphere perfect, filled with peple that listen. highly recommended. not too pretentious, either. (!)
[|]
z_gringo said:
"...this 'music' may be about the same thing as the Emperor's new clothes..."
This and much more. New art forms have about the survival rate of baby spiders.
I am surprised that the phrase appeared so late in this discussion.
Frank Zappa did a cover of 4'33" which was actually just a little over 5' long. I guess it was the extended dance remix.
Monty python wanted to do something like that, but the BBC wouldn't let them.
They would start the show normally.. but throughout the show, they'd slowly turn down the volume.. causing the viewer slowly turn it up.. then at the very end they'd crank the volume.
I've been playing guitar, building gear, fooling with synthesizers etc. for years and years (see URL link), and after doing music on the Net for a little while, I stumbled across something unexpected. It was called 'Noise'. I went, "hey, really? I bet when I was a stoned teenager I did better 'noise' than that", and then I looked into it a little. And wow! One guy was putting wireless mics in a clothes dryer with bricks. Someone else had written a passionate statement of what NOISE, true NOISE really was. It was uncompromising- no beat, no melody, you had to be getting into producing a blast of brutal sound or you weren't Noise... and I realised, hey, that was part of MY musical background. There were other people into that. It didn't matter that any sane person would turn the result off with a spastic lunge at the 'OFF DEAR GOD TURN IT OFF' button. What mattered was, there were people who WANTED what I used to do with sound.
Result: Hard Vacuum. Knowing there were people who were hardcore fans, I took some of my gear (a three-band compressor I'd built and a shortwave radio) and, in just one long intense session, recorded a whole CD's worth of noise performances, making heavy use of shortwave interference, satellite noises and circuit disruption. For one of the tracks I pulled the plug on the equipment to stop it, resulting in a classic 'weeeeoooooooSNRK' dying electronics noise. It was great! I drew on all the twisted teenager delight in abrasive unmusical noise, combined with a lot of years of musical development telling me when to change it up, keep it moving, go for different effects and results.
That album has been one of my most successful albums. There's stuff I've done where I spent days laboring over detailed little sequenced parts or played until my fingers were blistered, that still hasn't been as popular as this crazed noise crap that was seemingly effortless and talentless.
Why is this? Because there are people for whom raw noise expresses their feelings, their selves- seemingly normal people whose inner 'music' is like RAARRRRRRSSSJJJKKKKKFFTTTTZZZZZBK and most people can't do that, not sincerely, not with understanding. You get people trying to do 'noise' by making little techno ditties using noises for beats, and it is like comparing a wolf with a poodle- somehow even insulting, you want to go 'do you even understand this?'. And with me, it's the wild breed of Noise in its purest form, and anyone into Noise instantly gets a hit off of that and instantly KNOWS 'yeah, this guy gets it'. And I keep meeting people like that. One guy wanted me to come out to do live gigs with him. You'd think there wouldn't be many people into this, but the ones that are, are seriously into it.
And that's what this 'lowercase' stuff is about. It's not the same genre (though I bet they'd understand my noise work, even if it's way too loud for them), but it's the same deal. If you don't like it, well congratulations, join the majority, and you forfeit any possible claim that you understand what's going on here. It's not being done for you. It's never gonna be done for you. If they wanted to make music for YOU, they'd be doing something completely different.
No, 10-15 years ago, we sat in our bedrooms with large numbers of cassette recorders with variable speed knobs, and cheap casio synths creating & looping stuff and getting yelled at by our parents for wasting our time with such drivel.
:)
I believe he wrote a composition that is being performed in Germany that begins with 16 months of silence, followed by a single note in January 2003, then 8 more months of silence, and another note.... It sounds rockin!!
One of the coolest Einstuerzende Neubauten tracks featured them flicking the master power switch of their studio on and off.
Awesome.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/