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.
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.)
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.
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!
This is bullshit
by
uebernewby
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· 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'.
Heh,
one of the early phillips demo CD's did this to demonstrate the new-fangled CD players dynamic range... it went like this..
Orchestra playing softly.... Orchestra playing softly.... Orchestra playing softly.... Orchestra playing soft*********FUCKING BIG CANNON!************
As I recall, a lot of audiophile's speakers were replaced after the cones practically leapt across the room.
--
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.
Before you all jump on the hate-them bandwagon. .
by
freakpower
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· 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: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).
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
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
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· 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.
You jest but...
by
alistair
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· 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: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: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
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· 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"
TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
by
acidfast7
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· 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:
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.
the other name for the genre is MICROSOUND
by
AtaruMoroboshi
·
· 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!
More great music
by
jcsehak
·
· 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.
Old Art, New Name, New Fad
by
greygent
·
· 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.)
Nothing new, move along. Eno is god.
monty python
by
prockcore
·
· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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/
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.
. . . 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'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.
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.
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.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
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"
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.
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
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!
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 |
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.
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.