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Unrefined "Musician" Gains a Global Audience
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An unskilled musician performed a catchy pop instrumental for more than one million YouTube users even though he can't play a lick of drums or piano. The 22-year-old Norwegian's tool was stop-motion video, WSJ.com reports. From the article: 'To make "Amateur," Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the Fruity Loops sound-editing program — the same software he's used to create his all-digital music in the past. After organizing the sound files into the right order, Mr. Gjertsen reconstructed the pattern with the original video files. In the final product, he insists, nothing about his performance was digitally enhanced. "You have the original sounds from the video," he says.'"
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Have you read my journal today?
Aphex Twin, as has often been pointed out by music historians, is just repeating what Karlheinz Stockhausen did fifty years ago now in works like Kontakte , except Richard James dumbs it down considerably. Where's the twelve-tone row in a given Aphex Twin track? Where are the aperiodic rhythms?
In showing the legitimacy of creating music from sampling, it's better to use the innovators like Stockhausen or Berio as examples, or those who continue this tradition but at the highest levels of rigour, such as those connected with IRCAM.