tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45566758508464629302024-02-21T02:32:30.970-08:00Quarter Past MidnightMusic and culture in the C21Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4556675850846462930.post-79294559649341593242011-03-07T03:12:00.000-08:002011-03-07T03:34:31.073-08:00J3000 Nightdrive Mix<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPYxf1hdMKpO06-RUYjB_jSQ2gGAJP9E2C1PTMiWdxbE5WJ2eUHGOIQ1xiN2bwu7U6hnAKZv2D8SEcpWDrJdrz6zgYldAFy8kUPqz4D1q0WQ2l3Gwgn_iGVIuZLWoZac2IuZpcr2Vhl5c/s1600/nightDrive.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPYxf1hdMKpO06-RUYjB_jSQ2gGAJP9E2C1PTMiWdxbE5WJ2eUHGOIQ1xiN2bwu7U6hnAKZv2D8SEcpWDrJdrz6zgYldAFy8kUPqz4D1q0WQ2l3Gwgn_iGVIuZLWoZac2IuZpcr2Vhl5c/s320/nightDrive.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581299968995154546" /></a><br /><br />Sorry about the the lack of updates recently. The last month has been so busy that I haven't been able to fit in any writing but I'm hoping things return to normal soon. In the meantime here's a mix of mine from last year:<br /><br />J3000 is an alias that I intend to start producing under. The idea is for it to be an outlet for my interest in electro, detroit techno, chicago/detroit/deep house and the spaces between all of these. J3000 is about joining the dots between them I guess and this mixtape is the first attempt at that.<br /><br />Dâm-Funk - Come On Outside<br />Space Dimension Controller - The Love Quadrant<br />Eli Escobar - Shoulda Let You Go<br />Newcleus - Cyborg Dance<br />Kurtis Mantronik - Push Yer Hands Up (Bleecker Street Hip Hop Formula)<br />Dopplereffekt- Infophysix<br />Plus Device - Bodyheat<br />Jimmy Edgar - My Beats<br />Morgan Geist - Detroit<br />Roberto Rodriguez - About This Love Feat. Max C (Crazy P Dub)<br />The Hundred In The Hands - Dressed In Dresden (Kyle Hall)<br />Anthony Shakir - Assimilated<br />Kirk Degiorgio - Time Spins<br />Smith N Hack - Falling Stars<br />Aril Brikha - Winter<br /><br /><br /><br /><div><object height="300" width="300"><param name="movie" value="http://www.mixcloud.com/media/swf/player/mixcloudLoader.swf?v=106"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="flashVars" value="feed=http://www.mixcloud.com/api/1/cloudcast/j3000/j3000-nightdrive-mix.json&embed_uuid=8bb1ed3e-bb7d-4273-95cc-f3df3900a0a5&embed_type=widget_standard"><embed src="http://www.mixcloud.com/media/swf/player/mixcloudLoader.swf?v=106" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="feed=http://www.mixcloud.com/api/1/cloudcast/j3000/j3000-nightdrive-mix.json&embed_uuid=8bb1ed3e-bb7d-4273-95cc-f3df3900a0a5&embed_type=widget_standard" height="300" width="300"></embed></object><div style="clear: both; height: 3px;"></div><p style="display: block; font-size: 12px; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0pt; padding: 3px 4px; color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/j3000/j3000-nightdrive-mix/?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=base_links&utm_term=cloudcast_link" style="color: rgb(2, 160, 199); font-weight: bold;">J3000 Nightdrive Mix</a> by <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/j3000/?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=base_links&utm_term=profile_link" style="color: rgb(2, 160, 199); font-weight: bold;">J 3000</a> on <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=base_links&utm_term=homepage_link" style="color: rgb(2, 160, 199); font-weight: bold;"> Mixcloud</a></p><div style="clear: both; height: 3px;"></div></div>Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4556675850846462930.post-87787865514185491092011-01-18T11:11:00.000-08:002011-01-26T06:56:06.837-08:00Top Electronic Albums of 2010.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTlT16Q6xbjr1NgcPLO3wqbRTMfxjMJy2PBmYdm3HmG6AEloKqLevpihdYv3ksdALT4zCvllgnPy3tI1m0Cfp0PlsKXHyauQdARVPsAUtLiuCOT5mFw4o9xBFqWHdq8HL597YbYKlajrE/s1600/0relax.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 279px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTlT16Q6xbjr1NgcPLO3wqbRTMfxjMJy2PBmYdm3HmG6AEloKqLevpihdYv3ksdALT4zCvllgnPy3tI1m0Cfp0PlsKXHyauQdARVPsAUtLiuCOT5mFw4o9xBFqWHdq8HL597YbYKlajrE/s320/0relax.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563608171672345490" /></a><br /><br />Note: I appreciate we're a few weeks into 2011 now and most best of lists have long since been and gone. To hell with convention though eh, here's a belated list for you all to enjoy<br /><br />2010 was as fragmented and schizophrenic a year as ever in the world of electronic / dance music. In what strange world is Actress dubstep or Instra:Mental drum & bass? Artists seemed to be inter-breeding at an unprecedented rate with an irreverent approach to genre-bending. Flying Lotus transcended his Dilla’esque associations and pulverised everyone's brain with a bar-raising genre-less masterpiece. Meanwhile Shed made a techno album that jumped wildly between tempos and beats yet hung together beautifully. Similarly, the masterful Actress created an album that took in a bewildering range of influences yet pulled it all off with aplomb. In each of these cases, the artist took their genre as a frame to hang everything else onto; a starting point or a set of signifiers within the music. This was about building from the past but not in a nostalgic way. The best of these albums were surreal mutations adeptly mixing up old fragments into unlikely shapes.<br /><a name='more'></a> <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />1 Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma</span><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JkA1L6jcv78?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JkA1L6jcv78?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/292561-flying-lotus-cosmogramma#">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />Having wowed fans for the last few years with his warped electronic take on Dilla, in 2010 Flying Lotus didn’t just raise the bar, he attached rockets to it, putting it out of everyone's reach for good. It makes sense that his aunt is Alice Coltrane, its a complex head trip punching its weight far outside the world of beats and dance music. Its equal parts jazz, electronica, hip hop and video game music but don’t be mislead, this isn't just cerebral music. Its music for the body too and FlyLo knows how to make the beat knock and get you feeling things in the gut as well as the head. The whole thing sounds alive and “unstable” like few other albums, putting paid to the myth (if anyone still believes it that is) that music made on computers is staid and lifeless. This guy is so talented it scares me, a genius in the truest sense of the word. To the legions of copyists out there, you've now been lapped. Give up.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">2 Shed – The Traveller</span><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/sI50fktDVmM?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/sI50fktDVmM?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/328403-shed-the-traveller">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />Like Flying Lotus' effort this doesn't stay in one place for long. It rapidly skips through beats and tempos with only three of the fourteen tracks breaking the four minute mark. All of this is quite surprising for what is basically a techno album. To give you an idea of how broad the ideas are on this album, "Atmo-Action" sounds like something off Aphex Twin's Ambient Works 85-92, “The Bot” is a sparse dubstep-infused track with deep Detroit vibes whilst The Traveller is a haunted beatless synthscape degraded through layers of static. This is an artist overflowing with inspiration yet focussed as a laser beam. Its a singular and powerful artistic statement, consistently glacial yet simultaneously warm. Its spacey, dubbed out, playful and epic. This is clearly an artist whose mastered his style and now feels able to play with it freely as many of the best artists eventually do. This is an important album; a milestone in electronic music.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">3 John Roberts – Glass Eights</span><br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yvujuGLI23Y?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yvujuGLI23Y?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/343538-john-roberts-glass-eights">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />Next we have deep house with classical stylings from the highly talented John Roberts. Now before you get any preconceptions, this is a pretty unique work. The whole thing sounds ghostly with crackles, murky atmospherics, acoustic overtones, a slowish tempo and a fragile vibe. This isn't a club album basically. The piano forms the centre of this album, its delicate melodies permeating every song. The subtle moods never hit you over the head but instead, weave their way into your sub-conscious. It’s an album of initially inconspicuous yet eventually deep charm, fiercely focussed and understated yet powerfully affecting. As they say, still waters run deep.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">4 Actress – Splazsh</span><br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/WcnRT-m9MYo?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/WcnRT-m9MYo?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/300456-actress-splazsh">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />Of this album Pitchfork <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14375-splazsh/">said</a> “One of the upshots of dance music's active compartmentalization-- into genres and subgenres and niches aligned with certain kinds of basslines or BPM-- is the exalted space it affords work that jams the system. If an album proves unique, we celebrate it. And then that album makes us think all the more scrupulously about the system it happened to jam”. Splazsh takes dubstep as its jumping off point and then proceeds to throw in a wide array of sounds and influences. He jams the system with decaying ambient washes, house beats, samples with the digital lo bitrate fizz of Youtube, an opening track that lasts 8 minutes. There’s a track called” Maze” that sounds like its off Carl Craig's seminal Landcrusing, “Purple Splazsch” with its weirdly jarring yet catchy guitar sample and 80s rock snares, there's the weird metallic repetition and ghostly vocoders of “The Kettle Men” for example. This album is nuts, it goes from funky to bewildered and melancholy, from deep house to soundscapes. I don’t know how it all hangs together but it does. You can hear Actress is deeply conversant with dubstep but also with dance music history. He’s also clearly aware of electronica / IDM history, the lo fi sampling values and glitch aesthetics resembling the Mille Plateaux or Micro House artists of ten or so years ago. Don’t be fooled, he’s not invented the wheel with this aesthetic (as some reviewers seem to be claiming), it all has a history. What’s he’s done however is fuse this eccentric sensibility with a set of modern dance signifiers in a way that few achieve. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">5 ASC – Nothing Is Certain</span><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PBOu3ZZDtkQ?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PBOu3ZZDtkQ?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/311066-asc-nothing-is-certain">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />Drum & Bass. Those two words normally fill me with trepidation and, whilst I confess that I’m pretty ignorant about the scene, it feels like nothing relevant happened for a very long time in the 00's. Techno, minimal, tech house, electro house, dubstep; all of these seemed to be far more vital. All of a sudden however a small group of producers, namely Instra:Mental and dBridge, started putting out records that blew the d&b world apart and created what <a href="http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=7977">Resident Adviser called</a> “the most significant mutation in the Continuum since dubstep, or even—insofar as said (sub-)genre successfully assimilates the best bits of dubstep—before”. This stuff really is a mutation with most d&b clichés banished into exile. ASC's drums are pristine and electronic and not once is there anything even resembling an Amen break. There are rhythmical references to d&b drum programming along with sonic signifiers tying it to the genre but these are mixed in with a dazzling array of influences. I'd guess that 90s ambient and electronica along the lines of Future Sound Of London had an influence here and dubstep is clearly in evidence too (where isn't it at the moment?). Minimal techno probably had an influence as well; the spacious, meticulous sound design and synthetic timbres evocative of Hawtin et al. It’s a beautiful piece, full of rhythmical innovation, sublime melodies and strange moods. It’s another album made by an accomplished producer who's cast his eye over the past and bravely stuck it back together with unexpected and often sublime results.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">6 Rick Wilhite presents Vibes New & Rare Music</span><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/S1KtQO4PZvs?fs=1&hl=en_GB"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/S1KtQO4PZvs?fs=1&hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://boomkat.com/downloads/342889-kyle-hall-the-godson-urban-tribe-various-rick-wilhite-presents-vibes-new-rare-music">BUY HERE</a><br /><br />This final entry doesn't really need a lot of explanation. It’s a compilation of new and exclusive Detroit Techno & Chicago House from Rich Wilhite's friends and peers. It features giants like Theo Parrish, Moodyman, Urban Tribe, the up & coming genius Kyle Hall along with some lesser known talent. If you are even remotely interested in this stuff you probably already own this but if not, go and get it now. Compilation of the year.<div style='clear: both; text-align: center; font-size: xx-small;'>Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5</div>Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4556675850846462930.post-31135827113936071032011-01-05T16:11:00.000-08:002011-01-26T06:56:42.367-08:00Music & The Internet Part 2. Running Out Of The Past?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjneXvzVrIy2C4v0TM1iI86aXnPAV0zhjovm7-FdByWMh9-4tyC-HlIhrNIKIxIbKS_F67BuiNWTOfRDm0JivDkqy1tNKD95Wikk7_DkWVZA3BvzZurw2BRM40tGxW_6M2sz-qBuxdKY5w/s1600/200801future.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjneXvzVrIy2C4v0TM1iI86aXnPAV0zhjovm7-FdByWMh9-4tyC-HlIhrNIKIxIbKS_F67BuiNWTOfRDm0JivDkqy1tNKD95Wikk7_DkWVZA3BvzZurw2BRM40tGxW_6M2sz-qBuxdKY5w/s320/200801future.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5558860441161562530" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Looking back at the broad sweep of twentieth century music, its hard not to notice how fresh and powerful it often was. Think about the dissonance and strange rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the jazz prodigies who rewrote the rule book, the artistic and cultural impact of the bands of the 1960s. Think about Brian Eno's ambient experiments, Public Enemy's use of samplers, post-punk, Kraftwerk's machine music, Juan Atkin's dystopian hymns to Detroit, Aphex Twin’s other-worldly electronics, the glitch aesthetics of Autechre, Oval and the Mille Plateaux label, the dub techno minimalism of Basic Channel, the rise of the DJ and club culture through disco, house, rave and techno. The twentieth century is full of examples of music that had a powerful artistic and cultural impact that went way beyond the surface level. It seemed reasonable to assume therefore that, catalysed by the digital technologies of the early twenty-first century, the trend wouldn't just continue but actually speed up. <a href="http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetcurrency.html">Jaron Lanier</a> was surprised at the lack of musical progress in the noughties; “I entered the internet era with extremely high expectations. I eagerly anticipated a chance to experience shock and intensity and new sensations, to be thrust into lush aesthetic wildernesses, and to wake up every morning to a world richer in every detail because my mind had been energised by unforeseeable art” . It came as a surprise to Lanier however, that, at the tail of end of the noughties, this hadn't come to pass. For a while he put this down to a temporary lull, the calm before the storm, but after a while it felt more like a slump. Lanier’s growing suspicion was that the internet, far from facilitating musical evolution, was leading to an unprecedented picking over of pre-internet culture. In his view, “the reinvention of life through music was in retreat”. Culture was now “fixated on the world as it was before the web was born”.<br /><a name='more'></a> <br />I’d like to clarify that I don't buy into Lanier's argument wholeheartedly, he's more pessimistic than me. My feelings are ambivalent, I have a sense of disquiet that nothing is really “new” in the way it used to be but I also recognise that the noughties were an enjoyable and inventive time for music. Part of me is ok, for example, with the fact that some of of my favorite albums from the last few years were about reworking the past. Similarly, as a music producer, I’ve derived a lot personally (as part of the mashup scene) and professionally (helping to design the soundtrack to DJ Hero) from taking fragments of other people's music and re-working them. I can see the positive impact that mashup culture had and, whilst I’d be the first to recognize that we have long past the point of complete overkill, this stuff had more than mere entertainment value back in the day. It felt genuinely shocking to hear things like Madonna singing over the Sex Pistols as if she was alongside them. It felt weird and full of potential. Mashups were also indicative of what was happening to the wider musical landscape. At pop's peripheries, retro and novelty pastiche were the order of the day and whilst this had clear precedents (the retro/collage-mentality was in evidence in the 1990s), this new wave felt more open-minded, more radical and more pervasive. The problem lay in the fact that, as the decade wore on, this trend went too far and the novelty wore off. These murmurings at the edges of popular culture pre-saged the flood that followed and all of a sudden it felt like everything was either retro or a mashup of the past. As Maddy Costa <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/apr/20/popandrock">puts it</a>, “pop's history, not its future [became] the driving force”. Adrian Covert of MOG also <a href="http://mog.com/MOG_Features/blog/1811075">puts it well</a> “the specific brand of revivalism I speak of is not just about the sound. It is one that is all-encompassing, one where the sound, the image, and the appeal of a group directly romanticize a bygone era”.<br /><br />To help illustrate this, here is a list of relatively recent artists. At best the artists artfully mix up old influences to produce something interesting and at worst, they offer a virtual facsimile of an old sound with a few modern flourishes. In all cases however, there is a reverence for the past, a strong sense of “something” that went before it and to which homage is being paid both in the sound and the image.<br /><br /><br />Franz Ferdinand & The Futureheads – Homages to post-punk<br /><br />The View & The Fratellis – Influenced by the Libertines a band who themselves were nostalgic for the 1970s.<br /><br />Fleet Foxes – Crosby Stills & Nash-style Americana.<br /><br />Mumford & Sons - Folk / folk rock.<br /><br />Cee Lo, Amy Winehouse, Mayor Hawthorne, VV Brown, Plan B, Duffy – Motown etc<br /><br />White Stripes – Garage-rock, blues.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">As for more electronic music....</span><br /><br /><br />La Roux, Little Boots – 80s synth bands.<br /><br />Lady Gaga – Various 70s and 80s pop references.<br /><br />LCD Soundsystem, !!!, - Disco, post-disco, post-punk.<br /><br />Lindstrom, Black Devil Disco Club, Aeroplane, - Disco (Italo, Space, Balearic)<br /><br />Chromeo – Synth funk.<br /><br />Neon Neon – 80s electro<br /><br />Azari & III – Late 80s / early 90s Chicago house,<br /><br />Interestingly, Paul Morley, a man who helped make an art form from plundering the past (with "The Art of Noise"), <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/29/paul-morley-nostalgia-heaven-17">came up with a term</a> to sum up our present condition. “We now live in The Aftermath, where all pop music is either actually from the past, freed from its imprisoned context by the internet, where everything recorded can happen at once, or is a mutant, intoxicating transformation of the past, randomly, attentively mixing up genres, eras, instruments, styles, beats, fashions. The Aftermath is where the past gets gossiped about; it's a series of colliding echoes about the past; it's a gathering of rumors about what happened to pop music up to and including and beyond the vinyl era”. Is the pot calling the kettle black here, doesn't this definition apply to The Art Of Noise too? My answer would be no. The Art of Noise were more like a sound art project with pop sensibilities; they were post-punk in attitude i.e. non-reverential. Bands of The Aftermath reference and sample the past because they are in love with it, because they're awed by it, because they're weighed down by it. They want to be part of a tradition, to create a simulacra of another era or to transplant it into the present and stick it onto something else. This is so ubiquitous that people don't really notice it any more, everything is very blurry. For example, in what other era could Amy Winehouse be presented as anything other than heavily retro in sound and image? I understand that lyrically she's modern, she's not doing cover versions, but the past weighs very heavily indeed on everything she does and the whole thing feels very..... nostalgic. The fact that this could be sold as fresh shows how mangled notions of retro and nostalgia have become. Also, you have to ask the question, “why”? Why reference the past like this? Amy Winehouse is not really an example of post-modernism as The Art of Noise were for example. It's not about witty parody, the retro aspects are a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody#Modernist_and_post-modernist_parody">“blank parody”</a>, imitation for the sake of it and referential without particular meaning, humour or subversion. Basically it's fun and it sounds good. The retro part also has an inherent cool factor so it provides the music with an immediate hook. More cynically this provides the music with an easy selling point, why take risks when you can plunder a well-loved sound, especially in today's grim music industry climate?<br /><br />The knowledge we have about pop history has to be one of the root causes of this over-referencing. More than ever, pop music is canonised and positioned in pop history. Music books are more plentiful than ever, music commentary is rife in print media and every shade of musical categorization and critique is available online. Again, this is partly a good thing, a culture as diffuse and vast as music needs critics and bloggers to make something out of the chaos and to give shape to the culture. Is it possible however, that one of the effects of this glut of musical knowledge is to weigh people down and make them cowardly or overly reverential? Paul Morley <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/apr/20/popandrock">thinks so</a>, he says, "groups have a sense of something happening in the 50s, in the 60s, in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and they tend to get overwhelmed.” Most of all however, we are overwhelmed by the quantity of music itself, by the vast scale of our immersion in the entirety of recorded music. Music went from being a scarce resource, often hard to track down, to an infinite resource where any whim could be indulged in an instant. How else did Italo Disco become such a big deal in the noughties, a previously obscure genre that (apparently anyway, I'm too young to remember) never really had much of a following the first time around? Put simply, it'd be very hard for more than a small group of collectors to build an interest in something like this before the internet. It might have been exotic to express in interest in Italo Disco ten or fifteen years ago but now such pronouncements are commonplace. The expense and time-commitment involved in digging for records before the internet made it a full time occupation. Now you can indulge yourself with ease with the result that, serious music fans at least, have a new universe of old music to explore.<br /><br />It was fun for a while gazing back at the past and putting new spins on old styles. The problem is that, taken too far this can become a dead end and we risk building mere echoes of the past, interesting echoes sometimes, but echoes nevertheless. The most interesting of these echoes aren't retro in any conventional sense. A lot of this more interesting music is often a clever hybrid of styles, a weird Frankenstein-like fusion of unlikely bedfellows or a self-consciously surreal re-imagining of another era. Looking at the end of year lists from 2010 for example, those artists that weren't overtly referencing another era or retreading a well-worn path often fell into this category (off the top of my head Ariel Pink, Games, Emeralds and Forest Swords). Again, The Aftermath applies; music that isn't directly derivative, a slightly evolved retread or mashed up is probably a mutated transformation of the past. Perhaps one of the few semi-exceptions of the last 10 years is Dubstep (i'm thinking Hyperdub et al, not the naff kid's stuff) Its mixing up of genres, its rapid mutations, the largely internet-based grassroots, the moodiness, the (sometimes) dread and detachment is very twenty-first century. It echoes the way the internet has fragmented music and its mood seems well-suited to our times. Its part of a continuum but the way it sounds, the way it evolved and its restless mutations are relevant and respresentative of the times. Dubstep aside however, there are few examples of large and uniquely "21st century" genres. We're either left with nostalgia, retro or fragmented micro-genres.<br /><br />Despite the mixed effects that the internet has had on popular culture it feels like these effects are still where the next revolution will emanate from. I think that this freeing of music from all notions of era and genre is going to yield the "next thing". How can such a crazy, rampantly cross-breeding gene pool, not throw up exotic mutations that sound like nothing we've heard before? It would be nice to think that we could still be as shocked as people were when they rioted over Stravinsky's premiere of Rite of Spring or as awe-inspired as when they danced to Acid House for the first time or heard a Miles Davis album. It would be disappointing if, in ten years time, there isn't a genre of music, or at the very least a good few artists out there that're making music which couldn't conceivably be made today. I'll still be happy if I carry on hearing interesting, inventive music largely retreading the same sounds, scales, beats albeit in mutant form but i'll be even happier if I hear something revolutionary.<div style='clear: both; text-align: center; font-size: xx-small;'>Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5</div>Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4556675850846462930.post-37046138666793435212010-12-02T15:13:00.000-08:002011-01-26T06:56:57.252-08:00Music & The Internet Part 1. More is Less?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMFW3Hmh5ZNlpAbXLuzgZHrrJD3KUz_pGEi3clgENyhDV6ggbr8FBK6ijiYx_CRSHQaxjziUBGEqEqlt14zJVcPt8C6xTUl9p752JoMmQ0U6Avp7IfPOU34T07E90OusvXHW49Hh-ScRI/s1600/Nick-White-Jazz-53974.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 255px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMFW3Hmh5ZNlpAbXLuzgZHrrJD3KUz_pGEi3clgENyhDV6ggbr8FBK6ijiYx_CRSHQaxjziUBGEqEqlt14zJVcPt8C6xTUl9p752JoMmQ0U6Avp7IfPOU34T07E90OusvXHW49Hh-ScRI/s320/Nick-White-Jazz-53974.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546231292913221762" border="0" /></a><br /><br />There are two fundamental ways in which the internet has changed music. The first is that, by being freed from the limitations of physicality and old media, the vast majority of all recorded music is available to everyone instantly. The second is that the explosion of choice has created fragmentation; the decreasing relevance of the album, the splintering of music into sub-genres and the rise of the narrow cast, personalized, niche musical experience. The platitudes of the web-evangelists tell us this is overwhelmingly a good thing; the more choice people have and the freer they are to chose, the more everyone benefits. People will become more cultured and the culture will in turn become more sophisticated thus evolving more rapidly. Its a virtuous cycle, an exponential cycle of progress. Of course, nobody would argue that in order to have a healthy music culture (or any culture for that matter), diversity and freedom of choice is important. However, what happens when choice starts to feel limitless?<br /><a name='more'></a> <br />Simon Reynolds wrote a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/dec/07/musically-fragmented-decade">piece </a>in late 2009 stating that one of the defining characteristics of music in the noughties was its fragmentation. He points to an odd feature of the <a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7710-the-top-200-albums-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/">Pitchfork top ten albums of the 2000's list</a>. Seven of the albums where from 2000 and 2001, one was from 2002 and another from 2004. The only album from after the mid-decade point was Panda Bear's Person Pitch. One conclusion you could draw from this was that music deteriorated as the noughties wore on. The second, more likely argument, is that it grew harder and harder for people to reach consensus. The reason this came about he argues, is that music became so ubiquitous, with everything past and present available like never before. Not only that, but the present started to yield so much more new music because of the wealth of inspiration that artists could draw from and, more importantly, because of the relative cheapness with which it could be made and distributed. Because of this he argues, a surfeit of quality also emerged so it became a problem of quantity <span style="font-style: italic;">compounded </span>by quality. The result of both this overproduction and access to old music was “that “we” were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound”. Reynolds concludes “if even a relatively non-diffuse community like Pitchfork could only find its centre around records that came out in the early years of the noughties, it suggests that the culture-wide slide into entropy is speeding up”.<br /><br />The point Reynolds makes is that musical importance is seldom a purely intrinsic aspect of the music itself. Importance is a two way street; its impact and reception being determined by the audience. This idea is expressed in Pitchfork's end-of-decade piece on Arcade Fire's 2004 album Funeral, their No 2 album of the noughties. Ian Cohen writes: "Whether it's due to increasingly fractious listening habits or the increased ability for dissenters to be heard, Funeral keeps on feeling like the last of its kind, an indie record that sounded capable of conquering the universe and then going on to do just that”. Of the unifying force that Cohen finds in Arcade Fire's Funeral, Reynolds says “it is not inherent, completely, to the record; it must pre-exist it to some extent, seek and find itself in the mirror of the music”. The problem was that, with increasingly idiosyncratic tastes, atomised listening habits and the ever-increasing, and often divisive, influence of the music blogosphere, consensus was becoming rarer. Cohen feels that an album threatening to reach that level now would probably be met with severe scrutiny or disdain. In a related point he says that part of the reason the Beatles rose to greatness is that is they knew the world was waiting; it made them rise to the occasion. The current situation is not conducive to this however. “The bigger the spread, the more "we" are spread. And the less impact any given record can have. Worse, as artists internalise reduced expectations, the cycle of diminution spirals ever inward.” Reynolds is quite upbeat about music in the noughties, overall he feels it was a decade of plentiful quality music. His ambivalence about the impact on the bigger picture and the future direction of music however is clear.<br /><br />A counterpoint to Reynold's take is Kyle Bylin’s <a href="http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/paradox-or-paradise-music-choice-in-the-digital-age.html">argument</a> that this enourmous access to music may be leading to conservativeness on the part of mainstream consumers. Referring to Barry Schwartz writer of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less">“The Paradox of Choice”</a>, Bylin says that when overloaded with cultural alternatives, fans will often opt for the same old thing to avoid facing unlimited options. This seems to contradict Reynolds but, a person who follows a serious music critic, is not the average music fan. The Pitchfork reader and dedicated blog trawler will have a fairly serious interest in music with enough references points to be able to navigate the labyrinth. They will have the desire to explore deeply and the will to dedicate the time required to dig for music. I count myself in this category and its true that, for someone whose life revolves around music and knows what to look for, the internet offers endless possibilities for exploration. As Kyle Bylin argues, virtually limitless choice works when you know what you want but, for the average consumer this is practically impossible. When faced with everything all at once are you going to dig deep or are you going to freeze and retreat into the unknown? The truth is that most fans are passive and interested in new music only if its propped up by things like commercial radio (which is still a suprisingly big force) or the clubs they go to. Now, if fans were relying on these kinds of commercial filters pre-internet then, how likely are they to start going off piste in an age of limitless and fragmenting choice? A counter-argument to this might run something along the lines of “this is what what crowd-based algorithms and recommendation filters like Last FM, Pandora, Amazon Recommends or iTunes Genius are there for, they are the new mediators”. The problem, as Bylin points out however, is that the results are entirely dependent on the quality of the filter, the type of the filter and what you feed in. Rather than helping you explore music it might lead you deeper into your own narrow tastes. Furthermore, you risk becoming even less of a “chooser” than you were in the old world of record shops and commercial radio and more of a picker, taking things off a conveyor belt shaped by an algorithm which may just be confirming your narrow tastes.<br /><br />Think about the music you hear in the charts, see in the iTunes top ten or come across on TV shows. Is there anything interesting or progressive happening or is commercial music more conservative than ever? From the profoundly ordinary Lady Gaga, to the soulless muzak of X Factor and the slew of highly derivative retro acts it all looks pretty uninspiring. The mainstream has always had plenty of rubbish in it but this feels different now, the ratio of good to bad is rapidly shifting towards the latter. Clearly there are many reasons for this apart from the one i'm putting forward but the point is this; if the platitudes are right and the internet, as it exists at the moment, is such a cultural catalyst, then what's going on? Of course, assuming that all the good stuff is going on in the underground then maybe things are ok and its just commercial music that has gone up a blind alley. Reynolds thinks the kind of music you find on Pitchfork isn't suffering and whilst truly great music might be undermined to an extent, at least this point means its not all bad news. I agree with him, I think its an amazing time to be a music fan on one level, I'm constantly finding new music I like and clearly the ability to be exposed to so much stuff means that artists can access the past and appopropriate like never before. The apparent decline in era-defining music bothers me but there's something that's nagging away far more. Speaking from my own subjective impressions, little new music I’ve heard in recent years sounds fundamentally different to what has gone before. I wish I wasn't saying this and its tempting to think this is because I’m simply jaded or over-indulged by the hyper choice of the internet. However, the fact that several other people agree with this makes me think I might be onto something.<br /><br />In a recent <a href="http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/dc9/2010/11/qa_dj_shadow_talks_hip-hops_pa.php">interview</a> DJ Shadow states his view that, in the last decade, the evolution of popular music has stagnated. He argues that, if you take a record from 1970 and 1980 (for example), you'll often hear that they were made in different decades. However, compare a record from 2010 with a record from 2000 and it often sounds like it could be made today. Internet visionary and accomplished musician Jaron Lanier express the same idea in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/1846143411">"You Are Not A Gadget</a>". He says that, in every decade of the twentieth century you could point to music that could not conceivably have been composed a decade before. He says “a decade gets you from Robert Johnson's primordial blues recordings to Charlie Parker's modernist jazz recoding. A decade gets you from the reign of big bands to the reign of rock and roll. Approximately a decade separated the last Beatles record from the first big-time hip-hop records”. During the first century of recorded music there isn't a decade that didn't involve extreme stylistic evolution that went way beyond surface details. Every decade, music seemed to be mutating and rewiring its aesthetic boundaries, what it could mean and how it could fit into people's lives. A common counter to this might be to point to dance music, a future-orientated area of music obsessed with new sounds, new beats, new combinations of sounds. Its true that, if you understand the elaborate nomenclature of dance music you can often place a track in an era. However, as Lanier points out, this is a “nerd exercise” and lost on most people. Its different often on the basis of technicalities not because of large aesthetic or theoretical shifts. How much that is supposedly new and revolutionary, even in the supposedly hyper-modern world of dance music is more than a clever re-assembling of the past or tinkering with sounds so subtle that the non-aficionado won't even notice.<br /><br />Shadow suspects that at least part of the problem is once again, the hyper-choice of the internet and the new ways we consume music. His argument is that the limitless free for all of the internet means that its harder than ever to make an impact unless you're about “flash and image”. Even if you follow the contemporary wisdom of giving most of your music away for free and spamming people to death on Twitter, Shadow reckons it’s more likely than ever that no one’s going to care or notice. He says it's like operating in a void with the result that true artists are likely to become despondent. Innovation is likely to be drowned out by all the other noise so the artist has less imperative to innovate and focuses instead on playing it safe and grabbing people’s attention. Lanier’s take is different, like Shadow he feels that music hasn’t moved forward much in the last decade but he doesn’t put it down to artist despondency. Instead he feels it’s part of a deeper cultural obsession with re-appropriating the past. As he puts it “this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles” . His take is that, not only is popular music progressing more slowly than it has done for a century but that, this is due to a pervasive culture of nostalgia and re-appropriation. Rather than being liberated by the new technologies, so far the abundance of culture at our fingertips has turned us into scavengers picking over the past as never before...<br /><br />Continued in Music & the Internet part 2. “Running Out Of The Past”Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4556675850846462930.post-44501024355652381812010-11-10T16:09:00.000-08:002011-01-26T06:57:08.906-08:00Popular Music and Political Dissent<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghTaADvB5qb-FtrY5oT9LfayJwZkkD3tsFzcEaSnqShEeEm8vgcMkGswJpHWKSZgtlelN4RvYCEJAgKb4tGbrMZwpssSZrmwzI6QJG3vTRDb25Psjezp1U3mkRUjh4RUv8DhyphenhyphenFeMA0nVg/s1600/baez_dylan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 230px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghTaADvB5qb-FtrY5oT9LfayJwZkkD3tsFzcEaSnqShEeEm8vgcMkGswJpHWKSZgtlelN4RvYCEJAgKb4tGbrMZwpssSZrmwzI6QJG3vTRDb25Psjezp1U3mkRUjh4RUv8DhyphenhyphenFeMA0nVg/s320/baez_dylan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5538084105663425570" border="0" /></a><br /><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">John Harris' recently wrote an interesting piece in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/04/someone-pick-up-guitar-howl">The Guardian</a> about the lack of political dissent in popular music. He says that, given our political and economic situation it would be very surprising if popular music didn't provide a response. However, the thrust of the article is that, political dissent has been so lacklustre for so long it seems unlikely that it will suddenly come to life now. Sadly, I think he's broadly correct here, as far as the decline of dissent in popular music goes, the times are not so much '<i>a-changing</i>' as '<i>a-changed <a name='more'></a> </i>'. </span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This trend has many reasons but a key one is undoubtedly that the idea of “counter-culture” as defined by the sixties generation is all but dead now. As Harris points out, “</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>the spirit of protest in pop music is often seen as the preserve of an earlier generation, something we should venerate but not actually reinvent</i>”. To illustrate this point, Harris refers to one of the most talked-about albums in the States at the moment, "Wake Up", by singer John Legend and hip hop group, The Roots. Its reworking of classic "consciousness-raising" songs coming across less as a comment on the times and more, “sepia tinted radical-chic".</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Taken at face value, it does seem surprising that nobody is busily re-inventing the spirit of the 60s and the 70s. There are after all, just as many black clouds now as there were then, they had Vietnam and the Cold War, we have two deeply unpopular wars, a financial crash and a deepening environmental crisis. Hard times in the UK after all, helped to spawn punk and the New Romantic movement and the last big recession in the UK was a significant factor in the growth of Rave so it seems reasonable to ask why aren't there analogous movements now. Some people might say that young people these days are simply too apathetic and narcissistic, interested more in escapism and self-indulgence. This however is the same thing older generations have said about the younger generation since time immemorial. Its the same tired cliché and it tells us simply that older people are sometimes bitter and jealous of the young.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The problem is less one of apathy and more one of radical disenchantment and a mood of stoical “realism”. Since the heady days of the hippy generation a lot has changed; Thatcherism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the discrediting of traditional leftist positions and New Labour being four particularly significant (and intimately connected) changes. Since the early 1990s the doctrine of “no alternative” has taken root and <i>Capitalist realism</i> (to use a term coined by Mark Fisher is his <a href="http://www.o-books.com/obookssite/book/detail/358">book</a> of the same name) is the prevailing ideology. People might not be very happy with this ideology but there is a fatalistic acceptance that what is happening politically and economically is part of history's inevitable destiny. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">For evidence of this in popular music, the rise of hip hop to global dominance speaks volumes. One of the big success stories of the 1990s was Gangta rap, a type of music that often reflected a deep disaffection with the wider world and a nihilistic portrayal of it as a Hobbesian war of all against all. As Simon Reynolds wrote in a 1996 essay in <a href="http://www.thewire.co.uk/">The Wire</a> magazine , rather than offering hope that things could change it sold us a version of "realness" which meant a world stripped of sentimental illusions, a brutal Darwinian struggle. Its implicit message was about confronting a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're either a winner or a loser (and probably a loser) In other words it perfectly reflected the “no alternative” doctrine and was thus the perfect soundtrack for the era. It was disenchanted yet radically pro-status quo whether it realised it or not. What's interesting about its popularity is that, despite it being borne out of the historically (very) specific experience of poor African Americans, people of all cultures, races and classes were fans. How did this happen, how did they relate and what were they getting from it? Sure the music was often amazing and you don't need to buy into an artist's world view to appreciate them but could it also be that it captured the Zeitgeist? Perhaps the success of Gangsta rap reflected the phenomena of disenchantment, combined with, acceptance of the status-quo that now seems to be all-pervasive. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Another issue for the more anti-establishment tendencies in popular music is that perhaps its also too middle aged and omnipresent to offer much in the way of radicalism. As Harris says in his article “<i>perhaps a good deal of the story lies in pop's own passage into middle-age and the fact that its various incarnations now span not just most of the planet but almost the entire generational range. Ubiquity may have robbed it of its old counter-cultural charge; as it turned out, perhaps what some romantics call the People's Music is better suited to selling mobile phones than soundtracking revolt</i>”. If music is everywhere and used to sell seemingly everything, is it still a valid vehicle for dissent? If you have seditious thoughts are you really going to use pop music as your platform in a world where Iggy Pop sells car insurance and Jonny Rotten sells butter. If your “alternativeness” will just be co-opted and sold back to you by the very system you're questioning perhaps its better to try something else. Given this, perhaps the politically-committed simple jumped off the pop music bandwagon and did something else. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Despite all of this, it would be nice to see popular music recovering at least some of its Promethean ambitions and perhaps the current situation in the UK is just that opportunity. Perhaps the doctrine of “no alternative” won but what's happening in the UK now is something else. To a lot of people, there is nothing “inevitable” about what's happening, it looks to many like a blatant and opportunist ransacking of the system for the benefit of the few. I doubt we will see a new “punk”, but I hope we'll see some sort of response .<br /></span></p>Julian Fennerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08153092099787188327noreply@blogger.com0