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Well crap, my last 2 posts in M-Discussion where deleted
Which is odd as neither where even remotely offensive, guess the mods don't like me much!

Yeah, your post and Ishkur's disappeared from here. Both were good, too.

Sucks.

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Originally posted by Lilith Which is odd as neither where even remotely offensive, guess the mods don't like me much!

there was a db rollback when the board went down earlier. loads of today's posts vanished :/

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Originally posted by Lilith Well crap, my last 2 posts in M-Discussion where deleted Which is odd as neither where even remotely offensive, guess the mods don't like me much!

lol.

the big bro is after you and your cats!

what the fuck

both of you had great contributions to this topic


travesty :/

It just seems to ooze so much pseudo-academic pretension that I can't even bring myself to read it.

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Originally posted by basilisk As much as it may seem like we've run into technological barriers in terms of sound design, when was the last time you heard a really stellar live act in 5.1? If you would like proof that futurism is alive and well, simply turn to Montreal's own Nuclear Ramjet; an incredibly futuristic act if there ever were one.

I always thought Nuclear Ramjet was the single coolest name ever.

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Originally posted by DJ Shibby It just seems to ooze so much pseudo-academic pretension that I can't even bring myself to read it.

just read it


you know you like the ooze

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Originally posted by isoterra there was a db rollback when the board went down earlier. loads of today's posts vanished :/

We got Swamper haxed

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Originally posted by EvilTree the big bro is after you and your cats!

I don't think big bro would want my geriatric cat.


Where was I going with this?
I'll abbreviate rather than type it all out again.

Computers, software and society which I've drawn a rough parallel between their development and that of the music industry, electronic music scene and cultural foundations.

1980's, electronic music is fairly much being made in back rooms by people who require a lot of time and effort to sink into any kind of production, it's not overly complicated but it's foundations even as a progressive art form are well steeped in music from the past. Often the people who are coming to terms with the equipment are from a musical, more than a technical background and it does take quite a bit of talent to master them both in terms of productions.
Where, if it does get played, is in small niche communities which are a major deviation to any of the mainstream sources such as radio, television and in common record stores.
What small amount of exposure it got to the mainstream was at very best a token interest and tiny bit of airtime, anything you wanted that was a little more exotic than top 40, you had to mail away for, order in and hope it didn't get trampled in the post.
Or, you attended some kind of cultural get together, such as a night club or a rave to hear such music.

At much the same time a very naive 9 year old out in the backwater western UK, got lumped with a new-ish computer, which was an IBM 'portable' machine. About the size of a suitcase, it weighed probably more than I did, it ran DOS, had a tiny 9' screen which was an ugly shade of amber.
It also came with a manual about the size of a bible.
According to my software engineer step father and hippy mother, it was the future and I should learn to use this machine if I was to better my employment prospects after school more years than I could imagine at the time, somewhere in the far future. For my grandmother who I lived with at the time thought it was an irritating, infernal machine that had a noisy dot matrix printer and it may as well have fallen off the side of Mars as far as she was concerned.
Getting anything out of it, homework or otherwise, was an extremely cumbersome and complicated process, it did have a flight simulator game though (lol, wireframes! )

Within the space of two generations, much had changed and most felt alienated by technology, be it computers or music or simply the cultural impact of something they couldn't get their head around. After punk died in the early 80's, electronic music became the new 'shock' to the cultural system, like punk it had it's own identity which the mainstream didn't understand and it's own following which was a very niche crowd indeed.

Development from there led to the sounds which are readily identified as a genre, Detroit techno, acid house, Goa, trance, Euro-EBM, Gabba, Italian Disco, Industrial and most which as music lovers even in the contemporary scene, will have heard of. Know where it came from and know that the people who listened to it back then where readily identified by that association.
By region
Dress
Habits
Lifestyle preferences
All those where quite easy to identify with as much as someone running around in the 70's wearing punk clothes with a mohawk. For me in the mid 90's as a somewhat confused and weird little teenager I hung out with the EBM/Industrial/Gothic crowd and with the 4ft long synthetic dreads, leather, velvet and lace, you could quite easily get an idea of what I was into as far as music.
It was much the same with people who used computers, the Mac, IBM, Amiga crowds never really mingled much together, while they where not exactly adopting any kind of readily identifiable dress code or anything. They never really talked much because there was no medium they could share.
Mediums like a musical preference also didn't mix, you turned up at a industrial club in Adidas, they wouldn't let you in, correspondingly you didn't do the same with hip-hop or house clubs, (probably because they'd eat you.. haha!)

In the late 90's, 00's, those barriers are all gone.
Which has a lot of pro's, the music is available with such convenience and ease it's virtually (in the literal sense) everywhere you can get an internet connection.
It doesn't care what brand of computer or the OS you use either.
You don't have to go to clubs, raves, pirate radio, niche record stores and so on to hear it, they still exist but such things are being a marginalised outlet as far as the medium goes.
You don't have to if you're producing this music, be anywhere near a label to be heard either, the medium is completely electronic and the diversity of music is also increasing from these individuals.
The listener, not the record label, determines what they want to hear and from whom.

The con's however are somewhat more subjective.
The culture shock is coming back in where people like journalists and record companies have woken up one day to find their demographic has changed in under the space of 10 years.
For most, they're struggling to both sell to a demographic which neither wants or needs them and for the journalist who increasingly finds their subject matter being a nebulous, fast moving creature which doesn't exactly stick to any conventional genre.
The music itself, is finding it hard also to stick into a defined genre, rather than creating a genre like the acid house, Goa, Detroit techno or any of those things, it doesn't necessarily have an association like it's predecessors did. As a result, there's a lot of the bandying about of words like 'progressive' which get tacked onto anything which is cross-genre.

Are these bad things?
Not really, in a sense individuals, rather than anyone else are at a point in history where they can make that personal choice of music based only on what they like. It need not be a peer, company or media group which is exposing it.
I think a lot of the traditional mediums of music will find themselves more and more marginalised in the coming 10 years as their demographic is gone and internet connections, speeds allow people to access music as easily as flicking on the radio or TV.
Ultimately, they're going to fight, they will lose though, much like the journalists who write are going to find it extremely hard to give certain types of music an association. It doesn't mean the music is bad either if it adopts that 'prog' title, it just means it doesn't have a ready identification to it to label and I think it will become and increasingly murky form of genre... once people run out of times they can actually tack-on the term

Isolation in a sense that the connection of listener/producer not having much of an association though, remains to be seen. Over several periods of history people produced music without a direct involvement with how it was played, Beethoven certainly wasn't always a conductor at orchestras and neither was he playing he piano there.
After he was gone, if someone decided to swap in some woodwinds instead of strings, people didn't call it progressive classical, if someone now throws in synthesisers and bashes a gong instead of kettle drum, it's still just going to be classical at the end of the day.
Electronic music I think has enough of an identity to perhaps distance itself from regional, genre labelling as it has been around for some time now, much as classical is readily identified as being distinct sound, regardless of whether it was made in the 15th or 19th century.

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Originally posted by Project-K You and I are among the first generations to really grow up with technology being an important and essential part of our lives,

Every generation says that. I'm sure they started saying similiar things back when the phone was invented... Oh no, technology is taking over our lives, ppl won't be able to communicate properly all of the sudden because our lives are revolving around the phone network.

Debates still exist all the time in developing natiosn about whether adopted technology is ruining an ancient set of skills and processes that were inherently ingrained deep within a culture and lifestyle of the nation under discussion.

IN the end, there's no point at which anyone can define "machine's as taking over our live". It's all just relative. If you think hard, you can see that already the west is completely reliant on computers. Any collapse of one of the banks computer networks, or even the collapse of an imnportant sattelite network could spell global disaster.

All technology really is in terms of humanity, is a shift in needed skills and labour. Due to any efficiencies presented via utilising technology, instead of having ppl to do what the technology did, we simply need ppl to understand, run, and co-ordinate the technology.

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Originally posted by DJ Shibby It just seems to ooze so much pseudo-academic pretension that I can't even bring myself to read it.

It's actually not very academic or pretentious at all. It does like to name-drop however, but it's pretty clear-written.

good thing I posted this to my own forum:

What I got out of the article more than anything was that how little has actually changed in terms of electronic music development and progression in the last ten years.

Take a block of time 10 years long. From 87 to 97. Look at all the changes. In 87, there was house, techno, rap and electro, and ebm for the rivetheads. Sampling was still a primitive technique, as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu were about to demonstrate. People were just starting to twist the knobs on the 303. Rave hadn't even entered the lexicon yet. NO ONE heard of ecstasy.

In 10 years, the scene explodes. It divides--trance, jungle, happy hardcore, IDM, NRG, Goa/Psy, and all their subgenres develop sub-cultural identities, scenes, and parties all to themselves, each one bursting with its own eclectic creative energies, vibe, and social customs. Music goes digital, then it goes to the internet. Everyone tries to sample everything.

Now, take a look between 1997 and now. Has their been that many changes? Not really. What new genres have come about? ....Mcprog? Almost everything is either a rehash of what has been done before, or is a constant retro re-imagining of a past style or trend, often for kitsch value. The 2000s is most definitely characterized as the decade of sampling--not just in music, but in clothes, language, culture, everything, stealing bits and parts of the look and feel from every other decade to build a sort of collage culture.

It reminds me of a video game article I read about three years ago how games haven't really progressed much this decade years beyond superficial graphics and improved processor power. You take, say, the years 84 to 94, and you can say that video games went from almost text-based Dungeons & Dragons and Ultima games to Final Fantasy VI, from Dig Dug to Doom. That is an incredible leap. You take 94 to 2004, and you get from Doom to Doom III. Advancements of the same ideas; no new ideas. Real-time Strategy, The MMORPG, First Person Shooter, Button Tap Timing (ie: DDR or Stepmania) were all genres of games created in the 90s. What new genres have been created this decade?

Going back to electronic music, maybe it's just me. After all, as one gets older, time seems to speed up and things change less often. When you're a child, each year is jam-packed with stuff happening, and seems to take an eternity. I remember a half hour being an excruciatingly long detention after class. Today, I can waste a half hour just staring off into space thinking about nothing. So much changes in your life between age 9 and 10. But almost nothing changes in your life between the ages 80 and 90, if you live that long.

Have things changed, and I just not noticed it? Someone younger help me out here.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur It reminds me of a video game article I read about three years ago how games haven't really progressed much this decade years beyond superficial graphics and improved processor power. You take, say, the years 84 to 94, and you can say that video games went from almost text-based Dungeons & Dragons and Ultima games to Final Fantasy VI, from Dig Dug to Doom. That is an incredible leap. You take 94 to 2004, and you get from Doom to Doom III. Advancements of the same ideas; no new ideas. Real-time Strategy, The MMORPG, First Person Shooter, Button Tap Timing (ie: DDR or Stepmania) were all genres of games created in the 90s. What new genres have been created this decade?

That's very true. Games stopped being innovative somewhere around the end of the 90s. Suddenly it became all about technology - who could fit the most polygons in one frame, who could fit the most shaders and filters, and we ended up with a bunch of pretty looking graphics that played like shit. Nowadays a game won't even sell if it doesn't have all of that shallow polishing. Before that happened, technology was limited, and the common household system was very limited as well, so devellopers had to take that into consideration. With all the technological constraints, they were forced to focus their games on just one thing; making them fun. You could say something very similar happened to electronic music.

pwnt.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur Going back to electronic music, maybe it's just me. After all, as one gets older, time seems to speed up and things change less often. When you're a child, each year is jam-packed with stuff happening, and seems to take an eternity. I remember a half hour being an excruciatingly long detention after class. Today, I can waste a half hour just staring off into space thinking about nothing. So much changes in your life between age 9 and 10. But almost nothing changes in your life between the ages 80 and 90, if you live that long. Have things changed, and I just not noticed it? Someone younger help me out here.

Of all the things that resonate with me in your post (I'm glad you reposted it), this does especially. I always brushed off the warnings of those older who complained that as you enter your 20s, the years begin to fly by. Then, as I entered my 20s, the years did seem to tangibly pass faster. In my childhood and teens, each year felt like it would never end, and when it did, it seemed a lifetime had passed since the last. These days, I'm actually beginning to get the order of my holiday memories confused. It's chilling more than anything else; I'm young, but that bony, black-cloaked hand seems less unreal.

I've thought a bit on whether this skews our perception of dance music in the 90s versus the current decade -- indeed a collage of trends without any to really call its own. Perhaps it plays a part -- I'm often reminded of that mock motivational poster you made for "Nostalgia" -- but I think it's also objectively true that dance music learned most of its tricks in the 90s. Technology ceased to be a limiting factor by the late years of that decade. Instead, it seems dance music has lost its bearings creatively.

One possibility is that technology catalyzed the diverge of genres as people experimented with new production tools, and that those conditions will never happen again. Like the fanning of primordial body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, doomed to pruning as some gained predatory advantage over others, dance music may be locked into dominant tropes. That's a gross analogy -- we're talking about art, not biology -- but perhaps it helps to organize what's happened.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur Now, take a look between 1997 and now. Has their been that many changes? Not really. What new genres have come about? ....Mcprog? Almost everything is either a rehash of what has been done before, or is a constant retro re-imagining of a past style or trend, often for kitsch value. The 2000s is most definitely characterized as the decade of sampling--not just in music, but in clothes, language, culture, everything, stealing bits and parts of the look and feel from every other decade to build a sort of collage culture.

+1

that said, I think you could say there are new "genres" bobbing up all the time, but a lot of ppl are simply very dissmissive of them as somethign "that's already been done, with a new name". But isnt' that what a genre is? Somethign that's already been done, but with a name attatched? Electro for example...

As for my personal opinion, I"m neutral on this one...

re: 'collage culture'

i think as observers of our own time it's hard to really judge this.

What we see as discernibly different things making some sort of collage culture will in 300 years seem like one indiscernable movement.


for instance
Even the ancient romans were a collage culture. The forum romanum for example in rome was built over a period of 1000 years by many different governments and people. It's full of allusions and reusage of ideas and even physical material. Yet tourists look at today it without knowing any of this, because they can't discern the differences. Even Roman art was an intense combination of practical traditions and fashion from cultures they admired or assimilated through conquest. The majority of greek pottery that exists still was not found in greece but rather in etruscan burials - and rome stole much of the most important greek statuary and moved it into their facilities alongside their own greek revival pieces, etc

This is obviously stretching the discussion far, but I just want to make the point that 'collage culture' isn't really that new, though of course it's accelerated by global communications and the widespread availability of information.


I think cobalt's idea of the 'dominant' trope seems to be an important part of it. As electronics become embedded in our lives, the supersaw will become as commonplace as the air guitar or the saxophone. Breakbeats will be on file in libraries like waltzes. Provided it doesn't die, I think we have passed the formative years of this dance music and entered into a canonical phase. Of course you will have occasional oddities, but as far as futurism, I think it might not be applicable here anymore.

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec re: 'collage culture' I think cobalt's idea of the 'dominant' trope seems to be an important part of it. As electronics become embedded in our lives, the supersaw will become as commonplace as the air guitar or the saxophone. Breakbeats will be on file in libraries like waltzes. Provided it doesn't die, I think we have passed the formative years of this dance music and entered into a canonical phase. Of course you will have occasional oddities, but as far as futurism, I think it might not be applicable here anymore.

i completely agree

I would say that because of the genre of electronic music that is defined by its obsession with the future, that futurisim isn't dead in electronic music.

Consider for a moment the style of music I've been experimenting with...

You can see it here:

http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...37&forumid=1&s=

The thing is, the techniques are no longer magical to most people, but the truth is that there is still room to grow in electronic music. Electronic, dance in particular, is notoriously narrow-minded in the sense I suggest in the post above. Think about it.

SO is futurism dead? Perhaps... but there will always be new horizons in music regardless of whatever happens to the world of technology, THAT I can guarantee.

-Bryan

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Originally posted by bryanflint The thing is, the techniques are no longer magical to most people, but the truth is that there is still room to grow in electronic music. Electronic, dance in particular, is notoriously narrow-minded in the sense I suggest in the post above. Think about it. SO is futurism dead? Perhaps... but there will always be new horizons in music regardless of whatever happens to the world of technology, THAT I can guarantee. -Bryan

I guess I feel that leads to the "style-du-jour" scene, because of the lack of a substantive cultural movement looking at the "new horizon". You know, just a bunch of people looking for the 'next hot thing' and trying to profit off of it.


regarding your '6/8 break':
it's cool and all, but i worry that you're trying to hard to be different, looking at time signatures as 'untapped markets'.

I mean, I've wanted to dj a set entirely in 6/8 or triplet feel, and I started collecting for it, but I stopped because it would only come across as a one liner, IMO. You can't really start a movement if you just come out and try to do it artificially - movements happen because they need to happen.

You'll just get a small group of people that are going nuts because it makes them feel special and explaining to their friends, It's a TOTALLY DIFFERENT TIME SIGNATURE. which you might be able to call a 'movement', but it's not going to inspire like a 6/8 break pants or a drug culture that revolves around the triplet or something.

not that i don't think it's cool and important but let's just be honest

edit:
also you shouldn't use a standard canned breaks rhythm because it just comes across as a standard breakbeat track with little fills.

a lot of people would just call it breaks. the only difference is that if you were mixing it it would fall in and out of sync every 2 measures. think about how people dance - they don't dance in sets of four beats - they either respond to each beat or to half beats. So in either case they will dance exactly the same to a 6/8 time signature.

One must also be aware that futurism for futurism's sake is also a dead-end. Futurism isn't an end. It is a means. We shouldn't let the technology determine what kind of music we make, we should use the technology to make our music. For an example of this, read my recent review of BT, by far the most clear-cut example of an artist who's completely ditched creativity in musicianship for relentless studio perfection and technological innovation.

Though I must admit that it does get a little ridiculous sometimes.


I hope I survive robot vaginas.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur For an example of this, read my recent review of BT, by far the most clear-cut example of an artist who's completely ditched creativity in musicianship for relentless studio perfection and technological innovation.

Nice porn analogies.

LOL.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur One must also be aware that futurism for futurism's sake is also a dead-end. Futurism isn't an end. It is a means. We shouldn't let the technology determine what kind of music we make, we should use the technology to make our music. For an example of this, read my recent review of BT, by far the most clear-cut example of an artist who's completely ditched creativity in musicianship for relentless studio perfection and technological innovation.

quite an entertaining read, and a relatively easy target , but i don't really understand your concluding sentence, unless it was meant sarcastically


in the world of architecture as well a similar thing is happening with using technology as a substitute for creativity, (also in the art world. for instance):

Daniel Rozin - a BT of the art world
http://www.smoothware.com/danny/

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur One must also be aware that futurism for futurism's sake is also a dead-end. Futurism isn't an end. It is a means. We shouldn't let the technology determine what kind of music we make, we should use the technology to make our music.

That is so meaningless i'm actually struggling writing a reply to it.

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