I think his reference to an Idiocracy level regression in popular music due in part computer technology is interesting.

And I'm not really one to agree with "computers are evil LSDKJFLSDJF", but I think that accessibility in terms of production will just lead to more gimmicky "big name" acts.

Why?

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J he opens with the same "computers are evil" bullshit we were just discussing.

Actually computers aren't evil at all, but the effects of the software they run can be ... sobering when left in the hands of often-times lazy users who don't really care much about anything but using it as a mere shortcut rather than as a creative tool with its own set of challenging features to use.

The thing I was alluding to is the fact that in days past musicians were playing together all the time, whether live, in the studio or both and from years of practice often times managed to achieve a degree of funky cohesiveness that created a certain vibe and intensity which computer systems just aren't capable of reproducing or generating unless the operator is willing to spend inordinate amounts of time 'humanizing' the tracks. (try and program War's "City, Country, City" on a sequencer).

An apt comparison would be a lovely handcrafted wood-carving versus something machine-made to exacting standards, yet so close to perfection that over time many people find themselves less attached to it. (allusion to Japanese 'wabi-sabi' and other aesthetically imperfect artifacts)

From seeing how popular a lot of the music made in the 1970's still is today (all before the advent of the first wave of drum machines, MIDI and cheesy gated reverb on so many records) one can therefore wonder if this tightly-played human solution doesn't seem to offer certain long-lasting advantages over its software-engineered brethren.

By the same token a lot of early Detroit records were made with sometimes remarkably primitive equipment, and sync to tape machines with a lot of wavering in playback (like 4-track Portastudio or 8-track 1/4" analog tape decks) gave them a certain character which modern gear just doesn't have.

I think that over time we can see a pattern of certain things created which having staying power, what I was ranting about (since this is the thread for it) is the fact that software has enabled people with arguably very little qualification to make technically perfectly acceptable music which is otherwise devoid of much in lieu of emotional qualities. Wish I could put my finger on what that is, but a large number of those using this software appear to me to make a lot of eminently forgettable music, as if the perfectly rounded lines and super-straight vistas it suggests leave no imprint on the human brain, whereas the more imperfect hand-made ones seem to create little markers that one can easily become attached to over time. (In addition to the other comments I made about lack of compositional skills or ability to actual play an actual instrument)

At every step of the way it's hard to argue about the sonic advantages to using sequencers, drum machines and samplers over the real thing (as in: live musicians playing real instruments by hand) whether it's clearer sound, deeper bass, sharper highs, predictable levels and all the rest not to say anything of the actual cost of recording those real live instruments. Yet when the dust settles I find it interesting that a lot of the music that was created with those far more primitive means would appear to have a much-longer lifespan and have made far greater of an impression on many listeners.

The rant was about the disposability of much of what's out there today, and most of that has been facilitated by the 'distributed intelligence' that designing clever software products makes possible; and how over time how that's influenced the general public's sense of what's right and wrong, and that by now a lot of people who go to clubs are so used to this sort of fodder that it's not something worth questioning. Once wild but now tamed utilitarian music tailored for a specific purpose.

And yes, before you ask and as you probably can guess, I work with computers and music a fair amount, so even though you might not agree with much I write, I certainly feel just as qualified as the next person to venture this sort of opinion from a great many years of experience doing this in the innards of the beast.

Hence the rant.

Rather than going on about other people's rants, it would be great to hear your unpopular opinions just as well...

___________________
My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I find it extremely strange that you judge the health of electronic music based on what the "public" get to hear. Exactly when were large numbers of creative and talented electronic musicians in the public eye in the past?

Let's see.... Vangelis, Kraftwek, YMO, Jean-Michel Jarre, Giorgio Moroder and to an extent early Depeche Mode/Vince Clark. All multi-million sellers... (well, maybe not Kraftwerk) I could go on.

___________________
My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.

quote:

Originally posted by sg_57 Let's see.... Vangelis, Kraftwek, YMO, Jean-Michel Jarre, Giorgio Moroder and to an extent early Depeche Mode/Vince Clark. All multi-million sellers... (well, maybe not Kraftwerk) I could go on.

The only talent in Depeche Mode was Alan Wilder. Gahan has a range of 4 notes, Fletcher was stage filler and Gore... Well, I'll just point to his solo venture and leave it there.


To your point about timing, the groove functions on DAW's have improved. I'm really not trying to pump my shit, here, but the last few (16 if memory serves) measures on the track below are strictly quantized to 1/16 while the measures preceding them have a groove applied to them.

http://soundcloud.com/eddiezilker/e...lker-black-cats


The mix is garbage but you should be able to hear the shuffle, if that adds any perspective to the conversation.

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Now with extra singles!
my old stuff, not quite up to snuff - but I still dig it - UPDATED 9/23/2012

quote:

Originally posted by sg_57 I think that over time we can see a pattern of certain things created which having staying power, what I was ranting about (since this is the thread for it) is the fact that software has enabled people with arguably very little qualification to make technically perfectly acceptable music which is otherwise devoid of much in lieu of emotional qualities.

This is a curse electronic music has to bear, unfortunately. Blame Apple (or someone) for making machines which were once stubbornly complicated, with arcane programming languages, goofy protocols, indecipherable manuals written in engrish and an almost insurmountable learning curve.... into extremely simple software with out-of-the-box ease of use and a million tutorials just a url away.

The bottleneck of musicianship -- learning the theory, honing the craft, practice and repetition until the scales, chords and melodies become second nature -- has been replaced by machine code and intelligent algorithms that do all the thinking for you, finding the BPMs and key changes and all the boring stuff while you rock out with your cock out.

But this occurs in every tech industry. There are web developers who don't know a single line of html -- Dreamweaver does it for them. There are writers who've never taken an English class -- they got MS Word spellcheck and grammarcheck for that. And, if you can believe it, there are car drivers out there who have no idea what goes on under the hood. In fact, that's probably most of us.

Technology will always gravitate toward simpler user interfaces, allowing everyone to participate. Everything gets smarter, better, more automated, accomplishing things in seconds for the next generation what the previous one had to do manually over several tedious hours. This will never stop. The next generation will always be more privileged than the previous one.

DIY is one of the hallmarks of this scene and remember that its birth came from poor black musicians in Detroit, Chicago and NYC who couldn't afford a studio or session musicians so they purchased these cheap, terrible-sounding Roland boxes from second-hand music stores. They didn't go through the proper channels either, they just made the music they could with the resources they had.

Today's generation are doing the same. We can only hope that the cream rises to the top, but we should never disparage the legions of bedroom fruity tunes compositions. I personally don't care -- it's not like I listen to them. I think there's only about five guys on the DJ Top100 that I actively follow. I personally can't be made to care that they're all that popular. They don't even breach my music consumption sphere, and I'm the fucking music guide guy!!

...wait... I think I wrote about this once before. Ahh, here it is...

quote:

Originally posted by sg_57 Since this is the thread for unpopular opinions, I won't hold back about electronica and club music. As computers and software keep increasing their foothold and further permeate every aspect of music-making, our global music and DJ culture has steadily been regressing to a state which ultimately is leading our collective asses to some form of idiocracy for supporting it unconditionally. From the lack of compositional skills, inability to write memorable melodies to total disregard for the basics of arrangement and any innovative ideas or deeper message on the side of the music makers, the public itself has sunk to ever-lower depths of expectations, having now been trained and conditioned to accept those dumbed-down and inferior productions as the standard. There are now audiences who would not know what to do if someone was going to actually play a song with vocals, a proper melodic buildup and was played with real instruments by human beings. That same public, however reacts extremely well to people going on stage wearing giant masks or other gimmick props (to be fair, Kiss was way ahead of the curve with this one) while presenting simplistic tracks laden with special efx and synchronized to pyrotechnics, cheap thrills that are nonetheless a guarantee to get a rise out of them for a few seconds. Thousands of years of humans patiently crafting the most exquisite music being made irrelevant by terabytes of beat-matched sample libraries and intelligent software agents turning it all into one gigantic highway lined with perfect samey-looking cars forever. And leaving real musicians completely out of work as no one wants to hire them. Now of course, it would be unfair to forget the reality that most of this music I am ranting about is in fact designed to be consumed by people under the influence of chemicals, and that the aim of it is to clearly provide a smooth, predictable and appropriately themed endless backdrop to enhance their drug experience without ever 'rocking the boat' or waking them up from their torpor by causing them to think, other than to occasionally tweet about it (in 140 characters or less) or annoy everyone around them by snapping pictures with their new iPhone 4Gs. Mike Judge arguably was a visionary, and as is the case with most of them had his disruptive movie Idiocracy buried by Fox (who funded it) when it became obvious how incredibly prescient its message was, and that it was hitting a bit too close to home for comfort. This is pretty much what seems to have been happening to the once-lavish, exotic and gorgeously iconoclastic world of dance music. It all became streamlined, commoditized and defanged into a parody of its once-vibrant sexiness and beautiful energy; but with lots more bass, sharper drum sounds and wondrous synthetizer wooshes than ever before. That's where young sonic rebels like Skrillex (who everyone loves to hate) can come in and wake people the f*ck up from that complacent status quo with gut-wrenching ugly-ass beats and demented bass lines. The world might just be getting ready for the next generation of electronic punks without guitars. P.S.: before anyone even points it out, yes there are thousands of very able and extremely talented musicians, composers and practitioners of creative electronic music today, but they aren't very high on the public's radar, and for the most part what they do just doesn't seem to register at all.

man, this post was going great until you said skrillex

quote:

Originally posted by sg_57 Rather than going on about other people's rants, it would be great to hear your unpopular opinions just as well...

Maybe if you'd bothered to read the thread, you'd find a page or two back I was railing against all the shit you just said. I hear this identikit rant so many times I've no idea how you think it's an "unpopular" opinion. It's almost like you're deliberately trying to wind me up.

I don't even know where to begin dissecting all this, but I find it especially ridiculous you cite wabi-sabi of all things in a discussion of electronic music. Yeah, because the melancholy of transience is exactly the aesthetic philosophy I can hear in this:

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by Ishkur DIY is one of the hallmarks of this scene and remember that its birth came from poor black musicians in Detroit, Chicago and NYC who couldn't afford a studio or session musicians so they purchased these cheap, terrible-sounding Roland boxes from second-hand music stores. They didn't go through the proper channels either, they just made the music they could with the resources they had.

DIY certainly. poor - well, they were middle class kids, and if they could have illegally downloaded fruity loops back then, I bet they would have.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I find it extremely strange that you judge the health of electronic music based on what the "public" get to hear. Exactly when were large numbers of creative and talented electronic musicians in the public eye in the past?

i don't know, but if i go out to listen to music these days, it means going to a friend's house. there is no venue that plays interesting stuff consistently. there are no lounges that even play chillout forchristsake. (speaking about Toronto)

the mounds of stuff all of us dug up: it's nice to see electronic music alive and well in our collections. too bad that's as widespread as it gets.

the judgment is good. same way you judge the way people of a particular society live: if there is widespread corruption, it does little good to be proud of yourself and small group you may belong to that's brimming with moral goodness.