flying lotus: c/d, s/d

I remember someone complaining about FlyLo's set at Sonar being compressed to fuck, so maybe it's a production and not a mastering issue?

But then I don't really understand the distinction between the two for electronic music so uh

cosmogramma is in my year top 10 but i think the new EP is pretty hard to listen to

otm

holy crap you guys sound like grown ups

"great googly moogly! this new-fangled racket hurts my ears!"

also "reminds me of breakbeat" FTW

sadly, i am a grown-up.

lots of times i wish it were otherwise.

now, to ring in the new year, i will listen to dan fogelburg's old lang syne on repeat.

love that song to bits. "met my old lover at the grocery store . . . . "

anyhoo i am going to listen to three kenny burell LPs on blue note and THEN the flying lotus turned up super loud and get back to you on whether i succeeded in inducing a headache.

i feel like there are many layers to the sound and a great deal of implied space anyway in the beats, so i'm not sure what exactly's lost w/ the over-compression here that isn't made up for in other regards. or maybe it's just an aesthetic choice you don't like?

okay, i'm going to give cosmogramma another go.

Scik has major dislike for extreme compression in recordings. I know that and I hardly follow his every post.

a lot of this music makes heavy use of sidechain compression, as an effect. usually the kick is sidechained to another element of the track (the bass, a vocal, anything or everything) so that it pushes it out of the way on every hit. too much of it can make you feel kind of seasick when listening...i'm just wondering if that's what you're hearing instead of mastering compression.

(i haven't listened to cosmogramma in awhile so i don't remember how compressed it is or how sidechain-y, but the Teebs album is a good example of too much sidechaining for my taste)

yes Nick you should read up on sidechain compression -- it's not one band at a time, it's creatively applied by the artists at the mix stage. Jordan's describes it well and you know what it is, it's the sucking sound where the kick or snare or loud vocal hits seem to smack the rest of the mix out of the way for a second and then the mix inflates back up in the wake of it.

The technique also reduces dynamic range & allows for hotter mastering, which is why you hate it. But that's a taste thing and it's a world apart from your complaints about remastering -- people like the Daft Punk sound and you need to start distinguishing your argument against music ruined at the mastering stage and home producers like Flying Lotus who know what they're doing, even if it's not to your taste

I think I mentioned this before, but a year ago my dad, who has not listened to anything but classical radio for years, said that he finally figured out why he couldn't listen to the Beatles anymore, it was because their music had no dynamic range

then the mix inflates back up in the wake of it.

& not to go on about this too much, but sidechaining is what gives this record / Daft Punk their sense of rhythm, from pounding ones to lurchy swooping -- sidechaining is being used to compose the beats, it's integral. and even though the dynamic range is flat, it really churns the elements in the mix so it does drive the energy level higher

for the record I'm in the camp that's pretty grateful for your article. as late as 2006 I still heard people going on about how complaints about overcompression were just pro sound myopic whining and consumers didn't care -- but that's exactly why you've got to distinguish between older music that's being ruined and newer music that's living in it

I agree with Scik. Album is way too compressed to be truly enjoyable. It has no dimensions, no levels... you can't really separate the sounds in your head. It's the aural equivalent of a pixelated photograph.

Jordan, Milton: yes, now you describe it I recognise it. Not seen it referred to as side-chaining before, even when I was researching way back when, I don't think. Predictably, I don't like it! Aesthetic mixing choice by the artist or not, it's an effect that I find really unpleasant.

I'm currently "remastering" my old article for my blog, so I'll look into this further.

It is also sometimes referred to as "ducking" because the overall mix ducks behind the kick drum.

I'm kind of lost in the talk of compression and side-chaining, but I kind of get the gist. Anyone care for to give me a quick primer on this and what I'm supposed to see (and be aghast at) in those spectral images?

Lack of space, basically.

The Kanye's the worst because the waveform is clipped (i.e. flattened) at top & bottom; this means that sound has literally been cut out of the music in order to make it louder. Played on laptop speakers you probably wouldn't notice. On a good stereo it sounds like the edges of the sounds, instruments, vocals, etc have been chopped off - things are less distinguishable from each other, less sharp, and you get a weird digital hollowness sound where it vanishes.

There's barely any clipping in the Flying Lotus, but it is loud pretty much all the way through, which is going to make it tiring and lacking in excitement - it's like being shouted at rather than spoken to. What you can't see from the waveform is the sidechaining / inflating, which is audible as elements moving out of the way of, say, a kick drum, in the mix, when the kick drum hits. This, to me, just sounds really weird and artificial and I don't like it. (I don't much care for Daft Punk, as it happens.)

The LCD has plenty of space, plenty of definition, and lots of dynamic movements - quiet bits and loud bits. Think Pixies. It's exciting!

perhaps you would prefer The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

i get the compression-aversion, but does it really ruin your enjoyment -- across the board -- of all albums you would otherwise enjoy?

does the actress album have more space and depth? it's a disc i admire more than i enjoy.

i can totally see where scik is coming from on this one tbh. this record is really hard to listen to for extended periods bcuz of how in your face the sound of it is. its not 'oooh its so loud im old' its just that it has no dynamic range which means its loud in a flatline way instead of a way that makes use of contrasting volumes.

when he describes it as shouting vs talking its a lil unfair. its more like imagining someone talking with the exact same volume & tonality on every word, so their sentences have no rise & fall ... its all just flatline.

i mean, you can say 'thats the point' all you want but its pretty offputting imo

i put up w/ mixtapes w/ shoddy mastering too but i also scrounge the internet for CDQs when i can find them for that reason

scik, thanks for the information. How does one read the spectrals? I think I know where it shows the space and compression, but what shows that it's loud -- the fact it stretches out far?

Rennavate, read this pronto http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

hey this is good album

Yes it is.

Still really want to like this, but find it so bloody odd to listen to. Asked Graham Sutton re; side-chaining and just blogged his response and my understanding of it in relation to this.

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/03/14/a-brief-history-of-side-chaining/

i completely disagree that flylo does it for loudness reasons. to me it's more of a musical/rhythmic thing...the point isn't just to make sure the kick is super loud, it's also to create some ebb & flow movement in the other parts. in some tracks the groove is constructed around the sidechaining, so it's hard to separate one from the other.

That may be so, but for me it just destroys something like MmmHmm; I can't ride the bassline cos it keeps vanishing, I'm trying to follow it and I'm having it pulled away like jerking a string from a kitten; my brain literally can't keep up and I get a headache. Also, many tracks (especially the first 3 or 4) end up being MEGA loud start-to-finish. I think the grooves would be better if it wasn't sidechained and pumping at me.

Do The Astral Plane would be fucking amazing if I could hear every note on that trumpet and all of the clicks on that percussion track. But they keep vanishing because of the fucking kick.

funny, i find the sidechain compression on cosmogramma to be pretty subtle and non-obvious. just listened to 'do the astral plane', and i don't think the trumpet and most of the high synths are even sidechained to the kick, just bass synth and some of the textural elements.

especially compared to something like this, where the whole idea of the beat is based on the sidechain compression (with a really hard ratio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXhdEgCqhJo

has Graham heard the FlyLo album and pinpointed those instances as actual side-chaining? to me it just sounds like he's working with a wobbly/queasy-sounding beat, on purpose, but obv i could be wrong (i love it tho)

Graham hadn't heard it, no; I'm just picking bits that I find awkward to listen to and that seem to be suffering. The psychology of listening is an odd thing though; the trumpet in Astral Plane might not be tied to the beat, but the beat's stopping me catching it all.

Cos ultimately you can't prove with a waveform or with writing about a particular technique what the exact technical reason is for not liking a sound or feeling that a song sounds wrong (all a waveform can prove is that something's loud and/or clipped), it's just a way of trying to point at something empirical when explaining so that people understand what you're saying more. I don't record or play music; I just listen, and maybe that means that Jordan and I are going to hear things differently.

Like, I know I had to turn Cosmogramma down to listen to it a minute ago, and I know I just had to turn The Magic Position by Patrick Wolf up to set the treble free and stop it sounding muddy (and that's not a quiet record by any means).

i do think it's something that my ears have acclimated to over time, same with the rhythmic aesthetic of some of this music (which the sidechain compression contributes to).

and yeah, this year i've spent a lot of time at home playing with compressor settings, and that's helped me to be able to better pick out what's going on in other people's music. not to say i never find it distracting, like anything else it can be a great musical tool or it can be used badly/unnecessarily.

The sounds on Cosmogramma are SUPPOSED to move in and out of the mix surely? That's part of the appeal for me.

Oh totally; my point is that to some people it's part of the appeal and to others it's a barrier to the appeal.

Q&A with markers flying lotus re: music he grew up with >> here <<

But this is where it gets embarrassing [laughs]. I was also listening to shit like Korn. And I first started checking out Metallica on their album with all the strings, S&M. Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, all that. But yeah, girls didn't like that shit. I had trouble meeting girls. No one was trying to talk to me like that.

have to say, a couple of these jonwayne tracks are dope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rKv4c_RM68
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9QIE2uhiz0

lots of unreleased tracks & remixes: http://soundcloud.com/flyinglotus

I think Cosmogramma is even better than I thought it was last year. (On my unimportant EOY list I put it down lower than I would now, probably partly because I didn't want the top to be dominated by indie media picks.)

most of the tracks on cosmogramma are way too busy.. can't get past the excess

flying lotus lovahs might be interested in the free 2.5 hour mix he put out today, LOVERS MELT 2:

http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2011/07/flying-lotus-lovers-melt-2-mixtape

hope a tracklist eventually emerges...

^^this mix is amazing, really in-depth brazilian stuff and psychedelic music, just fucking amazingly strung out...some stuff you'd know like marcos valle and lots of stuff i'd never heard. needs to be bigged up more really, i only like a few flying lotus tracks but this is brilliant.

i like a lot of the sketches he's been putting up on soundcloud more than cosmogramma. much less busy/overcooked, more tossed-off brilliance.

don't know about this thundercat record. i get it, it's cool that it sounds like a '70s curio, but there's not much here that i want to come back to.

only heard one song (cover of a george duke song) and it was pretty great.

I really liked the tune that was made into the "Dance Floor Dale" video, but the full-length didn't have anything else like it.