What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

I bet this has been asked in a different way, so forgive me. I was just listening to some IDM stuff from 2001 and it occured to me that it's been a long time since I heard something really different. I remember thinking clicky, blippy microhouse stuff sounded very contemporary and cutting edge, 10 or 15 years ago, and I've heard a lot of music since, but I haven't heard anything where I thought, OK, this is a brand-new, cutting-edge sound that didn't exist a decade ago.

I'm also getting older, so it's pretty possible I'm just missing it. Or, has technology progressed to the point where there aren't a lot of new sounds to explore? I'd be curious to hear your examples.

farts

Ball J

the new is in the hearing not in the record

anyone heard any hip hop taken to new levels lately

More and more, Mount Kimbie and King Krule just sound like no one else.

But maybe I listen in a bubble.

https://youtu.be/orh_3Z8vjnY

Matthew Revert 'The Heartbeat's Heartbeat' (2014)

anvil otm

altho as far as recording technology goes there is no "cutting edge" anymore, progress has stopped

except that digital has gotten so much cheaper & better-sounding? and there is still progress to be made in new digital instruments, for sure.

except that digital has gotten so much cheaper & better-sounding?

this isn't really progress in terms of technology or available methods, it's just a refinement of existing tools and approaches.

No one's going to invent a new way to make sounds a la the invention of sampling or the amplified guitar or synthesizers or analog studio trickery or whatever. Everything is just software now, endless iterations of software enabling an infinite palette. I feel like the capacity for surprise has been overtaken by digital providing the answer to everything. Every "how did they make that sound!?" question now receives the same answer.

and I'm not saying this is a bad thing - it's the logical endpoint of recorded sound! But it does feel like an endpoint.

and since there's no real "cutting edge" anymore in terms of recording techniques or technology, the "cutting edge" is defined purely on aesthetic terms - which are fairly arbitrary and dictated entirely by the listener and the listener's pre-existing frame of reference (ie plenty of things can sound cutting edge when you're hearing them for the first time, even if they are 50 years old)

Well, to counter that, I thought there was potential in that layered loop-pedal way of making music. Owen Pallett, Tune-yards. I remember seeing Tune-yards live in 2012, that sounded pretty cutting edge to me. But then she changed her set-up, and nobody really copied it anyway. Too much work, I think.

looking for a Disrupter to come along and Disrupt current music

those techniques weren't new, the technology had been around since at least the 60s, and had been taken to extremes in hip-hop by the 80s. the degree to which Tune-yards took it live - and evidently in the studio as well, although it would've arguably been easier to achieve the same ends with digital editing - was unusual but I don't consider it innovative, she was not creating sounds that were previously not possible.

xp

you suck. btw nothing was ever really new, c.f. john cage.

everybody copied the solo looper setup (not from her though, i mean loads of people were doing it)!

one imogen heap youtube changed everything

Every "how did they make that sound!?" question now receives the same answer.

this is reductive though, "with a computer" isn't really an answer. it's true that most software emulates analog hardware & techniques, but something like Izotope Iris really seems to present some new possibilities for warping audio (it does spectral synthesis using audio samples).

I don't think that's true, you can point to a bunch of things that happened in the 20th century and credibly argue that the resulting sounds were not previously possible and did not exist in previous eras. This is not a qualitative judgment as to whether the resulting music was good (or bad, or better than music being made now), it's just a fact.

xxp

looking for a Disrupter to come along and Disrupt current music

― Keith Mozart (D-40), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 6:51 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

every day i wake up and think, will this be the day i hear it

but i agree with the thrust of the thread that, in our world of the future, context & aesthetics are more important than truly new sounds.

xp to Οὖτις i have no interest in arguing with you but you're wrong

mark fell sounds cutting edge to me rn, which just means i listen to too much dance music and his stuff makes me feel like i'm getting high while inside a computer.

it's true that most software emulates analog hardware & techniques

I think this is the key thing - software tends to take existing principles or approaches or techniques and the recombine them and or expand them to the nth degree. which gives the musician a shit-ton of flexibility, but no one's going to be surprised by any musician's capacity to make the software do what it's designed to do.

bu tbf I haven't heard of this spectral synthesis thing maybe it will become all the rage and sound totally unprecedented (I am a little skeptical though)

I feel like we're in an age where, for some reason, people still want to think that the future sounds like a computer malfunctioning, that the sound of making technology fuck up is somehow "where we're headed". Like taking perfect, precise, digitally smooth sounds and then messing them up in some way (and thereby implying some meaningful juxtaposition of humanity and machine?) is still considered a valid contemporary aesthetic. Whereas I already feel like we've been there for at least 20 years and I just don't give a fuck about that anymore.

xxp

kind of a tb

So (very)far, Algiers' s/t sounds pretty out there:
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/24/408296125/first-listen-algiers-algiers

the plainness of Laurence Crane's double cd on Another Timbre (last year, chamber music) sounded pretty fresh/unusual to me, on first listen. It seems nowadays that type of music is usually swathed in reverb/field recordings/overt, stylized aesthetics.

There are 12 tones in the Western scale, but we're not in danger of running out of ways to present them, even if they've all been used before. technology might not bring us another microphone or electric guitar or Fairlight sampler, but to think you now have pitch correcting software that can pick out individual notes in a piece of music and alter those frequencies is mindblowing. whole new approaches to sampling would be possible with that sort of thing. Is that cutting edge? I think more than ever, it's the ways in which ideas are packaged and presented that has to be cutting edge. you could argue that IDM wasn't too different to the kind of early electronic and tape music from the 60s, but the connection is only tenuous because they work in different realms.

researchers at MIT used video and image processing to recover the conversation in a room from the fluctuations the conversation caused in a house plant's leaf position and the position of the surface of a potato chip bag. someone could record an album with a potato chip bag camera microphone.

the cutting edge
http://costumedesignersguild.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/gene-hackman-247.jpg

Miami Nightclub Apologizes to DJ Shadow
Promoters had cut his set short for being "too future"

Tinashe

picturing some cave critic 10,000 years ago telling everybody that all possible permutations of sound producable from tortoise shells and sinew and wood and rocks had now been explored

you invent something then

smarty pants

NV OTM. Shakey Mo all you are doing is revealing the paucity of your own imagination here.

There was a review in RA a while back that suggested that perhaps, given a "limited number of danceable rhythms" there might never be another Year Zero moment "like jungle or dubstep" and I just wanted to track this guy down and shout "idiot" in his face repeatedly.

Matt DC, I think it depends on what is meant by 'cutting edge' though? No one here is saying that music isn't changing or evolving. There'll always be room for different rhythms in dance music (although from moombahton to nosebleed, p much every BPM has now been covered by a dance genre). There are new ideas, permutations of those ideas, and old ideas being recycled into brand new ideas every day.
OTOH, you could say that sonically, production values have been moving in outward, incremental steps over the last 15 or so years than they might once have done, and it's been a while since there's been a tidal shift in the way music is being created and presented - not in quite the same way as amplification or synthesis or sampling did in the 20th century.

The purpose of a thread like this isn't to bemoan the state of music or to talk about 'progress', but to look at which things are genuinely new and exciting, and also to speculate about where developments may lie.

I have a feeling the next 'new thing' might not be a new dance rhythm or necessarily a new sound, but it will be a technological change that will transform how music is heard. What if sound waves could be turned into haptic sensations, for example? You go to a club and literally feel the vibrations moving you. Or what if a whole genre were to be created from slicing, dicing and pitch shifting the individual elements of old songs - extreme mashups? Or if there were a way to easily fuse sounds together so that they become fluid - you get a guitar, a synth and a drum sound, and those sounds interact with each other like coloured oil in water? There's so much I guess.

I was responding directly to Shakey's comment here:

No one's going to invent a new way to make sounds a la the invention of sampling or the amplified guitar or synthesizers or analog studio trickery or whatever. Everything is just software now, endless iterations of software enabling an infinite palette.

Which seems to take software as the end-point beyond which everything will be just... more ways of manipulating sound via software. Which seems very short-sighted IMO. The RA thing was just me rolling my eyes in exasperation at this sort of attitude.

Cool, but is Shakey necessarily wrong in that respect? I'm not saying new and great things can't be done with software, because after-all software is only limited by its own processing power and people's imaginations. But how likely is it that a revolutionary new sound will happen to music (in the same way as amplification, synthesis, sampling etc) that won't ultimately boil down to 'someone wrote a cool program'?

how likely did each of those inventions seem to the generations before they were invented?

i'm gonna ignore all the problems of this kind of thread that seeks to place the individual's experience and some kind of Whig music history on the same trajectory at the same point of time and just focus on the unknowability of future tech

xp if this hypothetical invention were to come along, how soon would that be?

i have noticed that as i get older "whither novelty?" has become a question i've no inclination to ask myself

Well we're different. I like novelty. It's one of the key reasons I enjoy finding out about new and different types of music.

Going back to it, unless everyone takes up the yaybahar and it gets crazy popular, it is software that's going to make the biggest differences in music, right?

I don't think we're even anywhere near the point of exhausting the possibilities of the human voice let alone instrumentation or arrangement or technology.

I like how anvil put it. It's the idea of (new) things sounding cutting edge that's 'short-sighted' if anything - something to get over as you get older. It's laughable to hold up something like Jungle as an innovative pinnacle in that respect too, rather than a vital link in a chain as dependent on its antecedents as the evolution of digital. I'll still spend the rest of my life being blown away by sounds irrespective of when they happened, however the means to achieve them develop.

People who hold up jungle as an idealised moment in musical history always seem to want to think of music and genres in terms of constantly progressing lines and I don't know any genres that actually work like that. Genres tend to stick around rather than disappear and be replaced every two years and they build more and more layers on top of themselves. If you really can't find something out there, from whatever point in history, that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before then I'm impressed, you've listened to a lot of music.

Put the word progressing in scare quotes there.

I've been trying to remember the name of Paul Dolden for years, he's someone that my dad used to listen but neither of us could remember what his name was. I hated it when I was young but hearing him now I've got to say I'm finding l'ivresse de la vitesse fucking astonishing. TRUE STORY.

So indirect thanks are in order people of ILM, ta.

Careful, xyzzz will call you a neophyte wanker!

I wonder what my life would have been like if my Dad listened to Paul Dolden.

different

louis just skip to the last four minutes of l'ivresse, scott's second link, if you want a little less boredom in your life

PAUL DOLDEN

I live in a fantasy world where I was convinced his last record was going to get a lot of reviews just because he'd finally made a CD with a bunch of 2-4 minute long tracks instead of the 15-20 minute long movements he usually comes up with

ha ha

I wish I had something notable to add to this thread but this week's mostly just listening to 'blowout comb'

Kid Smpl's recent EPs sound cutting-edge to me, in that i have a hard time imagining them being made prior to now.

https://smbls.bandcamp.com/album/precinct

STARA RZEKA sounds sort of cutting edge to me

https://stararzeka.bandcamp.com/

Oh Louie I am just so disappointed! Here I am in ILM semi-retirement looking at the next generation claiming they are listening to all the trascendental noise, avant-garde genuises and when they don't see that Dolden is doing the business I just despair!

I live in a fantasy world where I was convinced his last record was going to get a lot of reviews just because he'd finally made a CD with a bunch of 2-4 minute long tracks instead of the 15-20 minute long movements he usually comes up with

LOL Milton its not length that's the problem - haven't listened to the latest but you could listen to the older stuff in short bursts too, more how much is going for every bloody second (iirc took years to put the old tracks together)

yeah the black midi thing is cool

I just realised that: i) Who Has the Biggest Sound? just came out last year and ii) I have not heard it. Listening on Naxos now; sounds great.

Dolden is pretty interesting music. Some of the other links are weird and wonderful too.

"What would "MIDI versions of acoustic instruments" sound like? Surely still an often amorphous-sounding mass?"

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, November 10, 2015 12:00 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would suppose that a good portion of all film music is made in a box now unless you got a serious budget. How they do it is by using computers with huge libraries of samples where they use different sounds depending on how hard or long you want the note to sound. How they model some of this isn't new technology but with CPU power and huge fast hard drives they can get pretty detailed sounds from a sampled/triggered by MIDI sound. Some film musicians are known for making their own banks of sounds, I know that Cliff Martinez does quite a bit of tuned percussion sampling to use as sounds. Those sounds being pretty primary on his Solaris soundtrack.

louis just skip to the last four minutes of l'ivresse, scott's second link, if you want a little less boredom in your life

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, November 10, 2015 7:53 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well I just did this and yes - it was brilliant

feeling a little better about PAUL DOLDEN. will even listen to more; he and black midi can both stay in this thread. xyzzzz otm or something, wonder what scornful comment he'll cook up now!

Kid Smpl's recent EPs sound cutting-edge to me, in that i have a hard time imagining them being made prior to now.

Liking this.

Chillax Louie.

I know that Cliff Martinez does quite a bit of tuned percussion sampling to use as sounds. Those sounds being pretty primary on his Solaris soundtrack.

The remake? I can't remember much abt it - I'll check it out.

http://everynoise.com/engenremap-gravewave.html

Jlin

Visionist

Kuedo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGiPlzcNpws

I saw a video interview with Martinez a few years ago going into making the soundtrack which was really interesting but I couldn't find it again on the fly.

A lot of this talk is just making me think of some really terrible Zappa records

i love gabor lazar but his stuff is so close to not even being music (please please don't go there) that it's kind of depressing to consider him "cutting edge"

you should hear what's going on in my basement right now. far out...

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/12226979_10154339196947137_6882167257310729138_n.jpg?oh=ed0864ebefef5ceba479c1c21e57036a&oe=56B39C40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPQ_Ac0uQr0

anne-f jacques and tim olive at my store last night were...wow! so good.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/12279000_10154343464197137_3615488219475071010_n.jpg?oh=441a62c4069f0ee1ee6c09403a9a70f4&oe=56B95C47

that looks interesting... do they have recordings of that setup in action?

always wanted to try something like that.

they have CDs together but i haven't listened to them yet. bought them last night. also bought a DVD from anne that is her music with animation by julie doucet!

been going on about AE_LIVE stuff, was sort of dismayed at the lack of coverage/discussion for the recent recordings, but it's still autechre music.. feels like they're realizing these ideal sound worlds, with lots of animated detail, super plasticity to the sounds/structure, and some heavy hitting parts. upon hearing the Dublin recording for the first time, i almost felt relief, like 'they finally did it'.. it's gorgeous stuff.

cool whats going on in that basement? is there audio?

New Zora Jones ep sounds futuristic, riyl: arca and visionist

reviewed @
http://www.passionweiss.com/2015/11/18/zora-jones-unveils-100-ladies-moves-both-minds-and-asses/

spotify: Zora Jones - 100 Ladies

https://open.spotify.com/album/0rVpMPYShtFjrTwaulNm87

great show today.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/12313765_10154365288932137_4268434911588120068_n.jpg?oh=5b69bcc427de7c11b408f474b1ec0820&oe=56DD18F5

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/12316098_10154365212902137_342112158489136364_n.jpg?oh=1f845c3cc9dd3cf88060ac3467b7e26b&oe=56E71FE1

"that looks interesting... do they have recordings of that setup in action?"

voila...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgJpL9tndN0

wtf sounds futuristic about zora jones and arca, ~moody instrumental grime exactly how you've expected it to sound like for years

and like idm existed in the 90s

If one were to argue in favour of Arca-style electronica etc being 'cutting edge', it would be a matter of sound design maybe? Like, listen to some of those Aphex demoes he released earlier this year and compare them to the MESH record and there's a huge gulf.

I'd say maybe that 'One Sec' single by Mumdance x Novelist would count as cutting edge. I can't think of anything like it (i.e. beat-free vocal grime) having come out before. And also what's great about it is it's not coming straight out of grime, and not some avant-garde or art music arena.

I wonder what the overlap would be between people who describe music as 'cutting edge' and people who describe restaurants as 'funky'.

at least with Arca it's the molten, elastic, slippery quality- his stuff has so much caprice in the way forms come and go- even programming intensive 90s IDM tended to have a metronomic hi hat grid that ticked away underneath the fancy snare workouts. To my ears, the Arca / M.E.S.H. moment is about giving up the grid and being a lot less reliable, formally. It's spiritually akin to IDM but not the same formally.

there can still be cutting edge idm or instrumental grime in 2015 in theory, you don't have to invent a new genre to be cutting edge

xp These guys' music seems to have something in common with Autechre's 'Quaristice' album, which I was very keen on at the time thanks to its being made up of shorter, sketchier tracks rather than over-busy 10 minute epics.

to my ears both arca's slipperiness and penchant for shorter tracks come across as slight, everything feels like a semi-interesting sketch that's not especially compelling in its current form. i had less patience with the new album than the first

didn't hear what was special about m.e.s.h. either

i wasn't mad about Arca's first album (not heard the new one) for similar reasons, although I kind of liked the angle in theory.

Not sure I could describe Arca as 'moody instrumental grime' though. I didn't realise Arca had anything to do with grime until more recently. I guess this more recent evolution of grime is pretty interesting - that the idea of the MC and beats in general are almost being peeled back to reveal just what's underneath; the inner workings. Again, I'm thinking of Autechre and they're much-touted but often imperceptible allegiance to hip hop and breaks-based music. And also when dubstep split into brostep and the more post-dubsteppy stuff on Hyperdub, neither of which really held that much in common with the original sound other than in name.

ah no i was referring to zora jones with the grime description, not arca

I guess this more recent evolution of grime is pretty interesting - that the idea of the MC and beats in general are almost being peeled back to reveal just what's underneath; the inner workings

instrumental grime is sometimes good (and not new in any sense) but in general shifting the focus away from the MC is a boring development

how would simon reynolds answer this question?

"Bleep bloop blorp..."

at least with Arca it's the molten, elastic, slippery quality- his stuff has so much caprice in the way forms come and go- even programming intensive 90s IDM tended to have a metronomic hi hat grid that ticked away underneath the fancy snare workouts. To my ears, the Arca / M.E.S.H. moment is about giving up the grid and being a lot less reliable, formally. It's spiritually akin to IDM but not the same formally.

― the tune was space, Monday, November 30, 2015 8:53 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well said.

btw people who have only heard Arca's albums should check out his Stretch EPs and the &&&&& mixtape, they're much more beat-oriented and accessible. maybe not quite as singular, but i come back to them more often.

he's also a really sick DJ, I just DJed with him in Iceland last week and he melts down other people's songs in a very startling way when he Djs

would love to hear that!

http://killedincars.tumblr.com/image/135585989879

Hmmm

http://killedincars.tumblr.com/image/135585989879

^I suspect this probably hits a lot of the bases when answering this question

I thought that this topic, perhaps more than any other, merits a 2016 thread, so I made one - What sounds cutting edge in 2016?