What sounds cutting edge in 2016?

I think the concept is actually valid inasmuch as we live in a time where a lot of records that get made sound like they could have been made 10 or 20 or 40 years ago, so it's interesting to think about what really sounds like it could only have been made recently. Technology is going to play a big role in that obv. I don't agree with your assessment that we've achieved some kind of technological end of history -- the sound of a record is a lot more than just a "combination of sounds."

my point is that there are no longer technological limitations involved when it comes to putting music together - decisions are all based on aesthetics and (at worst) estimating whether the goal is worth the time and effort. In previous generations if you wanted to, say, overdub a hundred drum tracks together there was literally no technological method for achieving that end. I defy anyone to come up with a sonic goal that could not be realized with current technology.

I defy anyone to come up with a sonic goal that could not be realized with current technology.

Some ideas:
A song that uses a choir consisting of every human being on the planet.
A concept album that has a corresponding designer drug that stimulates in time with the music and track sequencing.
Generative algorithm that produces hit singles (the future of music? buy an algorithm instead of an album and have new songs every day?)

none of those have to do with specific sonic qualities of the music (except *maybe* the very first one - and even there it is certainly technologically possible to construct a choir consisting of every *recorded* human being on the planet, that just goes back to my comments about whether it would be worth the time and effort. But it is technically possible.)

in defense of the premise/thread title, it's not literally about new sounds, but how the technology and culture/aesthetics rub up against one another, right? using old and new techniques in new ways to make something that sounds fresh in the context of the current moment.

buy an algorithm instead of an album and have new songs every day?

the Pollard equation

using old and new techniques in new ways to make something that sounds fresh in the context of the current moment.

right, obviously this still happens. but what sounds "fresh" is relative to what the listener is already familiar with, and is going to vary widely from listener to listener as a result. as anvil said on the previous thread, the new is in the hearing, not the record. so discussion seems kinda pointless to me - or at least, highly personal and not generalizable in any meaningful way, especially in the music environment we find ourselves in at the moment where there's no monoculture and all kinds of music are available all the time.

xp

outic otm very good posts

HOWEVER have any of you all heard of this dude JUTE GYTE? microtonal metal man

sorry i'm just being a dick, will be very apparent to anyone who read last year's thread

maybe I'm just getting hung up on what "cutting edge" *used* to mean in the days of rapidly evolving recording technology + monoculture. In that environment there were perceptible limits ("we only have two tracks? why can't we have eight?!") and there were also very real barriers to what made it into the monoculture. What was cutting edge was what challenged one or both of these. But since the monoculture is more or less dead and technological limits have been largely relegated to processing speed and/or the required investment of time and energy, the term has lost all meaning imo.

to take an example that came up in this thread and the last one, the whole axis of let's call it 'avant garde club music' like arca/rabit/lotic/sd laika. even if you're familiar with all the precedents and influences involved (idm, industrial, trance, whatever), it still sounds very 'now' to me because of the way it references and flips the tropes of recent dance music. i think you'd have to be pretty to jaded to say "nothing new there, it was already done by _____".

so referencing/reconstituting recent stuff = cutting edge? that seems like a low bar.

why would you interpret cutting edge in terms of recording or production technology (exclusively) rather than in terms of composition/improvisation/performance technique?

i mean obviously some of the innovations referenced in the last thread depended on technology, but they were also ways of realizing new aesthetic potentials thanks to that technology.

if anything is technologically possible now then that still doesn't mean any one musical choice is any more obviously the 'new' or 'next'

in terms of composition/improvisation/performance technique

idk how you define cutting edge in these terms, plz elaborate

basically anything that reads retrospectively like it was a discovery

schoenberg doing 12-tone, davis/evans style modal jazz, expressive use of distortion by rock and blues musicians, developments of sampling technique

the whole axis of let's call it 'avant garde club music' like arca/rabit/lotic/sd laika. even if you're familiar with all the precedents and influences involved (idm, industrial, trance, whatever), it still sounds very 'now' to me because of the way it references and flips the tropes of recent dance music

i have no idea how any of these artists are avant garde or "new". and not necessarily because others have done it before, but i don't hear where the freshness is. i think "nowness" is not a specifically definable trait and also shouldn't be confused with "cutting edge"

my interest in this topic comes from things like Simon Reynolds' Retromania and Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My life, which discuss the causes and manifestations of a lack of interest in the future, a lack of faith in it, and a general inability to conceive of or create a future that's too different to our present

i guess firstly stop taking that bollocks seriously and actually engage with what people and artists are doing rather than what over-the-hill theorists think is happening? firstly i don't think an obsession with futurism is laudable in and of itself, secondly an interest in the future doesn't have to sound "futuristic" (scare quotes crucial as it often denotes a very specific and well-trodden sonic path). it's not that people can't conceive of a future, it's that their conception of what the future should sound like is very limited

schoenberg doing 12-tone, davis/evans style modal jazz, expressive use of distortion by rock and blues musicians, developments of sampling technique

see my comments about monoculture then

for ex. I love a lot of modal jazz but it was only innovative *in the specific context of jazz at that time* - there were tons of other forms of music that involved improvisation over static or basic chord changes, and some of them are the oldest musical forms in the world.

lex comments on point, I think

i was making a point about the specificity of musical innovation and you responded by saying who cares about specific contexts. if burroughsian cut-up techniques have been used all over but not in something recognizable as tv production, then once some artists figure out how to make something recognizable as cut-up technique work in that context, they've innovated. the fact that something has been done doesn't mean it can be done again any which way, and not every new thing done clearly leads many places, or anywhere.

i was making a point about the specificity of musical innovation and you responded by saying who cares about specific contexts.

this may be, in part, to the fact that specific contexts don't seem to matter much in relation to anything else these days. idk if the original poster is asking for what's cutting edge in particular genres - in metal, in edm, in rap, whatever. In those contexts it's easier to say what's cutting edge cuz all you have to look at is where the lines of the genre have been drawn and then watch for what pushes against those lines. And those lines are always moving! But I don't know that there's a lot of genre policing going on (I get the impression this is def the case with metal but I am not an expert) or that that many people really care about genre boundaries these days.

new sounds or techniques by themselves are not particularly interesting to me, so i don't care about microtonal music made by the latest generative software or whatever. it has to be part of the world or tied to culture in some important way. maybe i am interested more in 'nowness' than 'cutting edge', which is fine.

so referencing/reconstituting recent stuff = cutting edge? that seems like a low bar.

not reconstituting, just tweaking and doing new things with existing forms, the way music always has.

and i'm generally thinking about this in terms of electronic music, which is where all the most exciting line-moving and boundary-pushing happens anyway (it's more or less the whole premise, right?).

Why does "cutting edge" have to be about technology?

For example, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon was "cutting edge" back in 1907 or whatever, but it didn't represent any advance in paint or canvas technology. He was using the same old crap people had been using for centuries.

xp Οὖτις comes close to nailing it on the 2015 thread:

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.

or idk it just articulates some feelings i have better than i can

Why does "cutting edge" have to be about technology?

it doesn't. we've been over this.

mockery of Jute Gyte is on the increase on ILX, which actually cheers me a great deal; when something cultural is more broadly mocked, its importance becomes more obvious

He was using the same old crap people had been using for centuries.

he was, and he was kicking against artificially imposed aesthetic limits about what painting was "supposed" to do/be. In the absence of authorities setting those kinds of limits (which we don't have these anymore, really) there's nothing to kick against.\\xp

nb: my favorite new music is mostly "cutting edge electronic music"

we've gotten rid of cultural gatekeepers thx to the internet - there's no longer boundaries for what can or can't be expressed artistically in the culture. this is what my comments re: the monoculture were referring to. Previously we had a smaller pool of cultural product that was consumed by the majority of the interested population, and there were various barriers put in place and maintained (by radio programmers, by labels, by press, by politicians, etc.) for decades. that is all gone now, along with the monoculture, now anybody anywhere can listen to whatever they want to. this has resulted in there not really being anything to "cut" against, ie, there is no "cutting edge" - the walls are down.

xp

shxchshcsh
the sd laika album
gabor lazar
sensate focus/mark fell
demdike stare testpressings
kouhei matsunaga
lorenzo senni
james hoff
lee gamble

i mean, bless it, this list is totally my shit, it's just that....... i can't say the ('cutting edge') effect this music has on my heart and mind = 'sounds cutting edge'.. just seems like a fools errand. and it's all just barely music anyway.

http://www.discogs.com/Workdub-Workdub/release/3529191

this is supposedly from 1989, really weird kind of homebrewed sounding crap instrumental stuff.. could be corporate muzak but the sampling just sounds "off" sometimes. i'm not convinced it's NOT a joke (i.e. some recently made garageband thing).. it would've sounded weird in 1989, but it sounds weird in a different kind of way in 2016.

nu-balearic folks might like this^

that list was 'some recent things that sound vaguely distinctive'

mockery of Jute Gyte is on the increase on ILX, which actually cheers me a great deal; when something cultural is more broadly mocked, its importance becomes more obvious

― sounding like a silly Iain Banks on a track (imago), Wednesday, January 13, 2016 11:44 PM (Yesterday)

to go against the grain of things like this

ah ok. i like 'distinctive', more nuanced

someone should probably c&p that list without the rest of the post to every one of these threads for the rest of recorded time

though it's been a disastrous year for lorenzo senni whose shtick has been heavily borrowed and is now covered in smudges and its edges worn down by overexposure

Haircuts for Men - 隠しは安全ではありません ep

we've gotten rid of cultural gatekeepers thx to the internet - there's no longer boundaries for what can or can't be expressed artistically in the culture. this is what my comments re: the monoculture were referring to. Previously we had a smaller pool of cultural product that was consumed by the majority of the interested population, and there were various barriers put in place and maintained (by radio programmers, by labels, by press, by politicians, etc.) for decades. that is all gone now, along with the monoculture, now anybody anywhere can listen to whatever they want to. this has resulted in there not really being anything to "cut" against, ie, there is no "cutting edge" - the walls are down.

this implies that the only function of the gatekeepers was to narrow the field, as it were arbitrarily, with the side effect of causing innovation to appear more significant than it was. but they also performed a cognitive function by interpreting what they let through the gates in light of the history of music, the times, the culture, etc. often partially, no doubt: but they made a lot of music in some sense 'knowable'. the other day maura said something about the vast unknowable field of pop. i suppose you would concur with the implication that's favorable to your point here: that yes, it IS vast and unknowable and 'now' we can finally access it for what it is, as we like. but i'm not sure that the change in people's access to 'all of music' completely eliminates any need for knowledge of music in some more limited sense. at the very least, knowledge of how to find your way around in it; or knowledge of what it means, what stands out. and i think that knowledge can have to do with some sense of a 'cutting edge'.

AE_LIVE (autechre), a thorough routing of an idiom. play a set on two systems, simultaneously in adjacent rooms, with a split-second delay.. it sounds fucking ultra.

the KOCH album is beautiful

a lot of records that get made sound like they could have been made 10 or 20 or 40 years ago

"like" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, imo; i'm a dumbass stoner, but there's air and atmosphere and history and stuff that you honestly can't capture anymore. jack white can try as hard as he can, it's just totally pointless. the chain of production doesn't allow for any fucked up shit like overdrive and nuance etc

if you do come close to making something that sounds like it could've been made 20-40 years ago.. it has these quotation marks superglued around it.

it's just that it can be so death-affirming and depressing when i listen to this: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Soul-Fire-The-Majestic-Collection/release/557307

subconsciously detecting the granular gaps between authentic-60s sound replication and productions that are *almost there*

NB: these are just my thoughts, i'm not judging or putting down people's tastes or w/e

mockery of Jute Gyte is on the increase on ILX, which actually cheers me a great deal; when something cultural is more broadly mocked, its importance becomes more obvious

― sounding like a silly Iain Banks on a track (imago), Wednesday, 13 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The state of this.

I guess I should say that my interest in this topic comes from things like Simon Reynolds' Retromania and Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My life, which discuss the causes and manifestations of a lack of interest in the future, a lack of faith in it, and a general inability to conceive of or create a future that's too different to our present.

How doesn't most music today imagine a future that isn't different to ours? You do know these thoughts (even if Retromania is from a couple of years ago) were based on about a decade old tossed off sentences in blogs both of them probably haven't bothered to update, right? Why are you swallowing this reactionary trash?

the future arrived and it was some people destroying the environment

I don't know what's cutting edge and don't listen to a lot of new music but I support this thread. Carry on with the actual recommendations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQxx0ESyNjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eUv9xzTv94

If only there were some other arguments one might make...

Oh, if only...

keith rowe & graham lambkin - making a

― ANU (sisilafami)

if this was made by anybody else, would it have been released? i thought this one was pretty bland, what are your thoughts on it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItMJtA8vfpw&feature=youtu.be

if this was made by anybody else, would it have been released? i thought this one was pretty bland, what are your thoughts on it?

― braunld (Lowell N. Behold'n)

Devin Disanto is nobody but his stuff gets released and is comparable to making a, so yeah.

I have no thoughs except that i enjoy listen to it.

As I've been reminded this week, Bowie's '70s output is a pretty good perpetual answer to this question regardless of year. Particularly the Berlin stuff.

I have no thoughs except that i enjoy listen to it.

so much for music discussion. the disanto/hoffman recording is dynamic and eventful, with structured activity, and an abundance of novel, sometimes jarring sounds.. it's puzzling, with elements of narrative and exposition. there's a liveliness to it. while Making a is comprised of sound events, there's nothing really interesting about it. i can't argue with your response, but there's a marked depth and coherence to three exercises. Making a is really hard to engage with, in comparison

I think 'making a' is as eventful, it's just that sometimes you wanna listen to something quiet and soothing.

http://asystems.co

More please.

the cutting paper w scissors thing turned out actually pretty prescient w the whole ASMR boom.

Saw Lotic DJ last night in the side room of Tresor and he played mostly r&b and rap anthems mixed with edits of his own and lots of that post-dubstep-post-footwork "experimental club music" you can find all over Beatport and it sounded both really out-there and really fun. I was expecting simply lots of horrible noises so I guess I should check his Boiler Room?

Lotic has done nothing but bore me to tears and write irritating posts about PC Music but if it's the future then it's the future I guess

I need to listen to this Elysia Crampton...Rev, did you listen to the E+E album that was getting some hype once upon a time...?

("this"...I meant "some")

boxedjoy, his own records are much farther out than his dj sets, the BR set is very enjoyable.

Yeah it was my boyfriend who wanted us to go and I was expecting it to be like that "when you play Lotic at a party" meme video tbh so I was really surprised to be hearing Rae Sremmurd and Rihanna - not even edits, just played straight

How very revealing that Imago finds a post denouncing racism and homophobia to be "irritating".

I forgot we actually did this two years ago so no sense in going back over old ground I suppose.

how very revealing? fuck off

it was all the stuff about insincerity that painted the actual music of lower worth that was irritating

racism and homophobia need to be called out wherever they exist. this is so obvious and true I can't quite believe you're flinging such poisonous murmurings my way

and if 'imago is a bigot, I read his Fader rant' is a thing now, then sure my posts there were totally wrong and misguided but at the heart of it was a disdain for The Fader as a shitty hipstery music-as-fashion sooo woke yah sex is so great yah these people singing about sex is so sexy they just want to impose their young sexy sex on us and we should be honoured superiority complex disguised as a magazine

...rather than disdain for people of any race or culture or orientation

Anyway, back on topic, Elysia Crampton is kind of awesome and has always grabbed me much much more than Lotic.

imago much love but you did start throwing shade at lotic completely unprompted, so your shock and awe at other people "flinging poisonous murmurings your way" comes off as slightly disingenuous.

Racism and homophobia need to be called our wherever they exist, as long as it happens in a way that doesn't disparage music you like, in which case it becomes so irritating that you have to bring it up two years later for no reason.

Like obviously I don't think you're about to go out and join a far right organisation but you do appear to have a number of under-examined cultural prejudices that could perhaps bear a little more examination before you hit send. Rather than realising and apologising after the fact, as usually happens.

no defending gfoty rly and the calling out itself was fine. the attacks on the music of pc music were irritating as shit and completely tangential to the necessary calling-out. bringing it up now was probably a dick move but seeing lotic described as the future of music based on their playing rae sremmurd in their dj sets is sufficient provocation? idk. pick my battles better I guess

anyway, when it's 2019 and I'm describing Lotic as the saviour of electronic music we'll all look back at this and laugh

the cleaning edge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PakAiTZWAs

namaste

"future of music" is pushing it. Hearing modern pop brush up against these ~avant-garde~ club sounds and make sense in the context is all I was getting at in the thread that seemed to have the most prior mentions of Lotic.

I mean I can hear these pop songs in any high street club and I can rummage on the Funkysouls UK Funky thread for this grime/ballroom/dancehall hybrid stuff but to hear the differences between them reduced to almost nothing was the exciting part for me