What sounds cutting edge in 2016?

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

Jlin and Visionist sound cutting edge to me

There is plenty of innovative or experimental or exciting music out there, and a lot that is none of those things and still wonderful, but I think people are pouring scorn on 'cutting-edge' because it's a concept for try-hards.

I dunno, I think it's important that ILM have one yearly thread where people can discuss new music that totally blows minds

1. 'Just as all the colours in the spectrum have now been seen and all the land masses in the world have been mapped, so too are all the possible sounds in the world now accessible to us, largely thanks to technology'

vs

2. 'The whole Retromania argument is bullshit. Of course new sounds are being forged all the time. Anyone spouting crap about 'no shock of the new', 'no truly new innovations' is blind to what is actually happening in music today'.

So which is it to be?

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

a better word for this is fashion, not cutting edge.

http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/904.pdf

'Retromania' gets a bad rap from people who didn't actually read the book past the introduction.

How you can muster the enthusiasm to have this virtually identical earnest conversation for like the fiftieth time is beyond me.

Just as all the colours in the spectrum have now been seen

this is a really philosophically weird account of vision

Of course new sounds are being forged all the time.

this is a really philosophically weird account of hearing

I dunno, I think it's important that ILM have one yearly thread where people can discuss new music that totally blows minds

― i have measured out my life in Goffey, Coombes (Noodle Vague), Thursday, January 14, 2016 2:13 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

impossible, can't make ILM threads without it becoming a big fussy arm waving thing

there is often a waving motion of part of the arm involved, yes

it's a finger and it's not a wave

'Retromania' gets a bad rap from people who didn't actually read the book past the introduction.

― canoon fooder (dog latin), Thursday, 14 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I haven't read a word of it.

ignorance is blissed

Nobody's positive thoughts on it -- actually regurgitation of the same reactionary clap trap -- has made me want to pick it up.

i've read it and iirc my assessment of it was 'simon reynolds is a grumpy old revanchist modernist'

I don't really follow most of what y'all are saying but all I would say is this:

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

Do you mean that it's no longer possible to create a music that *no-one* is already familiar with? Because that sounds like bollocks to me.

yes, but is bollocks cutting edge?

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?

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