suppose someone were to say : look, traditional music is rich because it takes place in two dimensions. You have your time based dynamic dimension of rhythm and melody; and across this you have harmony, and the sophisticated blending of timbres.
With this new sound dust / glitchtronica stuff currently we only have one dimension to explore, the serial juxtaposition of sound dust particles. And it will never grow into anything as rich and sophisticated as musical tradition unless it discovers it's second dimension.
Oh and the two current ways of managing the second dimension are insufficient.
Arbitrary layering of glitch sounds has no theory behind it and no depth.
Borrowing traditional harmonic ideas makes pleasing sounds, but is just a retreat to the past.
So, any thoughts?
― phil jones (interstar), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 12:14 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus (Momus), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 12:24 (twenty-one years ago) link
But there's sort of a lingering "so what". Like what are the stakes and implications of people singing over Yasunao Tone skips or whatever. The collision has pop-sympathy and fashion may lend itself to sound grain itself but does that mean anything more than antsy artists merely building toy houses out of the next slab of approved avant m. concrete? It's surely more than just formalist conceit (i hope).
I like voice+glitch things and Noriko Tujiko and stuff but the delight isn't simply A+B = oh fun. If the ideology of noise/glitch/errata is old, then there's more to be said on the gains/losses that result from the pastiche that you are finding so inspiring. There's a lot going on... a messy marriage of evocation from sides that seemingly have no intuitive connection (at least until a noise+song band like MBV maps out a point along the way and is later said to have set the course for countless melodic IDM acts. That's a tangential issue though...). The question becomes, what is so great beyond finding a pitstop in the search for relevance?
― Honda (Honda), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 12:32 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Sarah (starry), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 12:40 (twenty-one years ago) link
that takes this whole thing in a new, very intersting direction.
― phil jones (interstar), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 12:53 (twenty-one years ago) link
― doom-e, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 13:08 (twenty-one years ago) link
Phil you also talked about DIMENSIONS, as ANY FULE KNO it only starts getting interesting when you talk about the fourth and fifth dimensions ie MUSIC = SPACE-TIME continuum!! Sound dust is just another continuum but then again that's saying nothing new.
― Sarah (starry), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 13:37 (twenty-one years ago) link
Thriller.
― Sarah (starry), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 14:23 (twenty-one years ago) link
What are you, his fucking mother? Jeez.
― hstencil, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 14:40 (twenty-one years ago) link
Musical technology is becoming easier to use a more readily avaliable blah blah blah. People are doing things other than 4/4 trance with computers blah blah blah. Actually it surprises me how little sonic experiment and a more traditional songwriting aesthetic are blended together in the same piece of audio.
I'm trying to get the permission of an act called Shirokuma to post a link to one of his tracks here to give an example of pulled-apart samples vs. song. It's very good stuff.
One attempt of my own - http://lynskey.scumperson.eu.org/mp3/low/07%20Slow%20Travail.mp3
― Lynskey (Lynskey), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 15:30 (twenty-one years ago) link
― chk chk chk, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 15:59 (twenty-one years ago) link
― kephm, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 17:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus (Momus), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 18:05 (twenty-one years ago) link
Extremely well-said! And might I add this one sentence holds more clarity and truth than the entire essay! And might I add that I enjoyed the essay as well!
This is one of the key thoughts that will keep us all from sliding into the postmodern oh-its-useless-its-been-done-before wormhole and appearing directionless and, quite frankly, a bit miserable in a kind of sound purgatory. Cut-ups were done decades ago by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley and the Varese musique concrete sound collage for the 1958 worlds fair etc. etc. etc. If you look strictly at how long the medium has existed, it's been around probably as long as rock 'n' roll, if not longer...
But cut-up and paste-ups and electronic mish-mash compositions are still a relatively new phenomenon in the grande cannon of musical genres. It's been done before, but I don't think it's been done by enough people. It needs to be pushed, stretched out, dipped in absinthe, performed in art theaters, have a few college radio hits, get on the NME ("Glitsch: the New Rock??"), released to the populace, be on TRL, get assimilated into car adverts and digital camera commercials, and finally sold to young adolescents, with teenage pop-stars singing traditional boy-girl dilemmas over their skittery, mass-produced glitches, which could still be decades from now, if the human race lasts that long.
Actually it surprises me how little sonic experiment and a more traditional songwriting aesthetic are blended together in the same piece of audio.
Good point. Maybe glitch, as old as it is, is just now past getting over the awkward "new-medium" phase and now more and more people will find themselves combining it with 4-bar blues, 60s garage rock, 40s boogie-woogie, and 20s piano rolls. Not just the _sounds_ but the _songs_.
Ugh there I go into another messy tangent.....
― Adam Bruneau, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 18:13 (twenty-one years ago) link
haha have you not been listening to the readio for the last five years?
― jess (dubplatestyle), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 18:22 (twenty-one years ago) link
― vincent tuquedenne, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 19:07 (twenty-one years ago) link
It still hasn't been properly dipped in a well-prepared goblet of cloudy green absinthe.
I see your point but it's more on the edges of the sound, scattered about here-and-there to give it a slight edge, still used as novelty, still not fully taken seriously. We're a long way still from Britney Spears to bR1tN3y 5p3Arz...
― Adam Bruneau, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 19:19 (twenty-one years ago) link
― gygax!, Tuesday, 10 December 2002 19:26 (twenty-one years ago) link
How sad that you felt the need to box your scream into the stifling straightjackets of 'alphabet', 'words' and 'concepts', Vincent!
― Momus (Momus), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 19:32 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus (Momus), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 19:37 (twenty-one years ago) link
the last two formal sounds which have found true mainstream acceptance are *distortion*, as in the fuzz box sound, and the *analogue filter sweep*.
MBV showed that distortion could be pop, and Fat Boy Slim has build a pop career out of using the filter sweep as the logic of progression within a piece of music. (Not to mention a million trance / hard techno artists)
Jungle made certain kinds of cut-ups acceptible decoration, and of course hip-hop allows the record scratch as a rhythmic and melodic element.
So it is possible that other glitch based formalities might achieve pop acceptance. But are there any lessons to learn from the ones that have?
Both noise and filter sweeps are great at building excitement, raising tension. They generate a lot of emotion!
Is that just an arbitrary association we've learned or are they formal elements which have keyed into some deep psychological / instinctive interpretation we have?
― phil jones (interstar), Tuesday, 10 December 2002 21:42 (twenty-one years ago) link
The right instrument in the hands of the right artist can transform standards. Look at the guitar and how it evolved. Computer generated glitch sounds offer endless flexibility. Just because it's been done before doesn't mean it can't be stretched into something wonderful and different.
Cheers!
― Jake Langley, Wednesday, 11 December 2002 03:49 (twenty-one years ago) link
I think the MAX/MSP scene still consists mostly of people just kind of fooling around. They may be serious about what they're doing but mostly they're just fooling around, like my friend in college who wrote a program that could 'evolve' drum loops as you selected different random patterns for optimum funkiness. It almost worked, but it was really just fooling around.
I like the idea that people like Doctor L and Nobukazu Takemura are bringing pop (vocal) ideas into the realm of 'dust' but I have yet to hear anything that really turned my ear.
On that note - Does anybody have a copy of MAX/MSP to spare?
― Tom Millar (Millar), Wednesday, 11 December 2002 04:06 (twenty-one years ago) link
One thing I thought was cool about this music is that when you just listen to the sound of some of these traditional droning and plinking instruments that their timbre isn't so unlike some the newer sounds created running at 1.4 ghz.
Laub would probably even sound more pop to me if I spoke German, but they sound quite nice as is.
― earlnash, Wednesday, 11 December 2002 06:45 (twenty-one years ago) link
Admittedly curation has always held power over what becomes of creation, and in essescence its sort of getting some of that power too. But that's a kind of power struggle not addressing what is drifting into a supremacy of audtioning and selecting sources over creating those sources.
Its fine to create your own sources too. Makes them seem fresher at least this season, makes those other peoples sources into something no one will recognize.
So we have entered by several years into a new major generation of what used to be sampling and was musique concrete before that. But just like getting that internet domain name or being the first to affix a "post-" on to something and get attention for it, there still may be some chances to retrofit your music with it, get that paper into that academic art journal... so get with it.
If its a cool texture then what's the harm, go for it. If it really is a transforming element then you might want to think, was the source so mundane that it needed transforming? Will this tranforming become mundane soon since it might just be merely discommunicating? Lets hope its not used as justification, like this music uses software a lot of people don't fully understand... but I or my remixer does... so you'll appreciate that it's specialness
― nicholasdkent (nicholasdkent), Wednesday, 11 December 2002 09:07 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Wednesday, 11 December 2002 13:28 (twenty-one years ago) link
Momus, I read the essay and enjoyed it too.
I've been chewing on electronic music for a few years now, from an art school perspective. I've been inventing my own instruments by recycling old machines as I've been researching, and I've found that these sounds being utilised by laptop boys and gurls are not really that new. They are variations on things we have all experienced already.
Is there any reason to debate the sounds that are made? Does it matter how they were made? If some quasi snare rush sound is made on a laptop or a tape loop covered in chewing gum, do we ever see this when listening to the record? If this is a music debate, uh, what are you getting at? I've read as many of the linked articles as my limited language will allow, and it would seem rather a waste of time to chatter over the sources or techniques, as they are not what we consume at the end of the day.
On listening to the mp3's of the gongs home made instruments, I thought the idea of making new or marginal musics was alive and well; progressing at it's own rate without the need for validation by a techno boffin.
I feel rather happily naive. The other points here are interesting to read, but rather, um...un-neccessary?
― barryc, Wednesday, 11 December 2002 14:41 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ralph Pintz, Thursday, 12 December 2002 06:06 (twenty-one years ago) link
I don't think we could imagine the same being true even a hundred or so years later. A child prodigy Wagner? or Debusey? or Richard Straus? Let alone anything 21st Century.
― phil jones (interstar), Thursday, 12 December 2002 17:15 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Owen, Friday, 13 December 2002 13:42 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus (Momus), Friday, 13 December 2002 14:38 (twenty-one years ago) link
m.
*oh--but from now on, of course, the future & all pasts willexist simultaneously--
PS in 1986 i carried a battery-powered cassette recorder into ascience museum that had some old analogue synthesizer on display,& recorded an hour of improvisation based on heavily distortedsine-waves. i am hoping this will someday be seen as a precursor to"sinecore"
― michael helsem, Friday, 13 December 2002 17:30 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 18:31 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 18:33 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 19:04 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Honda (Honda), Friday, 13 December 2002 19:17 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 19:23 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 19:25 (twenty-one years ago) link
― g (graysonlane), Friday, 13 December 2002 19:58 (twenty-one years ago) link
― carson garhart, Sunday, 15 December 2002 00:10 (twenty-one years ago) link
have you heard the early Oval disc "Wohnton"? There's a singer crooning (in german) over most of the works, and it's amazing... my favorite Oval disc by far.
by including a human element over the more mechanistic backing, it somehow reminded me of my favorite john coltrane recordings (love supreme) where a solid rythem is pushed and pulled almost off track by more experimental solos.
if this is what is happening now w/ glitch pop, i welcome it.
― jfulton, Monday, 16 December 2002 03:48 (twenty-one years ago) link
― David Holl, Friday, 20 December 2002 17:50 (twenty-one years ago) link
which is your favourite track on the current Scratch Pet Land record?you have mentioned it many times i remember...
― Peter Lersch, Friday, 20 December 2002 19:07 (twenty-one years ago) link
it is of note that only the most pedestrian of discourses, commentaries, and scrawlings on this topic focus on things like simple chronologies and histories of laptop usage (a kind of technological frontiersmanship). ("mr. so-and-so was doing this back in 19xx and so therefore, anything momus has to say must be trainspotting." or something to this effect, as we can observe in the postings above by mr. Mike Taylor) these are to be ignored.
far exceeding these trifles in depth of meaning, the actual aesthetic/s being employed and their relationship to the technology is sadly and too often ignored. but even this is old hat, when we cite the piano-forte's precident as an example. a vast improvement over the harpsichord (in terms of dynamics, hence the name) the piano was hands-down a more advanced technology. however, the possession or usage of this tech. one became quite interesting when composers like beethoven (not the first to write for this instrument, mind you) began to take full "advantage" of the increased dynamic range of the instrument, and give us both the poundings and gentle strokes of his music for that instrument. this was the breakthrough in terms of musicality, composition and aesthetics.
and so it is, and so it goes with the laptop. the "hybrid" lappoppers (tsujiko, momus, and a few others)are the sound du jour because theirs is an aesthetic that makes use of laptop's true nature...that is to say that the laptop doesn't care what kind of sound it actually makes (the piano does, the guitar does...their bodies prefer certian scales and intonations, or they quickly come to be in a state of disrepair) and they interpret this not a kind of post-digital enslavement, a binding to the "limitations" of the machine, but as a kind of free ticket to be so "bold" (refreshingly novel) as to "return" to pop (of course they never left) by lucidly hacking their way through the dense, almost impenetrable forest of error the seems to surround most stupefied laptoppers, to their art, which in later times, might even be regarded as beautiful in its intransitiveness.
momus is part of a group of thinkers who's musings thankfully transcend (but still make use of) the cult of the laptop.
merry x-mas from tokyo, momus!roberthttp://www.tognet.org
― robert duckworth, Tuesday, 24 December 2002 08:11 (twenty-one years ago) link
― robert duckworth, Tuesday, 24 December 2002 11:33 (twenty-one years ago) link
― OCP (OCP), Tuesday, 24 December 2002 12:53 (twenty-one years ago) link
'supercollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis'
and that
'msp is a visual programming environment for building real'
Alarmingly, it also tells me that
'msp is a psychiatric disorder which involves caregivers intentionally harming children so that they can bask in the attention they receive for their own'
― Momus (Momus), Wednesday, 25 December 2002 01:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― jeremy may, Wednesday, 25 December 2002 07:44 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Jens (brighter), Wednesday, 25 December 2002 08:54 (twenty-one years ago) link
forum!!!! u can all cum on my glasses.
― vincent tuquedenne, Thursday, 26 December 2002 11:23 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Keither, Thursday, 26 December 2002 19:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
hmmm
I wonder if they sit down with 'failing in an interesting way' as a goal?
Is traditional indie music 'succeding in a boring way'?
I have to hear some of this shit.. (I mean stuff)
― Julian Standen, Monday, 30 December 2002 04:52 (twenty-one years ago) link
Something bizarre has just happened. I put on Dat Politics after reading momus' essay. Then I engaged once again in the neverending discussion with my mother about generation gaps and the evolution of aestethics. Nothing fancy, she was once again complaining about my hairstyle and I wanted her to understand that kids today have fuzzy hair like mine, and girls do like it even though she doesn't. As an example, I asked, do you like this music?She always whines about my music sounding too 'metalic' and unlike 'real music'. 'Where's the melody?',she wonders. But then about Dat Politics she said, with sincerity: 'I like it. It's got something...it's touching'
Damn!
― mario 3 (mario), Wednesday, 1 January 2003 01:13 (twenty-one years ago) link
Besides, aren't sound dusters renewing R'n'B's face?people like The Neptunes and stuff. I haven't heard much of that stuff but I know a hardcore sound duster (a fan of mego, childisc and the lot who disses Momus for writing about that music just for the hip factor) who is getting heavily into that stuff
― mario 3 (mario), Friday, 3 January 2003 00:30 (twenty-one years ago) link
The reason I'm interested in the progression of the 'glitch' and 'blip' is for this is related to my current dissertation on bjork, where I'm relating the path of Bjork songs/albums to display the merging between technology and nature/organic, using the metaphor of the cyborg and the goddess, with the outcome being the cybergoddess; the musical outcome is still inconclusive, Bjork's Vespertine certainly incorporated the best of both world's, in the usage of electro-acoustic samples, but is it possible for the organic and digital to be entirely combined in a musical form?
BTW this is my first post, so go easy! ;)
― Robert Price, Thursday, 13 February 2003 11:44 (twenty-one years ago) link
despite the 'all if full of love' video, i'm not sure how much bjork wants to do the cyborg persona thing... esp. on Vespertine she seems more concerned w/ bio-strangeness, psychadelic runny noses and stuff. or... the electronic angle of it seems to efface its technological implication for bodily fx. organic?
― Honda (Honda), Thursday, 13 February 2003 19:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
I guess at the very least, the digital manipulation of organic sounds could be seen as forming a link to the metaphor of the cybergoddess, I guess like the cybergoddess metaphor, the merging of the technological and organic/natural can take many forms.
― Robert Price (Robert Price), Sunday, 16 February 2003 13:59 (twenty-one years ago) link
http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern
― graywyvern, Wednesday, 23 July 2003 19:06 (twenty-one years ago) link
― graywyvern, Wednesday, 23 July 2003 19:07 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Sspeedy, Saturday, 30 August 2003 21:35 (twenty-one years ago) link
Link updated
― Off, Saturday, 30 August 2003 22:02 (twenty-one years ago) link
so go out plug MAX/MSP, Metasynth, Supercollider, PD, SMS, KoanPROor write your software and do some dust!
― Giorgio S, Tuesday, 7 October 2003 23:45 (twenty years ago) link
― RU, Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:30 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 13:28 (nineteen years ago) link
There should be a comma before "or something".
― RU, Friday, 12 August 2005 07:43 (nineteen years ago) link
A military regime in democratic disguiseThat lies in all impunityThat takes apart what it tookPeople years to buildPublic institutionsThat promised a decent life
― reggie (qualmsley), Sunday, 14 October 2018 19:50 (five years ago) link