Sound Dust

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.

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

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?

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.

m.

*oh--but from now on, of course, the future & all pasts will
exist simultaneously--

PS in 1986 i carried a battery-powered cassette recorder into a
science museum that had some old analogue synthesizer on display,
& recorded an hour of improvisation based on heavily distorted
sine-waves. i am hoping this will someday be seen as a precursor to
"sinecore"

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.

which is your favourite track on the current Scratch Pet Land record?
you have mentioned it many times i remember...

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!
robert
http://www.tognet.org

'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'

forum!!!! u can all cum on my glasses.

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)

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!

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

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! ;)

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?

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.

http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern

Link updated

so go out plug MAX/MSP, Metasynth, Supercollider, PD, SMS, KoanPRO
or write your software and do some dust!

There should be a comma before "or something".

A military regime in democratic disguise
That lies in all impunity
That takes apart what it took
People years to build
Public institutions
That promised a decent life