Sound Dust

Momus, this turn is quite prosaic, and frankly, beneath you.

This is what you should have been on about 3 years ago when you could not get enough French pop. I really do not understand why you are so excited about this all of a sudden. This has been going on for years.

Is it because the cute indie kids are finally making cut up records? Has it finally become populist enough that you can wear it as this season's subcultural hipster capital badge? This bothers me not because I think electronics are bad, or you are betraying me as a fan. It bothers me because it is so behind the curve.

I do not know if it is because the "real" music camp that you come from is innately more conservative than the dance or electronic camp that I have had marginal involement in over the years, but this is seriously old news.

Laptop electronics were big news when Sutekh and Kit Clayton were making their rounds in 99, but that was 4 years ago. How long has the Microsound list been running on Hyperreal? Hell, how many Muteks have they had so far? What about Sonar in Barcelona? Even IDM glitch material has been passé for two years.

I have a great deal of respect for your ideas, but you really need to rethink your stance on this. It has a certain digital mania that reminds of the .com hype of the 90’s. You missed the window to dream about the technology. It has already been mapped by Techno and IDM people. There is no technical vocabulary that you can introduce, the ground has been covered.

You need to acknowledge that the wonder of the technology has passed and you need to figure out what you want to say with this language that you are in a sense appropriating for you own ends. Laptops are cool, but what does momus have to say about it?

The dialectic goes like this:

1. Music is sounding tired. What to do?

2. A new sound comes from the area we call 'experimental'. We have the exciting, scary feeling that music is starting again from scratch. Just what we needed!

3. There's a negotiation with more traditional forms. This comes from both the trad people 'dusting' their sound with the new thing, and from the Dusters themselves, who get bored with marginality and purism and start to bring in stuff like 'showbiz' and 'singing'. Both the avant garde and the mainstream are refreshed by the synthesis.

This is what I hear happening now, particularly here in France, where there's a more glam sort of DSP than I've seen in the US and Japan.

I'd add that I believe there is *no neutral position* for musicians when this sort of thing happens. You cannot ignore it. You must either declare yourself on board or off. It's not so much a question of bandwagon-jumping, more the very necessary question: am I with the punks/fauves/glitchers/whatever or am I irrelevant/an outsider/a reactionary?

And I do not know if I agree with your serious/showbiz dialectic. I think there is a definitely middle ground between the two camps. I think that middleground is where the decent things will happen. Aphex Twin and Early Autechre were both working somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, and they made some of the most enduring and noteworthy electronic music of the 90's. Or look at someone like Robert Henke who has been doing absolutely breathtaking work with Imbalance Conputer music sinse the early 90's by balancing(bad pun) between 20th Century Academic Electronics and Underground Techno.

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?

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?

that takes this whole thing in a new, very intersting direction.

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.

Thriller.

What are you, his fucking mother? Jeez.

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

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.....

haha have you not been listening to the readio for the last five years?

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...

How sad that you felt the need to box your scream into the stifling straightjackets of 'alphabet', 'words' and 'concepts', Vincent!

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?

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!

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?

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