Dematerialisation.

blissblogger said:

really? "eight hours of generative stuff" doesn't sound like what Eno means by generative - which is an app or other system that contains a process to generate creates musical events that stay within certain parameters but never repeats and where there are infinite permutations. So that kind of generative music would not have a set duration, you could start the generative system and leave it running for 8 minutes, 8 hours, 8 days, 8 years...

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I think that's what they do, they just record and edit the output so that they can release it. You're just getting a snapshot.

version said:

I think that's what they do, they just record and edit the output so that they can release it. You're just getting a snapshot.

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Oh right. Well I think they have misapplied Eno's idea - since if anybody ever played the 8 hours twice, they'd be repeating it and you would no longer be experiencing generative music.

And in fact it's not even generative in the first place, at least for the listener/consumer. It's generated, but not in front of the listener's ears.

One of the Eno ideas is that each consumer / owner of the app gets their own unique rendition, but only as a one-time listening experience. And then they get another one, and another one - each unique, each ephemeral.

He's all about that idea of the author absenting from the process, setting up the system and letting it roll. Whereas Autechre are very much present, inserting themselves right in the middle of it and saying 'these here are the good bits, these are what you will listen to - and in fact this 8 hour set of sounds is all that you will ever be able to listen to"

I should say though, I have zero interest in listening to generative music, I like repeating things - if it's glorious, then you want that gloriousness exactly the same on each iteration. you might perceive different facets each time you listen, but the gloriousness as such is definitively achieved - it's product not process.

But he could be right, old uncle Bri.... maybe my attitude is just an un-evolved, hopeless retentive and neurotic collector way of thinking, and in the future people will want the Heraclitean (is that the right word?) flux, the river of sound that is never the same river each time you step in it....

uncle bri been drnkin his own kool aid a bit too much mefinks

It's an interesting idea, but it sounds really bland for some reason, like the musical equivalent of an infinite line of Ikea products. I'm just picturing lots of flat geometric shapes slotting together in millions of different patterns, but being kind of uniform in their flatness.

re: Autechre - I wouldn't be surprised to see them release the software itself at some point, they dumped a bunch of their live patches and samples recently and they seem to be experimenting with format and presentation more and more these days.

I dont think there's actually much of a gap between Eno and AE in concrete terms. They both set up parameters using custom software. Guide or manipulate the performance, record it and release it.

Eno's vision of an app based system with infinite permutations is another step along the road, but unless you go to one of his installations, the end result for the listener is the same. A snapshot of the system.

I think Eno's influence is most felt in the realms of music hardware and composition - the Nord has generative patches built in and there's a shitload of software that features various levels of generative processes. Of course he wasn't the first to come up with the idea either.

This is good: https://teropa.info/loop/#/title

Corpsey said:

now we have synth music that exists entirely in the synthetic zone

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not quite a refutation of your (admittedly undercooked) theory, but

there is tons and tons of 70s synth music that is entirely synthetic, albeit analogue synth rather than digital

Tangerine Dream is the perfect example - their early records are truly alien, then they start using sequencers and quickly become progressively less interesting

another example I think of is Allen Ravenstine on early Pere Ubu records, v into synth as maker of noises rather than glorified keyboard

while knowing Reich/Riley etc pretty well my technical knowledge of systems music is kinda half-assed (I mean I know the ideas, but not the math when it goes that direction)

but TD, Ravenstine etc are the opposite of that. In C is a set of guidelines to a process. Zeit and Atem are formless, protean, everything and nothing.

exercising everything by tapping into nothing.

blissblogger said:

I like repeating things - if it's glorious, then you want that gloriousness exactly the same on each iteration

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this is it for me - part of my central kick. it's in all my favorite things - the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, disco, old hardcore records. if a thing is the best thing, why change it?

repeating the best part is the foundation of all modern dance music, for one

that's the entire idea of disco - take the best part of the song and extend it, possibly until it's the entire song - and all dance music follows more or less on that principle

of course there's dynamics, building tension to release, etc but it's always about getting to the the best part

to me the most important, if not only, meaning of Heraclitus is a more cryptic, expansive way of saying you can never go home again. Everything changes, but in another sense the river is still the river. when I listen to a record I've heard 100 times, it's the same but I hear it differently. I have no idea how humans will change in 50 or 100 years but it's hard to imagine art ever being divorced from emotional connection to memory. to be human is to be finite and limited, and thus to experience nostalgia.

generative music to me seems to belong to the limitless realm of the post-human, and to be a fundamentally different thing in that sense

tho it could be said that this entire thread - and all the threads that are one thread - are a discussion of the early stages of transition from human to post-human

backing into it via an indirect approach - music etc - but what else is dematerialization? the removal of the limitations of the body

there's a line in Neuromancer I think about - that people have always dreamed of making pacts with demons, and only now is it truly possible (in that case, with true AI)

when you look at a world run by algorithms - which in a way is even more terrifying, in that that algorithms have no agency

anyway, I have always liked the idea of music that has no beginning and end, from La Monte Young to whatever

but of course it does begin and end, because humans are finite and all their endeavors begin and end (and eventually crumble, Ozymandias style)

whereas generative music truly has no end or beginning, or limits. it just goes.

but to me that also means it has no meaning. it just is. what is the point? if art is about making choices, and you never have to make any choices, what is the point?

so I wouldn't even call it art. that's not a value judgment. it's just something else.

padraig (u.s.) said:

not quite a refutation of your (admittedly undercooked) theory, but

there is tons and tons of 70s synth music that is entirely synthetic, albeit analogue synth rather than digital

Tangerine Dream is the perfect example - their early records are truly alien, then they start using sequencers and quickly become progressively less interesting

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Good point

1) my half baked suggestion was that even these early synth musicians would have been more influenced by accoustic music than synth musicians today might be, because accoustic music was all there was at a certain point

2) i'd guess that tangerine dream and artists like them were being deliberately alien, which can be interesting, but i was thinking more (and admittedly i didn't stipulate this) about pop music and dance music, and particularly hardcore music, which was futurist and so on but drew on accoustic samples (compare tech step, e.g., which probably uses samples but was going for a much more synthetic, 'inhuman' sound)

ahh maybe my theory IS complete bollocks - still, i think tangerine dream and co were probably fringe weirdos back in the day and nowadays the mainstream is synthetic

Corpsey said:

even these early synth musicians would have been more influenced by accoustic music than synth musicians today might be

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I don't think your main thesis - synth music gets more synthetic as the half-life of each generation that had a more direct connection to acoustic music fades - is wrong

that's why I didn't say it's a refutation - rather an addendum

that early synth music is often just as synthetic as now, but in a different way. "deliberately alien" is something I don't think can be determined, but it has no single recognizable form.

tech guys like droid will know the details better but as I hinted at, it gets less synthetic with the advent of (better) sequencers, MIDI, etc

ancillary technologies that allow synthesizers to more easily perform like "instruments"

a classic case of advances limiting rather than expanding potential. then your cycle begins, forms getting more and more synthetic, released from acoustic limits.

the larger point being that you can reach the synthetic from either end, from the protean or from structure.

On Tangerine Dream specifically - I wouldn't call them fringe weirdos, especially compared to the true fringe weirdos and obscurities.

In fact I chose them as an example because they were clearly influenced by the avant-garde (Stockhausen etc) but also sold pretty well and were at least nominally a "rock" band of sorts

and also because they were, like Can, influenced by things like Jimi Hendrix, but also by Bach, Wagner, Lygeti, and so on

it is true they weren't making pop records. maybe some of their 80s stuff i.e. (the Steve Reich-influenced) "Love On a Real Train" qualifies but that's almost a wholly different thing

still there's a whole galaxy of that stuff - some of it quite "alien"

part of it is that brief moment, loosely the first half of the 70s, when technology and the record companies continuing lack of grasp on what was cool created possibilities




there is also straight up Moog etc pop, "Popcorn" etc, which idk as much about cos it's not very interesting - it's an earlier version of what you're talking about later on, synths as acoustic instruments

luka said:

Early tangerine dream is all flute, drum and frazzled electric guitar funnily enough

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ya Electric Meditation (which some or all of them supposedly disowned, iirc)

but I'm really talking about Alpha Centauri, Atem, and Zeit

i.e. once they start using the VCS3, but before they start using sequencers

padraig (u.s.) said:

blissblogger said:

I should say though, I have zero interest in listening to generative music, I like repeating things - if it's glorious, then you want that gloriousness exactly the same on each iteration. you might perceive different facets each time you listen, but the gloriousness as such is definitively achieved - it's product not process.

Click to expand...

this is it for me - part of my central kick. it's in all my favorite things - the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, disco, old hardcore records. if a thing is the best thing, why change it?

repeating the best part is the foundation of all modern dance music, for one

that's the entire idea of disco - take the best part of the song and extend it, possibly until it's the entire song - and all dance music follows more or less on that principle

Click to expand...

repeating something with no changes can be great of course, but maybe you can add some degree of variation with losing the 'stay on it' appeal you're talking about? guess i'm thinking of how acid house or dub techno will be built around the repetition of one motif that gets filtered, sent through reverb, etc. in different ways without its basic character really changing--or even how old delta blues musicians will play the same riff over and over slightly differently each time. (there are probably a lot of relatively minimalist styles of music that wouldn't qualify though.)

idk, just wonder if it's possible to the combine the 'repeat the best part' ethos of dance music with the 'river-like' flux possible with generative music to an extent.

"life is the matrix"

An ICE spokesperson says 21 Sav -- real name Sha Yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph -- is a U.K. national who is unlawfully in the country and has been since 2006 when his visa expired. They say he came to the States a year earlier at the age of 12.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/02/03/21-savage-arrested-by-ice-atlanta-super-bowl-weekend/

the ubiquity of the word "savage" in the dematerialised age.

is soma on the way?