Has the cost of promoting music replaced the cost of producing it?
third, I like some of the stuff you've posted here but most of it is just slight variations (or not even) on basic techno, isn't it? I'm not knocking it, just don't hear much that's "new" in it.
like it or not, stuff like LSDXOXO is busting the underground in NYC right now. then you have Yves tumor, again maybe not everyone's cup of tea but definitely "new stuff", kind of avant-r'n b.
it's precisely the trashy drug noise that makes dance music so radical.
not interested in new rnb. you're taking a 60 year old genre and flagging its dead corpse. Even more old than techno. who cares? I'll check out lsdxoxo though. wasn't big on yves tumor.
When I say "new", I don't necessarily mean innovative. I also mean good music that was made recently.
RA ran a feature on him a few years ago, he has a pretty unique approach - https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/1941
But when he discusses the music he's making outside his day job—and it's worth stressing that the music he's making falls well outside the bulk of what passes through his limiters and equalizers—he sounds more like a man of letters, delving into character development, tone and storytelling. His trombone is an instrument, but he's essentially interested in it as a literary device. "I would write novels if I had more talent with that," he says. "But I have more talent with sculpting sound than I have with writing words."
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"I really don't feel my music is experimental music," he says. "I reject that notion because I'm not experimenting." He explains that most of the music you'd find sharing shelf space with Notional Species isn't particularly experimental, either—it's made with electronic, synthetic elements that occasionally sound wild and abstract, but it's more or less mimicking sounds and structures that have been used before. "This is the same kind of disappointment that I get when I look at animated movies, and I see that they just use very classic camera schemes. I'm always like, why don't you make use of the option, the possibility, to do something within animation that can't be done with a real camera?"
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"At the end of the score, I have a list of names. They show me the features that these characters have and also the features they share with other characters. Then I sit down and sonify it."
Becker says he tends to squeeze "the same kind of character out of most of the machines that I encounter" during this sonification process, and I ask if he can characterize it. "It's rather the progressions," he explains. "It's the envelopes and the harmonic progressions that the sounds have that are all—like syllables, maybe. These are the progressions that I obviously, or naturally, or automatically look for, that resemble speech, breathing and performance, that represent a certain actual shape of a body."
With the characters achieving something like completeness, Becker starts honing the pieces of music they'll occupy. He spent some years working on theatrical productions, and he approached committing Notional Species to tape the way a director might put together a play if he was also acting in every role. His goal with each of the album's eight pieces was to press record and perform them in the studio, with a minimum of mixing and post-production. "I appreciate that generally in recorded music—to just record music, not record fragments, not record tracks, but be in charge of the decisions that you make while playing music."
He says he's long had an affinity for music made in the days before multi-track recording, when music had to be performed and errors weren't so easily scrubbed out. When he first started Clunk, he intended to only commit two tracks to tape—one for each stereo channel. "The flaws, and the courage to live with these decisions—it gives the music some timeless tension that has by a large scale disappeared nowadays in music production."