luka

Well-known member
what Sophie reminds me of is if, I don't know if you have these in small town Texas, but we have these self service counters in supermarkets here, you have to checkout your own shopping, that's progress, and they speak to you,and Sophie is like if one of those self service checkout counters made its own music
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
The depths and textures and tactility of the sounds and environment created become as important as the tune. The grating violin at the end of VU's Heroin is an entirely physical phenomenon, no different than Arca tossing in some screeching amorphous howl into a track.

...

I used to listen to My Bloody Valentine and feel like the intense weight portrayed in the music was tugging at my chest with all the physicality of a giant pushing an iceberg up a mountain. Has CGI music had that moment yet?

was thinking of starting a thread called "what was good about rock music?" and using mbv as an illustration of the answer. now that rock is sort of in the rear view mirror, i increasingly find that what i uniquely love about it is its unprecedented deployment of the electric guitar. the cacophony, the howl. these noisey-yet-harmonic, violent-yet-sensual movements of sound. its actually similar to what kumar was talking about, but regarding jungle:

There’s something similar with this kind of thing, the hyper distinct frequency bands in the Sophie tracks that need all that space around them to properly stand out. You don’t really get any dirt, or that thick sludgy midrange with an amen break that emulsifies jungle. It would be dumb if someone said it’s politically insidious like the aural equivalent of homeless spikes or something, but you could see what they mean.

so much music now seems to be distinctly polarized between beats--rock-like, fixed, heavy--and ambient melodic sounds--ethereal, liquid-like, weightless. and that works. but maybe the rich, unbounded midrange you got in rock--burning, enveloping, seemingly impossible to fully control--shouldn't become a thing of the past.
 
Last edited:

blissblogger

Well-known member
Britt Brown in the Wire, reviewing Arca's Xen, made an interesting point about what you're calling CGI music

"The music of Arca... often feels indistinguishable from a high tech software demonstration"

But a lot of the history of experimental electronic music is a bit like that - people coming up with effects, testing the capacities of a machine, extracting the weirdnesses within a piece of technology

Then you have to find a way of organizing those devices into a structure that actually functions and serves a purpose

To keep with the digital-era cinema analogy, it's like the difference between a movie that only exists to showcase what can be done with the latest state-of-artest technology, and a movie that has those thrills and action-pyrotechnics but also actually satisfies as a drama

Re MBV, it's fairly easy to make amorphous swirling guitar noise, what set them apart was the way they threaded melody through the haze-tempest, and how the melody and vocals (and the song titles) gave it a feeling. That's why they were MBV and Skullflower weren't.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
one of the things that put me off keeping up with the music was that when I saw SOPHIE live pre-album it was not great, it was like EDM trance but afraid to commit fully to tastelessness. We didn't around for the full performance, there was definitely something else happening in the other room that was better.
 

wektor

Well-known member
for me, a certain approach to delay feedback and industrial/dubby atmosphere has a lot of traits of particle fx

latest Szlazak

carbon like dust, something alike to burnt bits blown out of a bonfire, though for sure heavier
btw I saw @john eden is the only person on discogs who admitted to owning the casette of this

also anything by Ena

his productions give off a feeling of an experiment chamber, where various kinds of gas get heavily compressed, leak in various directions with pressure changes and auto-ignite in chain microexplosions
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
im on page 6 and i havent found you yet but ive been totally blown away by the quality of my own work. its at such a high level of perception that none of the comments have any likes. no one understands it yet.
I dont make it till the very end. a total show stopper. thunderous applause and everyone leaves the auditorium.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
multiple like from blissblogger, a quote from mvuent. gus indignantly holding back all praise, seething from behind the screen
 

wektor

Well-known member
i've been advocating for a return to this broader style of production. the drums are dated in a thin/boom bap way but if the textural research of club deconstruction and -the gumminess and glitter- of ~trap~ could be paired with these kinds of rhythmic + hook recipes (which you could argue SOPHIE was already doing, that her + others commitment to *the integrity of a club construction* is what makes 'deconstructed club' such a misnomer),
then you'd have a psychedelic rap freed of its anhedonia and an idm freed of its own evasions.
I guess some of early, hip-hop influenced Arca stuff would land there? not talking as far as Nuuro, but Stretch 2 rather.
I feel like hh beat sound design mainly kept on pushing towards heaviness since the rise of trance-influence dominated trap, even the DG crew seems to have gone off the trail shortly after they blew up

one of my favourite examples is what this rap crew from back home used to do, this is not their most new age track, but I suppose what it is paired with visually makes it relevant for the thread:
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
was thinking of starting a thread called "what was good about rock music?" and using mbv as an illustration of the answer. now that rock is sort of in the rear view mirror, i increasingly find that what i uniquely love about it is its unprecedented deployment of the electric guitar. the cacophony, the howl. these noisey-yet-harmonic, violent-yet-sensual movements of sound. its actually similar to what kumar was talking about, but regarding jungle:

Was gonna shamelessly post this in the afrohouse/amapiano thread responding to @glasshand about how those producers could slow down by 10-15 bpm for double timed log drum fast/slow attack (the johnny burnette/bo didley continuum!) but i'll shamelessly put it here.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
for me, a certain approach to delay feedback and industrial/dubby atmosphere has a lot of traits of particle fx

latest Szlazak

carbon like dust, something alike to burnt bits blown out of a bonfire, though for sure heavier
btw I saw @john eden is the only person on discogs who admitted to owning the casette of this

also anything by Ena

his productions give off a feeling of an experiment chamber, where various kinds of gas get heavily compressed, leak in various directions with pressure changes and auto-ignite in chain microexplosions

Ena is the best producer to have developed over the last 10 years. the guy is incredible.
 
Top