Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Gabor Lazar

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Slothrop said:
This is my beef with a lot of conceptronica, tbh. Like, you've spent a nine month residency exploring the intersection of cybernetics and consumerism in a digital age, but the end result sounds indistinguishable from what a couple of former BMX kids with macbooks were doing twenty years ago. Why?
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I think it's partly down to where music technology's at. Where can you go from what Ae've been doing with Max/MSP? There haven't really been any drastically new instruments or programs since.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
Slothrop said:
This is my beef with a lot of conceptronica, tbh. Like, you've spent a nine month residency exploring the intersection of cybernetics and consumerism in a digital age, but the end result sounds indistinguishable from what a couple of former BMX kids with macbooks were doing twenty years ago. Why?
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that's one thing i like about early electroacoustic / avant garde electronic music. all the diligent study that went into it actually led to genuinely out there, different-sounding results.

the complete opposite of that is the indie kid approach, where you lazily gesture at interesting ideas without engaging meaningfully with them. namedropping joyce in the lyrics of your three chord retro garage rock song, instead of doing this.

maybe a lot of conceptronica is closer to the latter than its creators like to think.

edit: agree w/ version below, "translating that engagement into music" is exactly what i'm talking about
 
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Does meaningfully engaging with Joyce or whoever guarantee interesting musical results though? I'm sure there are some people who can both meaningfully engage with figures like that and make boring music.
 
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There's a producer called Bergsonist whose track titles follow suit and who makes pretty standard techno. I'm not particularly excited by the tunes, but I dunno that that's enough to judge whether or not they've meaningfully engaged with Bergson etc. They may just be bad at translating that engagement into music.
 
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I suppose meaningfully engage in this context means doing something interesting or valuable in response though.
 
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Simon silverdollarcircle

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Leo said:
I don't hate it but listen to very little of it, since so much is derivative. it can be interesting in a mildly abstract/experimental music sort of way.

I am puzzled why labels like TTT put this stuff out as 12" singles...how many DJs actually play these tracks in clubs (when clubs existed, anyway)? I can see albums or digital releases for home listening or radio play but how many clubs can possibly cater to this type of thing? but labels keep releasing it on 12s, so someone must be buying it.

can you imagine the club scene? bunch of mopey graphic designers in cool t-shirts swaying to a mark fell glitch for nine minutes.
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Quite a few of the nights round south London I knew of played this kinda stuff quite a bit before we weren't allowed to the leave the house ever again.
Like trilogy Tapes did nights at the big south London warehouse venues. And there was a host of fellow travellers who used to play similar things.

I saw the guy from demdike stare do a Friday night club set in stoke Newington a few years back. Lots of "difficult" grey music

That's why this whole thing confuses me.i don't understand why anyone would play this sort of thing in a club, but they do/did
 
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Simon silverdollarcircle

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My ungenerous take on it is that there were always people in raves, within the scene, that didn't really like dancing. It didn't sit comfortably for them. They liked the sound and the volume and the duration of electronic music in clubs but they didnt really like the dancing part.

But now this lot have gained more and more influence within dance music with predictably disastrous results.

They are infiltrators, cuckoo's in the nest! :)
 
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luka

luka

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Simon silverdollarcircle said:
I don't really think mark fell is scum. Mark, if you're reading this, you seem like a nice guy.i liked your stuff as snd.

It's not you, it's me.
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don't beleive him Mark. Simon wrote to me at some length saying he think you're horrible and you're ruining club culture singlehandedly
 
Leo

Leo

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Simon silverdollarcircle said:
My ungenerous take on it is that there were always people in raves, within the scene, that didn't really like dancing. It didn't sit comfortably for them. They liked the sound and the volume and the duration of electronic music in clubs but they didnt really like the dancing part.

But now this lot have gained more and more influence within dance music with predictably disastrous results.

They are infiltrators, cuckoo's in the nest! :)
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yeah, that makes sense. it's more "a club as place to hear weird music on a good, loud sound system" as opposed to "a club for dancing" in a traditional sense. and like I said, I don't hate it (particularly things by mark fell, who I like...hello, mark!), I just don't play it or spend money on it very often.
 
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Simon silverdollarcircle

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Yes I do think there's a common impulse behind a lot of these things,even if sonically they are very different.

This common sense of the music being at one remove, of it playing around with the signifiers of dance music without fully committing to it being dance music
 
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To me, the above sounds like house and garage with an updated palette. It doesn't strike me as particularly grey or difficult. The rhythms are regular, it's clearly built for clubs.
 
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Is it any weirder than jungle? Didn't people struggle to dance to some of that at the time?
 
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