luka

Well-known member
I don't want to feel I'm eating vegan food in Shoreditch Box Park. At least the stabbing music feels like Outside the Box Park.
 

luka

Well-known member
How is it possible to listen to new music without feeling like you're in a Nike Air stealth marketing campaign?

This is all synonymous with the birth of the hipster and the gentrification of culture and so IS hand in glove with the gentrification of Shoreditch. Maybe it's possible to do something outside of London, but then we would only hear it once it was coopted
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Well that's why I'm into the more abstract stuff really. the music with feeling and emotion i can't do because of exactly that aspect. london is dead. this is what annoys me a tad about still reading blackdown's blog, forget london. it's finished. it's only multicultural in terms of a cheap labour force that white people can fuck about. otherwise as a city its sound structure or its musical output doesn't really mean anything. like come off it, a lot of the drill stuff, there are like echoes of jungle, but who the fuck wants echoes? that's like middle class trap.
 

Leo

Well-known member
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.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
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.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
lol thanks leo we're going back to 95 again but...


the ethos of these guys was very prescient. neo-soul in the 21st century is for white people with a guilty race complex still. me and my mates back in the day listened to old rnb if we wanted soul.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the thing is me luca and version are showing you lot the way but you lot don't even have the humility of a nasreddin hoca pupil and that's saying something. all about those paltry emotional feelings. we don't want that. London is dead. love is dead! sex is dead! relationships are dead! they are all transactions now. rather than trying to recover some conservative halcyon haze the important thing is to surrender to electricity, to dispense with that contemptible ritual of capital. Everything has come to an end!
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Has the cost of promoting music replaced the cost of producing it?


you're on the right track but i'd say promotion in the sense of turning people onto shit doesn't exist anymore. it's all authoritarian advertising now. i mean john peel didn't like half of what he played lol. i know some people will say he did, but that's bollocks isn't it. he didn't fake it though. that infrastructure doesn't exist anymore. music has all become about the bourgeois personality again. if philip sherbourn or Andrew Rice or chal ravens writes about it then they must like it, and when they don't its acceptable not to like it. Like if it was cool to like James Blake in 2019 and Sherburn doesn't like the album he wouldn't be able to write that bollocking in pitchfork. the personality is already preordained by the industry apparatus before pen hits paper.

That's why i rate blissblogger for all his inaccuracies because it doesn't hide being partisan and maybe even being wrong. the journalist as fan doesn't exist anymore. it's a PR machine.

I think that joe muggs defence of brostep probably didn't convince many fact mag readers but i think it was the right thing for him to do, in the sense of hitting at the post-pitchfork readership of many of these publications. people are trying to treat dance music either as some kind of hyper aware political thing (antiestablishment) or this music on an emotional level with classical music or whatever. neither is the case. it's precisely the trashy drug noise that makes dance music so radical. it went places where the more traditional EBM/industrial couldn't go, which just endedup reverting to a darker version of european hard trance.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
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.


I'm listening to lsdxoxo boiler room. yeah i can see how people can rate this but tbf im not really into jersey club anb its descendents. the reasons for that are complex but essentially because post-jersey club became the post-dubstep for straight folks after post-dubstep fizzled out. we saw it all with night slugs. now night slugs shows on rinse are pretty boring atm, not like they were in 2011-12, basically the other day i heard bok bok play a set with hardly any grime or bassy bits in it. that is a problem we have to deal with in the uk. everything will become postified. luckily you don't seem to have that dynamic in the states. part of why i bang on the industrial techno drum a lot. it's about keeping that uncompromising hardcore alive. the problem is the structures will remain regimented in dance music necessarily for djs. so it's about going into new relationships with sound which i think the leftfield/no-skool techno does. otherwise you listen to club chai or whatever and it's like ok yeah middle eastern but you aren't even making aksak beats in 6/4 or 7/8 or 9/8. or 2/9. you are basically doing the entry level euclidian rhythm thing where you just subdivide a bar in ableton. well yeah you can do that with a break just chop it into microbits and make polyrhythms out of it. the thing is to come up with a new rhythmic vocabulary, to rewire the body. and that will generally mean making music unfit for djs to mix. but given dance musics histrionic worship of someone being able to put 2 4/4s together that's not going to happen. again that's why i like Autechre because they are making dance music (when you get down to it) but they aren't really making it for club djs. you can certainly mix a lot of it into a set, you just have to do it in a non-linear way.
 
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Numbers

Well-known member
it's precisely the trashy drug noise that makes dance music so radical.

That's quite true: take out its weird/eerie drug-related character and you have music merely suitable for fitness clubs, supermarkets, and preteens. High- and lowbrow redefined.
 

Leo

Well-known member
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.

I'm not a tumor fan but he's not r'n b at all, I used avant-r'n b as a cheeky description but he's well outside that. we might not dig it personally but stuff like him or arca are def new sounds. they aren't driving a galvanizing scene in London, but surely that's not the only criteria for "new", right? ;)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
no the problem is that stuff is basically upmarket selfie sex music but noise aesthetics have to be made upmarket now as that new commentariat are basically a generation above their guttertrash parents an grandparents. either that or radical art has been totally made mainstream and topdown. that's why i don't get on with it. there is pain in it but no snarling guttersnipe values at all. none of the dangerous sexiness of 2step dubs for instance, or the back alley vibes of a lot of disco and industrial, or even the hyper soul of zapp. again we're talking about the gnostic overloading of circuits. can yves tumor do that?
 

Leo

Well-known member
When I say "new", I don't necessarily mean innovative. I also mean good music that was made recently.

ah, ok, my mistake. I thought you were just looking for new styles.

in that case, third is correct: everything was better back in the day. ;)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
quite into the new rich devine as well, usually im a bit ambivalent about modular wank but he seems to be able to quirk some eerily aquatic bleeps out of it.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
also well into rashad becker. i mean he has managed to somehow make genuinely alien music for the 21st century. feels like some multitentacled extraterrestrial lifeform. very synaesthetic.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this guy is better when he's on an iranian rob hood flex that's when i really rate him but when he goes exclusively for the hard lsd nanotechnology futurism im less interested.


albums are a mixed bag. more exciting than arca's solo work but also a lot of this global diasporic conceptronica seems to have um. different reference points than i do. i hardly revisit my metal and short lived prog rock phase. i hate (at least temporarily) most metal apart from grindcore these days as well, even black metal. boring shit.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
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."

- - -

"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?"

- - -

"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."


I remember him in the wire saying something like I love traditional music but i don't want to understand how it works technically because of all its connotations and it demystifies it. i think that's also the attraction for electronic music for a lot of us. if we start dissecting it we basically become squeaky clean dnb or psy trance engineers. It's weird because electronic music is not punk in that way - like a lot of the newer dance records do actually sound more bigger in a club compared to older stuff. that's not really an opinion. i'm never sure how to deal with it. like i saw konstrukt live in 2015 or was it 16 and it was like this free jazz stuff you only get a fraction of it on the record. people chat about dmz and that but tbf with all respects to those guys the sheer propulsion of hearing a free jazz drummer or brotzmann scronking away. you can't really turn that up on a big system. it's the very travelling of air particles, you can hear the drummers hands or the breath on the sax.
 
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