mvuent

Void Dweller
a very forward looking way to achieve 'fog of war' without being able to be pigeonholed as 'retro' is not necessarily or exclusively to put things to tape -

'wrong'/'brickwalled' compression in contexts outside of pop music is the thing, using digital effects 'wrong' in general.
this is where 'vaporwave' both departs from and is continuous with 'hypnagogic pop', in that something like 'redefining the workplace' relies as much on Every Ableton Effect At The Stupidest Settings At Once as something like 'jarvid 9' relies on natural cassette tape compression.
the comparison could even be seen as 1:1.

putting things through amps and recording them as such rather than having everything be in-box/direct inject is key, also. capturing how the sound pushes the air on record rather than having the record be this abstract digital space. this sets what you do apart from things having the sort of audio-watermark of their workstation/line of equipment.

good point, using new technical means to imitate anachronistic "fog of war" effects orients you in a good direction. failure to achieve something old resulting in something new and all.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
genuine q. what actually defines chillwave?

effortless gestures. seductive vacuousness. entirely from the wrist, no deliberation, composition or even thought involved. the aesthetics or social connections are not really the common denominator. it's the lack of effort required to spin something bigger out of stupid-simple gestures.

this gets at what's prevented me from exploring ferraro et al more. the worry that all the messing with "fog of war" amounts to a gimmick, that listening to the first five minutes is enough as far as his early material goes.

as you point out though, toil-less composition can produce results. (my favorite era of aphex is when he was spending 3 hours per track, for example.) so maybe that concern isn't a fair one. what's not to like about seductive vacuousness?

but still, there is a sense in which what I want to hear is probably different from what a lot of these artists want. I'd want to manipulate the seams into a form of some kind. going back to the talk in the electroacoustic threads of creating a sense of reality bending. and surely it's harder to get there with the kind of breezy approach described.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller

on this album tape distortion doesn't create a sense of oldness so much as it creates a sense of "living" dynamic atmosphere. the movement of air.



who knows how this would sound without distortion. probably not nearly as good.



I don't care how much you like folk music, no way you could listen to this and keep your attention fully on the guitar playing and singing.



consciously or not, I think fahey's imitating the quality of those old recordings on his last few albums. he's not recreating the same recording quality, but using it as inspiration for the weird drone sounds that accompany his guitar. evoking "Destroyed buildings, the remains, the silence" as someone in the comments says. not evoking the old recordings themselves, but some imagined world suggested by them.



imitating "unintentional" tape / distortion sounds and using them very deliberately in a futuristic way.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller

on this album tape distortion doesn't create a sense of oldness so much as it creates a sense of "living" dynamic atmosphere. the movement of air.

compare with this, where he's clearly going for a SAW I vibe and uses a lot of reverb, but without fog of war.


to me there's a lot less atmosphere; it sounds like a studio recording not a world.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
from rereading this thread, it seems like the three ways of approaching this topic I started off with have aligned pretty well with the directions we've taken the topic in. for example, Leo's saying that the samples in Burial sound "lost" supports the idea of fog of war conveying distance or removal.

but there is one idea that came up on the first page that maybe doesn't fit with any of those categories: the idea of using it as a resistance tactic against dematerialization. like that old apple commerical where they throw a sledgehammer through the screen.


I don't know if I'd be on board with that idea. would any of you? does that approach made you a luddite?

an alternative route involves accepting the airtight, frictionless digital qualities of modern music while still taking fog of war phenomena as inspiration.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
.

but there is one idea that came up on the first page that maybe doesn't fit with any of those categories: the idea of using it as a resistance tactic against dematerialization. like that old apple commerical where they throw a sledgehammer through the screen.
.

On chino of the day the other week I talked about footwork’s dichotomy. On the one hand it was ”new” insofar as there wasn’t anything quite like that (at least not a whole genre of it), but it failed to be the future because it inhabited an antiquated soundworld (sample-based, soul, funk, etc.).

Dubstep was a similar thing of trying to hold on to and reinvigorate a bygone soundworld (reconfiguring the timbral language of the nuum) and didn’t really muster anything in that incarnation.

Reconfiguring the past won’t get anyone anywhere.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I liked the latest Jon Hassell thing that went for this effect. Sketched out the concept as sonic pentimento. It’s about memory, how they become altered by time. Manipulating layers to get this temporally displaced, anachronistic effect. Sounds like streams of memories passing by each other in the circuits of the mind.

 

mvuent

Void Dweller
Something I like about crackles, snatches and fragments of radio and so on is the idea of an intrusion of another world into this one. It feels like a point where several paths converge for a few minutes, seeing a ghost. That Deleuze quote about a musician being someone who appropriates something from a continuous acoustic flow is something I think about a fair bit.

»One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician?«

Like catching and surfing a wave, the turtles in Finding Nemo riding the East Australian Current.


I liked the latest Jon Hassell thing that went for this effect. Sketched out the concept as sonic pentimento. It’s about memory, how they become altered by time. Manipulating layers to get this temporally displaced, anachronistic effect. Sounds like streams of memories passing by each other in the circuits of the mind.


Contrails.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
Chemtrails.

Where is version anyway? He's been the life and soul recently now hes been swallowed up by the pitiless void. Someone go and save him.
 
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