Neon Screams!

C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
thirdform said:
if autotune was coded to tune according to quartertones, etc, then it would be very subtle, hardly noticeable. Ironically its strength is its very occidental supremacy.
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But it is. Or rather it can be. What you're keying in on is the fact that people have misused the autotune in order to provide a different sense of character. Subtle auto-tune, when used properly is hardly detectable and has been the bedrock of a ton of western pop-rock even in it's earlier incarnations through stuff such as 'vocal sweetening'. I can think of songs like Teena Marie's "Ooo La La La" which predate Autotune but when you pick it apart it's an unnatural sounding song for how much pitch correction is done, thus flattening any of the graces of the song. Which is of course, what non-educated folk have convinced themselves autotune is typically doing.

What you're lamenting and criticizing is the western notions of composition for pop being what they are. That has nothing to do with the technology itself. If anything autotune's potential for experimentation is still valid, it's just that those initial experiments are now hitting a cul de sac.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
CrowleyHead said:
But it is. Or rather it can be. What you're keying in on is the fact that people have misused the autotune in order to provide a different sense of character. Subtle auto-tune, when used properly is hardly detectable and has been the bedrock of a ton of western pop-rock even in it's earlier incarnations through stuff such as 'vocal sweetening'. I can think of songs like Teena Marie's "Ooo La La La" which predate Autotune but when you pick it apart it's an unnatural sounding song for how much pitch correction is done, thus flattening any of the graces of the song. Which is of course, what non-educated folk have convinced themselves autotune is typically doing.

What you're lamenting and criticizing is the western notions of composition for pop being what they are. That has nothing to do with the technology itself. If anything autotune's potential for experimentation is still valid, it's just that those initial experiments are now hitting a cul de sac.
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Sure, I didn't express myself quite clearly there. What I like about the maharaganat djs in Egypt and the rai producers in the Algerian diaspora is that they force the software into extreme pitch correction mode. They can of course use it properly and many non-street musics over there are very subtly autotuned. Because middle eastern singing is heavily based on quartertonal melisma you tend to get these earily posthuman pitch slides, but what makes it truly posthuman in contradiction to a lot of the ways that say Quavo and co. use it is that the line between the autotune and the human voice is so blurred. You become one with the computer when listening to it. K-Bart is more into this what he calls 'anti-rap-rap' but in a way that goes against his argument because that's about syllabic subversion more than posthuman innovations in the voice. It's why Luke was correct in this instance to counter with but Migos sound like aerobics instructors!
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
thirdform said:
Kanye was the best exponent in a western rnb/hip hop context I feel. Love Lockdown and Heartless. Could never get with Travi$ Scott, Quavo, etc. too cartoonish. I've never really liked overtly childish or innocent music, what I like about hardcore is it's post-edenic, moments of bliss interspersed with nasty tearout riffs from hades. But something like Eurodance is horrifying to me for this reason, it's simply edenic.
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Core principle of Thirdcore.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
finished the first two chapters and certain ideas + trails intrigue but idk something about the writing sets off my bullshit detector. i think that if i come up with any kind of larger Criticism of it it would not have a ton in common with muggs' or third's
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i think its a multipart thing of
1) this is the music of the present moment and not the future, and in that sense it is passed us by [and therefore not of use to -us- as musicians for making a future music]

2) it takes certain aesthetic positions/preferences and sets of oppositions (the 'dissensus consensus', which is a real thing and hard to argue against) for granted [ie in its discussion of gully versus gaza where caribbean christianity is coded as reactionary pretty unilaterally]

3) there's a grain of truth in muggs' criticism of it as racist/eurocentric/colonising [even if muggs review is shrill/motivated by petty beef] and third's observation that it is still very much in the school of rock criticism on techno [reynolds]/looking for that same kind of future music [that the opposition it sets up of its own thesis of a future music -against- that of reynold's et al on techno is a false one], or that its playing that kind of game with rap and dancehall
 
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other_life

other_life

bioconfused
but it's not something i'm going to go to war with anyone over and something i'd like to substantiate more with a close reading, ie doing drash/tafsir paragraph by paragraph, reading the book -against- the music it references [a youtube playlist of all music referenced is in order, as an alternative to Mister Mackintosh's curated + blended mixcloud files]
 
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other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i think that the notion that vocal psychedelia, the machine as ally/angel-servitor of the voice, is a macro-genre, of which the musics in the book are just particular instantiations, is an insight worth developing in regards to 1) the 'moanwave' of the Skaters, Double Leopards, Grouper et. al. (which is a type of vocal psychedelia now ~15 years behind us) 2) academy/art-world/techno press aligned electronic musics ie Herndon, the use of voice on Laurel Halo's Quarantine, the use of Lopatin's own voice in 0PN after Garden of Delete (which is a kind of vocal music the Dissensus Consensus rightly has little patience for in Herndon but is underdeveloped in the direction that Halo went, even Halo prematurely abandoned it)
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
because these are two kinds of music that in many ways could not be further from the music Mister Mackintosh is writing about but they are also 'vocal psychedelias' + -stand to learn- from the music of Neon Screams
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Yes. I mean, his writing is very jet fuel acid techno. In many ways it oversells the music and sometimes (I'm saying this with all love to barty) ends up reading like someone at boomkat decided to go on a speed bender.

Let me give you an example:

Kartel’s “Kill Dem” was a pounding paramilitary parade goose-stepping its way inside your brain. Bashment was living up to its name — bludgeoning, battering and brutalising the listener with everything at its disposal.
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Except there are 90s riddims which are much more harder, much more militant. The riddim of kill dem is not all that different to ironically the gay vogue house, an unlikely association that noone would want to associate with Kartel.

This I feel is the strength of Mackintosh' writing, that it's very enthusiastic. It's replete with alliteration, plosives, and non-standard accelerated sentence structures. That is a strength. It is invigorating. But also there's an achilles heal here that the more he historicises his theories, they will become a double edged sword that will bight him in the back. This is why he needs to move on from rockism in his next work.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
that's precisely the thing is that it's such an oversell. and that the music he's writing about is not as much of a rupture from its antecedents as he is selling it as
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
also not sold on the difference/opposition between 'frag rap' and 'mumble rap' and the coding of that opposition to apollo and dionysus is an -embarrassingly huge- tell. to kids out here that are playing nle choppa and pop smoke on the roku tv's in bodegas and on bluetooth speakers at train stations it's all still trap music. this is someone trying to get ahead on genre coinage and probably none of it will hold for anyone involved in the production of this kind of music or the people its primarily intended for (which is neither me nor barty)
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
other_life said:
that's precisely the thing is that it's such an oversell. and that the music he's writing about is not as much of a rupture from its antecedents as he is selling it as
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It's amazingly talented writing for sure. But one can see here why Muggs feels threatened. Because Muggs cannot write like this, but it's hardly as barty needs to be on the pulse. He just needs to have Simon backing him, and university leftists affiliated with the repeater/verso axis. In a sense you have to really applaud him for playing the system so skillfully. In that sense Muggs is wrong, he's not so much a gentrifier as exploiting the gentrified framework that music critics (Muggs included) layed the bedrock for.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i think there is a counter-narrative/anti-image of this music yet to be written. it just requires a shift of the camera a degree left. i think we are still very much living in the 'old future', that mechanisation of the old style continues apace and our interface with it is not yet as smooth or integrated with our biology as this books treatment of that theme would like us to believe.
 
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