Neon Screams!

[luka]

he also said he had no idea who he was when he made a mix for his podcast. it was only last week i told him it was a turner prize winner and now he regrets having missed a potential diamond networking opportunity.

 

[catalog]

I think leckwy is good so I was surprised. Also if you go to the twitter, he's pinned a post from Bobby Gillespie, who I also like, bug I'm pretty sure yoh were all saying how shit primal scream were

 

[Corpsey]

Has kit mackintosh done anything since this, whoever he is?

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose autotune is still huge but my latest cursory examinations of rap playlists suggest that the drakeo flow (i.e. Half bored sounding talking flow) is also huge

When the production is mad but the rapper sounds unbothered in the centre, is that a new form of transhumanism?

 

[wektor]

Has kit mackintosh done anything since this, whoever he is?

i used to see him around the fat walrus pub every now and then, but had moved out of the area more than a year ago now, not sure what he's up to

 

[luka]

i used to see him around the fat walrus pub every now and then, but had moved out of the area more than a year ago now, not sure what he's up to

He's still at his mums he hasn't moved out

 

[0bleak]

a weird thing about barty or mackintosh, whichever of those two totally distinct people wrote this, is that he never seems to get the same feeling a lot of us sometimes get listing to popular music, which is "this is cool, but it doesn't go far enough". he seems to think that pop music contains the entire spectrum of experience, which is both interesting and frustrating.

For some reason, I read this whole thread last night.
First, I want to say that I get the impression that the writer is somehow either from this board, and that this written under a pseudonym, or there is something else about the writer that somehow, in some way, kind of makes them part of this board in some way.
Secondly, I should state that I haven't read the book, so keep that in mind with what I have to say because I'm basing what I'm going to say from having read this thread.
Sincere congrats on getting published, but, my apologies, I feel like this is very much a case of the emperor having no clothes
#1 The fact that so much of the premise rests on the idea of music having vocals is a big negative. It's basically like saying the instrumental music has nothing to offer.
#2 I haven't listened to every track, but the few tracks that I listened to, they weren't NEAR as wild and extraordinary, psychedelic and otherworldly as claimed.
#3 How is autotune superior to other techniques of altering vocals? How is it so much so otherworldly than other methods of affecting vocals?
I'm just an amateur tinkerer that has only really been properly investigating what I can do for just a few months, but I don't hear what is so "far out" than what I've done with just a bit of messing around:
vocoder:


or cut-ups:


or with a chain of affects applied to a sample to actually produce something that really does sound psychedelic and otherworldly:


#4 Every example I've heard still just sounds just like vocals through autotune, and it's a rather trite sound at that at this time in popular music, while the author tries to earlier claim that "Techy timbres are trite." - is this a pre-emptive excuse for the rest of the music being discussed having such "stock" cliched sounds? Is autotune really all that most of this music has going for it as far as sounds?
#5 With so much focus on vocals, I get the impression that the rest of the music is allowed to be uninteresting when it comes to timbre and texture to the degree that, I guess what was supposed to be provocative statements like "Synthesisers and samplers have been sucked dry and now they’re completely depleted, they have nothing left to give you." just seem really funny since all of his hype about autotune has, to my ears, significantly failed to deliver on its promise and also make up for the use of "stock" sounds elsewhere in the music.

 

[luka]

Hes talking about music though and youre talking about weird shit and theyre 2 different things

 

[luka]

i llike weird shit too but i also like music. what dissensus likes is music that functions as music while also being objectively weird. hardcore and jungle being our paradigmatic examples but also lots of early house etc. neon screams argues that migos and dancehall fit into that cateory. not everyone was convinced, like, it was controversial, but that was the poisition the book took. it wasnt saying this is the most abstract soundworld conceivable

 

[Corpsey]

The stuff you posted sounds like it could come from the 90s or even earlier

It's funny how autechre say can do the most out there stuff with clicks ans farts and it basically sounds like everything they've ever done but it has absolutely no power to shock or surprise even

I'm sure their super fans will tell me that's the point but

The only times I feel shocked(too strong a word probably) or thrilled to hear these extreme uses of synths and filters etc is when they're smuggled into more generic/utilitarian music forms

That said, auto tune rap seems to have become old hat within only a few years (not that nobody's making it, but it seems to have lost its freshness)

The last shocking thing I heard was the Bronx drill with the super aggressive beats and rapping

 

[luka]

yeah i wa about to say the issue with what obleak has done (and hes done it really well obv) is that the ear immediately files it as weird shit and it does exactly the same things for the same reasons as the weird shit of the '50s and '60s. that is one of the things that makes it weird shit. its ahistorical, its outside the timeline, its an experiment with nothing riding on the outcome