An Emergent Order
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- alp an emergent takeaway order belly bouncing the cryptic shadowy tiger lord bourgois sad sack comrade corpsey corpsey's dangerous liaisons corpsey's emergent fleshlight distasteful god lurks in your subconsciousness hamas i pity your son i'm scared of germans i'm very wet imran of riga in defence of homosexual camels jung at heart mixed biscuits got an std without having sex mixed biscuits is a version but he has clamydia suspended and his 401k the mac? come on! they are a major player three cheers for hamas! version the egyptian intellectual version's atrocity exhibition version=conceptronica what if one person pays another for their banana
I think all of the "new wave" of British music that was imported and popularized here in the 80s broke the average American's brain which is why we ended up with people dressing like lumberjacks and listening to grunge in the 90s, and then later on voting for Trump so it will never happen again.
version
Well-known member
I never claimed there was non-framework functioning. My argument was it's all frameworks and that to assume you either aren't working from a framework or that your particular framework is correct/true is a mistake.
version
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That's not true. The textbook example of fruitless intensification's shredding.
version
Well-known member
This is his big one, in both senses of the word.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Are you asking me to take a harder line than it doesn't really do much for me? It really is the case here though. But if you want I could say it's about as compelling as an hour long podcast on socialism with @mixed_biscuits, hosted by Davina McCall. Or are you asking something else?
Stockhausen said all that about Aphex didn't he. Which is a perfect a way to put my point across. Why? Because for every 1000 times I listen to Aphex, maybe 2-3 times I would listen to Stockhausen. Like ganz graf, I like that Stockhausen exists and that people are exploring those territories and I like to pass through them once in a while. But do I stop for long, or overnight, or for a weekend or more? No. Can I see things from Stockhausen's perspective? Of course. He is coming at it from an intellectual academic's deconstructive, quasi scientific angle which is interesting for the avant garde head in me, but I rarely sit and listen to that kind of thing. Having said that, it's been a while so maybe I'll give both 7.30 and some Stockhausen a whirl because a lot has changed in my tastes the closer I get to collecting a pension
That doesn't surprise me. But I seem to remember you getting a contact nostalgia high when I was describing an evening in Asilah, Morocco where the local fishermen would get together in a little shack near the port on a Friday and have a late night jam session based around some old ass Moroccan classics, with tea and hash and everyone getting right the fuck into it singing along. It seemed to stir some distant emotional memory of yours. Could be wrong, was years ago now. Maybe that's the same kind of thing? Songs that have been sang for generations that glue people together. That's what good songwriting can do.
Au contraire, mon amis. When it comes to pop music, it doesn't get much deeper.
Yes academia tends to kill the good shit. We've been over that many times.
Gonna post a couple bangers in a bit. Lets see how they land
Wait so now @luka sanctions them you've changed your tune? Kin 'ell third. Get it together
The thing about The Mac is they are one of those pop rock bands (take it easy, it's just a label) that sound deceptively simple if you're not paying attention, but they put a lot of sophistication into their pieces. Fantastic non obvious arrangements, top musicianship, lots of depth with layering of vocal and instrumental harmonies, so many catchy and memorable melodies and some absolutely cracking lyrics delivered with unfiltered heart n soul. And Stevie's voice is otherworldly. They were also unafraid to experiment. Idk, I feel like their whole career is worth going through. But they're a proper album band so you need to really give the albums a full spin all the way through. I grew up with the hit laden, 80s classic Tango in the Night, but in recent years discovered Rumors and Tusk which are both choc full of amazingly written tunes.
Don't lie, you would totally have banged Davina McCall in the 90s at a freshers society shindig.
But this is it, I don't see a huge difference between gantz graf and Aphex. Maybe I just have ears that are more calibrated to rhythm, but I don't think Stockhausen would care for Gantz graf. he would see it all coalescing back to metric and period rhythms and not being totally free. Part of what appeals to me about Autechre is they let the software break the rhythm and then allow it to return to electro-techno rhythms. it's this variation in their tracks I like, whereas most techno and electro just stays at one rhythm. It's closer to middle eastern music in that regard, though obviously much more mechanical and much less organic. composed pieces in non-metric and non-periodic rhythms are for the most part not very interesting to listen to (with the exception of composers originally coming from jazz such as Braxton and Silva). It's like trying to solve an equation in realtime. But that doesn't mean the concept is bad, if it was, you would have to say goodbye to taksim, jazz, free improv, etc. It's just that it doesn't really work when you are trying to subordinate it to a score.
What people working with this sort of generative music software are now realising is something we've known in the middle east for centuries, music functioning as productive and communal communication. The latest thing Autechre are now doing is this huge live 2022-24 thing, basically so many variations on this one big system/piece. 19 of them in counting now. Obviously listening to them in one sitting would be torturous but that's precisely not the point, just like in the olden days improvisation itself was used to break up or extend parts of the repertoire as a backdrop to peoples social activities (weddings etc.) Incidentally this is why Eno is even more of an absolute cone head compared to that of Stockhausen when handling the concept of ambient music.
You forget that folk musics from these regions are/were heavily based on melodic improvisation. No two performances are remotely identical. Of course no two live performances in pop music are identical, but that's a question of quantity. the quantitative variation in makam and microtonal folk musics is much higher than that in a pop song which is repeated, where the quantitative variations are miniscule.
Sure but pop is a fantasy. You just like the stars from the 80s. No shade, I do as well (although probably different ones.) But the industry must keep generating stars in ever more fantastical configurations. There is no pop music that isn't manufactured. This isn't even a problem, it can be quite liberating when you don't pine for the authentic.
haha, no. I never said I hated them. I just don't really like reenactment societies. I'm not against revivals (like I'm not against the jungle revival) but the parameters have been codified. Again, improvisation allows you to avoid boredom setting in, which is why I'd like to see max/msp filter into a pop music context. I don't see why improvisation needs to be used exclusively as avant-garde it can be used as ornament.
version
Well-known member
Yeah, I thought Gantz Graf was just noise for years then one day ended up listening to the whole thing and realising it was because I'd only ever listened to the beginning/snippets. It both drops into a groove and you get accustomed to it. A lot of their stuff's like that. You have to listen from beginning to end to feel the full effect of the changes they're making.
germaphobian
Well-known member
the only problem with music, if you want to see is as a problem, is that there's way too much of it to proces, too many nodes to connect to and it has mostly departed from meatworld to digital realm. like the guy before said that there are no experimentations with alternate tunings within elctronic music, but there are, quite a lot actually - and good ones too. just connect to the node.
there is no great decline on a formal level, it's just purley "waning of affect" through over-saturation in combination with media fragmentation. loss of significance, that's another way to put it.
i mean, people used to complain that music is being gatekept by cigar puffing philistines with their distribution networks and million dollar studios and promotion engines; ok, now it's all been democratized both in terms of production and distribution and you can even pretty much cut the middle-man, which, again, was brought about by the same market engine that used to puff cigars (and another case where left's own dreams where actually fullfiled by the detested market itself) and your complaining again? and the nerve to somehow blame neoliberalism for this, it's too much projection
sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation
there is no great decline on a formal level, it's just purley "waning of affect" through over-saturation in combination with media fragmentation. loss of significance, that's another way to put it.
i mean, people used to complain that music is being gatekept by cigar puffing philistines with their distribution networks and million dollar studios and promotion engines; ok, now it's all been democratized both in terms of production and distribution and you can even pretty much cut the middle-man, which, again, was brought about by the same market engine that used to puff cigars (and another case where left's own dreams where actually fullfiled by the detested market itself) and your complaining again? and the nerve to somehow blame neoliberalism for this, it's too much projection
sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation
germaphobian
Well-known member
''there's always a man somwhere, blaming the faults of his feet on his shoes" I think that was the quote from Waiting for Godot, something like that anyway
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Right, can see that. Have said this before that I've tried to figure out how to put those elements into an electronic contex. That shit can be infectious. The way the M.E. perc ensemble keeps the pulse, but inbetween those pulse hits, it's like JB said about the one. You can go wild in between, but you always have to come back to the one. So in a M.E. context they're often employing these great staccato washes of finger taps, like rain falling on the drumskins, spraying notes in between the other elements, bending time by pushing and dragging at the tempo before the bar comes back around and the pulse hit snaps you back into place. At certain points, a break, the vocalist goes solo for a second or two and the spray starts up again, way ahead of the bar to create anticipation for when the other instruments come back in for the drop. Can be absolutely spellbinding. Especially late at night. Since that trip to Morocco in 2018 and seeing as much live music as possible I've been meaning to try and figure out some kind of midi rack that would allow for that kind of thing to be performed live with a drum pad and some controller knobs. It's probably doable. Would be preferable to having to write that type of off-grid midi in with the mouse. You definitely hear that kind of thing in Aphex and Autechre, those exponential rhythms that break free of the grid for a moment, pulling at the pulse before speeding back up to snap back into the beat. In a way I guess it's the rhythmic equivalent of a bent note. Go outside the lines for a moment but then come back to base.
There is a big distinction there because live modern pop is all about getting things watertight. Mass produced. Repeatable. Note for note precision gig to gig. But with a band like The Mac and a lot of those bands back in the day there was a lot of wiggle room for breaking out of all that. And it was for the band's benefit as much as the audience. It would keep it fresh for them and they wouldn't feel like a factory. But nothing on the level of a jazz or M.E. thing as you pointed out.
But there are also a lot of bands, inc The Mac and Zeppelin, Hendrix or whoever who had the main base of the tune but then also had areas in the tunes where they knew would be designated for extended improv and they for sure were not doing the same performance gig to gig.
I would say it's quite a bit more than a stretch to call The Mac manufactured. Without knowing their story, they absolutely come across like a band who just got together and started writing songs without much outside influence. Certainly no suits. Certainly not in their earlier days. And this has got nothing to do with stars. Am finding that whole star concept less and less interesting nowadays. It's really just about good music. If they have big charismatic personalities and stage presence it does help though for sure.
I didn't say there are none, but that it really hadn't started to be explored - that's why I said that Wendy Carlos was the only name that immediately came to mind because there seems to be so little of it (I already knew 2 or of the 3 artists you posted - only Sevish was new to me, and I had also said that I had been trying to remember Zia's name (someone I encountered decades ago so not exactly "new") so maybe you could please make me a list because another person, @thirdform , who has also always been a constant and deep digger, seemed to agree.
If there's quite a lot, I'd especially like to know if you can point out those electronic artists that use alternate tunings in conjuction with heavier sounds and beats and/or things like noise and distortion, please.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Aphex is one of the more famous examples
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
No idea but there's a lot. Better Google it
germaphobian
Well-known member
it's not a node i'm particulary familiar with, but just through a cursory search with our military grade search engines, there seems to be a loads and loads. dunno, just some random results
germaphobian
Well-known member
https://bandcamp.com/discover/xenharmonic - a pretty massive list just on bandcamp
there's also a podcast dedicated to just that (obviously not only electronica though) - https://nowandxen.libsyn.com/
germaphobian
Well-known member
seems like a thriving microgenre
germaphobian
Well-known member
that acreil guy's stuff i have actually noticed long time ago when i was looking up something regarding pure data, but had completley forgotten about it. wild stuff.