DigitalDjigit said:
Slothrop said:
Yeah, although it'll be intersting to see whether the Planet Mu / proper drum and bass crossover works to the benefit of both or just in their roster of junglists moving from being unusually interesting drum and bass to unusually repetitive IDM. The latter looks more likely, but I'm an eternal optimist.
The sense of superiority there is just staggering. Why do you look down upon drum and bass that way? Ok, so it frequently very dumb, by-the-numbers music but so is IDM. It's like all these nerds who have a superiority complex glommed onto IDM because it had Intelligent in it and allowed them to feel superior and then they look down upon those silly d'n'b producers playing in the sandbox.
Sorry, I may have been unclear. I don't view either form as being 'superior' - they're just different. My worry wasn't that Sileni, Breakage and Equinox are producing music that's okay for drum and bass but not up to the standards of IDM - it'd be pretty hard to be not up to the standards of IDM at the moment - more that they might get their music watered down and isolated from the scene, and end up with something like late nineties fusion / album drum and bass, but with glitches in the place of sax samples.
The mutual benefit of a crossover would come from the fact that when two different cultures meet, there's a good chance that they'll each be able to nick interesting ideas from the other (and much as I love them, imho both genres could benefit from a few more interesting ideas at the moment), not just that the drum and bass idiots will be glad to have crumbs of wisdom passed down to them.
As a further tangent, one thing that might interestingly move from IDM to drum and bass is the various software that makes live laptop performances an interesting and creative possibility rather than a slightly boring novelty. It finally seems to be moving out of being a desperate effort to return 'virtuosity' to electronic music, and might be turning into an even more direct version of the dublates -> dancefloor -> studio feedback loop.