sonic polyps

 

"To varying extents, each of these pieces also suggested a problem that electronic music now faces. Its sounds are either deliberately artificial or alterations of the familiar. In either case, electronic swells and sonic polyps, far from becoming abstract musical tools, tend to seem self-conscious, all too vulnerable to cliched imaginings. The basic electronic vocabulary has become inextricably associated with scores that suggest groundlessness or strange other worlds (as in science fiction, horror and nature films)...."

- Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 1992, reviewing League of Composers/ISCM concert tribute to the late Bulent Arel

Polyps! Ambiguous analogy - they can be beautiful coral thingies on the seabed OR potentially lethal tissue growths in the colon

"Groundlessness" is a good, evocative, hard-to-pin description of electronic abstraction

To the larger point, though ---

cf Mark Fisher on future-capture, the trammeling of the once-unknown by cliches, an encrustation of associations - 

"The problem is that the word ‘futuristic’ no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen.  In the 70s, ‘futuristic’ meant synthesizers. In the 80s, it meant sequencers and cut and paste montage. In the 90s, it meant the abstract digital sounds opened up by the sampler and its function such as timestretching. In each of these cases, there was a sense that, through sound, we were getting a small but powerful taste of a world that would be completely different from anything we had hitherto experienced. That’s why a film like Terminator, with its idea of the future  invading the present, was so crucial for 90s dance music. Now, insofar as ‘futuristic’ has any meaning, it is as a vague but fixed style, a bit like a typographical font. ‘Futuristic’ in music is something like ‘gothic’ in fonts. It points to an already existing set of associations. ‘Futuristic’ means something electronic, just as it did in the 60s and 70s." [my underline]

cf Phil Knight, commenting (earlier on this very blog, I think) 

"The Future always has that aura of thrilling trepidation... feeds the Spenglerian hunger for infinity.... The Future marks a further distancing from the natural world, from the tangible, and therefore takes us closer to our destiny, which we expect to be angelic, but know to be alienation. But, the ride to the future in music is not exponential - it just feels that way. The move from acoustic to electric to electronic suggests a teleological progression, but I can't see how you can get any more artificial than synthesized music. Once you are there, you have reached the peak of abstraction.”  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It is interesting that for the NY Times classical / avant-garde reviewer at the Bulent Arel elegy, electronic music was already in the rear-view mirror in 1992 - even as things like Rufige Cru's "Terminator" and a score of other techno-rave tunes / directions were reigniting a fresh future for electronic dance music.

A little less than a decade earlier, John Rockwell was already voicing a similar sentiment circa 1984- that electronic music, once clearly - and for many alarmingly - the future destiny of serious composition, had now slipped into the passé zone - and was now a backwater of serious music. 

"Only a few years ago, electronic music seemed ready to sweep all other music aside. Traditionalists worried nervously about music composed by machines, and predicted a dehumanizing Armageddon. Today, outside a few specialist enclaves, one hears very little about the subject. The odd loudspeaker still pops up at a contemporary-music concert, adding a bit of amplification, synthesized sound or filtering to live instrumentalists. But otherwise, along with their abandonment of serialism, composers seem to have forsaken electronically generated or reproduced sound, as well."

(from All American Music - the chapter on David Behrman, taken to represent a new direction of humanized electronic music - homemade, funky, miniaturized)

further to the Omni era / retrofuturism post, Jean Michel-Jarre is interviewed at Resident Advisor and is asked why it is that so many electronic musicians are looking back, c.f. his own time when they were all looking forward:

"We are still at the beginning of the 21st century for lots of different reasons—I think we are slightly frightened about the future, so we are looking backwards. That is partly due to the fact that for a long time we were looking at the year 2000 as a kind of final frontier. The people from the '60s, '70s and '80s, in cinemas, in literature, in music, everywhere—they had a vision of the future, and they thought that after 2000 everything would change; you know, cars would fly and we'd all go to the moon for holidays! Then the year 2000 came and went, and nothing special happened, so in a sense we lost our vision of the future.

"Now I think we have to re-create a kind of dream for the future. In that sense, electronic music can help. But today that state of electronic music is a sign of the times: people are looking backward and having this vintage approach to day-to-day life. Having said that, I think technically, all digital instruments, such as the Animoog on iPad, are really bringing something new. For quite a long time, the quality of the digital era was not there, it was still quite harsh. There was this lo-fi world, not only for sound, but also for visuals. It's only been over the last three or four years that we've been re-entering the world of high definition sound, and that's going to change a lot in terms of the kind of music we produce in the coming years....

He also had this to say about digital facilitation and the DIYstopia:

"I think the next step is not going back, but to restore the idea of the fact that when you really want to play the piano, violin or guitar properly, it takes a certain amount of time. Technology made a lot of people think that you can make a decent track with instruments you learned the week before, which is obviously not true. For quite a while, then, you had lots of music that was not that bad, but not that great, and not personal or particularly unique. And for every gem, you had a thousand decent tracks that were nothing special."

Interviewed Jean-Michel Jarre on the phone several years ago for Observer Music Monthly. Tres gentil homme... here's the short Q/A:


 You studied with musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer in the Sixties - how did you make the progression from avant-garde classical abstraction to highly melodic and accessible music?

JMJ: I trained in classical music, true, but I was also in rock bands at the same time. Schaeffer is the godfather of electronic and sample-based music. From him I took the idea that the crucial thing is not notes or harmonies, but sounds.

One avant-garde gesture from later in your career was pressing a single copy of the album Music for Supermarkets and auctioning it, having destroyed the master tapes.

JMJ: That was a premonitory act! I was protesting at the silly industrialisation of music that was happening with CDs, this El Dorado product in the Eighties. But digitalisation has ultimately caused the death of the industry.

You are synonymous with the word 'big': big sales (72 million to date), big concerts. Even your Unesco ambassador job relates to one of mankind's biggest problems, the availability and purity of water.

JMJ: When I started doing the big outdoor productions, it was not because of grandiosity. I just felt that electronic music sounded better outdoors - it gave a different depth to the sound. The visual spectacle was to compensate for the fact that synthesisers aren't sexy; you can't play them with the physicality of rock music.

Talking of rock, how did you get to have an asteroid named after you?

JMJ: It comes from this department of NASA. There's me, Zappa, Lennon, and Hendrix, all with stones in space named after us!

What's the concept of the new album, Teo and Tea?

JMJ: It's to do with encounters between people. I am interested in the way we have this culture of total connection - mobile phones, and emails - yet people increasingly feel this loneliness.

That was a side-bar for a longer Observer piece on the analogue synth gods of the Seventies, directors' cut of which is here.

He is a bit like Omni magazine, J-M J,  in so far as I never really paid him much attention at the time -- it was background stuff, just futuristic-business-as-usual...  Probably older brothers of my friends were into him, like the friend's brother who was building his own computer, or was it a synth? No, I think it was a computer. That was a pretty committed thing to do in those days.  But yeah, J-MJ, a passion for, that seemed like it might have intersected with the Omni readership, or the New Scientist readership. Or people who read Dune, but not Ballard.  Obviously a lot of people just liked "Oxygene" etc because it was a pretty tune, or even because they were the type of people who'd been buying Mike Oldfield records or Sky records (band, not label), ie. instrumental rock is the future types.

Same applies to Tangerine Dream. Remember seeing their name on the hoarding of Oxford Apollo in 1981 or 82 - the twilight of their UK fame, most likely - I doubt if they'd have been able to fill a large venue like that as the Eighties continued.  It would never have occurred to me to go see them, even if I'd not been an impoverished student. And then later when getting seriously into Krautrock I checked out the early T. Dream naturally, but never the Phaedra onwards Virgin stuff.   Probably just like yer Emeralds and Oneohtrixes and the rest, I got interested in the full on electronic proto-trance T.Dream and all the other analogue space epic dudes in the mid-2000s in part because you could find T.Dream and K. Schulze vinyl going cheap, and Vangelis and Jarre vinyl going real cheap. 

Any excuse to post this again... 

 And this

"What I do find a cause for concern, or at least it seems to be much more rare with all of this otherwise generally wonderful technology, results from the degree to which people now tend to start with a supplied sound, usually a loop, and then build in reaction to what they are hearing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this of course. But I fear that music comes from inside us much less often than used to be the case. The experience of listening to your own mind in silence and forming, clarifying, holding in your mind a spontaneous evolving sonic vision, of listening to your own personal musical imagination as it processes what you are feeling within yourself, this is being drowned out of our musical culture by the ways the purveyors of today's music tech make it as easy as they can to start a new piece and keep it going so that you'll buy more of their stuff. I am hearing more and more editing, selection and juxtaposition in the new music I run across, and less of what feels like genuine self-expression from within the individual, though I certainly do hear that at times in new works too"-- Laurie Spiegel, interviewed by Tobias Fischer here  [via Justin Buckley]

A number of retromaniacal themes, and thinking re. the relationship between old and new in music (and all arts) figure in my Pitchfork profile of Laurie Spiegel.

Here's something else she said on the subject, after reading the bit on residual versus emergent:

"This complex interplay between "emergent" and "residual" = interesting. Brings up the question of universals in music, whatever transcends style and time and doesn't become obsolete, but may sometimes get discarded along with a particular fashion. What is most central and necessary to music, what do we want to get "back to" when it isn't nostalgia? Something primal and central and fundamental that's been elaborated on and varied and camouflaged in so many ways we aren't even aware we are seeking it?"

Our God Is Speed on semi-forgotten and under-anthologized electroniconcrete music pioneer Richard Maxfield, and his Missing Tapes

his "Cough Music" is here

i've got one track of his, "Night Music",  on an album in the Music of Our Time series, where it nestles next to Steve Reich and Pauline Oliveros

What the Future Sounded Like, part 6749

further to the last post, Our God Is Speed points to another doc about early electronics

Greyhoos mentions the Mordant Music reissues of Todd Dockstader's electrono-library music ...

People keep digging more and more of this stuff up...

There's the ongoing Laurie Spiegel program (the super, super-expanded Expanded Universe being just the first of string of reissues, or more accurately, issues-of-never-before-issued stuff)

Public Information have loads of stuff in the works, with a collection of Canadian library music out in a few days-- Tomorrow's Achievements: Parry Music Library 1976-86 -- you can get a taste and see a video made for the title track here --  plus that Ernest Berk fellow coming soon


Every other month in The Wire, Ian Helliwell shines the spot on some forgotten or never-known electronic auteur -- Terence Dwyer recently, in the new issue a piece on Stuart Wynn Jones and the whole amateur tape recording enthusiasts subculture

Apres FC Judd, pedagogical electronics (Dwyer-style books on concrete in the classroom) and the hobbyist electronic/tape/radio nexus seem to be the hot new areas of interest, on the "scene"

Also electronic and tape music done for post-WW2 animations and computer graphic video in the Norman McLaren / Lillian Schwartz vein

At the more institutional / state-funded end of things, there's Mego's series of INA-GRM vinyl only reissues on Recollection GRM

I'm sure there's more i'm forgetting

The New Sound of Music, 1979 TV doc on history of electronic instruments

[via Mounds and Circles]

Meanwhile (as MoC notes) the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is relaunched as The New Radiophonic Workshop

maybe with Matthew Herbert as Director, this isn't such a bad idea as it seems

maybe....

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

hark, what's this then? another speck of lost radiphonic treasure on YouTube -- an early BBC radio piece involving Daphne Oram - Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957)

electronic pioneer Tod Dockstader interviewed by Geeta Dayal for Wired.com

the retrofuture-rush



wow, the entire run of Synapse, the 1970s electronic music magazine, digitized for our perusal, here

for more retrofuture titillation, check out fun blog RetroSynthAds

http://retrosynthads.blogspot.com/