Son, on hearing Art of Noise for first time, 35 years after the event: "It sounds modern"
I wonder why: something about the very limitations of early digital technology (incredibly restricted sample time - a second and a half - which necessitates a stab-oriented sound) making everything stark and angular? c.f. later vastly expanded digi-powers that allow for near-naturalistic levels of detail and fiddly nuance
he was also impressed with this Kraftwerk video (although possibly enjoying its retro qualities as with videogames of that era)
"The Groovy Socialist World of 1970s Soviet futurism", via i09
Friday, March 8, 2013
relating to the post on Jean-Michael Jarre and retrofuturism
Sebastien Morlighem directs to me an interesting interview from last month at Quietus with OMD, on their new album English Electric and also its predecessor History of the Modern
Andy McCluskey:
"Paul and I sat down and said "OK, we don’t want to be a nostalgic
heritage act. Nor, however, is it sufficient for us to just write a nice
collection of songs in the style of OMD." ... "What do we do next? We know we can write songs... That’s not only what we do. What does the future sound
like? And can we dare to dream that we could possibly reflect a little
of it again?" And that became our mantra: "What does the future sound
like?" ...
".... We were consciously trying to ask questions about the world,
ourselves, music, the future of music. One of the songs is called ‘The
Future Will Be Silent’. We looked at how we had constructed some of our
more unusual songs, and a lot of them were made from concrete music,
found sounds, and we looked at what we had explored in the past and we
were trying not to repeat ourselves, and, well, we’ve done trains; we’ve
done machinery. And then I actually said to myself "I realise now that
everything that we’ve sampled from the real world – trains, machines,
computers, guns, typewriters – they were actually accidental". The audio
that we had sampled was a waste product from the specific design
function of whatever it was that we had recorded."
"I want a future so bright It burns my eyes"
They had retromodernist preoccupations before, right, OMD? Like Dazzle Ships, as analysed here by Owen Hatherley. And "Tesla Girls" too, a little bit, perhaps. Veering near Thomas Dolby's Golden Age of Wireless and The Buggles's several songs about outmoded entertainment technologies or institutions ("Video Killed Radio Star", "Elstree"). But then where do all the tunes about Joan of Arc fit in?
A fan's video for a Dazzle Ships track made of footage of modernist architects being visionary
Never that huge fan of OMD but I did love this, the B-side to debut "Electricity"
And this one
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
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
Monday, March 4, 2013
via An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming, who has some loose thoughts on Suzanne Ciani and women in electronic music
Mind you, I can't remember if I was ever a reader. I might have had one copy, or flicked through it in W.H. Smiths a bunch of times, or seen it at some friend's house... Probably it was a little geeky for me, not being that technology minded. Even then I'd have found the covers kitschy, I should imagine.
I wonder how right they were in their predictions with this one (from 1984) :
Which reminds me, must scan the Sunday colour supplement article from circa 1977 I cut out and scrap booked (and which scrapbook I recently rediscovered) which has all these predictions about leisure and entertainment in the year 2000. Some of which have been out-stripped by developments - a rare case of the future that not only did arrive but was more impressive than anticipated. The fun stuff, actually, has worked out fairly futuristic and sci-fi expectations fulfilled -- it's the large-scale, heroic things that stagnated or collided with the political-economic realities.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
via Bollops at Found Objects, just one of several amazing "cities of the future" covers posted here
and here's some interior pages of another book whose cover is posted there
love that typography
and one bonus beat, in this vicinity
and another- with actual commentary from Reyner Banham on it!
- Nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been,
but is not, fueled by a dissatisfaction or discomfort with the present,
to which retro-futurism provides a nostalgic contrast.
- Particularly a dissatisfaction with modern futurism, and the almost
total lack of imagining of an exciting and alternative future world. In
some respects, an extrapolation of the present to the future produces
disappointing, or even ghastly results, exemplified in contemporary
dystopian visions of the future.
- Dissatisfaction with the modern world itself. A world of high-speed
air transport, computers, and space stations is (by any past standard)
'futuristic'; yet the search for alternative and perhaps more promising
futures suggests a feeling that the desired or expected future has
failed to materialize.
- Like some of the theories behind practitioners of Hauntology and Hypnagogic pop, Retro Futurism
is fuelled by an idea that much of these early modernist, 'futurist'
experiments had yet to be fully exhausted, that there is still more work
to be done."
Episode 2: Lab Coats (broadcast midnight 9 November) "will look at electronic innovations
kickstarted by composers working in academic centres and institutions in
the early-mid twentieth century"
Thursday, October 4, 2012
"The once futureshapers have become custodians of a heritage. Like the
computer, techno may have lost its most revolutionary connotations, but
traces of the old promise remain: one must still override the present,
if not solely for the sake of the future".
A probing and wide-roving review of Polysick's Digital Native by Reed Scott Reid over at Tiny Mix Tapes, touching on many facets of the futurepast utopianism of techno, from the launchpad of Polysick's debt to Underground Resistance.
And along the way achieving a Wire-writers tetrafecta of referencing (Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Rob Young, yours truly) plus redeployment of theorems from Vincent Mosco, Georg Simmel, and Robert Farris Thompson.
But what, prithee, is "an acid-moiled jounce"?
(It's a good record actually... and I like the title/concept of "digital natives")
Some other ace TMT stuff from recently: James Parker's contributions to the debate about vaporwave, and Jonathan Dean's takedown of Gatekeeper
must admit (talking of retrofutures) that my very soul did yawn when the 303s wibbled their way out of the mix on Exo .... other aspects of the sound made me flash on Front Line Assembly, seldom a good thing
shame as they are very interesting to think about / read about and one can only salute Adam Harper for using them as a canvas to genre-coin upon: "Distroid" – the muscular music of hi-DEF doom
of course as per the Concept-Music thesis, you could say their music is their own canvas... the Sounded Word c.f. the Painted Word
Just a week left now for New Yorkers to visit Ghosts in the Machine, an exhibition at the New Museum of fifty years of work based around "the constantly shifting relationship between humans, machines, and art" and tracing "the complex historical passage from the mechanical to the optical
to the virtual". It stretches from "Jacob Mohr’s influencing
machines to Emery Blagdon’s healing constructions", to "reconstructions of lost
works and realizations of dystopian mechanical devices invented by
figures like Franz Kafka", to work based around "dismantling the mechanics of
vision in order to conceive new possibilities for seeing" such as Op Art and Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome ("an
immersive cinematic environment where the viewer is bathed in a constant
stream of moving images"), to recent artists like Mark Leckey, Henrik Olesen,
and Christopher Williams, whose works "display a
fascination with earlier machines and the types of knowledge and
experiences that are lost as we move from one era to the next,
constantly dreaming up new futures that will never arrive."
Reminded me of this book I picked up recently:
Published in 1973, written most likely in 1970-71, and, crucially, based on the 1960s.
As the contents pages indicate:
Like so many Zeitgeist-snapshot books (and there are loads of examples of this in terms of big-picture rock books - including a few of my own) it projects forward from what seem to be the most era-defining and progressive tendencies of the present (which by the time the book comes out is the immediate past). Except that by then, other and usually radically different tendencies have emerged. Art and the Future's "prophecy" doesn't envision things like body art, performance art, appropriation art, or indeed most of the major trends and directions that would transpire in the Seventies and thereafter.
But it's full of exciting photographs and reproductions of work by artists, mostly long forgotten, that impart a retro-future frisson - specimens of kinetic art, computer art, early video art, and some of the same people covered by the Ghosts in the Machine exhibition, such as Hans Haacke. I've been meaning to scan some of them in here, but in the meantime, here's a few from the web.
This first one is from Art and the Future itself
The rest are pictures, or Youtubes, of works by artists covered in the book.
Nicolas Schöffer was a musician as well as a kinetic art pioneer, and some years ago I stumbled on this record (later to be Creel Pone-d)
Released in 1979 on the Hungaroton label, it's an attempt to translate his plastic arts oriented theories about color
and structure and space into sound: "to construct
trapped time--in the same way as trapped space or trapped light
information." The austere pulses and pure poised tones of pieces like
"Chronosonor 5" are not so much music as sonic mobiles hanging in space.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
a retro-future-spective
well if anybody deserves credit for their legacy it's K-werk but still bit sad to see them become a Heritage Institution:
Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
April 10–17, 2012
The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor
Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum's Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk's studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition. This reinterpretation showcases Kraftwerk’s historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture. Read more
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider began the Kraftwerk project in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1970, setting up the pioneering Kling Klang studio, where all of Kraftwerk's albums were conceived and composed. By the mid-1970s the group had achieved international recognition for their revolutionary electro "sound paintings" and their musical experimentation with tapes and synthesizers. Their compositions, which feature distant melodies, multilingual vocals, robotic rhythms, and custom-made vocoders and computer-speech technology, almost single-handedly created the soundtrack for our digital future. Kraftwerk anticipated the impact of technology on art and everyday life, creating sounds and visuals that capture the human condition in the age of mobility and telecommunication. Their innovative looping techniques and computerized rhythms, which had a major influence on the early development of hip-hop and electronic dance music, remain among the most commonly sampled sounds across a wide range of music genres. Furthermore, the use of robotics and other technical innovations in their live performances illustrates Kraftwerk’s belief in the respective contributions of both people and machines in creating art.
In recent years, starting with their performance at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kraftwerk has been invited into the visual arts context, festivals, and museums, most recently performing at Lenbachhaus Kunstbau in Munich. In contrast to all former presentations, where Kraftwerk videos, visuals, or the “robots” were presented in a museum context but performances were staged as concerts, MoMA is realizing a groundbreaking new display: the first synthetic retrospective to present, simultaneously and in one location, Kraftwerk's complex layers of music, sound, videos, sets, and performance as a total work of art.
A presentation of Kraftwerk’s historical audio and visual material is on view at MoMA PS1, April 12–May 14, 2012.
Tuesday, April 10, 8:30 p.m. 1 – Autobahn (1974) Wednesday, April 11, 8:30 p.m. 2 – Radio-Activity (1975) Thursday, April 12, 8:30 p.m. 3 – Trans Europe Express (1977) Friday, April 13, 10:00 p.m. 4 – The Man-Machine (1978) Saturday April 14, 8:30 p.m. 5 – Computer World (1981) Sunday, April 15, 8:30 p.m. 6 – Techno Pop (1986) Monday, April 16, 8:30 p.m. 7 – The Mix (1991) Tuesday, April 17, 10:00 p.m. 8 – Tour de France (2003)
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
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
