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Looper's Delight
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Muso time! :() Kim Flint wrote: > The lack of a saving capability in the EDP is a limitation, but at the >same > time I found it oddly liberating after a while. Me too, for the same basic reasons you describe. > A feeling of confidence grew out of that - I could > rely on myself rather than a hard disk. From an improvising standpoint it > was a great learning experience. It's certainly not a concept you can > easily market, True - though for people coming from a more "playerly" side of things, I think it could help reinforce the idea that an EDP is something designed to create evolving, developing, non-static *performances,* as opposed to static, fixed things that just loop over and over again... > Godflesh, Meat Beat Manifesto, Puppy, Ministry, FLA, etc. It > is really interesting to hear some of these bands develop over time to > their greatest moments. Much of what makes industrial music work is the > thudding aggressive repetition of the loops. But oftentimes that's where >it > failed too. Some of it just goes nowhere with that. I was never too into industrial as a genre, but I was a HUGE Skinny Puppy fan for a while, and most of their stuff (certainly in the '88 - '92 "golden era") was not particularly repetitive much of the time - you never really knew when some new freakish event was going to ooze out of the speaker, and the programming tended to be very meticulous and subtle that way. > there is still a chunky feeling. > "Ok, let's turn this chunk on!" "Now mute this chunk and sing over it". > "Now let's fade in this other chunk and play a short wave radio > sample!" It feels very constructed. Right, the whole "grid" - based sound. I think this was popularized by people like NIN and Garbage in the mid-'90s, and it was a cool sound - the chorus suddenly has a completely different arrangement and texture, and it slams you on the head right on the downbeat of a section. But it became a HUGE cliche, and now you can practically smell that stuff coming a mile away - "Ooooh, they're gonna have a big burst of guitars and heavy beats four bars from now!" It gets to the point where you can visualize the way the computer screen looked when they were assembling the songs, and you can hear the different sections being telegraphed long before they show up. It can still be used effectively, I think, but I'm really burned out on it myself. > Don't get me wrong, it's brilliant, I > can listen to it all day (and I did....) but they never quite get the > in-the-moment live feeling, and sometimes I really miss the energy of >that. One of the things I like about good IDM, or hip-hop, or mid-'90s drum and bass, is that there's an attention to subtle variation and detail that keeps the stuff from sounding overly "sequencer-assembled"... and I have to wonder if a certain amount of that doesn't come from the fact that a lot of those guys didn't HAVE swanky software programs to run on a G4. Squarepusher or Public Enemy were making records with tools that didn't necessarily lend themselves to loop-based music fundamentally, and I have to think that a certain amount of the subtlety and detail in their music is there specifically because they HAD to do it in a fairly meticulous, hands-on manner. As cool as programs like ACID and Ableton Live! are, they still strike me as being products of the "grid" paradigm in a way. Yes, there are lots of ways to use those tools to break out of these kinds of aesthetic ruts, but I wonder if people will be inclined to dig into those areas. When there are that many options available at any one time, it can get very hard to make a decision on any of them. Whereas if you're having to really construct the material in a deliberate (or real-time!) manner, I think there's a tendency to work with an idea and SHAPE it into something... instead of discarding it immediately if it doesn't happen to instantly sound good next to the other 8 tracks of automatically beatmatched ACID or LIVE! loops... Never mind me, --Andre LaFosse http://www.altruistmusic.com