Love Songs

These are love songs.

Brend

Recently there seems to be a growing trend in electronic music towards the "tribal" aesthetic. Polyrhythms, non-standard tunings, and vernacular sounds are becoming more familiar in the electronic vocabulary, but what is more striking is the general attitude towards the music making process itself. Technology is becoming a fact of life that all musicians will have to deal with, and the types of people you'd expect never to stray away from their drum circles and stoner metal bands are using the computer, drum machines, and sequencers. This provides for some interesting results, but the acceptance of many ethnic and vernacular ideas into the electronic vocabulary is not without problems.

Henry Flynt warns us that, more often than not, ethnic music has been incorporated into western music by simply inserting it as reference. In this case it is merely a surface treatment to existing structure and rules. Flynt argues that to embrace the vernacular or folk, one has to create new methods of notating and organizing sounds in ways that compliment their attributes. Lucky Dragons, the recording name of Luke Fischbeck, I think best demonstrates this attitude. Handclaps, bird sounds, tambourines, fiddles are not organized according to standardized western rhythms, time signatures, and scales (systems which were not made for these sources). Instead using applications such as MAX/MSP he creates his own processes to build songs with those pieces. Songs vary greatly in length, from less than a minute, to several minutes, never falling into the three to four minute pop standard.

Seeing Fischbeck preform live it is clear that his form of art is for his own self amusement, it is spontaneous, not governed by established laws, it is what Henry Flynt would call "brend." Flynt explains that "brend" is an experience at which you are unaware of value or your own personal valuing system, all of this vanishes leaving you with your own self enjoyment. While this may seem like a completely personal experience, "brend" can happen within a group of people. After about ten or fifteen minutes of playing on his laptop and flute, Fischbeck stood up, brought out a number of colorful ropes connected to one another, and passed them around the crowd. As they made contact with skin, sound emitted from the speakers, oscillating and harmonizing as different people touched the ropes, and made new connections through each other. It was quite a magical experience, the artist, the object being watched for our entertainment was no longer present, instead we were all part of the process, joined by system only measurable by our own connections to one another.

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Materialization

Before the invention of the tape recorder in 1929 music's vocabulary was extremely limited. Confined to traditional instruments played by musicians it was an event one experienced in a static environment. The introduction of recorded media would completely change music's role, capabilities, and meaning. Recorded onto tape (or any media for that matter) music makes the transformation from event to object, gaining the ability to be taken out of context and planted into new ones. The implications for this are immense. Sound, when recorded onto media becomes a material object, and its plasticity, just like any other material, can be altered, manipulated, and broken.

It wasn't long after the tape recorder for musicians to begin to discover the full potential of a materialized sound. Pierre Schaeffer's pioneering work with tape loops in 1940s in Paris and Halim El-Dabh's work in Cairo around the same time expanded music's vocabulary to include any recorded sound. The definition of the instrument changed. The media technology itself, in this case the tape recorder, becomes an instrument. Along with this a whole new set of methodologies and compositional strategies that emerge from the technology and mechanical workings of the tape recorder make their way into musical practice, widening music's boundaries even more. Here a synthesis between music and technology occurs, with the development of music and technology coincides forming some kind of symbiotic relationship. Musique Concrete, the making of music from concrete objects, would serve as the basis of sampling and sample culture which today has become a large part of popular music. You can listen and subscribe to the podcast at KCPR.

Library Music

Last week I played a track recorded a song by Delia Derbyshire under the name Episonic. In the late 50s and early 60s BBC opened an advanced sound effects studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, to record jingles, theme songs, and commercials for programming. While the studio was intended for commercial purposes, it was frequently used for tape loop and music concrete experiments. Delia Derbyshire’s pioneering work in the studio would become very influential for contemporary artists such as Stereolab and Broadcast. The artists on the UK record label Ghostbox look to Derbyshire’s work as precedent for their b-movie science fiction electronic aesthetic. Sampling lost pieces of popular culture allows memories to be transplanted into new contexts through different media, creating new connections between space and time. Drawing inspiration from library music: old movie and television soundtrack recordings, the songs of Belbury Poly, Advisory Circle, and Broadcast are drenched in grain and haze of electronic music’s memories. Listen to the show here.

Finding Errors

The term "glitch" to describe a genre of music started to appear around 1995, after Oval's releases Systemisch and 94 Diskont, and the ELpH vs. Coil album Worship the Glitch (where this show gets its name from). These two albums arguably started the modern day electronic movement most often referred to as "glitch." It is interesting how these three influential records were made and how they established ideas about this particular aesthetic. Oval, using scratched and written over compact discs, sampled the skipping and reorganized them. In effect they "harvested" the glitches - the errors, deconstructing the materiality of the media. Coil on the other hand had been collecting malfunctioning equipment over time and compiled these "natural" glitches to make Worship the Glitch. These two methodologies are the basis of music movement which celebrates the imperfection, error, and malfunction of the mechanized and digital.

There are varied analysis' of Glitch music, and keep in mind that is only to serve as a brief introduction. Check out Vague Terrain, a great resource to find more information about digital media culture as well exclusive songs and videos and photos. On their site is a download of a great writing by Kim Cascone, which goes into greater detail about this type of electronic music.

And last but not least Worship the Glitch is now officially podcasting! Check it out and subscribe! Also be sure to check out 91.3 KCPR San Luis Obispo for a schedule of some of the best music college radio has to offer.

14 April 2008

7 April 2008

Welcome back to another quarter of Worship the Glitch. By next week I'll have started podcasting episodes, so you can listen anything you want! As for the stuff played this week, I seem to love everything that gets put out on the German label Raster-Noton. Founded in part by Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), and Olaf Bender, who along with Frank Bretschneider, make up Signal. Rater-Noton is not so much a traditional record label, but rather conceived as a platform where the intersections between pop, science, and art can be explored. One way this mindset is shown is through Raster-Noton's exquisite packaging. Well weighted, buttery smooth cardstock makes up the digipacks in which most of their releases are packaged in. Fine attention to detail are noticeable not only in the typography and design, but fabrication of the cases themselves. For example, the two discs that make up COH's Strings are housed in what at first appears to be complex folded paper casing. However, upon unfolding the object its simplicity is beautifully exposed. A single piece of cardstock with slits cut in to hold each disc is then folded over itself twice to make a package that is not only artful, but also efficient to mass produce and distribute.