Sure. Its actually going backwards. Back to a focus on the performer as a simple human who does feats, macho virtuosity and does crowd conscious manipulations.
What electronic music opened up is much larger. Music is internal, electric (like our central nervous systems) and cosmic. The focus is in the body and mind of the people experiencing it. Its in the speakers and on the dance floor. The composer disappears, the audience disappears, the technique disappears (and all that thinking about "is the performance technically accurate/innovative ?")
As soon as you put some clown on the stage all the beauty evaporates and people stand around yelling "woot" and generally not dancing. Or if they do it involves fist pumping and making rock faces.
As soon as you put a live musician in the track then you start thinking about technical execution and about what the musician is feeling and thinking. It limits it. I love live musicians (I majored in Saxophone, I have a piano in my room here), but I just want to point out that the revolution of electronic music is that we took music past the limits of performance.
Its pure sound, pure feeling.
Also you should realize that even jungle, juke, IDM, breakcore are often written with furious fingers and lots of live tweaking. And AraabMuzik is using the auto rolls all the time and he has breaks that set the pace. And he has the dynamics turned way down so its actually pretty hard to make a mistake. Turntablists like Q-bert are a thousands times more impressive. Listen to Sabar drumming and forget about the simple boom bap and cheap rolls that AraabMuzik is doing here. Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.
And people have been doing crazy live electronic performance for ooooh.... 60 years now. We used keyboards and drum pads and MPC/SP type machines.
Ok, I have to admit that didn't really do much for me. I need a little bit of melody... think more along the lines of like Massive Attack or vintage Jamaican Dub.
listen to that and try to figure out where your attention is focused. that's not something that fingers do in real time, its like hitting the hyperspace button and writing beats on more than one dimension at the same time. that's tracker music. the software looks like VIM.
try to figure out how those beats and changes are structured. Its very precise. They count interesting number series and there are polyrhythms that are very hard to notate in western music.
Actually, I mostly agree, despite going in thinking I wouldn't. Girl Talk is terribly boring live. There are many better, more creative artists in the EDM world. Araabmuzik as mentioned, RJD2 is a genre bending turntablist/synth junky/live performer, Pretty Lights mashes buttons on a monome and plays live with a drummer, and I think The Hood Internet does much better mash ups and has a better live show than Girl Talk (though they don't do the instrumachine thing so much).
I don't think I fully agree with 'the assumption that electronic music is the future'. It will be part of the future, but analog/traditional instruments will always be around, and will always be a significant portion of what music is created and what music is listened to.
Instrumachines aren't necessarily new, I'd even say the original electronic synthesizers of the 60s and 70s fall into the category. The just evolved into things with keyboards so they kind of got lumped into the 'instrument' category. I was glad you brought up turntablism, another example.
I mostly agree with you here, I think we're just starting from different starting points. The "electronic music is future" thing is sort of a counter statement to the idea that EDM is a trend. My only argument is that electronic music will only dig it's claws into popular music. I'm not suggesting that analog instruments die completely. At least I hope not.
I know the synths are a good example of a legit hardware instrument. From the fan's perspective though, it largely mimics the skill of a pianist (even if you upload crazy other sounds into the keys). I'm more interested when we start respecting performers who play instruments conceived entirely in the digital era, with very little vestigial leftover from the analog instruments. Just the concept of that is cool to me.
As for RJD2, that's a big omission on my part, I was such a huge fan in the early 2000s. And also PL, more recently.
The issue is not that controllerism & live manipulation of machines is a new phase of musical performance, it is that the technology available to electronic musicians has matured to where the advantages of CPUs, GBs of sample storage, live DSP, etc. now have physical controller counterparts. This is nothing new, it is a cycle we have seen repeat through instrument design (actually all production, e.g., printing presses required fixed type, whereas freehand allowed expression) for centuries. With each technological advancement, improvisation and flexibility narrows to meet the constraints of the technology, then expands to meet the needs of those using it. Repeat.
But can you really dance to it? Is it fun to those just listening?
My first impression is that this is just a vain and boring exhibitionism of technical virtuosity, like those fast and boring guitar players (Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc) or those endlessly screaming pop divas (Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, etc.) just to show off.
I'd be curious to know if you create music or are just a listener. It's easy for someone who doesn't actually write music to write off a lot of that as "boring exhibitionism". But if you watch those guys play or talk about music, a lot of times you genuinely get the feeling that that's just what they hear it in their head. It's just how music is supposed to be to them.
I'm a guitar player myself, and don't really care for Vai/Satriani type stuff; there's just something missing. I have been getting into some more recent progressive shred and am having a hard time finding anybody that seems to really be pushing the genre forward as much as Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes. Both are extremely talented and just seem to "get it". Another guy who is right up there is Paul Ortiz. He's got some pretty serious keyboard chops, too.
true, it's definitely a different kind of experience. I don't necessarily think the dance culture will diminish. But I do think there is space for the virtuosic in EDM... or maybe I should say EM ;-)
WMF is coming up soon. Have you been in the last couple years or going this time? I haven't been in about 6 years since I moved from Miami to SF. Curious to see how things have changed. When I was at the fringes of the scene back then, the tools that are being used for this style were just starting to come into vogue.
Also, I've seen a few performances where iPads were being used in a similar fashion to decent effect. Not sure which software was used. What are your thoughts on that? The machines these guys are using cool, but essentially still hardware. We are at a point now where an artist can commission a unique instrumachine purely in software that runs on tablets or just regular laptops. This reminds me of classic musicians throughout the ages who either invent their own instruments, or commission artisans to build them.
I'd like to see more examples of people using these tools to control acoustic-seeming sounds. The tech intrigues the geek part of me, but the sounds don't agree with me (I mostly have a piano/classical/jazz background).
What electronic music opened up is much larger. Music is internal, electric (like our central nervous systems) and cosmic. The focus is in the body and mind of the people experiencing it. Its in the speakers and on the dance floor. The composer disappears, the audience disappears, the technique disappears (and all that thinking about "is the performance technically accurate/innovative ?")
As soon as you put some clown on the stage all the beauty evaporates and people stand around yelling "woot" and generally not dancing. Or if they do it involves fist pumping and making rock faces.
As soon as you put a live musician in the track then you start thinking about technical execution and about what the musician is feeling and thinking. It limits it. I love live musicians (I majored in Saxophone, I have a piano in my room here), but I just want to point out that the revolution of electronic music is that we took music past the limits of performance.
Its pure sound, pure feeling.
Also you should realize that even jungle, juke, IDM, breakcore are often written with furious fingers and lots of live tweaking. And AraabMuzik is using the auto rolls all the time and he has breaks that set the pace. And he has the dynamics turned way down so its actually pretty hard to make a mistake. Turntablists like Q-bert are a thousands times more impressive. Listen to Sabar drumming and forget about the simple boom bap and cheap rolls that AraabMuzik is doing here. Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.
And people have been doing crazy live electronic performance for ooooh.... 60 years now. We used keyboards and drum pads and MPC/SP type machines.