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by crucialfelix 4861 days ago
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.

3 comments

I gotta say, I agree with this post. Grandstanding != musical In fact it is regressive. It is actually theater disguised as music.
> Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.

You can't just throw something like that out there and not make recommendations ;)

I gotta admit, I can't stand about 98% of EDM, but some small amount of it actually is really good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9wUifJ-hQ

> You can't just throw something like that out there and not make recommendations ;)

here's a podcast full of hive, tech itch, etc.

http://www.mixcloud.com/lars-mion/unashamedly-nostalgic/

This stuff was all done with intricate editing before izotope, audio damage, etc. had one-button tricks to stutter and mangle.

Noisia, Phace, Rockwell, etc. are leading the new charge on d&b. Amazing shit.

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.
for virtuosity and density there's Remarc Thunderclap:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS3hPo81BKw

for pure beauty, Photek The Rain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYsY4wYMQe8

be sure to sit back and listen and wait for the bass to drop ;)

some beautiful mind juggling from Remarc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I09dIBsU80

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.

Sabar drumming from Senegal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWd8n1kK0F0

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.

yes yes yes yes yes and also yes.