quoted 2 lines i think that the "detached" feeling you guys are talking about has a lot =>i think that the "detached" feeling you guys are talking about has a lot =
>to do w/ the fact that its instrumental music
naw, I think it's the quality of the type of instrumental music we're talking about. I mean, this IDM stuff pretty much goes out of its way to be abstract and eschew sentimentality. The whole aesthetic of conspicuously synthesized and distorted sounds confronts us with a bracing strangeness, gives us the impression that we are leaving the familiar world as we know it, and in the process we are leaving our old earthbound selves behind, getting high as it were. That's not so touchy-feely in my book.
In classical music there's tons of instrumental pieces that evoke strong emotions. Once I played a slow movement of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto to a friend who dropped by and she was in tears by the end of the four minute movement. That never happens with Autechre.
Of course, it would be interesting if electronic music were to engage the emotions in a more direct way. Clearly we don't want a retread of sentimental pop music, we want something that we've never heard before. but it might be possible. One period of music that I think is very interesting and one could probably learn a lot from occurred in the very early 20th century, when composers who had come up on late-Romantic music (arguably the most intensely emotional music) began transforming themselves into radical modernists. In most cases, the composers didn't shift over night, and there are a lot of strange and interesting pieces that lie somewhere in between. (Oh, stuff like Schoenberg's first Chamber Symphony). Anyway. I think of it as I believe the assumptions behind some of the IDM stuff seems so related to the old ideas of Modernism...perhaps IDM should drive itself backwards into Romanticism...not the sappy pop one, but the wildly lyrical, chromatic forward-looking one of the late 19th century....now that would be something...
kurt
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org