Well, I'm no expert (but if Mr. Lockett is on this list, I do believe he wrote a thesis or dissertation applying structuralist critical theory to ambient music - Alan? You there?), but it seems to me to be about being in a certain "place" or frame of mind when you hear something. Any genre has those stylistic coneventions which mark it as such, and I feel like familiarity with the genre decreases the focus on the repetitive "planks" of the style and allows attention to be placed on the smaller scale variances. I used a disjunct ("or") on purpose, because sometimes the variance will hit you just because - for whatever reason - you happen to hear something in a different way which reveals the subtleties. I remember one evening when I was in the throes of a sleep disorder burnout and one of Slater's Planetary Assault Systems (The Drone Sector) hit me like a ton of bricks. It was like I had never really 'understood' it until then. Hearing electronic music "live" (I recall a Spacetime Continuum show specifically) has done this as well for me; I just had to be in a certain "place" for my attention, ears, mood, whatever to be aligned in order to be inside of it or have it get inside of me. Call that what you will. And having listened to electronic music for years, I now hear the variations and not so much the repetition. Of course, in techno, etc., repetition is a big, positive part of what makes it. The Basic Channel/Chain Reaction groove is an excellent example. Once you get inside of it, it's like heroin (maybe there's more than one reason it used to be called "heroin house!). Especially in electronic stuff (as it tends to rely heavily on variance in many cases), it takes either the patience to investigate a genre or whatever it may be for you to be in that attention shifting place where your ears are open. I believe it's the same for any genre, though.
If you think about it, the common criticism by anyone who stands outside is "it all sounds the same". What do you think of when someone mentions Blues, Country, BeBop or ______ (fill in the blank)? Not having read Mr. Lockett's work, not having any idea about his argument (but having some clues about structuralism), I'd suggest that acquaintance with the certian genre specifics or signature motifs becomes a 'rosetta stone', allowing one to interpret and reference within the genre - like a language. Avoiding the entire quagmire of subjectivity and built-in threads of deconstruction when it comes to such a notion (which, of course, is why there IS poststructuralist theory), all I can say is that's where this thread has led me. I may find myself in a different place tomorrow :-). I normally do not talk like this. What we we talking about, again?
jeff
> > > Like any other genre, once "inside" you can hear the variation - > > "outside" you mainly hear the rep[e]tition. > --------------------- > Hey Jeff, thanks for this writeupI wanted to pull this sentence out because you really > nailed a subtle and important point here. I noticed this most recently > with some of the 'deeper' Chain Reaction releases (Substance, Porter > Ricks) which did nothing for me when I first bought them back in '96 > -- unlike, say, Monolake which grabbed me from the outset. But when > I picked them back up for some long-distance driving music last year, > it was revelatory. > > I've heard the adjective "repetitious" applied to hip-hop, electronic > (house, techno, and trance variants), jazz, classical (Steve Reich and > Phil Glass, in particular) as the reason why somebody didn't like it. > I'm curious about how the process works whereby we (as you put it) go > "inside" a particular genre and start hearing the differences instead > of the sameness. >