snd
tender love
(mille plateaux)
Imagine, if you will, a piece of music in corporeal form: The percussion forms the skeleton; the bass line forms the tendons and muscles; the melody and harmony become the skin that affords the music its outward appearance. If you buy into this analogy, then Tender Love is a cyborg. To be precise, Tender Love is the mechanical endoskeleton of Missy Elliot collaborator and producer Timbaland. Picture a funkier, less malignant version of the Terminator?s robotic framework and you?re getting close.
It wasn?t until my second listening that I realised Tender Love is completely free of bass lines; snd has assembled the tracks exclusively from programmed percussion and miniature melodic gestures. I had the feeling of stumbling onto the mutli-track master recordings for some new HipHop album, but only a few of the tracks were audible, the rest had been lost to accidental data erasure. But like any skilled artist, snd?s work amounts to more than simply the sum of its component parts. Close your eyes, concentrate, and you may be able to hear full songs materialize in your head. The minimal elements presented actually suggest the absentee bass lines, melodies, and harmonies, not unlike law enforcement?s forensic technique whereby layers of clay are applied to a skull , creating a model of the victim?s face.
Tender Love arrives at a critical time for the Clicks & Cuts micro-genre of IDM. The concept of extreme minimal techno -- from a certain intellectual point of view -- looks good on paper (on screen?), but the resulting tones and pulses often sounds like aural documents of lab experiments in human psychoacoustics. Of course, there?s nothing inherently wrong with this type of experimentation, but by itself, it only takes artists so far towards art. And once you?ve deconstructed, reduced, and stripped music down to nothing more than a single faint hum, where do you go next? Minimal techno is a genre with a built-in dead end. snd have found the way out of the sonic cul-de-sac by absorbing outside musical influences. I hope other IDM technicians follow snd?s lead before the music disappears completely.
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http://www.angryrobot.net
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