JUNKMEDIA: Electronic Music
a special issue of Junkmedia, April 7-13, 2003
(
http://www.junkmedia.org)
As Autechre's Sean Booth has said, give a laptop to each newborn child
and watch the new folk music emerge.
Like rock, electronic music's popularity is intimately tied to its
practical means of production. Where aspiring rockers have a
second-hand guitar and three chords, nascent electronic musicians have
a laptop with a cracked computer music program.
These new-school musicians, many of whom bypass the traditional forms
of music education, have formulated a bewildering array of genres and
nested subgenres. In this special issue of Junkmedia, we look to some
of the day's leading musicians in the experimental electronic
community, an area of intense creative vitality but that receives
limited coverage in mainstream media outlets.
Essay
---In The Luxury of Details: Autechre’s Increasingly Experimental Music
“It’s not like we’re on any kind of exploratory journey,” asserts Sean
Booth. “I think we’re just trying to do things that don’t exist.”
Features
---Manitoba
“Even if you’re chopping up beats well or have nice little melodies,
it’s a dead-end genre at the moment. There really isn’t any reason you
shouldn’t make sloppy, live-sounding music on a computer.”
---Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars
“We live in really strange times. There are so many ambiguities and
they feed into what we think and what we are concerned with. It makes
it very difficult for us to play our music freely.”
---Lasse Marhaug of Jazzkammer
“I don’t know how to play any instrument in the conventional sense.
I’ve always worked with tapes and cheap guitar-pedals – you could say
I’ve been messed up from the beginning.”
Reviews
---Autechre; Draft 7.30 (Warp)
---Venetian Snares; Find Cadence (Hymen)
---Liasons Dangereuses; Liasons Dangereuses (Hit Thing)
---Bug vs. Rootsman and DJ/Rupture split EP (Tigerbeat6)
---Com.a; Shot of Love (Tigerbeat6)
Junkmedia is a daily internet music journal covering rock, electronic
and hip hop with daily reviews, features, and interviews.
(
http://www.junkmedia.org)
Sincerely,
Ben Sterling