quoted 1 line I'm sorta surprised our resident post-industrialist aesthete (Mr. Greg> I'm sorta surprised our resident post-industrialist aesthete (Mr. Greg
Gee, was I elected? *grin*
quoted 1 line Earle) hasn't already discussed this Skinny Puppy offshoot more.> Earle) hasn't already discussed this Skinny Puppy offshoot more.
Well, lots of reasons, some of which may surprise you.
The main one being that I don't feel that the Download record or the new SP
record have anything whatsoever to do with the canonical parameterization of
"IDM" as discussed in this forum. (In fact, I was a bit surprised by our
dentist friend Aaron sending a review of "The Process" to this mailing list.)
I think there's a fuzzy boundary out there where what we call "IDM" turns
into something else - like "Industrial" - that is best discussed elsewhere.
I think that things like recent Scorn and MBM et al. skirt that boundary,
and are fair game. I understand that Justin Broadrick's Techno Animal project
is enlisting some well-known-to-IDMers remixers, so I'd include that too.
I don't think Download and the new Puppy album fit inside that fuzzy zone, so
I don't discuss it here.
quoted 3 lines Download is among the most sophisticated music ever made by the Skinny Puppy> Download is among the most sophisticated music ever made by the Skinny Puppy
> crew, and the surprising thing about this record is the depth to which
> Techno permeates many of the songs.
Well, I've had one runthrough of "Furnace" and I don't really agree much.
(I think that's partly the reason why DJ Philth - Capt. Stargazer to Mike
Exist Dance Kandel's Commander Mindfuck - is no longer part of the crew.)
About a year ago Dwayne sent me a "Download Tester" tape (none of it appears
on "Furnace") and basically, it has one really great Techno track - the
direction I dearly wished they'd gone in - and one or two other ones that
were cool, and the rest was just a complete chaotic shambles. Peppered with
coffeepot and incessant R2D2-esque blips. I hated it. While "Furnace" seems
like things have progressed and are a little more coherent, it still strikes
me as chaotic. At this point in my life, chaotic music just doesn't interest
me much anymore. To me Download is like Metallica - you can't argue that
they're really great at what they do (and sonic construction-wise, nobody
can touch "Furnace" with a 10 foot pole - if you can get past the *volume* of
it, you'll find an amazingly constructed sonic architecture of dense layers),
but musically, it's just not my cup of tea now. ("I am Techno of Borg ... you
will be assimilated ... ")
The two most recent tapes I've been given by friends are "Tri Repetae" and a
copy of a promo CD of Skinny Puppy's "The Process". As a measure of how far
I've come, I listen to "Tri Repeatae" and I think "Now why couldn't Dwayne
still be here to hear this record, or make something this amazing in their
own way". Unfortunately, I listened to the Puppy album *after* Autechre, and
it's just so utterly appalling in comparison that there's no way I would have
ever mentioned it here. For Ogre to complain (in a sordid drag-the-muck
post-mortem in the new Alternative Press) "Ogre decries the often overt use of
``techno-shit'' ... " on a record whose sole Techno element consists of a
disjointed 30-second outro is pathetically absurd. Every time I listen to
Sven Vath's SP tribute track (the Barbarella track on TEEX 1) or to FSOL or
"Tri Repeatae", I think What Might Have Been ...
The last reason, quite frankly, is because one of the greatest, most unique
and creative persons to have ever walked the earth is not here anymore, and
it still hasn't fully sunk in. Especially when some of the greatest moments
in my life were spent raving with Dwayne Rudolph Goettel. (Among other
things, he and Philth drove all the way down from Vancouver to San Francisco -
a good 900-1000 miles or so - just to see Moby/Vapourspace/Orbital/Aphex.)
(Apologies for the length of this ramble ... )
- Greg