On Tue, 11 Jul 1995, Miles Egan wrote:
quoted 4 lines What's behind this recent fascination with "dark" ambient and> What's behind this recent fascination with "dark" ambient and
> "scary" IDM? It's certainly a twist on the old neo-hippie rave ideals.
> Is this a sign of the times or just a fad? There must be a lot of grumpy
> people out there.
Interesting comment Miles... personally, I'd agree with the person who
attributes it mostly to a combination of marketing and simply a need for
something different. I guess it all depends on where you're coming from..
I first got into "industrial" music because it was a) electronic music
and b) so far removed in mood/attitude from anything I'd ever heard
before (not too many years ago, my staple diet in high school was Depeche
Mode, if that helps any :-) that I was just mesmerized by it. So while I
still like dark, evil music (dark IDM among others--not that there's a whole
lot of it out there), a little mood-neutral music is a welcome change.
Conversely, I'm sure that there are just as many people who got into
techno/IDM through acid jazz/nouveau-ambient/whatever, and for whom this
Isolationist stuff is a breath of fresh air, a window into a strange, alien
new kind of music that must seem just as enticing as when I first heard,
say, Zoviet France.
Personally I'm convinced that most musical movements in modern, innovative
music--especially electronic music--go in cycles. Everything we latch onto
and consider "good", "innovative" etc. at any point in time is a function of
what we were into before. Who knows, in a year or so I may get really sick of
this IDM-dub style that is really a bit close to getting dangerously
overmilked. I already find myself listening to my old Skinny Puppy records
once in a while. If you'd told me that I might be doing this a year ago I'd
have laughed in your face.
Modern electronic music, the stuff that idm- and ambient-listers groove on,
is basically escapist music with (fortunately) a good dose of intelligence,
for the most part. However, the fact that it's escapist means that its
impact is made in large part by appealing to our imaginations--in other
words, anything that deviates from what we're used to will fire our
imaginations--hence my "cycles" theory; we're constantly flirting in and
out of a fairly fixed set of themes/imagery types over time (light/dark,
for example) with the electronic medium being the constant.
(To cut a lot of pompous twaddle short, _I_ personally am not at all
surprised that a ot of people are getting into the dark stuff, especially
since labels like Subharmonic are presenting it in a fairly conventional
manner--i.e. without all the gory covers that you and me had to deal with when
we listened to "industrial", and that would probably put off a lot of today's
techno/ambient audience.)
Phew!
Ashok
(On Now: The Reese Project "Faith Hope and Clarity")
PS> Incidentally, while I'm here, just a comment on the "dark IDM" thread--
I agree that the suggestions people have made today are all "dark" in varying
degrees, but they're not really IDM. I honestly can't think of a lot of _IDM_
that's dark. Leo Anibaldi, sure, some UR, sure, some Aphex, yes, Divination
yes, Locust yes, but bands like Coil etc. aren't really dance bands.
People who want to check out dark, atmospheric electronic music with strong
techno inclinations could do worse than to check out ClockDVA, who in my
opinion are one of the most underrated bands of all time, and the early stuff
by their offshoot System 01. Also, for a nice crunchier, more noisy
cousin of Muziq, try out Esplendor Geometrico.