IDM Mailing Archive

quoted 4 lines So many people who went to that gig agreed with my thoughts on Squarepusher

>So many people who went to that gig agreed with my thoughts on Squarepusher >- blips and stops and starts. >Ok he had trouble with the sound system but...... >Mike Ladd really rocked it.

I missed Mike Ladd, Tortoise were very good but I actually didn't know a Squarepusher set could be so boring !!!!!!!!!!!! He used to play bass at his previous shows but he apparently doesn't anymore (by the way, please get back to me if you own a recording of Squarepusher live playing bass)... All you could see this time was him behind his machines at the very back of the stage and all you could hear was some highly hectic "can't stay on the same pattern for more than 2 seconds" drum machine programming... I can hardly talk about it as being "music" given that there were no chords, no melody lines and no coherence whatsoever... So is that what IDM is all about these days ?... hectic programming and weird noises ?... And please spare me the lame excuse of the "conceptual approach"... Some artists just have no ideas so it's easier to make rubbish and say it's art (I'm thinking Vladislav Delay, Oval, SND, Terre Thaemlitz, Kid 606, etc... ) - and I think it's just sad to see that renowned artists such as Autechre and now Squarepusher seem to choose that path too... Thank God, we also have Magnetophone, Aphex Twin, Marumari, Arovane, Hrvatski and others to believe in... Topher. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org

On Fri, 4 May 2001, Topher wrote:

quoted 3 lines "conceptual approach"... Some artists just have no ideas so it's

> "conceptual approach"... Some artists just have no ideas so it's > easier to make rubbish and say it's art (I'm thinking Vladislav > Delay, Oval, SND, Terre Thaemlitz, Kid 606, etc... ) - and I think

This statement is kind of funny, inasmuch as "conceptual" sort of implies that the ideas are more important than details of execution (so how can you have conceptual art without ideas?). Then again, I suppose you have a narrower definition of "ideas". At any rate, I'm not a big fan of any of the above except for Oval, whose records keep getting better and better. In a way, Popp has been doing for years what Autechre are starting to cotton onto- developing real time environments for making music loosely parameterized by live inputs. From Dok on, his records have been remarkably dense and interesting throughout. Note that David Tudor and Roland Kayn spent decades on this approach with analog gear (to different results). -rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org