Momus on IDM, Simon Reynolds, etc:
http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/cosmopolitan.html
I'm going to see him play tonight in a smokey club here in Portland.
Should be very entertaining; he is clever and charming and pretty
insightful, and he is dealing with a whole host of musical issues not
very-well resolved or even addressed in most IDM. Were the interesting
sonic explorations and emotional melodies of the best IDM wedded with his
synthpop/prog/baroque humor in a functional music, something really
terrific would surely be the result.
The ending of Momus little article calls out for 'smart critics', whose
characteristics we occasionally see on the list: an intelligent ability to
pin-point the needles of decent inspired music in the internet haystack
(as he puts it). This makes me realize that, regardless of all the fluff,
jokes, flames on IDM, I have stuck around to get those bits where someone
who has every 12" on some label comes out and says "005 is the funkiest,
012-014 are experimental, like so-n-so, and everything after 016 shifts
over to disco-house". While I may not exactly agree with the assessment,
the longer I stick around on the list, the more I can learn to interpret
the particular tastes of the critic. I can appreciate a good net
community (they all wear the same friendly face after a while), but it
would be really cool if the list had that critic/transpotter focus that it
is (I think) perhaps a little embarrassed to show nowadays (except Lance
and Andrew Duke, who continue peddling information like monks of an
ancient religion...metaphorically bald and barefoot, but dedicated beyond
much embarrassment)
Momus essentially sides with our bedroom-music-bartering community in his
writing, though his music is very different from what this list talks
about most...
Solenoid
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