Well, I enjoyed reading it, and thats a compliment from me in a world of the
cluesless and unresearched written media.
Does no one here know the tracklists of the warp mixes I asked about a few
days back?! Find it a bit worrying since I resubbed that the list seems more
preoccupied with talking about the actual list itself than IDM.
nevermind...
quoted 168 lines From: "I D" <I-D@friendlycommunity.net>
>From: "I D" <I-D@friendlycommunity.net>
>Reply-To: <I-D@friendlycommunity.net>
>To: <idm@hyperreal.org>
>Subject: [idm] my paper on our music
>Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 11:14:51 -0600
>
>
>Wrote this paper for a class and I want to know what y'all think. I had to
>keep it short, so I kept to what I believe are they key events leading up
>to "IDM", and then onto the American kids like Kid606, Cex, etc.
>
>This paper is about us/you, so please give me your thoughts. Hope this may
>open some interesting dialogue.
>
>
>--
>
>
>The past half-decade has seen a new wave of young American electronic
>musicians whose work references, in a fast and loose manner, experimental
>electronic music, techno, hip-hop, and the reckless abandon of punk rock.
>The scene is both an outgrowth of and a reactionary response to ?IDM? or
>intelligent dance music, a cerebral, abstract hybrid of techno and
>experimental electronic music that developed out of the British rave scene
>in the early nineties. The label IDM in itself alludes to many of the
>issues these young Americans take up with the genre ?that the music is
>intended for headphones rather than the dance floor, it is largely devoid
>of emotional content, and the musicians maintain a calculated degree of
>anonymity. Many of these conventions, as well as the production methods
>and sound of IDM, can be traced back to the work of early electronic
>pioneers in the fifties and sixties. A brief analysis of the progression
>of electronic music technology from the 1950s onward, as well as the manner
>in which musicians responded to and utilized these developments, is
>essential to an understanding of direction now being taken by American
>electronic musicians.
>Electronic music bears the distinction of being the only form of music
>rooted in technological research and development, rather than cultural
>tradition. Early electronic compositions, such as Pierre Henry and Pierre
>Schaeffer?s Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1955) and Karlheinz Stockhausen?s
>Gesang der Junglinge (1955/56) were electroacoustic pieces created by means
>of physically manipulating pre-recorded magnetic tape to alter the recorded
>sounds. Magnetic tape was a relatively new and expensive technology at the
>time, and creation of such works required access to highly specialized
>studios such as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in France. These
>necessary resources were available only to a few select artists, whose
>interests lied not in traditional conventions of storytelling, rhythm, or
>melody, but in the quest for new sounds and musical forms. With each new
>piece came a new technological innovation. As such, the output appealed
>primarily to fellow artists and academics, and was too esoteric to appeal
>to the general public.
>The introduction of the first consumer electronic synthesizers utilizing
>transistors and semiconductors in the early 60s made the use of electronic
>instruments affordable and accessible to traditional musicians . Robert
>Moog?s Mini-Moog was a powerful, yet easily controllable synthesizer that
>became popular with rock musicians and came to define a very particular
>sixties sound. Rock and pop musicians?use of electronic instruments bore
>little resemblance to the compositions of early innovators in that the
>instruments were played as if they were pianos, essentially used to emulate
>the sound of acoustic instruments. For the most part, musicians had little
>interest in the sonic capabilities of the new technology and were content
>to simply apply the instruments to their predefined musical vocabulary.
>The use of synthesizers continued to grow over the next two decades as they
>became more compact, easy to use, and affordable. Production of
>synthesizers increased as companies such as Korg, Roland, and Yamaha
>introduced their own line of products. In 1982 Roland introduced two
>sequencing instruments ?the TB303 (Transistor Bass), which generated bass
>lines and was intended to emulate a bass guitar player, and the TR606
>(Transistor Rhythm), which generated percussion sounds and was intended to
>emulate a drummer . The machines allowed users to enter musical patterns
>that would play back and accompany the lead musician. Rock musicians, the
>products?target consumer, found little use for the machines, which sounded
>very little like a real drummer or bass player. Although the machines were
>a commercial failure, they gained a following among early hip-hop and dance
>music producers, who appreciated the unique sounds of the boxes and their
>ability to loop phrases indefinitely. Synthesized drums and keyboards
>became a ubiquitous characteristic of eighties pop music, but it was the
>TB-303 and TR-606 (and later, 909) that almost exclusively formed the
>backbone of hip-hop and techno music . Perhaps of even more significance
>to hip-hop, of course, was the role of the DJ, who accompanied rappers by
>scratching records and mixing samples from the records into their own work.
> Oftentimes, entire phrases of popular songs would be appropriated, as in
>the case of Run DMC?s ?Walk This Way? a reworking of Aerosmith?s hit of the
>same name.
>Both hip-hop and techno became massively successful in the late eighties
>and early nineties, the former primarily in the United States and the
>latter primarily throughout Britain and Europe. In the U.S., hip-hop
>groups such as NWA and Public Enemy created a storm of controversy, not to
>mention massive record sales and critical accolades, by candidly
>broadcasting the plight of angry young urban blacks, which in turn
>captivated a generation of young suburban whites and horrified their
>parents. In England, roughly during the same period, the rave scene was
>peaking. Raves, all night dance events staged in massive warehouses, were
>characterized by throbbing, repetitive techno music, elaborate lighting and
>video projections, and the consumption of copious amounts of synthetic
>drugs such as LSD and ecstasy.
>By the mid nineties the personal computer became affordable enough to make
>its way into many homes and powerful enough to handle complex audio
>synthesis and production. No longer was it necessary to own a synthesizer,
>sampler, or sequencer to produce electronic music ?all of these tasks could
>be handled reasonably well by readily available software programs. Sounds
>could be processed and manipulated in ways that were once impossible or
>simply tedious and time consuming. In 1993 British record label Warp
>released the seminal compilation ?Artificial Intelligence: Electronic
>Listening Music > Warp?. The album featured the premiere of prominent
>artists Aphex Twin (under the pseudonym The Dice Man) and Autechre, and
>solidified a burgeoning movement among a loose association of musicians who
>were utilizing this new technology to push the sound of techno and dance
>music into new territories. Later in 1993, a small group of computer users
>established an e-mail list to discuss the work of Aphex Twin, as well as
>the other artists on the Artificial Intelligence compilation. This group
>dubbed themselves the Intelligence Dance Music list, and thus the name was
>born. As the nineties progressed, Aphex Twin and Autechre gained
>international distribution and audio production software had reached
>unprecedented levels of power and simplicity of use. Awareness of the
>genre grew and a slew of clones of the early progenitors began to produce
>albums. What was once considered a genre by virtue of its inability to be
>categorized, came to form its own rigid conventions. As in the fifties and
>sixties, the music was often focused on its own methods of production ?what
>software was used, on what kind of computer, etc. The genre also lacked
>much of a performative aspect ?a typical performance could be expected to
>consist of a solitary figure on a dark stage illuminated solely by the cool
>glow of a laptop computer.
> In the late nineties in the U.S., a new wave of artists informed by the
>IDM scene began to gain attention for their particularly abrasive take on
>the genre. All too aware of the stigma that came with producing music on
>computers ?that the work is too cerebral for large audiences and lacks
>passion ?the artists took it upon themselves to upend the genre by drawing
>upon their uniquely American influences of hip-hop and hardcore punk. One
>work that helped define this trend was the three inch CD ?Attitude?on
>Tigerbeat 6 records. The release featured artists sampling, without
>clearance, the work of hip-hop group NWA (who in turn freely sampled other
>artists without clearance) and reworking the tracks into violent, mangled
>chunks of sound. Tigerbeat 6 founder Kid606, 23-year-old Miguel Depedro,
>has become the most prolific artist of this movement and its unofficial
>poster boy. His most recent album, ?Kid606 the Action Packed Mentallist
>Brings You the Fucking Jams? released in May of 2002, perfectly illustrates
>the zeitgeist of this movement in its title and first two tracks. The
>title alludes to experimentation and complexity of the music, but also that
>the music is meant to be energetic, fun, and danceable. The first track on
>the album consists of three minutes of clicks and droning buzzes that
>wouldn?t sound at all out of place alongside an early work by a composer
>such as Stockhausen or John Cage. The second track, however, starts out
>with a warbled, overdriven synthesizer line and quickly layers in a sped up
>version of Eminem?s hip-hop group D12?s hit ?Purple Pills? rendering the
>men?s voices high pitched and squeaky, and the song?s mid tempo rhythm a
>fast dance beat.
>Through the subversive appropriation of the work of other influential,
>aggressive young musicians, a new generation of American electronic
>musicians have found a way to reconcile the cerebral experimentation of IDM
>with the attitude and visceral power of hip-hop and punk. The availability
>of computers and music production software has allowed these artists to
>explore new avenues of musical production and composition, while
>consciously referencing both the canon of electronic music and popular
>culture at large.
>
>
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>
>
>
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>
>
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