Well the obvious link between The Valentines later work and much of what
goes on in electronic music is in the divorcing of sound from the
physical act that originally produced it (or the elimination of the
physical act altogether)... the Valentines were all about taking the
physical rush of the guitar torrent and removing its' insides, leaving a
ghost in its place... this almost exactly parallels the way that
sampling has worked in recent years, allowing sound to be manipulated
and used in ways not imagined by the creators of the sound... and
sampling has changed how people hear things... pitch shifting in
sampling has made the audience much more tolerant and accepting of audio
which is "out of tune" in the conventional definition... Kevin himself
remarked on this phenom one time, and said how thankful he was to house
and hip hop because they softened up the audience for the sort of tonal
scale bending which he accomplished with his whammy bar and his Emax...
Of course now we have music which has never entered the physical realm
at all... wholly fabricated inside silicon environments... and that
music is just as oppressive as the hoary guitar rock that it is a
reaction to... you need to feel the movement of human muscles inside a
piece of work, which is why computer music is often insubstantial and
unsatisfying in the long term...
Of course the problem with anyone who innovates sonically is that you
get these legions of people who come along and appropriate their
approach to sound without realizing that you cant have form without
content or vice versa... so you got all this crap a la SeeFeel, who
basically took a fraction of one of Kevins ideas (of which any given MBV
track would have at least five) and made a career out of it...
essentially turning a radical approach to sound into wallpaper...
SeeFeel in my opinion is a one line joke and I cant understand how they
have gotten any respect at all (in contrast the offshoot Scala is lovely
because they have sound AND songs)... none of the legions of Valentines
followers, from the shoegazers to the ambient crowd, understood how the
expression of the sound has to evolve from inside the music rather than
being imposed on it by a flanger or chorus pedal... and now we have a
whole new wave of Ripsters in the form of Bows and that ilk... ah
well... Kevin brought it all on himself by not releasing any records...
Ultimately, the problem with genres, lists and any sort of
categorization is that anyone with any sort of inquisitive sensibility
will by their very nature always be looking for something that FEELS
new... anyone who listens to one only sort of music (or who focuses on
only one type of art) is a moron... the fun is in the contrast that
change brings... hearing something and getting that feeling that you did
the first time you heard it... electronic music has felt new for some
time now, but that is fading a bit at the moment with the assimilation
of electronic music in the mainstream media and the predominance of
stupid people who are presently working in the medium... that
accompanying deadening that is going on... transcendence in any art form
relies in part on the unexpected, and I dont know about you, but
sometimes a Broadway show tune can sound like the most incredible thing
in the world after a steady diet of Warp shit... I love sonic
experimentation as much as anyone, but it sounds so much more incredible
right in between a Cole Porter song and a studio one track...
check out this pile next to the keyboard;
Oval Szenariodisk
Trashmonk Mona Lisa Overdrive
Tarwater Silur
Andy Pratt Resolution
Throbbing Gristle 20 Jazz Funk Greats
Miles Davis Sketches Of Spain
Primal Scream Swastika Eyes
Wire Chairs Missing
Frank Sinatra Come Fly With Me
Magazine The Correct Use Of Soap
Stock, Hausen and Walkman Stop
The Carpenters Now And Then
Sly And The Family Stone Fresh
Scientist Heavyweight Dub Champion
Merzbow Tauromachine
Broadcast Echos Answer
Scala To You In Alpha
Sneaker Pimps Splinter
Meredith Monk Our Lady Of Late
Plone For Beginner Piano
Supercollider Head On
Gang Of Four 100 Flowers Bloom
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org