IDM Mailing Archive

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