I would say that there is little IDM that is "harmonically very rich"
except, perhaps, stuff that grabs harmonic ideas from jazz. Like
Squarepusher's jazzy stuff, like "Port Rhombus". Someone already
mentioned Matthew Herbert, but that indicates another area: house
music that takes cues from song-like house music with jazzy chords.
In any event, the 'problem' with all this stuff is that the harmonic
ideas are usually not the creative part of the track (compared to,
say, the sonorities or rhythms).
certainly there's a middle ground. Mouse on Mars, Sack & Blumm,
Bjork, Plaid --I don't know, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't loop
but uses sequences of simple chords like a pop band would.
I don't know what to make of the comment about Confield being
harmonically rich...certainly there are shifting pile-ups of tones,
but i don't get the feeling that they're creating a vertical harmonic
ideas. maybe someone would like to do an analysis of one of those
tracks to enlighten us all?
harmonically very satisfying to me has been some of the recent
Wolfgang Voight stuff, like the Alltag 1-4 ep or the Gas "Pop" lp.
Really just a couple of chords with some suspensions, but he creates
these nice areas of harmonic instability which resolve or don't in
unpredictible ways. And, i don't know, maybe this shows how warped i
am, i think the reason I really liked the Steve Bug remix of
Robotman's "Hypnofreak" is that the two chord loop towards the end
voices the chords in contrary motion (one also doesn't hear much
cognizant 'voice leading' in idm...)
anyway...it could be argued that electronica is trying to pry us away
from rational experience, and the careful flow of harmonic logic that
we find in harmonically developed music is too conducive to
cleverness, to a lucidity that is the opposite from the hypnotized,
dionysion abandon the music is trying to incite.
the answer, for me, is to listen to other sorts of music. this fall
i've been really getting into Stravinsky's Cantata which, as chance
would have it, has a wealth of creative harmonic ideas. But no kick
drum.
k
quoted 14 lines The vast majority of IDM currently released seems to be very static
>The vast majority of IDM currently released seems to be very static
>harmonically, exploits often a single idea for a whole track and is
>extremely dependent on unchanging loops. While that can sometimes give nice
>results, I'd be very interested in hearing suggestions of music that's
>exactly the opposite.
>
>I'm looking for IDM-ish (or somewhat related) music that does NOT match
>these criteria: music that is harmonically very rich and dynamic, that
>develops itself extensively, that does not revolve abusively (or even at
>all!) around loops.
>
>Does it exist?
>
>g.