IDM Mailing Archive

Sorry to all those who just want this thread to die, but there are a couple points that i think were overlooked. I'll just use the stupid term shamelessly, because it's not really what I want to talk about. Also, instead of talking about innovation, which has too many "innovative business marketing solutions"-type associations for me, i'll talk about experimentation. The aesthetic of IDM, as with a lot of electronic music, came from the equipment and software available at the time. IDM was an experimental form of music, but it only experimentated with the medium of digital audio and analog hackery. In terms of composition, aesthetics, and culture, it wasn't quite experimental. I don't mean to judge something based solely on it's degree of experimentation; many great compositions and aesthetic moves have come out of IDM. Further experimentation doesn't neccesarily mean falling back on acoustic instrumentation alone. Along the lines of what Simon pointed out, there's still a lot of room for experimenting with the cultural place of the music and sound (outside of the recording or the music venue). This isn't a novel idea (Max Neuhaus is the best example of this), but the novelty of an idea and the room for experimentation within that idea are two seperate things. The first steps in this direction within IDM were the experiments with how the performance happens. Artists including Cex and Matmos have pushed this in very different ways. Having an interesting live show was the simplest way to critique and develop the genre at that point. (You could argue that Matmos doesn't fall into the genre of IDM, I don't care, but their work definitely had the effect of critiquing and developing the genre either way.) Matmos in particular is along the lines as what Simon was talking about, since they formed a grey area between performance art and electronic music. (What Simon seems to be talking about has been developing for a while, however slowly, in the practices of performance art and sound installation.) Matt --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org