Electronic Progress Goes “Boink”
It’s time to address the growing concern in why it’s been over a year since I last put up a mix set. In the interest of squarely placing the blame, it can be attributed primarily to laziness. I currently have two sets in the works (one that should have been released almost a year ago) and, as always, hope to have them up soon. But there are other underlying factors coming into play as well. These are not only inherent to the delay, but troublesome trends in electronic music that deserve to be addressed head-on.
The first is quality. The process of sonic craftsmanship has dwindled in electronic music, the only genre of music in history granted legitimacy without requiring an actual performance of any kind. You have limitless ability to rework, refine and experiment without requiring multiple takes, and with everything rooted in experimentalism there’s actually no limit to acceptable sound design and structure, so long as it’s coherent and well-organized. Your favorite floor barnstormer might actually be a time-corrected toilet flush coupled with your cat being picked up… with pliers. It was funny when Derrick May and Juan Atkins were doing it. The problem is, everyone else has figured this out. The application of logical extremes usually come with bleak forecasts and this was no exception. Like YouTube, on the fateful day they decided to add comments as a feature.
Genres are invariably flooded with a low signal-to-noise ratio, but it doesn’t make it any less offensive. The concept was once described to me by a friend as Lightning Strike Syndrome: When lightning strikes and an artist pioneers a new sound or approach, the masses flock to the point of impact waiting for lightning to strike again. Of course, it strikes someone elsewhere and the masses again flock to that very spot. What we actually have here is even worse: Artists feeding off the inevitable frenzy of bandwagon-hopping observers as they come rushing to witness the latest miracle. That’s not talent. That’s opportunism disguised as a Cult of Subgenre.
On the periphery, everyone understands this academically. It’s not until you review music on a regular basis or become addicted to the latest charts that you realize how much junk is really floating out there. Digital download shops have gone above and beyond the call of duty by aggregating all the trash, so we know where not to look. Granted it’s not possible to have every song in 200,000 be a revolutionary, groundbreaking piece of art — but it’s entirely possible (And should be expected) that artists push the limits of their knowledge, training, equipment and individual expression to bring us new and fresh ideas.
This is sadly lacking in a number of ways. What used to require the skill and invested time of jamming in the studio to find that perfect chemistry has been replaced by a series of formulaic builds and breakdowns, aided by out-of-the-box, widely-used sample packs in plug-and-play software kits. For an industry that grew up and sprung from rich, melody-driven sounds of 80′s-era FM synthesis and Yamaha DX7′s, today’s palettes are surprisingly insipid. There is rarely any original composition anymore, as preconstructed loops and patches do the heavy lifting, essentially leaving only arrangement and sound design to the mouse-clicking maestro.
And that leads us to our next problem: The electronic music umbrella as a whole is powered by technicians, not artists. Your classically-trained musicians represent a fraction of a percent of the industry in general, and even that’s not an actual guarantor that said musicians actually have any talent. It means they studied a lot of people who did. The remainder are programmers and geeks, Vulcans in a forum desperately in need of Scotty’s ingenuity. It’s no wonder these people turn to primes and fibonacci sequences for their cues on creativity — the inherent nature of analysis is counterintuitive to creative inspiration.
Similarly, the standard of skill has dropped to such a degree that DJs are now warp-marking their tracks to pass over that annoyance of actually having to mix two tracks together with different tempos. Today the trainwreck is poor beatmatching, tomorrow it’ll be out of key (One could argue it’s happening already). As is always the case, idiot-proofing breeds better idiots and someone will find a way to ground a set even after hitting play on the DAT and picking up a beer.
The standard of actual performance has become so low, hooks, movie samples and vocalists are picked up and arbitrarily exercised with reckless abandon. Breathy female vocalists kicked out of initial screening rounds of American Idol can suddenly become stars by setting the autotune, cranking up the vox and throwing up on the mic. Provided there’s some fresh-cut 4/4 beats and enough atmospheric reverb to wash the imperfections away, most people never know the difference and never care to find out. Vocals, as with innovative quality, are entirely optional and in fact, usually discouraged by minimalists huddling in the corner cursing any progression that threatens the high from their hallucinogens.
All said and done, it’s a whole whose sum of all parts actually results in a negative. The sad reality is that while some artists do genuinely handcraft their sounds and push the boundaries of experimentalism, they’re riding the only wave to shore. It’s never long before the hundred billion castaways looking for a trend come washing up behind them. And there are that many, because the output level in every subgenre has been pushed to its absolute maximum level of saturation.
The recent flurry of pressure to produce mixes and charts on a weekly and monthly basis have obscured the most important point of DJing in the first place: To create a unique, enjoyable, sonic collage of your favorite works. Any ding dong can stitch together two tracks at 132 bpm with friendly leads. The art comes from the era of the mixtape: The careful selection and order of tracks, the messages and emotions they convey, the joy of creating new combinations in transitions. A mix is personal, because it represents the DJ’s taste and conviction to share with others. Nick Warren’s Back to Mine was special not solely because of the fantastic tracks, but because it represented a over a decade’s worth of his favorite obscure and forgotten works. It was a 79-minute journey into time, and a view into a window we’d never known existed.
That’s the standard, and it should be upheld. Whether the frantic obsession with digital mixes ceases gradually over time or increases in intensity, my goal here will always be to contribute more signal and less noise. My mixes represent a compact, niche sound in electronic music that others may find droll and uninteresting, but if I can find more joy in hearing 14 songs together than separately in their respective, unmixed forms, then that mix is ready for prime time. Anything less would be a waste of a wait.
Your comment system is weird. lol But your article is great! I agree totally however we are also in the middle of a paradigm shift. Music is more than ever accessible by the masses indipendently and not force fed to us by the radio stations and label executives which although evil were the “filter” in most cases. But it’s up to us as electronic musicians to challenge ourselves and to put out a creative album that is not a “preset 01″ album or one that we’ve heard before.
Yo cuz,
Agreed. My officemate was getting way too deep into electro about the time it had begun to turn into a formula (*cough* KLAAS *cough*) and he used to bump it ALL THE TIME AND IT WAS KILLING ME SLOWLY AND PAINFULLY. Other genres that do this to me are: all the rest. Because really, you’re right. I mean, I get knocked by this guy for preferring what he calls “overproduced” tracks. Since then, his taste has improved, but really…I take a lot of pride in knowing that though it takes me ages to finish a single new track or remix, there’s enough content in there to slay the majority of that which has come before and will come after. I can release a track and know that the “overproduction” is like this thick armor of original synths, minimal command-c & v, and breakdowns that took forever to construct so that they drop harder than all the world’s snare rolls played simultaneously.
I’m just so sick of the BS out there, especially when it gets put on high. People are all, “Pryda this,” and “Deadmau5 that”, and it’s still riff-music.
Riff-tracks is all EM is anymore; riff gets made, copy and paste, song goes on beatport. 8 MINUTES OF IT. And then you hear all 8 minutes in the club and you want to slap the DJ for being lazy.
Lately, I don’t even listen to new stuff. I just keep on loving the old stuff, and follow this inexplicable desire I have to make it. I really feel your disenchantment, dude. It’s a serious problem. It’s might bolster the stereotypes that it’s simple music with a simple beat, but it will definitely make the super-producers, the valiant defenders of the form, stand out like visionaries. These visionaries may not get the props they deserve as band-wagons trail closely behind, but that’s their sacrifice, and it’s a necessary one.
I’m going to agree with you, but only because of the Calvin and Hobbes reference from one of my favorite strips.
well put. i’ve been watching the cycles of genre death and rebirth now for a while, 12 years since my introduction to “house” music, a lifetime in a style of music that has defied easy catagorization. as a dj the issue of staying current remains a constant problem of being behind the curve. the effort of getting something that is unique and not in every other dj’s crate is what defines you and your sound. digging and finding those tracks, taking the time to know your music, cherishing those records because you knew there was only so many of them that existed, that once that pressing was sold out you might never see it again. djing proir to the advent of beatport meant that you had more of yourself invested in your sound. now it’s totally changed, the music is cheap, alot of it almost disposable. great music is timeless, and i could take a handful of records and drop them on any dancefloor and they would still sound good. the people that produced most of those tracks are no longer in the current landscape, or their sound has changed. it could be argued that the quality of the music produced overall was better when the technology was more expensive, but i still find it inspiring that there is still a drive to push the envelope and make state of the art tracks…
and yet i have crates full of yesterday’s cutting edge sounds gathering dust. at $10 a piece they represent a very heavy and expensive investment and commitment to what may be a dying art form. it meant more to me then than it does now, because i see djing as what it is, interactive music listening that represents a convergence of old ideas being recycled as something new. the very nature of electronic music relys on the ideas and forms that proceeded it. this is not to say that it is just a sum of the parts involved, but it is nearly impossible to attempt to produce something without it being a cliche the moment it reaches the pop culture taste makers. what evolves underground is pushed into the mainstream and commodified and has it’s 15 minutes of being blown up, and the saturation point is easily heard in the number of lame remixes being done in that style that year.
records were the top tracks of their day, on labels that no longer exist and produced by people that will never see a dime, but it was the fact that they were the true innovaters that made it possible and paved the way forward.
anyways, that’s my two cents…props to the blog writer. and to those keeping the shit real, underground. :}>>>>>K
I’m affirmed yet also crestfallen to see that I am not the only ones out there who feels abandoned by a genre of music that once inspires me to drop $12 on a single record across town, and now doesn’t even motivate an instant $1.50 download. Between 2000 and 2005, I was putting out a labor-of-love DJ mix every 6 months or so, yet it has taken be 4 years since then for a follow up.
I recently attended a music production class lead by a very established dance music producer, more just to gain insight into the process of dance music production vs. the songcraft I am accustomed to being an “organic” musician as well. In the entire 6 hour course, not a single mention was given to the idea of musical expression, emotion, or anything else that compels me to pick up a guitar and create, but rather portrayed the process as if it were some sort of purely-engineered practice. Granted this was an introductory course, and one cannot be taught to be inspired to song, yet the complete absence of musical thought versus technical process presented in this introduction somewhat validated my concerns that dance music today, in all of its barrier-less accessibility, is less music and more a mechanized hobby with a coded formula for success. Such an approach does not breed innovation, much less art.
While the clubs may be happily bouncin’ to riffy, compressed electro prog, my headphones and I are happily waiting it out in a Hooj Choon time warp until the qualities that make good music good (thought, originality, expression, soul, etc.) come back in style. Thanks for the very thoughtful, original, and expressive article; assuming your mixes are crafted in the same spirit, I may have some awakening to do
Cheers,
Andy