mr.arrison wrote:Sure, same thing can be said of 808 State, but the end product is still Bo-ring garbage. (Unless you are shaking booty at a club I guess)

Fair enough.

Part of the reason I switched over to Daft Punk was that I wasn't enjoying the seriousness to which indie rock often aspired. When I listen to popular music, I want something interesting that doesn't take itself too seriously. When I want serious I look to other forms.

I don't find the music boring at all, and I like that I get to listen to it in a context where people are dancing rather than grimly bobbing their heads.

This burial stuff is nothing special, I don't understand the hype. I've heard tons of that stuff, I have records from 10 years ago of people doing the same kind of stuff, what's the big deal? I mean it's ok for what it is, but nothing special.

As far as the discussion, I have played guitar, bass and drums in bands for years but recently I have gotten ahold of this crazy beat machine/ synth/sequencer and I am completely obsessed with it. It's all I've been using in the current band.
I can do on this machine in hours what it used to take me days to do on my 4 track.
I basically sample myself playing something, a bass line or what have you then assign those sounds to various buttons and knobs and somehow remember where they all are and what they all do within the song. I add more stuff, add various effects, speed stuff up, slow stuff down, etc...I make the drum beats with either the drum sounds already in the machine or build a beat with sounds I have sampled into it, banging on a bucket, etc...
Peppers adds his vocals and guitar on top and there we are, we have a song. I suppose I could play bass and we could get some other people to play with us and we'd have the same songs sounding pretty much the same but I kinda like keeping things compact and quick.
I am through trying to arrange practices with 5 people who all have jobs and girlfriends and kids and blah blah blah.

I have made the decision to very, very rarely sample anything off a record of CD and if I do make it a point to mess it up enough to be something radically different than what it was originally.

To play it live is almost like some sort of complex memory game combined with playing a live instrument at the same time.
All these sounds must be triggered and manipulated on the fly, perfectly timed or else it falls to pieces very quickly.
It's very difficult to get it to do what you want without it going completely out of control and I love it.

People might say that I am not really playing an instrument or whatever and that's fine but I find this machine to be way more fun and challenging to play live than guitar or bass ever was.

Basically, I feel anything that makes a sound is a musical instrument in the right hands...be it a log and a rock or a turntable and laptop.
As far as people just taking samples off records and chopping them up, it takes a lot less imagination but it's an arrangement of sounds that would have never existed otherwise, you know?
The fact they must pay royalties if that's their thing is the trade off, I guess.

But yeah, I'm all for any way they come up with for people to be able to make music easier. I may not like that South American techno but there's a lot of people who do and them dudes are having a real good time.

I'd rather see a powerful rock band play live than some dude with a laptop, but I also think it is possible to incorporate bits of each into what you are doing and come out with something good.

I'm digging this Conlon Nancarrow. It's not necessarily sexy, but it's close.

mr.arrison wrote:the "box mix" version of the baked cake

Perfect.

All this time, that is what I was looking for.

The first time my band went to Italy, our minds were blown by the Autogrills. Autogrills are the functional equivalent of the Hardees and TCBYs at highway oases. Except there's a dude pulling espresso, and a woman who cooks (heats) up your gnocchi w/pesto right there in front of you when you order it.

We used to torture our friend Agostino by saying that Autogrill was our favorite restaurant.

To him, this Autogrill, she is like Denny's. To us, she is not the best food ever or anything, but to get this as a byproduct of stopping for gas is incredible..

A year or so later, one of Agostino's bands comes to the US. I see him when they are in Chicago. He and his wife Giovanna tell me that they have discovered something in the US that has 'blown their mind' to the same (i.e. limited) degree that the Autogrill blew our minds. That something is called Cracker Barrel.

Sometimes, you don't like something b/c you haven't developed a taste for it.

Sometimes, you don't like something b/c you HAVE developed a taste for it, and the thing you're tasting is not a good example of whatever it is.

Conversely, sometimes you like something b/c you're too inexperienced to know any better, and it appeals to your crude palate in some particular way.

And sometimes you KNOW it's not that great, but it still appeals to you on some basic, junkfood level.

The 'box mix' version of the baked cake. That's it.

tmidgett wrote:He and his wife Giovanna tell me that they have discovered something in the US that has 'blown their mind' to the same (i.e. limited) degree that the Autogrill blew our minds. That something is called Cracker Barrel.

I remember Ago telling me about how awesome the Cracker Barrel was. It was funny to me at the time, but when I thought about it, I could understand why it was so amazing to someone who had never been to one before.

I get the same way about foreign supermarkets.

Yeah, OK, spent some time w/it.

burial wrote:It's pretty simple.

Very true.

Mood music. Things can use soundtracks sometimes; I could imagine this fitting the bill for someone I liked on some particular occasion. But not me.

My half-asleep wife just asked me, "Are you trying?"

Yes, I was trying.

Maybe tomorrow I'll play that copy of Wake of the Flood I bought the other day.

Haven't had time to read the last two or three pages but for what it's worth I disagree with the notion that electronic music is best left undiscussed here.

I think it's much more healthy to have sort of discourse.


I like a lot of electronic music, btw..Subjex, certain Squarepusher, Seefeel, the first Chris Clark record, GAS, Mouse on Mars, Samurai Math Beats, etc., etc.

Lotta good stuff out there.

Don't believe the hate.

tocharian wrote:I actually love music that is a bald-faced pastiche of samples if it's done inventively and has a different form and feel from what it was created from. Postmodern visual art has embraced bricolage and simulacrum for some time now, and it’s totally fine with me that people make popular music which makes no bones about its postmodern ethics. I actually find this music more interesting and honest than music which aims to pass as a pure representation of a “real-world” event, but has actually undergone extensive digital manipulation.

Post-Modernism has also had it's moment, in way. It questioned a lot at a time things had reached a historical impasse, broke things down and so forth. But that is a limited strategy in the long run. And the Art that is beginning to reassert itself is more like modernism again (by that I mean Art that we can attach importance to).

Nicolas Bourriaud wrote an influential book about DJ culture and Art about 8 years ago called Postproduction - Culture as screenplay: How art reprograms the world. It talks about how DJ's recontextualize music with their taste and judgement to create new forms, but I'm not sure it's that convincing , though. He certainly isn't well liked in theoretical circles, but widely quoted.

It's interesting how the rise of DJ culture has been mirrored by the rise of the curator in Art. These two things are analogous for sure. The DJ is more curator than artist.

As for Burial...It sounds like Bomb the Bass c. 1994. I've kind of heard it before and hangs on bunch of clichés. I think for me to listen to music like this, it has to offer something genuinely new that has scope to expand--opposed to retreading the past.

I'm way more interested in stuff that is a 'real-world event' than one that merely represents it.

I do like electronic music. but that song on burial's myspace is quite boring.
sounds like a pothead failed to make a drum and bass track.

Cranius wrote: Post-Modernism has also had it's moment, in way. It questioned a lot at a time things had reached a historical impasse, broke things down and so forth. But that is a limited strategy in the long run. And the Art that is beginning to reassert itself is more like modernism again (by that I mean Art that we can attach importance to).
...

It's interesting how the rise of DJ culture has been mirrored by the rise of the curator in Art. These two things are analogous for sure. The DJ is more curator than artist.

What do you mean “postmodernism has had its moment”? Do you mean that artists are swearing off digital manipulation and creating everything from scratch? Postmodern strategies are here to stay, although there will always be cranky modernists who insist on whatever their idea of authenticity is.

I’m not quite sure what curator art is, but what Kavinsky, SebastiAn, Justice, and Mr. Oizo do goes beyond curation. Maybe you could say that their approach is akin to what Cat Power did with “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, i.e. detected some small element in a song, extracted it, and recombined it with other elements to make something entirely different in mood and texture. But you couldn’t even call their music curation based on the samples they use. A lot of the Ed Banger artists’ raw materials is cheese (Goblin’s “Tenebre”) or outright garbage (Simian’s “We Are Your Friends”), from which they make something astonishing—which in my opinion makes what they do more like Jean Tinguely and his sculptures constructed out of industrial and consumer detritus.