rambling about computer music and sharing
I was talking to one of my young colleagues the other day when the topic of Spotify came up. We had one of those generational gap moments where he was trying to explain me some feature of an app i have never used before and probably never will. He was surprised to hear i have 60GB of music on my OneDrive. (In fact, i have even more in lossless FLAC backups.) Almost all of it was acquired legally. I keep a record. My collection is about 10% pirated, of which some of it is music friends or loved ones copied for me, some of it is mainstream pop i keep for nostalgia reasons, and a good chunk is underground techno from long dead labels that live on only thanks to noble pirates.
Here on LiveJournal there is a celebrity gossip community called Oh No They Didn't that i read every day to pretend i still know what the young people are into. The latest groupthink is that so-called AI is evil, and it's especially evil when it is used by fans to make or remix music, for example by putting one pop star's voice into another pop star's song. ONTD is wrong. It has its moments, and it never fails to have one or two hilarious threads each day, but on this they're wrong and even more out of touch with the youth than i am.
When i was young, for a while i got the "gifted kids" treatment. Part of it was because in moving from Scotland to New Zealand i ended up ahead of my level in reading, math and so on due to different educational approaches and an offset school year. Part of it was because i had a funny accent and got teased by all the cool kids so i retreated into books and computer games for comfort. And perhaps part of it really was because i was a smart kid. (That didn't last.) Anyway, one of the things that entitled me to, was getting to go to a university open day when i was just 11 or 12 years old.
There were two things i remember from that open day. Number one. A giant sandbox with water running through it that was being used to teach (or study) erosion. Number two. A computer program that wrote music by itself. It was the early 90s. The music was formulaic. It used gritty plink-plonk ROMpler (sample-based) instruments. Nobody would ever mistake it for "real" jazz. But i was fascinated. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
Cignol - Binary Choices (HC Records)
This is well into the era of Second Summer of Love, acid house, orbital raves, bla bla bla. But as a child you don't listen to music in context, so i didn't think of Pump Up The Volume or Theme From S'Express as part of any particular style or subculture, it was just cool music on Top of the Pops. I didn't join the dots.
We also had an 8-bit PC back then, and one month in 1992 the computer magazine came with a covertape with music on it. (Usually it came with games or applications encoded as screeching and hissing noises that you had to play back to load into the computer's memory.) Anyway, that covertape had a song i played and rewound a bunch of times, made by one of the writers of the magazine messing around with a synthesizer plugged into the computer, and it was the coolest thing in the world since the last coolest thing in the world.
Most of my friends around this time were listening to hair metal, and i - too - knew all the words to every Guns'n'Roses song. But this stuff was different. No words. No pretensions. Just pure, clean, electronic sounds and a thumping beat.
I was too young to dig any further. I lived in a small country town and there was no internet back then. I wasn't able to put a name to the style till we moved back to Europe in 1993, and i joined the rave scene proper in 1995. From then on i was hooked. I was a computer nerd and sci-fi fan since childhood, but electronic music defined my identity. Electronic music is what got me to go out and seek other people like me, people into the same sounds, people to dance with, people with whom i could discuss subgenre minutiae, like why using one drum machine instead of another one totally made the difference between "commercial" and "underground".
PostEx - Ch 1007 (Ekssperimental Sounds)
And i wrote music too. Over the years i bought and sold loads of synthesizers, but the truth is i was never as musically productive as i had been during my teenage years when everything i wrote, i wrote on our PC - by that time a 486 running MS-DOS. I quit playing guitar the moment i scored my first song with a keyboard and mouse. Since then i have played with countless different sequencers and procedural generation methods, and i have spent decades being told by self-proclaimed "real" musicians that electronic music isn't "real" music, that you just press a button and magically a song comes out. And the people who think that are as wrong in 2023 as they were in 1993.
The idea that computer music is somehow unworthy is pure elitist claptrap. Whoever or whatever makes the music, people still have to want to listen to it. There is always a human in the loop, because at the end of the day, someone has to go "no, this sucks, and that does not". Hey, guess what? Guitar music fucking sucks. All songs with lyrics in them? Suck. Anything made before 1981? Sucks. The TB-303 wasn't invented till 1981, after all. (Praise be to our Lord, Tadao Kikumoto.) Does that sound unreasonable? So does declaring null and void anything which didn't involve giving some fretboard masturbator a blister.
Music belongs to the people listening to it, not to the performers, not to the artists and definitely not to the critics.
One of the great things about the rave scene is that they pretty much understood that from day one. People sample each other, people swipe each other's riffs, and everyone is just happy that now there's more music in the world. Hearing stuff which is a bit the same but different, that's a joy! It's a mind trip! It's a body journey! Now there's twice as much awesome, twice as many choices for what to put into a set, twice as much chance to surprise and delight.
Roderic - Recycle (URSL)
So i can't wait for the day when i can feed my whole music collection into an expert system and an endless, 303-drenched sausage of sonic bliss comes out the other end. But it'll never get to that point, because i actually listen to music. I dig through hundreds of songs to find the gems. Lots of stuff is close, but no cigar. Meanwhile another listener will dig through the exact same set of new releases and pick a different selection to take home. Computer generated music will never become the only thing. But i hope one day the technology will allow me to tweak the songs i do like so that i like them even more. Who hasn't listened to a song and gone "man, i wish that section lasted a bit longer" or "why did they layer that incredibly grating sound over the top?" Imagine we can just ask the computer to fix it. That day will be grand.
I mean, not even getting into the full ass holodeck concept of being able to construct a bespoke edit of a piece of entertainment. I wish i had a fucking button to take out all the unnecessary gore, torture and rape scenes that feature in so-called premium television. While you're at it, swap out the hetero relationships for gay ones. Why not? Computer games have been modded like this for decades. It's time for the rest of the entertainment industry to catch up. And it's time for popular music to catch up with techno.
Or, well, i suppose in a lot of ways pop music already got eaten by techno. In Europe it happened in the 90s. And it still makes me smile whenever i hear the TR-808 (praise be to Kikumoto-san etc etc) used in American pop music. To be fair that probably came more from hip-hop, but i'll take it.
Featherstone - Tethered (Gated Recordings)
Anyway, computer music is the fucking best.
And yesterday i spent all day buying more, some of which is featured in this post. I think i wrote before that listening to music is an active process for me. I find it very difficult to have music on in the background while i am doing something else, and it's gotten worse since i got older. If there's one way to get me to ignore everything else happening in the room, just put some music. You could rob me blind and i wouldn't notice. So i lost a day "crate digging" on Bandcamp, and walked out with a bunch of choons to play till late in the night.
What i love about Bandcamp is they combine the feeling of an independent record store with a Discogs-like superpower of being able to follow up on every back catalog tangent that takes your whim. You can find lo-fi tracks by some guy in a bedroom messing around on his laptop right next to veteran musos with dozens of releases under their belt. Click through and see all the labels they released on, then check out other artists on those labels, or click on people who bought the songs and left a review to see what other stuff they bought. You can listen to as much as you like for free, but the end goal is to pick your personal faves and buy copies to download and put on repeat. Prices are set by the artist, sometimes even "pay what you like", and any artist who makes the bad choice to not allow à la carte track purchases will miss out. It's wonderful.
Bandcamp recently got bought by some evil megacorp so they might start sucking just like Beatport did when they got bought by an evil megacorp, but something else will take its place. People who love music and hate megacorps are still going to want a place to share their stuff. Because that's what it ultimately comes down to. Trying to make money as a musician is an orthogonal activity to sharing something cool, beautiful or interesting with people who might enjoy listening to it. The long tail of techno is just people who love music sharing sounds they found, and it's up to us to decide what to do with it.
David Dorad - Murmeli (Kiosk ID)
Here on LiveJournal there is a celebrity gossip community called Oh No They Didn't that i read every day to pretend i still know what the young people are into. The latest groupthink is that so-called AI is evil, and it's especially evil when it is used by fans to make or remix music, for example by putting one pop star's voice into another pop star's song. ONTD is wrong. It has its moments, and it never fails to have one or two hilarious threads each day, but on this they're wrong and even more out of touch with the youth than i am.
When i was young, for a while i got the "gifted kids" treatment. Part of it was because in moving from Scotland to New Zealand i ended up ahead of my level in reading, math and so on due to different educational approaches and an offset school year. Part of it was because i had a funny accent and got teased by all the cool kids so i retreated into books and computer games for comfort. And perhaps part of it really was because i was a smart kid. (That didn't last.) Anyway, one of the things that entitled me to, was getting to go to a university open day when i was just 11 or 12 years old.
There were two things i remember from that open day. Number one. A giant sandbox with water running through it that was being used to teach (or study) erosion. Number two. A computer program that wrote music by itself. It was the early 90s. The music was formulaic. It used gritty plink-plonk ROMpler (sample-based) instruments. Nobody would ever mistake it for "real" jazz. But i was fascinated. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
Click to viewCignol - Binary Choices (HC Records)
This is well into the era of Second Summer of Love, acid house, orbital raves, bla bla bla. But as a child you don't listen to music in context, so i didn't think of Pump Up The Volume or Theme From S'Express as part of any particular style or subculture, it was just cool music on Top of the Pops. I didn't join the dots.
We also had an 8-bit PC back then, and one month in 1992 the computer magazine came with a covertape with music on it. (Usually it came with games or applications encoded as screeching and hissing noises that you had to play back to load into the computer's memory.) Anyway, that covertape had a song i played and rewound a bunch of times, made by one of the writers of the magazine messing around with a synthesizer plugged into the computer, and it was the coolest thing in the world since the last coolest thing in the world.
Most of my friends around this time were listening to hair metal, and i - too - knew all the words to every Guns'n'Roses song. But this stuff was different. No words. No pretensions. Just pure, clean, electronic sounds and a thumping beat.
I was too young to dig any further. I lived in a small country town and there was no internet back then. I wasn't able to put a name to the style till we moved back to Europe in 1993, and i joined the rave scene proper in 1995. From then on i was hooked. I was a computer nerd and sci-fi fan since childhood, but electronic music defined my identity. Electronic music is what got me to go out and seek other people like me, people into the same sounds, people to dance with, people with whom i could discuss subgenre minutiae, like why using one drum machine instead of another one totally made the difference between "commercial" and "underground".
PostEx - Ch 1007 (Ekssperimental Sounds)
And i wrote music too. Over the years i bought and sold loads of synthesizers, but the truth is i was never as musically productive as i had been during my teenage years when everything i wrote, i wrote on our PC - by that time a 486 running MS-DOS. I quit playing guitar the moment i scored my first song with a keyboard and mouse. Since then i have played with countless different sequencers and procedural generation methods, and i have spent decades being told by self-proclaimed "real" musicians that electronic music isn't "real" music, that you just press a button and magically a song comes out. And the people who think that are as wrong in 2023 as they were in 1993.
The idea that computer music is somehow unworthy is pure elitist claptrap. Whoever or whatever makes the music, people still have to want to listen to it. There is always a human in the loop, because at the end of the day, someone has to go "no, this sucks, and that does not". Hey, guess what? Guitar music fucking sucks. All songs with lyrics in them? Suck. Anything made before 1981? Sucks. The TB-303 wasn't invented till 1981, after all. (Praise be to our Lord, Tadao Kikumoto.) Does that sound unreasonable? So does declaring null and void anything which didn't involve giving some fretboard masturbator a blister.
Music belongs to the people listening to it, not to the performers, not to the artists and definitely not to the critics.
One of the great things about the rave scene is that they pretty much understood that from day one. People sample each other, people swipe each other's riffs, and everyone is just happy that now there's more music in the world. Hearing stuff which is a bit the same but different, that's a joy! It's a mind trip! It's a body journey! Now there's twice as much awesome, twice as many choices for what to put into a set, twice as much chance to surprise and delight.
Roderic - Recycle (URSL)
So i can't wait for the day when i can feed my whole music collection into an expert system and an endless, 303-drenched sausage of sonic bliss comes out the other end. But it'll never get to that point, because i actually listen to music. I dig through hundreds of songs to find the gems. Lots of stuff is close, but no cigar. Meanwhile another listener will dig through the exact same set of new releases and pick a different selection to take home. Computer generated music will never become the only thing. But i hope one day the technology will allow me to tweak the songs i do like so that i like them even more. Who hasn't listened to a song and gone "man, i wish that section lasted a bit longer" or "why did they layer that incredibly grating sound over the top?" Imagine we can just ask the computer to fix it. That day will be grand.
I mean, not even getting into the full ass holodeck concept of being able to construct a bespoke edit of a piece of entertainment. I wish i had a fucking button to take out all the unnecessary gore, torture and rape scenes that feature in so-called premium television. While you're at it, swap out the hetero relationships for gay ones. Why not? Computer games have been modded like this for decades. It's time for the rest of the entertainment industry to catch up. And it's time for popular music to catch up with techno.
Or, well, i suppose in a lot of ways pop music already got eaten by techno. In Europe it happened in the 90s. And it still makes me smile whenever i hear the TR-808 (praise be to Kikumoto-san etc etc) used in American pop music. To be fair that probably came more from hip-hop, but i'll take it.
Featherstone - Tethered (Gated Recordings)
Anyway, computer music is the fucking best.
And yesterday i spent all day buying more, some of which is featured in this post. I think i wrote before that listening to music is an active process for me. I find it very difficult to have music on in the background while i am doing something else, and it's gotten worse since i got older. If there's one way to get me to ignore everything else happening in the room, just put some music. You could rob me blind and i wouldn't notice. So i lost a day "crate digging" on Bandcamp, and walked out with a bunch of choons to play till late in the night.
What i love about Bandcamp is they combine the feeling of an independent record store with a Discogs-like superpower of being able to follow up on every back catalog tangent that takes your whim. You can find lo-fi tracks by some guy in a bedroom messing around on his laptop right next to veteran musos with dozens of releases under their belt. Click through and see all the labels they released on, then check out other artists on those labels, or click on people who bought the songs and left a review to see what other stuff they bought. You can listen to as much as you like for free, but the end goal is to pick your personal faves and buy copies to download and put on repeat. Prices are set by the artist, sometimes even "pay what you like", and any artist who makes the bad choice to not allow à la carte track purchases will miss out. It's wonderful.
Bandcamp recently got bought by some evil megacorp so they might start sucking just like Beatport did when they got bought by an evil megacorp, but something else will take its place. People who love music and hate megacorps are still going to want a place to share their stuff. Because that's what it ultimately comes down to. Trying to make money as a musician is an orthogonal activity to sharing something cool, beautiful or interesting with people who might enjoy listening to it. The long tail of techno is just people who love music sharing sounds they found, and it's up to us to decide what to do with it.
David Dorad - Murmeli (Kiosk ID)