| The State of Electronica I love electronic music. More precisely, I love good electronic music: music that surprises, fascinates and expands your sense of the width and breadth of the musical world, and the physical world along with it. One of my earliest musical memories is of hearing Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge on a Grundig tube radio in my safe little suburban Long Island home. The rich polyphony of reverb-drenched boy soprano lines filled my head with visions of eerie alien landscapes and forbidden rituals. The piece haunted me for weeks afterwards... I still get chills when I listen to it. I’ve followed the evolution of electronic music ever since, from the sometimes primitive (and often beautiful) efforts of the brave e-musical pioneers – Varèse, Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Subotnick, Lucier, et al – to the rise of analogue synthesis, through the unfortunate backwater of minimalism, to the dawn and eventual ascendancy of computer music, to the current flowering of techno-ambient electronica. And I’ve grown increasingly disenchanted with most of what I hear. The spirit of experimentation and adventure that accompanied early e-musical efforts has, sadly, given way to sameness, flatness, safeness, reliance on formulas, easy and slick solutions, and, perhaps worst of all, fashion. The suck factor is alarmingly high. And nowhere is this more evident than in the various e-music subgenres that dwell within the über-genre of ‘dance music’. How to stop this insidious creep towards artistic and spiritual mediocrity? A shift in attitude is the first step. As long as composers (and listeners) stay firmly planted in their narrow musical comfort zones, then nothing will change. Once you’ve gotten a taste of the exotic beauties that lie beyond status quo electronica, you’ll be hooked. You won’t want to go back to four-square, predictable, filter-sweep-drenched techno suckville. And that’s when the fun can truly begin! Here are a few techniques you can use to nudge your e-musical creations towards higher levels of power, subtlety, and expressiveness ... Non-Standard Meters 4/4 is the mandatory meter for beat-oriented electronic music; stray too far from it and you risk being arrested by the Trance Police. While 4/4 grooves can be dead cool, these days they’re more likely to be dead, period. Is there anything more spirit-killing than an unrelenting, metronomic hi-hat that cuts through the mix like a slow-motion jackhammer? Dare to break out of your 4/4 straightjacket! Try 3/4 or 5/4 or 7/4 or go really wild with 11/8. Add or subtract a beat at strategic points to keep your listeners interested. Change the tempo: double it suddenly, then slow it down gradually to a 16th of its original speed. Keep your listeners creatively off-balance, wondering what will come next. Original Timbres One of the greatest strengths of electronic music is its ability to produce never-before-heard (or even imagined) sounds. And one of the greatest weaknesses of contemporary electronic music is that it tends to all sound the same: snarly, digital, filtered, full of sound and fury but empty inside. It’s the Virus syndrome; Access: shame on you. Develop your ears! They’re by far the most important tool in your arsenal of audio devices. Develop an early warning system for clichéd sounds, and do your utmost to thwart them. Aim to create sounds that you’ve never heard before, but that work in the context of your own musical soundworld. Scales and Harmonies Think of the harmonies present in a Coltrane ballad, a Ravel piano piece or a Bulgarian women’s choir song: they all stem from unique underlying scales. Now think of the last dozen or so pitched electronic pieces you’ve heard. Chances are 95% of them use the tonal equivalent of 4/4: a major scale, or a minor scale, or a blues scale (yawn). Try basing your melodic world on non-standard scales and modes. For inspiration, look to jazz, impressionism, atonality or non-Western traditions but be sure to personalise it: rote imitation is an artistic cul de sac. It might be an idea to wean yourself off looping, too. It all began innocently enough, with tape recorders playing looped audio material at different speeds. But it’s become a universal practice, a knee-jerk response, a compositional plague. The likes of Acid and eJay have done as much to emasculate new music as the Clear Channel Radio Conglomerate. They’ve sold novice composers the lie that “you too can be a great composer with the right audio loops and a few clicks ’n’ drags.” Sure you can make music that way; give me an hour and I could teach my seven-year-old niece to create slick-sounding eJay songlettes, but does that make her a composer? The point is not to abandon looping entirely but to recognise it for what it is: a quick, cheap way to generate repetitive patterns that bears little resemblance to the profound art of musical composition in its purest form. Don't Stop Listening! Listen to everything: 60s pop, horror movie soundtracks, freeform ambient electronica, jazz improv, the second Viennese school, Zappa, Stockhausen, Hildegard von Bingen, commercials, street musicians, the sound your refrigerator makes when it kicks on in the middle of the night, the sound your partner makes when she sleeps, the sound your circulatory system makes when you sit in silence. Never shut your ears to possibilities and your sonic repertoire will
be enormous. And maybe, just maybe, that can save electronic music from
a fate worse than extinction: slick, ubiquitous mediocrity. |