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D I T O RI A L This magazine has a main objective to discuss,criticize, and explain the electronic music.
All the articles represent only the opinion of their authors. Begging the first number of Sample magazine deals with the following matters: The essence of electronic music The origins and the social circumstances of electronic music New musical vocabulary The people and the locals of electronic music As a supplement, a small booklet is published on the electronic music beginners.
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Index
4-5
John Cage Quotes
6-7
The Meaning
8-9
Delia Derbshyre
10-13
The Beginning
EEE
D D D
N N N
II
III
14-15
Kraftwerk
16-17
New Vocabulary
18-19
Josef Tal
22-23
20-21
Electronic Atmosphere
John Cage
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D D D
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WHEN WE LISTEN TO IT,
IT DISTURB US,
John Cage’s Quotes
WHEN WE IGNORE IT,
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WHAT WE HEA IS MOSTLY NOISE NOISE NOISE
WHEREVER WE ARE
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It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of “culture.”
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C W h e n
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m u s i c
G f r o m
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the meaning
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N O I S E .
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The mEaniNG OF A NOISE. At the beginning a noise. Not any kind of noise. An appealing noise. A noise that frees own emotions and memories, that recreates something lost or opens the gates of our fantasies. THAT NOISE IS MUSIC. Yet a music that embodies the concrete sounds where we
are merged, but modified, vibrating. A technology product coming from devices operated by buttons, knobs, sliders. Artificial in its creation and, nevertheless, giving a complex idea of our times of unrest. Music become a succession of experimental sounds trying to create a new reality. A non compromised generative act of new things. Just the ability of building something new.
E M OT TI I OON NA AL LL L YY E WE ARE INVOLVED
IN THE
WEAREI NVOLVED C CR REAT EIA T I V E VE PROCESS
P R O C E S S O F M U S I C .
I N THE
OF
MUSIC.
Electronic music. Music elEctroniC Something new that is simultaneously hypnotizing, emotive. Hypnotizing and emotive if the visual element goes along with the music. The sounds are the lights mix together and the unreal goes further. And the unreal takes progressively possession of us. We rebuild our emotions. Emotionally we are involved in the creative process of music. We bring our own personal
thoughts to the music. and the outcome is a complex and collective work. The listener is, in someway, also a performer. And all this comes from a simple manipulation of technology, that is a magic source of dreams, innovation and invention.
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new VoCabulary
NEW NEW CABULARY
VOCABULARY Throughout a class of genres and micro-genres, there seems to be a new musical vocabulary emerging, one centered around the way vocals are being manipulated to create moods and atmospheres defined by their amorphous, often spectral nature. Ghost voices. It’s something like what happened in the film Inception, the way music could be heard through layers of dreams. That effect-- as though sound were floating through several walls of consciousness, its outlines blurred to be almost unidentifiable-- has something to do with the fact that we’ve heard a lot of these vocals before in their original form; they’re often samples that have been resurrected and re-articulated to express a sort of new slang. You can hear it in dance music and hypnagogic pop, in witch house, drone, and art rock, the various presentations just as disparate as they are interconnected. Few artists at the moment are experimenting with the vocal more aggressively than 22-year-old London producer James Blake, who’s used the dodgier end of dubstep as a starting point from which he can take the human voice apart piece-bypiece, putting everything back together again in new, incandescent forms. Classically trained but a child of the 1990s, Blake has played around with turn-of-the-century R&B vocal terrain, most memorably those of Aaliyah and Kelis. “Vocals have sentimental value... and I’ve always wanted to sample things that I already love,” Blake told XLR8R in June. “Nowadays those [R&B] vocals really sit in your subconscious.... I
NEW VOCA DELIA ANN DERBYSHIRE was an English musician and composer of electronic music and musique concrète.
Y
ABULARY
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the beginning
tune in to kraftwerk...
Th e
BegInNING
Electronica has become a manageable, one-word catch-all for a range of music styles which, taken together, many believe represent the next step in the evolution of Western pop. Although what the term actually means tends in large part to depend upon which side of the Atlantic Ocean it's spoken on, electronica in its broadest common significance refers primarily to artists drawing heavily on dance music styles such as house, techno, electro, and EBM (electronic body music) in ways not simply derivative of the dancefloor. Similar in some respects to the early working distinction between rhythm & blues and rock'n'roll, electronica tends to involve an adaptation or mutation of dance music compositional elements to other-than-DJ/dancefloor ends; in the context of contemporary electronic dance music, that generally translates into dynamic (rather than static), composed (rather than pro-
grammed), listener- (rather than dancer- or DJ-) oriented "songs" (rather than "trax"). If the term's distinction appears to turn only on contrast -that is, by negative comparison to dance music -- it's because many of the artists credited with innovating the music (people like the Black Dog, Orbital, Terrace, Speedy J., Richard H. Kirk, the Future Sound of London, Autechre, and Aphex Twin) saw themselves in contradistinction to dance culture and the limits it placed on its music. These artists were interested in producing music designed for other uses -- home listening, primarily -- which allowed for a wider range of influences (ambient, classical, jazz, non-Western musics, etc.) and a higher index of experimentation. Heavily influenced by the early techno-pop, hip-hop, and electro-funk of Kraftwerk, Cybotron, Man Parrish, Soul Sonic Force, and Ice-T, as well as the first wave techno and Acid House of
Detroit and Chicago innovators, these artists brought a penchant for tunefulness and compositional dynamics -elements often lacking in club-borne dance music -- to the creative fore. Original wide-spread use of the term "electronica" derives in part from the influential English experimental techno label New Electronica, which, along with labels such as General Production Recordings, Warp, Evolution, and Rising High, was a leading force in the early '90s in introducing and supporting dance-based electronic music more oriented toward home listening than dancefloor play. Because of that label's role in the birth of "intelligent techno" (itself a heavily loaded and controversial term referring to electronic listening music rooted in, but not simply reducible to, dancefloor techno), the term in the early part of the 1990s became used to loosely characterize groups such as Orbital,
self - made instruments
.... tune into the melody
Man
ORBITAL is a British electronic dance music duo from Sevenoaks, England, consisting of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll.
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the beginning
Autechre, Aphex Twin, As One, Global Communication, Sun Electric, The Black Dog, The Orb, Higher Intelligence Agency, Biosphere, etc.; in other words, bands that drew primarily from dancefloor techno in constructing more song-oriented music utilizing similar instrumental elements, compositional techniques, and organizational structures (fouron-the-floor or electronic breakbeats; synth pads and 303, 808, and 909 bass and drum sounds; simple melodies and deep basslines; minor-key chord progressions; etc.). As a result, electronica became more or less synonymous with terms such as "intelligent techno," "ambient techno," etc., and was considered distinct from other emerging forms such as jungle and trip-hop, each of which had its own set of defining characteristics (as well as often dauntingly complex litany of terms and microgenres). A key component in the growth and popularization of the style was the Artificial Intelligence series released by the Sheffield-based Warp label starting in 1992, which presented many of the artists now thought to be formative to a wide audience for the first time (including Autechre, Speedy J, Richard H. Kirk, the Black Dog, and Aphex Twin). Previously a source of innovative but nonetheless clearly dancefloororiented house and techno (early singles from the label include Nightmares On Wax, Robert Gordon's Forgemasters, and LFO), Warp's two-part compilation series Artificial Intelligence, as well as subsequent full-lengths from Kirk, Black Dog Productions, Autechre, and Detroit techno artist Kenny Larkin drew a clear line in the sand between dance music and the "electronic listening music" that would soon become the label's focus. (The first volume of Artificial Intelligence pictured a computer
rendering of a chrome figure, spliff in hand, reclining before the front-room hi-fi, sleeves of Warp and Pink Floyd records littering the floor.) The series also constituted America's first serious exposure to the new sound; Wax Trax!/TVT licensed the two compilations and reissued a number of Warp's subsequent full-length releases. In the United States, it wasn't until 1997 that electronica was appropriated and generalized by the music (and non-music) press to refer to any dance-based electronic music with a potential for pop appeal. As a result, the term was used to describe everyone from the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy to Orbital and Ken Ishii, to Alex Reece, Mo'Wax, the Sneaker Pimps, Goldie, and Aphex Twin. Aversions to excessive genrefication notwithstanding, the grouping together of such disparate artists seems symptomatic of larger tendencies within an American music industry which knows little (if anything) about the histories of the various styles these artists represent, a notion which has its antecedents in a largely rock-based music press and its bias -- stemming in part from the legacy of disco -- against music featuring predominantly electronic instrumentation, as well as a tendency to subsume all potentially significant popular music styles under the category of "rock." Where, in the European usage, the defining feature of electronica was usually its "listenability" (a value gauged within the context of the experimental electronic music underground, which usually had some understanding of the degree to which "song"-y derivatives of the music such as Orbital or Aphex Twin deviated from the more nuts'n'bolts dancefloor fare of Derrick May, Jeff Mills, and Dave Clarke), in America the distinction seems to turn instead on the music's potential for popularity (read: profitability) via
mainstream success: It was only, ironically, when several of these bands began gaining MTV exposure, commercial radio play, and major-label recording contracts -- despite the fact that the music had been widely popular outside of the U.S. for nearly a decade -- that "electronica" as a concrete category in the American music industry gained any viability. "Electronic listening music" has also, of course, become big business on the other side of the pond, as well, with smaller indie releases routinely charting next to their Britpop brethren and artists such as Autechre, the Orb, and the Aphex Twin becoming the closest thing to pop stars the tenets of the genre and the limitations of its audience will allow. The steady adaptation of club culture to the demands of its electronic antagonists, however (as well as the fact that many of the artists and labels -- including Scanner, Higher Intelligence Agency, and Coldcut, as well as Warp, Rephlex, Skam, and Leaf -- formed their own clubs), has also (ironically) meant that much of the first wave of dance-music dissent has, to a certain extent, been reabsorbed as dance music (or at least club music, i.e. music one hears in a club). "Back room" club culture (previously the margin of experimental weirdness relegated to the literal "back rooms" of huge raves and weekly club nights) have also taken on a popular mythos all their own, with the vitality of freeform experimentation associated with them foregrounded in offshoot clubs such as the massive Heavenly club's Sunday Social (and perhaps best embodied by early genrecidal innovators Coldcut's Journeys by DJ mix CD, released in 1995). The result has pushed degrees of experimentation even further, with the "IDM" of first-wave electronic artists intermingling more directly with hip-hop, funk, industrial, jungle/drum'n'bass, free jazz, and Indian
and Southeast Asian musics, turning up some extremely interesting and innovative hybrids in the offing (from the schizoid electro-jazz/jungle of Atom Heart, Bisk, and Bedouin Ascent to the banging gabber-punk of Alec Empire's Atari Teenage Riot and the paranoid and depressed drum'n'bass of, alternately, TPower and Panacea). Just how far this dynamic is capable of taking the music remains to be seen. Several good introductions to the various strains -- both hardline and "contemporary" -- of electronica's eclectic face exist. An obvious place to start is, of course, New Electronica's early series New Electronica: Global Electronic Innovations (which, although heavily oriented toward Detroit techno, include many crucial early cuts), as well as Warp's two-volume Artificial Intelligence series, and its three-volume tenth-anniversary retrospective Warp 10+. More contemporarily, the German label Studio !K7's two doubleCD collections The Freestyle Files are excellent cross-sections of the rampant inbreeding of contemporary electronica. Those strapped for cash (most good new-school electronica comps tend to be import-only) should check out Nettwork's "greatest hits" package Plastic, as well as the label compilations licensed for stateside release by New York-based Instinct Records, which include Ntone (Earthrise.Ntone.1), Em:t (Em:t 2000 and Em:t Explorer), and Compost (two volumes of The Future Sound of Jazz). For a taste of now-school breakbeat culture's influence on the music's formerly techno-heavy sound, Rising High's Further Self-Evident Truths and Avant-Gardism, Blue Planet's State of the Nu Art, and the Talvin Singh-compiled Anohka: Sounds of the Asian Underground are excellent entrees into electronica's more schizophrenetic offerings.
... tune into the melody
Man
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KraftwerK
Th e
During the mid-'70s, Germany's Kraftwerk established the sonic blueprint followed by an extraordinary number of artists in the decades to come. From the British new romantic movement to hip-hop to techno, the group's self-described "robot pop" -- hypnotically minimal, obliquely rhythmic music performed solely via electronic means -- resonates in virtually every new development to impact the contemporary pop scene of the late- 20th century, and as pioneers of the electronic music form, their enduring influence cannot be overstated.
tune in to kraftwerk...
BegInNING Throughout their career, Kraftwerk has
PUSHED THE LIMITS of music technology with some
NOTABLE INNOVATIONS, such as
self - made instruments
AND CUSTOM BUILT DEVICES.
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new VoCabulary
NEW NEW CABULARY
VOCABULARY Throughout a class of genres and micro-genres, there seems to be a new musical vocabulary emerging, one centered around the way vocals are being manipulated to create moods and atmospheres defined by their amorphous, often spectral nature. Ghost voices. It’s something like what happened in the film Inception, the way music could be heard through layers of dreams. That effect-- as though sound were floating through several walls of consciousness, its outlines blurred to be almost unidentifiable-- has something to do with the fact that we’ve heard a lot of these vocals before in their original form; they’re often samples that have been resurrected and re-articulated to express a sort of new slang. You can hear it in dance music and hypnagogic pop, in witch house, drone, and art rock, the various presentations just as disparate as they are interconnected. Few artists at the moment are experimenting with the vocal more aggressively than 22-year-old London producer James Blake, who’s used the dodgier end of dubstep as a starting point from which he can take the human voice apart piece-bypiece, putting everything back together again in new, incandescent forms. Classically trained but a child of the 1990s, Blake has played around with turn-of-the-century R&B vocal terrain, most memorably those of Aaliyah and Kelis. “Vocals have sentimental value... and I’ve always wanted to sample things that I already love,” Blake told XLR8R in June. “Nowadays those [R&B] vocals really sit in your subconscious.... I
NEW VOCA
Y
VOCALS
think using them taps into a massive subconscious in our generation.... People don’t just want to hear them straight; they want to hear echoes of them in their dance music.” We hear echoes of music history in nearly everything we put to our ears, but this particular form of expression has extra resonance because of how our brains process the voice. It connects those who hear to one another, and also draws lines between memories. The marriage we hear now between dance music and julienned R&B vocal samples nods to the work of Burial and his now landmark 2007 album, Untrue. Not merely an impossibly haunting update on UK garage and two-step at time of its release, Untrue has also become a blueprint for many artists hoping to conjure equally murky, impenetrable, self-encompassing atmospherics. “I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up,” Burial’s Will Bevan told The Wire in December of that year. “I was listening to these [A] Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals, but I can’t get a proper singer like him. So I cut up a cappellas and made different sentences, even if they didn’t make sense, but they summed up what I was feeling.” Bevan built melodic foundations out of androgynous whispers, sample reconstructions that shapeshifted and evaporated above the crackle of slow rain and dark, growling bass. But vocal manipulation itself isn’t new,
nor is the style of shadowed, nocturnal tones that color so much of dubstep. If you wanted you could draw lines from T-Pain to Kanye to Todd Edwards to Prefuse 73 and on back, with stops along the way for Luomo’s Vocalcity, the KLF’s Chill Out, Kraftwerk’s vocodered melodies, King Tubby’s dub, and Steve Reich’s tape experiments. But what we’re hearing now, as framed by Burial and articulated further by James Blake, is the synthesis of 90s trip-hop, British dance music from jungle to 2-step to rave, and forward-thinking R&B, especially the eerie melodies penned for Aaliyah by Steven “Static Major.” Much of Untrue, like the music it seems to have inspired, is simultaneously urban and monastic. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it,” Bevan explained to The Wire. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.” These voices seem to reinforce the feeling of isolation, of being sealed away in a recording with voices that inevitably take on qualities of your own choosing and interpretation. It’s not just that we complete them, but that we translate them, too. Here are some of the most compelling coded transmissions from the past few years.
ABULARY
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The mEaniNG OF A NOISE. At the beginning a noise. Not any kind of noise. An appealing noise. A noise that frees own emotions and memories, that recreates something lost or opens the gates of our fantasies. THAT NOISE IS MUSIC. JOSEF TAL Yet a music that embodies the concrete sounds where we w
are merged, but modified, vibrating. A technology product coming from devices operated by buttons, knobs, sliders. Artificial in its creation and, nevertheless, giving a complex idea of our times of unrest. Music become a succession of experimental sounds trying to create a new reality. A non compromised generative act of new things. Just the ability of building something new.
E M OT TI I OON NA AL LL L YY E WE ARE INVOLVED
IN THE
WEAREI NVOLVED C CCR R E A T I V E REATIVE PROCESS
P R O C E S S O F M U S I C .
I N THE
OF
MUSIC.
Electronic music. Music elEctroniC Something new that is simultaneously hypnotizing, emotive. Hypnotizing and emotive if the visual element goes along with the music. The sounds are the lights mix together and the unreal goes further. And the unreal takes progressively possession of us. We rebuild our emotions. Emotionally we are involved in the creative process of music. We bring our own personal
thoughts to the music. and the outcome is a complex and collective work. The listener is, in someway, also a performer. And all this comes from a simple manipulation of technology, that is a magic source of dreams, innovation and invention.
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eleCtroniC atmosphere
The earliest pioneers of magnetic tape composition like John Cage were suddenly aware of the potential to place a sound at any point in time, complete with various fresh manipulation possibilities. In the modern age with the introduction of computer software, musicians are able to explore the realms of digital sequencers and audio manipulation usually all within a compact mobile laptop environment, a contributing and contradictory factor to Thom Yorke’s obsession with, but also lyrical topics of, alienation by technology and the social fragmentation of the 90s. (We already know Thom Yorke’s lyrical construction for the majority of Kid A was descended from the cut up technique Tristan Tzara coined, drawing words and phrases from a hat) As a direct influence on Yorke, Aphex Twin experimentally investigates such territory readily inserting the image of his macabre grinning face into spectrograms on the Mac based programme Metasynth, and returns them to audio signals. He has also experimented with circuit bending, by taking a simple electronic kids toy and rewiring the circuitry to achieve all manner of unimaginable sounds. John Cage’s innovative ‘Prepared Piano’ influenced Aphex Twin on the album Druqks that Yorke refers to as “aphex twins john cage piano stuff [sic]”. However the
O
most pronounced modern application of Nyman’s theory is towards the most advanced computer programming software like Max/ MSP, an ‘audio development environment’ used by Radiohead, Autechre and Aphex Twin where the user is able to create and manipulate audio and sound limitlessly, a steep learning curve for any ability. Colin Greenwood notes that the Beatles “came up with a new approach every album – they listened to all this stuff then brought it to bear on their work. And that’s how we work, too. But of course they were at the beginning, inventing how it could be done.” In terms of the song form, the Dada-esque ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ directly influenced ‘Paranoid Android’ in the way that “they take lots of different bits and they stick it together” and “we thought we’d have a bash at that ourselves and then ‘Paranoid Android’ was kind of the result of that.” When Yorke is in the earliest stages of writing he “assumes that the halfformed words have the sounds [he] needs for the final words” and is also the primary reason “Neil Young never goes back and rewrites”. We mustn’t ignore how Radiohead and the Beatles successfully fuse instrumentally divergent genres, whereas the Beatles took the idea a whole step further attempting
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to wholly emulate song styles through parody, imitation or extension on the White Album. George Martin’s method is to generally place the strongest tracks at the beginning and end of each side, whilst the members of Radiohead begin their records with the track that best summarises the album as a whole, simultaneously signified as the biggest departure stylistically from the last album. Of course the two groups noticeably differ in the live environment where Radiohead’s acute self-awareness allows them to adapt the studio songs into reincarnations suitable for the stage set-up. Here we can apply John Cage’s belief that “an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen” where Jonny Greenwood can be seen utilizing chance procedures from his Korg Kaoss Pad in ‘Everything In Its Right Place‘, to the transistor radio for ‘The National Anthem’, randomly tuning into stations for a few seconds at a time to portray fragmented sense much like Shakespeare’s appearance in ‘I Am The Walrus’. Jonny Greenwood’s position within Radiohead as the most prominently trained classical musician and multi-instrumentalist, esteemed for his complex and innovative string arrangements apparent not just with the band, but in film scores for There Will Be Blood (2007) and Norwegian Wood (2010), and his avant-garde compositions for the BBC concert orchestra
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as composer in association can be compared with George Martin’s role in realising the Beatles’ songs as far more than a producer. Despite obvious ‘experimental actions’, only the term avant-garde can apply satisfyingly to popular rock music since the idea is to communicate, and generally this is through the medium of language and the human voice. Although Thom Yorke has said in regards to I.D.M: “It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I’d ever felt about guitar music”, it is just not plausible in the mainstream. But “if you sell a lot of records you should be given more freedom, that’s what the Beatles did and they went on to make better and better records” and whatever the Beatles did, no matter how avant-garde, it did immediately become pop music. And with the size of Radiohead’s collective recorded output thus far a lot smaller, but exceptional in quality: “It’s clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who.” by James Godwin – December 7th, 2010
A
s e p a r a t e
m u s i c
G f r o m
l i f e
E w e
g e t
a r t .
JOHN MILTON CAGE was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist.
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MUSIC MUSIC
CAN CAN
BE BE
N
E
SAMPLE
E E
D I T O RI A L This magazine has a main objective to discuss,criticize, and explain the electronic music.
All the articles represent only the opinion of their authors. Begging the first number of Sample magazine deals with the following matters: The essence of electronic music The origins and the social circumstances of electronic music New musical vocabulary The people and the locals of electronic music As a supplement, a small booklet is published on the electronic music beginners.