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<!-- #thumb --> <p><i>Electronic Bass Music exerts an influence on contemporary culture that is ever more present. What are some of its defining characteristics, and what are the implications of its rise to prominence?</i></p>
<p>There’s a certain kind of anarchism inherent in all true artistic innovation. Perhaps this stems from a need to clear away space for new ideas. How can you be sure of eventual fruits without control over the parameters set out at the genesis of your work? Artistic, aesthetic power transfers occur all the time, often marked by dramatic sociopolitical events or the presentation of new, sometimes genius works to the world.</p>
<p>As the events of World War II burned past one another in a destructive race down what was, eventually, a dead-end road, the AM and FM frequencies broadcast in Axis and Allied countries rippled with poignant melody and fervent beauty. In America, Benny Goodman’s swinging clarinet made its way through the atmosphere with electric glee; in Germany, Wagner flowed from radios with presence and strength; and in Poland, Chopin played lullabies to the scorched hearts of an occupied nation. Harpooning in opposite directions, the harsh aesthetic reality of the lives of these war-torn people and the exquisite beauty of the music they listened to existed in alarming contrast. Music, an ancient escape mechanism, was exploited in an attempt to survive a second World War with one’s soul intact. Who knows how much longer the farce would have lasted? But the United States dropped the Atomic Bomb twice on Japan. With unprecedented, unthinkable force, explosions swallowed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a death-gulp, ending the war and the paradoxical disparity present in the world between beauty and ugliness.</p>
<p>Less than a decade later, David Tudor gave the first performance of John Cage’s<i>*4’33”</i>, a three-movement composition consisting of complete silence intended for performance by any number of musicians with any instruments. I couldn’t find any references that would support the assertion that Cage found inspiration for the piece in the bombings, but I like to think that the two are linked, that <i>4’33’’ </i>was born out of a necessity to reset a cultural world thrown to chaos, to reduce everything to its basic silence. Just as the bombs ended the war, Cage may have sought to end an era in music, to re-boot the system.</p>
<p>When Cage dropped his wave of silence on the world, many diversions came forward to fill the musical vacuum he had created with their radioactive mutations. For forty odd years we’ve pursued an interlude in which we’ve tried to preserve elements of Jazz, RnB, and Classical music. We’ve come up with awesome creations like Rock and Hip Hop. But*these genres, like animals living near post-meltdown Chernobyl, have a hard time growing legs to stand on. That is not to say that they are not great music*. Indeed, Bebop and some of the elements of Dance music that led to Hip Hop have largely influenced Electronic music producers. But it is within the realm of Electronic music that some of the most innovative music is being produced today, and will be produced tomorrow.</p>
<p>When the musical landscape has been leveled, and we’re left with silence, where is the first place to start when we bring sound to the world again? We don’t want to go too far in the way of melody- we don’t want to start right where we left off. So we start with pure tone. Mindfully at first - hesitantly throwing objects back into a well that we’ve now found to be empty.</p>
<p>Koreless - “Sun” (Yugen EP)</p>
<p>If you approach contemporary music as the inverted, photo negative version of that which came before it, and if you operate under the premise that no truly revolutionary music has been produced for fifty years, then ask the question, “what does an inverted symphony sound like; what does the opposite of a lush Jazz composition sound like; and would I want to listen to something like that?” It would sound strange at first, a very sparse landscape. Darkness where there used to be light. Everywhere where Mozart might filled the canvas with wonderful color would be a cavernous blackness. So as a composer, how do you work within that paradigm? How do you create when so many of the building blocks that have been available to your forebears are not available to you? The answer is that you work with negative space using texture, tone, and repetition. Texture and tone are an electronic producer’s bread and butter, and repetition, canonized by minimalist composers (read: closet Electronic music producers) like Reich and Glass, has proven its usefulness.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Four Tet - Ocoras (Jupiters/Ocoras)</p>
<p>Take a close listen to British producer Four Tet’s track, “Ocoras”: though it is easily danceable song, its withdrawn, mellow vibe and ambient beeps and bells lend it its true psychic impact. “Ocoras” is a great example of how tone, when celebrated for its own qualities, and not used merely as a building block for larger elements within a work, is used to great impact in Electronic music. And the track’s glitchy aesthetics solidify it within the mode.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to make ‘negative space music’, to compose with antimatter? A lot of it involves bringing the audience to a state where they think they know what’s coming next, and then deviating from that path, making them painfully aware of the sound that <i>isn’t </i>a part of the piece. Setting them up as Wiley Cayote running off a cliff, running on ground that’s not really there. And other times it’s about placing tones at strategic points, creating the contours of a drawing with push pins on cardboard, and letting the audience connect the dots and fill the space with their own experience and emotion. And ultimately that becomes an important element of good electronic music -a photonegative of the wordless music that came before it- that its emptiness, more than any other music before, invites the audience to participate, to fill the void with their own experience. Listening to Classical and Jazz is like interacting with a mirror, and Electronic Bass music is like interacting with the cardboard backing of that mirror. Thus it is more challenging, but also more exciting: the more you listen, the more you grow.</p>
<p><b>*</b>
</p><p class="audioplayer_container"><span id="audioplayer_1">Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version <a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW" title="Download Adobe Flash Player">here</a>. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.</span></p>
<p>Demdike Stare - “Haxan Dub” (Symbiosis)</p>
<p>What can we say about Haxan Dub? This track is a perfect example of how unorthodox structures and sounds that can only be made electronically can contribute to music that is disorienting because it is great, and great because it is disorienting. The track maintains a moody, undulating bassline and just wreaks havoc with smartly placed sampled drums, horns, and reverb, electronic all. Elements are placed in places where you wouldn’t expect them. You’re always guessing, always on your toes.</p>
<p>Often with Bass music an artist finds a sound he or she likes and gives it to you again, and again, and again. It is through this repetition that we really come to know a sound. Picture the rise of electronic music instruments as a giant box of toys. You can play with all the toys or you can pick your favorite ones and only play with those. The repetitive Bass artist is the kid who picks a favorite toy and plays only with that toy for a half hour, turning it over, posing it at different angles. In a musical landscape in which all sound has been removed, it becomes important to reacquaint ourselves with what sound is in the first place. Music is less about swathes of breathtaking composition, and more about myopic observation. In Classical music, often the sound is carried by high frequencies (think violins) and punctuated with low ones (horns and kettel drums), but in electronic music things are shifted: low frequencies (electronic bass tones) are framed by high ones (manipulated vocals, misc. ambient electronic tones). It is an inverted format for inverted ears and, perhaps, inverted times. These days we have our ears to the ground, holding our breath as we try to pick up the low frequencies of forces we cannot see, the existence of which we cannot even guarantee. We’re looking over our shoulder for Big Brother, and <em>bleeps</em> and <em>bloops</em> on a computer screen (cyber warfare, activist tweets) are regarded as more nefarious than shouts of war from a dictator.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Digital Mystikz - “Haunted” (Haunted/Anti War Dub)</p>
<p>Finally, one of the most important results of the rise of Electronic music is the decline of the use of lyrics in music. No longer do we see artists sitting down to compose poetry, to express themselves with words. The Bard mourns, but we shouldn’t. We should merely take this as another sign of the way things are moving on. Besides, any attempt to save poetry in music would be sadly futile. It was Electronic music’s controversially placed figurehead Skrillex himself who perhaps tolled the death knell of vocals in music when he released <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21aifX0lZY">this track</a>.*The song –if you wish to call it that- uses its eponymous phrase over and over again as punctuation for Skrillex’s rushed, womping roars of militant sound in an inane, irresponsible exercise. An essay on everything that’s wrong with what Skrillex represents has probably been done before, and may even be found, in some form, in the youtube comments of the video I linked to, but what Skrillex is doing here, though in particularly odious fashion, is actually a common, fruitful method within the form. When lyrics (vocals) cease to hold any meaning, the human voice is upgraded to a musical instrument, another weapon in the Electronic producer’s arsenal of tone, texture, and repetition.<b><br /></b></p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Battles - “Leyendecker” (Mirrored)</p>
<p>It is no longer <i>language</i> that we use to communicate, but something more cerebral and elemental. In some ways, by communicating only with tone in our music (vocal tones included), we have returned to the cave man’s stone age- to grunts and whinnies (see Skrillex). But if we do it right, if we re-boot the system, we may find that within our origins is where we were supposed to be all along. We are talking not about Gregorian chant 2.0 but something else entirely.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>-</p>
<p>*This discussion, that music created between the end of WWII and today is only an artistic interlude, is somewhat rhetorical. I don’t think anyone would say that some of the music produced in the past fifty years are not great works of art. In fact, these works have something that, as of yet, Electronic music lacks in some respects: the opportunity for performance by a virtuoso. Electronic producers have yet to find a way to play their music so that it channels the spirit quite the way musicians working with traditional instruments have.</p>
<center><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow"><img class="WP-EmailIcon" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email.gif" alt="email Electronic Bass Music" title="Electronic Bass Music" /></a>*<a href="http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow">Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers</a></center><br /><!-- // MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE --><center><a href="http://eepurl.com/eSzBY">Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here </a></center>
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[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/]
<p>There’s a certain kind of anarchism inherent in all true artistic innovation. Perhaps this stems from a need to clear away space for new ideas. How can you be sure of eventual fruits without control over the parameters set out at the genesis of your work? Artistic, aesthetic power transfers occur all the time, often marked by dramatic sociopolitical events or the presentation of new, sometimes genius works to the world.</p>
<p>As the events of World War II burned past one another in a destructive race down what was, eventually, a dead-end road, the AM and FM frequencies broadcast in Axis and Allied countries rippled with poignant melody and fervent beauty. In America, Benny Goodman’s swinging clarinet made its way through the atmosphere with electric glee; in Germany, Wagner flowed from radios with presence and strength; and in Poland, Chopin played lullabies to the scorched hearts of an occupied nation. Harpooning in opposite directions, the harsh aesthetic reality of the lives of these war-torn people and the exquisite beauty of the music they listened to existed in alarming contrast. Music, an ancient escape mechanism, was exploited in an attempt to survive a second World War with one’s soul intact. Who knows how much longer the farce would have lasted? But the United States dropped the Atomic Bomb twice on Japan. With unprecedented, unthinkable force, explosions swallowed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a death-gulp, ending the war and the paradoxical disparity present in the world between beauty and ugliness.</p>
<p>Less than a decade later, David Tudor gave the first performance of John Cage’s<i>*4’33”</i>, a three-movement composition consisting of complete silence intended for performance by any number of musicians with any instruments. I couldn’t find any references that would support the assertion that Cage found inspiration for the piece in the bombings, but I like to think that the two are linked, that <i>4’33’’ </i>was born out of a necessity to reset a cultural world thrown to chaos, to reduce everything to its basic silence. Just as the bombs ended the war, Cage may have sought to end an era in music, to re-boot the system.</p>
<p>When Cage dropped his wave of silence on the world, many diversions came forward to fill the musical vacuum he had created with their radioactive mutations. For forty odd years we’ve pursued an interlude in which we’ve tried to preserve elements of Jazz, RnB, and Classical music. We’ve come up with awesome creations like Rock and Hip Hop. But*these genres, like animals living near post-meltdown Chernobyl, have a hard time growing legs to stand on. That is not to say that they are not great music*. Indeed, Bebop and some of the elements of Dance music that led to Hip Hop have largely influenced Electronic music producers. But it is within the realm of Electronic music that some of the most innovative music is being produced today, and will be produced tomorrow.</p>
<p>When the musical landscape has been leveled, and we’re left with silence, where is the first place to start when we bring sound to the world again? We don’t want to go too far in the way of melody- we don’t want to start right where we left off. So we start with pure tone. Mindfully at first - hesitantly throwing objects back into a well that we’ve now found to be empty.</p>
<p>Koreless - “Sun” (Yugen EP)</p>
<p>If you approach contemporary music as the inverted, photo negative version of that which came before it, and if you operate under the premise that no truly revolutionary music has been produced for fifty years, then ask the question, “what does an inverted symphony sound like; what does the opposite of a lush Jazz composition sound like; and would I want to listen to something like that?” It would sound strange at first, a very sparse landscape. Darkness where there used to be light. Everywhere where Mozart might filled the canvas with wonderful color would be a cavernous blackness. So as a composer, how do you work within that paradigm? How do you create when so many of the building blocks that have been available to your forebears are not available to you? The answer is that you work with negative space using texture, tone, and repetition. Texture and tone are an electronic producer’s bread and butter, and repetition, canonized by minimalist composers (read: closet Electronic music producers) like Reich and Glass, has proven its usefulness.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Four Tet - Ocoras (Jupiters/Ocoras)</p>
<p>Take a close listen to British producer Four Tet’s track, “Ocoras”: though it is easily danceable song, its withdrawn, mellow vibe and ambient beeps and bells lend it its true psychic impact. “Ocoras” is a great example of how tone, when celebrated for its own qualities, and not used merely as a building block for larger elements within a work, is used to great impact in Electronic music. And the track’s glitchy aesthetics solidify it within the mode.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to make ‘negative space music’, to compose with antimatter? A lot of it involves bringing the audience to a state where they think they know what’s coming next, and then deviating from that path, making them painfully aware of the sound that <i>isn’t </i>a part of the piece. Setting them up as Wiley Cayote running off a cliff, running on ground that’s not really there. And other times it’s about placing tones at strategic points, creating the contours of a drawing with push pins on cardboard, and letting the audience connect the dots and fill the space with their own experience and emotion. And ultimately that becomes an important element of good electronic music -a photonegative of the wordless music that came before it- that its emptiness, more than any other music before, invites the audience to participate, to fill the void with their own experience. Listening to Classical and Jazz is like interacting with a mirror, and Electronic Bass music is like interacting with the cardboard backing of that mirror. Thus it is more challenging, but also more exciting: the more you listen, the more you grow.</p>
<p><b>*</b>
</p><p class="audioplayer_container"><span id="audioplayer_1">Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version <a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW" title="Download Adobe Flash Player">here</a>. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.</span></p>
<p>Demdike Stare - “Haxan Dub” (Symbiosis)</p>
<p>What can we say about Haxan Dub? This track is a perfect example of how unorthodox structures and sounds that can only be made electronically can contribute to music that is disorienting because it is great, and great because it is disorienting. The track maintains a moody, undulating bassline and just wreaks havoc with smartly placed sampled drums, horns, and reverb, electronic all. Elements are placed in places where you wouldn’t expect them. You’re always guessing, always on your toes.</p>
<p>Often with Bass music an artist finds a sound he or she likes and gives it to you again, and again, and again. It is through this repetition that we really come to know a sound. Picture the rise of electronic music instruments as a giant box of toys. You can play with all the toys or you can pick your favorite ones and only play with those. The repetitive Bass artist is the kid who picks a favorite toy and plays only with that toy for a half hour, turning it over, posing it at different angles. In a musical landscape in which all sound has been removed, it becomes important to reacquaint ourselves with what sound is in the first place. Music is less about swathes of breathtaking composition, and more about myopic observation. In Classical music, often the sound is carried by high frequencies (think violins) and punctuated with low ones (horns and kettel drums), but in electronic music things are shifted: low frequencies (electronic bass tones) are framed by high ones (manipulated vocals, misc. ambient electronic tones). It is an inverted format for inverted ears and, perhaps, inverted times. These days we have our ears to the ground, holding our breath as we try to pick up the low frequencies of forces we cannot see, the existence of which we cannot even guarantee. We’re looking over our shoulder for Big Brother, and <em>bleeps</em> and <em>bloops</em> on a computer screen (cyber warfare, activist tweets) are regarded as more nefarious than shouts of war from a dictator.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Digital Mystikz - “Haunted” (Haunted/Anti War Dub)</p>
<p>Finally, one of the most important results of the rise of Electronic music is the decline of the use of lyrics in music. No longer do we see artists sitting down to compose poetry, to express themselves with words. The Bard mourns, but we shouldn’t. We should merely take this as another sign of the way things are moving on. Besides, any attempt to save poetry in music would be sadly futile. It was Electronic music’s controversially placed figurehead Skrillex himself who perhaps tolled the death knell of vocals in music when he released <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21aifX0lZY">this track</a>.*The song –if you wish to call it that- uses its eponymous phrase over and over again as punctuation for Skrillex’s rushed, womping roars of militant sound in an inane, irresponsible exercise. An essay on everything that’s wrong with what Skrillex represents has probably been done before, and may even be found, in some form, in the youtube comments of the video I linked to, but what Skrillex is doing here, though in particularly odious fashion, is actually a common, fruitful method within the form. When lyrics (vocals) cease to hold any meaning, the human voice is upgraded to a musical instrument, another weapon in the Electronic producer’s arsenal of tone, texture, and repetition.<b><br /></b></p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>Battles - “Leyendecker” (Mirrored)</p>
<p>It is no longer <i>language</i> that we use to communicate, but something more cerebral and elemental. In some ways, by communicating only with tone in our music (vocal tones included), we have returned to the cave man’s stone age- to grunts and whinnies (see Skrillex). But if we do it right, if we re-boot the system, we may find that within our origins is where we were supposed to be all along. We are talking not about Gregorian chant 2.0 but something else entirely.</p>
<center><span class="youtube">
</span></center>
<p>-</p>
<p>*This discussion, that music created between the end of WWII and today is only an artistic interlude, is somewhat rhetorical. I don’t think anyone would say that some of the music produced in the past fifty years are not great works of art. In fact, these works have something that, as of yet, Electronic music lacks in some respects: the opportunity for performance by a virtuoso. Electronic producers have yet to find a way to play their music so that it channels the spirit quite the way musicians working with traditional instruments have.</p>
<center><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow"><img class="WP-EmailIcon" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email.gif" alt="email Electronic Bass Music" title="Electronic Bass Music" /></a>*<a href="http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow">Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers</a></center><br /><!-- // MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE --><center><a href="http://eepurl.com/eSzBY">Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here </a></center>
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[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/music/electronic-bass-music/11286/]
