On musical notation

Gyorgy Ligeti – Artikulation

Iannis Xenakis created the music using the UPIC which makes sound based on drawings that Xenakis made.

Posted in academia, de-dans on October 14th, 2008 by de-dans | 1 Comments

Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno. IV

By Philip Sherburne  – Published in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music, 2004

On the one hand, there’s the stripped-down lucidity of Daniel Bell’s work as DBX, in which he crafted tracks so deliriously spare as to be almost physically disorienting – with nothing but the barest of percussion lines and an eerie, disembodied voice, it becomes difficult to orient oneself in space or in time. (Not insignificantly, Richie Hawtin’s third album as Plastikman, 1998’s Consumed, which built upon Bell’s ultra-minimal foundation, derived from Hawtin’s experience of utter darkness in Canada’s northern wilderness.) On the other hand, the polyrhythmic chaos of a track like Robert Hood’s “Make a Wish” suggests the density achieved in Reich’s most rhythmically convoluted works.

Skeletalism is the teleological impulse driving early Chicago house, acid, and Detroit techno to continually do more with less, and it is the defining principle behind the late 90s “clicks and cuts” school to approximate the form of dance music by substitution and implication, swapping out traditional drum samples for equivalent sounds sourced from pared-down white noise: click, glitch, and crackle. Skeletalism is the sound of DBX’s preludes for thump and bleep; it’s the sound of Richie Hawtin’s bassy, darkly droning mantras; it’s the sound of M:I:5’s curious collisions of overdriven bass, snare, and guitar samples, which attempt to obliterate white space with bleeding distortion, but still leave the silence between the notes yawning ominously as seismic fissures. Skeletalism almost certainly finds its apogee in Thomas Brinkmann’s experiments in abbreviated form, in which techno’s essential form is carved, literally, by cutting vinyl records with a knife and then sequencing the sampled clicks and pops into rudimentary 4/4 pulses.

It is less apparently minimal than skeletalist tracks, even if it accomplishes its means with few more resources. In the early years of the 21st Century, massification has tended to be the more dynamic area of exploration. Its most distinctive exponent is probably the Chilean/German producer Ricardo Villalobos, whose training in Afro-Cuban percussion has led him to a practice that aims for maximum rhythmic density using only a handful of discrete sounds. Tracks like “Bahaha Hahi” and his remix of Monne Automne’s “El Salvador” submerge techno’s all-important downbeat in a roiled sea of offbeats and glancing accents, resulting in a woozy continuum as predictably unpredictable as the surface of choppy water.

Ricardo Villalobos – Bahaha Hahi

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Posted in academia on October 6th, 2008 by fresh good minimal | 2 Comments

Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno. III

Published in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music, 2004

the profoundly thinned-out tracks highlighted on Mille Plateaux’s Clicks + Cuts compilations, or Jan Jelinek’s densely looped work as Farben, which he explicitly connects to the minimalist tradition via the moir=8E effects in Op Art – could hardly be classified as club music, lacking the forceful rhythmic intensity required to sustain a dance floor. If anything, the latter exists as music in reaction to the dance club, an avant-gardist rejection of the obviousness that characterizes most populist dance music.

Mille Plateaux – Clicks & Cuts (2000)

Mille Plateaux – Clicks & Cuts 2 (2001)

Mille Plateaux – Clicks & Cuts 4 (2004)

Farben – Textstar (2002)

In minimalism’s ubiquity, then, its strategies have turned out to offer solutions to varying, even opposed, sets of problems. If one thing remains constant, though, it’s the emphasis on time – by cutting out pop music’s chord progressions and four-bar structure, and emphasizing gradually evolving rhythmic cycles,

It’s worth asking why non-club-oriented productions have retained this focus. The ideology of the nightclub, of course, is that “the party never ends.” This is preserved by seamlessly sequencing multiple DJs across the course of the evening who will typically play within well-defined stylistic and tempo parameters; it’s augmented by the use of drugs like Ecstasy to help keep partiers going long after normal bedtimes.

It’s possible that this represents a resurgence of the Modernist ideal of pure formalism – related, of course, to classical Minimalism’s exploration in the acoustic and psychological properties of repetition. Just as Picasso could exhibit the African mask divorced from its social context as an example of “pure” geometry, domestic techno seems to pursue ever more specific lines of inquiry into the function of

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Posted in academia on October 5th, 2008 by fresh good minimal | 3 Comments

Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno. II

Published in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music, 2004

techno’s origins are best documented in Xeroxed fanzines which were seldom archived, making any definitive research difficult. As early as 1992, though, Simon Reynolds was referring to the work of Detroit techno pioneers like Derrick May as “elegantly minimalist,” in contrast to the rough-and-tumble productions of the UK’s breakbeat ‘ardkore movement. 1 Also in 1992, a user on the rec.music.reviews newsgroup, archived by Google, can be found referring to “minimal bleep style,” and by 1993 a poster to the alt.rave newsgroup, attempting to make some sense of electronic dance music’s proliferation of subgenres, uses “minimal techno” to describe the work of both Detroit’s Carl Craig and Finland’s S=8Akh=9A label.

 
found everywhere from projects like Minimal Man to labels like the economically titled Minimal Records. Minimalism has become so entrenched that it’s invoked reflexively, if erroneously: Germany’s Areal label, which more than any other techno imprint is pioneering a fattened-up return to song-form, albeit within the context of repetitive dance floor tracks, goes by the motto, “Advanced Tech-Electronic Minimalism.”

Robert Hood – The Pace (from Minimal Nation EP)
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Posted in academia on October 4th, 2008 by fresh good minimal | 3 Comments

Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno. I

Published in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music, 2004

Like some microbiotic virus, minimalism is everywhere these days. In popular culture and the lifestyle press, it may not have the same cachet it did in the sans-serif ’90s, but from the radio dial to the galleries to underground nightclubs, sonic minimalism is on the upsurge. It’s especially prominent in the various forms of electronic dance music – techno, house – and their “post-techno” offshoots. To paraphrase New Order, the 80s group who themselves thinned pop music down to its lithe, arpeggiated essence, everything’s gone lean.

This, in itself, is not news. The origins of most contemporary electronic dance music — found in Kraftwerk’s 1974 opus “Autobahn” and updated in the late ’80s and early ’90s with the streamlined electronic funk of Detroit techno pioneers like Derrick May and Juan Atkins — emphasized a pared-down palette that cut away all the excesses of a bloating rock and pop tradition.

Since then, much dance-floor fare has restrained itself to a limited set of sounds and has produced forms heavily reliant on loops, recurring sequences, and accumulation-through-repetition. These are key tropes in much pop music, but electronic dance music particularly foregrounds the strategies pioneered in the work of so-called Minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Indeed, while it’s possible to say that most electronic dance music would be impossible without an emphasis on repetition, beat-oriented electronic music’s most avant-garde productions explore the very nature of repetition itself, carrying on the mantle of classical Minimalism as a movement delving deep into the heart of form – or, perhaps, skittering across its slick surface.

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Posted in academia on October 3rd, 2008 by de-dans | 5 Comments

Part Of The Weekend Never Dies

Partizan Film / septembrie 2008 / download

“Director Saam Farahmand filmed Soulwax on their recent international dates, capturing all the excitement, chaos and humour of the world tour. Where the Beastie Boys filmed one gig with 50 cameras, Soulwax filmed 120 shows with one camera, in Europe, Japan, US, Latin America and Australia. The result is a snapshot of life on the road with one of the most exciting live bands in the world, and features their friends including 2manydj’s, James Murphy & Nancy Whang (LCD Soundsystem), Erol Alkan, Tiga, Justice, Busy P, So-Me, Peaches, Klaxons and many more in interview, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, and LOTS of music.”

Posted in academia, film on October 1st, 2008 by de-dans | 4 Comments

Muzica in cuvinte

Nu iesim, citim, muncim, reciclam si ne luam dopuri de urechi. Deci:

Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music – Cristoph Cox, Daniel Warner

“Over the past half-century, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of musicians, composers, sound artists, scholars, and listeners attentive to sonic substance, the act of listening, and the creative possibilities of sound recording, playback and transmission.”

Eseuri de Jacques Attali, John Cage, Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varese. Si bineinteles Phillip Sherburne, despre Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno.
Complexa, dar usor de inteles, informativa, dar deloc plictisitoare, aceasta este o carte pentru oricine este pasionat de sunet si de noise. In loc sa ofere o istorie a muzicii contemporane, cartea urmareste genealogia practicilor ei. Traseaza linii de legatura intre practici muzicale recente si momente antice de experimente sonice. Explorează interconexiunile dintre minimalism, musique concrete, improvised music, classical avant garde, experimental, avant-rock, reggae dub, ambient music, hip hop si tehno. Impartita in “Teorii” si “Practici”, contine eseuri care ating subiecte precum: definitii, abordari despre muzica, moduri de a asculta, reproducerea electronica, tipuri de muzici, DJ şi electronica. Contine foarte multe materiale de referinţa, o cronologie de muzica moderna, un glosar, discografii si biografii selecte, un index de citate, dar si un index general.

Modulations – Ira Lee & Simon Reynolds, Peter Shapiro, Rob Young

Cartea acopera toate fatetele muzicii electronice, de la teoriile initiale, din prima parte a secolului, pana la pre-eminenta ei actuala în industria muzicala. Volumul cuprinde mai multe eseuri scrise de jurnalisti cu experienta si muzicieni, care ofera studii critice si istorice asupra fiecarui gen muzical. La sfârşitul fiecarui capitol exista o lista scurta cu comentarii la cele mai importante 20 de releasuri ale fiecarui gen. Pe marginea fiecarui eseu sunt abordate diverse labeluri importante, subgenuri electronice, dezvoltari de stil interesante si personalitati enigmatice. Design-ul este si el de avangarda si cuprinde fotografii din filmul Modulations. O carte de referinta pentru fanii stilului robotic.

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Posted in academia on September 11th, 2008 by fresh good minimal | 2 Comments