Its Time To Talk About Synthesizers and Sound

A few things floating around in the atmosphere prompt me to write today's blog which is to be about synthesizers and sound. Within the community of folks interested in these subjects there are all kinds of people. Some of these people are worth listening to and many are not. Just as some simply want to be popular, others are more thoughtful and purely artistic. Now the website Sonicstate.com recently published an article called Synthesis Innovation: Are You Sure We Can Handle It? in which the writer made the point that its not actually that easy to design a new synth that breaks new ground. We are, so the point was made, trapped in our conventional understandings of sound and synthesis. And, then again, if someone did make something new we might not like it... because its new and unfamiliar. People, in general, like what they know. This is very true in music and very relevant to Sonicstate.com which publishes a lot of gear reviews (mostly synths) and often the opinions given of anything new or a bit different are critical seemingly, to my mind, because the reviewer is a bit set in his ways. He wants something he knows it seems to me. Yes Nick Batt, I do mean you.

But regardless of the trials and tribulations necessary to create a new, groundbreaking synthesizer, something most of us will never be involved in anyway, there is a further question about new sound. And in the comments under this article the discussion turned more towards that. This is something I'm very interested in both as a music maker myself and as the host of the Electronic Oddities Podcast in which I often purposefully look for music no one has ever heard before and make a podcast out of it. I am greatly satisfied by doing this because, first of all, its exactly about finding something I've not heard before. Its about the refreshment that comes from something new. And I love this feeling that this music I'm hearing is not familiar, not using all the hackneyed old tropes and not something that could be played on TV or radio outside a dedicated show called "alternative" or something like that. A lot of this music is never going to be popular and certainly not mainstream. But that is its attraction. Its the attraction of the different. Its a counter culture. It is here you go if you want new, different, other, wild, crazy, alternative or strange.

But yet when discussing this with regular folk such as one might find in public forums I become very frustrated because most people do not think this way. To most people music is a tune about 4 minutes long with singing involved if possible. This is the kind of music that is "commercial", the kind that "pays the bills". But, I ask myself, what has music got to do with paying bills? Well for some people, I admit, it has a lot to do with it. But this isn't necessarily so. Music is just arranged sound and silence at the end of the day and money has nothing to do with it. One respondent to the article I mentioned talked about the stock sounds that come with synthesizers and made the point that such sounds are used by "successful producers". But is being a "successful producer" a musical ambition or a commercial one? The two are not the same thing. Being a "successful producer" is what I would call setting the musical bar as low as humanly possible. There is a reason most successful musical acts are not known for their musical innovation. Of course, a few slip through the net. They manage to combine innovation and creativity with popularity. But mostly not. They are the front for a bank of producers and 15 song writers. In my view most really exciting and interesting music has barely even been heard. And you have to find it yourself.

Now synthesizers are merely devices for making sounds. But it seems that often they make the same or similar ones. Of course, this problem will get exponentially worse as time passes because people will have more opportunity to make noises with them and they will, inevitably, tend to go down similar paths. There is a whole conventionality about this that I have already referred to and this becomes an issue if you want something new or different. Its for this reason that I have been a fan of modular synthesis, especially the Eurorack format, because here the building blocks of sound are broken down into hundreds of possible individual modules. No one manufacturer has any idea to what use you will put their creation or with what other elements you will combine it. The very format itself is, thus, pregnant with sonic possibilities. So I tend to think that when a new or "groundbreaking" synth is being discussed or pined for on synth forums that maybe people are missing the point. This new synth you want is right in front of your eyes. You just need to build it. It can be made of whatever is out there and these elements can be combined in any way you please. The results will be, at best, a fantastically exciting world of possibility. You just need to make the effort to create it. Surely this is an area in which "new" sounds can be discovered?

           A custom modular synth made by Latvian company, Erica Synths

I don't know what kind of music you regularly listen to but in the music I listen to, so-called experimental, noise, various kinds of ambient, avant-garde, IDM, etc., (all electronic) I hear lots of new, different and interesting sounds all the time. I firmly believe its not that there are no new sounds left to find, its that most people are just conventional, boring and totally unimaginative (music makers and listeners). "New sounds" generally won't be found in pop songs, chart music or things for general consumption. So if this is your musical diet I suggest you look elsewhere. And let me say that here "noise" is only a tiny part of what I'm talking about. "Sound design" is what I'm really talking about, the creation of atmospheres, ambiences and textures. Such music, and it is music, is as old as commercial synthesizers. I can refer you to records from 1969-1970 using synthesis to do just this. Those who read this blog or listen to my podcasts will know of examples of it that I've referred to before. Some synthesists, those I would characterize as at the more artistic end of the spectrum, have always wanted to make such music. You will note, of course, that in synthesizer music history there are instrumental synth albums that have sold in 8 figures (such as Oxygene by J-M Jarre). But then we need to remember never to confuse "good music" with "popularity". I make a weekly podcast of electronic music that showcases lots of never heard artists happy to just make their own thing unconcerned by popularity, fame or "what music makers want from instruments" which is a shorthand for the needs of boring, gigging musicians who wouldn't know creativity or originality if it left teethmarks in their backsides. If you produce for a mass market then you are inevitably compromised by that same market. Popular artists who make their "experimental" record often experience a dip in popularity as a result. And then go back to their formula for popularity.

The problem here is that nearly everyone is happy to reproduce something that they heard before. Very few are unhappy with that and want to be completely different. I've lost count of the unsigned bands and artists who say they sound (and often advertise themselves as sounding) like somebody else you might have heard of. I sit there thinking "WHAT?" If you sound like somebody else then I might as well go and listen to them instead. Its fair to say that originality is not often in vogue with many. People are too conventional to be different. We see this also with the sounds that are put into synths, both the hardware and software varieties. These get used by multiple people so that the sounds become known. This is not necessarily all bad if you happen to like the particular sound but music is something, I think, which always needs to keep being refreshed. It is a human failing that it is all too easy to be lazy but in music it can also be rewarding to do everything yourself. Anyone who has a synthesizer has a device that can be used in multiple ways with the sole purpose of creating sounds. And these devices do not necessarily have to be used as intended either. The whole genre of Acid House comes from a use and abuse of the Roland TB-303, for example. This device was originally put out by Roland as a relatively tame accompaniment device for people who played other things. It allowed you to not have a bassist. But in the hands of inventive people it became the lead instrument for bass heavy dance music. These same inventive people, I think, are drawn to modular synthesis too because such people are driven by an artistic desire for the new or different. Their polar opposite, to my mind, are those who want to design a patch memory system for modular synths which, up until this point, have no way to save the sounds you make on them. Once the patch cords are removed your sound is gone. THAT IS A GOOD THING!! The problem is that even new things eventually become ossified over time. Roland itself now remakes its old instruments in digital format (including the TB-303 now reborn as the TB-03) and sells them as a standard.

You are probably getting my point here that this comes down to a matter of mentality. It comes down to what music is for you. If its to make a career or to appease people commissioning music well then you have to give them what they think they want. These are limitations and, depending on your attitude to these things, maybe ones that are too much for you. But if you have more artistic freedom and a mind to wander then you are free to roam wider, disconnected from the need to appease anybody or anything but your own desire to roam across sonic landscapes and textures. This is what I do when I make my podcasts. These are good because they are not reliant on one person or their creative impulses. You can mix and match the tastes of many. But I must warn you Spotify-infested hordes that finding something new or different takes effort. It can't just be served up to you by some commerce monkey in a playlist. A big problem with this is how music is heard in the first place. You can search for yourself, a time-consuming process, and you will certainly find new, different and interesting things. But the vast majority don't search at all. They want to be spoon-fed whatever the mainstream gives them. Then they complain there's nothing new. Well of course there isn't! Those who make money out of selling music do so by serving up the same, the safe things, what people know. They wouldn't offer you something new and avant-garde. So my point is its up to listeners to seek out new and interesting music. It is out there.

People, of course, have differing tastes. They always will. And none of this matters. We should know by now that there is no "good music" and no "bad music". There is only music I like now and music I don't. And even that may change for people's tastes can change. Those tastes are also not coherent or logical. I like glitchy IDM music but my childhood has also bequeathed me a love of some of the hits of Englebert Humperdinck (ask your parents or grandparents). I didn't choose to like any of this music. I just did. The fact is it doesn't matter what you like or why. There is nothing special and nothing to be gained by liking one thing over another. Its all just music. That said, the whole point of this blog has been that if you want new, as the original article I referred to was about, then you will only find new sounds as a music maker or new sounds as a music listener by either making them or searching to find them. There is no shortcut. You will get out in proportion to what you put in.

You have only yourself to blame.

Postscript

One man who I think knew all this was the recently deceased synthesizer designer and engineer, Don Buchla. He created many instruments, beginning in the 1960s, which were aimed to create new types of electronic music. He did many unconventional things at the time, such as not attaching a musical keyboard to many of his instruments, which forced their users to go a different way about creating electronic sound. He was a man who refused to compromise design for popularity. (Bob Moog, who was also a pioneering synthesizer designer, did add keyboards to his instruments and received many more plaudits - and sales - as a result.) He inspired not only many electronic musicians but many electronics engineers who now incorporate designs he inspired into their own electronic devices and so his legacy of innovation continues today beyond his own life span. He will be much missed. RIP Don.

The Autechre Identity

The holy trinity of IDM music are surely Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Autechre. It is entirely possible, however, that you might never have heard of all three of them and barely listened to any of their music. If we were speaking in 2011 that would have also been true of me so this is perfectly fine. These are not mainstream acts and its very possible that they have passed you by. All three of them are private and secretive. They do not seek fame and share a liking for the shadows (not the 1960s guitar combo!) and obscurity. All three acts are seemingly quite prodigious and you get the impression that all of them are always working on new music. I like to see all three (and many others besides them) as simple music experimenters. You never get the impression that they are going for a particular thing when they work. They just do stuff and something happens. Perhaps the albums they put out are merely arbitrary choices from their experimentations. None really so much as do songs as pieces of sound. Boards of Canada are perhaps the most melodic of the bunch here and Autechre, my subject today, the least.

Last week Autechre, from northern England, released their 12th studio album which was actually in 5 parts. It's being known as Elseq 1-5, a typically obtuse title from a band known for being obtuse about titles. It is already pointed out by fans (who are obsessive, nerdy types) that L is the 12th letter of the alphabet. "Seq" could be short for "sequence" and there are 5 albums. So maybe that has something to do with the name. The album in five parts runs to over 4 hours of music and contains songs with names like 13x0 step, c7b2, acdwn2 and spTh. Not very catchy. Three of the tracks run to over 20 mins but the average is around 11 minutes. This is not pop music intending to capture your attention for 3 or 4 minutes. In fact, in its specifics it is unremarkable. Only the overall effect remains. All the tracks are sound collage.

For those not familiar with the sound of Autechre let me try to describe it. The music of Autechre evades description. This is not very helpful. In many respects Autechre's sound has developed into a kind of anti-music. There is often no melodic structure or harmony. It is pure sound collage where timbre is uppermost. But it is also a rhythm collage at the same time. But these rhythms may not be regular and the glitch or stutter is a common occurrence. If you know of the music of the German experimenters of the 1970s, Cluster, then this is very much like their early work in abstract sound but as done by two guys (as they are) who grew up listening to Electro and breakbeats. Indeed, I see much in common between a band like Cluster and a band like Autechre in that experimentalism is all. Its only context that is different. Autechre began in the 1980s when new electronic music technology had given musicmakers viable consumer level drum machines and synthesizers. This influenced what they could make in new ways, ways the 70s bands didn't have available. Autechre's first album, for example, was more melodic and regular and suited to its immediate musical context. But as they have gone on, now for almost 30 years, they have become more and more abstract... now almost to the point of noise at times. And they have continued using technology to create things that couldn't be done before.

It will be no surprise to regular readers of my blog or to listeners of my music that Autechre interest me. Making electronic sound collages is basically what I do myself so I feel some affinity to what they are doing. We are also pretty much the same age and from broadly the same area. So, in some senses, they are me and I am them. (Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada are around the same age as well. Maybe this is a generational thing.) This psychological reason to like them aside, what draws me into their music? I think it is the very fact of its abstraction. From its birth in experimentation without direction to the almost arbitrariness of the results (I refuse to believe they ever set out to give listeners specifically what they produce) to the fact that these tracks on an album are basically unrepeatable (I have no idea how you could notate or reproduce their music and even less idea why anyone would want to) everything about their music as a thought process seems open and directionless. Or random. This is music that is a blank page and provides room for thought. It also seems to be music without rules, electronic free jazz in which you go where you will, music that ignores what some people think should be done in favour of letting it go where it goes.

Autechre will never be "top of the pops". I suspect that's the last thing they would want to be and, in exchange, they have become a cult band. This aspect often annoys me. As with Aphex Twin, who to many is some kind of electronic god, it gets annoying when people come along and tell you that so and so are completely original and no one or nothing is like them. This betrays the speaker's lack of historical perspective for no one comes from a vacuum. When you hear Autechre's backstory it seems quite logical where they came from and why they make the music they do. I don't see them as unique. They are just a couple of guys with a similar background to other guys who do similar things. Without wanting to be brash, much of my music from this year could easily be confused for Autechre. If someone told you it was then nothing about it would give its origin away. The truth is that at any one time thousands if not millions of guys in their 30s and 40s are doing exactly the same as Autechre are doing and probably for much the same reasons. (And that's to forget the younger kids who are doing it too.) Autechre are just the guys you know about. The rest of us aren't. 

So what of Elseq 1-5? Its frenetic, abstract bricolage. Its a cavalcade of textures, timbres and moods. There are no "stand out tracks" because its not that kind of music and the vocabulary of pop is alien here. For me Autechre is about a mentality and this represents that mentality well. If you can tune into it it will be very rewarding. The thing is, with it being so "anti-music", as it were, many will get dissuaded from listening before they have chance to get into it. You cannot judge a 4 hour project on a 30 second listen though. To listen to Autechre you may have to throw off convention and unlearn what you have learnt about music from being spoon fed what those in the middle of the road want to serve up to you. (Thats my pretentious bit of the blog over.) If you can find a place inside you for listening to electronic sounds (dis)organised by two guys from England then this might be for you. I personally find it incredibly exciting. Each track is a journey with an unknown starting point and an unknown end point and I see that as a metaphor for life. I'm not too shy to say that this music represents for me various ideas I have about life in music - chaotic, random, varied. So to listen to this is, for me, to open up my mind to the possibility of falling into that as well.

You owe it to yourself to listen to Elseq 1-5 once even if you never do so again.

Electronic Oddities.... the album!

The Electronic Oddities Podcast is a podcast I started to showcase various styles of electronic music. I started out with a mixed bag of stuff in each show and now I'm moving into a few themed shows. I intended from the start to do a run of 13 weekly shows and then to see how it had gone and reassess if it was working out or not. In future shows I hope to showcase synthpop, kosmische, noise, the urban dance of the 1980s and ambient music.

But now a new idea strikes me in thinking how to end the current run of shows in a few weeks time with most of the shows planned out in terms of theme if not fully in terms of content. That idea is to showcase an album of fresh, new electronic music made especially for the final podcast and heard there first.

My podcasts run to between 100-120 minutes and I don't really want to go over the 2 hour mark as this would then seem too long to most people (I am guessing). So in thinking about this album possibility that is my time limit for the totality of the music: 2 hours. So therefore if I was going to take submissions your idea for a 45 minute piece of abstract electronics is probably not going to fly. It simply wouldn't give other people a chance and would cut down on the number of different pieces I could accept.

So, to think about it more explicitly, it would seem there need to be a few rules:

1. I make an ELECTRONIC MUSIC podcast. So pieces must be expressly electronic and in a recognizable electronic style. I'm the judge of if your piece fits this criteria. (So no country, rock or acoustic. But anything from a noise wall to psychedelic weirdness to dance beats is fine. As well as anything else electronic.)

2. Pieces must be no longer than 10 minutes long but can be any length shorter than that.

3. The piece remains your property as do the rights to it. I just ask that before you release it yourself you allow me to play it on my 13th and final podcast of this series. That will be on July 1st. Thereafter you can publish it or do whatever you want with it. Its yours, after all. 

4. First come, first served and I reserve the right to politely turn down your submission in my desire to get as wide a variety of music as possible. I wouldn't want one style to dominate what I hope to be a varied showcase of new and current electronic music. So a rejection wouldn't mean I don't like your track. It would mean on this occasion it doesn't suit my very specific purposes. So don't take it personally.

5. Contact for this project will be done through Twitter. My name there is @Absurd13t so please direct any questions to me there.

6. All songs must be in to me by June 15th 2016. If I haven't got it by then, regardless of reason, it won't be included in the podcast. No exceptions. ALL SUBMISSIONS TO BE IN WAV FORMAT ONLY PLEASE.

7. If you intend to do a track please let me know so I can begin to map out the podcast in my head. It will also stop you wasting your time if I already have 25 submissions.


So that's all I can think of regarding this right now. If you want to be included please let me know. And maybe remember that the show is called the Electronic Oddities Podcast as you create.

Thanks for reading.


You can hear the Electronic Oddities Podcast at https://www.mixcloud.com/DrExistenz/  

Artist Interview: Scott Lawlor

Scott Lawlor is an artist I have been aware of for about a year. He is active both as a listener and collator of other people's music on his blog and associated podcast, The Blind Flight, (which has archives going back 3 years but has a longer history as an Internet radio show) and as a composer in his own right. Scott is a noisemaker and specializes in drone, noise and ambience. His projects can be of prodigious length (tracks of 45 minutes are not unknown nor projects that run to several hours) but this doesn't seem to bother Scott at all. I admire his commitment to what he is doing. Recently Scott submitted a track to one of my own projects and I said the piece needed to be between 20 and 25 minutes. When I received Scott's submission I chuckled as it was exactly 25 minutes in length. I felt like Scott had had to limit himself to do that! What follows is a brief interview with Scott about his music and his influences.

1. Please explain your musical history and how you come to be making music?

When I was in graduate school in 1990, I went to a local music store and purchased my first synthesizer, the Ensoniq SQ1, and after playing around with it for a while, and with some help from a friend who taught me some of the layout, I began to realize that I put sounds together much better than words. Up to that point, my ambition was to be a novelist but getting that first synthesizer was a life changing event for me.

2. What influences your music-making, both in terms of musical influences and in the tools you use?

My influences are quite varied from the instrumental music of Suzanne Ciani, who influenced a lot of my early compositions in the 90's which were more new-age in style, to people like Robert Rich and Steve Roach, who were very influential in my first explorations into space music. I am also influenced, to a large degree, by the music of John Zorn, especially in my more experimental and some of the organ works.  Merzbow is also an influence when it comes to my more recent noise concepts and then, to round it all off, there are classical composers like Chopin, Debussy and Messean who have been inspirations in a lot of my live playing.

The tools I use are pretty simple, just a Roland FA-08 (which I got in 2014, before that, it was the Ensoniq TS12) and a computer with recording software and some plugins

3. Your music is quite long, I've noticed. Is this deliberate? 

It depends on what it is I'm composing but in the beginning, when I seriously started composing ambient music around 2013, a lot of my works were longer in nature but as time went on, I tried writing tracks that were shorter.  Even when I'm playing live and I'm going for a longer track, I have to always be doing something active because my attention wanders and I can become easily bored.  That's also a motivator in trying different styles like dark ambient, ethereal ambient, space music, noise and some more experimental atonal material as well.

4. How do you form a musical idea? What is your process when working on a project?

A lot of more recent ideas are albums inspired by literature or articles from the Internet.  The collaborative works with Rebekkah Hilgraves on the Aural Films label are examples of such works whereas the Divina Commedia series with Jack Hertz was inspired by the work of Dante.

Sometimes, the inspiration of a piece of literature doesn't occur until after I've written the album and am listening to the playback. The Dark Descent and up to Reascend is such an example, and though, musically it's inspired by the early work of Pink Floyd, upon listening to the final draft, I discovered that it fit the narrative of Paradise Lost very well.

Since coming up with titles is not something I'm good at myself, I'll just start browsing the net while I'm listening to a track and find a phrase that seems to fit the mood of the piece at the time of listening.

With a lot of collaborations, I'll send someone a drone and then that person will add layers to it or the reverse will happen, at which point, we'll talk about titles and artwork and schedule the project for release.

5. If you could pick 3 musicmakers to learn from who would they be and why?

John Zorn because he also plays in a variety of styles from jazz to avant garde to classical.  I have always admired his ability to jump from one style to another and not to conform to the establishment.  If you haven't heard any of his interviews, try to find them, they are a fascinating listen.

I'd like to explore more noise music and learn from different people in the genre, not just about what equipment they use but production techniques and how they come to conceptualize the work that they do.

6. What musical ambitions do you have in the future?

An ultimate dream would be to be able to play at the drone not drones 28 hour event in Minnesota some day or actually jam with ambient musicians in a collaboration effort.  Oh yeah, I'd like to play a real pipe organ as well.  I love the sound of the organ and since I don't feel that the instrument is represented very well in ambient. I've made it one of my missions to change that.

Thanks to Scott for providing the interview. You can find his music on Bandcamp at https://scottlawlor.bandcamp.com/ and his podcast and blog at https://theblindflight.wordpress.com/ He is on Twitter @sklawlor

His track for my new project Silent Screams can be found HERE! 

Electronic Music Culture

Recently, quite spontaneously, I decided to make a 13 episode series of podcasts called the Electronic Oddities Podcast. I think I was probably stuck in a rut with my own work and I wanted a way out, a way to let my creativity and mind flow that wasn't concentrated on producing yet more music of my own. What better way to do this than by concentrating on other people's? The idea behind the podcast is a give a survey of what now amounts to almost 50 years of commercial and non-commercial electronic music, all the way from 1967's "Silver Apples of the Moon" by Morton Subotnick, the first commercially commissioned electronic music album, right up until the present day. (The series goes even earlier than that though with music from "Forbidden Planet" in 1956 and from Pierre Schaeffer and his Musique Concrete in 1948.) Of course, what electronic music even is is a big part of this subject. Most modern music has something to do with electricity in that it is amplified through speakers. The primary modern instrument in popular music, certainly in much of the mid to late 20th century, was the electric guitar where the electric part was crucial to the sound. And yet when we talk about electronic music in the context of my podcast or more generally we do not mean this. We mean music that specifically uses electronics to create or manipulate the sound. 

The pre-eminent modern electronic instrument is the synthesizer. This replaced the tape recorder as the primary instrument in electronically generated music when it began to be invented as a viable commercial instrument between 1963 and 1966. Subotnick had commissioned Don Buchla to create an electronic musical instrument that he could perform electronic classical music on. But Subotnick did not want to be bound within the confines of a piano keyboard and so Buchla's instrument did not have one. This meant that the music produced was unlikely to be strictly melodic or 3 minute pop songs which needed to have easily repeatable hooks and themes. The instrument Subotnick got was more suited to abstract sounds and exploring the realm of musical timbre. Of course, at broadly the same time Dr Robert Moog had also invented his Moog synthesizer. This did come with a keyboard attached and this enabled Moog synths, and all those that followed this lead, to stay within the prevailing musical paradigm, that based on the chromatic keyboard. Thus, with these two first commercially available synthesizers was set up a distinction which demonstrated something that was to run straight through the heart of all electronic music: your tools determine the boundaries of what you can do with them.

                 Buchla system 100 as used by Morton Subotnick

We can demonstrate this point further in a story told in a BBC documentary about Funk music that I watched recently. The documentary related how Funk was invented in the late 1960s by James Brown and Sly and The Family Stone. This music, in terms of the rhythm, emphasized the 1 and the key to the whole performance of Funk was a rhythm section of drum and bass which emphasized this 1, the first note of the musical phrase. Later on this became replaced by Disco in which a rhythm guitar became the key to the sound (think of anything by Chic that is driven by the playing of Nile Rodgers). But now think what happened in the 1980s. Up until this point the primary dance music of the era had been played by skilled musicians. But in the 1980s viable electronic instruments had been produced that could, in some sense, replace these people. Your rhythm section could now be a TB-303 or an SH-101 and a TR-808. And these weren't musicians playing Funk, Disco or Soul rhythms. They were machines. What you got instead of Funk, Soul and Disco was House, Techno and Electro. The tools and their boundaries and limitations dictated what came out the other end of the creative process. (Hip Hop, of course, would make use of sampling technology too to start to rework the old licks that people had actually played.)

                        A TB-303, your replacement bass player

In today's electronic music culture there are even more choices. People can make electronic music on tablet computers, the latest iteration of something which revolutionized electronic music yet again: the home computer. This particular device acted as something of a leveler and a democratizer in the field of electronic music because a computer was something that many people were likely to have in their homes anyway. Users were, thus, already familiar with the device if not with using it to make music. It was simply a case of buying a music program, installing it and then using it to make your music. But this music wasn't necessarily played. It could just be drawn. This was a world away from the early synths which were created from the ground up from electronics and were based on the model of oscillators and other devices which came from radio studios which is where the early pioneers in the use of electronic sound were originally to be found. At that time electronic music was a niche activity enjoyed only by the rare few and made with cumbersome machines. There was still, however, a physical connection between the music-maker and the physical instrument. Today popular music has been completely overrun by electronic sounds, not least due to the convenience of the computer. As Jean-Michel Jarre has said in his many recent public utterances around his "Electronica" project: "We won". He means that electronic music, once frowned upon and despised, is now the king of the popular music world. This is at least partly because it can be made with stuff already to hand and with the Internet even for free. Like a virus it has mutated and affected everyone. 

It was partly in this context that I decided to create my podcast series. Recently, I rejoined Facebook to get access to a number of the discussion groups that are there of a specialist nature. Electronic music is, or should be, partly about the community. It is good to refresh your own thinking by partaking in the thoughts of others. But on Facebook, as we all know, you also open yourself up to the hordes. And so it is that the other day I came across the latest video of Deadmau5 and his studio full of electronic music bling. Now I wasn't so fussed about the studio itself. Deadmau5 has made his money doing what he choses to do and he gets to spend it how he wants. No, it was more the comments of the young kids who consider themselves his fans that caught my attention. When I see a young kid of 15 or 16 writing in all seriousness that Deadmau5 is "the best electronic musician of all time" then that makes me step back and think "Hold on a minute. Do you know the history of electronic music, kid? Do you know how we got here and who brought us?" The answer, of course, is no, he doesn't. He has no idea that there has been 50 years of electronic music nor of the myriad types of electronic music that have been made in that time. He is not aware of the innovation and experimentation that has taken place in that time. He just likes Deadmau5's four to the floor beat and software sequenced chords. He's allowed to like it. But when he makes bold statements we are allowed to step in and say "Hold on a second!"

Another recent event was the precursor to my podcast series too. I happened to start listening to 80s House and Techno music one day recently. This was music made with hardware synthesizers and drum machines. It was made with hardware only... because there was no software at this time. It had not yet been invented. It would have been recorded to tape as well. All a very physical, analog process. I was struck in that moment by just how full and rich it sounded. I thought to myself that my ears had become used to thinner things with less presence, the result of software and computers coming to pre-eminence. I thought to myself that there may be people who think that software synths and computer sound are normal. I pitied them for not knowing how things sounded "in the old days" because, believe me, it was like night and day how the 80s stuff sounded compared to modern EDM which, to my ears, is weak and sugary. Back then things were dirty and gritty and full of saturated presence. Swedish House Mafia or Avicii do not hold a candle to Frankie Knuckles or Kevin Saunderson in terms of how they sound.

There's another story I can tell. This week has been the music technology trade show in Frankfurt, Musikmesse. This is where manufacturers come together to show their new wares. One of these is a new software which emulates Eurorack modular synth modules. I posted the news story about this new software to a Facebook page for Eurorack users and the response was largely predictable. Lots of people who use real Eurorack synth modules pointed out that doing this in software is actually missing the point of modular synthesis in the first place. 

                     A Eurorack format synthesizer

But what is the point of modular synthesis in the first place? The point is its tactile nature. The complaint was that by making it just another software you maybe replicate how it looks on your screen and maybe even model quite accurately how it sounds with your computer. But you don't emulate the process of using it because one is a hardware instrument and the other is a program on a computer. Someone jokingly said they would need to create a hands-on controller for this new software.... *chuckle*

A lot has been happening to me musically in recent weeks. Another thing that is new is an interest in exploring noise music, a particular flavor of electronic music which is harsh and without compromise. I'm totally clear that it won't be to everyone's taste but there is a community that seems fascinated by it and that interests me. Of course, there is good and bad in all forms of music and this is no less the case here. Its a matter of taking time and stopping to smell the roses to find out which interests you and which doesn't. As one who has an interest in all forms of electronic sound this seems one well worth studying for a while at least and you can be sure it will be featured in my podcast series. This is not least because noise, in the form of industrial music, has penetrated far enough into musical culture in general to have even reached the mainstream and, at this point, it becomes a significant socio-cultural phenomenon in its own right. As I see it, noise shares in something that has been a feature of electronic music from the start, the ability to throw away the script, go off piste and just chart your own course. When you have instruments, from the cheapest, crappiest, circuit bent piece of crap to expertly manufactured super synths costing thousands of your local currency to play with then the sky (or space) is literally the limit. Noise musicians, as with ambient and kosmische musicians, are some of those who have taken this ability and run wild with it.

This is just one reason why I probably like electronic music above all other forms. It has the ability to create new timbres and textures and to keep doing it. You can create something that is yours that nobody else has. Of course, you can also use the presets and create something that other people do have. But that's up to you. I see electronic music as forming a broad spectrum of sounds, potentially as broad as human beings can imagine in fact. With electronic instruments you cannot just create songs or melodies but entirely new sounds themselves. You can create the actual building blocks. The very early pioneers did exactly this with tape machines using noises manipulated to make other noises and then combining them to make longer artistic pieces. Fascination with sound, I think, is at the heart of electronic music and this is what the Electronic Oddities Podcast, I hope, will be all about. In all the many and varied ways that people can now make electronic music, in ever greater numbers, the scope and variety of the possibilities is, perhaps, the most attractive feature of all.

Episode one of the Electronic Oddities Podcast is now available  HERE!

New Musical Directions: Facing The Boundaries of Reality

It is the case for most people that life is fairly static and stable. Many human beings like this fact and I am certainly one of them. Too much change and changing circumstances can be disorientating and it seems as if there is nothing solid and secure to hold on to. This is also the case musically from the point of view of musical creation. For the last few years I have basically had the same resources to hand. For a time before that I had much more available but reduced circumstances and life choices have now taken me down to a bare minimum which is what the music of the last 2 years from me has been made with. I'm somewhat shy these days of speaking too much about musical setups because I have found, in this world of egotistical opinions spewed out for general consumption on blogs, forums and social media sites, that knowing too much about an artist's "how" colours people's views on the product. Check any music forum for plenty of examples of this, often from people who should know better. So the view I hold these days is that you don't need to know how I did what I did. I also hope this will push your need to hold an opinion onto what I actually made and what you think of it. Because, after all, having something at the end of the process is the point, right?

In the much reduced circumstances I now find myself in, however, there are still two hardware synths that I have managed to somehow retain. They have been tucked away in the shed since last time I used them over a year ago. Before that I hadn't used them for maybe 3 years before that. They are the Korg Electribe EMX-1 and the Korg Electribe ESX-1. (The first is a virtual analog synth and the second a sampling synth with reduced synthesis capabilities in comparison with the first.) These are the original 2003 models with the Smartmedia card slots, Smartmedia being a format that no one ever really bothered with. I'm not sure if you can even buy these cards anymore. 

I mention these machines because for the last 2 or 3 weeks I have been thinking, very casually, about how I change things up. This, for good or ill, is a part of the make up of my personality. I'm unable, and unwilling, to go on repeating myself and doing things for a long period of time. I get bored and want a new direction, reason or goal. This is the history of my life story. There is really hardly anything I've ever done or any situation I have kept which got much past 2 or 3 years. The music I have made in the last 2 years using my old process is great, the best I've ever done. If I look back on my music-making history I see an upward curve in terms of ability, the musical interest it creates and the roundedness of the final product. But this isn't enough and, crucially, I think its only true because I don't sit in the rut happy to make the same thing but with a different tune.

Now the Electribe EMX-1 is an instrument I know well. Of all the things I've ever owned, and this includes expensive keyboard synths, samplers, DJ equipment, Elektron grooveboxes and software, it is probably the instrument I took most time to use and know best. Seven years ago I would habitually get up in the morning, switch it on and in 20 minutes jam out a tune which I recorded to video and stuck up on You Tube. These videos got a bit of a following and not simply for the music (although I hope some of it was for that) but also because, having just got out of bed, often my fat gut was on display in the video as the EMX-1 was resting on my knees. A man needs to be comfortable as he works! By the way, in case you're wondering, that You Tube account is long deleted and none of the videos survive. Sad, I know. You get deprived of those performances and I consigned some good tunes to the void. But that must be. I find it better to be defined by the next thing than by the last thing. So occasionally a total wipe of the past is necessary. Its all about reinvention. I couldn't be sure, but David Bowie's career seems to suggest he has something of a similar mentality.

So in thinking how I move forward from my old way to a new way these devices came to the forefront  of my mind. Sitting and jamming with them, though, is out. Its been done before and, these days, every 13 year old has a You Tube account with 50 videos showcasing the 10 beatboxes and ipads his parents bought him. They can do that and they can do it better than me. An old man and his gut isn't music news going into 2016. But a project I have recently completed does suggest a different approach to that. Recently I made the album "A Noise Archive of Science Fiction" and to make that I scoured the internet for free sound libraries of analog and other synths that I could download and manipulate in ways I found interesting. I managed to make 81 tracks doing that in a feverish 8 days of activity in which I barely did anything but make music. 

So what about if I took the EMX-1 (and maybe the ESX-1 too) and used it to generate the sounds myself this time? Its a progression from my last idea but this time everything is mine from creating the sounds themselves by messing with the synth until something I like pops out to putting the sound in a manipulative environment and changing it into something else that combines and works with other sounds to make something bigger. Not very revolutionary you may be thinking. This is true but for me its different and that might be enough. To understand why this is new and exciting to me you need to understand my musical mentality though.

The one thing that I have never employed in making my music is time. Taking time to me always equated to making hard work of music and music should not be work. It also shouldn't be an industry but it is often called one. To me music is fun and its about having fun with the plus that at the end of the fun maybe you have recorded something of worth. I know for many, and perhaps as an "industry" standard, music is supposed to be deliberately arranged, recorded and produced with a pre-determined idea of what you want at the end. But it has never been this for me as, intuitively, it seemed to me as if the moment, the inspiration, the muse, was much more important than making a job of work of it. So I never, ever took time. What I did was think of the next big idea and then record the moment of its execution. 

So that is where I come from musically (and philosophically but thats another story) and I want to preserve that into my next work. I think I can do that in using the electribes to find snippets of sound, make loops and record one shots. These can then be thrown somewhere else to be changed, effected, combined and chained to form greater works. The electribes are somewhat perfect for this kind of thing as they have no voice memories at all. This means that if you want to preserve a sound you make you must record it as it can't be saved on the machine. It forces creativity and makes it certain that no sound will ever be the same twice. Indeed, reading back some reviews from when these original 2003 models came out I'm reminded just what great machines these were with their motion sequencing (which records knob tweaks on the fly) and, at least on the EMX-1, quite comprehensive synthesis controls. The analog vacuum tubes also give it an analog saturation that goes from warmth to total distortion. Perfect for making noises. Or just noise.

So for the next 2 months I want to take time. I want to take time to make sounds. I want to take time to manipulate those sounds. I want to take time to combine those sounds. Rather than putting out the next set of tracks I made as if on a conveyor belt I want to be more choosy. I doubt I will be any less prolific but what gets put up in public will be the cream that rose to the top rather than simply the next set of moments I recorded. I don't know if I will like this way of working or if I will abandon it after an hour. I don't like the idea that the past can bind the future so I'm not laying down any rules here only intentions as I write as a musician who needs to keep things fresh. If I stick to my plan expect to hear a new album from me on my birthday which is in January 2016.

You can hear the best of this year's work right now at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

EDIT! 14 days later and this album is published. It is now available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/album/industrial-sounds-for-the-working-class 

Electronica: The Time Machine

Two weeks ago French electronic pioneer, Jean-Michel Jarre, released his first album in 7 years. If you follow electronic music, synthesizer websites or the music press you may have noticed this fact as Jarre has undertaken extensive PR to promote the album. The album is unique in his catalogue of work in at least one respect: every song is a collaboration with someone else in electronic music who he regards as having influenced him or as an influence in general. And so he has worked with people such as Tangerine Dream (including Edgar Froese shortly before he sadly died at the start of this year), Vince Clarke, John Carpenter, Moby, Pete Townshend, Air and many others. In fact, he has worked with so many people there will be a second album of collaboration coming in spring next year to complete the project in which people like Gary Numan and Hans Zimmer will feature.

But this blog today is NOT about that album. Rather, its about an idea that this album inspires. I have been listening to Jarre's album - which has been impressively made in a custom studio using a vast swathe of instruments from the beginning right up to the present day of electronic music - with interest and it makes me ask myself a question: What would be my selection of artists who "have influenced me or who I regard as influences?" This is one of those pub type questions then where you argue with friends over who is better or which is the more important artist. Of course, its necessarily a personal list because each of our musical journeys is different. So I feel no urge to agree with people. Each journey has its own validity. What follows is my list of electronic musicians who have been important way markers in electronic music and with a few words as to why. I've also put the songs I chose into a You Tube playlist which is linked at the end.


1. Depeche Mode (New Life)

Depeche Mode is where it really all starts for me. They emerged just as I did from boyhood and, as I think about it, they really are the one electronic band that was there at the start and is still there now in relation to my own musical interests. At the beginning it was Vince Clarke (latterly of Yazoo and Erasure) who was the main song writer as in the song I choose here, their first proper hit, New Life. Of course, this sounds nothing like what Depeche Mode would become. But more about that later.

2. The Human League (The Things That Dreams Are Made of)

The Human League came just after Depeche Mode in my fledgling awareness. This is the revamped League and not the dour three man setup the trendies will prefer that made Travelogue and Reproduction. The album that made me aware of The Human League was Dare. Dare has a very distinct sound, one of the first records to ever use the Linn Drum, one of the first proper electronic drum machines. Indeed, I understand the machine had only just made it into the country when the album's producer, Martin Rushent, got hold of it and rapidly began programming it for the album. This was a momentous decision as to think of that instrument now is to think of Dare as an album. Dare and its lead single, Don't You Want Me, went down well in America too.

3. Cluster (James)

Cluster (formerly Kluster) were an electronic duo of Germans, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (RIP). They started out as abstract sound artists as can be heard on their first two albums from 1971 and 1972. If you want to know where ambient came from then listen to those records. If you think that Brian Eno invented ambient then note that Eno worked with these two guys throughout the Seventies and in the "supergroup" Harmonia with Michael Rother of Neu! But not only did Cluster invent ambient noise they also invented synthpop on their pioneering 1973 album, Zuckerzeit (Sugartime). A listen to this album reveals that someone got there before Kraftwerk. The only thing lacking was that Cluster didn't sing. The song James from this album is like a crazy ambient remix version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" seventeen years before it existed. If you like electronic music then your education isn't complete without listening to Cluster.

4. Kraftwerk (Tour de France)

As with most things, I came to Kraftwerk late. Prior to the song I chose here, which to my mind is their best, I was only aware of "The Model". I had liked that but this one was much more 80s (which is what it was at the time). The Model had famously been tacked on to a single release from the 1981 album Computer Love as a B side but British DJs preferred to play The Model and so it went to number 1. Tour de France wasn't as popular but it showcased perfectly Kraftwerk's love of rhythmic patterns as well as their electronic sound, a sound that helped create Techno in Europe and America. No one will challenge my choice of Kraftwerk as an influence because anyone and everyone acknowledges that they are.

5. Jean-Michel Jarre (Fourth Rendez-Vous)

I became aware of Jean-Michel Jarre openly in 1986. This was the time of his world record breaking concert to 1.3 million people in Houston, Texas, in which the city was used as a gigantic backdrop for his music. There was a report about it on British TV and how the concert was being set up and organised and this caught my attention. I remember asking myself what kind of music could possibly be the soundtrack for a whole city? The concept seemed quite ambitious to me and the answer was his album Rendez-Vous. Subsequently, of course, I became aware of his previous work, particularly the sublime and enduring Oxygene which is one of the most atmospheric electronic records ever made. I recommend the "new master recording" from 2007 whole heartedly. If anyone has made electronic music widely known to masses of people then it is Jarre. Who else has repeatedly performed to crowds of over 1 million people with playing synthesizers as the attraction?

6. Man Parrish (Hip Hop Be Bop)

This is an artist I don't actually know that much about. But I know this tune and I know that he pioneered the electro sound of the 80s, a sound that took up the electronic dance music torch but was subsequently outshone by Techno and House. We can hear in records like Hip Hop Be Bop that even by 1983 Kraftwerk were being surpassed and left behind by those they had influenced and newer, younger, more American kids had got to grips with new, mass marketed, programmable instruments to make a sound that had never been heard before. Hip Hop Be Bop packs as much of a punch today as it did in '83. Its a seminal track.

7. Autechre (Basscadet)

Many people have never heard of Autechre, now a couple of middle-aged blokes from near Manchester, England. To describe the kind of music they make is complicated. They were, and still are, fans of electro music such as that from Man Parrish I just showcased. But they are also some of those who grew up just as home computing got off the ground and this love for computers has become integral to their music-making process. Its easiest to say that they developed into people who make music that no one could ever play in conventional, human ways and they have fully embraced the possibilities of making a music that only machines could ever make. As such, they are pioneers and standard-bearers for all the kids who ever got a computer and made music with it.

8. Boards of Canada (Amo Bishop Roden)

Boards of Canada are not so much a musical act or a style as they are a huge dose of nostalgia injected straight into the main vein. They do things with electronic music that no one else, I think, has ever done before and no one has yet surpassed. To listen to their tracks is to be taken away into a past, safe world of childhood where the sun always shines and familiar things are always to hand. Their music is like being wrapped in a soft blanket and snuggled. This is a group about which you don't care how they do it. You just enjoy the fact that they do.

9. Nine Inch Nails (Corona Radiata)

Trent Reznor is another guy I became aware of a long time after everyone else probably did. Almost 20 years after probably. But that's because, to me, Reznor has got more interesting the longer he has been active. By around 2010 he had become a film score composer and was also dabbling in working in different ways. The loud, depressed, alternative rock guy who had passed me by had become the mature, reflective thinker whose words on things musical I always like to think about myself. We need more people like Reznor who view sound itself as a communicative language. The Nine Inch Nails of Ghosts or The Slip or Hesitation Marks are, to me, infinitely more interesting than the one of The Downward Spiral, an album I can never listen through to the end of. But the latter came from the former and Reznor's musical journey keeps on getting more and more interesting. And influential.

10. Gary Numan (Are Friends Electric?)

One of those who influenced Reznor (because, as in everything, its all about networks of relations here) was Gary Numan, the London punk who popped up in 1979 and stole the electronic thunder from all the arty college boys who thought that they were the vanguard of British electronic music. The story goes that Numan one day found a Minimoog Model D in the studio he was in and, never having heard of it before, played it and liked it. The rest is history. Numan is an influence because so many 90s and and 00s electronic musicians say he is. He got in there first with a slightly punky, slightly alternative take on synths and had a few big hits. And people tend to remember stuff like that. His music was ripe to be mined and built upon by alternative rockers in the 90s and beyond. And it was. (Check out the video to this that I linked to. Its a live performance that features Billie Currie of Ultravox on an Arp Odyssey.)

11. Throbbing Gristle (Hot On The Heels of Love)

Not really a record very representative of Throbbing Gristle's output in the main, this track is, nevertheless, a standout one and representative of the fact that when Throbbing Gristle weren't making art to make a point (and they always were) they were actually musically very interesting. I've seen this track described elsewhere as one that deconstructs Moroder's "I Feel Love" riff and then smacks him back in the face with a stripped down version of it. But that's just pretentious music press bollocks and you won't find any of that here. The Gristles have an enduring appeal not just for their sound experiments (and everything they did was often an experiment, indeed, that was kind of the point of anything they did) but also for their attitude. Why make music if you have nothing to say?

12. Howard Jones (Hide and Seek)

It would have been easy for me to try and sublimate this choice and hide it away. There are trendier acts I could have chosen. But that would be to falsify the past. I was indeed a Howard Jones fan in the early 80s. Yes, time has not been kind to him and history doesn't make him one of the great names of the electronic past. But he was there and a few of his songs informed my teenage mind. So that counts as an influence on me. Jones was thoroughly conventional in pretty much every way but he did play synths - the Jupiter 8 being his signature instrument. When you're 13 or 14 just seeing someone playing a Jupiter 8 and wondering how it works and what it does is enough.

13. Daft Punk (Prime Time of Your Life)

Yes, they smacked it out of the park now with Random Access Memories. But I was there before that. Of course, I'd noted Da Funk. But the album of theirs that's really in my heart is the one everyone else passes over - Human After All. This is electronic music with a message. This music IS the message. The track I've chosen is an example in point. Listen to it and think. Because that's what they want you to do.

14. Underworld (Cowgirl)

Somehow Underworld seem to have emerged from the 90s dance craze and matured into electronic musicians par excellence. They largely got under my radar although Born Slippy was a track no one could ignore in 1996. Yet by 2012 they were working on projects like doing the music for the Olympics opening ceremony. They have a definitely British sound and are largely guys who get their heads down and just make music. A listen to their back catalogue is more than rewarding.

15. Leftfield (Open Up)

Leftfield's album Leftism is maybe the best album of the 1990s, a decade I often think of as a black hole in musical terms. For me the 70s and 80s is where all the invention comes from and everyone else after is just footnotes to what these people did. But some things from later still stand out and Leftism is one such thing. Its a masterpiece album of morphing electronic genres, always with a danceability that can't be shaken off. Open Up, which features the vocals of butter-selling ex punk, John Lydon, (ex The Sex Pistols) tears into your soul with its pounding rhythms and Lydon's unmistakable vocal tone.

16. Goldfrapp (Train)

Goldfrapp are a British delight. Formed by a blonde singer and the ex-saxophonist from Tears for Fears, they embarked with this century on a career of creating sonic masterpieces. On their first three albums this was expressly electronic and synthesized (the two had made an agreement that guitars could not be used at that time). What we got was the delicate album, Felt Mountain, and two glamrock, dancehall stompers, Black Cherry and Supernature. The Goldfrapp of these albums is by far my favourite. Later they would mellow and diversify but throughout they remained dedicated and skillful artistes who work with sound.

17. Depeche Mode (Enjoy the Silence)

There are, of course, at least two (and probably three or four) Depeche Modes. The first was Vince Clarke Depeche Mode. Now I pay homage to Martin Gore Depeche Mode. Violator is their highpoint as a band. Its the album that made them artists of worldwide renown. Personal Jesus and Enjoy the Silence are probably tied equally as my favourite singles of all time. As electronic musicians I can't actually think of another band who have stayed as popular and as at the forefront of music as Depeche Mode have. Most of the rest (including all the pioneers) faded away and died or retreated to some sonic backwater. And Depeche Mode have sold more albums than pretty much any other electronic artist too. That alone would make them "influencers". And so it is highly appropriate that perhaps the pre-eminent electronic band of my musical lifetime should bookend my choices.


You can listen to the songs I chose for my "time machine" HERE!!!