The Music of Possibility: A Noise Manifesto

Today's blog starts with a question: what links French composer Edgard Varese, 80s sampling supergroup The Art of Noise, Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, silence-loving indeterminist John Cage, German Industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten, the creator of Musique Concrete (Pierre Schaeffer), the name of a leading Eurorack manufacturer (Make Noise), the first all electronic score for a motion picture (Forbidden Planet), the more abstract entries into the canon of German Kosmische Musik, the harsh and unpredictable sounds of circuit bent instruments, the electronic jazz of Autechre, EBMers Nitzer Ebb, the glitch madness of Richard Devine, the Japanoise of Merzbow and Masonna, the IDM of Aphex Twin, the cut up, breakbeat craziness of Venetian Snares, a Berlin festival called Atonal.... and this list could go on forever!?

The answer is NOISE.

Actually, whilst the answer is noise it is more particularly the musical use and contextualization of noise, noise as a musically useful entity. But what even is noise? If it is members of German band Faust hitting a concrete mixer or Einstürzende Neubauten using electric drills or the weird shrieks of something that has been circuit bent this seems quite obvious but how might we define it? The temptation is to describe noise as unmusical sounds put to musical uses and I'm sure more than one reader was tempted to think that. But is it that simple? As a recent blog of mine showed, such a composer as John Cage, plus other pioneers such as Pierres Schaeffer and Henry, would hardly be likely to agree with this. Cage was so extreme (as some would judge it) as to believe that all sound was music (even including the sounds you might want to call noises) whilst Schaeffer's term Musique Concrete actually means real music, music made from real sounds, or noises as we might call them.

Now it can't really be argued against that many of those who pioneered working with noises (which is directly parallel to the rise of electronics in music) did so in order to be unconventional or counter to the prevailing movements in music of their times. (They might have described it as broadening our conception of music itself, however!) Some musicians simply plugged in their electronic instruments and tried to make normal music, of course. But a large number of those utilizing electronic equipment did not. They were wise to the fact that electronics meant new sounds and noises. A stand out example for me is the work of Louis and Bebe Barron who composed not the score for the film Forbidden Planet, it didn't have one, but what is described in the credits as "Electronic Tonalities". It was likely called this because the sound FX of the film and the "music" of the film cannot be distinguished at all. It is just one endless stream of strange, otherworldly tones. Or noises. The Barrons built their own circuits to make the score and many of them were destroyed in making the sounds they made meaning the score was literally unrepeatable. So outrageous in musical terms was their sound creation for the time that they were banned from being nominated for an Oscar. This was as recently as 1956, or 60 years ago.

An even earlier pioneer with things electronic was French composer, Edgard Varese. Varese emigrated to New York City in 1915 and, as a composer, was beset by the idea of making new sounds. In 1917 he wrote "I long for instruments obedient to my thought and whim, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, which will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm." He went on to compose two avantgarde percussion pieces in the 1920s, Hyperprism and Ionisation, the first of which reportedly created a riot and the second of which used two variable tone sirens but it is in 1930, during a round table discussion in Paris, that he gives his "Liberation of Sound" manifesto and it is worth quoting at length here.

"The raw material of music is sound. That is what the "reverent approach" has made people forget - even composers. Today when science is equipped to help the composer realize what was never before possible - all that Beethoven dreamed, all that Berlioz gropingly imagined possible - the composer continues to be obsessed by traditions which are nothing but the limitations of his predecessors. Composers like anyone else today are delighted to use the many gadgets continually put on the market for our daily comfort. But when they hear sounds that no violins, wind instruments, or percussion of the orchestra can produce, it does not occur to them to demand those sounds for science. Yet science is even now equipped to give them everything they may require.

And there are the advantages that I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of subharmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differential of timbre, of sound combinations, and new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound projection in space by the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, contrapuntally, since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them - all these in a given unit of measure of time which is humanly impossible to attain."

However, there are even earlier precursors to the coming age of electronic noise than this. Around the time of Varese's emigration the Italian Luigi Russolo was writing his now famous The Art of Noises booklet. This booklet, of course, directly inspired both the name and musical practice of the 80s supergroup, The Art of Noise, who utilized the most advanced and expensive sampling technology of their time, the Fairlight and the Synclavier, to turn noises into instruments. A perfect example is their first hit, Close To The Edit. The video to this track is also highly symbolic as four characters destroy a piano with electric saws, a chainsaw and other implements. It almost seems as if traditional music, and its instruments, is being replaced by a new electronic noise music based on any sound that can be made or imagined. A technological, noisy future awaits.

But back to The Art of Noises a moment for within it Russolo describes our emergence from a bucolic past into a noisy present and future.

"Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent...

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure."

Luigi Russolo and friend playing hand cranked noise instruments called Intonarumori which produced rattling and scraping noises. These were all destroyed during World War 2.

This narrative we find mirrored in the mid to late 1970s in the UK and Europe when "Industrial" music was born. The first thing to note about it is that it was purposely artistic. Groups such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire in England were people of musical and artistic ideas. Where they differed was in the sounds they used to express these ideas and this gives them a direct link to the motivations of earlier composers like Russolo and Varese. For the Industrialists, including later ones into the early 1980s in continental Europe, especially Germany, it was the sound of a dark, industrial wasteland that was the sonic inspiration as they sought to probe and make use of sonic extremity. Noise and noises were the sonic materials that they worked with and, in a very serious and composerly way, they knitted together noisy compositions from an acute awareness of sound. It is sometimes common to regard this music as somehow a lesser kind of music because it uses instruments in non-traditional ways (for example, Cosey Fanni Tutti's playing of the guitar) but this is, of course, nothing more than the sniffy disparagement of more conservative minds.

But now we sit here at the end of 2016 and none of this seems very new. We have computers that can hold sample libraries full of terabytes of sounds if we want to. Literally any sound we can record or invent can be used musically. We have 50 years of commercial synthesis to call upon with all the amazing instruments and their timbral possibilities that go with it. Before that we passed through a brief age of music made with magnetic tape and radio equipment. Yet how adventurous are we now? The old divides are still apparent. We take on new habits and these habits become the new norms we must seek to subvert. Is there a sense that we have now done all that can be done sonically? Are the dreams of Russolo and Varese and others like Cage and Schaeffer complete? This is really a twofold question for I am asking if we have now found all the sounds there are to be found but also if we are using the totality of sound when we compose music.

A few things suggest not. One form of music which creates a harsh divide is the appropriately enough named Harsh Noise music. This even has regional forms such as Japanoise, which is harsh noise originating from Japan. This is, in as straight a form as could be maintained, the use of outright electronic noise regarded as music. It can be seen to be on the cutting edge in that so many are ready to denigrate it as either not artistic or as not music. I look forward to those who take either pathway here presenting their fully worked out definitions of both art and music for our appraisal. In a collection of electronic music lectures and documentaries I have collected together on You Tube there is one called People Who Do Noise. Its an 80 minute documentary but I wonder how many who watch it (and you should!) get to minute 80 because some of those minutes contain the harshest of noises. The comments underneath this video (which you should read) are a kind of street fight over what music is, if this is a valid form of it or if it is just, as one commenter thinks, "over pretentious, meaningless bullshit".

Of course, the accusation of pretentiousness has been heard before. In my last blog but one it was used of John Cage's very own noise experiment, 4'33". One thing that seems to link those who work with noise is their utter seriousness of interest in the noise that they make or make room for people to hear. It is often thought that those working with noise must be somehow the opposite, not at all serious or joking, because, so I assume, it seems that some cannot escape the conventionality of the view that real music is melody and harmony conventionally understood. This, of course, is not so and certainly not since the onset of electronics in music. As Varese said earlier, we can now have any scale we like. Or even none at all. From the very first electronic musical instruments, such as the Theremin (the instrument which, lest we forget, got Robert Moog interested in synthesis), electronic noise music and its exploration has been veering away from traditional ideas of music, as Varese pointed out it would have to. New possibilities mean new opportunities. It was thanks to these new possibilities that new phenomena emerged. We now associate space with weird sounds exactly because electronically generated sounds and scores seemed to better fit these mysterious places so alien to our experiences. 

And so it can be seen that noises powered by electronics come to express things that more traditional instruments and forms of music could not. They are an extension of our sonic expressivity. I personally believe that this is all to the good for human beings that always have within them the desire to break new ground, to explore. We are creatures cursed to experience a physical world and that physical world includes sound. So, to my mind, it is utterly human to want to know what can be done and to find out in the doing of it and, what's more, to use new possibilities in sound to better express the experiences of life that we have. To that end, music with electronics had to involve the bringing of noise within the fold of musical creativity and it has immeasurably enriched us all as a result. Of course, conservatism will still hold the mainstream and try to limit, curtail and push back on the noisy neighbors that seek to broaden and strengthen our artistic appreciations and impulses but the boundaries of acceptability must always be pushed if we are to advance. Who one hundred years ago would have imagined the musical possibilities of sound and noise we have today? We live in the world Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises dreamed of. 

I leave the last word to John Cage who, in 1937, prophetically uttered the following words in his lecture "The Future of Music: Credo":

I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 mph. Static between the (radio) stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sounds effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of sound effects recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat and landslide. 

TO MAKE MUSIC

If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.  

WILL CONTINUE TO INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS.

The question is, how much do we live up to the hopes and dreams of our musical forbears? How much of a music of exploration and possibility do we make?

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Electronic Music Philosophy

My blog today arises from one particularly long and impassioned response to my last one which was about gear fetishization in electronic music. There were quite a number of responses to that blog (which has become my most read blog) both on this site and in the Facebook groups where I posted it and a good discussion was generated. However, some people did seem to be coming at what I had written in that blog from fairly traditional and unreflective positions, as I judged it, and this lead to me seeing that in some people's responses quite a lot was assumed that shouldn't have been and quite a lot of things were equated with one another that shouldn't have been either.

           Morton Subotnick with a Buchla 200e system and a Livid controller

Now I am very, very aware that electronic music is a wide subject. It is delineated, in many ways, by what were the two stand out pieces of electronic music commercially at the beginning of this commercial electronic music era back in the mid to late 60s. Those pieces were Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos and Silver Apples Of The Moon by Morton Subotnick. With these two records, which are completely different in musical style and intention even though they are both electronic, we see instantiated a kind of broad choice regarding how electronic music is going to be. And each choice comes with a whole philosophy of music attached and a direction of travel laid out in front of it. Wendy Carlos was playing traditional music on her Moog synthesizer in Switched On Bach and Subotnick was playing what he thought of as new music on his Buchla 100. Carlos's music followed traditional ideas of music and attempted to transform it by means of the synthesizer. Subotnick was simply trying to do something new.

Switched On Bach and Silver Apples Of The Moon

Even the covers of the albums seem to project different motives and ideals.

It is important to say that there will be no talk here of either direction being wrong in this discussion. Although I am very happy to pick my own side in this binary choice, that does not mean I think the other has no merit. In what follows I hope to explain why I personally feel the way I do. Hopefully both those reading this who agree and disagree with me can explain themselves too. For this is an on-going conversation here and not one that can be settled by a simple choice once for all time. Music is a subject in which you can be influenced by diverse and contradictory sources and, for example, one could learn plenty simply by listening to both Subotnick and Carlos rather than one or the other. The same is true when reading the arguments of those on both sides of this debate. For example, I was lead into much thought about this subject when reading what I thought were the mistaken comments of the person who replied to my last blog, the one that motivates this one. We likely start and finish in different places. But this doesn't mean we can't get insights from each other. Such is the spirit in which I discuss this matter.

The heart of my argument here is that the whole of someone's understanding about electronic music is directly influenced and originated by their electronic music philosophy. I see this as a "top down" process. What you think about the big things (like what is good, inventive or interesting - and why you do) will direct your practice and how you carry on with the smaller things which fit into the whole. We can perhaps see this in the examples of Carlos and Subotnick I have already given if you know the albums I referred to or something about their consequent careers. (If you don't know I suggest that researching this would be of great interest and benefit to you.)  One thing this means is that I don't think there is any one philosophy or guiding idea which is applicable to all forms of electronic music or all reasons to make it. This, I hope, should be fairly widely accepted. It is a completely different thing to play concertos on a Moog modular rig than it is to make harsh noise with electronic boxes and FX pedals on a table in a warehouse. And it takes a different philosophy, with its consequent beliefs, motives, goals and knowledge, to do either. There is no one way to do things or one motive to do them. The ways are as many as can be imagined and the motives are as many as there are people.

I state this first because that was the main thing that my respondent, I think, didn't see. He came to my post with his own ideas and ways of doing things, things that had been blessed by probably years of his practice as well as the blessing of those he had learnt from and, for him, that was enough. I understand that. The problem is, it wasn't enough, not for a broad understanding of all the possible forms of electronic music practice. For "electronic music" is a wide name that covers a lot of diverse things. And this is the problem. If you try to think about those two albums by Carlos and Subotnick again how do you begin to describe them whilst keeping them under one roof? They both are using synthesizers to be sure but even their equipment was designed based on opposing philosophies. They were using instruments meant to be functional in different ways and these ways delimited, shaped and directed the musical possibilities. Skill on the musical keyboard, such as Wendy Carlos has, would be of great help on the Moog. It is useless on the Buchla 100 because there is no keyboard to play! And what good would knowledge of either be if presented with Ableton Live and a Push controller or some turntables and a drum machine or some drone synths that had no labels on the knobs or a collection of touch devices? All of these types of equipment enable "electronic music" to be made as do circuit bent children's toys, theremins and any other number of electronic things.

But let's get into it before this blog becomes a long ramble instead of the tightly focused argument I hope it to be. I intend to argue against the position that my respondent took up yesterday and so I need to lay out concisely where I saw him as coming from. This position, which was meant to be applied to the whole of electronic music, anything that could be so described, was delineated in the following way:

Quality of output was linked to "musical ability" or "skill".

Technical ability or learning or training were assumed to be superior to random play, pure experimentation or happy accidents.

"Electronic music" was assumed to be a new form of sound as opposed to a new way of doing music.

Intention was prioritized over accident.

"Being good at music" was equated with knowing certain canonized things, having validated skills and having been trained in professionalized ways.

Now I appreciate there is some overlap between the five things I've noted there. They are my summation of the philosophy I was seeing at work in one response that was given to my last blog. It is a philosophy I come across quite often from electronic musicians who I regard as people wanting to do what Morton Subotnick labels "new old music". This is music which relies on the traditional ideas of music going back centuries within western music. These ideas are as basic as that music should rely on melody and harmony to be musically desirable as well as all the technical knowledge of chords and scales, for example. The essential description of this music is music that is traditional except in that it is now made with electronic devices. There is nothing wrong with this music. It is the dominant form of electronic music and certainly the one we are all most used to. But, and this is my point, it is ONLY ONE WAY to think about electronic music at all. Subotnick and many others since have demonstrated that time and time again. 

So let's kick off with the first point, that musical quality is linked to musical ability or skill. The first point to note in response here is that dependent on your form of electronic music and your tools then what skill or ability is required is wildly different. I don't see how knowledge of musical scales or keyboard chops are relevant to someone who is a noise artist or a turntablist, for example. There are plenty of examples of those who make minimalistic, beat-driven electronic music who have no musical training of any kind and so have not been educated in traditionally understood musical ways and yet they seem to have an instinct for creating rhythms and grooves which can make packed rooms jive. Is this based in their skill or ability? Is the quality of their work directly related to how much of this they have? I don't think so at all. At best we might say they have a feel or an instinct for what works musically. (PS none of this is meant to suggest that any form of electronic music cannot be done better or worse. It is to question whether this must be because of skill or ability in a direct way.)

Next we come upon a common assumption, that ability, learning and training are superior to play, experimentation (in the pure sense of not knowing what you are doing until something happens) and accidents. This I simply refer to as a base prejudice for one over the other, the expression of the dominant electronic music philosophy active in the person concerned. It is to choose one approach and designate it better AND NOTHING MORE THAN THAT. Again, there are lots of examples of relatively untalented musicians with no training that have undertaken no formal learning but yet who make music that packs stadiums or dancehalls. This particular point almost seems to veer into snobbishness, it seems to me. When you hear a piece of music you have no idea what the musical background of the creator is. You don't know if they know any musical theory at all or if they have been trained to the highest classification possible. But you must surely admit that if you hear some piece of music you like then all these things are in that moment irrelevant. We can codify this fact by noting that there is no such algorithm operative in electronic music as "more skill = better music". Its simply untrue. More skill equals more skillful music. But more skillful music is not necessary better. 

And so we come to a discussion of electronic music itself and what it is at its heart. This part of anyone's electronic music philosophy is very important for it will, in large part, direct where you want to go with it. Those who think that electronic music is merely normal music but made with synthesizers and electronic music devices will make music as traditionally understood and have a bias towards that as what they see as "valid electronic music". This is because for them music hasn't changed just the devices for making it and the sounds that can be made have. But there's another way. This is the way which sees that electronic music is not old music done with new things but THE POSSIBILITY FOR A NEW MUSIC. This is the direction Subotnick has taken. It is the direction Buchla took when designing his synthesizers. It is the direction noise artists in Japan have taken. It the direction the first Kosmische artists took in Germany when they made space rock or abstract, atonal sound washes. This is not old music made with new things. Its new forms of music. So when making electronic music asking yourself what you think you are doing is a vital question to answer for yourself.

Affenstunde by Popol Vuh from 1970. This is an example of the new Kosmische music that began to appear in Germany in the late 60s and early 70s. It includes one of the first European uses of the Moog synthesizer and one of its first recorded uses for original music.

Part of the traditional paradigm of music is the idea that music is something intentionally done by a creator who purposefully and with a plan creates his or her masterpiece. This has in many places been thought to be the definition of what "valid music" is. But is it? One among many things that electronics have given musicians the ability to achieve now is randomization. Randomization is musically desirable because it breaks things up and can disrupt something that feels too machine-like or regular. It can add what is sometimes called "human feel" because human beings, unlike machines, cannot be clocked. Indeed, if we measure humans making music to the limits of our ability we see that human rhythm is not straight. Its off, it varies. We are not machines, right? We see a similar thing in oscillators. People complain about the machine-like digital oscillators which are measured and perfect and favour the analog ones which are prey to physical variation and imperfection. They say they sound "warmer". People like Dave Smith put digital oscillators in their synths because the precision is useful to the synth builder. But they then give the user the ability to dial that precision out for reasons of musical taste (oscillator slop).

But let's bring this back to intentionality. Put simply, this, yet again, is only one way to see music rather than the only game in town and it is electronics which have changed the game and required the reorientation of the participants. We see with the burgeoning interest in modular synthesis, for instance, the possibility for pieces of music that are more conducted than played, more steered than precise expressions of a human intention. This is even the attraction of this kind of electronic music, that even the nominal creator of the piece does not know exactly how it will turn out. This not knowing is the desired and appealing feature of the performance. This is not music that could be notated or even repeated and it absolutely is not following the old "intentionality" paradigm. If anything, it has slid into a co-operative paradigm but one in which machines and devices co-operate with human beings to produce something electronically musical. A similar thing happens in DJ booths where "on the fly" performances occur mixing diverse sources to unpredictable outcomes. Is this "musically invalid"? I say a definite "NO!"

The attitude that I am really arguing against here is a professionalized one. Some people are professional musicians and so must abide by professional standards to survive. I get that. Others wish to imitate them and so preach these same standards since they are the ones they hope will enable them to follow in the footsteps of their heroes. I get that too. But neither of these groups have the right or the ability to thereby delineate what the whole of electronic music should or should not be. Professional bodies are inherently and necessarily conservative. This, after all, is how they police their own standards. The problem is that electronic music is new and creates new, non-professionalized forms, ones that may require different standards or even, clutches pearls, very few standards at all. Of course a professionalized musical tradition will rub up against such ideas and take a different point of view. But we should be able to decipher this and see why. 

Some of the values this new and scary electronic music promotes are ideas such as that self-taught is as valid as traditionally taught, that electronic music is new music and not just new sounds for old music, that an accident caused by some oscillators or some valves or transistors is as valid as me deciding that a C chord should be followed by a G and then an F. Electronic music as a whole allows if not invites the notion that intention and accident or intention and experiment are equally as pregnant with musical possibility as each other. Electronic music enshrines and explicitly enables the notion that a programmer can make music as beautiful, powerful or emotional as a player. Electronics in music takes the old paradigm of music based on knowledge, learning and training and acknowledges that much great music has been and will be made this way but that now, because of electricity, it can all be one big playful experiment instead and that things just as valid, musical and enjoyable are created as  a result.

                     Some anonymous Russian electronic noise artists

There are people who will sniff at this. They sometimes reply to my blogs and insist that although they can see my point it still might be a good idea to get some training or learn some musical knowledge. It might be. But it is not a necessity. You will have a great, thrilling and fulfilling electronic musical life even if you never do that. Or, rather, it is possible. I see those who respond to me in this way as giving voice to where they have come from. That's fair enough. But I must gently remind them that things have changed now in the world of electronic machines. The electronic music world has brought in a lot of non-traditional people who nevertheless have musical impulses and desires and the electronic devices of today allow them to be expressed. This won't be in old ways and, as I hope I have shown, neither should it be necessarily. 

Quality is not necessarily linked to skill or ability.

Ability, learning and training are not necessarily superior to play, experimentation and accidents.

Music with electronics is new music not just new sounds.

Intention and accident are of equal validity.

Being good at music can be as much about instinct as training.

Perhaps, in one last point, I might say that perhaps the most important thing that music made with electronics liberates is the possibility of play. In his response to me my respondent referred disparagingly to "goofing around". I thought that he got this dead wrong. As he referred to it, goofing around was seen as somehow not serious in a world of electronic music which he clearly regarded as a very serious thing indeed. It seemed beyond question to him that "proper" electronic music wasn't something you messed about with. Sorry, my friend, I think you're dead wrong again. Another thing that electronics enables is the ability to goof around, save it and play around with it. Indeed, looping, which is really only goofing around to a purpose, it an actual genre of music as well as a way many electronic musicians build their pieces. Wasn't playing with magnetic tape in former times or building mixtapes, the way a lot of people got into making electronic music in the 80s, for example, really just glorified "goofing around"? And should electronic music be so serious anyway? I know that Bandcamp is full of a million very serious electronic albums made using a "space" theme. One loses count of the electronic albums there named after planets, galaxies and the like or scientific processes. But I say there should be MORE goofing around and not just because it is fun. Its also valid and musically useful too.

Well, that's my latest. I hope you find in it food for thought. Happy electronic music making to all!

If you like articles like this one and have access to Facebook you may like to join the group Electronic Music Philosophy which I curate where I hope we may be able to discuss this music we all love and how it gets made a little more expansively for the benefit of us all. Please feel free to join by clicking the link.

PS Please note that although I often use binary choices in my blogs I am aware things are a lot more nuanced than this. Please read for tone as well as for detail!

Bleeping Modular Synths!

As I checked my various timelines today for what was happening in the world, a process which involves reading articles on music websites, watching videos and listening to people's new tracks, I came across a reference to an old interview on the Sonicstate website. For the purposes of this blog it doesn't matter who it was with except to note that they were modular synthesists of the Eurorack variety. The video interview itself is quite lengthy and interesting and there was also some music showcased along with it. My interest was peaked even further though when I ventured into the now ever-present comments section that seems to accompany almost any internet posting anywhere. Here I started to find somewhat puzzling, critical comments about both the interviewees and what it was they were doing, i.e. making music with modular synthesizers. (They had a huge, wall-sized, Eurorack setup.) I bring this up and, indeed, make a whole blog out of it today because it seems to me that there are some general criticisms of the whole genre of modular synth (that is, of the music and of the users) that are out there these days that are spread by those with chips on their shoulders or grudges to bear. I personally regard them as the preservers of an unseemly conventionality. But I want to try and address them. If you use modular synths too you may find the following discussion pertinent to what you do. Or you may not.

The first kind of comment I want to address is the kind that suggests, sometimes with regularity, that modular is somehow "being pushed down people's throats" these days. If this is the case, and I only say if, this is because, as Jean-Michel Jarre said in an interview recently, that "electronic music won". What he meant by this was that in the past the idea of making music with electronics itself was frowned upon. For a number of years, even into the 80s when people tried to stop those such as Gary Numan from doing what they do, electronic music was regarded as somehow not "proper". Again in the UK, as with Numan, Depeche Mode, who have since gone on to become the most popular electronic group of all time and lately with considerable amounts of modular gear at their disposal, were, at the start of their career, never given any credit or due in their own country. Their music, being electronic and all synths, was regarded as somehow insubstantial and fluffy. "Just Can't Get Enough" was laughed at not regarded as a pattern for future musical output. It certainly wasn't regarded as amounting to anything. However today, as Jarre pointed out in the interview, all music is basically electronic. The balance has swung from guitar music to synth music. The procedures for even making music have become significantly more electronic and involving of electronic devices. Very few people today, in the modern electronic environment, would even blink at the idea of synths or synth music. Today you are regarded as dangerously weird or "old school" if you don't use a computer and software as some part of your process.

So what then of modular synths "being pushed down people's throats"? Well the particular complainant who made this comment goes on to suggest that the problem is that a lot of modular synth music is "just noise sequences with no real substance". Is this the Depeche Mode complaint rearing its head again? It may well be. However, what this also is is an example of a value system in operation regarding what is regarded as worthwhile (or substantial) or not worthwhile (or insubstantial) when it comes to electronic music. That the language is a matter of substance or lack of it is interesting to me because it makes me ask what "music with substance" might actually be and, thus, whether this is a goal that the modular synthesist should have. Clearly, this person hears a lot of modular synth music and regards it as effete and ephemeral, fluff that gets blown on the wind. The suggestion is that it is ultimately meaningless. Now that is as maybe and, at this stage of the blog, I don't want to suggest for a second that the charge of being insubstantial might lead to the notion that something becomes meaningless. But, further, I also don't want to be forced to the conclusion that to make music that was meaningless, even if you did, would necessarily be such a bad thing. 

But let's back up a little. Another commenter accuses those in the video interview I referred to as being "noodling hipsters" and those in the modular synth community might be familiar with this casual insult. He suggests that they, and possibly a wider community of those like them, have "no musical inclinations beyond hoarding gear and making it bleep". Ouch! I wonder if anyone's Spidey sense is tingling after that warhead has been detonated? It must be said that when one surfs the various forums and internet places where modular synth fans go there does seem to be plenty of people with little musical output and plenty of gear they never seem to put to more than minimal use. Now, of course, we are not autocrats here. People can do with their things, or not do with their things, exactly what they want to do. But the charge seems to be that some modular synth users, and, by extension, the group as a whole, are collectors of stuff more than they are active music-makers. Does this accusation ring any bells with you, I wonder? We are starting to build up a critical picture of modular synth fans as people chasing an insubstantial cool factor, people who obsess over stuff and discuss gear but without producing anything that matters. Perhaps more evidence in this direction might be the preponderance of modular synth users who make 5 minute "jams" recorded on their camera phones as opposed to full length pieces of music which they have honed and crafted and produced as works of art in their own right. Some would certainly say so, it seems.

This charge of being "noodling hipsters" or collectors of cool things bites further when its suggested, as it was in the comments I refer to, that "such people give electronic music a bad rep". This makes us ask what we as modular synth users want to be known for. Are we to be considered as the electronic music equivalent of model train enthusiasts, collecting all our stuff, making sure it looks just right and then privately playing with it and maybe going online to discuss various layouts and technical specifications of equipment? Are we merely people with an interest who show our stuff to other people and then endlessly talk about it? Is this what being into modular synths is all about? For some it may well be and I don't wish to denigrate that. Above all else in this blog I will hold to the view that people can make of their resources what they will. However, this does beg the question of image and public perception. It makes us ask what modular synthesists want to be known for and perceived as. If modular synthesis is a subsection of electronic music and, thus, something with a musical purpose in mind where does this fit in amongst the collecting, noodling and discussing?

Now in the past couple of years I have become more interested in what might be generally described as abstract electronic music. Sometimes this blurs into flat out noise and certainly things that could be described as atonal. I like everything from drones and soundscapes to chaotic glitches and musical uses of harsh static. I embrace the chaos that can be inherent in a modular system or setup in which you can deliberately set out not to be tuneful. This, I argue, has always been there from when people started picking up their synths at the end of the 1960s. It is a constant and authentic branch of modern electronic music. I have written blogs about this before and suggested on some of those occasions that there was a bias in society against this due to cultural factors which canonize certain forms of music at the expense of others. I still think that this analysis has some truth to it. However, not everyone agreed with me. To persist with the Sonicstate link, sometime guest on their Sonictalk podcast show (and synth demonstrator and vintage analog enthusiast of note), Marc Doty, wrote to me concerning one blog I wrote (on his Automatic Gainsay Facebook page) that he believes that music "isn't a cultural choice" but, instead, "an evolutional outcome". He then goes on to write of his belief that human beings have "connections to organized sound and resonating vibrations that go deeper than their choices". He thus thinks we are, quite naturally and reasonably, drawn to tonal sounds, harmonic relationship and, thus, melodies and chords. I found what Marc had to say deeply fascinating. I wasn't convinced but nevertheless.

I mention all this because what you believe about things conditions how you will approach others, things that you come across daily. This, indeed, is how we humans are able to handle our daily lives at all. We process things based on what we already think and believe. Some of these things may help modify some of the beliefs. Most are just churned up and processed by the beliefs we already have. And so it is with electronic music too. Now I have to say I have noticed that the aforementioned Mr Doty has, at times, seemed to be quite critical of especially Eurorack users with his view of what it is he thinks they are doing and why. I don't intend here to critique or repeat any of this. Marc, I'm sure, is big enough and eloquent enough to speak for himself if he wants. But reading something of his deeper beliefs about music and sound it at least makes some consistent sense with those other things. It is easy to see why he is critical of some things in the light of where he seems to be coming from even if you think he gets the whole thing wrong! Marc is able to give an explanation of why he favours tones, melodies and chords over noise, incoherence and chaos being the fan of electronic sounds and music that he clearly is. This is important to me because I will always value a reasoned argument I don't agree with over a casual insult that comes from out of the blue. I don't ultimately believe that Marc has explained things adequately in what he wrote to me on Facebook nor why some, maybe many, people like making noise instead. Maybe one day he will give a talk or write a paper doing just that. But what of the criticisms I've collected up here from one random internet posting? Where do they fit in?

People get into modular synthesis for many reasons and, to my mind at least, its legitimate to get into modular synthesis for any reason you want. If you want to build the world's biggest modular synth decoration on your wall then go for it. Its no skin off my nose. But most people are, at least nominally, getting into modular synthesis for so-called musical reasons. Now this may just be for the "noodling" that my commenter above has frowned upon. But so what? It seems to me that the modular synth, of any format, lends itself to this purpose. If one is going to dedicate oneself to using a modular synth then, with there being so many possibilities, one will need to play, in the sense of have fun experimenting, in order to do this. This, it seems to me, is one of modular synthesis's biggest attractions in the world of electronic music. The fact there are so many options openly encourages this play and, to me at least, makes it a legitimate activity. A modular synth can be an activity, like the piano of old in the Victorian parlour, where you spend some of your leisure time just playing. Is that an illegitimate use of electronic music resources, an activity that gives it a bad reputation? I don't think so. There is no law or instruction which mandates you must do anything at all with a modular synth. Buying one or beginning to build a system does not commit you to "serious" or "proper" music and neither does it force you to submit to some traditional or authoritarian notion of what "music" is. No way, Jose.

And now we need to address the issue of "musical substance" once more. I genuinely do not know what this means. I imagine it could mean something traditional, something melodic, something, for want of a better word, "normal". Or mainstream. I crap on that idea. If a modular synth is anything, in my understanding, then it is an exploration tool. It is a device in which you can, deliberately and with some ability, purposefully tread untrodden paths. If you have one I think you should do this because, apart from anything else, its one way to guarantee that you will sound like no one else in a world where sounding like someone else seems, for many, to be the safest path. In a recent episode of Divkid's "Modular Podcast" I was delighted when the artist Scanner (also known as Robin Rimbaud) spoke to the effect that music is about finding your own voice in your equipment. I could not agree more with him. I would equate this with "musical substance" in that then the music at least becomes about something. It becomes about you, your interests, your experience of the world. 

But I have a bigger point here. And this is that I don't think music need have any substance. It need not have any meaning. It can be effete, ephemeral, empty, pointless and void of any sense. The demand that things have meaning is perhaps the most conventional demand of all. In this context, it is the nihilist, the person who does things simply because they can or for a moment's pointless fun, who is the rebel. And with a modular synthesizer you can certainly, and constantly, do this. You might not even know how you did it and never be able to repeat it. (Repetition is another conventional notion.) But so what? Why does, and why did, the music ever have to mean something? Why must it have a point, a substance? Why must anyone take the box of chaos that is a modular synthesizer and then regard it as something to be tamed, made safe, made conventional? Why not go the other way and simply enable it to express its inherent desire to blurt forth randomness into the void? This plea for substance is the death of possibility on the altar of conventionality. It is the desire that we all play it safe so as not to seem too "other".

In the end, I believe, the criticisms I found are merely expressions of the value systems of those who hold them. These people had their own ideas of what music is and of what they regard being musically valid as. But these ideas and beliefs can only ever extend as far as their own noses. Beyond that there are other ideas and beliefs which you and I are equally free to have and hold. This may be because, as Marc Doty believes, evolution will guide us down a certain path. It may be, as I tend to believe, that you decide to make a certain choice. Choices, of course, are never made in a vacuum. (And so Doty and I may be talking about the same thing from opposite ends.) In my experience each musical life is a great chain of events, of cause and effect, in any case. Due to my interest in electronic music I make a podcast called "Electronic Oddities" and in doing that I am constantly lead from one thing to another in a great chain, all the while discovering new things, things I missed from decades ago, and much else. To me this is the wonder of it all, that there is so much and it is all so different. Not knowing what will happen next, what I will hear next, is the greatest thing about electronic music, this inherent capacity for possibility. That is why I am so attracted to modular synthesis in the first place. Will some people who have a modular synth be "noodling hipsters" just wanting to look cool? Yes. But so what? Much more important to me than any chat about devices, tech talk, "look at my setup" pics or anything else surrounding modular synthesis is the ideas involved in actually making music. "What are you doing with your gear?" is the important thing for me followed up with the question "Why?" 

For me a modular synth should be, par excellence, the instrument for people with ideas and it should be used to musically express them. For me personally the sin would be to have a system and then not use it to see how far you can go with it. But I'm perfectly aware I can only control my own gear and output and no one else's. Its just that to have a great system, as many people seem to, and then not use it to explore sonic possibilities would seem to be a terrible waste. So, to finish, of course we all have our own ideas of what "substantial" music might be for we all have value systems. But these will only ever be ours and our music always expresses them. We should, as Robin Rimbaud said, seek to find our voice through the technology for this is not just a collection of electronics that will always sound the same. The fact a modular synthesizer is a device through which human beings can mediate themselves with the utmost electronic flexibility possible is of vital importance. And to that extent its like anything else. It reveals the person behind it. 

So are you a model train enthusiast, a noodling hipster or a sonic explorer?

PS I have always found electronic bleeps quite profound. Its always about how things are contextualized I find.