The Changing Sound of Now

My recently published podcast, Electronic Oddities 38, was different to my usual podcasts in that it set out to demonstrate something. It set out to show how the sound of music changes over time, how new things become possible or in vogue musically which replace the old ones. Of course, in such a relatively short podcast of around two hours maximum it is not possible to give multiple examples or work out a fully comprehensive theory full of explained examples. One can only give a flavour of the idea. However, judging by the responses so far it seems that my basic point, in the rudimentary form I gave it, has been accepted.

The podcast journeys from The Who's 1971 track "Baba O'Riley", which features Pete Townshend's use of the Arp 2600, through various 1970s uses of electric organs and synthesizers from Pink Floyd's "On The Run" to the full 22 minute version of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", Jean-Michel Jarre's airy analog in Oxygene 4 and David Bowie's krautrock homage, "Warszawa", into the 1980s where synthpop, formerly a sound never yet heard in popular music, took over in a hundred groups here represented by The Human League, Duran Duran, Scritti Politti and The Pet Shop Boys. Towards the end of the decade the influence of Hip Hop culture is hinted at in the tracks "I Need Love" by LL Cool J and "Buffalo Stance" by Neneh Cherry.

But its not just musical styles that are referred to here. Instrumentation here also plays a vital part of the story. This goes right from the first track with Townshend's use of the Arp, into the EMS Synthi used to perform the vital repeating arpeggio from "On The Run", through the specific sets ups of Kraftwerk and Jarre at the time and into the 1980s. The Human League track "Do Or Die" from their smash hit album "Dare" is notable for being the first record from the UK made with the new (at the time) Linndrum from Roger Linn and the producer of that record, the now sadly deceased British producer, Martin Rushent, had only a few days in which to learn how to program and make use of the machine before recording. The record wouldn't sound remotely the same without it. The same can be said of other 80s tracks I used. Duran Duran's "Save A Prayer" uses a Jupiter 8 sound for its opening riff, LL Cool J's whole song is a TR-808 and a Yamaha DX7. Enya's "Orinoco Flow" is the sound of a Roland D50 preset. Put simply, some songs here couldn't have sounded as they did before the things used to make them were invented.

Unfortunately, space precluded my podcast going beyond 1989 at the current time but some have already asked me about continuing the musical story into the 1990s and beyond. The story I had already told was one of a rock instrumentation, the set up of the first few songs I played from The Who, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd, becoming infected with electronics until, in fits and starts, a more purely electronic one becomes possible. It would be inauthentic and wooden to describe this as true across the board but acts like Kraftwerk or Jarre, which were pure electronic setups, led the way for others to follow suit and to consider electronics as their new band. Such people made acts like The Pet Shop Boys possible. The technology of the 1980s, paradigmatically represented by the DX7 and TR-808 of LL Cool J's "I Need Love", made music like his and that of a thousand empty synthpop songs possible. A new way to sound gave birth to a rebirth of the pop song of the 1960s. Back then it had been the sound of three minutes of guitars as songs were based in rock n roll. But in the 1980s this was re-invented with synths as synthpop, a totally different sonic palette. 

So if I am saying it was instruments that gave birth and rebirth to new sounding music what happened after the end of my story, after 1989? Well it seems to me that were I to continue telling the story we would move into the digital 90s when numerous new forms of dance music were tried and invented from Rave to Drum N Bass and Jungle. And let's not forget Trip Hop either. Already on the cusp of the 90s there had been a surge in Acid House based on a 1982 invention of Roland's called the TB-303. The sound of this synth, still heard today and either loved or loathed in equal measure, was the new toy to play with and it took a few years for urban beat makers to decide what to do with it. They decided to use it as the centerpiece of a track rather than as its understated bass support. Instruments such as these, which were relatively cheap and accessible not just to professional musicians but also kids in the street, started what would become a democratizing movement in music creation which led directly to the free for all that we see today.

But back to the 90s which I remember as a bit of a digital wasteground. Synthesizer purists today often disdain the 90s as the fashion in synths became for so-called digital romplers, synths with the heart and soul and heft of a warm analog sound removed from them. Often the music of this time can sound fake and cheesy whether that be the wave of New Jack Swing that rolled over us from America or, to my British ears, the urban forms of music which were using digital tools such as the mega-selling Korg M1. Its piano sound would become ubiquitous and annoying throughout the 90s. But there was also a backlash in popular music and a resurgence in guitar bands through the mid 90s as acts like Oasis and Blur rose to fame, the supposed antidote to tracks like the very digital sounding "Rhythm of The Night" by Corona. The problem with digital synths, and this is not just true of the 90s but they are a good example, is that they are too perfect, too accurate, too mathematical. Analog synths contain variation right down at the basic level of the waveform. Digital synths don't. Its a subtle difference but its there. And that changes what you hear.

There is an actor missing from our story so far and this is partly because it was not a feature of music or music-making that I was familiar with. This is the computer. While some had been using rudimentary computers since the 1980s (such as the Commodore 64 or the program Sound Designer, issued in 1984 and which would, in the end, become Pro Tools) many had not. I was one of the ones who had not but as we went into the 21st century everything would change. By the year 2000 Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason software had been invented and issued for the first time. Software synthesizer plugins  and DAWs had been developed throughout the 90s and by 2000 we had Reaktor from Native Instruments, first issued in 1996 as Generator, which was an environment for creating your own software instruments and sound processing devices. 

Such tools (as well as earlier versions of what would become the Cubase and Logic Pro of today, invented in the late 80s and early 90s respectively) would fundamentally change how music sounded because they moved the focus of writing to a computer sequencer. Whereas before even musicians using synthesizers had still been players making a song according to sound and feel now they began increasingly to make it according to the computer timeline or, a new phenomenon, to simply be computer users who wanted to make music. I can play you a thousand songs from between 2000-2010 that are locked to the grid, as people call it. The influence of softwares like Live, and DAWs in general, not only allowed musical expression but also shaped it as well. They came not as neutral, uninterested parties but with their own inherent philosophies which were inscribed in what they would and would not let you do as well as in how they let you do it. When you have a grid to work to you work to it. You begin to count samples when what you are making your music with is basically just a fancy counting machine. And that's exactly what a computer is.

You might dispute my last claim but I would argue that people, even musicians, are often easily led and so people, even musicians, are much more likely to do the things that are easy to do rather than taking the effort of doing something that takes more imagination or effort or works against the grain of their tools. People are trainable and habitual and they can be molded by their environments. Plus we have to remember that with each new technology it does take some time for these things to mature and so the first uses of these things are unlikely to be the most innovative or the most striking. The first decade of the 21st century, the first proper, fully-fledged software decade, is full of very neat, precise, in the box music that feels somewhat inert, neutered, coiffured and its because now producers work to that grid on the screen. They worry about drawing neat curves in their softwares and how it looks on the screen. This is a fundamental change. Everything lines up and becomes symmetrical. Take a listen to the numerous popular tracks by Timbaland from this period for a perfect definition of this "in the box" electronic sound.

There is another podcast I did in the Electronic Oddities series and it was back in Episode 9. I called it "The Invention of Electronic Dance Music" and it was meant to be similarly educational as my most recent edition of the show was. It aimed to take dance music from the 1980s, the first genuinely made purely with modern electronic devices, but still with an old time player's sensibility and with no computers in sight, and to contrast its SOUND with the dance music we know from today. I challenge anyone to argue that that old stuff is not fuller, fresher, rawer, more alive and with more depth and soul than its modern, computerized counterparts. You can hear it in the beat AND in the sounds. The overall sonic effect is something much more engaging and effective in my ears. The trouble is it gets lost over time. People's ears get used to the new normal. They think things were always like this (or maybe they never knew anything else?). But it wasn't. As these two podcasts of mine show, when you compare and contrast you hear sonic change. To know where you are sonically, you need to know where we've been and where we came from. It puts where you are now in a necessary sonic perspective.

The Roland Jupiter 8, first issued in 1981.

And now we are in 2017. Since about 2010 or 2011 the tools have begun to change again and now electronic music makers have gone in several directions. Software still retains its fans (and DAWs retain their place as the go to recording device). Electronic avant-gardists Autechre, to the chagrin of some, have eschewed all hardware devices in favour of a software environment (Max/MSP) in which they can design unique and individual setups for themselves. They make a music with it that sounds like no other so maybe we can praise their determination and singularity of purpose. They have not been lazy users of software, content to go where it leads by default, but they have used it to further their own unique ideas. On the other hand, we have seen a resurgence of hardware and even of analog devices. Many manufacturers have jumped on this train and a new generation of kids have a multitude of relatively cheap devices to fiddle with. There is also a more expensive version of this based around modular synthesis, a thing which in many ways started the modern period of electronics itself in the mid to late sixties in the pioneering work of Moog and Buchla. Re-imagined in the mid 90s by Dieter Doepfer to a different standard as Eurorack, this form of doing synthesis has come from left field to emerge as a definitive scene within electronic music as a whole. It has led to many modern devices having CV and Gate ports added to their spec. This would never have happened in the 90s!

But there is a further thing to note about today and I leave you with this thought. This is that music is now ubiquitous itself. It is no longer confined to physical products one had to buy, borrow or steal that was made by professional musicians in expensive recording studios. More music is put online in one day than you could probably listen to in your whole life. We are literally drowning in the stuff and much of it is terrible. Much of it is sonic doodling, the effluvia of bored people. Music, aided by the technology which made it possible for anyone to make it by moving their finger across the glass screen of their mobile device on some app, is now everywhere. In many respects it has become worthless. Is it now also pointless too, now that anyone can do it and the most carefully produced piece of music is side by side with thumb jams and sonic afterthought, my latest noodle? Technology made it so anyone could make sounds, join them together and call it creative. But what happened to the ideas? Is music more than sounds?

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.

ETM: Electronic Texture Music

ETM: Electronic Texture Music - what's that then? ETM is something I have just created, something I have decided it is what I do now. Of course, this is not creation from nothing. Nothing exists in a vacuum (except all the heavenly bodies that exist in the vacuum of space) but, more particularly, nothing creative is without forbears and influences. These forbears and influences can often be controversial or a matter of dispute. But they are always there. The story of electronic music is one of such forbears and influences. I am currently making a podcast series about it and, in episodes yet to be published, I intend to suggest some lines of influence and say how, for example, music made by Germans in the 70s leads to Trance and Techno in the 80s and 90s. But this blog is a little piece by me about what I imagine ETM to be as I have been making it for the last 6-8 months. I have come to see it as a style of music but one that comes from certain ways of seeing and being in the world. So I think that not everyone could make it because not everyone would be in the position to do so.

I begin by saying what ETM is not. ETM is not about tempo as some forms of music are. Its not House or Drum and Bass, music which needs to be at a certain speed. Indeed, as we shall see, ETM may not even be about a beat, at least not simply so or as the main focus of the music. (Nearly all music has rhythm, however, even if its subtle and in the movement of sounds.) ETM is not about melody or harmony either. As with rhythm, pitch is not the focal point of ETM. But, again, this is not to say that pitch doesn't matter. What doesn't matter is the conventional use of pitch to achieve conventional melody or harmony. And so this means that, thirdly, ETM is not about making "a song". This is another conventional notion that ETM politely avoids. 

So what is ETM about? Well ETM is fragmentary, its doesn't conceive of itself as created wholes, fully-formed or otherwise. ETM is pieces of sound. ETM is also abstract and this deliberately so. ETM has a need to be amorphous and resistant to fitting into conventional form. To ask of a piece of ETM "What is it about?" or "What is it for?" is to find few answers being given you directly from the music itself... and yet, on the other hand, all that you will ever need to answer such questions is there within it. ETM does not give itself up without a fight. It is music you struggle with to know, experience and understand. For this reason ETM is layered, a spatial form of music existing in a physical universe. This suggests that perspective is relevant to appreciate it and that it can be approached from differing angles. What do you find in it when you listen? Well where are you listening from?

ETM, sonically, is about timbre. It is timbral music focused on the mixing, contrasting and creation of timbres. This is in open distinction to music (which in the Western tradition is the norm) based on tones or pitches. This is why ETM is not tunes with melodies. Its just not the focus. Instead what is sought is timbrally interesting music that creates atmospheres or textures. The texture of the piece is the point and primary musical concern. Texture is what is being exploited here and is the musical interface for a human interaction with sound. For this reason all of sound is taken to be equally valid. There are no good or bad textures like there might be good or bad tunes. All textures are equal if different and nothing within them recommends one above any other. They are all just experiences of sounds. 

ETM, certainly as I have been making it, is often pure improvisation or the disconnected juxtaposing of sounds in an electronic context. It is a non-deliberate, anti-authorial type of music (compare free jazz). Sound is all around us. It doesn't have to be conventionally created and its creation ascribed to a writer for it to be valid. In my making of ETM I have deliberately gone out of my way to avoid responsibility for how things sound, for example, by just throwing things on a timeline and letting them be or arranging them at random and without concern for where they stand or with what. This lack of responsibility, this deliberate letting go, will upset the conventional for they then have no one to blame for the sounds they hear. Consider the uproar, for example, when John Cage "wrote" 4'33". This is a founding piece of ETM. Cage also foreshadowed ETM when he stated that "dissonance is just a form of harmony we haven't got used to yet". ETM is often dissonant, as it must be since it is created to create textures and without conventional melodic or harmonic concerns. In a way, and in one sense, we can see ETM as a kind of free jazz for those using electronics.

Why is ETM like this? For me ETM is about experiencing the world as it is rather than as we want it to be with the comfort of conventions. It is, as a must, anti-conventional music. ETM is based in a way of seeing the world. It is stream of consciousness music that does not look on things as they have been falsified and fixed but as always moving and ever-changing. There is no permanence in ETM (it cannot be notated or directed) and it is not a final word or a finished object. It is a moment that cannot be grasped, something just passing through. ETM is about noises and sounds. These things may only happen once and be forever thereafter unrecoverable. Often this is the point and much of my ETM is things that happened at one time only that I could never recreate again. ETM exists in a world just like this and gives it substance but never permanence. Noise music is an extreme form of ETM in my mind but ETM does not have to be simply noise. ETM is a means to describe the breadth of human experience through the timbrally rich world of sound. 

Where does ETM come from? Musically, I think it comes from John Cage, who I've already mentioned, Pierre Schaeffer and his experiments with Musique Concrete and the German Kosmische musicians. ETM is at its core anti-conventional. All these people created new music that stepped outside of what was expected or accepted. All received ire as "not producing proper music". And they should have. ETM is not proper music either. It is new music, music which eschews the modern day, mainstream conventions about what music should be. It is an experimental music in a world where humans must experiment to learn and progress. This makes it necessary. ETM is the desire to work with sounds and noises in unconventional and anti-authorial ways, to make things that aren't regular or conformist because it is only by not conforming that the falsity of conventional forms and standards is revealed. It is about the experience of everyone who makes it in distinction to a professionalized discipline or notion. ETM is circuit bending, soundwashes, shouting over noise, birds singing in the outdoors, abstract, bland sounds and much, much more. It is a primal connection between sounds and their human apprehension.

ETM is also ineluctably electronic. It is ELECTRONIC Texture Music. Electricity is necessary for it is the power to create (manipulate) the unreal and make it real (or vice versa). Many electronic sounds are not found in nature and yet it is nature itself, our natural world, which makes all sounds and enables us to hear them. In the electricity is the being of the sounds electronic music creates. They are an electronic moment that exists but briefly and, before you know it, is gone again. Electricity, like sound itself, is always in flux, a constant oscillation. ETM is about this natural oscillation. ETM attempts to capture and manipulate this on-going electronic succession of moments. So oscillators and samplers, electronic tools, are what ETM is made with. Electricity and electronics, the means to manipulate it, are the heart and soul of ETM.

These are but preliminary thoughts on what I take ETM to be. It is, of course, not new. Were I to write a historical piece I could flag up many forbears. It is my name for what I am doing and it has some theory and ideas behind it. It is music about embodying ideas in sound and about sound and sounds. It is not for entertainment but you can certainly be entertained by it. ETM is about experiencing what you hear more than about being entertained by it though. It is about realizing that human beings exist in a world of sound and taking each sound seriously... and then letting this tell you something about the world that is always passing away.

ETM is the sound of things constantly passing away, a reminder that things never stop, a testimony that fixity is illusion.

To hear what ETM sounds like you can go my to my Bandcamp at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

John Cage Once Again

If there is a book that has affected my attitude towards music and has actually materially changed my ideas about music and my own musical practice, and there is, then that book is without question John Cage's book "Silence". Specifically, for I can be specific, it is the section near the beginning headed "Experimental Music". It is not a very long section of the book and it is also one of the parts of the book which, I think, it is relatively easy to understand. Both of these factors are fortuitous for other parts of "Silence" I find so dense as to be impenetrable. The section "Experimental Music" I find so fundamental to an understanding of music that I would count it as a great loss if I had never read Cage's words and understood what he meant by them. Before beginning with the meat of my blog I should, of course, say that Cage was writing in the 1950's. His musical situation was not that of our's today. In the 1950's no one had yet built a viable commercial synthesizer and magnetic tape was the cutting edge tool of the day. Cage, we may say, was at that time creating the future. But he wasn't yet in it and we can look back on specifics that he helped to bring about but could not describe in detail as we can today.

So what is so great about this section of the book? I have written about this before and I recommend that you search through my blog to find those blogs too. They may add to what I say here or re-emphasize things. What is so great, if it is to be put like this, is that Cage is not afraid to get embroiled in the big questions about music that many either assume in their ignorance or ignore in their stupidity. Cage is not afraid to take a stance on what music is and should be seen as. This is an important question and all the more so in the 60 years since he wrote in which any number of electronic musical genres have been invented (and, in some cases, passed away again). A definition of what music even is is important and for at least two reasons. It informs what it is you think you are doing if you make music and it gives hints as to how you should do it.

Most musicians and musical writers, even today, are primarily concerned with pitch. When picking up their instrument or sitting in front of it they primarily intend to affect pitches and weave them into a pleasing union. Indeed, many traditional instruments were made specifically as devices to produce and affect pitches as their primary function. Melody and harmony are the endgame. For such people so fixed can their ideology be and so unthinking can their appreciation of music be that it never occurs to them to think that music might be anything else. Music is melody and harmony as a statute. If something is not melodious or not harmonious then it is not music. It does not take a genius to realize that this definition completely destroys the claims of some forms of music to then be music at all. Specifically, these are electronic ones, ones that were coming to birth as Cage wrote. Fortunately, there are others who see things a different way and Cage was one of these. Cage came to regard such music as happily "experimental", including his own, a judgment many wouldn't quibble at today but which, in his day, was controversial.

The crucial factor in this, Cage finds, having realized that as long as he is alive there will always be some sound even if it is only the flowing of his blood or the high pitched whine of his nervous system, is to turn away from the idea that music is something deliberately done to the idea of music as sounds that are not intended. There will always be these sounds of course and for the musically conventional they would regard their task as to eliminate them as much as possible. But not Cage. Cage sees this fact and these sounds as his orchestra. Cage freely admits that many will see such a turn as giving everything away. If music is not a musician deliberately creating with authorial purpose then it is nothing for many people. But Cage retorts. Cage sees human beings as at one with all the sounds around them. In this context there can be no concept of music as some artificial, deliberate creation. Music is any sounds occurring "in any combination and in any continuity". As I would put this, "Music is any combination of sounds". I summarize Cage's thought here as "Give up music as a collection of deliberately made and organized sounds. Realize that any combination of sounds is music."

It is this "any combination of sounds" idea that seems to scare many people though. And some people do seem bound to their idea of music as something deliberate, an authorial intent, a matter of canonized forms and sanctified approaches. Cage was right to say, even in the 1950's, that some people regard, for example, the use of noise or a random approach to a collection of sounds, as "not music at all". The years between his writing and our present day may have removed some of that anxiety as electronics gave birth to industrial music, ambient music and an appreciation for abstract forms or, alternatively, rhythms which endlessly replicate themselves and morph, seemingly forever. But this is not entirely so. There are still those who regard things without a tune as not music. For Cage I think this would be to focus on the lesser thing (that you can form pitches into melodies) to the exclusion of a much greater thing (that tones and timbres are all around us in any number of naturally occurring combinations). 

For a number of years I have been an enthusiastic fan of the analog synthesizer enthusiast and educationalist, Marc Doty. Doty, known as Automatic Gainsay in the online world and a man who works as part of the Bob Moog Foundation to prosper the legacy of the great synthesizer inventor, Dr Robert Moog, has for a number of years produced demonstration videos for numerous vintage analog synths on his You Tube channel. I freely admit that I have spent hours watching, and re-watching, many of his videos which I find to be both educational regarding the synthesizers he is demonstrating and in relation to synthesis itself. In my way, I have also found many of the videos musically significant as well for I have found music in the tones and timbres that these usually vintage synthesizers have produced. Indeed, I have found no difference musically between the theme songs Marc has written for his videos and his pawing at the keyboard during the demonstrations. Why is this? Its because, like Cage, I am not seeing "music" as the production of deliberately intended tunes. I am not seeing "music" as a matter of deliberation or intention at all. Music is sounds in juxtaposition with one another. And nothing more is needed. 

Of course, it takes a psychological shift to come to this position and Cage sees this. But Cage does not see it as a giving up of anything. He sees it as a gaining of so much more. "One may fly if one is willing to give up walking" is how he puts it. And this is very much how I see it. Recently, not least from watching Doty's videos, I have become somewhat disturbed and a little claustrophobic, musically speaking. I've wanted to shout at Marc as he was demonstrating "Stop flinging all these pitches at me!" I look at the keyboards Marc is demonstrating and there they are in all their fixity with a keyboard attached as the user interface. A keyboard, of course, is an interface primarily designed to affect pitch and in some, but not all, keyboards pitch is all it does affect. How limiting, how narrow, how blind. In contrast Cage talks about "sound space" and the technical possibilities of the use of magnetic tape which, in his 1950's context, was cutting edge. He speaks of being able "to transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of operation into art". Now, reading that, can you say that this task is even primarily a matter of pitch? Surely not. 

Lately my own musical output has become what I now refer to as "texture music". When approaching the creation of a piece I look to create the conditions for a piece of electronic music's arrival. But I don't look to play it or even really create it. I try to stand at a remove and let it come to be. I juxtapose things and let them be and let the music come from their juxtaposition just as in nature things are just juxtaposed. You will perhaps not find it surprising that, in this context, I prefer electronic and technological means to do this. Both software and hardware solutions are available today that Cage cannot have foreseen in detail and one wonders what he would have done with them. However, in my own practice I approach music as something primarily of timbral and not melodic interest. I can write melodies and have done so. But this is very rare for me and, frankly, I just find timbre both more interesting and more vast as a range of possibilities. There are only so many notes and people will keep playing them over and over again. But there are endless timbres. So lately I find myself wanting to smash all the keyboards and I want electronic things to play with that make it difficult or even impossible to be precise with. This is not unusual in the electronic arena and instruments from the theremin to certain flavors of modular synthesizer are difficult to play melodically, especially if no precise interface is used. For me the more interesting question is why you would feel the need to play melodically in the first place. Such an urge is surely indicative of cultural teachings and a leaning towards conventionality that I just want to give the finger to. Nature is full of timbres. Our music should be too. I see it as more human.

I see this very much as Cage sees it in the end. Cage talks about a choice between wanting to "control sound" and, on the other hand, giving up the desire to control sound, clearing your mind of "music" and setting about discovering means to let sounds be themselves "rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments". I see pitch-based music, music that wants to be a tune, as very much music in the "I am a human who wants to control things" mold. And that kind of music disturbs me. Its not even a question of if such music is "good" or "bad", subjective judgments that are largely meaningless in the end anyway. To me that approach says something negative about human beings themselves and their motives in wanting to act that way. It seems blind to many of the insights Cage raises, not least that we are part of a greater whole and that fitting into this whole, letting things be what they will and being at peace with it, is a greater good than the ability to say "this and this will be so". "Pitch music", as I have started calling it, is narrow music and narrow not just musically but also in terms of what it means to be a human being expressing yourself that way. Cage, of course, did not see music as necessarily about expression and even less so as about meaning. For him sound just was and it was the human task to let it be what it will, to enjoy the intermingling of any and every sound together.

Postscript: I am currently making a podcast series about electronic music, as you may know, and the first podcast came out last Friday. In the course of making the show I have had reason to speak to a few people about putting one of their songs in the show and this has led to fortuitous connections. Thanks to one person I came across the idiosyncratic synths of Rob Hordijk and specifically a little box he made called the Blippoo box. This table top synthesizer seems, to all intents and purposes, to generate random noises which change in entirely unpredictable ways as you either move its 12 knobs or use either the CV inputs (and outputs if you patch it into itself) or the light sensor that is built into the unit. The unit itself is a mix of oscillators, filters, his unique "rungler" circuits and FM possibilities. I've seen more than one comment about this synthesizer that it plays you, you don't play it. I mention the Blippoo box because it strikes me as an instrument encapsulating entirely the kind of musical freedom I was expressing in the piece above. The Blippoo is impossible to play melodically and is nigh on impossible to play in any conventional sense at all and yet it offers seemingly endless opportunities for making sounds you could never imagine and putting them in the context of lots of others. It is an instrument that you can affect but cannot control.

Perfect!

                              Rob Hordijk's Blippoo Box

Music, Meaning and Harsh Noise

I am back blogging again and, as usual, it is thoughts on things I've observed that is animating me. If you are an electronic musician the first quarter of the year is an interesting time because it is the time when all the manufacturers show their new products for the year. There is much wonderment and awe at what boffins in sheds or industrial scale manufacturers in corporate headquarters have produced. There is then the febrile atmosphere of the Internet to deal with as any number of informed and uninformed people (the Internet does not discriminate) comment on what has been revealed and say where they would have done things differently, what they want and what they hope to get. Or, like me, they just stare and wish because they are poor. Of course, this is not to suggest that making electronic music is about a big, fancy studio full of thousands of pounds worth of gear. This is to fall prey to the commercialist myth that if you don't have something expensive then you don't have anything worth having. This is snobbish rubbish and I utterly reject it. The simplest piece of battery-operated electronic crap is enough to make electronic music with if you can find something to record it with.

Now I have lots of time to look at the Internet. Probably too much. And so, naturally, I see a lot of these discussions as well as product demonstration videos, people jamming with their gear and round table discussions such as the plethora of electronic music podcasts which have sprung up lately. If you were to take too much notice of all of this stuff, stuff which is growing exponentially, then you would certainly never have time to do anything else. You become a person who talks about doing rather than one who simply does and music is about doing not talking. But these things, should you pay heed to them, are indicative of a kind of community sense of ideas that are at large amongst your average common or garden electronic music maker. Its some of these notions that have animated me this week enough to want to blog about it. Specifically, I have found over and over people commenting about what they regard as "music" or "musical" uses of things. Worst of all is that phrase "musically meaningful" which I find sprayed about from time to time. Its worrying.

A typical scenario of the type I'm talking about here (for example, a demo) is some person noodling on a modular synth or with some small electronic device. Often there will be some simple arpeggio or sequence playing at these times and if the person concerned hasn't prepared in advance it might not be the sweetest melody you've ever heard. At some point someone might well say, embarrassed by the sound they are making, "Let's try and make something more musically meaningful". Its at this point that, should I be drinking one, I will splutter out my cup of tea across the computer keyboard. What, I wonder in my provocative way, is "musically meaningful" when its at home? Now in the sense these people usually mean it this is saying something about what they perceive music to be at all. In short, they are revealing their prejudices. These prejudices are often on display when, for example, modular synth music is discussed. Its bleeps and bloops and that is "not musically meaningful" is what they mean. But when did this rule come out? Who decided that bleeps were devoid of meaning? Who says static isn't beautiful? Who, indeed, got themselves elected to the Chair of Musical Meaning with the right to decide what sounds mean something and what sounds don't? Wouldn't an arbiter of meaning be a god?

With such nuclear prejudices on display one can start to wipe out whole areas of culture. One form of electronic music today is known as Harsh Noise. This is exactly what that description makes you think it is. And I am sure that to people who talk about things being "musically meaningful" it is the exact antithesis of that kind of music that they would find meaning in. It has no tune, it is not sweet or subtle and it is extremely challenging to even listen to. I have dabbled in this form myself recently but not with any conviction because I seem more constitutionally drawn to the abstract nature of sound rather than its harshness. Harshness for me is part of a palette of sounds rather than the palette itself. Harsh things can be brutal and brutalising and that is not where I am. But I can appreciate that others are and I have been listening to some lately. I get it but at the same time I know that if I was doing it myself it would not seem authentically me. But this world of ours is about more than just you. There are a multitude of voices out there and trust me when I tell you that you are not unique in wanting to be heard. Its a basic human need. This a good thing for I find, in my idealistic and optimistic way, that the multitude of human voices comes together somehow in a choir of all human possibilities, hopes and fears.

We are many people with many voices. You get the point. And none is valid and none is invalid. Or, if you prefer, all are valid and all are invalid. For they just are, extant in our world wherever someone feels the need to make a sound and say it means something. And that is really all it takes for something to be meaningful. A sound is made and someone finds meaning in it. There are no overarching arbiters here. We do not live in a situation where we can ascribe meaning to something and then someone else can come along and rule it out of bounds. Well, we live in a situation where people will try to do that all the time. But so long as someone gives something meaning then, for them at least, it has it. That might be bleeps and bloops, abstract, wandering sounds or 10 minutes of harsh, full volume static. Who are you or I to decide when or if something is meaningful for anyone but ourselves? What arrogance would such a leap take? What bogus notions are involved in coming to such a preposterous conclusion?

Harsh Noise I find to be an instructive category in this respect. I do sometimes wonder at the motivations of people for doing what they do. It is very easy (all too easy) for each of us to imagine that everyone else is like us and this is a common human failing. Having recently been put in contact with some Harsh Noise makers who had joined together to make an album I ventured to ask them what it meant. It turned out that what they thought about their music was much like me about mine. They seemed to be people with ideas who wanted to interpret those ideas in sound. I suspect that it is important to them that this is "sound" or "noise" and not a melody because, as with the Kosmische musicians from the late 60s and early 70s in Germany, they want a sound which marks them out as different from other people and which leaves them free to bring self-expression to the fore. They want themselves or the improvisational situation they find themselves in to be the boundary and not some imposed social notion of what "music" is or of what is acceptable. They want something which they can regard as theirs. 

To make music in someone else's recognizable style is to associate yourself with it and what it means, either consciously or unconsciously. Nothing exists in a vacuum of meaning for us and so there will always be links to something else, a network of relationships. So where you insert yourself in this network matters. It has meaning. Harsh Noise has a history in socio-cultural and political contexts. It is a form of music about thought, ideas and social action. For example, I have recently added a track to an album of noise makers protesting at the UK government's social policies called "These Are Those That Kill With Cuts". In addition, one person from the Harsh Noise Movement told me that the records he releases through his Bandcamp page are about "free thinking" and I think that describes it very succinctly. Harsh Noise music is not about other people's conventions. It does not bow down to someone else's idea of meaning. It makes its own.

So here we have very deliberate harsh noise and we have people who find it meaningful to listen to and to make. Are they wrong? Are any of my readers prepared to say, definitively, that these people are mistaken and that's actually not the case? I suspect not because I expect that my readers are self-aware enough to realize that meaning comes from within and not from without. We human beings are the meaning-makers. We make meaning. If we are electronic musicians like me then we make it with electronic devices. There is no such thing as a sound that has no meaning just as much as there is no such thing as a sound that is inherently meaningful (although we have been trained to regard certain sounds in certain places as having certain meaning such as a door bell, for example). Sounds are tools we use to inscribe meanings into performances and recordings. It may be the maker is the only one who understands or even hears the meaning that they put into it. But this doesn't matter. Each of us has our own network of meanings and each of us can slot any sound we hear into that network. Indeed, we don't even have a choice in this because it is going on autonomically without our express permission. We are meaning-makers and we seek meaning. We can't stop so long as we are still breathing.

So what of those who find no meaning in the bleeps and bloops, the static and the distortion? Being polite, they haven't thought it through. They are, at best, merely dressing up a preference as a fact and this is another common human trait. Its one that jars with me because I see a broader canvas for musical meaning than a trite tune that relies on melody and harmony. I remember reading recently that in the late 90s Thom Yorke of Radiohead felt a similar way. A quote I remember is that he said the very idea of writing a melody at that time simultaneously depressed him and filled him with dread. He wanted freedom from the artificial socio-cultural boundary that said "music" was a melody and that anything else was somehow not ok or out of order. He wanted to flee into abstraction and I can well understand that because I have myself fled there too. I don't want to write a tune. A tune would say nothing I want to say. A tune would just be playing someone else's game by someone else's rules. For some people their music is therapy and a means to their survival and so, in this scenario, self-expression becomes very important and if other people conventions must be confounded to do that then so be it. I feel myself in a very abstract world and so it is a matter of some importance to me that I can express myself abstractly. I imagine that the harsh noise makers haven't chosen their form of musical expression by chance either.

But is it musically meaningful? You better believe it is. Its often a matter of life and death, or so it seems.

In writing this blog I referred to some harsh noise makers. I feel it only respectful to name check their album since they kindly replied to my questions so helping me formulate the blog today. 

The album is THE DANGER OF BEING SUBJECTIVE and is by @waynerex80, @Ghost_Jazz_ and @NoizeMuzik (to use their Twitter names). The album can be listened to at https://harshnoisemovement.bandcamp.com/album/the-danger-of-being-subjective 

The other album I referred to is These Are Those That Kill With Cuts  on Sonic Entrails Records which can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. It is soon to be released as a cassette.

A Change is As Good As A Rest

This week has been a reinvigorating and refreshing one for me in a creative sense. I predicted some weeks ago that my creativity would inevitably break down and that what I had been doing for 9 months would quite organically collapse. And so it has proved to be. A combination of being constitutionally unable to continue repeating myself and the dreaded month of October, in which my world always seems once more to descend into the depths, with the vanishing light and the increase of night, have made my premonition come true.

And so the Berlin School-influenced music has now vanished. This week, in its place, came experiments with noise and sound. In a strange way I'm still locked into the same German influences that I have been following all year though. Listen to the first album by Tangerine Dream from 1969 (Electronic Meditation) or to the first couple of albums by Cluster (who were then called Kluster) or Popol Vuh's first album (Affenstunde) and what you hear is musical experimentations with sound. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no song structure here. Its merely playing with sound until you decide to stop. Fast forward into the 80s, 90s and 00s and people like Coil, Autechre and Aphex Twin are found doing pretty much the same thing but with different tools.

                Kluster (later Cluster) - Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius

I have this notion in my head, thats been growing for some time now, that a fixation with making a tune is a great deceiver in making music. There is, of course, a mainstream bias towards it. No piece of noise art would get into a popular chart. Even the great names of noise genres were never popular in a mainstream sense. Tangerine Dream only did one album playing with sounds before developing into the makers of evolving electronic music that they came to be with their many TV and film soundtracks to keep them going. Industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire or Test Dept, who similarly wanted to play with sound, are niche bands with artistic or political things to say. They are not mainstream acts. Even the aforementioned Aphex Twin, the hero these days of fanboys everywhere, is not a popular artist in a mainstream sense. Most people would not know who he is. But people do know who any number of artists are who will knock out the lamest of tunes. Its music you can hum. Arcade Fire and Coldplay are popular. IDM artists and old German noise experimenters are not.

Aphex Twin

Autechre

And yet it quickly becomes clear to any musician with any sense of adventure whatsoever that the world is full of sounds both imaginable and unimaginable. And, as I've said over and over again, there are no rules in music. And you cannot "go wrong". "A mistake" only exists if you conceive of the idea that there is something you should have done instead of what you actually did do. But what if you forget the idea of having an antecedent plan for where you want to go and, instead, you just throw things together? What if you made up some arbitrary rules and just followed them? What if pitch and tune became completely irrelevant to the process? What if the only thing that matters in music is not that you can save it and repeat it (my current pet hate) but that you can manipulate it, twist it and mangle it into insensibility right now in this moment which is all that matters? No two performances of music (even when its meant to be the same piece) will ever be the same anyway. So why keep trying to replicate?

None of this is new of course. The musical avantgarde of the 40s, 50s and 60s were already embracing such ideas 60 or even 70 years ago. My favourite of these people is John Cage with his chance operations in which he would arbitrarily follow some rules or ideas he had made up or that the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination text utilizing cleromancy) had ordained he must follow. This was music at random. Brian Eno is famous for his "oblique strategies" which are his own way of following a random rule or idea and just seeing where it takes you. David Bowie has always utilized random ways of writing lyrics for his songs, either with paper and scissors or in electronic ways. Throbbing Gristle often seemingly had no guide at all other than choosing an instrument and then playing it exactly the way you were not intended to. Cosey Fanni Tutti, the guitar player, would often play the electric guitar sitting down by hitting it with something or bowing it rather than strumming the strings or playing recognizable chords. (She still does this today together with fellow former TG member and her partner, Chris Carter, in their current musical endeavours.) She also had a cornet she couldn't play, not that it mattered. Autechre's increasing uses of software to make music has often resulted in outcomes that were not predictable to the musicians themselves and has given much of their work the flavour of sound abstraction.

                                             Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter

So why do this? In my own mind its because not doing things "properly", not being able (or wanting) "to play" or just saying "fuck the rules and expectations" is actually a very freeing thing to do. There is no bigger boundary to artistic freedom than being told there is a way that you should  do something or that there is an expectation it needs to have a certain structure, style or expected outcome. I don't think that people who play up to these standards are being particularly artistic nor are they really doing anything other than joining the dots. It is relatively easy to write "a song". Anyone, even if they don't know it, can write a simple repeating pattern of notes. Repeat it for three minutes and you have a song. Easy. But why do it? There are, of course, many who have long and enduring commercial careers based on their ability to bash out the same thing for years. But who said that commerce or getting rich were the goals of musical art? All things must pass, including your incredible wealth and lame, mainstream and very popular music. But what did you stand for?

Let's get to what I've been doing this week. I have this notion that ideas are the currency of artists. It is then for the artist to use whatever skill he or she has to bring the ideas they have to fruition. But the idea is key. My idea this week has been relatively simple: take a number of sounds or pieces of music or noises and just juxtapose them on a sequencer timeline. Do this unconsciously and in no way deliberately (that means often not even knowing what the music or sound or noise is) almost like throwing playing cards on to a table and letting them fall where they may. Then, once you have given each sound a track, play with them. Change their speed, reverse them, chop them up, add effects to some but not others (reverbs, distortion and delays are favourites here). None of this is new. Its all been done before. But its freeing because no one, especially not you, even knows what you will get at the end. Often I didn't even listen to what I had got at the end. I just made sure the sound level was tolerably OK and recorded what was there. Listening back to the album was the first time I heard the whole piece. Its amazing and interesting that often what you get is a strange kind of preternatural beauty as sounds combine and contrast in unexpected ways.

You, of course, may be sitting there thinking this is all noise with no redeeming features and that art is deliberation, a product of an artist using their talents to create something on purpose that conforms to rules. But consider this: no one made the countryside but I bet you find it beautiful to look at. The universe itself is random in the most radical way it could be. And isn't it full of wonder! What I've done this week is the same principle applied to sounds as I juxtaposed things without any real care for what they were or how I did it. And my attitude in making it was to allow the random sounds to reveal their inner beauty in the process of simply placing noises into a relationship with each other. And for that to happen you have to be open to it and not bounded in by notions of the "right" way to do things or what in the end are themselves completely arbitrary notions of right and wrong in any case. So what I did this week was part therapy, a break from the norm, part philosophy, an opening of my mind to possibilities, and part music, a creative playing with sound.

I've made 7 albums of this stuff so far because its relatively quick and easy to do. A couple of hours can easily produce 8 tracks and 30-40 minutes of music. In vinyl days that was a whole album. Of course, there will be a further bias at play here and that is the bias towards the thing that is difficult and takes effort over the thing that that is easy and quick and takes little effort. "It can't be worth much if it was so easy to do" will be the thought of some. And yet many of us humans are the result of a 2 minute fumble in the back of a car. Are we worth nothing either because of the easy circumstances of our creation?

In music and in life it might often be beneficial to think differently - just to see what could be rather than meekly accepting, in the most conservative way possible, what "is".