Once More, With Feeling

Over the last 3 weeks or so I have had some fun expanding the reach of this blog by posting electronic music related blogs to Facebook (which has a much larger potential than Twitter for actually engaging people). It has certainly got me more readers but what interests me more than this is being involved in quality conversations. The reach of those blogs enabled me to set up an Electronic Music Philosophy page on Facebook where some interesting discussions of a more theoretical nature than "look at my setup" have already taken place. As you may know from past blogs, I'm very much a quality over quantity person if that is the choice.

Thanks to this group a video was posted of Adam Neely's. Neely is a guy who chats about music theory on You Tube. This was my first introduction to him and, while I found him a bit overblown and "in your face," I cannot deny that the video I watched (about Vaporwave) was largely informative. In speaking about his subject at hand he made what seemed to me to be a fascinating link between timbre and emotion in music. The vlog itself was largely about the draw of Vaporwave as a form of music and Neely made recourse to the phenomenology of music (how music makes you feel, how you experience it) in order to do this. His point was that a musician's primary tool to manipulate the emotional response of a listener was a timbral one, how a sound sounds and how a sound's sound can be affected timbrally. This, so Neely argued, had the power to affect how someone might hear a piece of music and emotionally react to it.

Unsurprisingly, this got me thinking. First of all, I thought about music from the perspective of what it feels like to listen to something, the experience of listening. I considered that this is something not often discussed. What is often discussed is the more trivial like/dislike that people give to music as it is presented to them or as they hear it. These subjects are linked but I doubt they are much discussed anywhere outside of academic circles. Following John Cage, who has educated what I think were probably my base instincts anyway, I've come to find the like/dislike judgment we all give to music of not much use and certainly no good as a musical guide. If one is to take music seriously as a whole (and as a world of sounds which just are what they are) then we need to get over our egos and snap judgments. They may be marginally useful for deciding which thing I want to hear right now that is compatible with my mood but, outside of that, they should be completely set to one side. If one is going to think about music seriously one needs to have more stamina and insight than this.

The second thing I thought of was a scene from one of the old Star Trek films. In this scene Spock, who had been dead and brought back to life, was once again training and educating himself to get back up to full fitness. During the scene, which you will see if you click the link, Spock is being tested by multiple computers simultaneously. He is passing with flying colours, answering every question and puzzle thrown at him with ease, but gets stumped when a computer abruptly asks him "How do you feel?" Spock says he does not understand the question. He even responds to his inquiring mother that it is "irrelevant". Setting aside the fact that this is a play on Spock's half Vulcan, half human nature, I pondered about this in relation to the musical question before me. I wonder, have you ever listened to music and asked "How do I feel?" Does this question make sense to you as one that might be asked and with useful things to find in the answer? If not, I find this amazing. I don't find this amazing because you have not asked it. I find it amazing because considering music can have such a potentially large effect on human emotions surely its a question we should be asking very much more than we do. Contra Spock, its far from irrelevant.

Music is often used expressly to fuel emotions. One thinks of many locker rooms where loud, supposedly motivational music will often blare out before games. Then there is something like the old Dionysian festivals in Greek history where the idea was to work oneself up into a frenzy using music in order to be on the level of the gods. One thinks of ballads which, if done skillfully, are meant to tug at the heart strings. Gospel music, of which I have some past history myself, is meant to be praise of a deity but also includes a strong motivational vibe in promoting peace, happiness and courage in a particular faith amongst its adherents. Singing, especially in groups, is said to be psychologically beneficial. At many concerts or festivals what people will describe first is how the experience made them feel. In many, many places and situations we see music being used to affect human emotions. And yet, when we're alone, do we ever ask how some piece of music is making us feel? Do we ever study music from the phenomenological aspect? Do we ever write or make music seeking to utilize this phenomenological aspect for ourselves?

I thought about this and considered that it might be a good idea to experiment with it. As I also make a weekly podcast and I quite often choose music I haven't heard before when doing this I thought it might make sense to use this to select some music that I could choose to listen to from this phenomenological perspective. I'd like to invite my readers to do this too since the podcast with the music I've chosen is to be number 26 which will be released around the same time this blog is available to read. I wanted to choose music I had not heard before and make it something outside of the norm. In fact, I expect it will be outside of most people's norm. I ended up choosing the music of eight composers whose music is not generally thought of as "popular music". I cannot speak for anyone else, but they are mostly pieces new to my ears. I'd like to challenge anyone who wants to listen to the podcast to do so. Ask yourself as you listen to each piece how you feel and what emotional response each piece triggers. Clearly, there will be no right or wrong answers, only honest or dishonest ones.

The pieces I have chosen are as follows:

The Last Dream of The Beast by Morton Subotnick

Nachtmusik by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich

Branches by John Cage

Apocalypse de Jean by Pierre Henry

Etude aux Objets (parts 1-5) by Pierre Schaeffer

Theme from For A Few Dollars More and Man with A Harmonica by Ennio Morricone

A Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley

The pieces have been fairly randomly chosen. Only two was I familiar with (Morricone's) due to my interest in Westerns. But even there they are interesting choices since I will need to listen through over 90 minutes of music to get to them. This is because context, too, affects an emotional response to something, something any DJ building a set (as I once was) knows very well. It will be noticed that these are all prominent composers from the latter half of the 20th century. Some are still alive and others are not. Pretty much every one of these composers is known for their use of sound and for their interest in composition. This is to say that they think about music rather than just making it and they are familiar with music at the atomic level, as it were, in that they all know very well it is made up of sounds, these sounds being individually and collectively important. I judge these people, then, to be familiar with the idea that music can stimulate feeling even if, as with Cage, they may be wary of this.

Many of the pieces have a connection with feeling in their creation it seems to me. Subotnick's piece utilizes "ghost electronics", modules created by Don Buchla which are making no sounds themselves but are affecting the timbre, pitch and amplitude of the instruments you can hear as you hear them. This, then, is massaging Subotnick's need to be involved in a music he cannot be said to be wholly responsible for. Stockhausen's piece was written during a seven day period in 1968 when he was going through some personal turmoil. He wrote 14 other pieces during this time too, a prolific spurt of creativity which produced Aus den Sieben Tagen, which Nachtmusik is taken from. Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, played in the version I've chosen by Pat Metheny, utilizes looping to create the counterpoint of the title. I think it will function in interesting ways when set after the two pieces before it. 

Then we come to, perhaps, the most problematic piece here, Cage's Branches. This is a relatively long piece of music made up of the sounds of cacti and other plants being plucked by toothpicks. The plants have contact microphones attached to them to amplify the sounds. This piece also contains considerable silences as Cage was apt to have. Cage, notably, repeated many times that he did not need music to communicate to him nor for it to have any message. He wanted sounds to just be themselves. I wonder if that is what a potential listener will feel listening to Branches and how the silences will make them react? 

Pierre Henry's Apocalypse de Jean is verses of the biblical Revelation set to music. This is interesting in itself as the book of Revelation is in the literary style "apocalyptic", a style which is meant to give hope to persecuted insiders such as the Christians it refers to, but to preach doom to its enemies. Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux Objets was his last study of sounds within the musique concrete perspective. Musique Concrete was literally "real music" by which Schaeffer, and Henry who made such music with him throughout the 1950s, meant a music made from real sounds. This, I think, lends itself particularly to unpredictable emotional responses.

The two pieces by Morricone are from film scores and, thus, lend themselves to dramatic interpretation. Indeed, this is what director Sergio Leone literally did himself as it was Morricone's practice to write the music before filming had even started, something Leone encouraged. Leone would then interpret the music visually on screen. I finish with an influential track from Terry Riley which influenced Pete Townshend to name a song after Riley (Baba O'Riley) and another group of musicians to take the name of the piece as their own (Curved Air). This piece again utilizes looping (and directly influenced Steve Reich's piece earlier) and is improvisational in nature. Riley himself played all the instruments (hence the looping). This track is often claimed as "psychedelic" and so who knows what emotions it might release?

At this moment I'm aware that I've given readers information regarding the contents of the podcast. This information will, of course, colour your listening or potential for listening to the music. But I'm pointing this up right now because I want you to get past it. Listening to music is often regarded by people as a lazy, relaxing activity in which the listener is expected to do no work, they soak up the music by osmosis. But it need not be this. It can be an active listening, a hearing, in which we take notice of what we are listening to. I imagine all the composers I've chosen here both did that and would encourage it.

But back to listening and emotion. This subject takes place in the context of a discussion that really goes back as far as when human beings first started having connected thoughts. This discussion is about the nature of the human being and the supposed war inside each example of that species between reason and emotion or, as its sometimes put, logic and the passions. This opposition is, of course, both false and fake. Human beings are organisms and not discrete parts. Human beings are both thoroughly and thorough-goingly rational beings as well as being emotional ones. There is no means to switch off either faculty within us even though, with effort, we can attempt to ignore or counteract their impulses. How this applies to music is that there can often be a tendency to regard it intellectually, rationally, technically as a collection of notes, time signatures and formal styles but to ignore questions exactly like "How will this make a person feel?" This latter question, under pressure from a heavy scientism in much of society today, seems a little namby-pamby and unscientific. It is a question which appeals to emotion and not reason. However, in these hopefully more psychologically and emotionally aware times, we should beware the idea that the emotions should never be questioned or their impulses buried deep inside and hidden away. Our psychologists would be quick to point out all the possible disorders which could result from that. If we have only appreciated music rationally then we have only scratched the surface.

With this insight its with a wholeness of human being in mind that I raise up the subject of music's emotional power and influence in today's blog. I have no idea if any readers of mine will listen to the pieces of music I've chosen for my podcast and I certainly can't make anyone listen. But I hope some of you will and, should you, I hope you'll think about how the music makes you feel and muse on the importance and uses of this question. I also hope next time you make some music you ponder, maybe even only for a moment, how someone hearing the piece you are making might feel upon hearing it because, to be sure, they will certainly feel something. And that's important too. Its seems to me there is much research that could be done on the phenomenology of music as we ask questions about how it makes us feel and then study the responses to this. This is because the experience of listening to music is perhaps one of the most important things about it. If you made music with one ear open to its emotional effects then, it seems to me, it would be a completely different way to make music, one that might contain many creative possibilities you had never thought of before.

This is A Gear Blog

This is a gear blog. Its going to discuss electronic music tools, devices and equipment. Do you ever ask yourselves questions like "What is my perfect synth?" or "What would my perfect setup be?". Have you ever sat down with a pen and paper or at a computer and attempted to design the perfect electronic music studio for yourself? Have you ever done the same thing but made your perfect list of gear instead? (I have.) Some of you must have because if I go on Facebook or the most popular synth forums online the vast majority of discussions are about gear and the longest threads are 9 or 10 year old threads of endlessly scrolling studio pictures. This leads me to think that at least the people who buy electronic music equipment and go online to talk about it are interested in "stuff".

                               Is the Roland JD:XA your ideal synth?

But an interest in things does not necessarily mean an interest in music. I have found this out over time. Look in these same Facebook groups and synth websites and you will see that music or musical ideas are discussed much less. Some groups even ban music or talk of it and reserve themselves as places for chat about equipment only. Many physical music magazines seem to be barely disguised adverts for endless equipment. Previous blogs I have written have led to conversations revealing that some people are simply synth collectors or budding museum curators. Others use synths as furniture or electronic ornaments. Yet others simply seem addicted to buying things. There is nothing wrong with any of this but it can get slightly confusing if you wander into such places and wonder why musical purposes for these electronic music tools are not being discussed.

                 Is the Elektron Analog RYTM your perfect drum machine?

But what about those questions I asked right at the top of this blog? What, for example, would the perfect synth for you be? (Seriously, ask yourself.) When I read gear forums I seem to see every synth that any manufacturer ever puts out is immediately torn to shreds by the commenters. Either this is missing or there is not one of those (when there definitely should be) or they could have made this device so much better if only they'd dropped this feature and added this other one. It seems fair to say that people discussing electronic music equipment are never satisfied. This is one reason I ask myself if anyone commenting on things like this actually has any idea about the devices that they themselves really want. This, though, involves stepping back from browsing the pages of your online retailer or electronic music gear forum and thinking about it seriously. 

Would you sell your soul for a Korg Arp Odyssey?

However, its hard to think about what kind of device or devices you might want to use if you don't know the context you want to use it in. So then you have to start asking yourself even MORE questions and doing even MORE thinking. It might be pertinent to ask what any device might be used with and so then you have ask yourself what sort of setup you want as a whole. It makes sense in this context to ask yourself what you want to do with these things in terms of musical output (unless you're one of the collectors or synth museum curators I mentioned) and so that comes into the equation. I wonder if anyone actually does this? It seems from my casual glances that many people simply ask themselves if they have money and if they like a given thing and then they cobble together random, not thought through setups with no guiding philosophy or idea active in the background. "This is nice, I can afford it, I'll buy it" is the only thought process taking place. I wonder how many of these people have things lying around they never use? I wonder how many are honest enough to admit it?

                             Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators

The commercial market that partly shapes what is available for music makers to buy responds to this. Cheap devices like Pocket Operators, Monotrons and Volcas exist because they can be "impulse purchases" for people with a spare relatively small amount of cash. We have all seen the pictures posted of desks festooned with a million small things. None of these things are overly special in terms of features and the sound is kind of compromised in comparison to more expensive and professional things but they are music making devices nevertheless. I think also of Apps on phones or tablets. Some people have taken special affection for such things and these small devices have their fanclubs just like many other things do. These devices are exactly the kinds of things Morton Subotnick meant when, decades ago, he imagined a future time when electronic devices would be available for any member of the general public to use to make music with. That time is our time. Right now.

                                 Korg Volca Beats, Bass and Keys

At this point in the blog I need to make it clear that I am an electronic musician and electronic music and ideas about how to make it are what I personally am interested in. Discussing the tools used to make it does not come naturally to me because it seems to me a bit like carpenters sitting discussing hammers and chisels instead of using hammers and chisels to make something. Of course, such discussions have their place and no one would want to ban discussions about hammers and chisels. Its just that hammers and chisels were created to be used for a primary task beyond the facts of their existence and the qualities that they possess. It could also be argued that discussing what you do with them is much more interesting than the things themselves. But that's just my opinion. With this in mind, the rest of this blog is now going to discuss gear as applied to its intended purpose: making electronic music. Should you be a collector, a curator of a synth museum or a synth buying addict you may want to get off the bus here. But you're welcome to stay for the rest of the ride.


If, like me, electronic music is your goal then the things you make it with are mere stepping stones to that goal rather than the goal itself. I'd actually go further and say that if electronic music is your goal then you cannot let yourself get sidetracked by gear fetishism. Gear fetishism is not musical or related to music. It is a fascination with the things in themselves as things. Its one reason why in the most gear fetishistic places (you know where they are) discussions about music or musical uses of things are scarce on the ground. Maybe the fetishists themselves realize this and maybe they don't. It doesn't really matter. As I said before, there's nothing wrong with this. People can choose what conversations they have and what activities they value. Its just my point here that talking about gear in itself is not musical. So if music is your aim then talking about gear is a means to an end not the end in itself. If you are talking about a synthesizer or a drum machine or an FX box it doesn't automatically follow that some musical purpose lies beyond your discussion of the thing. That case has to be made during the discussion by the participants.

I want to make the case in this blog that there is another way forward in the discussion of gear and electronic music besides the way I described earlier which is seemingly the ad hoc purchasing of random items because they seem desirable and you have the cash to buy them. I am, of course, assuming some measure of thought and purpose here in my prospective electronic musician. That is to say I am assuming they have a plan, an idea of what they want to be, where they want to go and how they want to get there. It would be all too easy to just imagine that the ideal electronic musician has one of everything they can afford but I believe this approach is driven more by unthinking commercialism and an uncontrolled ego than any sane musical purpose. I am not writing here for such people though. Rather, I am writing for those who want to think about what they should have and why, people who critique their requirements as electronic musicians and have the purpose of stretching their musical creativity in view. This, it seems clear, is far from everyone and the commercialists probably don't care about that at all. But people like myself do. My approach here is going to be very different from the grinning forum dweller who has nothing better to talk about than "gas" (gear acquisition syndrome).

      The Modal 008, one of the most expensive analog synths... in the world!


You see I really do believe that rather than playing the constantly silly acquisition game it would be more musically useful to think more musically and, from this perspective, think about what you need and what, perhaps, may be useful as a bonus. The fantasy electronic musician position where one has a huge studio like you've seen on You Tube full of every vintage modular and analog polysynth is not within everyone's reach nor is it necessarily desirable unless you plan to spend your future showing pictures of it to the other people who want to be like you. I make this argument primarily for the people who don't have very much gear and who despair sometimes because they don't have "the next big thing" that everyone says you should have. Commercial purposes dictate that you should have this thing. Musical ones, which rarely enter such discussions, might not. And how could they if many supposed musicians never even address the point? My point is that musical purposes should outweigh the commercial ones if music is your purpose. When thinking and talking about gear it should be musical criteria that are dominant not commercial or conversational ones. 

When looked at from a musical perspective I'm not necessarily that sure there is so much to say about gear online anyway. To really experience an instrument you must hear it yourself and/or play it yourself. Only then can you know if something suits your workflow or any purpose you might set it to. Someone else's view of how it sounds isn't much use to you because you aren't them and so don't share their tastes or motivations. This becomes more important the more expensive a thing is unless you are in the lucky position of being able to buy and sell things at will. I do see people like this in forums sometimes. They seem to buy things constantly and then sell most of them again 3 months later. Of course, the swapping of views is fair enough but, again, it shouldn't exactly be decisive if musical purposes are key for you. Its your own ears and your own foibles which only you know that have to be pleased and not some conversational right and wrong in a forum situation.

           Fantasy setup time! But how do you know this would work for you?


So I think that the fantasies of forum dwellers who will always think that people should have one of everything in huge, unmanageable rigs are actually siren voices for most people luring them onto the rocks of becoming a gear collector. I think these siren voices distract people from properly musical purposes and that upsets me because music is the point of these things. And music is not really a hundred snatched You Tube videos of you doing "just a quick jam". Yes, people can do what they like. But others can also look on and wish that things were different and imagine all the music that could be made if the people who spoke about things diverted their energies into creative purposes with the things. Imagine how much better music you might make if you weren't spending hours talking about what you or others had to make it with. Imagine actually working at your music in an attempt to make it better. Imagine that better music was not made with a better thing but with a better musician using whatever thing they had.

This latter point is key. For music is not just about (more) things. Its about what you (can) do with the things. Indeed, this might even be MORE important because you can make great music with synthesizers. But everyone has also heard rubbish music made with them too. And no instrument yet made comes with an "instant great music" button. Its still about the user putting things to musically interesting uses and that will not be learned or found by chatting about "stuff" nor by buying synthesizer A over synthesizer B. After you have settled on what equipment you can afford or have access to it will still be up to you to make something of it unless you intend to build your musical reputation off posting rig pics for the next 10 years. Its my view, however, that these forum fantasists miss the point. That point, in my humble opinion, is that it should not be the musical ideal of most to have one of everything with every possible musical instrument at their fingertips. Instead, it should be about leveraging and mustering any musical instincts or capabilities we have regardless of what gear we may manage to acquire. Remember, I did say that musical purposes were key for me. I am not in the least bit interested in dick waving on forums.

       Left alone for 2 years with only a Modulör 114 what could YOU achieve?


It is often said, so much it is pretty much a truism at this point, that limitations encourage creativity. This is one more reason to have modest intentions when it comes to the acquisition of electronic music equipment. And it seems to me that it would be better to develop as a musician with less than to focus on getting stuff but being a poorer musician for it. Pity the person who has one of everything but never does anything worth a listen with any of it. So this is why I personally have focused musically on various quite modest things, things like groove boxes or kaoss pads. Another aspect to consider here is that music should be fun and, I also think, simple. Music making should not be a huge, complicated enterprise or even something approaching a chore. I preach here the benefits of simplicity. Happy is the electronic musician with his or her compact little setup who intends to explore it to its outer limits and every moment of it is limitless fun. I like to believe that, ultimately, someone will derive much more pleasure from their musical development on any given device than they will from the acquisition of things.  What use is some ubersynth if it sits on a stand unused, one of ten ubersynths you've got but barely use?

Now of course its true that Trent Reznor, Vince Clarke, Hans Zimmer and Jean-Michel Jarre (and a few others) maintain synth shrines and I suppose its natural (or, at least, tempting) to want to be like them. They all make great music to be sure. But let me let you into a secret. People who don't have 5% of what they have make great music too. Great music is not restricted to very rich people with large synth collections. There is no link between expensive gear and great music. And there are lots of other famous musicians and composers who were not also collectors. Someone whose music and philosophy of music I have been influenced by is John Cage. Some say he was the greatest experimental musician of the 20th century. I don't know about that but I do know that in the mid 1970s he was writing pieces to be played on cacti and other plants. Yes, that's right: plants. Not a Moog. Not an Arp. Not a CS-80. Plants. More specifically, plants wearing contact microphones played with toothpicks. Here was a man for whom music was sound and the liberation of sounds and the letting of sounds be themselves. His appreciation of music was not in some fetishistic circus in which commercial products became venerated as idols. This blog asks you to consider being more like him.

If you did become more like him I think your music would get better. Your music would start to become more about ideas, which are limitless, than things, which are not. I think you would start to take more risks, stretch your horizons and have more fun. How much fun can you really have staring at your latest synth and telling strangers you own it anyway? Will it be as much fun as pushing radios on the floor and playing with water in a bath as Cage did during a 1960 performance of his piece "Water Walk" on US TV? I think that if you did become more like him your judgment would become more about what was musically useful and interesting than pleasing people in forums or boosting your ego with acquisitions. Of course, this depends on your motivations being musical ones and whether they are or not is strictly up to you.

Now at the top of this blog I did say that this was a gear blog but that was, I'm afraid, a bit of a deception. It has been a blog that discussed gear. But it only really had one purpose and that was to say that within electronic music, as with all music, the primary currency is not the thing but THE IDEA.

AND YOU WON'T FIND THOSE FOR SALE IN GEAR STORES.

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!

Electronic Music Theory and Gear Fetishization

It is good, I think, when you come across electronic musicians who are thinking about what they do. And this seems quite common because electronic music, for one reason and another, seems to attract quite cerebral people. But this is not to suggest that all electronic musicians do this nor that all thoughts are equal. This morning I was reading the website of one electronic musician who posts regularly on Facebook and I couldn't believe what I was reading. He is clearly a person who thinks about what he does but the results of this thinking seemed to be lots of rules about how to go about making electronic music as if there were a right or wrong way to do it. The vision of this person was based on technical skill and proficiency, another choice he had made rather than an unavoidable necessity. The whole philosophy of this person seemed to be very outward looking, as if the job of an electronic musician was to impress anybody who might be looking with what, for want of a better word, might strike someone else as a "professional" image. 

The 0-Coast Synthesizer by Make Noise

This all annoyed the hell out of me. The professional guild of musicians have been trying to hoodwink people for years into thinking that unless you could play your instrument properly or you had this skill or that skill or knew this arcane art that only they could teach you or unless you had the right gear which was truly "pro" then, somehow, what you were doing was invalid, pointless and even laughable. These were the kind of people who, when synthesizers started invading popular music, tried to get electronic music makers banned because they could seemingly do with one finger what they had taken years to learn with their professional notions of what music was about. Electronic music, as popularly conceived, became something which re-wrote the book on what "making proper music" was all about. And it didn't involve music teachers, professional notions of what music even was or even necessarily any playing skill. If I can program a 303 and an 808 I can make music that keeps a club moving all night in this new paradigm. You have to realize that this fact annoys the hell out of some people. So imagine what fiddling with knobs and plugging patch cables here and there does to them! And what comes out of the audio out might not even be a melody!

Now even if a fair number of electronic music makers today don't buy into such professional and misleading notions, perhaps because they have a "punk" ethos that you take what gear you can get and then make the best of it, there are still plenty who do buy into one aspect: gear fetishization. In fact, the Facebook group you probably saw this post advertised in is likely full of people discussing gear, stuff, instruments, look what I've got, isn't that expensive synthesizer great, etc. You get the idea. Other well known forums online, such as Gearslutz or Muffwigglers, are equally places where most often gear is discussed. I find this a bit strange and this is not because it is discussed at all but because it takes up so much space. The cherry on the cake of this sort of thing is the "show your setup" thread that such places always have. What for? It seems quite clear to me that whatever motivates such threads, or taking part in them, it is not a musical impulse. This is something else not to do with music. Maybe its a bit like someone showing you a fantastic sports car. Looks nice but you have no idea if they can even drive it. What's my point in mentioning all this? My point is that electronic music is about music and everything else surrounding musical output, which is the creating and arranging of sounds, is peripheral to that.

Of course, if people want to start "look at my setup" groups, clubs, websites or pages then that's completely up to them. For myself, I'm totally clear that I'm more focused of what comes out of electronic music equipment than what it looks like in your home studio or how much of it hundreds of anonymous Internet people have. From comments and conversations I sometimes have I think a few others are with me too. These people, perhaps people like me, wonder why so much space is given over to stuff and rather less is given over to what you might do with it - which is surely the point of having it at all in the first place? Part of the problem here is the electronic music press and media. A lot of those who write about electronic music write about things rather than ideas. You get puff pieces on what such and such an anonymous maker of trance music in Berlin has as opposed to a discussion of his musical ideas. This is not always true but it seems to be the prevailing direction of travel. Perhaps it is not then so surprising that we consumers and music makers go the same way. But it seems to me that this is arse about face. The fact you can show me your huge modular setup up or your Rick Wakeman style 28 keyboard rig tells me nothing about what you can do with it or how you go about utilizing the huge resources at your command. And, frankly, that is much more interesting than knowing you are rich and can afford a lot of stuff.

This is because I think electronic music, par excellence, is a music of ideas. Or, at least, it should be. And so when I routinely see people complaining about "fart noises" (and you could find such comments every day if you looked) I think that what they are complaining about is a lack of imagination, a void of ideas. Anyone who begins to build a modular synthesizer or buys something like the 0-Coast there is a picture of above can make the "fart noise" very easily and really without trying. This requires no effort or skill. This, I think, is what people complain about. If you think about the history of electronic music in what we might call its commercial period which is now almost exactly 50 years then what we see is a history of ideas with electronics. And that period extends back further with the various radiophonic experiments that took place in various labs in Europe and America even before that. These experiments took place on huge lab equipment largely adapted from radio studio gear. Those working there, people like Pierre Schaeffer in France who invented the Phonogene, were trying to put this equipment to new uses to author sound. What they were doing wasn't strictly conventional and they were coming up with new and controversial ways to do old things but also new things as well. Electronic musicians today with an 0-Coast or a modular or an electronic device of most kinds have the same opportunity that they did. 

This opportunity is not based so much in stuff. Indeed, if I may be so bold, does it REALLY even matter what you have got? You may be one of those who looks down on the guy (or girl!) with their 3 or 4 Volcas (or a Rhythm Wolf!) because you have one of every expensive synthesizer there is. (I assume this is what the "look at my big rig" pics are for?) So what? Its what you do with it that counts. And here's the thing about music: you may make a fantastic piece of electronic sound every time you switch your synths on BUT you'll never be the only one. Jean-Michel Jarre seems like a guy who has one of everything. He has made some of the best electronic music ever as my ears hear it but he has also made some limp dross. In terms of equipment I doubt there is a person on the planet who has had access to more of it than him. He has used (and owned) everything from the huge and rare Arp 2500 to the Fairlight CMI to the new Roland System 8 which seems to be his main keyboard on his current tour. But this doesn't guarantee that his next album (which incidentally is Oxygene 3) will be something you like or want to hear or that it will be musically innovative or interesting. Electronic music is a musician plus electronic equipment (whatever that is) plus IDEAS. And the ideas aren't the least of those things. 

                       Jean-Michel Jarre on his current Electronica Tour

What does this mean for electronic music? It means you should stop worrying about what you've got or not got and starting thinking about how to use it. The most distinctive thing about any electronic music will always be how it sounds. This isn't merely a matter of tone. People can do great things with a Minimoog, for example, but I assure you its just as easy to make rubbish with one too. The same applies to any musical tool whether analog, digital, hardware or software, modular or fixed architecture. No tool yet invented guarantees original, innovative or creative electronic music. This is because that is the bit that you, the user, supplies. So it would be a bit pointless, should you be lucky enough to be rich, to build a mega studio full of every synth desired if it turned out that you didn't have a single interesting musical idea in your head. Such people do exist. They probably spend their time showing off their kit, racking up likes and follows from people led astray by a room full of gear and thinking that that is the goal. Its not wrong to have nice things. But its not really the point either, is it? Synth museums are not places of exciting musical creativity.

But back to the person with whom I started, the man whose website listed all the rules he thought he needed to follow in order to feel professional about what he was doing.  It was all very interesting. But its a million miles away from any understanding of musical expression that I have. And, to be clear, I think that for many people, if not most making electronic music, expression is what it is about. This man also seemed to think that musical proficiency was the basis for taking part as well, how well you could play something. But how does that apply to a music that is primarily about the creation of sounds as is the case with electronics? It occurred to me as I was reading that I have personally eliminated the need for the vast majority of these rules simply by regarding music as a matter of personal expression rather than technical ability. What's more, if you take the view that any musical piece or performance is nothing more than yet another experiment, as many experimental musicians might want you to, then you don't have to worry about artificial notions of how good or bad it was either. These, I find, are stupid terms when assessing music you make in any case.  All rules seem to do is heap personal pressure on the music-maker. And I just don't see why anyone would want to do that. If I were to make any rules there would be just one: don't worry about what you do or how you do it: any sounds you make are perfectly valid and equally worthy. Electronic music is experimentalism pure and simple: there is no right or wrong.

What more of a framework do we need than this? We certainly should not impose the standards of commerciality upon our creativity (unless that is what we are doing and I concede that those for whom making music is their business have to do this). Electronic music has always been a pioneering form of music, a form of music which is about originality, experimentalism and ideas. Since the first music with commercial synthesizers was made in the mid to late 60s numerous whole new genres of music and sounds have been created and become the soundtracks to numerous people's lives.  This is the very heart of what electronic music is about. This is why in previous blogs I've written about the exciting possibilities of machines. A lot of this is to do with the so-called "happy accidents" and the possibility that something electronic may just spit out some sound or phrase which inspires you in a direction that you, as a player, may never have thought of. I personally have 100's of examples of this from my own time making electronic music and you probably do too. Electronic music is not just about playing a tune either. Electronic music is how you build sounds up and weave them together, yes, but its also about creating the sounds themselves. This is what synthesis is! Indeed, much electronic music is just electronic sound and whole genres (such as Japanoise, for example) are based on making a certain sound.

                                Japanese Noise Artist, Merzbow

So I'm very much all in favour of an experimental, non-professional approach to the creation of electronic music, music that becomes an expression of the human through machines. I think it helps to have some idea about what you think you are doing when turning on a synthesizer too. I don't mean in terms of how to use it (much good music has been made by people who had no clue how to use the device in front of them just as it has with the most proficient user of all) but in terms of a philosophy of ideas. I personally find the most joy and excitement in electronic music which is interesting and this is different from simply "good" or "bad", subjective terms which are functionally useless when judging music I think. What I want to hear when I listen is some clue that the music maker was trying to do something specific or get somewhere in particular or musically describe or inhabit some space. If I can see they are doing that then it helps me to appreciate what is going on. In comparison, a simple like or dislike is pretty meaningless. I think what informs this thinking in me is the idea that with electronic music you can go places. You can make new things and you have a blank canvas to do it on. Electronic music can go wherever you want to take it. It can describe the future, as it often does in sci-fi soundtracks, or create whole ideas from nothing. 

Electronic music is as big, or as small, as YOUR imagination. So imagine. Dream crazy dreams!