Insights From Artist Interviews

In recent days I've been spending a lot of time reading various artist interviews. As I have a preference for the written word (which is why I write blogs and don't make videos) this has meant a lot of reading. There came a point in this process when I realized that I could probably snip a few of the questions and answers from their immediate locations and make a blog from some of these. These cuttings could address points that I've seen raised recently both in my own former blogs and in some of the discussions they have aroused. All the people I will bring into this blog will be "famous" to a greater or lesser degree. But I don't mean to use these people as arguments from authority (as philosophers call it). Setting aside the trappings of fame, they are just other electronic musicians although, granted, some if not all have great experience. Its just my naive view that people can learn something from the experiences of others. So in what follows I will introduce a few artists, set up the context for them and then present the question they were asked, the answer they gave and what it teaches me. Hopefully, this will have some worth for others too. I'll also slip in a link to their music just because I can and to give a hint to those who may not have heard of some of the artists included.

1. Venetian Snares (Aaron Funk)

Some while ago Canadian Aaron Funk, better known as Venetian Snares, had a magnificent stumble of an interview when he said some things that, apparently, you shouldn't say. Funk, like many electronic musicians, including others I will bring into this blog, doesn't like doing interviews or fulfilling media duties because he is quite secretive and private. Fair enough. I wouldn't either. This is all part of a fame equation it seems. It got to the stage some years back where he started to not want to release music. At which point I snip from an interview with him...

VS: I think 2007 was the point when I became really at odds with releasing music.

Interviewer (I): What made you feel like that? You seem to have always been at odds with it.

VS: Um... I don't know. I love making music but its kinda hard for me to put it out to be honest. The idea of it being heard by people who want to hear it fucks with my head so, you know... its easier to choose to keep it to myself.

I: Its an interesting position to have as an artist.

VS: Of course. As soon as you release records some person hearing it will think that this record is a product for them to enjoy whereas that's not my intent making it whatsoever. Its for me while I'm creating it. I don't know. People coming at you from that angle is kinda sickening, you know?

I: As soon as you create something and put it out there its no longer under your control.

VS: No. Its out in the world of fucking IMDB one-to-tens, its out there in the database of millions of people shooting off opinions at each other that they believe they're formulating on their own.

In print this interview was presented as "Venetian Snares hates everyone including his fans". But the truth, as often is the case, was a bit more subtle than this. Essentially, Snares was presenting a modern dichotomy for the electronic artist who works alone creating and getting the buzz of creation entirely to his or her own requirements. But then, if they choose to share it, it becomes prey to a lot of random views which were nothing to do with the context of creation. The artist becomes prey to a lot of opinions that were nothing to do with what he was doing. Snares almost has a "what has my music got to do with you?" attitude here. And I somewhat understand that as someone who finds his own music very personal. Venetian Snares gives voice to a very modern problem here for electronic musicians who are working away in their homes on essentially very private projects. To then be subject to public expectations is often a burden.

2. David Bowie

David Bowie needs no introduction. The picture here is from when he had a stint as the keyboard player on Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" tour in 1977. Around the same time he was producing his so called "Berlin Trilogy" of albums which were influenced by krautrock and the Germanic sounds of the seventies. Bowie was, perhaps, the consummate artist. Musician was a word too narrowly confined to contain him. His electronic meanderings of the time, such as the track Subterraneans which finished his 1977 album "Low," were highly regarded but Bowie had long since become a star by then. In 1978 Bowie was asked by a British journalist to "assess his greatest contribution to rock". "I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension," was his witty and pithy reply.

But concealed beneath the deflecting wit I see a reservoir of truth. Bowie's career was carried out only through the medium of a succession of characters right from Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane through to the Thin White Duke, the Stadium Superstar of the mid 80s and on. And its not as if these were peripheral to the act. They were the act. A little digging reveals that Bowie had biographies and life stories worked out for these characters. An album like 1995's "Outside", for example, is a whole detailed scenario worked out with characters, storyline and plot. So for Bowie's "pretension" in the quote we can substitute the word "creation". For Bowie the music needed a whole creative context worked out in detail over which the sounds could be laid like a blanket and I wonder how many others go that far? Music and ideas were inseparable siamese twins for David Bowie.

3. Brian Eno

A famous collaborator of Bowie's at the time was Brian Eno, the Roxy Music synthesizer dabbler who had gone off to Germany in the mid 70s to jam with Harmonia, released some ambient music and become something of a sound guru. In the 70s he once made a throwaway comment that he was a "non-musician," a comment which some saw as a reverse conceit of some kind. In a later interview Eno explained what he had meant by it.

"It was a case of taking a position deliberately in opposition to another one. I don't say it much anymore but I said it when I said it there because there was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it. And that seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought it was well worth saying that whatever I was doing it wasn't that. And I thought the best way to do it was to say that I was a non-musician.... When I say "musician" I wouldn't apply it to myself as a synthesizer player or a player of tape recorders because I usually mean someone with a digital skill that they then apply to an instrument. I don't really have that so strictly speaking I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're not to do with manipulation in that sense, they're more to do with ingenuity I suppose."

Eno is then asked if he ever had any formal music training or felt any pressure to get some.

"No, no I haven't really. I can't think of a time that I ever thought that."

What strikes me about this exchange is how relevant it is to the current situation in which the vast majority of electronic musicians are essentially ordinary citizens at home. With their electronic things. For them, electronic music is not about learning scales or musical theory. Its not about a formal training process or, indeed, anything formal at all. It is about the instant satisfaction of making a noise. It is, to paraphrase Eno, about ingenuity over technical skill. In response to some of my blogs I have found some, presumably of an old school variety, who have mumbled and grumbled about this. But electronic music is overwhelmingly the paradigm of "ingenuity" and Eno stands as one of the greatest examples of this.

4. Coil (John Balance and Peter Christopherson)

I mentioned Coil as an example in a recent blog of mine and in reading several interviews with them to get a feel for what they were about musically I came across the following exchange.

I: You've said before that you work very instinctually. How do you mean, exactly?

JB: I have notebooks and ideas and its just grabbing, really: trying to be informed by the earth and the etheric. And trying, by any means whatsoever, to make that into a solid object, or a sound object, or a record. And that's what we've always tried to do. It seems - we don't create it, really. It's already there. We just assemble a kit. 

PC: We have discussions sometimes about the feeling behind a track that's about to be started. It might be a discussion about a picture or a feeling or a moment in a film.

JB: Sometimes we set down a whole page of parameters: it should do this, it should do that, it should reflect the moon, it should be lunar. Or we'll burn some incense or let the dogs run wild around the room while we're doing it - or we'll shut them in the garden. Anything like that. Or eat carrots for a week and then do something. Just so some chemistry within us is deliberately changed. 

PC: As for the music itself, its not like "Let's set up a rhythm and set up a bass." We'll try combinations of equipment or filters or computer programs almost at random and then...

JB: Something hits.

PC: There will be something about one of them you like and you want to develop. Its almost like the process of selection is the most important thing.

I find this little explicative exchange fascinating. First, there is the notion that to do music you need to change the dynamic, to get your head on. This alone is interesting in a world where many electronic music makers are citizen musicians with a 9 to 5 who do music in their spare time. I wonder, what state are they in when they come to create? Is it a creatively fruitful one? Or is it a lowest common denominator one only good enough to produce a casual You Tube jam not meant to be taken seriously? Further, John Balance held to a view of the musician as conduit. He did not think he created the music. He thought he was an agent through which it manifested itself. This perhaps explains his belief in the necessity for some kind of preparation. Christopherson completes this thinking with his own contribution to the discussion and the suggestion that this random process of selection "is the most important thing". Food for thought indeed.

5. Sean Booth (Autechre)

Sean Booth and Rob Brown of Autechre are different to many of the current electronic musicians of our day, not least the hipster or gear collecting varieties, in that they deliberately and purposefully use software to make their music. The reason for this is they value control most of all as electronic musicians. Maximum manipulation is their overwhelming artistic desire and it is only in designing custom software that they feel this aim is satisfied to its maximum ability. If you have heard much of their music this will begin to make more sense. But this controlling, software-based music might, from the outside, come across as a little cold. In a Q+A session Autechre subjected themselves to back in 2013 Sean Booth of the band was asked if they ever take an interest in how their music "stimulates the nervous system and our physiology (not just in terms of emotions)?" In a related question he was also asked if the main goal of the band was "to produce music that is emotionally appealing to yourselves, or do you lean more towards the sound designs/textures that music can be manipulated into without having the emotive element in the forefront of the music making process?" His answer is interesting:

"To be honest I think that everything has some emotional element but we're not really thinking about that when we do stuff. Its not that we don't feel that emotions are important, more that its hard for me to imagine a sound that does not convey some sense of something. And quite often when people discuss emotions in music they only think of happy and sad as being emotions when, in my opinion, emotions are a lot more than that. E.g. if we put out a really angry track then people rarely describe it that way. They would more likely say it was unlistenable or difficult. The emphasis moves from expression to design. Maybe they just fail to recognise it as expressive if they think its very technical."

The thoughts that come from this quite profound answer are worth pondering, in my view, not least electronic music's image (sometimes) as something cold and technical. As people who use software to create dense and complex electronic noise collages, Autechre might be especially open to such a charge. However, the sonic realities turn out to be somewhat different and this should lead us to ask questions about what is going on and how electronic sound, something on the one hand uncaring and impassive, can come to be intimate and familiar.

6. Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre is currently celebrating 40 years since the release of the record, made in his kitchen in 6 weeks, which made his name and gave him a life of fame and fortune. That record, of course, was Oxygène. Jarre has been very active lately. In the last year or so he has put out 3 albums, two volumes of a collaborative project he called "Electronica" and the third part of the Oxygene trilogy. He has also toured his Electronica project. In the corresponding period he has also given numerous interviews and this gives a little insight into the processes that such well known electronic musicians go through. For example, he was asked regarding the track Close Your Eyes which he collaborated on with his fellow Frenchmen, Air.

I: So presumably you travelled to everybody's studios, taking your own software?

JMJ: For every artist it was slightly different. With somebody like Air in Paris we worked first in separate studios and then we joined forces in my studio. Nicolas from Air had this idea where he said it would be great if we used all the different generations of musical instruments. We started with the first oscillators from when I was a student with Pierre Schaeffer (at the Groupe de Recherche Musicales centre in Paris), synthesizers from my time with Stockhausen, and then also doing the first loop of the song with scissors and sellotape and magnetic tape. Then we used the first drum machine, the first modular synth, the monophonic Moog synthesizer moving to the polyphonic analogue synthesizer, the Fairlight, to samplers, to the first digital keyboards, to plugins and the last sound of the track has been made with an iPad. We said it shouldn't be visible, it was more of an exercise for us.

What strikes me here (aside from the fact that if you are Jean-Michel Jarre or Air then you have access to all this stuff!) is that even millionaire superstars need creative ways in which to create, puzzles to solve as part of the creative process. Often creation is approached very unimaginatively, very straight, and it is a chore as a result. This may not be the best thing for encouraging creativity to take place. And so tasks within the task need inventing so that the creativity you require may almost be a by-product of doing something else which may not, in itself, have been creative but encouraged the creativity that you hoped to achieve.

7. Richard D. James (Aphex Twin)

Richard James, better known as Aphex Twin, has been the darling of many fans of a certain kind of electronic music for many years. Known to be excessively secretive and with an autistic need to know everything that there is to know both about every possible electronic device that can make sound and about musical theory, he is rumoured to have a huge backlog of material most of which has never reached the public's ears. All this is true whilst he is largely unknown to the mass of the population and I'm sure he could walk down nearly any street without being recognised. His most popular track is probably Window Licker which was accompanied by a video from Chris Cunningham that received heavy MTV rotation back in 1999 when the track came out. In one of his rare interviews he was asked about what he sees himself as.

I: Would it be fair to say that you're a sound artist as much as a musician?

RDJ: Yeah. Its all about sound but people forget that. They think "Oh, I want to hear a nice tune." But what you're actually saying is you want to hear the combination of frequencies that make you feel a certain way. And more excitingly, its about finding out the new ones. A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament (an equal temperament is a system of tuning in which every pair of adjacent notes is separated by the same interval) and I'm definitely one of those.

You're brainwashed in the West with equal temperament, so its quite hard for people who like following rules to get outside of that and see what you can do. But for me its easy because I don't work like that. I work intuitively. I actually prefer it if I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you've got an equal temperament piano keyboard then you know what you're going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don't know where the notes are because then you do it intuitively. You're working out a new language, basically. New rules. And when you get new rules that work you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

So if you hear a C-major chord with equal temperament you've heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you've never heard before you're like "huh?" And your brain has to change shape to accept it. And once its changed shape then you've changed as a person in a tiny way. And if you have a whole combination of all these different frequencies you're basically reconfiguring your brain. And then you've changed as a person and you can go and do something else. Its a constant change. It could sound pretty cosmic and hippie but thats exactly whats going on.

I think this answer pretty much speaks for itself and is a testimony to how doing things differently both requires change and initiates it.

8. Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Kluster, Cluster and Qluster)

Hans-Joachim Roedelius has a very important place in the history of German electronic music. Not only was he one of the men who started the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in late 1960s Berlin, a place which gave birth to acts such as Kluster (later Cluster and two thirds of Harmonia), Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, but he played a key role in defining the German electronic music of the 1970s. His partner in Cluster (once called the best band in the world by Brian Eno) pictured above on the right, Dieter Moebius, described him as someone who could write the most beautiful melodies. For such a pioneer we might expect some impressive musical background or personal history. The truth is a little different as this snippet of an interview I found shows.

I: When did you start writing and producing music and what or who were your early passions and influences?

HJR: I'm an autodidact. There was no music school I went to. I can neither write nor read scores. But even so, the body of work that I created since I moved from healing (Roedelius was once a masseur) to tone-art in 1967 includes thousands of musical works, about 1000 texts/poems, an uncountable amount of photos, photo collages and films. There's a lot yet to come out from my archive of unreleased works.

I: Do you feel it important that an audience is able to deduct the processes and ideas behind a work purely on the basis of the music you make? If so, how do you make them transparent?

HJR: There are for sure not many people who are able to analyze music in this way and why should they anyway? I am most transparent as a person/artist, after everything that has happened to me and everything that I've done within the 80 years of my life! Its obvious in my work. I don't have to make anything transparent because I am what I am doing. Person and work are one.

What these answers reveal to me is something I think is probably common to all of the artists I'm referring to in this blog today. Its summed up in Roedelius's phrase "Person and work are one". So whether its Roedelius or Aphex Twin or Coil or Venetian Snares or any of the others something of the creator is revealed in the created. There is an identity factor at work which is revealing. Or is there? And what is your electronic music saying about you? What is it revealing that you didn't realize? Or maybe you are intending it to reveal?

9. John Cage

John Cage is a kind of dividing line when it comes to music. He is a person who makes you choose sides. And we should be forever grateful to him for that. For what John Cage reveals in his music as well as his talking about music is that something is at stake. Music is not, as our shallow, commercialized world would love us to think, just entertainment. It is much, much more but also much, much less than that. Music is our environment. Music is about hearing the sounds that are there. Cage is primarily known, in a compositional sense, for two things: chance and indeterminacy. Needless to say, he has been asked about these things many times and in this section of an interview I read he explains how they work and what they are for.

I: Is there a difference between chance and indeterminacy?

JC: Yes. I use the words "chance operation" when I'm writing music and making use of numbers that are derivative from the I Ching that I've used for so many years. That can produce a piece of music, such as the Music of Changes that I wrote in the early fifties, which is determinate. Its fixed and can be read in the same way that you read a piece by another composer. An indeterminate piece is written in such a way as a camera is made. In other words, the camera enables you to take a picture but it doesn't make precise in any way what picture you are going to take. So indeterminacy is like a camera, giving people the ability to take a variety of different pictures, but chance operations can produce a fixed picture or a fixed piece of music. Chance operations could also be used in making something indeterminate but they are two different things. In both cases, the common denominator is non-intention on the part of the person who is working. Most people, when they work, work with something in mind. I always work with nothing in mind.

I: You say you start out a piece with nothing in mind. How do you know when you are on the right track?

JC: There are many tracks, and they are all right. Take the I Ching itself. I recommend it; its the oldest book on earth. It comes from something like 4000 BC and consists of 64 hexagrams. It is a book of wisdom. You can ask a question and get an answer through the use of chance operations, which classically were the tossing of three coins six times to get a hexagram, or tossing yarrow sticks. I didn't do it that way; it took too long. It takes about half an hour to toss the yarrow sticks. Now you can do it with the computer very rapidly and you can get an answer to your question. It would be foolish to ask a question and get answers by means of chance operations if the question asked needed a particular answer. It would be absurd. So, implicit in the use of chance operations is that all of the answers answer all of the questions. That's very interesting. Curiously enough, I learned that when I was studying with Schoenberg years ago but I didn't know that I learned it. 

He sent us all to the blackboard with a problem in counterpoint, even though it was a class in harmony. He said "When you have the solution of the problem turn around and let me see it." I turned around and he said "That's correct. Now give me another solution of the same problem," and I did. I then turned around and he said, "Thats also correct, now another." It went that way until about 8 or 9 solutions. Then when he asked for another I said with some trepidation, "There are no more solutions," and he said, "Thats also correct." Then he said, "What is the principle underlying all of the questions?" I was flabbergasted. I'd always worshipped the man but at that point he ascended. It took me almost 30 years to learn the answer to that question and I think he would accept it. That is, the principle underlying all of the solutions is the question you ask. So there you are, and that goes along with all of the answers answer all of the questions. 

Now it doesn't take a genius to see that this outlook on things is very different to the closed, authorly concept of music making that is the default method beloved of what we might call the received western tradition. This thinks of music as the deliberate choices of writers satisfying their tastes or their "feelz" as modern language might have it. Cage, instead, thinks of writing as about questions and and of the answers as merely different directions of equal validity, all correct. It all puts egotistical tastes vey much in the shade. So what does it matter what you think? Each direction is a right answer.

10. Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream)

Edgar Froese was the leader of Tangerine Dream from their formation in 1969 (coming out of Hans-Joachim Roedelius's Zodiak Free Arts Lab scene) until his untimely death in January 2015. During this time span he was one of those who invented styles of electronic music and simultaneously provided a voluminous back catalogue of albums both studio based and live. I have often pondered how one might create something "new" since things are always inevitably related to their predecessors. Froese was fortunate to be alive at a time when new music making tools and practices were becoming available but, that said, the genius of what he created must remain his alone. In the end, I think a simple quote of his explains much if you think about it and unpack its connotations:

"In the absurd often lies what is artistically possible." - Edgar Froese

What fool ever thought music had to make sense, right?

If you enjoy discussing electronic music, how its made, why its made or any such questions then my group Electronic Music Philosophy might be for you.

The Loneliness of The Electronic Musician

The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, a man who happens to come from the same home town as me. In its original literary form it tells the story of Smith, a poor Nottingham teenager of working class stock (again, like me), who has few prospects in life and drifts into petty crime. Eventually the law catches up with him and he finds himself sent to borstal (prison school) where he seeks solace in cross country running. Smith turns out to be very good at this, something the borstal authorities latch on to as an important race is coming up against a prestigious private school. Smith is offered an easy time of it for the rest of his sentence if he can win the race.  The twist in the tail of the story comes when Smith races away from all the other runners in the race only to stop running a few meters short of the finishing line whereupon he lets his competitors catch and pass him, losing the race on purpose even though this will mean the removal of his easier lifestyle and the imposition of punishments instead. In taking this action he demonstrates his personal freedom and defiance of those who would seek to coerce him (as well as what they represent) and demonstrates his own personal authenticity.

Coil, the experimental electronic band, released their first official record, How To Destroy Angels, in 1984 even though the main players in the band, John Balance and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, had started what would become Coil in around 1982. They continued on until 2004 when Balance, by this time utterly reliant on drink, fell to his death. In the 20 odd years of their existence they put out a catalogue of experimental electronic music which could never be defined either by one word or by genre. (Therefore you should resist the simplistic description found in a number of places "industrial".) They took delight, in fact, in evading concise description. Having recently voraciously read a number of interviews with Balance and Christopherson, I've started to form a sense of what they were about which perhaps suggests why so many mention them as influences. A couple of quotes may suggest their direction of travel:

"Resist the things you can find elsewhere." - Peter Christopherson

"I think all good music should be an attempt to change people's mind-sets." - John Balance

Having read numerous interviews it seems that Coil did not ever want to repeat anything they had done before. Examples of this would be what is regarded by many as the "holy trinity" of their early works Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain which are each quite different. For Coil to have done something once was enough and, thereafter, something new became the driving force. In a number of interviews Balance is quoted as always being one album ahead of the one they are currently at. There is a constantly forward thinking attitude to their work. It seems that Coil required an intellectual or experimental idea to be expressed in the work that they were doing to give it some validation. This is true even though Christopherson, who was formerly a member of Throbbing Gristle too, is quoted as saying that sometimes the music is just music. 

Nothing Coil did was without some risk, some sense of danger or adventure. There always had to be something at stake. There was also a focus, especially from Balance, on the idea of turning base sounds into the gold of music. John Balance himself was very interested in alchemy which is what Scatology, their first album, had been all about. Both Balance and Christopherson, who for a time was a desired director of advertisements and pop videos, something which financed Coil's indulgences, were men of ideas and it was inevitable their music would be the product of these idealistic riches as they transformed an interest in base sounds into the production of electronic music. Two later examples of these riches are the supposedly trance-inducing Time Machines in which each of the four tracks is named after a drug and the two volumes of Musick To Play in The Dark in which each track is almost a different genre and yet it all coheres magickally somehow.

Jean-Michel Jarre at his GRP Synthesizers A4 synth in the video for Oxygene 17. He famously made his fame-creating album Oxygene in his kitchen in 1976.

This blog is to be about electronic musicians, people like me and probably you if you are reading this. We are people who make our music at home on our little or, in some cases, not so little setups. Having written a few blogs about this and taken part in a few interactive social media chats about it it seems there are a number of common issues we all face. This particular blog aims to give a sort of overall picture of the business of making electronic music and to drag a few of these issues into the telling of it. Since this is a personal blog this will be a personal view. So you don't have to agree with me. You may even strongly disagree. Its all good. Feel free to comment with your disagreements somewhere so we can all learn from each other or be stimulated to further thought. It may seem, at first thought, that this particular blog has got off to a strange start with a mention of a short story and a description of a band. But, hopefully, by the end it will make sense why I started this way.

Let me start (yes, this is the start!) by talking a bit about electronic music as I see it. Electronic music is a kind of music which specifically enables variation, change and difference. As a means of generating music it focuses on much more than pitch which is the main way that traditional acoustic musical instruments can vary their sound. Electronics specifically energize and enable huge timbral variations even in one simple sound. Electronic music is a music of manipulation. Added to this we should note the ubiquity of electronic or electronically created sounds in our world. They are all around us from electronic doors opening to the beeps of our phones, alarm clocks and the noises made by a million other electronic devices. As I sit here typing now I can hear the whirr of a computer fan and the radio of my neighbor. Electronically generated noises have become the background to our lives and electronic sounds are now a music of life.

But where there are sounds there must also be meanings. We live in a physical world and sound itself is a physical thing with physical consequences. For example, set any two sounds against each other and merely by doing so you set up a relationship between them, you ask that hearers relate them one to another. Electronic music is capable of what Tony Rolando of Make Noise often refers to as "unfound" sounds and so the possibility exists to create and juxtapose sounds that never existed until you made them. These sounds need to be set in context and given a meaning. But how shall we do this? Each of us comes from a different place and has a different story to tell. Each of us has very different musical vocabularies and musical histories. This opens up the prospects for differing meanings to be given and, in the end, the electronic sounds and musics that we create end up becoming part of a great electronic music conversation greater than any one of us. 

But there is a problem and this is where I turn to us as people who make electronic music. Electronic music has a potentially unending world of sounds within it but we people who make it do not for we are limited in many ways. Yet, as part of being human beings, we have an exploratory focus. Human beings always want to go further than they have gone before, to know more, to stretch themselves. This is part of how we survive, part of how we stay sane. It is for this reason that things like William Burroughs' "cut up technique" (taken advantage of by many musicians over the years) or taking drugs (which Coil did in great quantities) or the use of chance operations (by Cage and others) exist for all these and many other strategies are ways of getting to places you could never get by volition alone. We ourselves are limited by being ourselves and are our own limitations and so some creative examples of our species find ways to get beyond themselves by using various strategies and techniques. In order to escape the creative prison of the self you need some way to disengage from or bypass your own will.

Intellectually speaking, I relate this notion of needing to disconnect from yourself in order to go beyond yourself to what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to in his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, as "a gauze of impure thinking." In a chapter of that book in which he discusses artists and writers he talks about laying "a gauze over reality". He also talks about the shadow which in art "beautifies" the artwork and suggests that, in a similar way, "muffling" is necessary in order to make the things that matter in art clearer. His comment finishes in this way:

"Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking."

What does this mean? As I understand it here, related to my former point about needing to get beyond yourself in order to create things that you never could by yourself, it suggests that musical creation is not something direct, it is something that is almost approached sideways. An example would be a recent challenge I posed members of a Facebook group I curate. I asked them to produce pieces of music on the theme "abstract". Having completed the work and published the resulting podcast someone asked in the group how the contributors had gone about the task. A number of them had not done so by thinking about abstract things and then trying to give musical expression to the thought. Instead, they had set up various processes and, as it were, allowed any abstraction to shine through as a result. So this was not a direct looking of abstraction in the face. The "gauze" of their processes was laid over the task all the better to see the abstractions that might then show through. By analogy to hunting we might suggest that it is better to attack a creative project from the side rather than facing the charging beast head on. We need an angle which allows our creative attack and shows a creative vulnerability we can exploit.

Of course, one of the greatest problems with electronic music is that in such a music of possibility, with such a wide sonic territory to survey, one can feel lost. There are so many choices that could be made sometimes a kind of freezing panic is induced. Often the reaction to this is to get stuck in ruts or to retreat to the safety of what you know. You then turn into one of those safe but irrelevant artists who happily churns out the same thing ad infinitum. Its my strong belief that electronic musicians, of all musicians, should not be like this. But this then becomes a matter of courage. Electronic music is not in my understanding rules-based music. It is a "there are no rules" music. Such music feels no obligation to a tradition or standard. It is not about certain chords or an identifying structure. It is a moment in time and its only consistency is with itself. The only sense it needs to make is on its own terms. But it takes courage to be like this, especially if you are publishing the music you make. Sounding unlike anything else heard before, or even deviating from the general flow, can make you stand out and not everyone has the courage to do this. Many more make endless space-themed soundscapes or yet another ten minutes of four/four "techno" which, apparently, is the only idea they have ever had (for example).

In thinking about this subject for this blog I came up with a list of six keywords I thought electronic music should (for this is my opinion) be about. They are: 1. ideas 2. identity 3. intellect 4. possibility 5. courage and 6. personality. These keywords enunciate what I see as a fusion between a creator and their electronic tools to make electronic music. (As a little anecdote here I'm reminded of an interview that Kraftwerk head honcho, Ralf Hütter, once gave in which he reminded his curious interviewer that Kraftwerk were "Mensch Maschine" and pointed out that the human body does in fact have its own electrical current.) It is in fusing electronic machines and human beings that electronic music results. But electronic music is still a very specific thing that we need to take note of for, in so doing, we realize its specific challenges. Electronic music making, for instance, can be a very solitary form of music making and for many it is since the very mode of its existence enables one person alone to conduct an array of machines all by themselves. This then leads to the necessity for ideas since these ideas may be the only company the electronic musician has. But, I believe, the resulting music also needs to have some character or personality of its own, to have been thought out and to push some boundary. I see electronic music as being about realizing some possibility not yet achieved otherwise what is it for? The best examples of this craft, as I see it, have been exactly that.

But let's try to explain this a little better for I am being vague and dancing around what I mean without directly shining a spotlight in its face. To do this I need to tell my own story.

Speaking for myself, my own interest in music has always been electronic. It started when, as a teenage babysitter, I would drag out an SH-101 and a Juno 106 from behind the settee where the person I was babysitting for kept them when they weren't in use. I liked to play with the sliders and see what effect it had on the sound. I had an electric guitar at the time (before this I had only had a radio cassette player to play with) and I started to write very straight, structured verse/chorus type songs (with lyrics). The idea of music as expression was very strong with me due to my own troubled background and circumstances. Making music was a chance to have a voice in a world in which I often did not. The electronic nature of the sound was important too because it was something you could bend and mould into any shape but, most importantly, into a shape that others didn't have and so couldn't claim to own. It allowed for a creating of a unique identity. The history of electronic music is littered with acts that have created numerous identities because of electronics.

Many times in my own story after that, which was more a slow burn than a quick rise to music making success, I experienced what I referred to earlier as a freezing panic. I was lucky enough at one point in my life to become relatively prosperous and my collection of electronic gear grew. But it got to the point that there were so many things that they got in each other's way. (And I see many bigger collections in numerous Internet pictures of various home setups.) To learn one synthesizer properly would certainly take many months and some would say years. If you have several it is a task that may never be completed. This is not conducive to creativity and is, indeed, a waste of resources. I've always been strongly focused on the idea that it is the fruits of an endeavor that count. As you may have understood from previous blogs, having x,y or z piece of gear means very little to me. What you did with it much more so. Fortunately, life had an antidote to this problem in that it made me poor again and much of the gear went. Left with a bare  minimum that I required to keep on making music I started to discover resources that had always been there but had been hidden by the things I used to have.

These resources were intellectual and ideas-based. I started to research the history of electronic music in which pioneering work was done but without really any of the devices that today even the most casual music maker might have for just a few pounds. Today an app on a phone can achieve what it took Pierre Schaeffer the might of a radio studio to do. But what Schaeffer had that the person with the app might not is the sense of possibility and the intellectual framework as a background to his activities which energized his work. I researched not just Schaeffer but others like Cage, Edgard Varese, Stockhausen, the kosmische musicians of Germany and even up to this very week with bands like Coil and I found that they all had intellectual and experimental frameworks and attitudes of mind for what they were doing. They did not expect their ideas to drop from the sky, delivered by some fortuitous stork. They all realized that ideas come from having an active, fertile, engaged mind. This enables both the ideas and the setting to work in giving them sonic expressions. Ideas are all around for they are made of life itself. But only a certain kind of mind can tune into them and cultivate them. (Here the former point about coming at things sideways is pertinent too!)

  Pierre Schaeffer who, incidentally, was Jean-Michel Jarre's teacher for a while.


Electronic music is a very paradoxical thing. I conceive of it as very anti-conventional and anti-knowledge in the sense that it is more an electronic expression of instinct. (Wise people already realize that human awareness is about much more than facts or knowledge.) Music that is knowing relies on patterns, forms and structures but electronic music need not and, perhaps, should not. Its my view that something like Switched on Bach is fine as a curiosity but irrelevant as an expression of electronics. Electronic music is possibility not a new way to do something that could be done 200 years ago. It should be something no one could do until now. In order to make it this there needs to be an intellectual and experimental framework behind it to direct and motivate its creation. This is why I think many electronic music makers are deep thinkers and ones with a desire for constant forward movement. We value art in general that is an expression of an idea and electronic music, with its ability to make sound plastic to a musician's touch, is perfectly placed to take advantage of this. But it is also why so much electronic music is devalued in that it is empty, sterile and devoid of ideas, a hollow, formless repetition or a commercialized shell. It lacks substance and is therefore seen right through. Electronics can be vapid and insubstantial, like cotton candy which, if you eat too much, ruins your insides. But it can also be an electronic representation of existence itself thus containing the ultimate substance and meaning. (The name under which I publish my own music is Elektronische Existenz.)

I speak in big terms here for I really do believe that music made with electronics has an ability to express more of our human experience, with more meaning inherent in it, than ever before. But we, as electronic musicians, need to be up to this mammoth task. It will not just be there at the fingertips of anyone with an app on their phone or a basic synth at their fingertips. There is a sense, of course, in which music is simple, a matter of stringing sounds together. It does sound very simple. And yet the task is also very complex for not every collection of sounds will be imbued with those qualities that give it feeling, expression, meaning and the basic significance for us which is what happens when some piece of music makes an impact. How this happens is very enigmatic and is never the mere repetition of a formula. Its my own intuition that music is both expression and communication of a kind. I have written in the past that my own electronic music is a kind of philosophy. Philosophy, of course, is a love of wisdom and I can understand those who understand music as a kind of communicative wisdom that expresses thought and ideas beyond words. That's certainly how I feel about mine which is very deliberate and purposefully created and understood. Going down this route can lead even into spiritual understandings of music, something with which Coil themselves were very involved and which Nietzsche wrote about in his discussions of the ancient festivals of Dionysos in ancient Greece which were times of intoxication in every sense, not least musical.

I need to start wrapping this up and so I return back to The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner. I do so because I believe that our hero from that story, Smith, is our model electronic musician. He is a figure of authenticity expressing his personal freedom in the only way he can. I believe it is the electronic musician's opportunity to be able to do the same through music. I used the example of Coil earlier too because I believe that they did exactly this. Their driving motivation was an expressive and experimental one in which all their creative work was an expression of some personally important idea. No idea was too strange, too dissonant or too eccentric for them. If it could prove its experimental and intellectual worth then it was a creative direction to take regardless of any outside influence. In one interview I read the members of Coil claimed that a number of people had said they were scared of them, seemingly because they would have and pursue ideas which others just wouldn't. This seems to me an entirely healthy thing to do in a creative sense. And, again, I hold out electronic music's special place here because of all the many possibilities inherent within it.

I want to finish with a bit of a teaser. First, think about your music. What do you sound like? Do you sound like anything in particular? Can or could you be identified from how you sound? Think about it. If the answer is yes, is this a good or a bad thing? At various points in their career Coil were quite touchy about this question. The idea that their fans had expectations, that they expected them to sound a certain way, became a bit of a burden. The members of Coil had a different view. They wanted to be true and authentic to their own motivations and interests (much like Smith) but didn't want the burdens of others or to be pigeon-holed to a particular sound. Personally, I think they achieved this in spades. Their music is not definable or identifiable by genre. What seems important to me, throughout all the vicissitudes and possibilities that music with electronics may bring, is that some synthesis of humanity and machine comes together which produces an authentic product. Where it does something worthwhile has taken place. 


Please feel free to join my Facebook group Electronic Music Philosophy for more discussions like this.

A Sense of Wonder

Once upon a time there was just an ape with his bones. The ape took those bones in his dexterous hands and hit them against things. They made a noise and it was good. It also felt good to hit things too. And thus music was born.

A member of a Facebook group I run, which is called Electronic Music Philosophy, the other day made a very gracious post in which he praised the group's existence and appreciated the challenge to think about electronic music making which it poses. In the course of his post he made the suggestion that what the musician needed was not things but what he tentatively called "a sense of wonder". He went on to relate tales of his remote music making past in which he had recorded metronomes under plastic bowls, altering the sound with guitar pedals, or used a convector heater (which contained spring elements) as a primitive reverb tank. The way he related the tales I felt that, reading, it was almost like I was there observing his sonic experiments. The sense of wonder with its inherent questions such as "I wonder what will happen?" and "What will this sound like?" were palpable. I very much connected with his idea that what mattered was not the craftsmanship or price of the equipment you were using but this sense of wonder that he was imbued with. 

There were a few responses to this post and many of the comments expanded upon this point. The poster made the point that he later got rid of the convector heater reverb and replaced it with something digital which was much more convenient. But, subsequently, he found that what he gained in convenience he lost in texture. The convector heater hadn't really been a musical device at all, of course, and yet it provided a unique texture that something made for the purpose could not provide for all its utility and convenience. This set me thinking once more along lines aligned with this sense of wonder. It struck me that authenticity in music is much more important than convenience. Much electronic music today is entirely based around "convenience". Is this not, in the end, why people use computers and why Digital Audio Workstations were invented? But I sense in a lot of this a lack of authenticity, the authenticity that comes, I think, from someone following their perhaps naive musical ideas in a very innocent way. 

Sometimes I think we forget this. We get caught up in consumerist notions that music is about what you use. It can be but not in the sense that unless you have the latest cool or most highly regarded equipment then what you do musically is useless. This couldn't be further from the truth. A Moog bass sound or an Oberheim pad sound are unique and deeply satisfying but if the entirety of music consisted of just either then we would all be musically impoverished. Music's ultimate value is in its variety, in its being made up from all possible sounds, real and imagined. This includes the sounds made by convector heater reverbs. So what becomes prime currency in this context, as I've said before, is the idea and, as the commenter in the Facebook group suggested, this needs to be somewhat innocent, approached with a sense of wonder. It needs to be practiced with a sense of experimentalism as opposed to that knowing sense which is destructive of ideas.

One way to practice this electronically is to do sound manipulation. This is a kind of electronic music pretty much anyone, whether musical or not, can make. What you need to do this can be as simple as your phone, onto which its quite likely you can download a free recording app turning your phone into a sound recorder, and a computer onto which you could download free sound manipulation software. (Apps are also available and a tablet combines both devices in one.) And so, pretty much for free if you already have the hardware, you are able to pursue the idea of making music by recording and manipulating sounds. If you are doing this you are carrying on in a noble line of electronic music making that extends back many decades. Its also a way of making music that utilizes a completely different set of skills to that based on the playing of an instrument which is bequeathed us by the orchestral tradition. It is something that is an expressly electronic form of music making for you need electronic equipment to be able to do it. As I'm sure anyone who has done it could tell you, it is in many ways quite a relaxing and satisfying method of making music and one which is much more unpredictable than pawing a keyboard making conventional tunes. Often you end up with sound collages you could never have imagined from the sounds you first recorded. This method also has the benefit of making any sound you can record into something musical and so, I think, encourages the sense of wonder I'm focusing on here.

Such music is also a form based in ideas for its what you can imagine to do with the sounds you record that counts. Not every musician is the most imaginative and some seem to miss that ideas are important, thinking instead that because they have a large setup up or certain pieces of equipment that this substitutes for lack of creativity. Of course, that's not true. What counts in the end is always ideas and this, indeed, is what differentiates music one piece from another. I think of many musicians both past and present who are not by any means known for what they have or use but are known for variety of musical ideas they have or the experimentalism with which they pursue them. In short, I'm put in mind once more of the mission statement that Tony Rolando of Make Noise, the Eurorack synth company, brought to my attention when I interviewed him some weeks ago. He said that

"We see our instruments as a collaboration with musicians who create once in a lifetime performances that push boundaries and play the notes between the notes to discover the unfound sounds. We want our instruments to be an experience, one that will require us to change our trajectories and thereby impact the way we understand and imagine sound."

This sounds so much more than, and so different to, the consumerist mantra of the mere collection of highly prized musical things as if this alone makes any musical statement or impact. It sounds much more like my commenter's sense of wonder and seems, to me at least, to contain a sufficient innocence that allows musical surprises to happen in the first place. Musical surprises and wonders do not happen to people who either think they know it all or have it all. You need to stay a little innocent, naive and wondrous for that. So I don't think its coincidence that Make Noise manufacture the Phonogene as one of their modules. The original phonogene was a magnetic tape device that Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of Musique Concrete, the original electronic way to manipulate sounds, used. Rolando has created a digital version for use in Eurorack modular synth systems. Rolando and Make Noise seem to have the sense of wonder too to my mind.

Of course, all of this has to fit in with other notions. A "sense of wonder" is fine from the creator's point of view. It can be an exciting and personally meaningful sonic journey for them. But what about any listeners? When your creation hits their ears you lose control of it. No musician controls how a listener hears it for no musician controls the network of relations that constitutes the way a listener hears and receives music. It may just be a kaleidoscope of weird sounds to them. This once again reminds me that music is a two-sided thing. It is to do with two roles, that of creator or maker and that of listener or hearer. Both roles are different and each of us can take up each one. Even as the same person we may be different people when taking up one of the roles or the other. I listen to things I would never make and make things that in others I might not listen to. I wonder if you are the same? This, I think, is because makers are not listeners. They are makers. And listeners are not making anything. They are listening to something instead. These roles are different and that should be noted. However, I think that both roles would be enhanced if they were carried out with a sense of wonder. This sense would give a necessary openness, the openness in which something gets a chance to make an impression. So often musical ideas, from the perspective of makers or hearers, are killed before they have a chance to develop simply because our minds are closed. Closed minds are conventional minds, ones not open to change or difference.

A few weeks ago again I interviewed Marc Doty, the synth demonstrator and educationalist. I knew at the time that we had some things in common and some not and in my interview with him I tried to ask questions that would highlight that. One difference between us was my enthusiastic interest in Eurorack synthesis and his lack of it. He said that any Eurorack system he could design would bore Eurorack enthusiasts to death. He is not interested in fancy functionality so much as in what he hears as an authentic analog tone. In some respects I regard Marc as an analog tone fetishist but he is also a fetishist for what I've referred to before as a "player's paradigm". Marc sees a necessary and deeply enjoyable connection between players and instruments in the making of music such that any form of electronic music which relies more on sequencing or machines is a turn off for him. 

Now one of the reasons I like Eurorack (and other modular formats such as Buchla and Serge) and its inherent possibilities so much is that I see it as embodying exactly the sense of wonder I've been talking about in this blog. Eurorack, as I envision it, is the freedom to build any synthesizer or sound manipulation or processing device that you can imagine. Its the most flexible way to make electronic pieces of music currently available and, overall, no one is controlling it. It is the wild west. (Software might object here. I'm open to discussing it but software has a big problem in that its often not very tactile.) You get to build whatever you want (or can afford) and use it both according to and contrary to its purposes. This is not electronic music obsessed with tone or that normalises one tone above all other tones. This is exploratory, "what will happen next?" electronic music making. I think its good to not be sure what will happen next. I certainly think its better than fetishizing one kind of tone even if that tone is memorable. We should no more get attached to sounds than we should to things. The sense of wonder is more important.

The exciting thing about sounds is their difference. For its only with difference that we can begin to distinguish and use sounds. Hearing sounds in all their particularity and difference is what the sense of wonder I've been repeatedly mentioning here is all about and so ways of making and using sound which maximize sound possibilities are more valuable to me. Yes, of course we all have sounds we like and like to use. I like the sound of Moog's Taurus bass pedals, for example. But thats just one sound within a world of sounds and its the world that gives each sound its own value. So we shouldn't belittle the other sounds. All sounds are equal in nature. Each sound is an opportunity to make something unique, momentary, revelatory, something that, as the Make Noise blurb intimates, might change our thinking about sound and its use. So I'm very much about sounds and making new ones and building new combinations of them.

Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every Eurorack enthusiast is like that. In any discipline you will find plenty of non-ideological copyists who just want to look cool or feel part of a cool group. Having money buys people a place at many a table. But that's my vision for it. I am quite prepared to say that a decent number of Eurorack users are just people with disposable cash who want a trendy hobby but who, when it comes to musical ideas, are lacking imagination. Money doesn't buy ideas you see. But its the same with people who buy hardware synths or plugins too. Having things does not equal having ideas or creating things of interest. Being interesting, I think, is the prime musical virtue but that too relies on having ideas and a sense of wonder. This is not the same as making some music that is "good" or likeable, by the way. Electronic music, in my view, is a music of ideas because it simply opens up so many possibilities for the manipulation and combination of sounds. It becomes frustrating when one just hears the same ones over and over. These ideas, in the end, require thought, experimentation and time. And a sense of wonder.

Perhaps that was what made the ape hit things with bones in the first place? 

Musical Maturity

Having written my blog yesterday and dispatched it both to the archives and to the wilds of the Internet, I went for a walk. I go for a walk pretty much every day (as the fading heels on all my shoes will attest) because, as many philosophers record somewhere in their works, walking is thinking time. Thinking is an activity in which your relaxed mind feels free to come up with ideas, things which might start you down paths that you otherwise might miss. Thinking is thus a vital activity if you don't just merely want to be trapped in your convictions. Convictions, as Nietzsche wrote in his book Human, All Too Human, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Convictions are self-built prisons.

I started off with an idea for a blog today discussing repetition in music. The idea of repetition reminds me of a clearly still important memory somewhere inside my damaged psyche. As a young teen I was still at that stage where I did what my mother told me. And she wanted me to go to Sunday School. I was well into the phase where I found this boring but this particular Sunday we'd been asked to bring a favourite record along to discuss with the group. I took Wings of A Dove by Madness since at that time I was a Madness fan. The staid Sunday School teacher wasn't very impressed by Wings of A Dove which, even for Madness, who I think its not indelicate to say are not the world's most accomplished musicians, is somewhat of a simple song. "Its quite repetitive" was the teacher's only comment before moving along to the next record. As a 14 year old I didn't take this very well.

Wings of A Dove is indeed quite repetitive but, now much older than 14, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. The Sunday School teacher clearly took repetitive to mean "not interesting or varied enough" or "simplistic" but even these designations don't tell you anything necessary about an impression some music will make. This is because the more you think about it the more you realize that something's repetitiveness or simplicity is not an easy route to judgment. Right now, if I asked you, I'm sure you could come up with pieces of repetitive and simple music that you both liked and didn't like. Both would be equally repetitive, equally simple, but these qualities would not help you to distinguish a like from a dislike or a good from a bad. There are repetitive songs which I'm sure drive you crazy. There are also dance clubs worldwide that resound throughout the night to a 4/4 beat that never stops.

Repeating patterns, themes, leitmotifs and suchlike are at the heart of much music, particularly in the mainstream, and its very likely that much of the music you hear and make is based on it. Indeed, we may even say that repetition is at the heart of the musical traditions we have received. This is true whether the songs we value are of the "verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus" type or songs based in a simple repeated riff or hook. When I think about repetition I ask myself why this is so. I think mainly of two advantages it seems to have. Firstly, its a simple structure. This makes it not very difficult to understand or follow. So its easy to get into. This leads into the second feature I think of, its safe and secure. Structure always offers security because in a physical world one needs to know one's bearings. A relatively simple repeating pattern achieves this admirably. So repetitive music offers everything the listener needs. Its easy to comprehend and offers safety in familiarity.

But then I asked myself what a non-repeating song might sound like. What happens if we start to step outside these easy to understand and safe surroundings? Some examples came to mind. The first is the track Flutter by Autechre. This track was composed in a very deliberate way in 1994 at a time when so-called "raves" were being banned by the British Government. These were unofficial parties which would spontaneously be arranged and several hundred people would descend on some illicit location and music and usually drugs would take place. The Government tried to ban these events and, in so doing, defined the kind of music being played there as "repetitive beats". The track Flutter was Autechre's response to this in that, so they claim, no bar of the track, which could be played at 45rpm or 33rpm, repeats at all. As Autechre later said of the process of writing this track, they lined up as many different drum patterns as they could and then simply strung them together to produce a piece of music that never repeats a single bar even once. As such, this could not be banned if played at the raves because it was quite literally non-repetitive. Flutter is still a friendly way into the world of non-repetition though since, if you listen to the link I've given, you'll hear it does have a repeating melody.

A second example of music which eschews the path of easy repetition is that broad swathe of music labeled "kosmische". The example I choose here is Popol Vuh's In den Gärten Pharaos which is much like the music on their previous and first album, Affenstunde. Its a 17 and a half minute piece of studied abstraction. But, if you've listened to it, yes, you will tell me that it contains repetitions within it, not least the percussive sections where repeat rhythm patterns are played on bongos and suchlike. I agree with you that it utilizes repetition in parts but then so did Flutter. My point here is not that one should swap a childish reliance on repetition for the maturity of music that never repeats, as if, in a very crass and stupid way, one were good and the other bad. If anything, its to open the musician's mind and the listeners' ears to the possibilities. I have already noted that repetition or lack of it is, in itself, no guarantee of anything. Neither a repeating nor a non-repeating compositional strategy guarantees a piece of music people will or won't like or, more importantly, that will or won't be interesting to some listener. For example, some people love Discipline by Throbbing Gristle. Others have it as a high contender in the "worst song ever" category and I've read more than one person say its not music at all. What I think it is is a masterpiece of the mixture of repetition and noisy abstraction.

                           "Wreckers of civilisation" Throbbing Gristle

Were this a blog in which I were cataloguing even more and more examples I'm sure I'd spend the rest of my Sunday morning now going on an interesting musical journey through music that uses abstraction and repetition in interesting ways. Should you have examples of such, because everyone's exposure to music is only as wide as their own experience, then I hope you'll note these in the various comment sections where you see this blog. Its good to share musical experiences. However, I'm always conscious that I need to keep these blogs focused and to the point. More than one Facebooker has told me in the past that my usual 10 paragraphs (or so) is too long for him to bother with. These are those for whom music much longer than 3 or 4 minutes is regarded much like a prog rock drummer's 10 minute drum solo. Its dull and boring and who wants to listen to that?

But this comes to be relevant to this blog because, having thought about repetition on my walk, a narrative started to unfold in my mind. It was a narrative of growing maturity. I thought of the younger me. Aged 9 I was a member of my local Cub Scouts. We didn't have a car but the Cub leader had invited me to a local swimming pool on a Monday night to learn to swim. I had to walk (on my own) but it was in a direction I'd never gone before. It was very much out of my comfort zone. Well, inevitably, I got lost and more and more upset. Eventually a passerby asked me, the crying child in the street, what was wrong and if I was alright. I spluttered through my tears that I couldn't find the swimming pool. The helpful stranger set me right. I hadn't walked far enough down the main road to find the left turn I was supposed to take. I arrived at the pool in a strange area just as the session was finishing. But, of course, through all my trauma I now knew where the pool was and had enlarged the local territory with which I was familiar.

It was this narrative of growing maturity, accommodation to new territory and a growing ability to deal with new things that particularly appealed to me in a musical context from this traumatic personal recollection. As children we are used to a fairly tightly defined local area. Yes, we may go off on little adventures but its always within the context of a comfort zone and tied to our personal sense of confidence. This naturally varies from person to person but in each case it can be enhanced and grown. This fits in very nicely with what I was saying yesterday about training the musical sense in each of us. This is not a given, a static thing once and for all the same. It can be nurtured and matured or it can be left to stagnate and become stunted or malformed. As people we go from being children nervous about the world to adults meant to be more confident and able to deal with a bigger territory. A child may stick close to home but an adult might be expected to be able to travel from city to city or even country to country. It is normal human development to mature and develop the skills necessary to deal with this.

So when I now write a blog about musical maturity, which is what this blog has been about, this is what I mean. I mean developing a musical sense which does not stick in one rut. I mean the ability and even the desire to want to tread new ground with a confidence that has naturally developed. It means that, like cities or countries, we do not see going to one or another style of music as bad or good. We just see them as different and as each with their own challenges or good points or bad points. The 9 year old me listened to his mum's Abba records. The 47 year old me still remembers that but wants to explore abstract electronics, music composed by chance operations and music made on modular synthesizers. This is how it should be for to have stuck with the Abba records would have been to have refused to grow, change and develop. In such people something is not ideal and has gone wrong. It is the ideal to spread one's wings if one has them for this is how you learn to fly. So by "musical maturity" I very much mean an appreciation of music based on an analogy to the adult geographical sense. Its an ability and willingness to move about more freely, to accept and even welcome difference, to judge on something more than the local, childish values you had in younger days.

Music as Education

As far as criticisms of my blogs go, I'm happy to take a few hits. You would need to be spectacularly naive and utterly blind to the world to think that you could write a blog which some might take as criticism and then post it 10 or 15 times on Facebook and Twitter without any comeback. Of course, I try to write my blogs in a detached style. I do not write rants here nor use the language of the street. I try to give a calm and sensible discussion of the points I want to raise with at least the impression given of an open mind and a use of reason and argument. If you treat people fairly they will do the same in return is how I hope it goes. Of course, I can't guarantee this and occasionally I come across a less charitable respondent spilling his bile for my thoughts. I regard that more as his problem and not mine. My only golden rule in all of this is that you can think what you like but you need to be able to rhetorically support it with reasons you are prepared to discuss. 

This point was brought home to me in an excellent and thoughtful comment someone left under my blog, now almost a month old, about gear fetishization on social media forums to the detriment of actual music. This is the most popular blog I've ever written (approaching 5000 reads) and probably the most contentious too since I plonked it fairly and squarely into the middle of many Facebook groups that I'll clearly admit are groups about electronic music equipment as opposed to what to do with it or the music I hope ends up being made with it. (That, in many ways, was exactly the point of the blog!) For many the blog was a stumbling block or a blind spot. Others, and I'm warmed to say it was quite a few, seemed to get the point too. Of those, one by the name of "agustin n" made an excellent point which I'd like to snip from the comments to that blog and post here:

"I think the problem is mainly that, to admire someone else's gear, you just need to open your eyes (and say "good synths bru"). But to admire his/her music you have to open your heart/mind and that needs a lot more commitment. Like engage in a feeling with a stranger (over the www) and, in that, expose yourself. "Hey I enjoy your vision and relate to your feelings" is a lot more committed thing to say and... people are usually afraid of exposing themselves. But, nevertheless, I think its important that we as artists do..."

I've noticed a lot of this since I stumbled into writing blogs overtly about electronic music which I then posted to public forums. I was surprised to find they accrued thousands of reads not least since my music posts still accrue barely any listens. But they are different things and there need not be any translation from one to another. Perhaps, for example, my thoughts are interesting but my music is not. However, what I took on board very much from Agustin's insightful comment was that talking about things, objects, doesn't entail very much. If I like synth X instead of synth Y then so what? Looking at a picture of your gear and purring with desire isn't going to stretch me or anyone else in any way. As desirous creatures its as easy as letting a human drive have its head. But getting involved in their music and its ideas is much more intimate. Or, at least, it should be. And this brings me to why we're here today.

I have long had an itch regarding music that needed scratching. When I started becoming interested in John Cage it itched much more than it had before because of the peculiarities of this extremely interesting man. Cage is interesting not least because he is a composer but he is also someone who completely refuses to stop talking about music as an idea, as a set of ideas, as a bunch of compositional strategies or goals and even as something that is part of a bigger whole, life itself. Already, as I'm sure you will see, we have gone far beyond the customary topics in a Facebook group dedicated to swapping pictures of one or two pieces of gear and saying how much you want them or how much you love owning them. To be blunt, it is my general position that music makers should become more like Cage and less like your average Facebook group member. But this is a digression from my point here today. 

Music of Changes is a piano piece composed by John Cage in 1951 and first performed by David Tudor (for whom it was written) on January 1st 1952. It is described by many as a piece of indeterminate music, in some sense, although in terms of performance it is very determined. It was composed using chance operations (Cage's second piece written this way) but does have a resulting score which the performer is expected to follow like any other. So it is indeterminate in its composition but not in its performance. The more well known 4'33" is, of course, indeterminate in both composition AND performance. I use this piece as an example today because it seems to be one that evokes strong emotions. The You Tube comments under the video that I've linked here refer to it as "bullshit" and "masturbation material" and another wishes to withdraw the description "music" from it as if it did not deserve such an artistic description. (Someone also says its not art.) I first heard this piece of music, by listening to this very video, about 3 weeks ago. I had expected to find it difficult (thank you commenters for making it impossible to come to this with an open mind!) but was surprised when I found myself listening to the whole piece (44 minutes worth) without once feeling the need to stop or switch it off. It goes without saying that I am unaccustomed to listening to piano music on a regular basis.

Now I could not say that I "like" Music of Changes. But I can say that as an intellectual musical exercise I find it interesting and edifying and I can even say that I appreciate it. I'm glad it exists. Others seem to have been enraged by it (as, indeed, by 4'33" which came shortly after this in Cage's career). Now when music provokes such strong reactions we have a reason to ask what is going on here. To some the apparent randomness or abdication of authorial responsibility seems to be the issue. The thought is that if someone does not take responsibility then chaos is the result and chaos is bad. Chaos is irresponsible. Allowing chaos to occur is a moral affront to listeners, a trying to get them to accept that anything goes. And, in more general terms, anything cannot be allowed to go. Not, at least, if one calls oneself a composer and composes piano pieces to be performed at piano recitals.

                                      Autechre performing live

Fast forward 64 years to a piece called Feed1 by Autechre from the album Elseq1-5. What do we have here? To the casual listener it sounds very much like an all electronic version of Music of Changes in general terms. Things are happening (from a listener's ear point of view) very chaotically and perhaps even randomly. (Forget that both pieces are not really random at all if you can.) There seems to be no guiding idea behind it. Some describe Feed1 as "the sound of energy" or "the extreme power of electricity" but another pines that he doesn't really understand what people like about it and he asks for musicians to inform him of its point or value. This is a very good question. What is the point or value of any piece of music? I can't help but think that if more people asked this kind of question before they started then there might be less thoughtless music in the world. And that wouldn't be a bad thing in a world drowning in music.

What I think that both John Cage and Rob Brown and Sean Booth (who comprise Autechre) have in common is that they don't just make music. They also think long and hard about how to make it too. It is not some casual pursuit for these people. It is their life's work and purpose and so they take its arrangement and composition very seriously. Neither of them are joking or being frivolous. I would very much like to encourage this mentality in all music makers but especially in the electronic ones which is the music that I generally favour. As a means to this end I think its important to make one big change in our personalities not just as musicians but as people. This change is to move away from valuing things based on a "like" using a value system in which something I like is "good" and something I don't is "bad". Let me put this another way: we need to change from people who value things based on their appeal to us into people who value things based on their ability to change us. Let me explain.

Six years ago both John Cage and Autechre were just names to me. I knew nothing about them except perhaps that Cage had composed a piece of music which had no music. But in the intervening 6 years I have come to be aware of the music of both of them and interacted with a number of interviews I've read from both of them. I am now acquainted with how they sound and some of their thoughts. It is not the case that I like all or even most of the music that they have produced (although I surely do like some in both cases) but, much more importantly than any of this froth, I see them both as vitally important musical influences. They are interesting and original and this changes me as someone appropriating their work. Of course, the world of social media which works on popularity (because this suits the commercial purposes which are the reason social media exists) will not value them for this. Social media wants us to believe that likes, faves and retweets are all that matter. Popularity is king and numbers are what count. Neither Cage nor Autechre are ever going to be mainstream popular. And I say thank god for that.

Cage and Autechre are worthwhile and of value because listening to them might just change you for the better. Or even change you at all. They are musicians who are going to challenge your preconceptions and make you think about what music is and what it is for and what it should do. In this respect it really doesn't matter after that whether you like or dislike their music. If it changes you and makes you think I would regard this as the far greater service than a stroke of your musical ego. Of course, we are now into Agustin's spooky area for to be changed we will need to open ourselves up to new experiences, new thoughts, ones that challenge our status quo (and I don't mean Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi here!). In order to change we need to first be open to change and this is what the world of likes discourages for to be taught that something I like is good and something I dislike is bad is to be groomed in musical conservatism and conventionality. This way does not lie progression, growth or maturity. Of course, we may feel happy and safe in our conventionality and want to be left within our boundaries. But isn't life more generally about living on the edge, the thrill of taking a risk, the danger of knowing and feeling that you are actually alive? 

I think that it is and, slowly, over many years now I've been trying to educate and encourage a curious musical mind, one that will listen to music I might not like to try and find the value in it. Utilizing this attitude I've discovered Cage, Autechre, Boards of Canada, the whole world of German Kosmische music and many other things besides, ones that probably no one else has heard of and who will never be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of likes. My musical vocabulary, and my life more generally, have been enriched and educated beyond anything I could have imagined. And this was only in a few years. Who knows how much further it could progress? What's more, I've developed new attitudes towards music and sound, ones I never would have thought of by myself with my likes and dislikes. I've learnt that music is not just an education in sound but in life too. 

I've also learnt that the musical sense is not a given, something to be left as it is. Its something to be trained, educated and explored. Indeed, this is the most beneficial way of using it. So you should give things a chance you don't like. You may end up liking it. I've lost count of the things I used to dislike I now like. Because tastes will and do change and we can and do learn new things from new sounds. Even if we don't "like" something it can still educate us in other ways. What a great service some piece of music would do us personally and musically if it made us more appreciative of music or sound in general. What is a simple "like" beside that? And more, as musicians ourselves we should not be afraid to outrun our boundaries. We should try to do things we consider beyond us. How else are we supposed to grow? We need to "expose ourselves" as Agustin suggested. This might encourage failure. But which is better, the setback we grow and learn from or the stunted safety of never trying?



If you like electronic music, have a thoughtful disposition and are on Facebook you might want more chat like this. In which case feel feel to join my group Electronic Music Philosophy there.