Out on a Limb, 1

Good piece at from PC at mnmlssgs on favoured recent releases, all three of them: John Maus' We Must Be The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, Kangding Ray's OR, and Tim Hecker's Ravedeath 1972. The limit's a good thing, much better than your standard December top ten. More of a stand from PC, and easier to engage fully with.

I've not properly heard the John Maus - a quick scan on the computer last night, which revealed... something of genuine interest and invention. Definitely linked with the bleaker, goth-tinged end of seventies synth pop, but not tied to that. Christo at Mind Bomb was baffled by its success:

It seems just like synth waves hypnagogic retromania (sic) for 80s synth pop done by a guy brought up listening to indie music. “Streetlight” has some lovely synths, but the singing just isn’t up to it, while “Quantum Leap” (also known as “Dead Zone” is just a hidden cover of Mission of Burma’s “Academy Flight Song” done with a vocal delivery somewhere between Ian Curtis and Suicide.

which led to my lack of interest, but I will give it a proper go. Also interesting to see the launch of a new book on Maus - Adam Harper's Heaven is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop for Sale at The Wire Bookshop.

PC quoted Badiou which certainly resonates with my feelings, and links with much of what's been argued on the lack of adventure in much contemporary music by the likes of Simon Reynolds and Stefan Goldmann:

The audacity of thought is not to repeat 'to the limit' that which is already entirely retained within the situation which the limit limits; the audacity of thought consists in crossing a space where nothing is given.(emphasis mine)

And here's what I said about Tim Hecker:

Tim Hecker seems to be doing this with Ravedeath. Given his previous dissatisfaction with his work as Jetone and the need to work away from rhythmic structures, he's clearly an artist intent on challenging himself. As I wrote for RA, An Imaginary Country offered little beyond a retread of what he'd been doing since Haunt Me..., so he needed a rethink, and found it in Ben Frost. The point you make about time is pertinent here - the tracks seem to snake, swell, bloat, empty, divorced from any sense of strict timekeeping. This reminded me of VDelay's Anima. Pieces within suites bleed into eachother, as do the suites themselves, almost organically. If he's saying anything about the current state of things its that machines have lives of their own (clearly a Frost influence), with the fusion of instrumental and electronic timbres more fused than ever (without completely erasing themselves). Also he's feeding us our own thoughts with titles like 'Hatred of Music' and even the album title, and it sounds lovely! Worth hearing Janek Schaeffer's organ electronics album In the Last Hour for Room 40 alongside, it too is a doozy. http://www.room40.org/releases-inthelasthour.shtml

... and Kangding Ray:

I find Kangding more difficult, as he's working from within a predefined genre, and one I'm not personally fond of, and he offers little in terms of breaking out of it. There's no denying the depth and richness of the sounds he uses, which reminds me of a more musical Monolake, with more acoustic tones, but beyond this what does it offer or question? Good to hear voices creep in, but its done in just the way that artists like Burial and Actress have done previously (albeit more sparingly). Yes, he'd be great to hear live and loud, but beyond sound design I'm not sure what he's giving us.

PC has commented that OR is like a culmination of a genre, and also a true album statement, both of which I'd agree with. The former doesn't interest me so much, given my personal distaste for IDM-tinged techno (just can't enjoy that drum programming) but the latter is something at least - OR does proceed like an album in the traditional - almost retro - sense, something rhythmic electronic music has always struggled with. But beyond this...? I'm not so sure.

The genre question is one PC touches on too with regard to house and techno - that maybe all the experimentation and novelty was done by the early nineties, something I'd agree with. Also hinted at is the prospect of an examination of the return of microhouse:

Then there's the 'second coming' of microhouse, with new work from so many of my old heroes (call it Perlon and Playhouse, Kompakt and Krause... and Dial). Are the many returns happy? I think a whole post on Pampa and Re|dial (as the 'houses' of all the microhouse refugees) is warranted. I'm not sure I quite have the interest.

I hope he does, but not sure what can be said on the subject. My view is that all these labels and artists are treading well worn paths, tweaking things slightly, making slight improvements, but doing nothing new, and I mean NOTHING. Deep house in particular, the 'proper' US variety, seems overtly retro in its pursuit of indeterminate soulfulness and its championing of vinyl (something I'm guilty of), reminding me - unpleasantly - of retro jazzbos.

I still buy tons of it. More from me on this later.

For Part 2 I'll highlight my picks for the year so far, those that seem to be doing something new, addressing the strange world we find ourselves in, in line with the electronic focus of the mnmlssgs selections. Not so easy...

Recorded Music in the Digital Age

For me, much of the joy in listening to recorded music, particularly acoustic music, has to do with hearing the recording process itself, acknowledging - celebrating even - its artifice, self-referentially incorporating this process into the finished product. This is why records are such a rich medium: the noise of needle on vinyl is inescapable and intrinsic to vinyl playback.

The Hi-Fi phenomenon of the twentieth century was obsessed with noise reduction, a 'problem' which seems to have been largely mastered (pardon the pun) by the advent of digital recording and CDs. Or, more likely, no one cares anymore in the frenzied everything-for-free fileshare deluge, heard as low bitrate MP3s through little white earbuds or computer speakers. I'll moan about some of the other issues with MP3s at another time, but the sound quality alone is enough to champion vinyl, or CDs even. Since we've gone all-vinyl at home I find even CDs sound shit, and now view digital files purely as the 'reviewing tools' argued by music giveaway blogs. I'm a prolific 'previewer' of digital files, I'll admit, but I feel less guilty about it now.

This hot issue has kicked off a regular series in The Wire featuring various arguments on digital music and quality, value, storage, listening habits, etc, and its been interesting to follow. I feel strongly that musicians need to get paid, but I also feel that policing the ceaseless flow of stolen music on giveaway blogs is an impossible task and one that now its too late to start trying to enforce. As one side of the argument has articulated, the landscape has irrevocably changed and the past cannot be recaptured. Given this, that the initial shock over music freely available everywhere online has passed, we've reached a kind of plateau and something has been realised: there exists a demand for quality music releases on physical formats, and that some people are willing to pay for music in these forms.

The issues here lie around the idea of 'quality', and the volume of music that people are willing to pay for versus the volume of music they want to acquire and listen to. The quality argument came up at mnmlssgs and by Stefan Goldmann at LWE, and touched on in varied forms by countless others, and cannot be overstated - given the saturated market we find ourselves in, and the lack of financial reward available to most music producers, its more difficult than ever to create original music work of high quality and have it recorded and released to a high standard. I'd argue that this is less of a problem in certain genres, particularly classical (and I'll post about that soon), but in most areas of music there's complacency and tedium from the many issues that digital music has raised.

As for how much people are prepared to pay for music, this area will continue to be defined as time passes within this situation, ie as those listeners prepared to pay AT ALL for music begin to cement their spending habits in this age. I still buy far more music on vinyl than I need/ought to, but never as much as I'd like to. I also trawl charity shops for bargain records, something no one aside the charities benefits financially from, but given that most of the people involved in the production of the record are long dead, who cares?

I also download a lot of music, scan, promptly forget and/or abandon in search of the next new cheap hit. This seems symptomatic of current music consumption habits, that given the lack of investment, in all senses, in music downloaded and skimmed through portable devices, music consumed in this way can only be heard cursorily. This practice is wearying, causing exhaustion and depression (and guilt), but can be corrected. Sit back in your listening space, turn on the stereo, dust off some records, have some people over, play whole albums, talk about them, let them lead you to other records, study the covers, read the notes, buy some more ...