From Ashok Divakaran Sent Mon, Jan 5th 1998, 04:49
From Ashok Divakaran Sent Mon, Jan 5th 1998, 04:49
> OK, point taken. I'll fall back to my next excuse then: availability. I've > never seen a General Magic CD. Nor a Wabi Sabi. Nor FX Randomix (to quote > the examples you used below). And once in a blue moon when I get into a good > specialist's store (like DropBeat up in Oakland) I tend to get those things > that I see which I've either been looking for or which I think might be rare > or hard to come by in the future if I pass it up. In those stores, I tend to > be awash in zillions of obscure stuff that I Just Don't Know about. It's > frustrating as all Hell! I'm sure this must be true for other IDM'ers ... Certainly it's true that the budget constraint (sorry for the nerdy terminology) faced by people, coupled with the plethora of unknown names one sees in most shops and catalogs, is intimidating and encourages the typical buyer to fall back on safe options. However, in the final analysis that's not good enough. Everywhere I look in today's splintered electronic music scene I see a blinkered herd mentality and a general lack of curiosity, with people stuck in the endless purchasing habits loop of their "scene". No one really seems to want to try anything new. Some of my favorite artists were discovered after getting excited by a review and hunting down the release in question, or hearing a track on a comp by someone I hadn't heard of before and picking up on his back catalog. I know that I wasn't alone in this. Perhaps it was just that we were more easily excited by things because the field of options was smaller, but I just don't see much evidence of that hunger, or capacity to be excited by something new, around me any more. Greg, for all its failings, I'm sure you remember how awesome it was to get a good discussion going on some new discovery on r.m.i.... be it some newly-discovered fragment of e-music history from the 70s and how it related to the music we normally discussed, or the latest Scandinavian trash-can bashing outfit.. whatever. But here it's Skam, Ae, bla bla bla ad nauseam. (And I do have an excuse for anyone who says "if you don't like what we're discussing, start a new thread yourself" - I was unsubbed from the list for most of this year.) Music has always progressed through the cross-pollination of ideas, both musical and conceptual. There's a depressing homogeneity in peoples' tastes on idm (and, in all fairness, on just about every other list I'm subbed to) and I don't think it's getting us, or the music, anywhere. There doesn't seem to be any desire to learn about the history of electronic music and how it got us where we are. I'm convinced that this lack of historical perspective is both a cause and a symptom of the musical myopia I'm bitching about. Pet peeve #2: The degree of segmentation in techno (and yes, I still, and will continue to, use the term) is laughable. It's reached the point where someone will flatly rule out the possibility of, say, ANY goa trance track even remotely appealing to them, or (another depressingly ubiquitous example) the hardcore Detroit types disowning all European techno - never mind the fact that most of it was directly inspired by Detroit or that (gasp!) one can actually *hear* it in the music! Without wishing to sound preachy, I've listened to - and, perhaps more importantly, sought out - pretty much every genre of electronic music and managed to find worthwhile content in all of them. Surely my ears aren't *that* different from everyone else's? And it's for this reason that I say... for all Gil's failings as a businessman (and I've had a couple of semi-dodgy experiences with him myself, although nothing approaching what others seem to have suffered) I think he was a positive force on the list, and I for one will miss the free-ranging eclecticism of his posts, pompous or not. Ashok