From Chris Fahey Sent Thu, Jul 9th 1998, 14:45
In response to the various responses to my post: > Mother of God! What is this rubbish? When a musician is considering doing anything > he needs to think carefully about only one question. "Does it sound good?" > Noone needs a load of rules for correct/incorrect music creation. If we judge music > not by how it sounds, but by how it was created - then we've lost the plot completely. > Take this "Keep Music Live" crap and return it to the fifty year old rockers where it > belongs. NO! NO! Just because I say you should *think before you sample*, everyone accuses me of being some kind of "Keep Music Live!" hippie or something. All I ask is that we, fans and artists, think about the music a bit! That's what the "I" stands for in IDM. I totally disagree that the sole question when judging music should be "Does it sound good?" I could release a record which is nothing but a giant sample of Bitches Brew and satisfy your simple criteria. You have to hold artists to a certain standard of artistic integrity, and your standard is simply not high enough for almost anyone (except maybe a person who thinks postmodernism is a fundamentalist religion). Judging music by How It Was Created is and always should be one of the criteria. If I told you I was an expert cellist, then I stood behind a curtain and played a Yoyo Ma album, wouldn't that be a bit of an ethical problem? I think you're lying to yourself if you think that How The Music Was Created doesn't come into play in your opinions. (For me, part of almost every musical experience, I think, is a degree of personal identification with the artist, imagining yourself making the music and what kind of skills it would take to do it.) I find it strange that you and others saw my list of QUESTIONS and saw them as RULES. What you call rules, I call plain old "thinking". Frankly, I can't even fathom how anyone could use a sample and not ask themselves these pretty simple, basic questions. > > I still think that using the Amen Break in 1998 would be hard to justify > > artistically. > > I disagree with this too. I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with > unique amen usage these days, but it could be done. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID!!! I never said you CAN'T, I just said it would be HARD. (grrrr) > It still takes a skilled chef to make delicious soup from store-bought > ingredients, even with shelves full of cup-o'-soup. Ah, yes, wisdom! Again, I'm not saying it can't be done, but if I go to your house for dinner and you give me cup-o'-soup straight out of the box, no matter how good it may be, I'm not going to be impressed with your cooking skills. I may *like the soup*, but I will probably think of you as a lazy chef (if I even think of you as a chef at all). But if you make me a stew which happens to have cup-o-soup as an ingredient (it's possible!), yet you've employed other culinary skills and ingredients as well, then I will think of you as a chef. -Cf ' - . _ . - ' ^ ' - . _ . - ' ^ ' - . _ . - c h r i s t ø p h e r f ª h e y . _ . - ' ^ ' - . _ . - ' ^ ' - . _ . - ' ^ xxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx 2 1 2 - 6 3 4 - 6 9 5 0 x 2 5 8 http://www.raremedium.com - ' ^ ' - . _ . - ' ^ ' - . _ . - ' ^ ' - .