From Tom Millar Sent Thu, Jun 3rd 1999, 01:24
I agree we sometimes get caught up in a lot of form-related arguments or discussions- especially on the IDM list, but a little on the 313 list, too(when I was on it, anyhoo). These have their place and this is often the only way to objectively talk about a great deal of this stuff. But concentration on form creates a lot of shit. Look at fusion or the ten thousand other jazz-related musics that have come about in the last decade or three. Prog rock. And a hell of a lot of techno/IDM since its inception- people just playing around with form-related issues and not expressing anything. This is how I feel about a great deal of Ae and other glitchy-melodic type stuff, as well as noise-related music. Fuzz fuzz chirpity chirp, who cares. Wow, so-and-so can program a synth/knows his way around Cubase, but what do they have to say? I guess that's why "formulaic" has the connotations it has. This is always the greatest danger in working in such a structured environment as musicians work in nowadays: you either conform to the blues song structure, the step-time sequencing software, the SFX built into your machines, the commercial demands of the populace, or you try hard to break all the rules and do something freakish and new-sounding. Either way, however, you can end up making a bunch of music that expresses nothing, because you're just playing with formulas. This is the only way I've come up with that effectively separates the wheat from the chaff in the deluge of new electronic music- does this even make me think of anything? Can I imagine any sort of cinematic scenes to go along with this(my personal perspective) or does it just sound like a bunch of notes and noises? Too often it's just a bunch of notes and noises, but then again, there's always Carl Craig. Tom