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Recent listening: Swayzak's newest, Dirty Dancing, is, I'm sorry to say as a fan, the pits. Awful cover--what were they thinking?; too many tracks with guest vocalists; too many self-conscious attempts to capitalize on the '80s revival. The only track I really like is the last one, "Ping Pong." Adrien Capozzi aka Adrien75 has a CD out on Worm Interface under a new alias, 757. The CD title is also 757. Really interesting musician. Fans of To Rococo Rot, Richard D. James, Kit Watkins/Coco Roussel, Alan Gowan/Hugh Hopper take note! (Listen to the track "Two Cats" here; also good is "Dusseldorf," which is like Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" set to a raga beat.) Two old-school tracks from Clay's Pounding System show on WFMU recently caught my ear (check out the stream for 9/25/02 on his archive): Eazy E's "Nobody Move" and Coldcut's "That Greedy Beat." The late 80s/early 90s were truly a golden age.
People sitting in a darkened theater stare at a large reflective surface, while cell phones ring randomly throughout the room. The typical moviegoing experience at Times Square? No, it's a musical piece called Dialtones, which I recently learned about on dratfink's page. This "telesymphony," performed in connection with the Ars Electronica festival and funded by Swisscom Mobile, etc, is a half-good idea that just doesn't know when to quit. Check out the exhausting spec sheet--it's a social sculpture, it uses corporate switching systems as a found medium, it employs a lot of clever programming and hardware, it's electronic music, it's live performance, it's an audience participation piece, it has flashing lights, it has graphics, it has Mylar!
This kind of MIT Media Lab product (at least one of the performers went there) just pounds you with technology. It's essentially a loss leader for the tech industry, crafted by geeks whose art sense derives from rock concert multimedia shows. Audience members are asked to register their phone numbers when they arrive for the concert, special ringtones are downloaded to their cells, and then a musical ensemble "plays" the phones in an auditorium by punching buttons on a graphic display. So far, so good, I guess, but do we really need spotlights hitting the audience members when their cells ring? Keychain lights distributed to everyone that glow red two seconds before the tones go off? To see all this activity in a reflective mirror? The visual element is as gimcrack-filled as a Spielberg movie.
The piece assumes an audience with near-infinite time, patience, and trust. You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded "custom ringtone," all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own). Thirty minutes of antiphonal chirps, climaxing in the inevitable "crescendo of sound," might be pretty interesting to sit and listen to in the dark, if you weren't also being forced to "participate." The authors dispense grant-panel-friendly nonsense when they say this participation is "active," though. Your creative input consists solely of choosing a ringtone (doesn't the phone company also call this "creativity"?) and deciding what exotic handwaving motion to make when the spotlight hits you. The spec sheet doesn't mention another option you have that would definitely affect the "texture" of the piece: turning off your phone.
"Electroclash" (taking its name from the annual festival held in NY, now in its second year) is a rather confused, marketing-driven conflation of early-'80s electro, which is basically urban dance music/hiphop, and synthpop, which is Euro-styled new wave rock. These two types of music had the barest of common ground back in the day. Arthur Baker produced "Planet Rock" and then worked with New Order; both types of music use synths and vocoders; that's about it. If electroclash was just DJ music it would go nowhere--it's the "new wave nostalgia" angle (i.e., marketing it to white people) that's selling it this time around. I really don't buy the crap from Electroclash's promoters that "these kids (going to EC parties) are too young to know about Kraftwerk, Nitzer Ebb, etc." It was the music their parents had playing around the house when they were tykes in the 80s. (Well, maybe not Nitzer Ebb.) I guess I'm one of those purists referred to in this Village Voice article. I'll take the Mantronix/Drexciya/Man Parrish/DJ Assault (forward-looking) strain of what i call "electro" over the kitsch-retro, Human-League-by-way-of-Fischerspooner strain any day. I see no reason to coin a term to combine the two genres in the absence of any true innovation. But I realize it's out of my hands.
Addendum: Simon Reynolds covers this subject with his usual compulsive thoroughness here. He thinks the main thing that distinguishes electroclash from electro is vocals, but then criticizes electroclash vocals as pretty thin overall. He also thinks the new music is technologically sprightlier, less plodding than '80s music, and I agree: "There’s a textured intricacy to the rhythm programming and production that testifies to the
technical advances of the last 15 years of digitized dance music, to lessons that can't be unlearned."