Vulnerability & mechanics in Xela's 'For Frosty Mornings...'

Electronic music fans will no doubt have come across the way of categorising their favourite artists and albums not by trendy sub-genres but by the associations artists and listeners make with that music. In her excellent recent book on the aesthetics of experimental electronic music, Listening Through the Noise, Joanna Demers devotes a whole chapter to the idea of musicians and listeners interpreting music through some external concept, of the music signifying some external thing or working as a metaphor. As Demers points out, futurism is one concept that often features in electronic music discourse; another, ironically (or perhaps inevitably) enough, is nostalgia, famously exemplified in Boards of Canada's evocation of 1970s educational TV shows.

The work of metaphors such as these goes beyond giving the music some 'meaning', in an intellectual sense, for the listener; it can, if the listener is receptive, play an active role in shaping the way we listen to the music (and determine its 'success' or fulfilment for us).

Since discovering Xela's For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights two years ago, I've always been struck by the album's emotional impact, which seems to wash over you as you listen. The album, with its minimal glitchy hip-hop and analogue synths, exudes what Boomkat's reviewer calls a “breathtaking melancholy”; Mark Martelli on Pitchfork described the album's tracks way back in 2003 as evoking a wandering familiarity and, impressively, as being “clear in their emotion, focused and difficult to misread”. I think the focused emotional expressions in this, Xela's first album at the age of 21, are created on some tracks in part via particular metaphors through which the listener interprets a track's different musical elements.

Take the contrast between the analogue synthesisers and the beats – this is a contrast that goes from sonic to metaphorical. The beats are of the 'click-n-cut' variety, with short high-frequency glitches interspersing lower, fuzzy 'snare' tones and trails of electrical-spark bass drum patterns. Xela contrasts these drums with long analogue synth chords and meandering melodies that often give the impression of woodwind instruments (in itself an external association). Often the drums begin the track, for example in 'The Long Walk Home At Midnight', setting a particular timbral & spatial frame, as well as a musical key (based around the pitches of the drum parts); we 'get our bearings' of the track based around these drums. When the long synth pads enter the track this frame is compromised somewhat, since we now have a musical element of a different timbre and key. It's also of a seemingly different (artificial) space, as the synths are drenched in reverb while for the most part the drums remain dry and immediate – the latter appear 'in front' of everything else.

The evolution of each musical part adds to this contrast. Xela's drums, like much late '90s / early '00s glitch, remain constant; they sound throughout the piece and rarely alternate or offer up fills and 'drum rolls'. The synths too are repetitive, with thematic elements building upon themselves slowly but surely (something I'll discuss later in its own right), but they do not continuously sound – the chord fades in (an important aspect since this immediately differentiates it from the immediate attack of the drums), allowed to sound, then fades out into reverb. Of course, the drums technically don't continuously sound either as they're made up of a number of short pieces of sound that start and stop in a measured fashion. But the impression given by the drums is of periodic continuity, whereas the impression given by the synths, at least the longer pads, is of a lack of rhythm, of stillness.

From this sonic contrast comes a metaphorical contrast that relies upon listener interpretation and association.* As listeners, we know that the music has been created by a human being. We also know that most if not all of the musical sound has been created or put together via non-natural means – a computer, most likely a software multi-track sequencer, electronic methods of sound production embedded in synthesisers. The notion of the robotic musician, a long-standing trope in electronic music, cannot be easily avoided.

Yet Xela's album is, I think, undeniably emotional, evoking over its 50-odd minutes a brooding and pining melancholy. Xela doesn't try to struggle against the robotic associations of electronic music (and so-called Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) in particular) but instead shapes those associations for his own ends to achieve this emotional effect. The glitchy drum loops of each track offer themselves up, with crisp mostly-reverb-free clarity, to be associated with what I'd characterise as clockwork mechanics. The whirring wind-up rhythmic patterns suggest interlocking movements, of drum parts connecting and setting each other off in a chain; the timbres evince disparate artificiality, of mechanical parts working together to make a whole; and the mostly dry spatial quality of these parts imply mechanised accuracy and immediacy. These associations aren't fixed or guaranteed, but I think there's a strong case that they're encouraged. The genre conventions of IDM and its own associations make mechanistic metaphors likely. Within the album itself, the middle track 'An Abandoned Robot' certainly adds to the allure of a mechanistic interpretation, with its electronic test-tone shrieks, metallic clangs and interference-style fuzz.

If this association is established in the listener's mind, what do we then make of the warm, reverb-drenched and (often seemingly) non-rhythmic synth parts? The sonic contrast here is crucial to setting up the metaphorical contrast. The drums often dominate the track, in terms of volume and frequency of presence, while the synths stay in the background, fading in and out. When the synths do sound, they inevitably fall back into the pristine silence of the track; this silence, often established earlier in the track by the presence of the dry drums, comprises a very low noise floor that itself evokes artificiality – the noise floor is unblemished by ambient sound of the world outside the computer. The synths appear only to vanish into this 'silent' noise-floor while the drums maintain their pristine mechanical delivery and refuse to vanish. The drums seem like they could go on forever, and their stopping towards the end of the track feels like a deliberate intervention; the synths are in a constant decay, and will eventually decompose completely no matter what any intervener attempts.

The synths, in order words, appear vulnerable to the listener. Despite being artificial themselves, they possess a human quality the drums lack, that of mortality. This mortality works precisely in relation to the mechanism of the drums, which appear immortal but consequently non-human, non-natural. When the two elements sound together, I think Western-influenced audiences hear a metaphor play out of human vulnerability juxtaposed with industrialism – of human individualism next to monotonous standardised machines. And what's key is that the human disappears: the synths sound only to release and fade while the regularity and quantity of the drum elements ensure their survival. The importance of memory to music is evident in this juxtaposition. The clockwork drum loop, sounding as it does continuously and seemingly forever, 'remain' in the present as a metaphorical material; memory of the drum having always been playing cements the impression of remaining. The synth chord, however, 'disappears' and thus encourages the listener to use memory differently, as a way to try to predict the chord's re-emergence. When it does re-emerge, though, we correctly predict it'll disappear again. The synths are doomed to always decaying.

This interpretation of metaphorical associations ultimately contributes to our hearing For Frosty Mornings... as expressing a pining melancholy. Xela creates this melancholy by having the most humanly-associable elements of the music perpetually vanish in the mechanical clicks-n-cuts of the drums. As listeners we hear this act of vanishing through the metaphors of vulnerability and unfeeling clockwork mechanics; the human elements we keep being promised fall away, leaving only artificial clockwork.

You might ask how this is any different from the repeating structure of a rock song, where the drums continue and reverbed guitar chords fade out? Timbre is crucial here. Rock drumming is certainly often dominant and continuous, but it's not usually made up of clicks, beeps, whirrs and glitches; reverbed electric guitar itself often fails to sound vulnerable, precisely because of its timbre (and heteronormative masculine associations). What also sets music like Xela's apart are its external associations as established by genre and compositional method. The paradox of human composer and computerised compositional tools provides the framework within which these metaphors of vulnerability and clockwork mechanism can play out; not only does rock not have this frame to draw on, it has its own frame, of the physicality and visualisation of human performance, which electronic music often works against.

Therefore, while the pining melancholy of For Frosty Mornings... is undoubtedly related in part to the harmonic & temporal structure of the songs (with their minor keys, hushed tone and lack of romantic-style triumphalism), I argue the external associations with mechanism and vulnerability create a meaning for the listener that provides a lens through which to interpret the album when listening.

Crucially, however, despite my description of the drums as dominating the listening frame, continuing while the synths fade, the sound of the drumming is not in itself malevolent. In fact, a lot of the music on For Frosty Mornings... has an air of naivety about it. This speaks to another external association provoked by Xela's album, one relating very much to popular perceptions of experimental electronic music... that'll be the next post.

* I don't want to imply that the sonic contrast is 'really-existent' in the music while the metaphor floats outside it somehow; in fact I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that music can hold material properties which can then be compared and contrasted. As Demers herself argues, “material as a physical, tangible or repeatable object simply does not exist in music” (p. 64). Musical elements are not physical objects. The sonic contrast relies upon listener interpretation as much as the metaphor, just not in a conscious cognitive way