murmurations

In the last post I looked at how metaphors attached to different musical elements can shape the way we listen to a whole track. Specifically I looked at Xela's gorgeous debut album For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights , arguing that its music conveys the notion of human vulnerability juxtaposed with mechanised artificiality. This might imply that the mechanised part of that, the clockwork-style drums, somehow 'defeats' the vulnerable or empathetic elements, reigning over them in some cruel way. But what's so striking about this album is that the drums display little malevolence whatsoever. In fact there's a pleasing naivete to the drums and the synths, something quite emblematic of this style and period of IDM. This naivete is actually part of the emotional impact of Xela's early work; the pining melancholy I described in the last post is made up of musical metaphors, and this is one of them. The naivete of For Frosty Mornings... of course stems ...

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 mu...