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 ...

As a way of inaugurating this blog, I thought it'd be good to explore one of the issues that prompted me to set up a blog in the first place: prevailing attitudes towards experimental electronic music (EEM). One interesting thing about these attitudes is they actually provide a useful way of linking together various disparate genres and styles (which has the handy bonus effect of giving this blog some coherence!). From the glitchy degraded techno of Autechre to the calm drones of Chihei Hatakeyama, from the field recording-based work of Francisco Lopez to the funky IDM-dubstep of Ital Tek, maybe we should be surprised at the consistency of attitudes to different forms of electronic music (though of course reactions aren't homogeneous, and certain attitudes are more prevalent with some styles rather than others). By 'prevailing attitudes' I don't necessarily mean common instinctive reactions of listeners to such music. So for instance, I'm not going to disc...