murmurations

I've been wanting to write about Jan Bang for a while but despite having it in the pipeline for weeks there's still more I'd like to explore before drawing strong conclusions (plus it turns out university requires work too!). In particular there's been some academic work on musical ontology recently that I think might be relevant. But for now, some thoughts on Bang's ...and poppies from Kandahar . (Have a listen to bits of the album here ) What I find so exciting about this album is Bang's collective approach to sampling, field recording and found sounds. First off, there's a real physicality to the snatched recordings in each track, achieved largely through an emphasis on or 'sounding' of the production process of the recordings. So the layering of samples/recordings is made quite obvious to us, with different elements having quite different EQs, volumes and spatiality. The nature of their recording is also seemingly-deliberately man...

In the realm of beat-based electronic music (acknowledging the beat-beatless distinction can be pretty arbitrary these days), one development that's been really exciting is the Los Angeles 'beat scene' , largely comprising young producers, working broadly-speaking from an instrumental/abstract hip-hop aesthetic. The best of these LA artists are genuinely experimenting with timbre and rhythm and their combination. This seems to be one of the main driving ideas for these musicians; as one of these new producers, Baths, puts it, “[t]he crazier it is, the more people are into it”. One of my favourite labels to emerge from this scene is Leaving Records (I was first mesmerised about a year and a half ago by dak's standthis ). The head of the label is Matthewdavid, whose album Outmind just came out on Brainfeeder (have a listen to it here ). I get the impression Matthewdavid is considered one of the more innovative and 'out there' producers to be linked to the L...

How much do our culturally-acquired preconceptions of of music shape our listening? It's pretty clear, I think, that our socialisation has a lot to do with the kind of beliefs we hold about music (this needs to be the case for any notion of 'music' to get off the ground, since not all human societies have this specific notion). As we grow up within our societies, we're taught explicitly or implicitly what music is made up of in terms of both its creation and realisation. So we learn (at least in Western society) that music is created usually by individuals through the use of a score and is then realised through certain objects called instruments when humans interact with those objects in a certain way. These ideas aren't fixed in the essence of the concept 'music'; they are socially-legitimised beliefs constituting the 'right' view of music, a collection of shared norms of (listening and creating) behaviour. So when you hear the sound of piano n...

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...