luke vibert Not giving much of a shit

[Lianne]

It's all become become very postmodern and ironic and people unfortunately don't give much of a shit about creating something special anymore. What's wrong with aiming to create brilliant, original, polished, ambitious, affecting music? Why is that something to be embarrassed about?

 

I know I may well get blasted for this post, but it'd be good to hear some interesting points, rather than the unimaginative, cynical - (everyone does cynical all the time now on the internet - it's boring) - grunts that these things usually attract. Artists like Luke Vibert, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares and Aphex Twin (yes, even him) are so "I don't give a fuck" and nostalgic and lazy and magpie like in their attitude at the moment that they've disappeared up their own collective asses.

[jeremymacgregor87]

I can only agree in the sense that Just a Souvenir is very "I don't give a fuck" compared to Ultravisitor and even Hello Everything

 

also, I think We Hear You is a bit "I don't give a fuck"

 

...and what recent Aphex were you referring to exactly?

 

 

maybe you're just not looking hard enough

[Guest spraaaa]

i agree with op, but i kind of think -- stop speculating like this and do something. find artists you like, support them, play them to friends, make your own tunes etc. right now i'm just kind of fascinated by how many different conflicting attitudes can be expressed by music and more into listening to what's good than analyzing the shitty mood of the '00s.

 

i do think electronic music is at a place where it can evolve, via dubstep and stuff that's pushing rhythms and structures in different ways, but the mood of a lot of that stuff is straight up dead. maybe the noise scene can help, i think groups like astral social club have a bit more of a ravey mood but they need to get together with the beats.

 

but if you want any kind of analysis, and this is more dance in general than idm, same reason why hip hop sucks in 96.

[Guest chax]

i definitely get the gist of what you're saying, and i don't think it's just with the popular IDM artists but with everyone involved in independent music. it is now "cool" to not care about anything

 

i believe these are the actual effects of hipsterdom, and the associated culture of apathy. hipsters have destroyed culture as we know it. check this out: https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

[Guest camoqp]

maybe you are looking in all the wrong places.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

What's wrong with aiming to create brilliant, original, polished, ambitious, affecting music? Why is that something to be embarrassed about?

 

Because of fans like watmm.

[Guest chax]

What's wrong with aiming to create brilliant, original, polished, ambitious, affecting music? Why is that something to be embarrassed about?

 

Because of fans like watmm.

 

what does this mean exactly? people here aren't as obsessed as other people at other sites. if you want to see really insane stuff, check out the nine inch nails forum

[karmakramer]

It's a quantity over quality argument... I don't mind the concept of an artist putting their own lives before the fans, because I think that their output will be far more impressive / honest. IDM is dead and that's unfortunately all this is about. If a permenant scene was going to happen the 90's would have started it.

[karmakramer]

That's what's exciting about the future : )

[karmakramer]

Innovation will come, I'm thinking in the realm of virtual reality... Where music is no longer restricted to stereos and speakers but instead will exist as a living artificial organism inside the mind, within new worlds and dimensions.

[Guest chax]

Innovation will come, I'm thinking in the realm of virtual reality... Where music is no longer restricted to stereos and speakers but instead will exist as a living artificial organism inside the mind, within new worlds and dimensions.

 

YES! this is it exactly. probably within the next ten years the next major breakthrough will be able to beam music DIRECTLY 'inside your head'. we can already kind of do this. so you could even maybe go to a 'noiseless' concert, and then play actual instruments...and now my brain has exploded

[joshuatxuk]

It'll sort itself out, every generation has had it's gripes. People hated 70s prog and adult pop, 80s new wave and hair metal, grunge fizzled in the mid-90s, "electronica" and big beat came and went, etc. No one looks back at the the early 2000s and think "Limp Bizkit sucked and ruined everything" because they're just a historical joke now. Memorable artists get their due eventually. I'm not a big fan of someone like M.I.A. but at the same time I think it's a good sign music like that is popular with mainstream artists. IDM influenced critically acclaimed albums like Kid A and Vespertine.

 

I'm worry about apathy and superficial attitudes, including the whole hipster phenomenon, overrated bedroom producers and the fact that kids listen to mp3s flippantly on ipods, but it'll all pass. The future will be interesting.

[dr lopez]

Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesisers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved. Koan Software is probably the best of these systems, allowing a composer to control, not one, but one hundred and fifty, musical and sonic parameters, within which the computer then improvises (as wind improvises the wind chimes).

The works I have made with this system symbolise, to me, the beginning of a new era of music. Until a hundred years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances, and made it possible to hear them identically, over and over again.

But now, there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music, and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations — you can hear it when and where you want.

I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: "You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?

 

eno can see into the future.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

What's wrong with aiming to create brilliant, original, polished, ambitious, affecting music? Why is that something to be embarrassed about?

 

Because of fans like watmm.

 

what does this mean exactly? people here aren't as obsessed as other people at other sites. if you want to see really insane stuff, check out the nine inch nails forum

 

I don't think it's a matter of obsession, more one of overly inflated exigence. There is no conventional rapport in IDM between the artist and the fans. Actually no fandom at all.

 

When i was little and i liked crap music and i had no internet and i bought one CD every 6 months and i listened to every track back to back and became a fan, it was a more organic relationship. Even in the context of my low standards at the times, those records had flaws, had risible goofs, yet for those 3-4 tracks i love, i was voluntarily a bit deluded in their favor. There was an euphoric stupidity to listening to music and to professing my appreciation for it.

 

I've lost that to a degree and i'm not even amongst the more hardcore cases. The problem with IDM is that by glorifying (even unintentionally) intellect amongst all things, both in the producing and receiving of music, and through endless meteoric irony in your public persona, you engender a very restrictive musical environment for yourself. You HAVE to be clever, you HAVE to put that sequence 5 times through a max patch, you HAVE to SURPRISE everybody everytime. The problem isn't that IDM has set the bar too high for itself, it's that that it created a feedback loop of SETTING THE BAR ITSELF BEING THE BAR. Maybe the artists sometimes feel like picking up a guitar and singing a love song. Of course that most probably will end in failure, as Flashbulb's latest opus has shown, but maybe, just maybe, it might end in pure win. Of course none of these guys is about to take that risk, beyond make a little throwaway joke track or something (like snares and squarepusher do). But no serious intention and emotion may be invested in something that's not a baroque landscape of max patches. Of course, i'm exaggerating, but sometimes the responses do reach pretentiousness critical mass. I saw the fermium thread yesterday. Oh my lol. WHO GIVES A SHIT IF I DOESN'T HAVE LAYERS YOU ONLY HEAR AR THE 800th LISTEN?!

1. listen to it more, maybe it's a 801st listen thing

2. expression is what it is, all of art and especially music is VERY much about framing emotion, moods and states of mind, so, in a non-sterile world with a temporal continuum, night-and-day cycle, and the possibility of moods shifts or disruptive day-to-day events, IMMEDIACY is definitely a luxury that artists crave. The sad thing is, IDM artists cannot afford said immediacy.

 

Maybe they're getting old, aphex has a kid... you don't feel like flaunting your cock as much. But IDM fans and their culture of cascading disappointment definitely don't help.

[xyrofen]

I like to think whatever Autechre puts out always pushes things. I look forward to the hopeful next BoC album and AFX album.

 

Just a thought.

 

Dr. Lopez's post is interesting.

[Guest Calx Sherbet]

well, richard did say the released stuff isn't as good as the stuff he doesn't share. it's not as special to him

[Candiru]

I definitely agree with the OP that the entire hipster movement cannot end soon enough.

 

I guess some artists are afraid of being sincere, because when you put your honest ideas that carry real emotional weight out for people to judge, it hurts if people ridicule them. This is why hipsters suck so much. They are afraid of committing, so they churn out tired ironic bullshit. A "subculture" of absolute pussies.

 

Luckily not everyone is like this, and I think the artists with subforums on this site are too old/too smart to have the hipster attitude. They never really liked being in the public eye anyway, which is actually a sign of intelligence.

[joshuatxuk]

I definitely agree with the OP that the entire hipster movement cannot end soon enough.

 

I guess some artists are afraid of being sincere, because when you put your honest ideas that carry real emotional weight out for people to judge, it hurts if people ridicule them. This is why hipsters suck so much. They are afraid of committing, so they churn out tired ironic bullshit. A "subculture" of absolute pussies.

 

Luckily not everyone is like this, and I think the artists with subforums on this site are too old/too smart to have the hipster attitude. They never really liked being in the public eye anyway, which is actually a sign of intelligence.

 

That's why I fucking hate Girl Talk, at least back in 2002 the mash-ups 2 Many DJ's did used decent and obscure tracks they liked in their mixes, not just hip-hop acappellas over hooks from 90s alternative rock songs.

 

As for IDM and electronic music in general, there will be those trying to reach the broadest audience possible (I feel that way about Benn Jordan for example), decent stuff following a recent trend (i.e. Flying Lotus/J Dilla intimidators) and the few really experimental and unique trying to do something new. The latter will be respected in the end.

[xyrofen]

well, richard did say the released stuff isn't as good as the stuff he doesn't share. it's not as special to him

 

As stupid as it sounds. I hope someone steals his harddrive and leaks all his stuff, with evidence that it's his, some day. Although... a lot of his personal favorite unreleased stuff probably isn't even recorded in any digital form. bleh

[Lianne]

There's some really interesting replies here...

 

People are right to point out that 'hipster' bands and fans who are afraid of sincerity are the main criminals in this whole thing. They were probably what I really had in mind, rather than the other artists mentioned - but while Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and Vibert will always be infinitely better than these awful specimens - who can offer nothing other than a faint, fashionable, trashy sarcastic smile - I think their latest output feels like it's a bit 'in inverted commas' if you like; it's got a nostalgic wink to it and it lacks the raw emotion and invention that it once contained. (Just my opinion - and it's probably too soon to be saying this, what with it only having occurred over one or two albums.)

 

Perhaps it's understandable, what with the sentimental "listen to hear how I feel!" mush of pop music. But is it a worthwhile reaction? And like somebody said, it's now hip to love the worst of pop music, though of course not genuinely.

 

Luke Saibot, I hear what you're saying - but I think you're coming at this from a different perspective, perhaps. I'm all for people dedicating themselves to MAX/MSP (I know nothing about it, though) and aiming to produce something challenging, or simply getting out a guitar and singing. The means are irrelevant: I just want the aims of creating something elegant, terrifying, beautiful, sublime - whatever adjective you want - to stop being so unfashionable. Not that artists have ever consciously 'aimed' towards creating great music - they just made what they made to the best of their ability - but now, even if ambition or sincerity is so much as sniffed at by the hipster artist or writer, it is ridiculed or snuffed out.

[Dan C]

at all the bollocks in this thread about hipsters. You're all joking right?

[BobDobalina]

This thread is stupid, everything people are complaining about here is a byproduct of the times, give kids information overload via every sort of telescreen, diminish the value of the individual in society, blah blah blah, politics, blah blah blah... voila, apathy and indifference.

[The Green Kingdom]

I may be in the minority, but I love what Squarepusher has done with his last couple releases (especially Just a Souvenir) in terms of expanding the limits of what you can do within "idm", pop and rock music. The mind-blowing musicianship is always there along with the melodies, I consider what he is doing the modern-day prog (in a good way). In no way would I consider it lazy!

[six]

I may be in the minority, but I love what Squarepusher has done with his last couple releases (especially Just a Souvenir) in terms of expanding the limits of what you can do within "idm", pop and rock music. The mind-blowing musicianship is always there along with the melodies, I consider what he is doing the modern-day prog (in a good way). In no way would I consider it lazy!

 

I haven't really liked the last couple Squarepusher releases but I agree with your point. I think my personal tastes have begun to slowly shift from pushing things weirder and crazier to embracing the past and putting a new spin on it in a non-ironic way.

 

A few years ago, I always wanted newer,stranger, more creative, until I kind of hit a wall with Confield. I adore that album but since then nobody has really been able to push it further while remaining enjoyable to listen to. Nowadays the stuff I love references old folk and psychedelic music, like Bibio and Broadcast/Focus Group, or with the wonky scene it's throwbacks to my love of hip hop and video games in the early 90s.

 

I think Saibot put it very well that this was a genre that by very definition was bound to hit a wall at some point. The glory days of IDM have come and gone and all we can do as listeners is embrace people that may not be necessarily be pushing the envelope as much for the sake of it, but are still just making great music.

[acid1]

Its easy to get lazy with IDM cuz it usually is hard as fuck to make if done correctly.