BT

[Friendly Foil]

"Think of instrumental music as like books, and vocal music as like films.  While it's easier to watch a film than read a book, and that's the way most people usually prefer to learn stories, it's conversely easier to write a book than to make a film, so I have a lot of respect for filmmakers."

 

Are you saying what I think you're saying? That music without vocals are like books, vocal music is like films, and that making a book is easier than a film?

[cear]

L O L

[BCM]

the only music with vocals i like is Lynyrd Skynyrd

[sweepstakes]

I didn't say anything about vocals. I like plenty of music with vocals.

[sweepstakes]

I just think BT sucks and I don't believe it's my "fault" for feeling this way. The same way I think Pizza Hut sucks. There is just better pizza out there FFS and I don't want to waste my time or money on the shitty stuff, as long as I have the choice.

[pierlu]

I'm curious, what are people here's opinions on BT's music? He seems to have a similar thing going on (creating a vast array of different styles of painstakingly built up music, often from scratch by programming or making electronics).

 

Yeah he may be, but I think he's after the wow factor more than exploiting it for musical expression.

 

I don't like the kind of music he's after, but I liked the Antikhitera Mechanism track someone posted before, the opening melody is wonderful. Even tho the rest of the track seems to be thought as a soundtrack, not like a musical piece on its own.

[sweepstakes]

BT is known for using a production technique he calls the stutter edit. This technique consists of taking a small fragment (or fragments) of sound and then repeating it rhythmically. BT was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for his song "Somnambulist (Simply Being Loved)". This song was recognized as using the largest number of vocal edits in a song (6,178 edits).

 

THis reminds me of when the Moby track 'Thousand' was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having 'the highest BPM in recorded music'... When it just sounds like just cranked the BPM knob a few times over an otherwise uneventful techno track...

 

 

 

Ah well; I suppose he could've feasibly been the first one to do it.

Have to say, this track was fucking awesome!*

 

*it was 2003 when I heard it, I was 13 and knew very little about how electronic music was made.

Fixed.

 

Hmm, that was the same year Draft 7.30 came out....

Deploy cheap trick to an extreme degree on a lukewarm pop song: Sell tons of records, get a world record entry.

Create a mindbending, complex, mysterious record that references: Sell tens of thousand records to some nerds and give them something to talk about on the internet.

 

Must be the hair.

 

Oh wait, you were talking about the Moby track. Nevermind.

[encey]

also on a related note, while I do like lyrics & singing in general in some music, I fucking hate it when it's completely sliced up. it is just distracting, and does not add anything musically. people get this idea that IDM/glitch is all about stutter edits. it's not. those who have actually listened to autechre (not just gantz graf) and other glitchy idm type of stuff know that.

 

[xfxf]

I liked some of BT's works way before I got into IDM, so the music holds some kind of nostalgic value for me. I remember being introduced to his music by some televised interview, though, where I became fascinated with the intelligence, obsession and detail he portrayed as a producer, but I was like 12 at the time so who knows how bloody accurate that really was.

 

I do remember "This Binary Universe" being introduced as some kind of genre-changing IDM mega album and having major lols when I heard it for the first time, though.

 

Probably the best description I've heard of BT are that his albums are more demo pieces for his production services/abilities...

Edited September 8, 2012 by xf

[RichieBees]

if you dont like bt youre a fucking stupid prick who doesnt even know anything about music because its not mainstream enough for you?! ok. im not even with bt im with virgin u get better fiber optic speeds : /

[ryancolecreate]

I saw BT once live on accident. His music is really really overproduced and very lacking in anything interesting or original.

 

He played a really overblown set that no one danced to, and then literally came out on a fucking trapeze during the only good DJ's set, effectively ensuring that no one would dance. And he looks like a frat boy tool box.

Edited September 8, 2012 by slightlydrybeans

[encey]

A frat boy would never frost his hair.

 

I also think that most of the uses of 'overproduced' in this thread end up meaning something different than they should, in order to really get at what makes BT's music less than compelling. The problem is not that he uses lots of effects and cuts and processing and such. That cuts across good and bad electronic music. Arguably, autechre's music is even more 'overproduced' than BT's in this sense.

 

But autechre's music is better because it's better composed, or sequenced, or arranged or whatever. In particular, I think they have a much more interesting and funky sense of rhythm than BT (or Richard Devine or Otto Von Schirach or Telefon Tel Aviv, for that matter -- all equally 'overproduced' artists in both senses of the word I am drawing out here). Autechre know how to rush and pull back on the beat, when to drop a snare, how to do more surprising fills than triplets and sixty fourth-note snare rushes. They must just be better at 'humanizing' their beats, whatever that involves. Because you feel the beat of their tracks in a much more visceral way than you do with those other guys.

 

So I thnk it has little to do with plugins and everything to do with 'feel,' for lack of a better word.

[sweepstakes]

if you dont like bt youre a fucking stupid prick who doesnt even know anything about music because its not mainstream enough for you?! ok. im not even with bt im with virgin u get better fiber optic speeds : /

:angry:

 

I don't even know what "overproduced" means. The first time I heard that criticism was from my dad after listening to Orbital's "In Sides", which basically makes no fucking sense in that context.

[MDF]

BT makes music that I find utterly bland, the only other adjective I could apply would be cheesy. Plenty of people make what I consider to be bland music, but few seem to be praised as much as he does for being innovative. I just dont get why anybody considers his music innovative, unless their only other listening experience was Cliff Richards discography.

[acid1]

[youtubehd]xr9Ci-pO1pg[/youtubehd]

[auxien]

BT Studio Tour (link: BT Studio Tour)

text: BT Studio Tour (alt text: a Studio Tour of the studio musician BT of the BT studio. a tour.)

[NewSchoolScience]

Jesus, this guy is so pretentious.

[ignatius]

that studio tour is a bit weird. does he do sound for tv or something? 

those albums he is promoting in the video are both ambient music for adult contemporary market or something. they're on yotuube. sounds like BT and maybe that's just how he sounds. idk. i've only ever heard that track from the 90s w/whale sounds in it and some stuff my nephew played for me when he was like 12. i guess BT produced some backstreet boys and justin timberlake tracks. the vocal editing was quite complex and had some interesting dsp. 

anyway...

[Wunderbar]

how does a guy like that have such a studio?

[exitonly]

2 hours ago, auxien said:

BT Studio Tour (link: BT Studio Tour)

text: BT Studio Tour (alt text: a Studio Tour of the studio musician BT of the BT studio. a tour.)

here are my notes-

what is "an experimental record". 

really glad he didnt bore me with his deep knowledge of acoustics, which normally required a 4+ year degree to understand. prime numbers tho.

oh he later clarifies it as "the idm record". ok.

points to modular - "why would anyone have something that looks this complicated?". i dont know? maybe ask a million youtube synthfuencers that show up every day? not sure if he thinks no one has seen anything like this before or what.

hates the rx1, but unfortunately he had to keep it

"cornucopia of awesome"

seems like a chunk of this gear is inaccessible. kind of a hoarding situation going on.

"sick how this powers up"

in summary- when someone is a complete synth nerd but also a 90s trance bro tool, it's hard to wrap my head around. but i guess that's the kind of person that needs to exist to make that kind of music. kudos to him for having a super successful, long running career doing it.  i will have to track down this "idm record" and see what he thinks that means.

 

6 minutes ago, Wunderbar said:

how does a guy like that have such a studio?

he was pretty big in the late 90s if i recall correctly. there was a set of people like him, paul oakenfold, josh wink etc that made epic trance type crap for mollied college kids. at the time Border's bookstore's "electronica" section was 90% this and stuff like Mushroom Jazz and then maybe a aphex cd if you were lucky.

[exitonly]

i think this says it all

[auxien]

42 minutes ago, exitonly said:

points to modular - "why would anyone have something that looks this complicated?". i dont know? maybe ask a million youtube synthfuencers that show up every day? not sure if he thinks no one has seen anything like this before or what.

lol yeah. loved the scene: 'yeah there's the joke that all these guys with huge modular rigs are always unpatched because it's just for show, but that's not the case for me even tho my rig is unpatched just because i totally just finished a patch and unpatched everything after and put all the cords away so tidy just because i'm like that' pan to perfect patch cords in holder that has obviously never been touched after being set up by an intern

also made me wonder about the timing of this video. seems to have been posted pretty recently but the video quality is pretty shit, i assumed this was a video from like ~10 years ago or something and the whole studio was new and maybe he'd not properly started using it?

also the fucking speakers are insane. cannot fathom why the fuck the backing wall between them absolutely had to be at that exact slope but what do i know man, what do i know. probably to offset the diffuser baffles infused with prime numbers which makes sound reflect in ways that could rupture the Gaian planetary noosphere if unchecked with opposing 11 degree reflections. 

52 minutes ago, exitonly said:

i will have to track down this "idm record" and see what he thinks that means.

it's gotta be the 'new age' version of Intelligent Dance Music that shows up in various places. the two alternate realities of IDM got mixed up in this reality i guess. some of that Mandela Effect shit maybe.

[exitonly]

ok yeah i found this "idm" record which sounds like he loaded up a bunch of richard device presets and loaded the entire native instruments orchestra sample sets and dabbled around. Steve Hauschildt is about as far as I will go in this direction.

[exitonly]

ok im going down a rabbit hole now . I found this thing which I guess was sold as an nft https://btmusic.com/genesisjson/ . Pretty amazing quote on the page

As a child, I grew up with a grandfather clock that was passed from many generations ago to my father. This clock imbued in me a deep awareness of the passage of time. I’m reminded still as an adult, time is our one and only finite resource.

 

... yep. the one and only, aside from, i dont know, oil.  this guy gives zoolander a run for his money

 

[exitonly]

from what i can tell this nft thing is 24 hours of plonky piano along with a BT silhouette in front of some waves, behind some fish.  The NFT sold at auction in may 2021 for $212.7k 

https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/genesis.json-24884

 

I wonder what it's worth today? must be a lot!