Sean Booth quote about being surprised by how similar electronic musicians sound to one another..?

[awepittance]

Does anyone know where to find the quote where Sean Booth was expressing surprise at the fact that so many new music tools are available now to almost everyone yet so many electronic musicians choose to imitate each-other rather than creating a unique sound for themselves? I think it was from at least 5 years ago before Quaristice, maybe during Untilted or before

[YO303]

I don't have a link but i agree 100 percent with him.

 

this is my own quote, it got overlooked ..

 

 

 

"Not sure what grime is and to be honest i dont want to know, the name itself gives me an indication that the genre is not my cup of tea.

 

My comment in this thread will be about music genre branding and how i wish it will all be over by now. This attitude of associating yourself with a genre is blinding musicians and eventually damaging their final product, you cannot go into a studio or computer thinking to yourself "i'm going to make grime or i'm going to make dubstep or i'm going to make blues", thinking in genres restricts your creative output.

 

Now maybe most artists are not that creative or good so the only way for them to make music is to follow a blueprint already perfected by others but i've seen so many talented artists fall in the trap of making music for a genre rather than making whatever comes to mind.

 

In an ideal world musicians should do whatever come to mind and give an honest artistic output, i get that it takes time to find your thing but i feel artists will find their thing much faster if they stop taking the easy way out in making music thats already been done a 1,000 times (dub techno for example). Hell maybe your final product will fall into the genre you initially wanted to be but it will feel more honest, more organic and people see tru that."

 

 

Musicians are getting lazier and lazier, more impatience and more obsessed with fast rise to the top, music is getting shittier and shittier because of it.

[awepittance]

i agree with him too, if anyone finds the exact quote i would be very appreciative.

it sort of goes in line with RDJ's quote of 'too many sheep not enough sheperds'

[auxien]

early on in Tool's career the "all indians, no chiefs" idea came up a few places....shirts, interviews and such i think it was

[whylessness]

This?

 

Maybe if I throw a name at you like Chris Clark, a label mate of yours? Well, to be fair – I don’t listen to it shitloads, but I check out the new stuff. I think because we’ve been at it so long, we can see a flag being flung up where we know it’s third generation Warp or second generation electronic/IDM – I mean I hate that term, when it was coined in the early or mid-nineties, it was already outdated, it was a silly term. Every now and again you hear something; I mean Jackson was nice, but unfortunately it was overused and I heard the shit aspects on TV. Clark’s nice yeah, but in a way it’s a bit too knowing – there’s a blueprint just being used natively that wouldn’t normally be natural, but then I guess some people could say that about us, because Kraftwerk, Eno, Keith LeBlanc and Tangerine Dream had already existed for 15 years before we started doing stuff, so we were pretty late in the day.

Kraftwerk’s probably the reference point for nearly all electronic music really, would you be proud if one day they said Autechre was considered a reference point? It’s hard to say, because it’s all electronic isn’t it? I mean Richard James, when he came out with Didgeridoo, even Locust and people like that were already shaking the ground with new ideas and feelings. But at the same time if you play something like Selected Ambient Works alongside Eno’s Apollo or Music for Films you’ll find complete evidence of the same ideas. It’s not to say they’re being ripped off, it’s just that some people can stumble across the same thing. I mean, let’s face it, we’re all like sheep in a high tech world in that we’ve all got the same gear now, we’ve all heard of DX7s, an MPC or an Apple Mac. It’s a weird world we live in; if you want to be super-cynical about it, we’re all fucking clones - do you know what I mean?

 

source: http://www.barcodezine.com/Autechre%20Interview.htm

[thehauntingsoul]

I try to convey this to people often and fucking nobody understands it. It's like even to the average music consumer the expectation is that when they hear something new it should sound very similar to something they already heard.

[LimpyLoo]

I've been waiting for this thread.

[splesh]

And no one really sounds like Autechre except obsessive fans desperate to emulate their heroes.

[awepittance]

as far as i can tell only a handful of people have tried to make music inspired by AE's post confield period. Probably the most notable is the Machinedrum side project Syndrone. There were a ton of earlier era AE imitators like Arovane (Lp5 era) and others. Future Image and I both did works inspired by the Untilted live set, but there are very few of us out there. I think that's in part why AE change their sound so much, they don't want leagues of imitators out there in essence 'missing the point' of what makes their music so interesting.

[gl0tch]

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote'data-author="Awepittance" data-cid="1935456" data-time="1358743325"><p>

as far as i can tell only a handful of people have tried to make music inspired by AE's post confield period. Probably the most notable is the Machinedrum side project Syndrone. There were a ton of earlier era AE imitators like Arovane (Lp5 era) and others. Future Image and I both did works inspired by the Untilted live set, but there are very few of us out there. I think that's in part why AE change their sound so much, they don't want leagues of imitators out there in essence 'missing the point' of what makes their music so interesting. </p></blockquote>

 

This 1000%

[auxien]

I think that's in part why AE change their sound so much, they don't want leagues of imitators out there in essence 'missing the point' of what makes their music so interesting.

 

i honestly think AE couldn't care less how many imitators there were of them...and definitely not enough to purposefully go 'let's change the sound for this record to keep imitators on their toes!' that just seems...childish. i dunno.

 

it seems to me that they are just musically very creative together and innovation and their changing 'sounds' comes as a byproduct of that.

[awepittance]

the connection i drew might be inaccurate, but Sean has expressed a sort of disdain for people imitating them. I do think when it comes to the really ahead of the curve producers like Aphex, Squarepusher and AE it would be hard to appreciate all the people just copying and doing poorly certain techniques from the music like really fast stuttering drum breaks. i think inevitably you would get tired of the way certain techniques you innovated got rinsed so fast and mostly without soul or finesse by many imitators

FYI, that quote above is not the quote i'm talking about, but sort of close. Autechre seems really keen on Locust, who i think more people on Watmm ought to check out. My friend has an LP of his from the mid 90s that actually sounds a lot like later (analord) period Aphex twin. Guy is definitely an underrated innovator.

[goDel]

I think they most of all hate to copy themselves and don't really care about others. Auxien has a point. Look at how they already progressed early on in their careers. Was that because they were already afraid others would start to copy them? Nah.

 

Looking back at those early nineties it's interesting to see who ended up where. RDJ had a unique sound and lots of talent, but he wasn't the only one. Even within the early R&S group there were others with similar talents but who didn't make the break like RDJ did. Locust being one of them. Personally, I could see Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland and Robert Leiner making similar progressions as well but they just didn't.

[zkom]

This bit's from the 2001 Alex Reynolds Sean Booth interview..

 

 

AR - Sound is growing more and more chaotic -- to run away from imitators?

SB - No, it's not a race, man, you shouldn't think about it like that, that's not the way it is. We're basically just about making things that are new and putting them into the world, and if people are copying the stuff that we used to do, then that's the way it is, you know. I think it's always been like that, really. But, yeah, that's cool. I'm not particularly conscious of what other people are doing when we're doing stuff, I think our stuff would sound like... I think we'd still be making Tri Repetae if we listened to that kind of music, you know what I mean?

 

Also, mushrooms.

 

 

AR - Chiastic Slide vs Tri Repetae, how did you get from TR to CS?

SB - Yeah, I don't know what it was, really. Did a lot of mushrooms that year (laughs). It might have something to do with that, maybe. No idea, really, couldn't say. We had a lot going on in our heads; yeah, a lot of realizations took place, you know, so. But that kind of happens a lot, you know, I think the less sort of methodical and contrived you are the more that happens.

[Zephyr_Nova]

Does anyone know where to find the quote where Sean Booth was expressing surprise at the fact that so many new music tools are available now to almost everyone yet so many electronic musicians choose to imitate each-other rather than creating a unique sound for themselves?

I remember one where he mentions how there are so many combinations of sounds and tools available for electronic music that it should be difficult to make something that sounds much like anyone else unless there's a deliberate effort to do that. The gist was that if someone today wants to make something sound original, it should be almost hard to fail.

[lumpenprol]

i eat lots of mushrooms and now my farts smell like autechre

[awepittance]

Does anyone know where to find the quote where Sean Booth was expressing surprise at the fact that so many new music tools are available now to almost everyone yet so many electronic musicians choose to imitate each-other rather than creating a unique sound for themselves?

I remember one where he mentions how there are so many combinations of sounds and tools available for electronic music that it should be difficult to make something that sounds much like anyone else unless there's a deliberate effort to do that. The gist was that if someone today wants to make something sound original, it should be almost hard to fail.

 

yes this was the quote, what is the source for that?

[Blir]

I know the one you mean Awe. Something is telling me it was from a Sound on Sound interview. I'll dig it up.

[awepittance]

thank you forum mod, you are most helpful

i eat lots of mushrooms and now my farts sound like autechre circa draft

[kirm]

in the fact mag interveiw they say this http://www.factmag.com/2009/01/01/interview-autechre/

 

I get the sense that a lot of your work is concerned with ideas of originality. Fair?

Sean: No..

You’ve been quoted as saying something along the lines of, “Given all the technology that musicians have at their disposal, there’s no reason why anyone should sound the same”…

Sean: I read that on our Wikipedia page – it’s not a quote from us, I don’t know where it comes from. It does sound like something we might say, misquoted [laughs]…But I think where that comes from…

Rob: I think it’s more like, how can people keep repeating the same pattern with the choices of available…

Sean: I mean, I keep getting asked this question, “How come you guys have got into doing guitar music, because so many from your scene have deserted dance music?”. I mean this is mostly from foreign journalists, and people in the fashion. They’ve basically got this idea that, you know, “perhaps you should broaden your horizons a little bit” – and I’m like, that’s just wrong. Making guitar music isn’t broadening your horizons, it’s just narrowing your tonal palette. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to be in a band where we just play six-string guitars?

For us, we get bored listening to the same thing over and over again which is why we don’t make the same thing over and over again.

I mean, why would Band A sound like Band B if they weren’t either both into copying the same thing or one’s just copying the other? Why else would that occur? I bet if you got four untrained musicians and put them in a room with a bunch of gear, eventually they’d come out with some music. And I bet if you got another four and stuck ‘em in the same room with the same gear, they wouldn’t come out with the same music. Everyone’s drawing on the same stuff, unfortunately. It’s like the charts at the moment, it’s full of records that all sound the same to me. I’m sure a lot of young musicians think their music has to sound like that, within really strange parameters…

[Lianne]

I agree with the idea - that electronic artists should sound different given the tools...but I am also tired of any new (more adventurous) electronic artist being called a derivative of Autechre or Aphex or anyone else established like that, just because they utilise glitches or stutters or unusual electronic sounds/rhythms, etc. It's like a poor newer or lesser known artist can't do anything interesting in the arena of dark ambiences, weird electronic rhythms and more alien or machinic music without being slightly condescendingly compared to the big four (Aphex, Squarepusher, Ae, BoC.) One example (a bad one because my brain is mushy today): Richard Devine. He sounds NOTHING like Autehre to me. Yet if music artists really are carbon copies in other genres, or at least sound very similar to thousands of artists before them, that's fine.

[thehauntingsoul]

I'm even willing to give credit to guitar bands since they do have such a limited palette of sounds. Samey electronic music is just disgraceful though. Could use literally any sound our ears are capable of hearing yet everything sounds the same.

 

I guess I just rephrased booths point but it really irks me.

 

 

[Blir]

Samey electronic music is just disgraceful though.

 

I agree, Venetian Snares is shit.

[lumpenprol]

I find VS interesting, and I don't listen to his music much. I think he's a true original (original *something*). Almost seems like an idiot savant of sorts...

[TwiddleBot]

Honestly I wouldn't slag imitators per se, we all start from somewhere and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (great way to learn too).

 

Early Autechre sounds a lot like AFX. Arovane started off sounding a lot like AE but went in a different direction and it's hard to say what would have happened had he stuck around.

 

What annoys me about some imitators is that they don't evolve, they only get so far with the discography then decide to recreate one part of it over and over because it's safe. It's like they've found a happy nostalgic place and are content to sit there poking the same neural pathways over and over. There was a while where peeps I knew who didn't really get into newer Autechre would send me spinoffs of Amber/Tri Repetae era stuff.. things that were not really all that memorable and oddly, not even a candle to the risk taking and energy of the originals.