To appreciate the nature of Music Technology today one needs to look in all sorts of places. Outside research confines, one finds that the combination of music and electronic technology has evolved into a cultural experience more complex than would have been thought possible. Few people could have articulated the kinds of musical events that now flourish and which depend heavily on certain characteristics of electro-acoustic sound production. Some twenty or so years ago, the vision music technology fostered was relatively simple. Amid a musical scene in flux, technology offered to help the composer make a uniquely contemporary statement about a musical future. One that, for the most part, was still a descendant of western musical thinking, at least, as it had coalesced around the middle of this century.
This view of music technology continues because technology in general is future driven. The problem, of course, is which future. But this is now all part of the hype associated with technological marketing, the fact that it triggers an almost incongruous pile of emotions and criticisms is something for the consumer to resolve. Something like a wary enthusiasm is frequently the mood. What, if anything, we have come to realise, is that music technology needs to be tested in some kind of musical arena before it's value can be truly assessed. This usually requires the efforts of many like-minded musicians.
When you think about it, musical production linked to a general technology is destined to be problematic. No musical instrument in history has had its relevance determined by global industries variously disinterested in the production of music. Perhaps the piano is almost in that category because for its viability, it depends on the fruits of such technologies as heavy industry, international trade and marketing. Music comes under Marketing.
What was extremely difficult to grasp several decades ago was how and to what degree technology would change music. Anyone could have imagined that the sound would change but how would people respond to it? Suppose the sounds radically departed from past musical practices? Technology may appear to be neutral with respect to musical style, genre, history, status and content but it deviously mediates, distorts and bends, towards itself, everything within it's sphere of penetration.
From the 1960s onwards, music technology has been essential to youth cultural development and participation in technological evolution is frequently and conveniently the domain of the young. Consider how many 60 year olds there might be hacking code with unbridled enthusiasm for 30 hours straight. More likely, by the time anyone reaches that age, they can employ 20 year olds to do that. So with technology, you get a window of opportunity, that tends to close when you are not spending 60-75% of your day actively engaged in it. And as a consequence, young people, left to their own devices, often come up with interesting and relevant projects.
So when we begin to stir the contemporary music pot with these kinds of ingredients, it not surprising that it is anything but technically and stylistically homogeneous. Of course, this is precisely the kind of cultural climate a non-specific music production system is likely to encourage and flourish in. That was a difficult vision to focus on several decades ago. Then things looked rosy but mono-thematic. Technology was the new direction in music even if no one had an idea what that direction was. Composers for the most part produced music that sounded like it really should have been for orchestra because that was their underlying mind set. In short, that nascent music technology was shackled to prevailing traditions and their attendant theories and had no unique cultural context.
However, in recent times, music of the Rave/Techno/Dance culture has emerged as slightly different from prevailing modes of musical expression in Western society. In some ways, the scene resembles a context from a different culture altogether. Of course, this culture is too complex to explain adequately here, so I'll confine the rest of this discussion to illuminating its essential musical traits. In passing, however, it is worth noting that the culture should be viewed as distinct in many important ways from the so called Rock music industry which continues to whinge about being in hard times. While both groups may be lumped together as Pop culture, there are some profound differences. I will touch on these in due course.
To begin with you have to appreciate that youth culture seeks to distinguish itself from everything around it. With massive resources of time, energy and naivete, it is occasionally capable of producing breathtaking feats of originality from a torrent of material. Also by their very nature, youth activities can draw upon an endless stream of young people. While the period between rampant youth and the onset of a post-youth lassitude is short, those who cross the border don't entirely forfeit their former connections and spirit of participation, even if they do feel burnt-out. So, the community matures.
Well, Techno music is for most people a noise pumped out of Jean store outlets in shopping malls. To regard that as definitive of the entire repertoire is about as useful as regarding Bach as definitive of Classical music. Techno music is, in fact, a collection of genres which are, depending on how you view them, complimentary, contradictory or none of the above. The styles (Techno, Trance, Ambient, Goa, Jungle, Hip Hop, Trip Hop, Hardcore, House, Garage, Gabba, Breakbeat) are only edges in a Kaleidoscopic sound space. Composer/producers are legion and the music is a rapidly changing sonic world driven by a recognition of its past, its present and a constant need for an identity strategy through sound. It is bound by certain constraints (what music isn't?) but it continually pushes at those until some kind of infusion process transforms everything. There are heated debates among the cognoscenti regarding the value of each style and the practitioners responsible for it. The culture eschews Rock/Pop industry hype, having recognised that its success is not due to the Rock industry's patronage. Nevertheless, it supplants one hype with another, often a gnarly stylization of contemporary life.
The technology of the global dance culture, is not state of the art. Art of a state of mind is probably a closer description. Dance/Rave culture sound is largely founded on old technology that works for this particular social configuration. The technology is often commercially redundant and is reconstituted by those who could not afford the latest directions in music technology. This situation has, of course, spawned new commercial developments of old products. Techno/dance music, in all it's myriad forms, has thrived on arcane technology (by recent industry standards); analog synths (moogs, ARP's, Oberhiems), keyboards (Fender Rhodes pianos, Farfisa organs, Mellotrons); drum machines (808 series), and, of course, the principle instrument, the turntable (typically the Technics 1200 series) are currently the instruments of performance. Another curiosity is that the techno scene, with an apparent heavy emphasis on the future (mostly alternative and plural), is dependant on vinyl. A medium with a distinctly anachronistic feel. On going vinyl production is important to a DJ. It increases his or her repertoire and provides a condensation of specialised material on one disk. It should also be noted that there are a large number of underground record labels producing an astonishing range of CDs, representative of the music that also shapes this culture. In other words, there is the dance club/rave scene which is a performance venue for the music and CDs which are an outlet for extended creative freedom, not bound to the dance/performance space.
There is something curiously nostalgic about the vintage gear. Apart from the sound being at odds with contemporary equipment, the older equipment might, strangely enough, signify youth (a retro notion) and the new in a way that no contemporary electronic musical systems can. The early equipment was genuinely new. Even its marketing was naive. By contrast, todays technology has somewhat lost the plot and appears to be marketed under the influence of corporate hallucinogenics. Yes, there's functionality, too much perhaps; the industry appears obsessed with providing for every possible musical direction. Nevertheless, amid the plethora of equipment, the Techno music practitioners understand how to use/abuse any technology-where they can get access to it. So to further complicate the situation, the newer technology is being selectively integrated with older equipment.
The stylistic/cultural progress of this type of dance music dates back to the introduction of records and the birth of the listening experience predicated on the recording. The record player inherently possesses the means to create a musical event. This event began with teenagers in their bedrooms in the middle of this century and has progressed to something like Tribal Gathering `95 at Glastonbury-a 25,000 strong dance party with 5 sub-genre tents. This is a generation that takes for granted, takes without questioning, the concept that the recording is an instrument. Hundreds of DJs worldwide prove this every night.
As with any other style or genre, the music ranges from crap to sublime. Not unexpectedly, the success of a work depends on how it is received. The dissemination of music is typical of our times, it is either by recordings or through performance. The major difference is that recordings play important multiple roles in the dance context. It needs to be appreciated that the DJ is a special kind of performer. He or she performs with recordings. Anyone who thinks that the DJ simply puts one record on after another hasn't grasped the potential of the recording as instrument. No surprise here. I should say most people do not fully appreciate the possibilities inherent in the recording. It is largely seen as a second rate simulacra taken from what is thought to be the primary experience; the live performance.
The Techno world is a living example of what, perhaps, Pierre Schaeffer was getting at in the 1950s. Schaeffer, by the way, was (he died this year) a French music intellectual and composer who tried to fathom the intricacies of real-world sound and thus make them amenable to compositional processes. His thesis, set out in his Traité des Objets Musicaux, attempted, among other things, to formulate a solfÝge that might help composers work with any sound, not necessarily those produced on musical instruments. It was a remarkable undertaking but plagued with theoretical and practical problems.
Although Schaeffer's efforts resulted in a great many words, some music and lingering epigones, the only people who, I think, have come close to practising what he was getting at are todays DJ's. The reason is that they are the only musicians exposed to the intense process of mixing and considering sound on a routine and often context critical level. In sets lasting longer than two hours, not to mention many private rehearsals, the contemporary DJ spins a great deal of diverse music in search of sonic experiences that can be dropped on a highly receptive audience. If the effect doesn't come off, the audience could get a tad upset. Destroying the experiential flow at 3:30 am is not a thing to mess with lightly unless the DJ is highly respected and has the backing of his audience. Sometimes it works and then again... Consider this excerpt from a posting to UK-Dance by Jon Ross. The club is the Rex in Paris; the date is a Thursday morning in mid September; the DJ is Laurent Garnier.
He does his usual trick of popping in unexpected stuff - the odd jungle track now and then (great idea - but didn't work too well on the french crowd). Half way through at 4:00 I am leaping up and down to System 7's Alpha wave (You can't avoid it these days), and Garnier lets it go into the quiet bit. Strange, I think, for the quiet break is a few minutes long at least, and I've never seen any DJ attempt to make it through - it's just too quiet. But then comes the bit where Hawtin [the original composer] obviously planned a little trick for the big sound-systems. The bass gets lower and lower, you can hear it on your stereo, but if you have a huge stack of sub-woofers this is something you feel. There are waves of pure sub-bass ripping my insides apart, it is making me feel very queasy, everyone is looking around and grinning - it is really fucking everyone. All of a sudden a killer hip-hop beat kicks in. Garnier has just dropped a Public Enemy track. Hardcore gangsta rap. Bemused looks galore... At the end a mad funky techno beat kicks in - it is Garnier's trade-mark track... The crowd are loving it. But what does Garnier do then? He tries to be too funny, too clever. He mixes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, the bit where they are playing those famous five notes over and over and the spaceship is replying with mad tones. More bemused looks.The Jon Ross concludes, after giving another example of a weird mix, by saying that for him Garnier had lost the audience and destroyed the atmosphere for the rest of the night. This suggests a willingness on the part of some, perhaps, more seasoned DJ's, to push their audience to sonic and aesthetic extremes. Which is more problematic, the sub-bass effect or the Close Encounters drop-in, is a matter to be resolved on an individual basis.
The idea of randomly mixing material from a vast repository of recorded music is not something that most people think about and probably, neither did Schaeffer. Unfortunately, Schaeffer was a chronic aesthetic conservative who basically wanted to produce old music through new means, so a new social/musical landscape would not, in all likelihood, have occurred to him.
Garnier is one of many master DJs whose record collection runs to tens of thousands of disks. Like other DJs, he also produces other Techno music on his label F Communications. For the uninitiated, a sampling of the scope of this volume of production can be had by first visiting several specialised record stores in the major cities. Second, reading a few magazines and third, checking out the internet.
Why is music of the Techno/Dance scene of interest? I think because of the nature of the cultural acceptance of electronic music technology and recording by a broad based social group. It is a mature position that combines experimentalism with criticism. Second, it contrasts the ceaseless and unquestioning euphoria that has historically plague the progress of music technology. This might seem reactionary but, in some respects, it is a reaction to the naive Orchestra on a Desk Top aspirations of the 70's technologists. That technology, for all intent and purpose, is here and the democratisation of music production it permits creates a vast number of bedroom Beethoven's/Techno daemons. Any attempt at assessing the worth of music from these factories must require some filtration process i.e. a massed set of ears, some where.
MixMag UK magazine. Mostly scene culture, interviews, music reviews. Also has internet access.
DJ UK magazine. Scene culture, music reviews and music technology reviews.
Loop Australian Publication. Discusses the local scene.