What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

moving the goalposts eh, you were talking about my 'white knighting' for pop & prog

i can well justify the subjective novelty of all the acts i mentioned in a way that most people on this site would identify with - only a few would yawn and say 'it's been done' with any weight of justification

― an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 14:54 (8 minutes ago)

the claim to novelty was just aesthetic white knighting, as demonstrated, in this instance with an appeal to novelty

the cutting edge being invoked is of course the appeal of sharp and serrated surfaces that david kelly would be familiar with from that fated day in 2003 when he read the words 'objective' and 'subjective' being used one too many times on a music message board

what i mean is, it's very exciting music and it sounds unlike much other stuff, but it's not inconceivable that it could have been made at any point in the last 25 years, apart from some exceptions (JLin)

well yeah, it's pretty much just MPC+808! it's a really simple idea, as far as what you need to make it, and it's funny how something so spare and ironically hard-to-dance-to fascinates me so much as dance music. Musically, it's also not far removed from patterns you hear in dubstep, trap and hip-hop, and house and techno. It's like a hybrid lifeform, and I think that's why it strikes me as "cutting edge".

Also the question isn't whether it could have been made at any point in the last 25 years. If that's the case why wasn't it? There are social and cultural reasons why it emerged when and where they did, and whether or not some isolated IDM nerd made something that sounded much the same in 1995 is neither here nor there.

Likewise with deep tech, the issue is less about what the music sounds like as who is dancing to it this time round.

exactly. that's why when someone leaps in and starts talking about how 'Stockhausen did it first' in relation to, say Aphex Twin or whoever, it's not a big deal.

the type of novelty being described here is the sort of process music where its sound is immediately apparent from a bare descriptor, 'mictrotonal bedroom black metal' or 'it is 2004 and someone has just ysid an epic bossanova cover of love will tear us apart'

rashad becker album is formless and meandering but timbrally quite unlike anything else around

If I'm to answer this semi seriously, which feels like an embarrassing move somewhat, I feel like what I'm really doing is offering a prediction over what will most visibly shape the sound of music in the future. In the u.s. I feel like the goon cru follows stuff that tends to be the vanguard of what's new and shaping hip-hop's future already. though the young thug thread may make it seem like there's a bit of an imbalance as the corny fuxx praise as distorted his contributions relative to a swath of other rappers.

Internationally, big picture though, I still think Nigerian afropop feels like the most obvious direction for the shape of music to come, a populist genre that is also popular, which provides an aesthetic "out" for genres currently spiraling in boring directions cf UK deep house, edm, most rap, r&b, etc

it's a big deal for me. originality is a big part of how I respond to music. plus, credit should be given where it is due

xxp

it is static and bloops evoking the Seoul cityscape being overrun with cockroaches

tbf it is always interesting to hear a 'new musical language' outside of known form, katie gately is of that stripe as well imo

anagram, but context is everything here. Jute Gyte's not the first person to experiment with microtones, but in the realm of extreme metal, he is.

kanye west

agree with deej that afropop feels like a vanguard for pop music. the fact it's so accessible and at the same time diverse and different enough from established UK/US dance music is a plus. Spent the other night with my g/f just watching vid after vid from the afrobeats thread and we were transfixed, which i doubt would have happened if with any other dance genre.

Jute Gyte's not the first person to experiment with microtones, but in the realm of extreme metal, he is.

Is this true though? How do we even know? (serious question, not trying to be a smartass)

well it's AFAIK of course.

http://www.heavyblogisheavy.com/2012/12/07/agm-week-microtonal-metal/

Couldn't care less if he's the first. He might be the first to do it well, though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rBhv-Wg-Kw

Thanks for the AGM week link, NickB!

agree with deej that afropop feels like a vanguard for pop music. the fact it's so accessible and at the same time diverse and different enough from established UK/US dance music is a plus. Spent the other night with my g/f just watching vid after vid from the afrobeats thread and we were transfixed, which i doubt would have happened if with any other dance genre.

― p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, May 28, 2015 10:09 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

word. i think part of this is the logic of hip-hop making other genres seem like they were merely feeder-genres for its innovations...i feel like afropop does the same thing with dancehall,hip-hop,R&B, EDM, etc...makes them all feel like individual ingredients rather than genres unto themselves, the same way hip-hop made jazz, funk, disco, breaks etc seem like mere tools

originality is a big part of how I respond to music.

thing with this is, a lot of stuff i've responded to because it sounded so original and wildly innovative to my ears at the time, i've later heard precursors that make me think "ohhhh that's where they got that idea from". not that there's anything wrong with this but imo what's important isn't just originality - though innovation is a great thing of course! - but a) the other musical and emotional components of a song, the stuff that keeps me coming back to it even after i've realised it wasn't so original, and b) the personal/social context, how it fits into either/both my world or the world at large, ie is this person saying this or making that music radical at this point in time?

and on a similar note, even if something is wildly original, of what use is this if i never want to listen to it?

yup context is everything.

I think confusing what is literally technologically cutting edge in terms of how music is produced (which is what I was referring to upthread in terms of how we've reached this plateau where progress has reached a logical endpoint) for what is aesthetically or culturally cutting edge is a mistake - those two have been separate for quite some time now.

Xxp to deej yeah that's a good analogy. also, the early rave scene in the UK before genre specialism really came into play, and you tended to get a grab bag of dance styles being played next to each other through the night because it was 'all dance music'

Οὖτις yeah these are two completely different things And shouldn't be confused.

I think they were confused in the past when you would have serious cultural arguments/splits over, say, the use of amplified instruments, or whether or not sample-based music was "music", or whether drum machines were evil etc. but those days are gone.

did you guys hear the acid house album that the red hot chili pepper dude made?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpUv4tVBISA

It is good to have a strange little cabin in the woods now and then, something that you hadnt seen before and you think well who put that there. But if there were only cabins then the magic is gone and you are in a timber housing estate.

microtonal metal music is groundbreaking in the least interesting way possible to anyone vaguely familiar with the prewar heterodox avantgarde

― lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, May 28, 2015 8:40 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pvmic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPC9erC5WqU

My roommate showed me this video last night love those purple monsters.

I expect to hear the cutting edge sounds of Sheb Wooley when I click this link

I'm digging the Trickfinger record.

these threads always devolve into ppl recommending music i will never listen to

you just aren't cutting edge enough grampa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmRCCy7Bta8

microtonal metal music is groundbreaking in the least interesting way possible to anyone vaguely familiar with the prewar heterodox avantgarde

― lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, May 28, 2015 8:40 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pvmic

― flopson, Thursday, May 28, 2015 7:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See, I thought it was the actual lex posting that and I was like, whuh?

well tbf i dont think it would be of any interest to the lex

or anyone outside the rolling metal thread (or indeed half of the rolling metal thread, it is an acquired taste)

i'm usually happy with the whole everything old is new cuz it's new approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q86y5xrADtc

i enjoy a good digital age fuck you too. again, nothing groundbreaking but it sounds like now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZfT6LCY9Fk

they were playing this in Bed, Bath & Beyond the other day when i was looking for 1500 thread count sheets...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIntRXLpiUc

accepted xp tho if there is a reason to be haughty and obnoxious then lj posting about dork metal and pc music on ilm is probably it

coh, haswell continuing to produce good content year on year

It is good to have a strange little cabin in the woods now and then, something that you hadnt seen before and you think well who put that there. But if there were only cabins then the magic is gone and you are in a timber housing estate.

The thing that I find fascinating about some digital musical instruments and software isn't that it is new, more that the technology has become so very refined, miniaturized and ubiquitous. I don't really think some of these technologies have really been peaked in what they can do in some ways. That a cell phone could capture music so remote and local like Khun Narin's Electric Phin Band then it gets spread across the globe is pretty inspiring. That is some serious long distance musical connection.

so what is "cutting edge"? if it's john peel's "i just want to hear something i haven't heard before" then we can expect less and less of it as time goes by, simply because that criterion doesn't necessitate "newness"; it's a personal standard, not a societal one. julian carrillo is going to be as new to most people as anything put out in 2015. in fact if anything he's got an advantage in terms of newness on anybody working today, because the past is a foreign country; whatever his zeitgeist was it's not something that happens today.

on the other hand if one thinks of "cutting edge" as the stuff that people are going to be listening to two or three or five years from now, that's a very different question, and i think it's one we've stopped asking. and it's not one i can answer because i don't know about the music of today, i'm busy listening to julian carrillo or whatever. when i listen to modern music it's not generally "vanguard" music, something that portends a future, it's just weird, something like meta meta, and i think there's a meaningful differentiation to be made between those two.

micachu - nevers

your mom

"for those who want to dance they can also incorporate more modern Irish sounds from Van Morrison, Daniel O'Donnell and Ronan Keating to name but a few"
http://www.completeentertainment.co.uk/Irish.aspx

matt otm this thread is garbage

It introduced me to Asteroidi Esadecafonici and persuaded me to finally pay for 777: Cosmosophy = it is a classic thread.

All the good threads have been done already

I def have the Asteroidi Esadecafonici bandcamp page bookmarked. Expect the url to show up in future posts