What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

the plainness of Laurence Crane's double cd on Another Timbre (last year, chamber music) sounded pretty fresh/unusual to me, on first listen. It seems nowadays that type of music is usually swathed in reverb/field recordings/overt, stylized aesthetics.

There are 12 tones in the Western scale, but we're not in danger of running out of ways to present them, even if they've all been used before. technology might not bring us another microphone or electric guitar or Fairlight sampler, but to think you now have pitch correcting software that can pick out individual notes in a piece of music and alter those frequencies is mindblowing. whole new approaches to sampling would be possible with that sort of thing. Is that cutting edge? I think more than ever, it's the ways in which ideas are packaged and presented that has to be cutting edge. you could argue that IDM wasn't too different to the kind of early electronic and tape music from the 60s, but the connection is only tenuous because they work in different realms.

researchers at MIT used video and image processing to recover the conversation in a room from the fluctuations the conversation caused in a house plant's leaf position and the position of the surface of a potato chip bag. someone could record an album with a potato chip bag camera microphone.

the cutting edge
http://costumedesignersguild.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/gene-hackman-247.jpg

Miami Nightclub Apologizes to DJ Shadow
Promoters had cut his set short for being "too future"

Tinashe

picturing some cave critic 10,000 years ago telling everybody that all possible permutations of sound producable from tortoise shells and sinew and wood and rocks had now been explored

you invent something then

smarty pants

NV OTM. Shakey Mo all you are doing is revealing the paucity of your own imagination here.

There was a review in RA a while back that suggested that perhaps, given a "limited number of danceable rhythms" there might never be another Year Zero moment "like jungle or dubstep" and I just wanted to track this guy down and shout "idiot" in his face repeatedly.

Matt DC, I think it depends on what is meant by 'cutting edge' though? No one here is saying that music isn't changing or evolving. There'll always be room for different rhythms in dance music (although from moombahton to nosebleed, p much every BPM has now been covered by a dance genre). There are new ideas, permutations of those ideas, and old ideas being recycled into brand new ideas every day.
OTOH, you could say that sonically, production values have been moving in outward, incremental steps over the last 15 or so years than they might once have done, and it's been a while since there's been a tidal shift in the way music is being created and presented - not in quite the same way as amplification or synthesis or sampling did in the 20th century.

The purpose of a thread like this isn't to bemoan the state of music or to talk about 'progress', but to look at which things are genuinely new and exciting, and also to speculate about where developments may lie.

I have a feeling the next 'new thing' might not be a new dance rhythm or necessarily a new sound, but it will be a technological change that will transform how music is heard. What if sound waves could be turned into haptic sensations, for example? You go to a club and literally feel the vibrations moving you. Or what if a whole genre were to be created from slicing, dicing and pitch shifting the individual elements of old songs - extreme mashups? Or if there were a way to easily fuse sounds together so that they become fluid - you get a guitar, a synth and a drum sound, and those sounds interact with each other like coloured oil in water? There's so much I guess.

I was responding directly to Shakey's comment here:

No one's going to invent a new way to make sounds a la the invention of sampling or the amplified guitar or synthesizers or analog studio trickery or whatever. Everything is just software now, endless iterations of software enabling an infinite palette.

Which seems to take software as the end-point beyond which everything will be just... more ways of manipulating sound via software. Which seems very short-sighted IMO. The RA thing was just me rolling my eyes in exasperation at this sort of attitude.

Cool, but is Shakey necessarily wrong in that respect? I'm not saying new and great things can't be done with software, because after-all software is only limited by its own processing power and people's imaginations. But how likely is it that a revolutionary new sound will happen to music (in the same way as amplification, synthesis, sampling etc) that won't ultimately boil down to 'someone wrote a cool program'?

how likely did each of those inventions seem to the generations before they were invented?

i'm gonna ignore all the problems of this kind of thread that seeks to place the individual's experience and some kind of Whig music history on the same trajectory at the same point of time and just focus on the unknowability of future tech

xp if this hypothetical invention were to come along, how soon would that be?

i have noticed that as i get older "whither novelty?" has become a question i've no inclination to ask myself

Well we're different. I like novelty. It's one of the key reasons I enjoy finding out about new and different types of music.

Going back to it, unless everyone takes up the yaybahar and it gets crazy popular, it is software that's going to make the biggest differences in music, right?

I don't think we're even anywhere near the point of exhausting the possibilities of the human voice let alone instrumentation or arrangement or technology.

I like how anvil put it. It's the idea of (new) things sounding cutting edge that's 'short-sighted' if anything - something to get over as you get older. It's laughable to hold up something like Jungle as an innovative pinnacle in that respect too, rather than a vital link in a chain as dependent on its antecedents as the evolution of digital. I'll still spend the rest of my life being blown away by sounds irrespective of when they happened, however the means to achieve them develop.

People who hold up jungle as an idealised moment in musical history always seem to want to think of music and genres in terms of constantly progressing lines and I don't know any genres that actually work like that. Genres tend to stick around rather than disappear and be replaced every two years and they build more and more layers on top of themselves. If you really can't find something out there, from whatever point in history, that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before then I'm impressed, you've listened to a lot of music.

Put the word progressing in scare quotes there.

Katie Gately, Jute Gyte, much of the footwork scene, Blanche Blanche Blanche, Dawn Richard, Ueno Maasaki along with most of Editions Mego and Autechre, still

And a reminder to myself to revisit the Jlin album

Was Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man the first rock artefact to float the idea that the older we get, the more difficult it is for us to recognise crucial shifts and sea changes in popular ('youth') culture, even when they're happening right under our noses? I remember Tony Wilson saying much the same thing, once upon a time.

Jute Gyte

Is perhaps the most startling artist I've heard in the last few months. But I can't bare to listen to him (them?) for too long.

I'm interested in, for example, how before the proliferation of recorded sound, vibrato was considered bad form for opera singers. but because of limited tech in the early 20th century, vibrato was found to be more audible on playback than straight singing, and so it became a norm and shaped the sound of what we now think of as 'opera'.

I noticed a parallel the other day when a friend remarked on the amount of autotune on a song we were listening to, but to me it just sounded like that was the way the singer had chosen to sing.

'U

Jute Gyte is interesting because he's not the first to use microtonal/atonal tunings, but he is one of the first to use it in the context of extreme metal. But yeah, I can stand to listen to one track and that's enough at a time for me. Same as Jlin - she's def part of the footwork family, but there's something about the approach and attitude in there that sounds just a tiny bit removed from the Chi-Town producers that makes it sound fresh. They're not pivotal or transcendental in their delivery, but they are carving out their own niches. Whether those niches will develop or have any further impact on the muso-sphere as a whole is anyone's guess. Flick to any page in this month's Wire and there'll be 'cutting edge' music featured there - but it's doubtful as to whether even 1% of it will have influence beyond its own limited reach.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1490000/images/_1492964_mcnulty_300.jpg

there are loads of other BM bands who sound a lot like Jute Gyte.

name them

here are three: Aluk Todolo, Krallice, Botanist

Botanist doesn't really do the same thing as Jute Gyte IIRC? The whole point (or gimmick) behind JG is he uses bizarre tunings to create uncanny atmospheres. Botanist's gimmick is that the guitars are replaced by an amplified dulcimer. They're working in the same place but they don't sound the same really.

well all those bands mentioned are engaged in "experimental black metal" I think, and we'd really be getting into the narcissism of small differences if we were to say that JG are sui generis as compared to those other bands.

lol no

botanist is unusual in a different way but not exactly mould-shattering, albeit excellent

the other two I don't know so well but they are surely doing very different things with less neoclassical theory & tonal exploration

Jute Gyte released an album earlier this year which sounds a bit like Autechre's weirder material, that mindset informing BM is nothing like anything else I can think of

I've listened to several 'experimental black metal' bands, including a few mentioned, and JG is definitely the most weird and striking to me.

But it's a genre I dip my toe in now and then rather than immerse myself in, so I'm hardly an expert.

fair enough.

xxp which JG record was that? I will check it out. Lots of them, hard to keep up!

xxxp okay. i guess it's pointless arguing over that. avant-metal has a lot of strange stuff going on by definition.

that's avant garde music for you I guess - it's only as groundbreaking as its influence, otherwise it's just shouting into a vacuum. I love it when people slather over a perceived novelty in music and someone always has to chip in with "you obviously haven't heard Cornelius Cardew/Wyschnegradsky/White Noise - those guys were doing this waaaay before your new favourite act", because often they're not taking into account the cultural context. Non--standard time signatures are par for the course in genres like metal, classical music and jazz, but when the beat flexes out of time on Hey Ya or Ignition (Remix), that could be seen as perhaps an even bolder move in its own right.

ctrl-f 'chief keef' --> 0 results

ilm you fail me

Oh, and Micachu

Jute Gyte avant-electronic album is Dialectics, check it

Paradigm shifts in pop culture are equally worthy of note and the Dawn Richard album feels like a leap of expression rather than musicality

I love it when people slather over a perceived novelty in music and someone always has to chip in with "you obviously haven't heard Cornelius Cardew/Wyschnegradsky/White Noise

...

the new is in the hearing not in the record

^ yeah, totes.

as i said on a couple of other threads, but recent trap-style hip hop feels VERY *ahem* 'future' to me, and not just with the production but also the whole approach to vocal delivery exhibited by guys like Young Thug - it's unlike anything I could describe from even five years ago.

that jute gyte was completely unremarkable within the context of marginal experimental electronic music though in terms of marginal electronic music made by metal dorks it is slightly more advanced than the burzum stuff

mark my words, the next breakthrough in music will come from biotech. get ready to love mutant centipede freaks with 5-10 differently-tuned kick drums in their setup, I guess

It sounds like emoticons, the rest is aesthetic preference I guess (re: nu-trap), gimme Lil B every time tho

Jute Gyte electronic album is not particularly groundbreaking but his metal stuff assuredly is and I was using the electronic stuff to illustrate his range and palette of influence

, you divock

Don't think of Dawn Richard as cutting edge in any way (given numerous other artists out there trading similarly, disregarding tiresome genre context) just generally cogent, pleasant, disciplined, well made etc.

cool whats going on in that basement? is there audio?

New Zora Jones ep sounds futuristic, riyl: arca and visionist

reviewed @
http://www.passionweiss.com/2015/11/18/zora-jones-unveils-100-ladies-moves-both-minds-and-asses/

spotify: Zora Jones - 100 Ladies

https://open.spotify.com/album/0rVpMPYShtFjrTwaulNm87

great show today.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/12313765_10154365288932137_4268434911588120068_n.jpg?oh=5b69bcc427de7c11b408f474b1ec0820&oe=56DD18F5

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/12316098_10154365212902137_342112158489136364_n.jpg?oh=1f845c3cc9dd3cf88060ac3467b7e26b&oe=56E71FE1

"that looks interesting... do they have recordings of that setup in action?"

voila...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgJpL9tndN0

wtf sounds futuristic about zora jones and arca, ~moody instrumental grime exactly how you've expected it to sound like for years

and like idm existed in the 90s

If one were to argue in favour of Arca-style electronica etc being 'cutting edge', it would be a matter of sound design maybe? Like, listen to some of those Aphex demoes he released earlier this year and compare them to the MESH record and there's a huge gulf.

I'd say maybe that 'One Sec' single by Mumdance x Novelist would count as cutting edge. I can't think of anything like it (i.e. beat-free vocal grime) having come out before. And also what's great about it is it's not coming straight out of grime, and not some avant-garde or art music arena.

I wonder what the overlap would be between people who describe music as 'cutting edge' and people who describe restaurants as 'funky'.

at least with Arca it's the molten, elastic, slippery quality- his stuff has so much caprice in the way forms come and go- even programming intensive 90s IDM tended to have a metronomic hi hat grid that ticked away underneath the fancy snare workouts. To my ears, the Arca / M.E.S.H. moment is about giving up the grid and being a lot less reliable, formally. It's spiritually akin to IDM but not the same formally.

there can still be cutting edge idm or instrumental grime in 2015 in theory, you don't have to invent a new genre to be cutting edge

xp These guys' music seems to have something in common with Autechre's 'Quaristice' album, which I was very keen on at the time thanks to its being made up of shorter, sketchier tracks rather than over-busy 10 minute epics.

to my ears both arca's slipperiness and penchant for shorter tracks come across as slight, everything feels like a semi-interesting sketch that's not especially compelling in its current form. i had less patience with the new album than the first

didn't hear what was special about m.e.s.h. either

i wasn't mad about Arca's first album (not heard the new one) for similar reasons, although I kind of liked the angle in theory.

Not sure I could describe Arca as 'moody instrumental grime' though. I didn't realise Arca had anything to do with grime until more recently. I guess this more recent evolution of grime is pretty interesting - that the idea of the MC and beats in general are almost being peeled back to reveal just what's underneath; the inner workings. Again, I'm thinking of Autechre and they're much-touted but often imperceptible allegiance to hip hop and breaks-based music. And also when dubstep split into brostep and the more post-dubsteppy stuff on Hyperdub, neither of which really held that much in common with the original sound other than in name.

ah no i was referring to zora jones with the grime description, not arca

I guess this more recent evolution of grime is pretty interesting - that the idea of the MC and beats in general are almost being peeled back to reveal just what's underneath; the inner workings

instrumental grime is sometimes good (and not new in any sense) but in general shifting the focus away from the MC is a boring development

how would simon reynolds answer this question?

"Bleep bloop blorp..."

at least with Arca it's the molten, elastic, slippery quality- his stuff has so much caprice in the way forms come and go- even programming intensive 90s IDM tended to have a metronomic hi hat grid that ticked away underneath the fancy snare workouts. To my ears, the Arca / M.E.S.H. moment is about giving up the grid and being a lot less reliable, formally. It's spiritually akin to IDM but not the same formally.

― the tune was space, Monday, November 30, 2015 8:53 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well said.

btw people who have only heard Arca's albums should check out his Stretch EPs and the &&&&& mixtape, they're much more beat-oriented and accessible. maybe not quite as singular, but i come back to them more often.

he's also a really sick DJ, I just DJed with him in Iceland last week and he melts down other people's songs in a very startling way when he Djs

would love to hear that!

http://killedincars.tumblr.com/image/135585989879

Hmmm

http://killedincars.tumblr.com/image/135585989879

^I suspect this probably hits a lot of the bases when answering this question

I thought that this topic, perhaps more than any other, merits a 2016 thread, so I made one - What sounds cutting edge in 2016?