What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

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.

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

i bought the jute gyte electronic album when it came out and it just sounded like early 00s IDM that I used to listen to

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 1:40 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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"

to my diletanttish ears, Jute Gyte has strong sonic affinities with a lot of what has come to be called "cavernous death" -- stuff like Portal & Aevangelist with heavy atmospheric effects that are probably being done with 'cutting edge' software plugins -- Jute Gyte being entirely home-recorded IIRC it makes sense that his sound would be "c.2010 digital studio reverb" rather than "c.1970 Black Sabbath" or whatever, if that makes sense? so the novelty comes not just from the microtonal stuff, but from the convergence of an individual artististic project (microtonal guitar explorations) & a stable aesthetic or subgenre that hasn't yet exhausted its appeal

when ILM in general is looking for 'cutting edge' music i very much doubt 'it' wants metal. I dont see people scurrying off to buy it somehow.

The most novel thing about Jute Gyte is the strength of the songwriting and the integration of the quartertones as not gimmick but melody

xxp ... my point, which I guess wasn't entirely clear, being: sometimes a critical mass is reached where a particular 'sound' (recording aesthetic, whatever) becomes significantly easier to achieve than it ever had been in the past, & that increased accessibility leads to a temporary influx of creativity (subgenres, or microgenres -- we're talking short pop-culture cycles, here, like producers using trance synths in chart rap)

to answer this question, which isn't so much a question as an invitation to inhabit the noosphere of dog latin and the psychic space of doglatinnery in general, some recent things that sound vaguely distinctive

shxchshcsh
the sd laika album
gabor lazar
sensate focus/mark fell
demdike stare testpressings
kouhei matsunaga
lorenzo senni
james hoff
lee gamble

dog latin it isn't so much wyschnegradsky, perhaps the eighth or ninth most interesting russian piano music composer of the early 20th c, but a whole school of marginal wackiness following that before its ideological currency was debased to the extent that prog rock and even prog metal people take it up

If anyone is painting pop on a canvas anything like Dawn Richard's then hit me up

ty for the list nakhers, u forgot gaz kingsnorth obv

Bob Dylan -Shadows in the Night

or like, what about all those Attack! Attack!-style post-metalcore myspace bands we used to have so much fun mocking -- bands doing nothing that hasn't been done before, but doing it in such a spectacularly ill-advised way that the result takes on this fascinating outsider art quality

turn of the century microhouse sounded distinctive because most electronic music did from 98-01 or so due to the proliferation of software of greater complexity
probably something like farben/textstar still sounds quite good although vocalcity while being slightly estranged towers all over the more exoteric clicks and cuts stuff

none of those i just listed sound 'cutting edge' exactly, in that way, though they might have the advantage of being better

x-post to myself--re-contextualizing Sinatra covers in 2015 is as cutting edge as much electronic programmed music is in 2015

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

What a gobsmacking sentence.

this is the thread that could bring back challops in 2015, repackaged in unprecedented forms

but first the very idea of "music" needs to be rethought

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?