What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

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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.

p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, 28 May 2015 10:55 (eight years ago) link

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

Keith Moom (Neil S), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:02 (eight years ago) link

name them

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:37 (eight years ago) link

here are three: Aluk Todolo, Krallice, Botanist

Keith Moom (Neil S), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:40 (eight years ago) link

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.

p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:47 (eight years ago) link

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.

Keith Moom (Neil S), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:51 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:56 (eight years ago) link

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

the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:58 (eight years ago) link

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

the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:59 (eight years ago) link

fair enough.

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

Keith Moom (Neil S), Thursday, 28 May 2015 11:59 (eight years ago) link

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.

p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:06 (eight years ago) link

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

ilm you fail me

tpp, Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:15 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:20 (eight years ago) link

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

anvil, Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:21 (eight years ago) link

^ 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.

p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:24 (eight years ago) link

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

lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:29 (eight years ago) link

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

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:31 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:34 (eight years ago) link

, you divock

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:35 (eight years ago) link

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.

nashwan, Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:40 (eight years ago) link

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, 28 May 2015 12:40 (eight years ago) link

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

Eric Burdon & War, On Drugs (Cosmic Slop), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:44 (eight years ago) link

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"

p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:47 (eight years ago) link

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

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:48 (eight years ago) link

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.

Eric Burdon & War, On Drugs (Cosmic Slop), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:51 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:52 (eight years ago) link

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)

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:54 (eight years ago) link

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

lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:54 (eight years ago) link

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

lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:56 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:57 (eight years ago) link

Bob Dylan -Shadows in the Night

curmudgeon, Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:58 (eight years ago) link

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

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 12:58 (eight years ago) link

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

lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:01 (eight years ago) link

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

curmudgeon, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:03 (eight years ago) link

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

What a gobsmacking sentence.

the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:03 (eight years ago) link

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

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:05 (eight years ago) link

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

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:07 (eight years ago) link

for teens 100 years from now "music" will refer to the process of turning something that happened in real life ("a sample") into a sharable meme thru ordered repetition ("looping")

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:13 (eight years ago) link

the value of music as rendered / recorded "finished" pieces manifested in consumable formats does need to be reconsidered.
is the future imperfect music played socially without the safety blanket brand identity of recognisably monikered "Band/artist"
even "let me wtf you" gets tiresome pretty quickly

massaman gai, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:14 (eight years ago) link

you could kick a violin in the street

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:14 (eight years ago) link

so long as you don't put a recording up on bandcamp

massaman gai, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:16 (eight years ago) link

yes I like the idea of "imperfect music played socially" in some respects I think the current scene has already begun to resemble that

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:17 (eight years ago) link

+ then we have a narrative that reflects how&why live looping is such a BIG DEAL

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:19 (eight years ago) link

i hate looping. it's so lazy. webern all the way

massaman gai, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:20 (eight years ago) link

xp however we must also acknowledge that on a certain theoretical level "music" is synonymous with "perfection"

actually this reminds me of something I meant to post earlier in the thread, about a sound that really IS new and unprecedented: software keyboard instruments capable of computing on-the-fly pitch adjustments, to make the intervals of a chord sound as harmoniously as possible -- put that in your well-tempered clavier & smoke it!

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:25 (eight years ago) link

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

― an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:52 (8 minutes ago)

this is just an invocation of classical virtues and the sort of thing you bring up when your ideological white knighting veers from 'pure pop' to worthless progressive rock music

lex merk a tory ya? (nakhchivan), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:28 (eight years ago) link

the future imperfect music will have been looping and autopitching

an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:29 (eight years ago) link

Well when I think of artists who are currently making music that doesn't quite sound like anyone else, I think of Colin Stetson, but I don't think he quite counts cutting edge.

MarkoP, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:29 (eight years ago) link

I hate questions like this because:
- there is no limit to the number of candidates you could come up with. "Cutting edge", objectively, is meaningless, and in practice only defines what sounds new to whoever you're asking
- thus, there really isn't ANY answer.
- And who cares what's cutting edge? It's not a contest. If there WAS a contest, it would be based on whoever is most popular, which kind of defeats the idea of "cutting edge"
- it makes cynical music journalists posit that there is no avant-garde, no progress left to be made, and other nonsense claims that say more about how hard it is to write about music -- in an age when opinions matter less than the minuscule space on the twitter server where they're placed -- than insight into music or people or anything else

That said, for me, footwork and teklife stuff seems like a pivot point in the development of electronic dance music, in a similar way as Aphex Twin, and early IDM did in the 90s. IMO it is meaningful when I can play it in a hipster DJ situation, or for my girlfriend while we're cooking dinner, and have each "audience" enjoy it (and still have it written about as "avant garde" dance music)

Dominique, Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:30 (eight years ago) link


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