What sounds 'cutting edge' in 2015?

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

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")

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

you could kick a violin in the street

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

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

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

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

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!

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

the future imperfect music will have been looping and autopitching

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.

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)

less white knighting, more attempts to express aesthetic preferences in the terms of value, maybe i shouldn't bother, except 'worthless' does the same thing so it's the only countermanoeuvre available

thought about mentioning colin stetson upthread but it's a novelty of recording technique more than anything else

The Scott Walker/Sunn O))) collab sounds pretty cutting edge to me, can't really identify any antecedents for that drone doom w/crooner from hell sound

this qn is beyond stupid in strong ie teleological terms but in more modest terms ie 'what seems vaguely different' its fine

the qn is 'what sounds' not 'what is' so i don't feel foolish answering it

what sounds cutting edge at 2015

less white knighting, more attempts to express aesthetic preferences in the terms of value, maybe i shouldn't bother, except 'worthless' does the same thing so it's the only countermanoeuvre available

― an absolute feast of hardcore fanboy LOLs surrounding (imago), Thursday, 28 May 2015 14:31 (8 minutes ago)

the claim was that it was new/different/etc not aesthetic preference and your retreat into thatisjusthowifeel solipsism is the end of a failure to argue on those terms, which ought to apply even it is worthless since it perfectly possible for terra nova to be covered in turd

This is quite similar to that awful poptimism thread that's still rumbling on it that both of them are full of people folornly straining for some kind of pseudo-objectivity to justify their tastes.

i <3 footwork, but a lot of it sounds like the tracker gabber my friends and i were making in the 90s /Wyschnegradskyguy

some of it reminds me of kate bush

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)

the claim was that it was new/different/etc not aesthetic preference

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

From 2013, but still out in front, for me anyway - http://www.discogs.com/Rashad-Becker-Traditional-Music-Of-Notional-Species-Vol-I/master/583248, but I'd also considered mentioning Mark Fell/Sensate Focus and the Demdike Stare testpressings as above, and many of the things I've heard on PAN, specifically, Afrikan Sciences, Beneath, Hecker Leckey, NHK'Koyxeи.

massaman gai might though, he's definitely the most avant-garde poster on ilx

oh nice, more recommendations. that is what this thread should mostly be imo

From 2013, but still out in front, for me anyway - http://www.discogs.com/Rashad-Becker-Traditional-Music-Of-Notional-Species-Vol-I/master/583248, but I'd also considered mentioning Mark Fell/Sensate Focus and the Demdike Stare testpressings as above, and many of the things I've heard on PAN, specifically, Afrikan Sciences, Beneath, Hecker Leckey, NHK'Koyxeи.

― neilasimpson, Thursday, May 28, 2015 2:54 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that Rashad Becker is the best and closest suggestion that I recognise so far ITT, in that the sounds themselves aren't ostensibly man-made or synth-made but something quite alien to anything else I've heard in music. i've had some very strange visceral reactions to moments on that record while listening on headphones; emotions that I'm not even sure how to pin down, but they're there.