I thought the Johnny D thread made me think of that post... its a long one but it can insightful.
(dedicated to people who used to enjoy my blog)
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This is in response to a recent article by Philip Sherburne in Pitchfork (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/node/147344)
And also, why not, to a recent discussion I had with Todd Burns from Resident Advisor.
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So, What happened in 2008?
Everyone just spend their year fixing problems that the "failing products" conspiracy has been imposing us. We had cell phones dying and rebooting; computers going slower while Mac released new, not so good macBooks; plus the regular things of life, like house appliances, breaking apart as the garantee just expires. Think about it, seriously, it's really becoming a joke.
For electronic based musicians, this is basically an eternal nightmare to think that our music is dependant of these and there's not a single day where I'm not haunted by the thought that my cpu might be fried by lightning, that the hard drive could just be corrupted. Being dependant of a fragile technology of blazing speed makes us all anxious and procrastinate in other moments. Villalobos even named a track "Electonic Water (San Proper's 'It Ate My Quarter' Mix)", surely refering to an external hard drive crash. I actually told him, at La Nuit Blanche @ Metropolis, not to move those while they're turned on. I hope he got a lesson there.
The challenge here is to master technology while comes a quest, a task: become better musician. This also means, get better tools, better gear, better studio. I got my first real pro studio this year that I share with Mateo and Alexis. We're fighting a bunch of problems such as a wobbly internet connection, acoustics problems, electrical failure and a leak in the roof. There's some others that i forgot.
But the sound is amazing now. It'll even be better too, soon.
One of the thing that I realised by spending a lot of time in studio and listening to a lot of music, is how my tastes in music are changing. Listening music LOUD makes you see it completely differently and sort of made feel really uncomfortable about my own music. I started to be interested in other things too, like spending hours experimenting with how to make a really nice beautiful kick. Compression turned into a passion, same thing for EQ use. The sort of things that sounds completely abstract to my dad but that can increase the price of the tracks i sell to labels.
Listening to really really simple techno, loopy and repetitive, sort of started to make a whole new sense. Perhaps house too. Two things that i had been discarding and seeing as boring for its simplistic approach. People who know my music know that i love complexity and huge amount of layers. The thing is, while loud, its not as cool as it sounds when you produce it at home.
So my music production changed. I'm way more interested in more simplistic ideas and weird frequencies handling. The sort of thing that 95% of people will never get on a first and only listening. My new sounds sort of also got me my first few bad reviews from close friends like Cantin who have been long time supporters - but in the same time, attracting new people's attention too, in return.
I was with Nadir in a restaurant last night and we were commenting on how, for most of people, music is a background affair and all the hours spent in perfecting that bass is lost in a restaurant's PA. Reminded me a comment of Simko's interview on how her dad forced her to pay attention to music... to listen...
Where did that go? Why can't we listen to music like we read a book?
So recently, Sherburne wrote a long text about how 2008 changed and didn't reach his expectations.
I feel 2008 has been about artists, like me, moving to become craftsmen, trying to turn music into perfection. Less originality, but more efficient. We saw a big revival for house too, which are the roots of what we do anyway. I really believe we need to handle our craftsmanship to become better artists. The trap would be to forget about creativity."In 2008, "What happened?" seemed to be the question on everyone's mind as house and techno struggled to define themselves. As for so many years now, minimal was the scapegoat. FACT magazine's Kiran Sande decried "the steady, sterile pulse of T-Mobilized minimal techno"; The Guardian's Tony Naylor chronicled "the strange, lingering death of minimal techno," and even Magda acknowledged that, having reached a certain level of mainstream acceptance, "a lot of the sound has become generic.""
A recent severe review of Burns on a Kaden EP sort of made me feel this is exactly what's happening. Although he got really hard on it and from what I heard in my studio, the EP was not original compared to his previous outings but the quality was outstanding. Maybe the review was done and written after a few listens on a stereo or headphones. As we say on WindowsXP, that might be a fatal error.
Sort of how my whole year was. Moving from the artist flow, to the craftsman's status. Many times you'll see the 2 work together (ex. Loco Dice association, the artist Dice and ideas that veterant Buttrich put together). A lot of artists will take a long moment to master new aspects of their creations. In other spheres, we see this in people taking sabbatical year.
I guess we're going through exploration and i'm only optimistic that new realms of music can be reached but we'll have to go through some formula experimentation to find new quality. For medias, i fear they might not have the patience to spend time on checking how artists are developing, which was recently a critic that Somfay was addressing at Burns' other tough review he did of is LP 2x12" on Archipel. Burns totally missed that the tracks were written in 2006 BEFORE "Fricative White" (read the review to get the details).
Anyway, that EP of Jesse is our best seller this year and as I have discussed with Todd recently and cleared out any frustrations, he concluded that in the end, no matter what, music is a matter of tastes.
Tastes, artist's number one enemy... where people will say "This is good" or "This is bad" as opposed to "I like it" or "I don't like it."
But that's not going to change in 2009.
