Re: [microsound] failure and production (or lack thereof)

[Joshua <thermal@xxxxxxxxx>]

>>>
any thoughts? why is "reverb" a bad word now? these dry, glitchy
sounds that we all use rarely have any spacial effects added.. and
the whole traditional art of production seems to have been thrown out
the window!..
>>>

Traditional?  I assumed this referred to the Phil Spector (or Jimmy Jam if
you prefer) approach:  hire session musicians and songwriters and
oversee/mastermind the conversion of humans into hitmaking stars.  I have
generally bristled at the use of the word "producer" in the case of
electronic musicians for this reason; it is not that we are producers but
rather that production is so integral to composition that the two can be
separated neither as activities nor as charactered roles.  Yet it seems to
me that in the case of even the glitchiest music (and I must say I am not
happy that a certain English magazine has now buzzworded this former
nongenre - with Coil taking little of the credit) we can say what a well
produced recording is without much hesitation.  The danger of confusing
temporary technological - materialist - metaphors with the abstractions of
aesthetics (by which I do NOT mean to aetherially idealize or de-world
these concepts) hovers above any type of music in any era.

But as for reverb and its current scarcity, I have two theories:

1 - fashion;

2 - hardware - more specifically, the lack of CPU and memory resources on
the musicians' computers to run the highly demanding reverb plug-ins.

Just as we can look back five years and know which recordings were using
reverb fashionably and which creatively, it seems likely that in several
more years we will sort out the datedly dry from the crisply crunchy on
the snack table of today.

Reverberation and delay place sounds within real or fictitious spaces, and
within sound design such spatialization is a central element, whether in
1986 on a Neve console or in 1999 on a Audiowerk8 card.  The avoidance of
such sonic modifications places the sound within a nonworldly space, and
perhaps it its precisely this artificiality and inorganicity toward which
these untimeprocessed noises are pointing.

np - Jochem Paap "Vrs Mbt Pcs 2" (with LOTS of reverb)

Joshua / Thermal / Boxman [Hako Otoko] label
mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.wenet.net/~thermal/

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