Re: [microsound] microsound future

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As Flann O'Brien wrote, a fierce pancake indeed.  As far as hazards and 
ruts, the realm of digital music is perhaps in more danger than some other 
realms of music given the nature of the tools:  the wide availability 
freely or cheaply downloadable software and patches ensures that anyone is 
able to "upgrade" to the latest tools at any moment, leading at times to a 
fickle approach to the instrument, as well as to the sound generated from 
the instrument.  Such a problem is not at all unique to digital music; 
electronic dance music has frequently been plagued by gear-centered fads 
and styles, and I recall the impassioned divides - Fender or Gibson, MXR or 
Electro-Harmonix, Mesa Boogie or Marshall - clouding musical consiousness 
in rock music as well.  But in digital music we experience now the 
luxurious situation in which the instrument and the studio are one and in 
which the tools of production formerly restrictly to professionals are 
suddenly in our own hands, and in such a situation the temporal distance 
between the composition and the release of music becomes far shorter.  Is 
it a coincidence that in these days of highspeed downloads and instant CD 
pressings the cycles of musical styles are increasingly narrowly and 
rigidly formulated, as if engineered for their own cultural 
obsolescence?  At the same time, I think those of us making electronic 
music at the moment are extremely fortunate to be living at a time in which 
devices once the price of cars and houses are now cheaper that a month's 
rental of an SF flat (sorry, bad joke) and in which the channels of 
production and distribution have been thrown open by virtue of the speed of 
the processor and the resources of the internet, especially when I recall 
the grim 1980s years of keypad-and-slider sampled-waveform 
synthesizers.  And despite the fact that the sheer number of recordings 
released in any genre has seemed to grow dramatically in recent years, the 
proportions represented by the good ones and by the bad and mediocre ones 
(I would set them at about 5% and 95% respectively) seem to have remained 
constant, giving us far more interesting music to which to listen (and on 
which to spent money).  But in any music it seems some trouble spots - some 
of which we near from time to time - are best avoided:

(1) orthodoxy (THIS is the right way to make music, and others are 
misguided or primitive);
(2) extremism (for example, digital music is the one true path, so I am 
tossing all hard instruments and from here forward will only use my 
computer and will listen to nothing extruded from any other source);
(3) ghettoization (this so-named subgenre has these features and obeys 
these rules, that so-named subgenre has those features and obeys those 
rules, etc.);
(4) formulation (a partner of (3), causing music to be created according to 
the rules of a style rather than letting styles evolve with the growth of 
musical intuition);
(5) self-importance (WE are the vanguard, see footnotes 1 through 97);
(6) gear worship (allowing the equipment to guide the piece, rather than 
using the piece as a test of the limits of the equipment);
(7) insularity (in which the creations of a closed community become 
in-jokes and nudge-nudge-wink-wink references only for members of that 
community, which itself grows distant from outsiders);
(8) excessive obscurity (not all in music need be exoteric - I will take 
Karlheinz S. over Britney S. any day -  but the strategic obfuscation of 
simple and graspable techniques behind a Wizard-of-Oz curtain threatens to 
push one into a corner, while others point to the duncecap strapped snugly 
to one's head);
(9) saturation (the flooding of market and consciousness with barely 
distiguishable product); and
(10) exhaustiveness (the need to release everything one creates without 
aging, editing, or scrapping).

All of these (with the exception of (8)) to a certain extent bite at the 
heels of any current musical genre, and any one of them, when uncontrolled, 
can devour a genre completely, with only Cleopatra compilations to suggest 
it had ever existed.

As for the issue of payment, I imagine that most people who have released 
records over the last decade will chuckle at the idea that suddenly 
musicians will now be unable to make money.  I have been unpaid as many 
times as I have been paid by labels and distributors, and MY luck has been 
rather good.  For other stories, one might look at the rock-oriented but 
still applicable (big labels are only "moving units" after all) articles in 
"The Big Takeover" of about six years ago detailing the horrors of having a 
Big Contract.  My favorite bit was the fact that the members of XTC, at the 
time of their biggest US chart success, were still working for a car rental 
agency in order to support themselves in their debt to their record 
company; they did refuse to tour, of course, and used expensive producers, 
but still, no mansions?  no poolside debauchery?  no money at all?  The 
point of the articles was that a Big Contract is really the instrument of a 
debtor relationship between musician and label, the latter allowing the 
former a period of realworld career deferral but demanding payback for what 
is considered a line of credit in the form of an advance.  Day jobs are not 
so wonderful, but then again they do free music from the constraints of the 
market and the financial demands of basic material survival.  I do like, 
for example, Brian Eno's claims of musical dilettantism, although it is 
easy to be a musical dilettante with those U2 production checks coming 
through the other mail slot.

And for fear in the future, forget the paycheck and consider the following 
bugbears:

(1) SDMI (the industry's "Secure Digital Music Initiative," designed to 
wrap downloadable audio files in a "secure" shell for which one must pay 
per play or per download or per copy, this one recently at the center of 
the ridiculed "Hack SDMI" challenge" and offered by the folk who see the 
Audio CD as a serious lapse in "security");
(2) Freuhofer (he of the MP3 CODEC and related intellectual property 
litigation, the result of which may be the requirement of license fees for 
now free MP3 software; we can hope for Ogg Vorbis); and
(3) analog copy protection for DVD-Audio (a return of the notorious CD 
frequency notch just in time to compromise the beauty of 24/96 audio, and 
this on a format already saddled with anti-global region codes for video).

I see musical production following the pattern of US economic 
stratification in the future:  just as here we have an increasingly small 
proportion of people getting grotesquely wealthy while an ever larger 
proportion toil away in narrower financial straits, I imagine records will 
fork onto either the Britney path or the obscurity path.  The Britneys for 
a while yet will require gargantuan piles of ubiquitous product to satisfy 
their fans, while the increasingly segmented world of marginal musics (and 
here I will place everything from Don Cherry to Morton Feldman to Hood to 
Neina) will tend to sidestep the main arteries of distribution in order to 
find listeners directly through online shops and shopper-friendly 
e-zines.  The limited 7" or cassette or CD-R release is already evolving 
into the downloadable EP or album, and with cheap server space readily 
available the cost of running a virtual label is sustainable through even 
the most meagre of day jobs.  In this equation, the Big Five labels win, 
and the nanolabels survive only by virtue of needing the least in the way 
of nourishment to eek out a pulse.  Musicians, meanwhile, all have day 
jobs, either in order to support their own labels or to pay off their debts 
to the Big Boys.  And having watched the die-off (at least in the US) of 
midsized independent labels and distributors over the last decade - many 
either getting sucked into major companies or withering in competition - I 
do not think this little scenario is the stuff of science fiction.  To keep 
myself happy, I remind myself that ever more powerful tools are ours at an 
ever lower cost, and that those of us at the nano level probably have an 
easier time now than a decade ago finding listeners.

np - The Lotus Eaters "No Sense of Sin"

joshua maremont / thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
boxman studies label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/