Image : Amy Plant
Just a quick post to point you in the way of a small interview myself and Dean Feeney from Tr One did with Irish website Thumped.com. The usual topics for us luddites; vinyl n’ hardware plus how we feel about the Irish electronic music scene….
The Drum Dance 12″ has now hit Hardwax, Piccadilly and a bunch other places etc, enough spam. Nice one.
3 Comments
thanks for talking about your consideration of constraints and displaying common sense regarding the digital saturation. to broaden the discussion…
the idea that laptops and midi controllers are more guilty of being cliches than two turntables and vinyl is a lame argument. i don’t think arguments based on tactility/interface of analog gear get you very far. you push buttons and turn knobs. how is that different than pushing buttons and turning knobs on a midi controller? from a tactility/interface perspective, they aren’t.
so the difference has something to do with the sound. but ultimately, it’s all direct-injection, and you arguably miss out on all of the richness of transductive recording practices. these were the fault lines you found when the beatles recorded sgt pepper. now i don’t take one side more strongly than the other, but i think you can see that these arguments surfacing today pseudo-problematize the past.
using hardware today is a cliche, precisely because it’s a technological solution that doesn’t address its original problem. people bought a 303 back in the day because they couldn’t afford a bassist. today they buy a 303 because it’s supposedly more authentic to use it in electronic dance music than record a real bassist (pretty simple and cheap to do today) or use software. note, i’m not accusing you guys of this, but there are plenty of people who believe this.
digital/analog is a very old question. representation of an idea (proto-digitization) vs. its materialization (analog) drove architecture for hundreds of years.
“I mean, who in the hell needs a collection of 400gigs of sound samples, 4,000 note polyphony and 4 days worth of sample time?”
yeah, pragmatically, it may not make sense, but this is a conceptual limit that should be addressed by contemptorary artists and musicians. see terre thaemlitz’s new project.
“You also have limits on what you can do with vinyl – the amount of tracks, the duration, etc – and thus how the songs are even sequenced on the pressing.”
this is the same for digital, it’s just not in the minutes-scale.
I’ll leave most of that for the lads who make the music, but the minutes scale is a big thing, it effects what gets on the release and in what order. As I said, I would have other material on the release if time was less limited, but because its on vinyl it is, and thats a pretty big difference. and the sequencing is limited in scope too, due to lengths of tracks…so imo, major differences. 🙂
word. it’s a big jump, minutes to hours, and it can be done, just not on vinyl or cd. i’m thinking of the scale of really long performances in raga or by the likes of la monte young for example. it’s almost unfathomable to conceive of sequencing stuff at that scale of time, but this is the technological age we live in now, so i think it’s an opportunity for some brave people to take it on.
and about the cliches, let me be clear so as to not piss anyone off because that’s not my intent at all. cliches aren’t inherently bad in my opinion. so long as you’re aware it’s a cliche, you’re in a position to make a decision as to what you want to do next. reformulate it, use it as an opportunity, etc.