Recently when I’ve been listening to music, I’ve been trying to set the music into two kinds of categories. If the music is technical, very clever, lots of ideas and concepts, it is done with the brain in mind. If there’s a message, something that makes me feel very different, it is done for the heart.

There are of course mixtures of it all. Anyway, to take an example, a lot of angst music, you know that kind of contemporary rock music with songs about girlfriends new and old, stupid parents et rest, it is really targeted towards the heart. Punk music was very much such a style, as well.

As for pure brain-music, we are dealing with technical material that usually only musicians dig, Spiro Gyra style technical jazz, lots of progressive/complex rock music (Steve Vai et rest), and so forth.

As for mixtures (this is where my musical taste navigates to), for example Peter Gabriel’s albums such as So is a good example of music that is both technically interesting as well as moves the heart. Believe it or not, same with Frank Zappa, he was a brilliant composer but at the same time he had a message, if nothing else, a funny one. There are extremes here, too, such as sugary ballads that are mostly template work.

Concerning contemporary electronic music, dance music et rest, I think the we  are absolutely dealing with content that has very little emotions, with some exceptions such as Matrix-style anger-electronica music, or what NIN has done.

Same with technical skills, there’s really not much about using loops and sequencers today, some programming skills were needed ten years ago, not today. So it fits, sorry, into a very sad place.

It sounds controversial but I do think that if electronic music really has a chance to become something tangible long term, it needs a big dose of both. To start with, electronic music has to move the heart, you have to feel sad, happy, angry, surprised, inspired and so forth.

Secondly, there has to be something that separates the artist or band from the rest concerning musicality — just adding loops and plug-ins does not cut it, it has to sound personal. It does not mean that someone needs to  study the piano for ten years before releasing something. Rather find your very unique voice using the instruments or tools, so that if anyone keys in on a radio station, they immediately know who this is. Good example is Daft Punk.

Feel free to comment.

I kind of got a rekindled interest in Indian dance music, modern Bollywood music, maybe it was after watching two episodes of So You Think You Can Dance with Bollywood choreography that just blew my mind concerning creativity.

So I checked out more contemporary material using YouTube — YouTube is an excellent way to find out more about various artists, in this case contemporary Indian ones.

There’s also an excellent article over at Wikipedia concerning Bollywood Songs. I especially liked the concept of using the nine rasas to define the dominant emotion of a song. In case you have a writer’s block concerning writing music or lyrics, use that as one of the tools to break the ice.

Anyway, the fun part with Indian music are the tempos that are not standard, even if 4/4s are more and more used. Also, the use of percussion is very different and exciting. Sometimes it’s really the upfront part in combination of singing — the rest of the instruments take a supportive role which is not that common in contemporary Western music, unless we talk about hiphop and similar drum-centric styles.

As a bass player I checked out the bass lines; use of bass synths are more and more in place, which is also interesting. As there’s a growing population of Indians here in Silicon Valley I would not be surprised to see more and more Indian party bands appearing, actually.

I saw a couple of Indian music streaming channels in iTunes, under the International section (such as Bollywood & Beyond) so tune in and get influenced.

I read some time ago Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia. This was quite a fascinating book, I would recommend any musician to take time reading it, or think about the issues the book raises.

Oliver Sacks is actually a neurologist, and he has been involved with all kinds of strange states concerning brain and music. Usually after some kind of internal brain damage or accident, various people have strange problems concerning music and audio. For example, one person was struck with lightning, after this he became so passionate about music (not before) that he is constantly composing and playing, hearing songs in his head.

Others have annoying music loops playing over and over in their heads after an accident or problems. Some become totally tone deaf.

The book really points out that there are sections in the brain that controls the level of musicality for persons. A damage and it’s over. Or then something else strange happens and new patterns emerge. It would also explain how composers such as Mozart constantly heard music, all they needed was to write it down. And why for some others they can’t really hear much, even to a point that they attend American Idol and believe their voice is godlike, while they can’t even hold a tune.

It might even explain why I’ve had bass licks and melodies that suddenly started playing in my mind in mid-December, hence I’m nowadays a bass player.

Anyway, in practical terms it means that for us musicians, we need to take care of our brain. Never go out biking without a helmet. Use aspirin every day to make the blood elastic to avoid any sudden blood bursts in the brain. Check your blood pressure, take it down with all means, if something bad happens — like a bursted blood vessel — it might be the last time you could create music. Take down the overall weight. Take care of your brain.

Here’s another article on the web talking about how jazz musicians turn off certain sections of the brain and enact other when jamming together.

Anyway, there’s still the mystery why some get the right wirings in the brain and become amazing musicians — supposedly nobody in Steve Vai’s family is a musician — so there’s more than genes in action. And it can’t be just random patterns, that’s not logical. But that’s another deeper philosophical issue.

Maybe by now you have noticed that I’m on a small quest to bring musicianship back to electronic music. That means that there’s an attempt and it takes time to learn an instrument, but then you have far more nuances compared with copy/pasting loops or using fixed MIDI sequences.

For example, the state of art concerning electronic drum kits are far beyond the early days of the Simmons sets. Check out the Roland TD-3S kit, a very reasonable price, you could usually get them for below $1000 or even lower. The videos at the link also shows what could be done, provided you do your homework and learn to play the instrument.

Now, compare using something like this for recordings or live sessions versus using a drum machine or drum loops. There’s something special about humans that play, the nuances will pop out. Yes, I know, many of us try to put them back with shuffle modes and all kinds of tricks, so that’s another way to do it. But then again you could do it in one take — assuming you want to learn to play drums.

Those electronic drum kits are also easy to transport, for example for jam sessions. Not to speak of the clarity of the drum sounds when running them through a PA. And we have not even touched the options to trigger and play all kinds of percussive and non-percussive sounds during a live set. The other bonus is that the audience loves people playing instruments.

I guess someone had time collecting a lot of records, see this article about an eBay sale of a collection of three million records and 300,000 CDs.

Physical record collections are important, in this age of digital material, especially unreleased stuff, it’s easy for a hard disk to fry. I don’t even know if my old archives work any longer, speaking of +12 year collections of stuff on hard disks. I might not even be able to open them up due to  material produced with Opcode Studio Vision. I think some material is still on a DAT tape, and one might wonder if that’s even playable today.

Now, has this person listened to all the tracks? That would take multiple lifetimes…

Hey, that’s good news. Even better, Alex Patterson is going back to the U.F. Orb sound roots.

Here’s the link to the Resident Advisor article, it also has a youtube video which is quite funny.

I always felt Alex Patterson is the closest to a ‘Frank Zappa of the electronic music world.’ Frank Zappa actually also worked a little bit with electronic music, check out Jazz from Hell.

Now, all we need are more innovative electronic music producers, those who dare to do something different.

I recorded the Classics Series, Frank Zappa Apostrophe/Over-nite Sensation program to my DVR as it was shown via the VH1 Classics cable channel a couple of nights ago.

Wow! I used to listen to Frank Zappa quite a lot during my high school days, but I suspect I didn’t really appreciate Apostrophe as much as now when I’m older.

If there was an artist that was so opposite of the classical ‘rock&rock’ archetype artist, this is it. Frank Zappa was really a composer that made use of rock music as his medium.

Watching and listening to programs such as this one makes me go back to the studio and really make use of arrangements, triads, non-standard tonality changes, scales. I miss all that stuff after a longer stint doing techno productions….

PS: If you ever have the stamina to watch this movie from beginning to end, Frank Zappa’s Baby Snakes movie is very, very interesting. Not to speak of the concert scenes, too..

Another thing to get the creativity up is to experiment with other musicians. You could join various jams, craigslist is a good source of finding what’s going on. Or then ask around, or find out what’s going on.

The nice thing with playing other musicians is that you really never know the outcome. Which is for me very liberating — after living years and years inside a production studio and controlling every aspect of the production.

Sometimes the whole of it all sounds very inspiring, compared with you controlling every aspect.

As a DJ, it is not so hard to hook together two systems with MIDI synchronization. In the case of Ableton Live, read the manuals that has the info. You only need MIDI in/out ports on your audio card/box. Then one could play tracks and the other annotates them, and you could switch roles. Or even more fancy, do a totally free-form jam with dance tracks.

It is the unexpected result that is the interesting aspect when working with other musicians. It’s fun to fine-tune a performance, as well. But for me, the interesting thing is when multiple musicians get together and have a good way of communicating and creating music on the spot.

This is part two of how to get the mojo back, creativity, inspiration, you know that feeling where you really are in the flow and want to make music.

For me it was to get a bass guitar and a bass amp? Why? Well, I got recently to a point when doing digital dance music where I realized that most of my time I spend with polishing and fixing audio material on a screen, mostly using my own loop snippets. Even worse, taking out nuances such as sloppy playing and so on. It makes the music exact, but there’s no breathing in it.

In addition, mostly with keyboards you really don’t get that much variation across a song played, especially if you use copy-paste to line out song structures.

With a bass guitar, I could have small timing parts that I deliberately create in order to get to the groove pocket. I could use my fingers with all kinds of variations to change the sound. I could put in different strings, experiment with my amp simulator in my Line 6 LD150, and so on… I kind of missed that part.

In addition, it’s fun playing with other musicians, of all kinds. Sitting by myself in a studio became somewhat an isolated experience. The sum of it all is sometimes much more interesting than the single-person total control of a production.

There’s nothing wrong to expand and learn playing guitars and so on. I’m an ex guitar-player, even ex bass session player (used to do hundreds of gigs back in college days), but it’s been 25+ years since I last seriously played bass. Anyway, getting back to bass playing has  been fun, indeed.

Phew. This was intense. I was drowning in a bigger software project, but finally we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So sorry for the long delay concerning new postings.

I will actually write a short series of ‘getting the mojo back.’ I think this scenario happens to a lot of artists, from time to time. For me it was a combination of working long days and weekends and not having enough energy to work on something completely different in the evenings, as well as another thing I will mention in a later posting.

Anyway, how to get the mojo back if you feel your creativity has stagnated, or you just feel you are on the wrong track and nothing happens?

One way I solved this was to once again rip in all my tracks from every CD I had, but this time I was selective and only ripped in material that I felt was special and different. So most of the mix CDs were excluded. While adding in classical music, old rock music, soul, reggae and so on was something I wanted to do.

Then via iTunes I just dumped it all into an iPod and set the iPod in shuffle mode. Yes, it sounds like Kent of all the people finally got the idea behind iTunes/iPods, but for me it was the concept of hearing Schumann one minute, Bjork the next, then Rush followed by XTC and a little bit Fixx and Simple Minds, and then Swayzak. Those kinds of odd combinations made me appreciate all kinds of musical ideas, and get new ideas how to progress with new productions.

More mojo stuff in the next posting!

My wife wanted me to make another mix for running purposes. That it inself is usually a challenge, as runners, depending on their pace, like something like 80-95 bpm. Finding tracks in that range that are not ballads is a tough job, unless you use the 160-180bpm tracks and those are super-fast. In addition she wanted music from the eighties, from the European New Romantic period (Simple Minds et rest.)

So I fired up my newly installed iTunes collection and looked through material. It was actually very interesting. For example, the Ultravox Rage in Eden album had bpm values from 73bpm to 150bpm, and many tracks were 140bpm or more. In many cases the tracks sounded faster than the actual bpm value, using all kinds of classical tricks such as syncopation.

And this was true of many other similar albums of this time.

Now, it seems we are stuck in the 128bpm rot in the concurrent electronic music, especially in the dance music world. Maybe it’s a practical issue concerning the dancing audience and having the option to increase the bpm during the mix. But it’s for me a little bit sad that we don’t really make use of various tempos in music today. It seems few dare to change this model. Anyway, especially if someone is working on an album, I would strongly recommend to just break all the rules and use tempos from 60pm up to 180bpm. That would be refreshing. Now, having even radical tempo changes along the track would be even more intriguing.

Classical composers used tempo changes, even microscopic ones, along their compositions. While we are locked to a fixed tempo, ack.

See this, it is of course Autechre. Otherwise Myspace pages for many bands and artists are either totally confusing, but Autechre makes use of that.

In general, if a web page is hard to understand and use, it will mean that few will bother exploring the page…

Anyway, Autechre is soon out with a new album, hurray. They’ve done all, glitch music, minimalism, and so on, a long long time ago.

Actually their Wikipedia entry had a very interesting note:

In response to comments about their unique sound, Autechre argue that given the incredible range of tools available to modern composers, especially in the electronic genres, it is incomprehensible that any band should “sound like” any other band.

Yes!

Fabric, the London based night club, just announced their podcast, so I was curious to listen to the first one. Not what I expected, at all, it was an interesting journey to the history of blues and forward in time, so why not, it’s good to listen to all kinds of music.

Phlow is an online blog that has articles about netlabels, and they just started a podcast series. This one actually sends out single songs most of the days, one at a time, so it’s like getting a single a day from their selection. It’s a good idea, and I suspect other podcasts that send out netlabel music might jump on this same concept.

Filter27 is another electronic music blog, and they also have a podcast, they don’t seem to send out so much music, once a month or so, but the DJ mixes are very radical and interesting.

I have my own Something/Everything podcast, the idea was to dump out music from my collection of material that I put together every month, but of course I’m running behind with it all, have two EP releases I need to get in place, and get BioWaves 005, now a one hour series. But I have not forgotten this other one, so as they say in the business: stay tuned.

I’m afraid this will sound like a grumpy old man writing entries how things were better long time ago (it was not), anyway, had to release some steam, and if you think this is the opposite, feel free to quote.

For a longer time I’ve now listened to dance tracks where a producer is using a female singer, and then a remixer goes in and does more remixing.

What then happens is that the poor female singer is sampled with a tiny snippet, let’s say 1/16 bar, and that one is used as a stuttering effect across the whole remix. Most likely the original singer is very talented, and the lyrics might be very good, but there’s no chance to hear it.

Trust me, if you have a good singer, male or female, singing for your track, let her or him be heard with their true voice. By the way, why are there so few male singers on contemporary tracks, Underworld being one exception, and look how popular Underworld is?

Secondly. A lot of contemporary minimalist tracks indeed pave the way for new, interesting music, especially on the netlabel releases. However, I’ve heard enough tracks with that vinyl emulation/distortion mode, the one where it sounds like the track is slowly dissipating into tiny bits. We don’t need any more that kind of sound, it was originally just bad to hear it, so with today’s excellent music systems, please, I rather like to hear a really good production than something that is deliberately crippled just so it’s cool and sounds like the rest of similar vinyl distortion emulation stuff.

Hmm. What else? Oh, the use of arpeggiators. I’m falling to the trap myself over and over again. Arpeggiators are nice, but the stiff 1/16 scale up-down thingie, that’s been around since the 1970:ies, nothing new, nothing exciting. If arpeggiators are used, do something totally unexpected.

There’s maybe more, but I better stop. I like any kind of music that dares to be different. If someone emulates an existing artist or style, their chance of being recognized just diminishes, as the sound will not pop out from various mixes, radio shows, podcasts, shows and so on. Especially if the production is using a cliche effect, then it’s usually hard for me to get any more listening time.

The Dance Department Beats To Go is another podcast series I’m listening to from time to time. Yes, it it sometimes cheezy, but this is one quick way to find out what the hot sound is just now, and I can’t complain when the guest mixes have been from Nathan Fake, John Holden, Richie Hawtin and others that I really like.

The DJ, Dennis Ruyer, usually ends the podcast with a historical dance track, so those are also fun to follow.

This is the RSS feed link in case you want to subscribe to it, or check out an episode or two.