From: Steve Witham (sw@tiac.net)
Date: Tue Dec 31 1996 - 01:36:34 MST
>From: Ray Peck <rpeck@PureAtria.COM>
>
>"Max M" writes:
>
>>What happened in mid to late seventies was that a few bands, mainly
>>europeans, started to experiment with completely electronic music.
>
>Um, the first Kraftwerk album was 1970 or 71, as was the first Cluster
>album (why Cluster is always forgotten in these dicussions, I'll never
>know).
Gee, if we're going to be picky, what about Isao Tomita, Klaus Schultze (sp?),
Morton Subotnic, Walter Carlos, Jan Hammer, Vangellis, Larry Fast...
>From: "Kathryn Aegis" <aegis@igc.apc.org>
>
>The humorous irony that suffuses most of Kraftwerk's compositions
>always brings a smile to my face, especially the song they wrote
>about the old-style pocket calculators that had musical tones
>attached to the number keys. [...]
Me too!
I'm the operator of my pocket calculator.
[beeping noises between lines]
I'm the operator of my pocket calculator.
I am adding
and subtracting.
I'm controlling
and composing.
By pressing down a special key it plays a little MELody!
I have the single in English on one side and Japanese on the other. (Dentaku)
The rythm and sound of the lyrics in Japanese makes it especially cool.
To me, the perfect irony is when you express both sides of something--
get enjoyment out of both sides--in this case the perverse joy of silly
technology as well as the, well, the perversity of it--without having to
make exaggerated raised eyebrows or smirks. Being either "pro" or "anti"
would be boring.
>Are we as transhumanists willing to accept, learn
>from or even value ambivalence regarding technological progress? Are
>we able to laugh at our own hubris and draw strength from that?
Boy if we can't we're going to be bored and maladapted. I see our
civilization--techies included--as really clueless in the face of its
own technology. I think we paste things onto ourselves rather than
working out how to fit them to our lives. To assimilate anything well
requires seeing it and oneself from different points of view, exaggerated
ones even, and manipulating it in different ways. So Kraftwerk and Gary
Numan and Devo have done good work and the weirdness and irony are more
necessary than sober souls might think.
From: J de Lyser <gd33463@glo.be>:
>[...] i think Max meant here that the character of that music didn't
>change until the mid to late 70's. (i always keep 1978 as a personal
>guideline) where it was being produced electronically before, it still had
>much in common with more 'traditional' music. I'm not saying it was less
>exerimental or less innovating, it just became 'different', less 'emotional'
>(or maybe more, depending on your point of view ;-) ), and more 'technical'
>in sound.
This is very different from the way I've seen it. The early electronic
guys (up to the early '70's) were doing weird stuff, avant garde, exploring
what they thought were the frontiers of sound and musical structure. Sure,
at the same time there were people incorporating electronics into more
traditional and popular music, but electronics still had a raw, new sound,
a sound of pure possibility. In some ways it seemed more organic than
"natural" sound. Same for the equipment and methods--an ad hock collection
of unreliable machines connected by a spaghetti of patch cords seems to
have more natural anarchy in it than a midi rig.
Somehow it all seemed to fall apart around 1978--just when sampled keyboards
and FM synthesis came out, making the old analog methods obsolete. Musicians
didn't want to explore ur-sound or frontier sound, they wanted to push
buttons to make sounds they already knew about, whether "acoustic" (bank A)
or "electronic" (bank B--for instance my keyboard has a sound called
"Kraftwerk").
But techno seemed, to me, to adopt the "electronic" sound as a fetish,
affectation, attitude or nostalgia thing. And, it all seems 120 beats per
minute, 4/4, one or two chords to me, no matter how much filter "eer-
err-oor-oop" and strange sampled vocals are going on.
I'm being too hard of course, but my point is that the best early
electronics weren't about technology but about raw sound and its
intersection with acoustic and musical perception. I find music with a
techno attitude to be like 50's retro: tailfins, chrome, neon, The Jetsons
and such. It holds technology at a distance instead of being *in* it.
That probably sounds like a contradiction to my praise of Kraftwerk's
irony. But my point was that Kraftwerk are both "in" it and putting it
"on." Besides, they were in there early doing some of the real exploration
stuff--like that comb filter sweep and wooden flute piece on the back
side of "Autobahn"--stuff that would throw your mind into a different
place.
Obviously this is mostly an autobiographical piece about the plasticity
of my mind in different decades. But still, current techno is not so much
technological as "technological" with quotes around it, a reification of
certain ideas of what technology sounds like. In that sense earlier
electronic music was more enthusiastically, honestly, unabashedly
or unselfconsciously, technological (in the tool-making sense). Now I
have insulted a whole genre that I know next to nothing about.
--Steve (on vacation with his laptop--a dangerous situation)
-- sw@tiac.net http://www.tiac.net/users/sw "It just keeps going and going and therefore you yourself have to keep going and going." --Energizer Bunny researcher
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