fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Submit Your Event
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Send Letter to the Editor
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Sounds of the past’s future

by John Burdick
June 22, 2020
in Village Voices
0
Sounds of the past’s future

photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg

File under musical comedy.

It is time to stop calling sequenced, sampled and programmed electronic music “futuristic” or even “forward-looking.” You can take off your visor helmet now. Electronic and digital production have been status quo for over 25 years, which is about 25 lifetimes in digital chronology.

I once dropped in on a topic at a musician’s forum in which a kid was complaining that he couldn’t get the gooseneck microphone vocoder on his Micro Korg XL. One helpful responder asked, “Have you tried saying things about ‘the future’ into it?”

Electronic music has replicated its silicon tendrils through everything that we once considered inviolably organic: laptop folk, worldtronica, Switched-on Bach. It’s not transgressive or radical any more, except in its rhetoric. It can be good and it can be bad, revelatory or utterly half-assed (“Hey everybody, watch me press Play on loops I bought at the loop store!”). But it is no longer “forward-looking,” agreed? It’s just music now, fending for itself in a crowded market.

Still, a futuristic mythology seems to be inscribed in the “digital DNA” of almost all music that uses tempo-synched delay and grid-based quantization, pitch and time correction, and auto-harmonization.

Long ago, I stopped keeping track of the proliferative categories and subcategories of electronic music — Downstep Miami Dry Chill, or Intelligent Jungle Hard Trip, whatever — and trying to understand or even believe in the difference. Curmudgenhood has its liberations. It all sounds like the past’s future to me.

I stand in awe of the sound design, the technology, the deep skill of the programmers. Live performance is always a big question mark with electronic music.

The question that attends: Why bother? How much of it, if any, is performed off the grid and with an actual risk of failure? How much is just the glorified pressing of Play, with some provision for mixing spontaneity? And how much is that soulful fusion of man and machine that the Korg and Ableton product brochures have promised for so, so many years now?

Read more installments of Village Voices by John Burdick.

Tags: John Burdick Village Voices
Join the family! Grab a free month of HV1 from the folks who have brought you substantive local news since 1972. We made it 50 years thanks to support from readers like you. Help us keep real journalism alive.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher

John Burdick

Related Posts

Village Voices are on hold
Village Voices

Village Voices are on hold

November 17, 2020
A liberal education
Village Voices

Keeping it all together

August 24, 2020
Writing about oneself
Village Voices

I need a day off

August 24, 2020
Saugerties initiative combating addiction and suicide adds more events
Village Voices

Time travel

August 24, 2020
Where to buy face masks locally
Village Voices

A story of three states

September 2, 2020
The kids talk politics
Village Voices

Stories on the ballot

August 23, 2020
Next Post
Old Mother West Wind

Winslow Homer, painter

Weather

Kingston, NY
72°
Partly Cloudy
5:19 am8:30 pm EDT
Feels like: 72°F
Wind: 3mph NE
Humidity: 82%
Pressure: 29.96"Hg
UV index: 0
SatSunMon
73°F / 59°F
77°F / 59°F
73°F / 59°F
Kingston, NY weather forecast ▸

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Art
    • Books
    • Kids
    • Lifestyle & Wellness
    • Food & Drink
    • Music
    • Nature
    • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In
  • Free HV1 Trial
  • Subscribe to Our Newsletters
    • Hey Kingston
    • New Paltz Times
    • Woodstock Times
    • Week in Review

© 2022 Ulster Publishing