Chris Lorch

Rebirth (via Electroacoustic Musicians)

In the first half of 2013 we’ve had new albums from The Knife, Baths, Toro y Moi, James Blake, Atoms for Peace, and Daft Punk.

A number of these artists have mentioned how boring “laptop music” has become. All of them have sought a return to the often-painstaking process of collecting live, analog instrumentation for their recordings and some have practiced their songs to play on live instruments at shows.

William Tyler’s recently-released “Impossible Truth,” at first appearance, seemed like a simple folk and blues guitar album. Listen closely, however, and you’ll hear a strong influence of musique concrète, including a series of found sounds that Tyler plays back from a cassette tape player. In his live performances, the clean guitar finger-picking is paired and offset by many looped guitars and lush, reverberating feedback. There are no vocals, but the tunes have currency, and a sense of life.

In early 2013, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” had this sense of “aliveness” even before the song was associated with Pharrell’s human voice. Collaborator Niles Rogers’ attributed the life-giving attributes of the song (and many of his previous hits) to his guitar-playing methods. Rogers’ voice-leading technique carries the melody along with the rhythm, and in combination that melody can tell a story on its own, even without the rest of the track’s layers.

In some ways, all music (and much art, for that matter) is all about telling and retelling stories. Modern music (and again, much modern art) has the gift and obligation of perfect recall: of echo, of feedback and playback, about setting and meeting expectations at a degree that is eternally replicable. It’s a scary, yet exciting proposition, and it’s nigh-impossible to ignore with the ubiquity of digital music players, of color LED screens and high-speed internet connections. Barring some freak data corrosion, what the artist sees is what the end-user gets, repeatedly and without fail.

In response, electroacoustic artists create performances that work to be precise and imprecise in all of the right ways. Their new songs meet the expectations of previous ones, and build upon those expectations. Their live shows embrace imprecision, even though they sometimes hedge their bet or account for impossible-to-play parts with a click and a backing track. However, new electroacoustic artists do try to avoid playing the easy hypeman-DJ part that many electronic artists have fallen prey to, eschewing the new tradition of pressing play on Ableton Live and jumping around to distract the audience from the truth: that these expensive and flashy shows are not performances, but pre-made, shallow pretenses for playback. Most audiences intuitively know this, but cognitive dissonance allows them to ignore the fact that they are being sold what is essentially a sham, and a shallow one at that.

Counteracting this trend, new electroacoustic artists attempt to use the elements of traditional musical performance to elevate the playing field. They are both vulnerable and yet flexible; sometimes even empowered to try out new things. Vampire Weekend uses samples heavily in their new album, but most songs are played without a click in favor of triggering or playing most parts live. Rostam Batmanglij sings backup vocals on “Step” through a pitch-shifter. In live performances his voice changes throughout the song, whereas in the live recording it only shifts at the very end. These variations are playful and yet artistic, showing off the fact that their performance is malleable: it can, and will be changed to suit the artist’s, and audience’s mood.

In the next few months, we’ll hear new albums from Boards of Canada, Gold Panda, Washed Out, and Braids, whose new track and album announcement is linked in this post. Do these artists truly seek to explore new possibilities of sampled/live acoustic instruments? Will 2013 be remembered as a breakout year, where artists made a concerted push to redefine modern electronic music?  Is this a movement that will pass, or is it even a movement at all? Are these acoustic sounds going to define the next decade of music, or will electronica revert back to bleepy bloopy bedroom-crafted chillwave?

Only time will tell, but judging by the great music we’re hearing in 2013, the answers sound refreshing, liberating, and quite promising.

nobpm:

Daft Punk - Horizon (Japan Bonus Track)

You gotta love Japan bonus tracks

iTunes: http://bit.ly/jg-itunes
Bleep: http://bit.ly/jg-bleep

‘On Your Side (Radio Edit)’ available now with preorder
Full version available June 3rd with the complete EP

Digital release June 3rd 2013 | 12” Vinyl release July 1st 2013

(Premiered on BBC Radio One - Zane Lowe, 21st May 2013)

Midweek throwback.

Fantastic cover of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

Beat by @michdonovan at West Village Apartments

nprfreshair:

“Eerie Photos of Boston Looking Like A Ghost Town” from Business Insider

Really, really excited for this album.



I don’t want to be a star

But a stone on the shore 

Long door, frame the wall

When everything’s overgrown

Beat Making Lab: Cho Cho Cho

Beats & Breakdancing in the Congo!

“Forget the fizz, forget the buzz; the flavor possibilities are incredible.”

Really found out about and got involved in carbonation/ flavor infusion through a Gizmodo article and video demonstration on infusing Rum with fresh basil and orange peel.

Dave Arnold (featured in the NY Times article) appears to have invented the infusion technique, you can see his process and see two years of follow-up discussion in the comments on this post. It’s genius.

Lost, hidden, or discovered.

Plastic bag full of
solitary socks
washed, tumbled and dried.

Someday
or in another life
they will find a partner

Or at least an owner who
cares less about
matching.

Tumblr, you’re fantastic. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - “Atomic Ranch”

My Bloody Valentine- “She Found Now” off of “m b v”

Suede - “It Starts And Ends With You”

Add some synth groove to your day.

Since Duke joined the Coursera project last summer and we started developing our first MOOC, we knew that these free online classes had the potential to really make a difference. I don’t think anybody quite anticipated the breadth of impact they would have in only a few months’ time:

“Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in which he wrote: ‘Please tell Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old boy emerging from autism. I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your course] was my first real course ever. During the course, I had to keep pace with the class, which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can benefit from having to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.’”

Here’s one that was sent to a faculty member I work with: “Since I live in a third world country, investment in science and education is very low. However, you and your course motivated me to pursue my dreams, and because of that, I’m working on a project for my undergraduate thesis, related candidate genes responsible with cleft lip and palate syndromic and non-syndromic.

It is a little difficult, given that I am a low-income student and the university does not have many resources, however, I love genetics and hope someday to be as bright as you…”

Ok, I’m just gushing now. Just… just go read the article.

And come join me in the Songwriting course offered by Berklee that starts March 1st! Or if you haven’t done any music production before, you can take the intro course that also starts this week.

cornelluniversity:

“In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” says audio curator Greg Budney, describing a major milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. All archived analog recordings in the…

Fantastic.

x-surface:

I am a gamer. I don’t work for Microsoft.

I, like most other gamers, am sick of seeing endless rumours and speculation citing “anonymous sources” or “insiders” with no evidence, no proof, no guarantee that they’ve been fact-checked or can be relied on.

The games industry is the only one I can…

The inherent failings of the interblag echo chamber is why pushing Nintendo Direct makes so much sense: Nintendo can make stuff up themselves. Nintendo can directly set fan expectations, hopes and dreams, and then directly crush them. They don’t have to let unverified sources have all of the fun. See also: What Nintendo has learned from Kickstarter