A couple of months ago, our old upstairs neighbors moved out as they had found greener pastures a mile or so away in Logan Square. We wished them well and in due time, they were replaced by a new couple. When first introduced, the guy told me he was a DJ - played electronic music. I nodded politely and made reference to Derrick May and Kraftwerk, both reference points causing him to smile quite fondly. Within days however, we began to miss our old neighbors. Sure we missed having dinner with them, watching low brow horror films and generally shooting the breeze about the vintage Playboys on their dining room table and the Waffle House quality 70's country music playing on the 8-tracks on their stereo, but mainly we found ourselves missing them because we couldn't stand their replacements.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. *Eccentric Blip* Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Yep. The DJ played electronic music alright - the most monotonous, bland strain of the stuff one could imagine - the stuff you hear being used in the background of Jersey Shore adverts or pouring out of the speakers and spilling out onto the sidewalk outside of Crocodile - that most reviled establishment on Milwaukee Avenue where the locals of Wicker Park find themselves shooting visual darts at the dude bros and their arm candy trixies as they berate one another and passerby loudly as they take up the whole of the walk way.
The DJ in question, one point for each thing you point out wrong in this picture.
As the days wore on and the thumping of the staccato 4/4 bass drum continued, I found myself going from simply grinding my teeth towards wondering what it is that makes some so-called electronic music generic while some of it is still a cut above. Is it the inherent lack of creativity that comes in creating repetitive rave ups meant solely to induce the crowd to move? So called genres such as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music for those of you not keeping score - it's alright if you don't, this particular genre is less than two decades old - a bit wet behind the ears even now as it reaches legal drinking age) borrow their glitchy ticks from such forefathers as The Aphex Twin who in turn were pilfering all manner of 20th Century avant garde by the likes of Subotnick and Stockhausen back when they were still young lads attempting to figure their ass from their ears (Aphex Twin, not the aformentioned composers - I really should get better at sentence construction shouldn't I?). Less Detroit Techno and Chicago House and more background atmospherics for beard fondlers and coffee shop dwellers, IDM is one of the variants off of the electronic family tree with room for creativity and innovation beyond the 4/4 wall.
One record in the genre of IDM that leads particular credence to the sake of the music as art form over tricks to induce the crowds to wave their hands in the air argument comes in the form of Nobukazu Takemura's "10th".
Deemed a lesser effort by his more hardcore faithful.
I stumbled across this record while digging through the racks at newly discovered Logan Hardware, a record shop hidden away off of Western and Fullerton (I'll devote an entire post to talking about the beyond rad room of vintage arcade games they have tucked away in the back - price to play for as long as you want? A record or two.) Near the cash register where the lone employee presided over the space and kept patrons moving through the racks to the sounds of freshly pressed Numero comps, I found two shelves worth of 'bargain' vinyl. The catch? Water damage galore. Apparently, someone had seen a major eruption of aqua from some now unknown source and much of their record collection suffered as a result. Hidden amongst the third tier Impulse! titles, I found 10th. A quick look up via smart phone clued me in that Jim O' Rourke had done a limited amount of work on the album and from there, I turned the phone off and placed it back in my bag, knowing full well that this knowledge was all I needed to slap down the 2 dollars required to attain the record (the sleeve received the majority of the punishment, the records contained inside are practically mint).
Upon putting the record on, I found a world of glitchy sounds evocative to the genre and while I enjoyed them (generic though they were), I found myself particularly drawn to the vocals. Both male and female took turns and both were fed through a myriad of processors. The female vocals were the most striking, at certain points sounding less like they were running through a vocodor and more like they were channeling the theremin off of an old Clara Rockmore LP. While this particular sub sect of electronic music often comes off generic (IDM's most ardent adherents have many within their numbers who play with programs that are little more than descendants of Cake Walk. These 'musicians' are happy if they manage to string together a few blips and bloops in a linear fashion. Slap them together with some clicks and pops for percussion and voila!), 10th has a certain haunting quality to it - the production trickery utilized makes the human vocal element of the music stand out and for a genre best known to the mainstream listening public as a vehicle used by Thom Yorke on The Eraser, a clear indicator of where electronic music (and IDM in particular) can go if in the hands of folks with more than a modicum of thought.
Whether unintentionally or not, records like these follow very much in the steps of the early to mid-20th century composers and musicians who put electronic instrumentation to tape in the first place. While Kraftwerk with their own transformation from tape collage enthusiasts to Berlin dance floor robots stand as the obvious link between the two schools of thought - the pre-1960's where sound acted as foil for academia and discovery versus the post-1970 'Switched On Back' world where electronics began to congeal into discernible melodies meant for palatability to the ears of the mass market - it can't possibly hurt for many of the electronic music enthusiasts of now to dip backwards a few decades to see where the sounds of their passions started, to find the world that existed before Trans-Europe Express was pilfered for Planet Rock. At the very least, such reflection and re-discovery would make the thumping coming through the ceiling a bit more bearable.
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