nonrandommusic

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Techno

This week I listened to a lot of techno. I always associated early techno with Germany but never knew about its roots in Detroit with people like Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

A lot of techno reminds me of the deadmau5 song “Bounce” that I listened to a lot as a kid. My parents, much more into classic rock/singer-songwriter music didn’t like it at all because it was just a beat, no chords or melodies. But that really isn’t the point: the point (at least to me) is to focus on that forward driving motion of the beat, without getting distracted by traditional harmony and form.

One other thing that blew my mind was hearing Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, a 1973 album that was integrated some techno-like-elements into Hancock’s jazz music. I’ve heard lots of Herbie Hancock before, and I knew he did some electronic stuff in Head Hunters and Future Shock but this album caught me off guard, especially with how early it was. Before Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” there was Herbie Hancock’s “Rain Dance.”

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This is a noise study I made, running some simple sounds through a lot of distortion and fast modulation to create some interesting and noisy textures.

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Ambient Study

(The file was too big to upload to Tumblr so I put this on my SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.com/nonrandom-1/ambient-study/s-eVlNfLGBPC8)

This is an ambient music study I made in Ableton. The main body of the piece is a short classical jingle I wrote that I ran through paulstretch and slowed it down a ton. Then I added some synths and other sounds on top of it.

The most interesting part was the fact that the original piece was a simple chord progression, but slowing it down so much created a cool-sounding texture and turned the chord changes into sound objects that were much more gradual. The chords felt more like full-on modulations than simple chords because they took so much time.

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Sampling and Looping

This week I listened to a lot of music that utilizes samples and loops, ranging from early experimental music by composers like Steve Reich to the hip-hop of people like Grandmaster Flash. I also saw this interview with Flash https://youtu.be/m3YXyK-gWvc where he breaks down the his turntable technique that became the foundation of modern hip-hop and rap. It’s really amazing to see him loop specific song sections by moving back and forth between two identical vinyls. It’s the kind of thing I do all the time without thinking about: I can just drag the end of a region in Logic to loop it: but before accessible software like that, Flash developed a system to do it using a 2-record turntable and his hands. (And his transitions are so clean every single time!!)

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This is a sample study I made. It’s made up of 4 main samples:

The beginning groove from Gotye - State of the Art (which samples Frances Yip - Green is the Mountain)

The main beat from Childish Gambino - Sweatpants (which samples Michael Jackson - Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough)

The high Electric Piano and Siren sounds from Gorillaz - El Mañana

The chorus vocals from Bastille - Weight Of Living, Pt I

I rarely ever work with samples of other songs, much less samples this big, so this was interesting to create. It doesn’t feel like it’s super original, as it’s just a bunch of loops made by others that Ableton time/pitch-shifted for me. However I am pretty happy with sound of the result, and it was cool to combine all these songs I love into one object.

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This is a dub study I made, based on what I’ve been listening to recently. I took a multitrack of “The Last Stand” by Ikebe Shakedown and made a dub remix of it. The main constraint I had was I couldn’t chop up the audio at all: I had to do everything through effects and automation in Ableton. I ended up splitting the tracks into drums, horns, and guitars and affecting those each differently.

[nonrandommusic]

Dub

This week I listened to a lot of dub. This is more in my territory than the super early electronic music, and I can see a much more direct connection to the electronic music I usually listen to. In dub I hear a lot of samples used in ways that remind me of trip-hop I’m more familiar with like Massive Attack and Portishead. There is also a huge focus on drums and bass to create a very clear, driving groove which I quite like. One standout for me was “See Mi Yah” by Rhythm & Sound with Willi Williams. I could not get enough of the super low synth bass sound they used, it was so good and worked perfectly to push the song forward. There was also a blanket of reverb over pretty much everything, which gave the song a very spacey, ethereal feel that I really appreciate.

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This is an analysis I’m working on of the piece “Switched On” by Manuella Blackburn

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This is an acousmatic piece I created for my first 57358 assignment

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This is an audio challenge I did to recreate a sound using a different sound. I recorded my gas stove turning on and a pencil snapping in half, then attempted to edit and warp the pencil sound to recreate the stove sound.

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Radiophonics

This week I listened to lots of British electronic music from the 50s-60s onward, and I started to see a lot of stuff I recognized. Things like the original Doctor Who theme by Delia Derbyshire were already very familiar to me, and I enjoy the combination of the fancy new electronic sounds of the era with simple, recognizable melodies and structures. I also love Blade Runner, so it was cool to see Vangelis’ awesome soundtrack on the weekly playlist. It does feel kind of dated at this point, but I think the music of Blade Runner (as well as the tone and overall aesthetic) has been hugely influential on modern films and games.

It was also interesting to realize how insanely important Bell Labs was to technology in general. I had heard the name before in a computer science context, Bell Labs being where the C programming language came from, but never knew it was so influential in so many different fields, from astrophysics to checkers to electronic music.

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This is a piece inspired by Stockhausen’s methodical, mathematical approach to electro-acoustic music. It consists of nine sounds organized into three groups based on how tonal they are (i.e. whether they have a distinct pitch/pitches or are just noisy/percussive). They are played one at a time at in order from atonal to tonal, then mixed up, then from tonal back to atonal.

I am not very used to this style of composition, and while it was conceptually interesting to create I am not sure that I really like the final product from a listener’s perspective. I generally prefer to let my ear guide me when creating music.

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Krautrock + Elektronische Musik

This week I listened to a lot of German krautrock and other early electronic music, and I really liked it all. I find bands like CAN and NEU! interesting because I can very clearly hear the influence they had on modern bands I enjoy like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And I am just generally a fan of rock with electronic elements mixed in. I also really liked “Hausmusik” by Harmonia, which had lots of meandering piano and synth sounds and was generally nice to listen to.

On the more electronic side of things, I am always impressed to hear what Kraftwerk was doing in the 70s and how that would later turn into synth-pop and EDM. I especially enjoyed “The Man Machine” and “Abzug,” with their use of vocoders, drum machines and synth-ostinatos.

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This is a musique concrète study I created called Liquidity. It is completely made up of sounds I recorded from around my house and warped in various ways using Adobe Audition. It’s short but I tried to create a sort of ABA structure which ended up as more of an intro-drone-outro type thing.

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Musique concrète

This week I listened to a ton of very early experimental electronic music. My favorite was probably Pierre Schaeffer’s Etude Violette, which had a lot of strange warped (piano?) sounds unified by a very consistent looping rhythm. I think it showcases how consistent, repetitive rhythms can give a very musical quality to literally anything. Iannis Xenakis�� Concret PH was also a standout: it was quite different, focusing on a very stable and slowly evolving glassy, sprinkly texture. Lastly there was Memory of a Big Room (For Matthew) a fantastic ambient piece by Ellen Fullman and her “Long String Instrument” which I found a great article on https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/music/ellen-fullman.html