AFX/Polygon Window recensie 1993

Ik kwam tijdens onderzoek voor een artikel over een andere artiest deze recensie tegen in mijn archief, uit de Melody Maker van 10 april 1993. Simon Reynolds op zijn best:

"This makes Aphex music sound cold and forbidding, when it actually glistens and glows with "soul". In fact, it's 21st Century gospel, a glimpse of cyberdelic heaven. It's sacred music for a secular age, synth-siphoned balm for the wounded soul, and the (il)logical sequel to both Eno/Bowie's "Low" and Spacemen 3's "Playing With Fire."

Analogue Bubblebath 3 en Surfing on Sine Waves kwamen dus ongeveer op hetzelfde moment uit (wat een weelde.) En al begint Syro voorzichtig zijn geheimen prijs te geven blijven deze twee nog steeds mijn favoriete RDJ albums (mijn herinnering is een beetje in nevelen gehuld op dit gebied maar het kan zijn dat ik deze twee eerder kocht dan Selected Ambient Works 85-92).

(de scan hierboven is aanklikbaar en leesbaar)

De Hel als Rave

Digital maximalism is the ultrabrite, NutraSweet, Taurine-amped soundtrack to a lifestyle and a life-stance that could be called NOW!ism. In most dance scenes there's a vein of nostalgic reverence, an in-built deference to a lost golden age. But with EDM, there's just this feeling of NOW! NOW! NOW! And that's the thing I found heartening and refreshing about Hard Summer: the utter absence of any sense of the past being better than the present.

Simon Reynolds in een nieuw hoofdstuk van de laatste editie van Energy Flash waarin hij fraai het gladde digitale geluid omschrijft van veel hedendaagse producties. Maar als retro op deze manier moet worden opgeheven (en dat moet het in geen geval) dan ga ik van nu af aan ook maar naar OLD SKOOL ACID '88 feesten. EDM heeft niets met het nu of de toekomst te maken maar louter met een extremistisch gebrek aan smaak. Ik denk dat je eerder zou moeten concluderen dat de Verenigde Staten voorlopig (ik zou bijna zeggen definitief, maar je weet maar nooit) uitgerangeerd is op dit gebied. Niets nieuws overigens, dit is een logische conclusie van een fenomeen dat al heel lang terug gaat. Ik herinner mij dat de enige keer dat in Dance Valley heb bezocht (1997?), wachtend in de rij bedacht dat boven de ingang de tekst Consumptie Maakt Vrij moest hangen. Vals bewustzijn in full effect.

 Drew Millard bestudeert het met een kalme blik in een lang stuk over EDM  in Noisey:

And with this audience comes corporate sponsorship. When it comes to corporate sponsorship, festivals work somewhat like a magazine does: a magazine makes money off of selling subscriptions and copies at a newsstand, but they make sure to keep that price low enough to acquire a large, loyal audience that they can then sell to advertisers. Where magazines use articles to draw readers in, festivals use the experience of the festival—it’s telling that those at EDM Biz referred to the music as “content,” just as those in publishing might refer to a feature. Once the audience is in the festival grounds and having fun, they can also be advertised to. (EDC 2013’s sponsors were Red Bull, Sony, Pioneer, and the Brazillian sunglasses/watch brand ChilliBeans).

In short, EDM is efficient bait to lure the product in. And that product is you.

 (Geweldige laatste alinea's over Tiësto overigens)

De Rode Draad van 2013?

Uit het uitstekende interview met Boards of Canada in De:Bug:

Simon Reynolds strongly relies on you as the forefathers or originators of certain musical and theoretical concepts of the last ten years, like Hauntology or Hypnagogic Pop. You’re actually the starting point for one aspect of his Retromania concept – making music sound old, worn out, triggering memories etc. Those were things you did and talked about almost 20 years ago and have become the principles of many young producers. What are you thinking about that today?

Mike: That’s still absolutely a driving force in our work. It’s something we love doing, we can never run out of inspiration in this direction, because if you only pay attention to current music then you can’t help sounding pinned down to the fashion of today. But when you allow yourself to explore music from various eras in the past, you can find starting points that were never fully explored, like tangents that didn’t actually occur in the real history of music, and that’s really exciting to me. Especially in the face of so much current music that is becoming indistinguishable because all the producers are basically using the same tools.

Overproductie

Interessant om weer terug te lezen. Simon Reynolds in 1995 over het gevaar van muzikale overproductie. Gewoon een "voorspelling" die is uitgekomen (behalve die Ballardiaanse subsidie):

As a music journalist, I'm in the frontlines of what may be a crisis for the post-industrial West in the 21st Century: cultural overproduction. For it's not just music, it's the entire mediascape that (with the cable revolution, on-line, desk-top publishing etc) is afflicted by an excess of access. There's gonna be too many creators, not enough consumers.  I can imagine a future World Government doing something similar to what the European Community, faced by surplus 'food mountains', does when it subsidises farmers to leave their fields fallow, i.e.  pay people to be uncreative.
   
The punk ethos of anyone-can-do-it lives large in music, from lo-fi indie to home-made techno, and that's fine. But when you move from amateur music-making to putting out a record, you're staking a claim on people's time.  So my message to music-makers is: think hard before you put it on disc and out into the marketplace. And to music-lovers:: if you're lucky enough to get obsessed with something, go with flow, forget about the rest.  Music should be precious, not something you channel-surf through.