techno isnt about the past, its about the future

[Torque]

Again you're giving far too much credit to the tools and not the person using them. The best artists i know are in constant battle with machines to do what the artist want, not the other way around. The second you give up control of art to a machine it becomes like a machine and is emotionless and flat like a machine. Maybe that's what we're all hearing in modern electronic music and maybe that's why everybody is getting bored. How is a human supposed to relate emotionally to a device with no emotion?

but youre not taking into account that all musical instruments are machines, a violin, saxophone, piano is a machine, no-one is talking about giving up any control here.

and why is it a battle ?, its a relationship like with any instrument.

synthesizers are no different.

The violin, saxophone and piano are all machines which require a human to power them. It's like comparing a bicycle to a fighter jet. None of those instruments have a sequencer other than a human and humans don't have perfect accuracy and cannot play indefinitely, Humans do not have random arppegiators. It is a relationship but it's the relationship a kin to a human having a slave. The battle is twisting it to your will.

[Torque]

Hold on a second there...
The reason the technology was used allot in detroit was completely a different motivation than what you're talking about. Allot of these guys were playing in funk and rock and roll bands and allot of that kind of stuff coming out of detroit was based on futurism as well, just listen to P-Funk. When the drum machine came around not everybody said "wow now i can sound like kraftwerk!" they were saying "sweet, now i can fire my drummer and take his cut of the money at gigs!". When sequencers came around some of them were like "hell yeah!!, now i can fire my keyboard and bass player too!!". It was never the equipment that made the music it was the guy working it. The subject matter of allot of funk music from that era around here and techno were essentially the same just the instruments were different. Technology did not make the mindset happen all it did was make a noise.

is this the official line from the Detroit pioneers ?

i thought it was common knowledge that Kraftwerk were an influence on those guys.
and electrofunk was a very deliberate use of machines to make music.

sacking your drummer ? it sounds so implausible, are musicians so shallow ?

in the UK the early drum machines and machines like the TB303 were seen as completely inept at replacing musicians, they languished in second-hand gear shops at give away prices only a few years after they were released.

and the people who were using the new digital machines were dedicated to making electronic pop music, it was huge in the UK in the early 1980s.

if you bought a synth or drum machine at that time, you wanted to be the next Duran Duran, Orchestral Manuevers in The Dark, or whoever.

Yeah they all listened to Kraftwerk but so did everybody else in detroit pretty much that tuned into Mojo. Allot of the guys i know were actually trying to make funk without a band.

It's not everybodys official line but it's the truth for allot of the guys i'm around.

[steevio]

The violin, saxophone and piano are all machines which require a human to power them. It's like comparing a bicycle to a fighter jet. None of those instruments have a sequencer other than a human and humans don't have perfect accuracy and cannot play indefinitely, Humans do not have random arppegiators. It is a relationship but it's the relationship a kin to a human having a slave. The battle is twisting it to your will.

it could turn into a very interesting discussion, but at least i'd like to say that what you're saying is too simplistic.

some synthesizers requires a human to power them, ones without arppegiators for instance, electricity isnt an issue, plenty of instruments require electricity (electric piano ?) some synthesizers are effectively just more flexible electric pianos.
where do you draw the line ?
when i switch on my TR909 it doesnt just start making techno by itself, it requires that i program it, trigger it, whatever.. its a different process to playing a saxophone, but they are still both instruments that would do nothing without a musician.

the analogy of bicycle and fighter jet is cute, but maybe you should have said bicycle and moped, the moped makes it easier for you to get from A to B but neither would go anywhere without a human needing to get to B in the first place.

sheeeit i shouldnt have this much time on my hands.

[jackbrazzo]

when i switch on my TR909

show off

[steevio]

when i switch on my TR909

show off

haha dude,
i forget that it isnt just normal to have a 909 these days, everyone had one when i started out, infact you virtually couldnt make techno without one.

[pafufta816]

some of the discussion here is going nowhere. some of these "disagreements" aren't even such, instead i keep reading "well that's your opinion, but my opinion is in bold and caps so i'm more right than you are!!! nananananan." boring, i don't even care to read the dozen paragraphs i'm seeing here.

what i'd like to see is people citing references and not personal opinion. this is potentially a very interesting subject steeped in history, sociology, politics, technology.

[oblioblioblio]

mmm i realise my last post was probably a bit distant and hard to connect with, but I had just had an experience that was really hard to put into words, especially in digital domain.

I was at an experimental music festival over the weekend. In many ways it made me feel really happy about being bored with most techno. Mehh, again, it's still hard to describe and explain. Like, techno has a lot going for it. Like, one of my favourite experiencces over the weekend was a rough post punk kinda band, with bit fat traces of Suicide, playing a 10 hour completely improvised set with various other musicians joining them over various points. Very deep and trippy and primal and very fuckin hypnotic.

Big shades of techno there... minimal and repetitive. But no obvious climaxes. (the band were called Oneida .... I'd listened before but not made a proper connection)

The deepest experience I felt was with the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor .... defied words to express the experience. I can't even remember that much of it in human terms. All I can really describe of it was that it was God's tears. The band are heavily politically motivated, and fully inspired by the terrors of the world. They usually use lots of collected dialogue, but when I saw them they were fully instrumental. Simple old acoustic machines, simple chords and movements. Syncronised visuals, also.


Lots of techno reaches the same places as other forms of music. But there is just something about it that is kinda disconnected and takes the escapist side of music too far. You gotta make music that allows people the chance to be in a different world to their regular domain, but you can't be away with the fairies (too much).

I think with techno the format of a constant sequential jam is quite interesting. It's quite architectural in that respect. And certainly there is the possiblity to include that deepness that inhabits other musical domains.

[oblioblioblio]

i guess to connect my tangent with others, and myself.

I think you just gotta go with your own personal flow. If something has meaning to you, you gotta trust your instinct... put your head down and see it thru. Maybe it won't make sense in your own lifetime. that's the game we're playing with music.

But honestly. Life is just a fucking ridiculous spectrum of possiblities. I guess it's the same with music. Who fucking knows what the threads that connect it all together are.

I had one of the most meaningful musical experiences of my life to a band that I've known since I was 16 years old. I guess something doesn't need to be new to be meaningful.

But maybe other people are motivated differently.