By Josh Brill
If you comb the back of your brain searching for past musical clichés you may well stumble upon that oft repeated phrase, ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’. In his last years, American psychologist Timothy Leary, the man who coined this 1960s counter-cultural phrase, proclaimed the PC as the ‘LSD of the 1990s’ and I, for one, believe he was onto something. Computers have also had a dramatic effect on the way we consume music. In the last twenty years, a tornado of shiny innovations in musical technology has swirled rapidly along at the same wild pace as mobile phones and computers, constantly evolving and feeding off other industries.
Whilst a perturbed older generation struggle to keep their heads above the water, more and more fresh faced producers are surfing this technological tidal wave and cultivating never-before-heard sounds in unique ways.
Any self respecting hip-hop junkie should know DJ Shadow’s debut Endtroducing…(1996), a prolific album that landed itself a Guinness World Record for being the first album to consist entirely of samples. The instrumental hip-hop album was constructed on a single piece of hardware called an MPC, redefining the rules of what’s really needed to make music. The ‘Shadow’ sound melted ominous vocals to the chime of weathered beats and 1980s American rap, striking a chord with some 500,000 people in the first week of release, as well as tugging on the ears of TIME magazine who included Endtroducing… in its ‘Top 100 Greatest Albums of All Time’. Shadow also paved the way for others to follow in his footsteps; as recently as 2009, L.A. based hip-hop producer Exile released Radio, an album made solely from radio samples.
This relentless and self-generating growth has forced the industry to up its pace, as one genre intrinsically fastened to technology knows all too well. In the last five years, electronic music has come to resemble a frazzled mother, overwhelmed with the chaos created by over thirty sub-genres, piped in on sugar-coated frequencies. Drum and Bass has brought his girlfriend Liquid back to stay the night, Dubstep is slowly drifting off the straight and narrow, and amongst all this disorder the genre has fallen pregnant with a miracle baby; an angel of the post night-club scene that in the last two years has brought about the most significant change to electronic music since its humble beginnings.
Fleeing from the futurist vibe where it all began, and steering away from the digitalised club sound that has dominated the genre since the days of Acid House, artist Mount Kimbie has created a sound so primitive and intimate you‘ll initially be confused as to where it should be filed.
Debut album Crooks and Lovers, released in 2010, was a monumental fusion of organic sounds (samples of radiator clunks, bicycles in tunnels, tongues clicking, feet kicking, and rain) heavily corrupted by digital automation and robotic bass lines. The album’s oozing digitalised humanity has created something genuinely original.
What is so fascinating and refreshing about this sound is the way in which it mirrors our own evolutionary development. It has been predicted that in the next thirty years we will be biologically integrated with computers, and what better way to accompany us as we coast down this technological highway than a soundtrack that willingly embraces digital vibrations, but at the same time refuses to ignore the unique potential of human sound, an aesthetic that has so often been neglected in the world of electronic music over the past fifty years?
So as ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ moves to ‘turn on, boot up and jack in’, the future not only of electronic music but also the music industry in general is uncertain. In my own wild imagination,
I’d like to believe that in a hundred years a robotic folk group will have manifested itself on Earth striving for the comforting warmth of the human voice, but that might just be me. We will have to wait and see…