VIRB

Lately I've been trying to get two tracks finished for a compilation on the label I sort of run with two friends. They're fairly good tracks. Not without their flaws, but serviceable. I've noticed that both of them follow certain characteristics - heavy (and perhaps unnecessarily showy) amounts of pyrotechnic pitch-modulation and feedback.

I'm not sure why I'm intrinsically attracted to such sounds, but I can pinpoint the start of my fixation. It was when I first listened, at the tender age of 17, to the blitzkrieg guitar efforts of Daniel Ash on the famous live version (1981) of Bauhaus's signature goth-rock epic Bela Lugosi's Dead .

Ash's guitar solos (all three of them!) didn't sound like guitar, but more like a thunderstorm forced through echo and twisted up and wrenched up and down and pitch and then tossed into another bucket of echo. I'd never heard sounds like that before, and I was entranced.

While I knew that Ash's tricks comprised extreme amounts of echo and feedback, there was another magical ingredient I wasn't able to identify. It's only more recently working with VST plugins that I realise that the MSG of Ash's guitar sound was tape delay. Tape delay involves recording a sound on one tape head, and running the tape over a playback head a short time later - that short time is a delay. Mixing the played back signal back into the recording head introduces feedback. The speed of the delay can be modulated by increasing or decreasing the speed of the tape, and this is what Ash did. Rather than using tape delay simply to enhance the sound of his guitar, he made it all about the enhancement, and not at all about the guitar.

This perhaps provides a clue as to why, while loving Daniel Ash's guitar work, I ended up making ambient music, because ambient primarily focussed on sound and its position in space (whether it be close space, big space or no space).

Ash's choice of guitar sound highlights the distinction between electronic music and what I like to call 'real musicians'. On Bela Lugosi's Dead Daniel Ash didn't really play guitar at all (even if he really was jamming away under all that electronic mashing and pulping). Instead, to use Eno's terminology, he provided sonic 'treatments' to his guitar. Even while playing live he was really fulfilling more the role of producer. In this instance it made Bela a much more interesting track than it would have been if he'd just played straight guitar.

The ability to completely transform a musician's sound, and the ability to synthetically generate sounds, has liberated people interested in making music from having to be competent at playing an instrument. That liberation does, however, come with a cost. Humans generally prefer human-made sounds to electronically generated ones, as a rule. Purely synthetic electronic music just isn't as engaging (without close listening) than electronic music that drops in sampled voices or string sections. While Bela Lugosi's Dead has a thrill for certain listeners, in the broader community these people are by far in the minority.

Electronic producers are always struggling to replicate the raw impact of an angry young rock band cutting up the stage. We put on visuals, pretend to be working at turntables, declare loudly that laptop 'artists' are the true musicians of the 21st Century. We even use frickin' lasers. But the average human needs a human connection for music to have an impact. Not always, but usually.

So why don't we just trample our laptops and pick up guitars? Well, the guitar, and indeed any musical instrument, is grossly limited compared to the sonic possibilities that can be created by even a shitty cheap laptop. And, at the moment, if rock or jazz or folk or even hiphop has anything new or interesting to say, no one seems to be saying it. But in the electronic domain, there's still an infinite sound world out there, and I'm keen to continue exploring it.

All the same, I still have mixed views about the value of an electronic producer vs a 'real' musician. I have a great respect for 'real' musicians, even if I don't necessarily like the genres in which they play. Recently Michael and I recorded a solo by a trombonist in a local brass band. We played him the track, he picked the chords straight away (although there were only two of them), had a practice at home and the following evening we recorded him in about half an hour. No endless tinkering with loop timing, or searching for the 'right' sample. There's no bullshit in it, whereas some electronic musos can shroud their activities in pretense and sheer self-delusion in a way that a 'real' musician never could.

Then again, I get a bit territorial when a real musician enters into the electronic domain. Not that they're not entitled to, it's just that the results tend to be shit. I can think of two New Zealand examples: one a pianist and the other a jazz trumpeter, who simply translate their acoustic musical world into the electronic. This doesn't really work - you just get boringly over instrumentalised electronic music; jazz club misguidedly turned into dance club. Or even worse, low grade house music!

To my thinking, music in the electronic production world is best made without excessively intricate melodic lines and chord changes. A good example of the 'right' trajectory is the career of Vangelis. He started out making turgid synth jazz escapades in the mid 1970s and gradually pared back his style, until you get what I consider to be his magnum opus, the BladeRunner soundtrack. Unfortunately, that jazz synth heritage, the sort of vaguely new age, semi-scientological, and highly chromatic 70s noodlings (think Deodato or Herbie Hancock) are still too hip, esp in cafes and clubs where I live. To my mind at least, the German synth rock of the same period is a more basic, honest, and genuinely progressive template, and that's the church to which I belong.

It's hard to say how many contradictory arguments are contained in this post, but hopefully the ride was entertaining.