Recently on the I Love Music message board, I wrote about Orchestra of Bubbles, an enjoyable IDM-ish collaboration between Ellen Allien (of the Berlin-based BPitch Control label) and Apparat from last year. What struck me about the record was that even though I'd been listening to it a ton, I felt curiously unsatisfied. I wondered whether it had something to do with a distinct lack of solid melodies, writing:
The tension inherent to even the best of these records is almost entirely of the textural and rhythmic variety — not anything to do with melody or harmony, really. I guess the question that gnaws at me, even when you look across the history of dance music, is: why can't you do both? Or perhaps, why aren't more people doing both?
I mean, you have to acknowledge that spatial, electronic arrangements create a kind of energy in music that's unique. And there's something to be said for using the spare parts of pop music for other purposes. But a lot of IDM, microhouse, etc. artists seem like they would be more exciting (and transcend the pure dance-related scenes from whence they came) if they were a touch more rigorous in determining why their music is so impressionistic and non-linear. After all, you can't really dance to a lot of this stuff anyway...
I was happy with the point, in that it hit upon what it is about IDM that so often bothers me: so much of it sounds different enough from straight up pop music to sound like something different and new, but draws on enough pop conventions (beats, verse/chorus structures), making poor enough use of them as to leave me frustrated that it fails so miserably as pop.
For all the superiority I felt in having made the argument, I immediately found my own compositional skills tested by it, wanting to try out the new version of Ableton Live, software that, in essence, allows any loop to play in time with another. I'd used Live for some time, finding its "elastic audio" concept conducive to the composition process. But recently, I've started to wonder: is it too conducive? Put another way, does the glut of increasingly powerful (and accessible) music software like Live, Reason and GarageBand correspond in any way to the glut of new music with production values that far outstrip its artistic values?
Case in point:
This is the first thing out of the box, as it were, for me, my laptop and Ableton Live 6 — recorded in so short a time that I'm almost embarrassed to admit it. As a blatant ripoff of the Orchestra of Bubbles soundworld, it isn't bad, getting most of the surface details right—the driving, punchy bass, the fastidiously detailed beats and not-quite-melancholic atmosphere—though it clearly lacks the duo's sense of drama — the crescendos and persistent textural development that marks their work together. As a composition, the song is negligible to the point of nonexistent, more or less centered around one melody, introducing a counter melody and repeating them until the fade. But honestly, were I to trim a few rough edges and add an additional textural variation or two (which won't happen, since I wrote this in an unsave-able demo mode), it wouldn't exactly sound out of place on, say, a BPitch b-side. Which is to say, without even trying, I came awfully close to replicating something Philip Sherburne, among others, lavishly praised in Pitchfork less than a year ago.
But then, I didn't succeed, did I? And of course, I didn't get there first, either. Yet the ease with which I made it makes me wonder whether the "lack of rigor" I mentioned in the ILM post bears any relation to the ease with which artists can apply production values that were impossible (or impossibly expensive) only a decade ago. Judge for yourself.
