In the Studio: Electronic Music Remix Production Style with Ableton Live and the Exploration of New Possibilities and Challenges
I’m a digital artist.. well analog to.. or traditional media to.. but the digital space is.. an area where I specialize. Digital, Analog.. the tools you use have implications on how you can work. Now that my studio has moved a few light years forward.. I find myself in a space of possibilities unexplored..
A few latter:
I’ve had some sort of a studio for about 10 years… and so I have work dating back at least that long. Not all of that work is so great.. In some cases the changing technological landscape dates the old work.. and sometimes the evolution of my self as artist dates old work. Still.. there are often golden seeds left behind.. dreams still waiting be brought to full flower. And this is at least part of where my dreams turn today.
Yet a little bit latter:
So something that’s pretty groovy about Ableton Live is.. you can import audio, find the tempo of it.. and match it to the tempo of something else. What this does is allow me to use all that old work as the raw building blocks of new work. Bringing this idea into my work.. has many implications.
My first steps in exploring this.. really.. was ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures, though I suppose my very first project to do something along these lines can be found in G. G. Moe Cow Gay.
These kinds of ideas, of course, are not terribly new or radicle at this point in time. It is, after all, the life blood of DJ culture / certain strands of electronic music. Though you could call me an electronic musician.. I don’t actually listen to too much of that kinda thing. For me.. most of where I’d hear that sorta thing is with someone like Frank Zappa.. which is very different.
Generally we associate these sorts of ideas with DJ / Electronic Music culture.. and Hip Hop. True music snobs will associate it with avant guard music since the second world war..
I think of my approach to music making as.. often at least, being like that of a painter.. And that makes it so I’m not really approaching music from anything like a traditional vantage point.. at least on some levels. And there’s clearly something in this that allows me to take the painting metaphor to the next level.
Latter that night:
The land scape of possibilities opening up to me is much broader then what I’ve described here thus far. I suppose the trouble is.. with the new possibilities comes new challenges, new struggles. That’s maybe both good and bad. The bad of it is largely just a sort of negative point of view.. the realization that in taking this path.. I’ll have to start from the begging… which is a way of saying.. all the muscle I’ve built up thus far.. all the skills.. I’ll have to leave them be while I try and develop all new skills… and as I head out on this adventure I’ll be demoted from master to novice.
This over states things, to be sure, but it is the psychological truth that lys at the heart of an artist trying to take a giant step into the unknown. The deeper truth, of course, is that broadening your horizons is growth.. so it can only add to what your doing.
I feel some need, have been feeling it for sometime.. to jump off the deep end and go nuts.. to try and loose myself in a grand new adventure.. that is basically a lot of mess making.
Painting is maybe a good metaphor… with paint, you could realize a highly photorealistic painting.. one where the brush strokes became invisible… a realistic rendering of whatever. The world of photorealistic art, or art that aspires in this sort of direction, is very large indeed, but it isn’t the whole universe. People who think of this as the highest realization an artist could aspire.. when confronted by impressionism they freak.. never mind any kind of abstract expressionism.. modernism or postmodernism…..
And you see these artists.. paint splashed all over the place.. making such a mess of the canvas.. ahh.. but do you feel the energy and the emotion in there? You see this is sorta what I’m talking about in my sound work.. moving from realism to abstract expressionism, or something of this order.
Well sort of. The point is I want to create work that has that kind of explosive energy.. whirling madness.. I want to create work that’s like.. some building held together by Elmer’s glue. I want the quality of the construction to be expressive.. I want my way of relating to media aesthetics to be expressive.
What I’m describing is probably not like anything you’ve ever encountered before because, after all, I am thinking in the terms of “formal elements” which have nothing to do with style…
A few latter:
In the long term, the way this project will work is.. I’ll basically run around trying lots of different things.. lots of little adventures… experiments. These projects will not be “whole projects” but mini projects. It will be “lets think of something that might yield interesting results.” The results don’t have to stand on there own.. they will simply be raw building blocks of other projects.
Many hours latter, arguably the next day:
The Challenge
I feel cursed with a monstrous ambition. I’m on an adventure seeking some kind of greatness, a greatness that is beyond conventional notions of the possible. As my ambitions present me there challenges, the fear comes over me: am I up to them? This moment in my artist’s story is one of horizons pushing back, of limits opening up. To achieve a true greatness one must develop a technical mastery, one must speak with a virtuosity, and one must also have something worth saying. In the confines of the limited, the challenge of great mastery and virtuosity is much less then in the world of the limitless. And so there is the nagging question “am I nuts to turn in this direction?” Do I have the energy to make this journey?
There are the questions of my inadequacies. Nietzsche advises ‘beware in throwing out your demons that you don’t throw out the best thing in you,’ a wisdom that suggests it’s your demons that make your virtues great. I only wish my feelings of inadequacies were not so great… and of course these feelings are exhasterbated by entering into this new larger space.
I’ve been listening to this sonic experiment.. one that I plan to post in a podcast shortly… along with some commentary on the matter. It strikes me as amazing, and yet at other moments not so much. There is the feeling.. in working this way.. that “bad craft” or “bad production values” do have an expressive quality.
If you read me at length, or even listen to me at length, you will realize that I have a rather large and complex philosophical framework inside of which I think– perhaps even outside of which. This framework, it seems to me, is probably the shape of my art to come.
I started off talking about working with Ableton Live.. and really all of this can be seen as about this; about the new vistas Live opens up to me. If my experiment is as good and amazing as I feel it is, when I’m feeling good about it, then the fear of the challenge is not really the issue it appears to be. I have some hope, that in charting this new territory, I can still lean on the virtuosity and mastery that is already in my possession. If this is so, then the new work will, at least on some level, just be like new colors to old work.
What I love about my experiment is the mad guitar.. perhaps more then anything. It is a heavy metal thing gone off the rails.. exploding through space..
One of the challenges working in this way brings is.. the element of chance. If you construct raw building blocks that do not have an awareness of one another.. that then get brought together.. there interrelationships are products of chance. When you bring these parts together.. you have different choices for how to bring them together.. which is perhaps like a chance to play with how you want to frame those interrelationships. The positive effect of chance is that it can bring your work to places that your conscious will would not have brought it.
The main thread of my electronic music is conscious will.. I would describe it as a process of painting where you paint your self into a corner.. where being in that corner… the complexity of how to wrestle with your predicament grows stronger till you get to a point where you don’t really know if you can pull it off.. and in this tension great things can happen. The particulars of the predicament are, it would seem, analogous to chance.. they are are a way of chance speaking to your work.. and the effect of this is like a dialectic between conscious will and chance.. or conscious will and mystery. Still, the chance of it might be thought of as illusionary.. as it is really the effect of your own actions, of your own will.. It is, in someways, the voice of the unconscious.
A while ago I was reading a book by Leonard Bernstein, that explored the interrelationships of linguistics and music. I think I must have been listening to this while working on Deep Space Adventures, because I began to think about the implications of this on ideas of the remix in art and music.
It’s sort of interesting.. I mean imagine that you have these raw building blocks that are the products of various processes. As our compositions / productions take us in and out of the spaces of these building blocks.. we are recontextualizing the building blocks. On the other hand.. lets say the building blocks where material you were familiar with… Lets say, just as a for instance, the building blocks were in many cases musical projects that I gave away for free. In this case, these would probably be the bits of my work you would most likely be familiar with.. that you are now experiencing in a transmogrified form.
If you imagine that what a thing is is how it contrasts with its context.. we are talking about shifting contextual ecologies.
As I write something else comes to mind, a theme in my work. There’s this kind of range.. between the cliche and new or the never heard before. The cliche is somehow dead.. we experience it as “oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before, and probably way to many times at that.” We are deaf to it. When I see this in films it drives me nuts.. and is probably the number one thing I hate about so many Hollywood films. But if you can somehow experience the cliche, as if for the first time, you may find a symbolic resonance in it: There is a reason it got to be a cliche after all. The funny thing is.. in that Hollywood film, it would seem the film maker has no idea about that symbolic resonance.. and has actually rendered the cliche in such a way that it has not connotation sorta relationship to the deeper resonance.
Some time ago, I blogged about my philosophical process. One of the ideas is that you have these ideas / concepts that are 3 dimensional models.. the problem I have is I want you to experience it as a 3 dimensional model.. As I talk about this or that thing, and try to explain it’s implications, I do wish your awareness of the thing could be one that goes beyond whatever it is that I’m talking about. I want you to see the 3 dimensional object of it.. and be able to connect it to other objects your self.. and see the implications your self.
I often feel that in explaining a concept.. I’m doing so in one context.. but the concepts implications have different effects in multiple contexts.. and I feel as if I have to paint the whole painting for you.. in order for you to see the whole picture.. which of course leads me to writing very long blog entries.. like this one I suppose.
It is interesting to think.. that the remixing of stuff, as I’m speaking about.. is analogous to this problem. Another words.. the recontextualization of the building block, is like seeing the 3 dimensional conceptual model in a new context.
Well I suppose this entry is long enough as it stands.. so be done with it!
Oh, let me leave you with some video ReMix sorta projects by EBN.