2013 thoughts on the New Aesthetic in Music pt 2

 from a 2013 interview

I can’t think of many really new things in music. Some of the bass sounds in dubstep – the wobble, brostep, Skrillex end of it – seem pretty extreme, if not completely new then a development along on an axis of intensification from things being done in the Nineties. And similarly the use of AutoTune and “vocal science” effects, while building on Nineties techniques, seems to be a growth area – it seems to be a way that musicians indicate contemporaneity and “this is now”. You get that across the board from mainstream pop and rap to underground and experimental music – an interest in vocal weirdness, the denatured and posthuman voice.

from a blogpost of around the same time

This relates to a thought I had listening to songs on the radio full of emotion-melody blasts and those chorus-uplift rushes that Dan Barrow calls the Soar. The songs are meant to be super-emotive, but it's all too hyper-real to feel. It struck me that as well as compression in the audio sense (the loudness wars, brickwall limiting -- the flattening out of volume dynamics, so that it's at max impact all the way through, no dips in the levels) there was something you could "emotional compression".  The emotion levels aren't allowed to fluctuate; the verse is like the chorus in terms of intensity. But it's also on the micro-level of every single line, every single word sung. The melisma. All the extra tremulous twinges you can work with a voice using AutoTune and other FX. It's like every syllable has been injected with emotional collagen.

2012 thoughts on the New Aesthetic in Music

Bruce Sterling with a super-thought-provoking essay on what some are starting to call the New Aesthetic - “an eruption of the digital into the physical”

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

so far it is seemingly restricted to graphics, design, visual-world creativity

examples accumulating here http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

Bruce writes "Above all the New Aesthetic is telling the truth. There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period. We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things... Scarcely one [of them] owould have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images"

Bruce also writes "The New Aesthetic doesn’t look, act, or feel postmodern.... It is generational. Most of the people in its network are too young to have been involved in postmodernity. The twentieth century’s Modernist Project is like their Greco-Roman antiquity"

as well as the positives he also points out some negatives of the New Aesthetic as currently constituted

someone just tweet-asked me what the musical equivalent of New Aesthetic would be...

[period ensues of head scratching]

it's hard to say because "an eruption of the digital into the physical" -- well that happened to music already, a long long time ago -- nearly all of what you hear on the radio or as recordings is both digitized in terms of being reconstituted code as well as having been either overtly or subtly reprocessed in all kinds of digital ways during the making and mixing process

so any sort of physical-world realism has long been inapplicable (if it could ever have been said to apply to music, which is insubstantial and non-referential in its essence, and furthermore started to take on a radically unrealistic plasticity and malleability a long long time ago through analogue-era studio techniques of overdubbing, layering, tape editing etc... you might say in fact that analogue-era studio-tricknology anticipated and prophesied many aspects of digiculture)

what seems overtly, blatantly digital in today's pop -- to draw attention to its digital hyper-reality -- are all those AutoTune treatments and various other vocal-science effects (stutters, glitches, drastic pitchshifts from high to low) etc that you get routinely in chartpop in recent years-- that, and the general sheen of too-perfectness on both vocals (through AutoTune) and on the entire sonic-surface of songs -- a digi-gloss - there seems to be an attempt there, semi-unconscious most likely, to make music keep up with the high-definition crispness of flat-screen TV, CGI in film, skin-tone even-ness and other digital touching-up effects as used in glossy magazine photography and (i believe) also in TV and films.

I'm not sure how I knew it was him -  I just sort of smelled him...  just the feel of the alter ego name and the language he uses. which incidentally disproves Mark K-punk's theories about the impersonality of text-based communications -  the voice manages to creep in, despite the nature of the medium. it's like the fingerprint of someone's mind. I wanna do some massive pro-personhood post dealing with all this, the importance of charisma, grain of the voice, intonation, voice as "language lined with flesh" as Barthes had it. 

it's like with MC-based music, it's not  really understandable or enjoyable except in terms of the voice, character, idioysyncracy, the rhythm of someone's thought.

(once again bloggers = MCs)

although i suppose that said,  the word "character" is ambiguous, meaning both a role you theatrically play and your truest deepest authentic self. persona versus personality. 

hmmm...

versus 

In some of my writings on post-rock I talk about the removal of the rebel-teenager-with-raised-middle-finger as  the putative stage center protagonist of the music...  replaced by a diffuse un-body, an ego-less and attitude-less spirit of adventure that didn't require the focal figure of the vocalist acting out as proxy for the audience.

Post-rock, at its best, offered a kind of nerd version of a musical heroics - a way to be, yes, fearless - crossing boundaries of the mind....  breaking the laws of genre.

Heroism without ego-drama.... grandeur without self-aggrandisement.  Paraphrasing Stubbs on Krautrock, the artists submit themselves as a speck on a landscape of their own creation - an exploding skyscape.

But ultimately as the Nineties rolled towards its close, it all got a bit too mild...   pulled along with the general tide in the culture towards a new kind of self-repression... the neurotically implosive detail-work of what Woebot called audio-trickle.

It learned the production technicalities of rave and hip hop - and put them to clever, complicated use - but it rarely picked up on the core energies in those musics: what  - in this sister post - I characterise as the impulse to brock out...

there's something about the sound and the look of contemporary cultural production that I find unappealing, even aggravating

i can't put my finger on it exactly - i think it's related the kind of level of detail and burnishing that current technology affords, and that therefore it's irresistible for culture-producers to go there

but i came across this great phrase in a book by Carol Vernalis about video, YouTube, digital visual culture

she talked about "an overpreening of the image"

e.g. with a lot of TV, I find often it's just exhausting to watch. why isn't stillness, a slowly developing mood, a plot focused on only a few characters, an option?

but an overpreening of the sound-image, or sound-space, the same thing is going on with a lot of music

 it's not so much that I'm increasingly resistant to new things, because my overt stance / ideology would still be "yes yes new things bring 'em on bring 'em on" - that's habitual outlook

it's more like, something within me resists this, baulks at, recoils from it, is offput by it

but i'm coming to terms with it - it's probably only natural that by a certain point, the appeal of stuff starts to elude you

it would be weird not to reach that point.

overpreening - it's partly the digital, hi-res thing - and the overly mobile camera-work, whizzing about and swooping all over the shop - also the omnipresence of superfluous drone shots

but it's also something to do with how insanely detailed the people who design sets and do the costumes are

if you watch a period drama now (e.g The Queen's Gambit), every fucking surface of every fucking scene is crammed with period-perfect accoutrements and studiously non-anachronistic design features

it actually distracts from the drama

and then you have the Wes Anderson thing of composing every scene like a painting - with all kinds of annoying symmetries and obsessively curated little exquisitenesses that you'd have to freezeframe and study for 20 minutes to pick up on every thing

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity... So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.''

-- Bowie (2002)