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.