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Originally posted by minya
Uhm... just an off-hand guess here, but I think Nick described it as 'dark ambient' due to its sound, not the year it was released. Totally just a wild guess, though, of course. |
And my off-hand guess, Minya, darling, is that you're taking my remarks so literally that if I were carding you at a club, I'd ask to see your binary code. It should be fairly obvious that what I'm addressing is not, specifically, why Nick might have called the piece dark ambient but rather why 1997 was a crossover year for certain darker tendencies in the culture: those were the days when Koner and Lustmord would have appeared on the same comp. I'm not understanding why you feel it's appropriate to post as if entering into a debate when what you're responding are people who are evoking musical experiences poetically. Modes of rhetoric and styles of expression are not all the same. There is expository mode, for example, in which you might find me explaining that a particular form of jazz was developed by a particular artist at a particular time and what characteristics define that music. If so, you could challenge my explanation with evidence to the contrary. And then there is the lyric mode, which I happened to use in this particular thread, which tends toward the poetic and can involve names and events in sequences and groupings determined by emotional resonance rather than musicological exactitude. Explaining to me that what I'm evoking did not happen *exclusively* in 1997 is rather like telling Ernest Dowson that his statements about a woman's cruelty are exaggerations, or that his description of the endlessness of a rainy night is meteorologically incorrect. A woman with whom I was involved off and on for six years died in the summer of 1996 and so added to my sense of decay and decadence in 1997. I wrote as much. Into what specific musical genre would you have me thrust her memory?
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Originally posted by minya
And my point was 'dark ambient' isn't usually the commonly accepted term used to describe the sound of albums like Zauberberg. But whatever. |
What seems to be the trouble, young mien? When did I refute or contradict you? Your point was that dark ambient, that famously 90s genre, was not a term that the genre-correct would apply to Zauberberg. My point was that the senescent, grainy, elegaic mood of that time had an aesthetic impact on many different styles, which imparted to those styles for a finite period what many would associate with dark ambient music normally. Ordo Equilibrio (on Reaping the Fallen), Deutsche Nepal and Raison D'Etre are artists on the CMI label who are considered to be dark ambient. But the sensibility of Porter Ricks's/Techno Animal's _Symbiosis_ also partakes of a detritic, low-sonority-driven deliberately grainy sound, as does Memorandum, as do completely different kinds of work across the board: static, kinetic, visual, sonic, cinematic, ivory-towered and low-to-the-gutter.
To draw larger cultural parallels and to search for concordances of tone and gesture -- these are standard concerns for an artist. To promote ideas of smaller genres and labels with a serf's fealty is the province of the fanboy. I'm not saying people are wrong to correct other people's reference to a particular flavor of micro-house, deep house or what have you. I'm only saying it's wrong to overdo it when people are describing music subjectively. I could have spent lifetimes on this forum correcting people's logic, musical references, grammar and the rest. I refrain from doing so out of respect for the enthusiasm of people who have found something they truly enjoy, and because the worst thing one can do is make people feel more shy and inhibited than they already do.
Everyone can tell a writer what's wrong with her/his ideas. Most people hate their own writing in any case. I'd rather tell a person what's right about their concept and then work on the flaws if it's even practical to do so. I think that Nick was raising an interesting point by calling Zauberberg dark ambient, whether he's genre-correct or not. Genres have become a way for people to tread the shallows of music they don't understand. In post-house derivations, descriptions of compositions according to genre have deteriorated into lists of adjectives meant to suggest surface characteristics (however ineptly). Defining the thrust of a piece of music as microhouse is like defining a woman's character as brunette with acne scars.
Current post-house genre labels don't matter to me except in the most literal way: as an aid to finding an album in a store, for example. Which is why I wasn't *correcting* you, Minya: you're right about dark ambient in the literal sense. On the other hank, I really don't give a Shar-Pei's flaccid jowls that, somewhere, a dark industrial artist is offended by the use of the words *dark ambient* to describe Zauberberg. How did various so-called dark ambient musicians become so important as to have trademarked those words and prevented them fro being used in the context of other musics?
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| BTW, all years are "particularly shady," going by your definition. |
Irony 327(iii): In attempting to dismiss my poetic/critical characterization of 1997 as vague and overly inclusive, you've done so in language that is blurry and non-specific. Question 1: How exactly does every word of my "definition" (read: description) of 1997 apply to every other year? If you're going to needle-dick, then be as specific as you expect others to be. Question 2: Where exactly in my post do I state that I am attempting to define a year objectively rather than convey the mood of that year as I felt it and understood it? I was evoking a time, not categorizing the stages of the morphology of the blow-fly.
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| 1997 was pretty early in the game for Mr. Deupree (well, as far as his glitch stuff is concerned, that is). |
Which might seem to be the case to you, but why, exactly, should that matter? I happen to be thinking of specific CDs of Deupree's that came out in 1997 and, as a musician, *do* see a correlation, whether you happen to or not. And whoever said that ambient music can't be melodic? Tell that to Brian Eno. I'd also mention Duepree's Occur. (We can't have the leisure to flesh out what we're hearing if you're going to continue stopping everyone every ten seconds to tell them their lapels have gone curly.)
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| Methinks the final Drum Komputer album, which was still too melodic to really be called glitchy, was released around this time. I wouldn't call Deupree's work dark, either. Experimental for sure, but definitely not dark. |
It is amazing to me that you'd think a veteran studio musician and programmer living in NYC would be unfamiliar with such an obvious genre. There used to be an industrial/ambient music store down the street from me in the 80s in the days of Laibach. I watched the entire wretched progression of pseudo-styles unfold. If I choose not to think that way, the choice is deliberate. My best friend and I *never* talk about that music in those terms because that would be attributing too much importance and musical intention to transitory styles. I happen to like Lustmord, but that doesn't mean I'll be listening to him in ten years. Stravinsky's another story, and so are musically specific labels like neo-classical, nationalist, polychordal, pandiatonic and dodecaphonic, all of which apply specifically to his music.
If you only knew how ridiculous people's insistence on the correctness of various arbitrary meanings of the word *dark* sounded to lifelong trained musicians. Dark can be a sonority, a register, a tone color, a tempo, a progression, a tone, a mood, a level of contrapuntal or rhythmic density. Classical composers and performers are trained to spot gradations of light and dark in order to be able to control the syntax of a piece, whether in performance or composition. The very psychological context of classical music is predicated on tension and release. We all know which chords are darkest, which modes (Lochrian), which melodic intervals, etc. etc. If you don't want to read my meta-genre comparisons and have utter contempt for my use of my conventional musical training in composition, then I suggest you read a zine instead of my posts.
There's no point in correcting people continuously on genre titles when they're trying to describe music in terms of their immediate experience. It would be like telling a little girl that her hula hoop's on backwards. She'll figure it out, as long as she doesn't get scolded arbitrarily.
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| Oh, BTW: Köner doesn't use synthesizers. His work is constructed entirely out of samples that he records and manipulates himself. (for his recent work, at least... perhaps his earlier work is different?) |
I know the last bit wasn't directed toward me, but your mania to correct the self-evident is sauteeing my nerve-ends. I've actually corresponded with Koner, who seems a very nice sort. At one point, I was going to write an article about him, possibly for the NYP. He seems not to be inclined to correct people in compulsive and useless ways or, indeed, at all, in my experience. No, Koner doesn't use synths on the releases we're discussing here. His primary research as a trained engineer was into vicissitudes of timbre, which led him to experiment with miking gongs and other acoustic sources to alter electronically (no doubt Stockhausen's mikrophone was an influence -- we didn't discuss that). Still, he's used synths in the past. Few musicians haven't.
