A Year of Music

For a long time, “dubstep” was more or less a free signifier very loosely attached to the music made by a small group of British producers who all knew each other. It was mentioned in print – when it was mentioned at all – by electronic music cognoscenti like Simon Reynolds and Woebot, had a loyal, tiny internet following and was otherwise very much a London scene nobody else knew or cared about. A couple of years ago, though, it became a Thing – it got written about in music magazines, had its own club nights all over the world, generated a couple different series of compilations, and got a lot of breathless hype from Mary Anne Hobbs over high-profile remixes of indie artists. Its sudden popularity caused Simon to instantly pronounce it dead, the producers to start grumbling about how the newcomers just don’t get it, and all the other things kids in the underground do when they suddenly find themselves confronting an expectant public they were never particularly interested in meeting.

Still and all, it’s weird to watch people police dubstep’s margins, to watch fans and DJs try to issue decrees about what is and isn’t proper dubstep. It’s a warning sign that classicism is setting in, and that people are trying to own a style – something that’s patently impossible. That usually coincides with me losing all interest in the style for a while, because being obsessed with “the classics” gets tedious in a hurry. This happened in a major way to Detroit techno, and as a result, there’s been very little new music from Detroit that’s genuinely excited me for a long time. I’ve heard stuff that’s insanely well-crafted and that moved me, but none of it has struck me as all that innovative or different.

I bring all this up because I was reading Blackdown’s newest monthly summary of the dubstep and grime scenes, and something about it set off my bullshit alarm (emphasis mine):

There’s something very timely about Oneman’s selection. Between the rise of funky, Mala’s continuing “broken dub house” direction, and the return of the 2step influence to dubstep, be it through Burial’s beats, Geiom’s “Reminisin’”, most of TRG’s productions, Martyn’s selection or Kode9’s sets, the vital link from dubstep to “house and garage” seems to be rejuvenating (in an interesting parallel to the Berlin/Bristol dubstep/techno axis). Oneman is most definitely at the forefront of this, going so far back in the dubstep continuum that old becomes new, classic sounds fresh, when placed in relation to the dominant styles that fill the bulk of dubstep in 2008. Plus, to much of his audience, pre-2005 or even pre-2006 dubstep is new ground, and that’s not even touching the vast number of current fans who wrote off UK garage in its entirety.

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To say TRG’s sound owes a debt to Horsepower and to a lesser extent, early Zed Bias, would be an understatement. But set in the context of dubstep’s recent output, there’s something refreshingly welcome to the re-emphasis of swing and rhythmic variation (2008 dubstep producer in “snares-not-on-the-third-beat shocker!”). Increasingly there is the sense that if someone doesn’t re-ignite this style, it might be lost from dubstep’s canon for good. 2002 it seems, is the new 2008.

Come on, dude, 2002 was only 6 years ago. There’s a ton of records coming out that are still obviously indebted to the old garage sound, and the free interplay between dubstep, grime and newer UK garage (funky house and bassline house most specifically – read his past columns for more details on those styles. Blackdown knows the score) makes it pretty clear that the only ghetto dubstep is in is one consciously created by its critics and fans. It’s a little early to be talking about dubstep having lost its hardcore.

At the same time, I think I see his point, or maybe a version of it. Specifically, there’s a whole crowd of drum’n’bass producers – most prominently Tech Itch, who should know better – who seem to hell-bent on translating their fun-free mechanical techstep idiom into something that sounds the same as their usual, idea-free crap but runs half as fast. UK garage was a reaction against exactly that kind of tedious one-note darkness, and although I love Tech Itch’s old drum’n’bass, I really wish they’d leave dubstep alone. At least until they actually engage with all the stuff that happened since dnb and dubstep ended up on parallel paths.

I do really enjoy the totally uptempo, dancefloor-oriented dubstep that folks like Skream!, Caspa and Rusko are making. It’s plastic and pop, and it ditches the weirdness and obsession with dubstep’s musical dialectic with itself that makes artists like Shackleton, Burial and Various Production so interesting. Rusko’s “Jahova”, Distance’s “Traffic” and Skream!’s “Check It” are all slick as whaleshit, and sound even slicker in the mix, but they’re all fun, bass-heavy dancefloor stompers. As DJs crews, Skream! and Caspa & Rusko are unapologetically prejudiced in favor of ass-shaking, and they put together very consistent, slick sets that still encompass a lot of dubstep’s diversity while still being clubber friendly.

I think the club-friendliness is probably the main thing that bugs Blackdown and people like him. It sucks to watch your special thing go mainstream, especially when the people doing the mainstreaming don’t seem to understand what it was that made it interesting or cool in the first place. Maybe it’s easier for me to not care because I’m only a casual bystander (although I’ve listened to a lot of dubstep and grime in the past few years). I don’t know. I’m just wary of the impulse to build a canon, to worship the classics. A good tune will remain a good tune forever, but if you fasten upon the classics of the past, you might miss the classics of the future.

I want to say something about the music Autechre’s been making for the last five years, but it’s hard to find the words. Autechre defined, more or less by themselves, a pure, electronic sound that, after their first three or four records, was indebted only theoretically to the electro and hip-hop that originally inspired them. It is now something entirely other, although they have a legion of followers who together constitute a dotted line connecting Autechre back to the techno continuum. Their music is rooted at least as much in the process and tools used to make it as any residual notions of traditional songcraft, and this can give their music, even at its most turgid, a glossy, intellectual sheen. It can also make it feel fathomlessly recursive and inhuman.

I sometimes end up feeling about Autechre the same way I do about the more abstruse electronic works of Iannis Xenakis (RIP) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (RIP). A piece of music (or, really, sound art) can be an aesthetically unimpeachable artifact of an intellectual process, and it can intimidate you with its recondite structure and alien sounds, but sometimes that’s insufficient if the work doesn’t lend itself to interpretation. I believe that Autechre spend a long time working out the structures they use, and are conscientious about shaping their aggressively experimental music into songs, but sometimes I feel like I have to take that too much on faith.

I will say that I feel that they’ve pulled themselves out of the creative dead end they were in when they made Confield; that album is one of the most frustrating CDs I own. Excerpted, it sounds brilliant, but despite concerted, repeated efforts to wrap my head around it, I’ve never been able to get it to stick. 30 seconds after hearing it, I’ve completely forgotten what it sounds like. It contains an hour of sound that mimics music without ever coalescing into songs – with the exception of the obsessive quasi-Japanese melodic figuration and monotone rhythm of “Eidetic Casein”, which is the one part of the album I love without reservation.

Each album since then is another step back from the inaccessibility of Confield, but their last 4 albums are all easy to admire and hard to love. Draft 7.30 returns to the ghostly melodies of Garbage while keeping Confield’s arrhythmia. Untilted brings back some much-needed low-end heft and some discernible attempts to engage with Autechre’s electro legacy. And finally, their newest album, Quaristice, sees the return of the diversity and ambition of tri repetae (as well as its length).

But I miss the promise of Autechre’s middle period, when they were probably my favorite electronic musicians of all time, and when they knew a secret: they had figured out how to invert the figure and ground of music, and use their keen ear for ruthlessly pared-down melodies to create melodic lines that were sturdy enough to act as the backbone for their wandering, erratic rhythms. Just listen to “Laughing Quarter” from Envane, “Tewe” from Chiastic Slide, or “Under BOAC” from LP5 to hear songs that balance spastic rhythms with simple 4-bar melodies that somehow never get old. Sometimes, as in my favorite song by Autechre, “Arch Carrier” (also from LP5, what I consider their last fully successful album), both the beats and the melodies are kept on a tight rein, and they produce songs that are both rigorously constrained and classically beautiful.

I have to be careful when I talk about Autechre, though. I was completely disgusted with Envane and Chiastic Slide when they were released, taking them as yet more evidence that the whole IDM community had finally and irredeemably disappeared up their own asses. In fact, I was mostly reacting to the fact that tri repetae++ consisted of two brilliant EPs shackled to a wildly uneven album. Perhaps in reaction to the eventual near-total reversal of that opinion (at least when it came to Envane, Chiastic Slide and Cichlisuite), I tried to convince myself (and a few other people) that Confield was a difficult but ultimately brilliant record that would release its secrets in time. This lasted a few short weeks until I went to see them play in Oakland. Practically everyone in the Bay Area’s electronic music scene was at that show and were in the mood for something weird, challenging and transcendental; I can’t speak for anyone else, but I got the distinct impression that I was far from the only one who was severely disappointed. It was amelodic, rhythmically flat, and while technically live (and perhaps even improvised or generatively produced) sounded completely lifeless.

It’s possible that someday a key will turn in my head, and suddenly the most recent third of Autechre’s output will suddenly open up to me. I want to like it: I love difficult, esoteric sounds (see: rest of this blog), and it feels like a confession of failure when I ultimately just can’t get into work as clearly uncompromising and innovative as Confield and their subsequent albums. It’s never fun to see my limitations so clearly laid out. But I also have to be honest, with myself if nobody else: I don’t think my feelings are going to change. Somewhere along the way, Autechre lost me, and while I’ll keep my ears open, I don’t think they’re going to find me again.

Imagine, if you will, lo-fi retro-disco with a totally bloodshot dude doing stream of consciousness rapping in a style not entirely unlike the work of Wesley Willis (RIP). This, in essence, is Gary Cloud & the Gospel of Power’s “Puff Rider”, which is fun in a greasy, low-brow kind of way.

Now imagine it being remixed by one of the UK’s most talented electronic production teams. The result is still greasy and low-brow, but also sketchy and glistening. As I mentioned yesterday, Various Production are all over the place, and that’s part of what makes them so fun and irritating all at the same time. They never settle in one place, and they’re talented at coming up with curveballs like this one.

Hard on the heels of my post on Fucked Up and Kelefa Sanneh’s laudable efforts to get them noticed by New York Times readers, I bring to your attention this excellent article by him about dubstep’s ongoing half-assed attempt to penetrate the American gestalt. He does a great job with the nearly intractable problem of describing dubstep (a thing more defined by what it’s not than what it is) and he does it without talking down to the audience. He’s now my favorite critic writing for the Times.