When the mode of the music changes, the
walls of the city shake.
Adrift in cyber-space one night some months ago, I found that the gods of chance or serendipity had me click my way into a German site with the unlikely name "Thinnerism." How many sites have you been to that changed your life? I mean, really changed your life? Thinnerism changed mine. For the better. For the much better. How? Thinnerism is a "net label," that being an Internet site where aspiring composers and musicians post their newly created mp3 files for free downloading. That first visit almost became my last visit, because as soon as I saw the list of postings my first impulse was to click away to some happier elsewhere. My ears, like yours, are full to disgusting overflowing with bad music, trivial music, empty music, violent music. I didn’t need anymore of that. Something about the site caused me to stay. And explore. And begin to listen. Nothing’s been the same since (I—and my ears—are happy to say). My hard drive runneth over. Here’s why.
1. After Garage Bands, What? In addition to the hardware, at the same time sounds themselves began to accumulate into libraries, at such a rate that now, we have cheap, readily available digital recordings of every imaginable sound, musical and otherwise, familiar and unimaginable. These libraries are the fodder on which the modern digital studio feeds, and they can now fit on a laptop as well. Garage bands (in some form) we shall always have with us. But technology has now put the creation of music back in the hands of the composer. Where Beethoven spent weeks slaving over a hot piano to map out his symphonies, now your lone music-geek in Kazakstan or wherever spends weeks slaving over a hot laptop to shape his or her own unique aural response to the world. Finished, Beethoven then had to labor weeks longer converting his piano scribblings to an orchestral score, then that score had to be given to a copyist to make part copies for each member of the orchestra that would play the symphony, then came rehearsals, ticket sales, etc., all before the work could be heard. Now, our loner music-geek, when finished, uploads his work to Thinnerism or one of the other hundreds of net label sites, and voilà, the world audience can hear (and download) it at the click of a mouse.
2. Musical Newspeak A daunting range of possibilities, to be sure. The modes of expression available to Beethoven were limited but he—as have all other composers—made a virtue of necessity and created mightily within the known and quite narrow limitations of his day. Now, the only limit facing the young composer is that of imagination. If you can think a sound, you can create the sound. More daunting still: If you’re fresh out of thinking, there is software that will draw on vast databases of music and combine and recombine stuff and then offer suggestions to you for new ways forward, sonically speaking. When I first entered this new musical world, I felt like I’d stumbled onto the shore of a whole new, unexplored aural world. In fact, after months of exploring and listening, I still feel that way: endlessly varied sound-landscapes, each reflecting the culture and geography of place and the uniqueness of individual composers' responses. Cityscapes, landscapes, organic, inorganic, mechanical, orgasmic. Very private music, very public music. Opaque music, transparent music. Simple music, complex music. You’ll find it all (or at least a lot of it) at your friendly local net label. Free. As usual, talent tells. As with any human endeavor, 99% of the product ranges from the not-very-good to the passable. That other 1%, though, is aural treasure that will set your ears to tingling and remind you (and your heart) what music is all about. After decades of media immersion, our ears now are not merely sated, they are jaded, numb, anesthetized. We’ve heard so much of the same music over and over, so much of almost the same music over and over. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Beethoven or the Beatles, Bach or the Beastie Boys, it’s almost impossible to HEAR music now. Whatever music does—and, in spite of many efforts, no one has "explained" what music does except in the most obvious, superficial ways, it—at least initially—delights and surprises (later, of course, it also can console, powerfully). Aurally benumbed, we seek delight in the trivially new: a new beat, a new riff, a new combination of instruments, which for a moment can once again delight and surprise us. Vast media empires and fortunes have been built on the pursuit of the musically- new-but-trivial. Spend enough time exploring and listening to what’s on the net
labels, weed out the merely passable, get to the good stuff, and you realize the utter
vacuity of what passes publicly for music these days.
3. Clarification. Until now, to use the available technology creatively required a large investment in hardware (and software), lots of square feet to hold it all, and lots of time to deal with the often clumsy, primitive interfaces of the various devices. Think Les Paul. Think the Beach Boys. Think George Martin and the Beatles, Wendy Carlos and Bach. It was expensive, difficult, and time-consuming, but it could be done. You could create really good stuff. And people did. Parallel to the superficial trivialities of the many forms of pop music that used the technology to its own ephemeral, pecuniary ends, there was a smaller, less apparent world of musical creativity where on-going, high-level exploitation of the possible happened. Think Brian Eno and tomandandy. Good music, even some great music, came out of the very complex, very expensive computer and recording studios of the last 40 years. But, as I said, until very recently, it was so frightfully expensive. No more.
4. Partial
Disclosure. As you delve into what’s on offer at the net labels, you will, like me, most likely be somewhat daunted by the genres and categories. You run into, not merely, "ambient," but "dark ambient," "ambient club," "ambient trance club," "club techno lounge ambient", and so on. My advice: be not daunted. Only explore. You have nothing to lose except some minutes—OK, maybe days, maybe weeks—of your time and a few megabytes—OK, maybe some gigabytes—of space on your hard drive. Seek and ye shall find the music your ears hunger for. It took me a while and I went down some strange aural paths and detours before I realized what my own ears wanted was what is very loosely included in the large umbrella, "ambient." Your own umbrella may well be—probably will be—different. So vast is the offering that I have no doubt—got that?
NO DOUBT—that you will find the music you have been looking for, even though
you may not have known you were looking for it.
5. Where to Go. Thinnerism.
Germany. Note: most of the sites have a links page which will lead you yet deeper into the unknown reaches of this new continent. In addition, here are two sites trying to keep track of all net
labels: I have not included composers' names nor links to specific pieces
because I don't want to deprive you of the joy of exploration and discovery that I have
experienced, and continue to experience. My apologies to the no-doubt many excellent sites
I have not yet found. (Columbus must have had a similar feeling standing on some wee islet
in the Bahamas that morning of October 12, 1492.)
6. Tips. Many sites include a brief description of the music in a given album, which is often very helpful in deciding whether you want to download. You can of course listen without downloading. In Windows, to listen you left-click on an mp3 file; to download, you right-click. The typical browser (that’s you and me) can download individual tracks. Some sites also offer a compressed file containing all the tracks in an album. 2) File size. Generally the tracks run from five to 10 minutes and about as many megabytes. Occasionally you’ll run into a very long track (over an hour) or very short tracks (One Mexican composer has done a series of tiny pieces based on the sampled and manipulated sounds of rubber bands being stretched and popped). 3) File quality. High, mostly done at 192 or 256 kbps (CD quality). 4) Money. The downloads are free and unlimited.
Note also that many sites also offer CD’s of the albums for sale (cheap). And some
sites also allow you to make direct contributions via PayPal to specific starving
composers of your choice.
7. Esthetics. Add to that the sounds of instruments that have never been built (and never will be built) but that exist only in the virtual mind of the computer, designed by the composer. And finally sounds—noises—from the real world. Some of the new composers go out into what passes for reality and make field recordings which they then incorporate in whole or in part, manipulated or raw. Somewhere in the net labels you’ll find a long track based on sounds from a composer’s circumambulation of an English lake. Another composer moved to London and incorporated street sounds from his first days gathered by hanging a digital recorder outside his window. You’ll encounter—for my taste, too many—vestiges of the old sonic world. Musical clichés are frequent, many in the hands and minds of unskilled composers and thus wholly without irony, but some you’ll find are skillfully sent up or re-invigorated. Examples: Vestiges of 20th century academic music recur, from 12-tone to musique concrète, from Stockhausen to Ligetti, from Hindemith to Babbitt. Don’t be put off by these remarks. So vast is the aural and musical universe now open that much of the work you hear is sui generis: young talent flexing its creativity in young ways. While there are some weak tracks, some irritating tracks, and some tracks that are little more than computer Muzak, most of the work is engaging, thought- and emotion-provoking (anyone for horror? Or a nice spring day? Or a walk on a frozen Finnish seashore?), and aurally delightful. What you will hear is the sound, uncannily, mysteriously, of hope, the sound of a coming world where the terms and modes of human life shift so differently that we, lost in an imperial Wal-Mart with George W. Bush as the greeter at the door, cannot imagine how such real, new beauty might not only exist and thrive, but be given away. Beauty available for the clicking. The infinite poetry of music re-born, far from the madding crowds of MTV and Rolling Stone, indifferent to the pursuit of celebrity. While Neanderthal imperialists try to impose what they call "the ownership society" on the whole world, they primitively pursue terrorists, not realizing in their blind hubris that the true subversives—the people who are undermining the present, exploitative world order and laying the groundwork for a better, more equitable, more joyful way—are these lonely music-geeks churning out beautiful, enchanting, seductive, truly soulful sounds. And giving it away. A braver, newer world than any Huxley ever imagined.
8. La
musique, c’est à toi True, absolute globalization in theory and in fact. People are making this music everywhere in the world. There’s a classically trained trumpet player in Japan who takes his trumpet into "interesting" aural spaces and plays it in the Zen manner of the shakuhachi. There’s an Indian who’s computer-riffing off classic ragas. There’s a person in West Virginia who’s rendering Appalachia in a way Pete Seeger had no way of knowing. There’s a Brazilian who’s creating rhythms and cross-rhythms beyond the capability of the most talented human percussionists. And they are all giving it all away. To you. 9.
Annunciatory Lights of Music It is, because of how it's made, by whom it's made, and how it is distributed (free! free! free!), also a beacon. These fragile, often tentative, works are also distant, faint lights shining from the other side of a chasm of time and history whose treacherous depths it is up to us to traverse before we get from this troubled, corrupt, violent, weary here to that pleasanter, more nurturing there from which the music beckons. A chasm? Who knows. Maybe an abyss. Looking at history, the greater the greed, the more unfettered the striving after power, the deeper the plunge when collapse, as it must, comes. But mysterious, unpredictablly simpler passages have also marked ends and beginnings. Perhaps no chasm, no abyss lies before us but only a declivity in whose shallower depths we'll but briefly wander shut off from light, hope, with all sound muted temporarily under cries of chaos and old night. Unlikely, given what we've done to each other and to the earth, given what we've become. Still, already, against all expectation we suddenly have these aural beacons beneath whose surface delights surges the hope of a great renewal to come. À toi. END
2. Equally striking but less puzzling: Over the centuries the Germans' greatest gift to humanity has been music. Now, after a long silence, they're doing it again. 3. Intriguingly--and very roughly--you can divide the music into two broad categories: city vs. country, or urban vs. nature. A surprising number of composers are either using sampled sounds of nature or are creating impressions of natural landscapes. The German site, Stadtgruen, self-consciously divides its list of files into two sections, one with urban tracks, the other, rural. 4. Audible here is an esthetic criterion, which is alluded to in the name another German site, Thinnerism. In a sense much of this music is a simplifying reaction to the dense, heavy-handed computer music that litters the pop charts and big-budget Hollywood soundtracks. While not exactly "thin" or even especially "simple," the music here is for the most part exquisitely transparent. Computer chamber music? The attentive ear can pick out and follow all the individual parts of these compositions with ease. 5. Ear re-training: Expose your ears for a while to this varied, new musical universe and you will find an odd side-effect. You old favorite musics suddenly sound, well, old. You become aware of the limited "aurality" on which they were based. From the new, much larger musical perspective, well-loved works from the past seem quaint and not a little primitive. You'll also likely find that as your ears are opened to this wider world, the number and types of the new music that you respond to will expand exponentially. 6. A reader of an early draft of this piece called my attention to Jacques Attali's remarkable 1985 book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. A bit of a slog to read (these academics!) but worth the effort. Attali, mired in the late 20th century, reads a different set of musical tea leaves but with remarkable, anticipatory (!) conclusions not unlike those I arrive at here.
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Soon
after the turn of the millennium, fittingly, the hardware and software of music reached a
level where it became possible and affordable to have a complete music studio in a laptop.
A pretty robust laptop, to be sure, but still. What once required tens, if not hundreds,
of thousands of dollars in equipment and programming and several thousand square feet of
floor space can now be carried about. Piece by piece, the hardware components of recording
studios and computer music production were converted into software, separately at first,
and then ultimately into tidy, unifying software studios like "Reason" and
"Reaktor." 
Beethoven had only the instruments of his time
available. Your musically talented laptop geek now has ALL sound at his or her fingertips.
Any sound that has happened or might conceivably happen is creatable or re-creatable for
the new composer with sufficient skill, imagination, technical savvy, and patient
creativity. And not just sounds but the spaces where the sounds may occur, aural spaces,
real and virtual. A whole universe of sound.
Obviously the potential to do this kind of vaster music has been
with us and growing for quite a while, from the theramin to the Moog, from magnetic
recording tape to the digital sampler.
The number of
genres in music is now approaching the number of atomic particles in the known universe.
In this report I have confined myself (as much as I could) to what is called
"ambient" music (simply because it’s what I like). If you don’t know
what ambient music is, I’d rather you didn’t ask. Very roughly speaking ambient
music is not based on melody, nor on beat. "Texture" and "atmosphere"
are the two big operative words to describe ambient music. With the sonic tools now
available to anyone with a computer, all possible textures and all possible atmospheres
can be created, depending only on the imagination and musical skills of the creator.
Your own ears will guide you far better than I can. For starters,
these are sites I have fairly thoroughly explored, some with great delight, some with
lesser delight:
1) Files. Typically, a composer will upload several
tracks and the host site will post them as an "album," often complete with notes
and cover artwork.
You’ll find traces here of everything old.
Sampling means that all music from the past that’s been written, performed,and
recorded is available for use, re-use, and manipulation. All instruments, all styles, all
genres are open to the new composer to do with as he or she will.
La musique, c’est à toi: The music belongs
to you.
Magellan's Log Copyright ©
2004 Texas Chapbook Press
www.texaschapbookpress.com