The history of music in the years of millennial transition is the story of a land-grab by outsiders and institutional renegades. It is the story of a shift in authority and access, from academic, professional, institutional control, to private, democratic and chaotic processes grown up from the streets of forgotten urban ghettos and European art-colleges. It is the story of a takeover by unlikely men and women who had no plan save to express themselves. It is also a story of empowerment through previously unavailable, digital technologies and production systems; an unmediated and intuitive cultural collusion between foreign tech companies and poor kids with dreams. This is a brief, broad and superficial overview of some of the personalities and moments of creative inspiration that have shaped the current music ethos. It is a glance at the tips of icebergs, in a sea full of them; the depths are not explored here, rather it is a basic mental-map of the territory for further explorations.
Kingston, 1973
Osbourne Ruddock doesn’t allow ganja smoking in his studio. Unlike other producers in the area, this is not just a studio, but his home. He is by trade an electrical engineer, highly successful by local standards, and regarded by musicians as someone with integrity. He is also a stickler for discipline and wants to avoid any unnecessary problems with the police in a neighbourhood notorious for crime and criminal-cops, Waterhouse. The ban is a problem for some of the more militant Rastas, but they respect his wishes, if for no other reason than to have access to Ruddock’s talents. He has transformed his knowledge of commercial circuitry into a kind of sonic wizardry and his magic is generating massive buzz at the local sound-system dances and, more importantly, selling records. His back-room workshop has become a sort of shrine to the new sounds that are beginning to influence the local music, and which are destined to shape the future of popular sound (Veal, 108).It may be a bit of a stretch to call Ruddock’s place a “studio” as it had no recording facilities. Instead, it was a sort of post-production centre, where he would use his custom-wired, MCI 12-channel mixing desk as well as commercial and hand-made effects units to manipulate multi-track recordings. His tools included a Japanese made Roland Space-Echo (RE-201), a MCI high-pass filter and plate or spring reverb units, many of the latter having been hand-tooled by himself (Veal, 110, 117). Using his studio as an instrument, Ruddock “King Tubby” Osbourne would transform the tracks that came through his workshop into spacey, spiralling and bombastic soundtracks for the urban dances and yard-parties throughout the island. The concept of studio-as-instrument was not new, as producers such as George Martin with the Beatles and early innovators such as Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer and Daphne Oram were already experimenting with sound collage and tape manipulations. While Bill Putnam, an engineer and inventor, was using echo and reverb to enhance professional recordings. All of this precedes the work of Tubby and provides a historical framework of the technology and some of the innovations that developed through them (Veal, 37-39).
But the strategy and approach that Tubby brought to the process was unique, and set a precedent for the further development of the producer as creative engine. He was not simply using the studio technology to master or enhance the tracks sent his way, he was putting himself in the centre of the process and creating a lasting cultural artefact: a style. His technique was to re-record and mix down during a live manipulation of the technology, using the mixing board and effects as instruments through which the various tracks were transformed into wholly new sounds and a song was often deconstructed so far as to be almost incomparable to the original recordings (Veal, 119).
“Melodies became fragments, fragments became signs, and the whole thing swirled like a hurricane” (Chang, 29). The new style which was developed out of these sessions came to be called “dub”: a music of contingency, existential, broken, fragmented, tied together with bass and drums into a tidal wave of thunder and dread apocalypse. It would, unbeknownst to Tubby, become the foundation for all subsequent developments in popular music (Davis, 53-57).
The South Bronx, 1973
Clive has lost his accent. Born in Jamaica, his parents raised him with a deep appreciation of his home country. He spent his early years in the same Second Street, Trenchtown neighbourhood as Bob Marley; a neighbourhood on the other side of the tracks in a place that was altogether the other side of the tracks (Chang, 22). His parents emigrated him when he was 12 to New York City, in search of opportunity and a better life. After living in the States for a few years, he grew tired of being asked to repeat himself, and did his best to cover over his native patois (Chang, 73). Yet, his roots remained, and these included a love of the music that he heard as a child and the sound-system culture that promoted it. His father, Keith, was the manager of a local band in NY, and allowed Clive to use the band P.A. to put on parties and play music. If Jamaican music and dub was the root, these parties were to become the branch of an international movement now known as “hip-hop culture.”Clive – dubbed ‘Kool Herc’ by his friends for his physical prowess and tagging style– used a technical setup that included microphones run through a Roland Echoplex (Chang, 78) – a nod to the yard-DJ’s of Jamaica – as well as two Technics 110A turntables. The echoplex provided the sonic space that allowed him to manipulate the music, cutting off any edges or mistakes made along the way; it was a sort of buffer for his experiments on the turntables. Of these, Herc would use one to play through a song’s length up until the climactic “break”, and with the other he would set up to repeat that break once the other record had reached the end of it. The “breaks” are those moments when the rhythm section was stripped down to its most elemental structure, without a chorus or melody. These breaks were the “fundamental vibrating loop at the heart of the record” (Chang, 79). Herc worked up a method of keeping these break-sections on a recursive loop that could go on as long as he liked, or as long as the dancers wanted. Along with the application of effects, Herc found that this elemental approach was shaping into a style of music that was unique for its time.
Using this looping-technique to maintain a groove and a dance was not new in musical history, particularly not in non-Western settings. The Balinese gamelan and Indian raga musicians were known to loop-back on a musical idea for hours, even days, on end (Toop, 21). Their approach was well known to the modal jazz players of the 60’s, having been influenced by composers like Debussy who first heard the music at the Paris Exhibition in 1889 (Toop, 17), and through growing interest in Indian players like Ravi Shankar (DeVito, 134). In live performance, this looping and lengthy approach was often emulated by players like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy who wished to extend their explorations while avoiding the driving necessity of chord changes and cadences (DeVito, 230-31). But Herc was not raiding Oriental ideas nor was he educated in the system of modal jazz from the preceding decade, he was simply responding to crowd-demands, ones that called for an endless groove to which to dance. [The return to what are often considered basic musical forms and the attribution to the other music as primal betrays a very Euro-centric notion of historical progress, as if counter-point is the final word on musical expression. This is a topic for another time.] His temperament, skills and his own experience with Jamaican musical forms, the demands of the audience and the limitations and possibilities of the technology available led him to shape a musical style that fit the context.
Tokyo, 1983
The head of Roland Corporation, Ikutaro Kakehashi, decides, after only three years, to pull production of the TR-808 (Transistor Rhythm, as it ran electrical pulses through transistors to create the various percussive sounds), an analog drum machine, due to falling sales and perceived obsolescence. Music stores across the world begin markdowns of the already low-priced, consumer-market product.Detroit, 1983
By 1980 punk had lost its shock value and hardcore was beginning to edge its way into the American scene. Electronic music was viewed as a form of art-rock that postured an indifference to world events; a sort of distant, inhuman music made by arty new-wavers and slick moderns. The pop-charts were filling up with electronic artists, using the new (incredibly expensive) synthesisers and drum-machines. The music cruised along, or above, the actual events of the times.Three friends from Detroit, specifically the Belleville area, had become interested in electronic instruments and technology, their musical tastes tending towards the spaced-out funk of George Clinton and Funkadelic. Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins were fans of the technological stylings of Kraftwerk, but their hereditary culture was funk and R&B. Together the three formed a musical production group called the Deep Space Soundworks. It was during a trip to a music store in the city that Jaun came across one of the marked-down 808 machines and bought it for his production work. He first applied it to a duo-band he started with another friend, Richard Davis, called Cybotron. Their record, Clear, was a ground-breaking, purely machine driven music, with the drums at the center; it was the beginning of what would become known as “Techno” (Henderson, 210). This stripped back, bass & drum music pushed the current technology into new rhythmic pathways, by applying funkified and danceable grooves to what had been, up to that point, a static, flat rhythmic assumption, a la Kraftwerk.
The three had moved in their own creative direction and developed a style based on a straight quarter note kick-drum pattern, repeating underneath a two bar bass-line, reminiscent of the Chicago House music, but with an element of funkified Afro-futurism that gave the music a distinct philosophical base. This “bare-boned but wildly futuristic jack trax” style (Henderson, 223), was for the three an aesthetic statement of their worldview as much as it was something to dance to. Their social and economic context gave them a sense of outsider-ness; their intentional use of discarded machines was for them a statement reflecting their present post-industrial, “infosphere” dystopia and future, transcendent hopes (Toop, 214-215). Although their music contained lyrics of varying length and depth, it was the means of production, their adopted stage-names (3070, Model 500), the song titles (Techno City, Cosmic Cars, Info World, Crackdown) and the style itself which primarily conveyed their ideology.
Berlin, 1999
They are arguing again. The platform’s user-interface is a contentious issue, because there seems to be only one or the other way of doing things, and they have to decide. Bernt Roggendorf, Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke (Monolake) are all music makers, but they are also technical experts in digital software. Each has cut their teeth at Native Instruments (a highly respected German, digital instrument manufacturer) and the Technical University of Berlin, working on projects of granular synthesis and hardware interfaces. They are each well aware of previous hardware and technology and know the history of its development. But, they are looking at the singularity of computer based music as the future: they believe the laptop computer is destined to become the brain of electronic and hybrid music creation. Yet they are not seeking to recreate static, studio operations, as other Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) have done and are doing. Rather live, in the moment, manipulations and design, much like an analog instrument provides to the user. How are they going to facilitate that with their software? The answer is an integrated, flip-interface that combines two creative approaches to song making and live performance: a live performance window and a sequencing window for capturing, in time, those performances. It is a remarkably simply and elegant solution to a problem in the creative process, one that up to thsis point no DAW had attempted. Further, their understanding of synthesis has led them to design an interface that combines time-free manipulation of samples; in other words, music can be stretched to fit any BPM, yet retain its pitch and sound quality. These two technological advances are the beginning of a musical wave that will sweep across the world over the next 17 years. Three technical music nerds, seeking to make software for themselves to use in their House and Techno sets, have just stumbled on an idea that will change how music is created in the 21st century (DeSantis, 15).London, 2006
Steve Goodman, aka Kode 9, is an outspoken advocate for musical experimentation and, putting his money where his mouth is, has started his own independent music label to make sure that happens. His central roster of artists are local, bedroom producers from areas such as the Tower Hamlets, Bromley and Croyden; the lowest income earners in a working class that is slowly disappearing. These artists include Burial, Cooly G, Flowdan and SpaceApe (whose moniker is taken directly from the title of a Lee “Scratch” Perry dub record of the same name). Besides sharing similar backgrounds, these artists share production techniques that allow them the freedom to write, record and master their music from home, with very little outside resources save a laptop, a pre-amp and a couple of mics. The ability to create such sounds with little cost and access to a supportive record label owner put the artists in control of the creative process from the ground-up (Moorefield, 110). Along with the technology comes access to samples and styles without the requirement of capable musicians. The new digital technology facilitates musical composition and production quality that was available only to full-fledged studios in the previous decade. But further, it also makes possible the hybridization of the music into new, unexplored forms. As Goodman points out:“People need to remember what is interesting about these musics – jungle through to dubstep. They can weave together every single music ever, potentially, at that speed, with those basslines. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be aspects of techno, hip hop, reggae, soul, electro, house…” (Henderson, 320, italics mine).
This ease of hybridization – a sonic inclusiveness – is an acceleration of a creative arc that previously took years, even decades to develop. But with the advent of the purely digital music production, these styles are multiplying at a rate that is difficult to measure. The list of styles mentioned by Goodman are an example of this, and their origin – all from those same inner-city areas – betrays the reality of who is driving the creative substructures of modern music, including the ideologies behind it, and provides clues to its future.
♕
“Music in the future will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such
an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronism.”
— David Toop
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brewster, B. Broughton, F. (2000). Last night a DJ saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. New York: Grove Press.Chang, J. (2005). Can't stop, won't stop: a history of the hip-hop generation. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Davis, E. (2008). Roots and Wires Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic. In: Miller, Paul D. ed. Sound Unbound : Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
DeSantis, D. (2015). Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers. Berlin: Ableton AG.
Henderson, D. (2010). Journey to a Plugged In State of Mind. London: Cherry Red Books.
Katz, D. (2006). People funny boy: The Genius of Lee Scratch Perry. London: Omnibus.
Moorefield, V. (2010). The Producer As Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Toop, D. (2001). Ocean of sound: aether talk, ambient sound and imaginary worlds. London: Serpent's Tail.
Veal, M., Tubby, K. Simon, P. (2007). Dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in Jamaican reggae. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.