fluorosis
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Posts posted by fluorosis
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Anyway, I thought that this thread had basically evolved to "Boris Blenn is great", which I agree with.
The consensus appeared to be that the OP had done a hit-n-run and that no one had time for the video.
I confess that i watched it in it's entirety, however at 1.75x playback, as recommended, which counteracted the dramamine vocalization velocity.
I randomly wanted to also add "Blue Planet Corporation" as a total non-sequitur that has some pleasing songs, IMO. What was that first track on that one album ? Alidade?
or alternatively, it sounds like the album mix, possibly ripped from vinyl?
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mmmm I'm convinced that a hook is necessary for virality. His point is that "darker" styles are basically sound-design and a contemporary beat, which I agree with.
It's not to say that there aren't SOME Skinny Puppy remixes, but you'd be hard-pressed to isolate a singular iconic riff, sound, rhythm, etc. Skinny Puppy is a perfect example of anonymous grunge, and yes I had cassettes of their music and thought it was the Bees Knees when it was, etc... but it's ultimately grist for the mill.Whereas some earworm pop tune like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "Relax" has such a stupidly simplistic melody (for the day, we've hmmm "upped"? the ante since... aka hold my beer while I sing one note and call it a main melody) but it will be remixed endlessly.
It's not really consequent what you or I like, musically speaking, to be able to recognize the basic principle at work here, as it's the essence of a "catchy tune" since tunesmiths first began to ply their trade. A bard who could compose catchy melodies tended to eat better than their more underground peers, lol... I dunno.
He's basically telling us that pop music is popular because it's catchy, to the degree that it's actually catchy and not the result of mere marketing hype.
But I'm not sure if you really are seriously trying to tell me that iconic catchy shit doesn't matter in terms of popularity and virality and, hence, what the OP seems to regard as musical life.
Personally, I don't think future people will give a rats ass about any of our disposable music, to the degree that it's the soundtrack to a social gestalt vs a musical vision of some deranged genius who is likely not even in any charts, and Skinny Puppy was in charts. Face it, it was tough-guy tunes for teens, and we were teens and liked it. There's nothing musically great about Skinny Puppy nor Einsturzende what's their face, nor Ministry, as I just listened to Ministry the other day and it was total dreck with some mood attitude trying to pose all tough n stuff...
nothing personal, I had rivet-head credentials, that's on the pile with Dead Kennedy's for me (past glories, etc...) my endocrine system has aged, lol...
But anyway, the authors virality theory aside, I don't think this says anything about the VALIDITY of such music the OP excludes from his Noahs Ark of music.
For example, this Blue Planet Corp track is a fucking corker that only gets going halfway through it's 10+ minutes! There is not single iconic melody, but it's gorgeously melodic and harmonic etc. I would say that the WHOLE is something greater than the sum of it's parts, and that's true for a lot of music.
but yes, I could care less about Vini Vici... that's just a psy-kick and bass with samples on top and some change ups. They even forgot to switch their Sesto Sento kick for a more "smup" Neelixy one...
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1 hour ago, Padmapani said:
the whole point of the op can be easily refuted with a single word:
Techno.
? as far as I can remember, for a techno track to be remixed outside of it's original release frame/promo campaign there's typically a signature melody...
which techno tracks that don't have signature melodies, riffs, hooks, of some kind get remixed a decade later?
I'll grant you that a vocal hook or rhyme or rap will suffice, like that insipid "they don't know what is what, they just strut, what the fuck" track...
I don't understand how this refutes the videos point that one needs something musically iconic as content for a remix.
ones' kick drum isn't sufficient material for a remix, or maybe I'm missing out on something major here?
Hey wow, I became "enlightened ape"! I love that album. Shakta has loads of signature hooks/melodies, lol
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but no, I'm no producer nor musician... just a picky whinger who likes to babble on and on about topics I know fuck-all about... that's why I like forums, lol.
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1 minute ago, Padmapani said:
you do not produce psy i suppose?
once you go in with all these rich chords, progressions and concepts that work for old music and bring it into electronic dance music you almost inevitably end up with an ultra-cringey cheesefest.
i've had the same idea a while back and wanted to bring some of the magic that i know from my prog rock background into psy and the results have all been despicably bad.
the only way i've found to do harmony in a tasteful way in our context is to use sublety. lots of it. if you want to hint at a chord, you might for instance use an arp-like melody and play the chord defining note a single time in a whole bar, you might as you mention use delay, you might use a reverb tail of a heavily filtered note, you might use the resonance of your filter to emphasize a particular frequency while playing the root note, you might use a pad that uses a waveform that emphasises a particular overtone…
if you want to go deeper and more complex and don't want to risk ending up with unlistenable shit, you go deeper and more complex with sound design.
I don't think it necessitates an "ultra cringe-worthy cheese fest" as simplistic major/minor diatonic chord progressions are typically more cheesy than richer harmony.
Voice leading, my friend. Do you imagine that one jumps up and down like a silly Balearic rabbit? Consecutive chords in a GOOD professional level chord progression usually share notes in common and half-step movement in resolution is ideal. One voices the chords and inversions and notes with sophistication and maturity.
I'm familiar with arpeggiators and delay effects, and it's true that one must take care for the space of a mix, but this is tangential, I would say.
What I generally feel in most "formula" prog and fullon is this minor triad "sigh" as the only harmonic context beyond the bassline indicating the key we are in. I need a little more to FEEL actual human emotions. I sincerely doubt that anyone in their right mind would call the superlocrian mode "cheesy", or any other modes of the harmonic minor scale, for example.
Don't confuse poor initial compositional results and first attempts with a bad conceptual approach. Honestly, you should just work on your prog-rock attempts more and after significant effort you may find that you have something amazing. No one said that achieving the next level in psychedelic trance was easy. Maybe you will bring some cool new fusion to this world!
I think that one will pass through many throw-away melodies and harmonic structural ideas before one arrives at something that SOUNDS good. One must be ruthless and not settle for the first thing that comes along. Often times one can recontextualize the chords with regards to the bassline, "counter-tonic", relative-major/minor, recontextualizing a sustained minor triad as the 3-5-7 of a new 1, etc. The chord voicings and the VOICE-LEADING are what will determine the meaning (context) of a melody, and this can be as subtle or as obtuse as you make it.
Honestly, I think that the reason most dark psy features very little melody is this fear of "oh that's cheesy" when one first even begins messing around with a synth. One must embrace the initial cheese, study music more, and then improve the cheese until it's a 3-year aged fine parmesan lol...
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Psychotoonz and Witchcraft are 2 of my favorite releases from the 90's. Sandman has a unique sound. I remember some interview in which he said something to the effect that "trance needs more MAYHEM" and this was before minimal, fullon, dark, etc split off. Sandman and UX are what I would consider "proper dark" trance with actual music, vs just sound-effects and 20 layers of the same FM synth grind or LFO-pitch-mod rubber sound.
But yes, Spawn (and others) are way ahead of it's time.
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On 7/12/2020 at 1:43 PM, recursion loop said:
Don't pretend to be a "real producer" but I know a thing or two about DAWs, synths, music production and theory. Here are my attempts if someone is interested
So if this really happens I don't mind contributing something.
It sounds as real as any producer I've listened to. Reminds me of Goa trance a bit
But seriously, good sounds, you should put it out. Submit it to labels at least..
It's at least as good as anything out there, and better than most.
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4 hours ago, Multi-Media said:
This is a bit insulting, I watched the video and even asked some questions about it...also explored some other content by the OP (or as some would say gave him clicks). That the thread turned the way it did, shows even threads with no future can be turned into something worthwhile to read imho. Even if OP does not care about his thread at all
At the melodic topic, guess the British industrial pioneers or Einstürzende Neubauten had very little melodies at all (as the name implies it was more noise and rythms), however somehow started a music movement and are considered "cult" or groundbreaking to this day. Later mixed with Kraftwerk and early wave it became ebm and techno and... in goas case added Indian and Hippy music influencesI'm so very sorry for insulting you personally rather intentionally, clearly.
Back to the point:
Are they being remixed? (Einstürzende Neubauten) and isn't Kraftwerk precisely being remixed due to their iconic melodies?
I rather agree with the video's point. Without an iconic melody or, i don't know, hmmmm "musical hook", a song has little to offer a remixer nor cover by another musician. I'm not sure that you challenged this point here.
The OP was referring to a song's virality, durability, re-digestability, and while I even provided avante-garde cover for being able to consider an iconic rhythm or abstract sound to be memorable musical content that could be remixed, I don't see a single comment referencing the 500 word essay I provided you on the topic.
Don't worry, however, as I'm not insulted
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I think I can be a bit more helpful.
Psytrance is missing "HARMONY".We have melodies. That's only a single note at a time, plus a more-or-less droning bassline. People occasionally get jiggy with the bassline, but I will readily acknowledge that rapid chord progressions in which the bassline changes tonic notes all the time can be nauseating at times, rather like an airplane changing altitude a lot and often.
What is missing are harmony lines that go WITH that melody and imply the richer harmonic world of chords and, well, harmonies. It's common for choral works to be written with 4 parts of harmony, for example. We occasionally get accidental harmonies as the melody/lead sound may have a delay effect and we hear the leftover results of one note trailing over the next note(s).
We occasionally get *real* harmony, with a background pad sound playing gated chords, for example, but I miss richer chord options than the simple major/minor diatonic triads, like 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, suspended 2nds/4ths, secondary dominants, tritone substitution, etc. Getting beyond the basics to the deeper more complex emotions, etc.
I'm missing richer harmony. That would take trance beyond Goa trance, in my book, which is where it needs to eventually go, in my opinion.
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fair enough.
Boris Blenn makes nice music. Etnica was great precisely for what it represented and sounded like when it first came out, with respect to everything else going on at the time.
Endless attempts to "clone the magic" look like some plastic surgery ducklips.
Message to the world: Stop living in the past and make the music of the future so I can nitpick it errrrm test my new car stereo with it
... i mean since we have a topic free-for-all I'll just drop my usual refrain that you will see me repeat in all threads always henceforth, lol
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Silly me, I wrote a long discourse actually replying to the video that started this thread.
I now realize that absolutely no one watched the video, and they merely turned this topic into another argument about which trance from when is the best.
The video actually had a totally different and coherent point, but then folks who won't watch the video, considering it "clickbait" will be happy to expound on topics that are NOT in the video the OP posted.
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I think it's a well-thought out proposal:
a SONG (has a signature melody, the chord changes/modulations under it, the name itself implying ones ability to SING the signature melody, which I consider less important as I will describe) can be done in a Polka version, a Psytrance version, a Bossanova version. I'm sure you can picture "Happy Birthday" done in a million different ways, yet still retaining that signature melody. You will even EXPECT that a jazz version will alter the chord changes while still allowing the same melody to be contextualized over it!
It's true that mere sound-design accompanied by "contemporary rhythms" (as you say) will not have any CONTENT to be recontextualized.
Melodies are sequences of notes. Notes are ostensibly "pure tones" with a base root principle frequency, which is a lie, of course, as we understand that even a single note on the guitar string will have an entire correlated frequency system (harmonics/partials) related to a central main basic root frequency (tone), nevertheless, as all physical vibrations follow the physics of the harmonic series, regardless of medium, we will perceive a coherent "note".
There's some debatable degree of cerebral processing involved beyond the physical mechanisms of the human ear and the frequency "bins" it can perceive activity in. (resonant single-frequency sensors) but one can expect some memory of patterns here, and so one may expect some characteristic and unique "sounds" to be readily identifiable, regardless of their musical content. You will recall that being able to recognize the roar of a predator likely precedes music, lol.
Additionally, much as the sense of smell is pre-cognitive, there is also pre-cognitive auditory function, and I'll not go into this at this juncture.
What are the limits of human-recollection of distinctive sounds and how does this compare as far as broader definitions of a melody?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and also note that the vast bulk of dance music is a beat and bassline, whose primary purpose is to make physically impressive sound waves when projected over large sound systems, such that one feels suitably impressed and one feels like moving and dancing in response, as surely such an overwhelming force can be the equivalent of darkness in the discoteque, aka "normal" folks who would "normally" be embarrassed to dance and prance around do so with great abandon and alacrity.
Rhythm and characteristic sequences of this are an equally viable conduit to memory, however.
Our societies are biased against a rhythm-centric approach, but it's interesting to note that that 3/2 ratio is both a basic unit of cross-rhythm syncopation, and, when sped up, is the musical interval known as the 5th, which your fellow Greek, Pythagoras, is credited with noting in his studies of the tuned string and harmonics and musical intervals.
Ask any Punjabi about the Bhangra rhythms and if one can remember them as distinct musical patterns of some kind.Or, those characteristic 60's and 70's funk soul motown etc drum-grooves, such as Clyde Stubblefield (James Brown's drummer) and The Winstons "Amen" grooves that are featured in countless hip-hop and electronica songs. (or rather, "tracks" as we know that they aren't songs, lol...even though a track is like a single instrument recording (1 or more channels, but commonly characterized as a single mixer "channel" even if there are 6 channels stuck inside, as in the case of 5.1 surround, lol...)
Alas, all 4 on the floor disco-based dance music styles bring absolutely zero to the table on the subject of rhythm. Future people will not be quoting our beats, lol
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On 6/22/2020 at 9:52 AM, recursion loop said:
Except that very small fraction of these melodies is any good IMO.
That was the same ratio of good to bad back in the 90's. People simply have rose-coloured glasses and think that the past was always better, and forget that they are cherry-picking their favorite tracks from an entire year of goa-psy that was "meh" quality. I can honestly propose 10-20 tracks from the entire 90's and then decide that the 90's were better...
What is missing? Music.
No one dares take a risk anymore. We have managed to recreate mainstream society within the rave scenes. We reward conformity, punish eccentricism, etc.
Everything is about some Big-Assed-Mafia-Festivals and their copy-paste lineups that are all based upon obvious sycophantry and court intrigue.
But what is mostly missing from ALLLLLLLLL of electronica? Music. People study "electronic music production techniques" and I'm pretty sure that there are University courses for this new field. What is missing? Music.Am I referring to Music Theory? No, although you WOULD think that it would be useful for our thousands upon thousands of producers to be able to communicate effectively with trained musicians.
Am I obliquely implying that the trance musical public is musically ignorant (aka, went from Pop or Rock directly into Trance, and thus have never left shallow-cool-kid superficial musical concepts behind, which is why most people think of Skazi or Infected Mushroom when you say "guitars in trance"... what if Segovia or Sabicas were to be a trance producer?) Yes, I suppose that I am insinuating that we are an ignorant scene who gets what we deserve, LOL.
What do we want to do about it?
How many damned posts must I read in which someone seeks something that copies 90's music ("is there anything that sounds like X-Dream or Etnica etc?")
The very idea of asking for copies of greatness ignores what made that music great in the first place: it's originality was certainly part of it.
We are basically glorifying the idea that it's possible to a achieve a formula that isn't formulaic. Sorry mate! It doesn't work like that.
Death to the formulas.
See those funny black and white keys on that keyboard? Those are "notes".
Despite the Biggest Names Ever insisting that technology has rendered "notes" redudant, I can assure you that not only are they ever-relevant, but that there is an order and structure to how these notes are connected to each other! This structure is obvious to any serious musician or MUSICAL composer who has studied their relationship. Believe it or not, any semi-competent musician or composer from NON-ELECTRONICA can tell in 1 second if you know what you are doing with those "notes" and the sad fact is, most producers are NOT even semi-competent at MUSIC, but they still proffer this idea of technology or a plugin being able to fix that.
I hold out hope for the fusions achieved when actual musicians start playing with technology and making it a tool in service to music.
What we currently have is music in service to technology.
We need to up our musical game a bit.
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and one could argue that Manuel is in some kind of trance state... "duende"... it's a 4am "you had to be there" kinda thing...
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Why psytrance has NO future..
in General Psytrance
Posted
My apologies, I tend to obsess over a single track for 1-2 days and then get over it and get obsessed about something else, lol..