Listening to: Minilogue

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

On 29/01/14 11:16, Jay Vaughan wrote:
>>> I guess I should listen to Minilogue, but .. sorry .. the association with Ableton just turns me right off.
>>
>> Why?
>
> Because I can’t stand Ableton-produce tracks, really.  There is something too accurate about the way the clips lock together, or .. something .. else about how Ableton enforces a convention on song-construction, for the purposes of convenience for the user.  I just find it predictable and formulaic - things are very rigid clock-wise, and I guess I’ve adopted a pattern-finding approach to listening to electronic music that has the effect of recognising when things were just ‘copy/pasted’ into existence in the track structure.  Maybe the jitter of MIDI is missing, who knows .. I’ll be the first to admit that I am being myopic about it, but the standard structural composition of your average Ableton composition seems to me to be too accessible for overuse.

actually your criticism is valid for any widely-used musical instrument, 
imo.

there's a tension, creative, between successfully enabling musical 
expression,
and the inevitable result that it becomes more widely-used, and therefore
diluting the effect of resulting musical forms

electronics and software democratise music-making to an amazing degree,
so, first you get amazing music, but also then a large volume of fluff
that sounds similar

another view of creativity is collective: these instruments bring musical
forms into the world that are then examined by their human minions,
from every fascinated angle :)

so, one must have a dialogue with aliens.

what's new? :)

t.