There’s a never-ending debate in IDM circles of whether the genre of IDM is dead, due to the stagnation of significant technological advancement in music production, coupled with the recent “home studio revolution”-based onrush of newbie producers, flooding The MySpaces with mediocre “my first” tracks made with a copy of Ableton Live (or Reason or Fruityloops) they pirated off the internet just the other day. This is not a development of isolated significance however — IDM was often considered the final frontier of “new” music. To call it dead says something about the state of music as a whole.
For a bit of background, IDM (”Intelligent Dance Music” in an arguable wink of self-parody) is a blanket term & genre driven by the explosion of synthesis and sequencing technology. Much of it revolved around subverting the nature of “dance”-oriented devices such as drum machines in order to paint unusually sophisticated or otherwise whacked out beaty music, hence the name, IDM– “dance” music for the brain and, if you’re a dancing hero, the body. A second generation of IDM was created during the advent of softsynths (in particular personal computer-based DSP environments like Max/MSP and Reaktor), which freed artists to make even more unimaginably bizarre material.
In its heydays, there was a sense of IDM being at the cutting edge of music especially when compared to the more popular but stagnant electronic genres of techno/trance and hiphop. For clarification, this article refers to IDM, the blanket term for convoluted beat-oriented electronic music and not the archetypical “genre sound” of say, classic IDM or melodic IDM
on genres
IDM was driven by the explosion of electronic music technology in the 80s and 90s. While everyone else was using cutting-edge music gear for their “intended purposes” (e.g. techno, pop, hiphop), IDM was all about exploring and exploiting the new tools of music production in search of new sounds and new styles. If there was a new thing in synthesis, sequencing or control, IDM was there to “push it to the limit” as they say*.
The problem is, there hasn’t been a significant new thing in music production in a while. The IDM of 2008 bears no significant difference to the IDM of 2000. As a pure genre, IDM is arguably “dead”, or at least stagnant. However IDM fared better than other pure genres that were of the last to be considered “new” like hiphop and techno, which in their pure forms haven’t advanced since 1992 or so.
Instead what has been happening in music in the dearth of new “pure” genres is a merging of preexisting genres– Glitch into hiphop to make glitch-hop (1, 2); Melodic IDM aesthetics and pop/rock to make whatever The Postal Service is, along with the hazy-rockband-and-something-else smorgasbord that makes the entire “post-rock” movement. Let’s not forget about all the retro hybrid nostalgia-heavy pop music you hear on the radio so often, reiterated and remixed to retardation. However, aside from the standstill of significant music production technology, why are there seemingly no new styles of music left to “invent”? Is filling in the gaps among preexisting genres the only thing left to do?
Its one thing to contextualize many of the new genres we’ve seen in the past century to the advance of recording technology, but it’s another to say that everything that can be done with music, fundamentally, has been done in the past. Of course you’ve heard this argument before — there are only twelve notes in the scale; how can you come up with a combination that’s a radical departure from everything that’s been tried in the past? Perhaps it is totally impossible, and the cynical adage of “it’s all been done before” is true — at least in terms of notes and harmony.
It’s likely that everything that can be done with melody and harmony has already been explored in the days of highly sophisticated orchestral music, and everything since then can be traced back to a precident.
how music has developed with recording technology
The thing that recording technology brought to the sonic table was the ability to shape the aesthetic of sound. Previously, the recording medium of choice (sheet music) only dictaed the “note data” so to speak, and only up to a certain point. Everything else was up to the performer, his instrument, and the environment he played it in.
Since the arrival of audio recording, popular music saw a gradual but dramatic shift from sophisticated melody/performance-based aesthetics to pure sound aesthetics (2), e.g., a synth line and a techno beat; Some raps and a simplistic “crunky” backing; Rock music which is often simply a set of strummed chords under a lot of fine-tuned distortion; The blanket genres of ambient and “soundscape” with its often heavy reliance on experimental/field recording and effect-tweaking; IDM with its experimental sound and machine-aided sequencing of sophisticated patterns.
The frontier had shifted from harmony and melody to audio aesthetics and technology-aided composition. However once the technology of recording and synthesis stopped advancing in “revolutionary” ways, the final frontier of IDM also stopped in its tracks. Meanwhile, the internet gave exposure to many world genres and most of what’s useful in those have been integrated into the core of modern mainstream music. The “extents” of all possible music styles have been discovered and charted. All that is left is to fill in the gaps.
when the gaps are filled, will music die?
No, and to understand why, we have to step back and look at the ultimate objective of art & entertainment — to strike people in some “emotional” way. ”Melodies”, “sounds”, “aesthetics” and all these other techniques are simply a means to that end. A combination of this sound, that melody, and at this pacing will ellicit a certain response. Changing one core element even slightly will radically alter the emotional outcome, due to the abstract nature of music in general (unless you’re listening to a literal storyteller like Bob Dylan).
If you’ve ever produced a track, you will understand how fragile this all is. Producers put so much effort into getting the right mix and arrangement of sounds just to make their listeners feel something. When you consider the fragility, you’ll realize that the possibilities are endless. The “tools” (styles, techniques) have all been charted out in the past, but the emotions you can build with those tools have not yet been exhausted.
people change
Additionally, the “emotional effect” that musicians strive for is a very context-sensitive thing. What may sound ridiculously outlandish to one person may in fact be the Jam to someone else on the other side of the globe, all because he has learned to emotionally interpret music in a different way. Similarly, what used to be emotionally affecting centuries ago now makes little sense to the ears of most modern audiences. In fact, what people found emotionally engaging 20 years ago may now ellicit a different response from modern audiences.
What this means is that as people and cultural tastes change, the old combinations of styles and aesthetics lose their effectiveness. The search for emotionally relevant combinations of aesthetics is a never-ending quest. This is why, even in the face of “the end of pure genres”**, music will never truly be doomed to stagnation. Obviously this is of great importance to me seeing that I’m whacking together one old thing (IDM/electronic) with another (traditional Japanese music) for the next album. Then again, practically everyone is being forced to do something like that these days if they don’t want to make some tired old pure genre material.
**until IDM is revived with next-gen BCI-controlled physical modelling synthesizers of course.