Apologies to all few of
you out there reading. Moving house (part one now, with the sequel
next month) not only managed to take up a lot of time and energy but
threw out of whack the daily life patterns of two boys a tired
partner and a fragile feline. Even as I wallow in the withdrawal
symptoms caused by the packing away of cherished instruments and
amplifiers (not to mention reliable and fast wired internet
connection) I gather up the fragments of writerly strength and free
time available to me so I can write to you, dear reader.
What has moved me to write
is a musical reconnection with an aesthetic vibe captured by the
early fusions of electronic music and metal I first discovered in the
90s. There was a brief window of time when groups such as Ministry,
Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and latter period Pop Will Eat Itself
were binding beats and metal with real courage and audacity. In this
early period of experimentation (which arguably would go on to be
fully realised in the mainstream in the form of nu metal) aesthetic
rules were not yet set.
The speed of transmission
of these new sounds was as limited by technology as were the sonic
possibilities. Many of the accidental, individual sonic concepts -
such as the sludgey precision paradox of Ministry's white noise
defiance on the Land of Rape and Honey, the welding of strong riffs
to hip hop beats on PWEI's Dos Dedos Mi Amigos, the electronically
manipulated aural pallet of the guitars of NIN's The Downward Spiral
and the reckless slamming together of huge guitars, spectacle and
visuals on White Zombie's Astro-Creep 2000 - later became genre
conventions. This resulted in the distorted electric guitar tone and
a certain swagger possessed by metal being appropriated both with and
without irony across a broad range of popular (and underground)
music.
Recently, I have been on a
contemporary (and so-called) technical death metal binge (what is
with all the drug idioms?). Thanks primarily to the excellent metal
news blog, Heavy Blog Is Heavy, I have been able to engage
with what is essentially new in the genre and within metal as a
whole. I have expressed reluctance to some stylistic conventions
(refer to my article on Djentlemen) and I have held
reservations regarding possible future directions given an
over-reliance on the contemporary stylistic elements. Thanks to Heavy, I have gone from knee deep to neck deep and
have started to find what I consider to be real innovation. And I
like it.
Before that, however, let
me circle-back (flashback? groan) to what gelled this altogether for
me. A remix of Meshuggah's "I am Colossus" was posted as a
really awful remix
over at Metal Sucks. It is hard to tell whether this is an attempt at
irony or simply post-Illud Divinum Insanus exhaustion and disappointment. Nevertheless, I was inspired to listen
as a result of reading the comments in defense of the mix and of the
various readers' affection for dubstep.
As for the remix itself,
while not necessarily the most mindwarping, Aphex Twin like
reconfiguring of musical expectations, it is a fantastic take on the
original, taking the riffs and timbres which creates seamless
metal-dubstep hybrid much closer to Justin Broadrick's new album
Posthuman or the
surprising remixes from Chimaira's Age of Hell
than to Korn/Skrillex collaboration Path
of Totality.
This reconnection of metal
with frontrunning electronic musical genres is exciting and is
starting to finally yield results. At its peak, it is creating
musical hybrids as innovative and gnarly as Disfigure the Goddess'
new platter, Sleepless in
which the boundaries between electronic metal are shattered and
remade in new yet familiar, accessible ways. It excites me to think
about how metal and electronic music can continue to co-evolve in the
coming years.
Indeed until now, the
paradigm has been the incorporation of electronic influences by metal
heads via high profile producers such as Charlie Clouser or Rhys
Fulber. But now we are starting to see electronic musicians and
composers who "get" metal in terms of stylistic
conventions, attitude and philosophy. In addition, this new
generation are growing up with musical production tools and skills
that would have been inaccessible to the hobbyist or even
professional ten to fifteen years ago.
Due to the fast pace of modern
digital thought, listeners are repeatedly traversing complex and
multiple genre terrains, rapidly encountering new, evolving, social
sounds as well as leaving digital pollen bits of themselves wherever
they go in the forms of likes, comments, collaborations and
connections. The pairing of technological capability and individual
ability with the porous spatiality of a social-media-ised musical
landscape is bringing about a contemporary musical multiculturalism
in which the barriers between ethnicity, culture, gender,sexuality
and race are being negotiated in a consensual, polyvocal fashion.
Cross genre experimentation will no doubt still lead to shameful,
shameless and ignorant appropriations but the undeniable fact is that
the dominance of dubstep as a social musical meme is contributing to
an affectionate intensifying deconstruction of metal by those outside
of the genre. Though it is not dubstep that really captivates me, it
is rather the opening to the future that it provides.
What comes
next? But also, let us savour now the treasures we will find after
the zeitgeist, you know, the stuff that falls through the cracks and
accreting value, slowly over time. But I will keep that discussion
for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment