Writing music certainly is not always glamorous work. Still, there’s something to the process that sometimes begets spectacular results. The most inspirational composition clip I've seen is the classic Dylan documentary scene from Don’t Look Back where Joan Baez is singing for the camera from the back of her throat while Bob Dylan is rocking back and forth to his own rhythm, trying to punch out a new song of his own on a typewriter. Whenever I feel overwhelmed with distractions, I just think of Bob and Joan.
One of the great excitements of a live band is seeing a work come together. This is particularly of note for electronic bands in an era where Apple's Garage Band program (which comes installed) has made beat programming as simple as selecting adjectives. Finding out that killer music has a killer composition process can amplify the effect. There's a resonance psychedelic electric indie group Cloud Cult taps into at their shows by having painters on each side of the stage concocting murals Bob Ross style while the band spins their tunes.
I’ve always liked electronic music where the human element shines through. I crown Vangelis the king of this postand perhaps my heart, at least for the duration of his Love Theme. While he may not be the earliest synth composer (that title goes to Wendy Carlos Williams), he exhibited to the masses the full power of strong synth voice in classic soundtracks like Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire.
I used to have a Blade Runner tape that I’d listen to in my car, and it was, in fact, the last cassette to work in it. The tape deck slowly gave up as the tape itself wore thin. Still, even as conditions degraded, somehow the music sounded good with the rhythm in the wear and the gradual warp as the circuits slowed. The tones morphed so that my tape deck’s swan songs were surprisingly sweet, unique performances.
Vangelis - Love Theme (From the Blade Runner Soundtrack)
Among the occult apocrypha that veils Boards of Canada’s heady electronic cuts in folklore mystery are backwards samples from cult leader Amo Bishop Roden. In Kid for Today, BoC builds the beat as you listen, spellbinding you into the trance of the song.
Boards of Canada - Kid for Today
Mu-ziq’s Mike Paradinas meticulously programmed the sounds and sequenced every trip beat and break. With so many ideas and explorations in his ecstatic candy modem melodies, these tracks still ring prophetic and futuristic .
Kraftwerk (German for power plant or power station) and early techno bands prided themselves on the shiny robotic throbbing metallic beats. More recent electronic groups like Flying Lotus, Baths, Talk Demonic, and Groundislava sometimes feature slightly off kilter beats, played either by hand with a beat pad or deliberately staggered with cycled rhythm loops or swaggered programming. This sound gives normally autonomous sounding beats a human hand to them, an organic texture.
Baths – Animals
Flying Lotus – Brainfeeder
Talkdemonic’s live drums and violin bring warmth to the electronic sounds and by matching the nuance in programming with their own playing achieve a heady, cerebral sound that carries powerful emotional push.
Talkdemonic – Mountain Cats
I'm following up Talkdemonicwithgroundislava, and I’m putting the whole Groundislava album here because it’s a classy ride all the way through. It’s at once electronic and organic. Jasper Patterson’s frenetic and perhaps slightly ADD composition process sounds like he jammed a Commodore 64 sound chip into a Never Ending Story VHS and recast the whole shebang on the limn of a sexy Biggie hot tub party.
The headspace this music traverses is vast, but the sounds are always immediate and visceral, so that to plug into it is to be taken on a journey. It’s great to put on if you like to listen to something while you write or while you dance or in my case, where your girlfry creams you in Doctor Mario and then while you act like it wasn’t a big deal.
When vocals come into the mix, the soundscape and the vox themselves are cleverly mixed, maintaining the continuity of the album as a whole. In Panorama featuring Weary, Patterson runs vocoder on Weary’s voice to sway his singing into the electronic realm. This effect, rather than weighing down the vox recasts the entire palette of sounds into a choir of Patterson’s own making.
Like a piñata, this album is filled with candy and suprises, still, in all its nuance, it’s cohesive and driving enough to bear heavy rotation.
Groundislava
The Fuck Buttons compose their sound on a medley of equipment featuring toy keyboards and vocals screamed into a children karaoke tape recorder.
Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow
The first time I saw the Roland SPDS sampling pad, I was in smitten. Though I did procure one, it did not survive the rigors of my life. In the end, it was probably a blessing that my SPDS broke when it fell off the couch arm: My schedule opened up and I was subsequently able to get my life back in order.
The show that lit that fuse for me was Themselves. I’m including the track here where you can really hear the hip hop influenced finger beats stroked out of a sampling pad. Watching the beats form before me opened the idea of the lyrics to me, this unleashing of the id, this natural punch and flow. By seeing the process, I began to understand something more in the music. I saw that the lyrics themselves were playful, that meaning was in the act itself.
Themselves – It’s Them (1999)
Tobacco, keyboardist from Black Moth Super Rainbow, polishes the folky synth sound from BMSR to drive heavy, huge lead lines. BMSR's combination of lo-fi guitar and thick vocoder give them a sound that is seventies electronic wonderland brewed with swamp shed folk. Tobacco and BMSR have huge bodies of awesome work that reward spelunkers mining deep.
Tobacco - Hairy Candy
Black Moth Super Rainbow - Roller Disco
Casino Vs. Japan is one of my favorites. I’m always a sucker for the slow, kick-heavy beats. The big open tempos create a space where veils of synth can flutter from polyrhythms into a wash soundscape where samples unfold. Here a simple beat can become a sea of ideas.
Casino Vs. Japan – Single Variation of Two
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