general

A criticism two posts back of the repetitiveness or sameness of recent modular synth music inspired the putdown of modular as "sounding like a demo of gear I can't afford."
It's affordable if you want it -- most of the "racks" wigglers are playing with weren't bought at one go but in increments over several years. The beauty of it, in a way, is that you can assemble the sounds you want, at the pace you want, over time, as opposed to plunking down a single large investment for an instrument someone else "hard-wired."

The instrument above, an 8-bit sampler/wavetable synth with filter that acts as a second oscillator, is hypothetical: assembled in a virtual synth rack planner. If it existed it would cost just under $1000, as compared to, say, the Waldorf Blofeld tabletop synth, for half that price. But you'd be putting this together in installments. The sampler module alone is $220.

That same module, the Doepfer A-112, is the subject of an excellent Soundcloud demo that (contrary to that earlier post) transcends demo-dom to become intriguing music in its own right. It also inspired software to control it from outside, in an analog-digital hybrid scenario.

A single computer with a decent sound card can make plenty of bodacious music inexpensively. The move to modular music was (among other things) a reaction to the limitations of laptop music: wanting to get physical movement, the hum of wires, and artisanal, "distributed" engineering into -- or back into -- the process. If you have this urge, it's affordable.

I am guest-blogging for a couple of days at SCREENFULL, a site that net artistes jimpunk and Abe Linkoln ran, with hyperactive exuberance, in the mid-'00s. It's come alive again for a one-weekend, ten-years-later tribute bash.
After a few years of dump.fm I am having to adjust to the measured pace of what was once browser-demolishingly frenetic. My Quicktime plugin is regularly crashing, just like the old days, however.
jimpunk and Abe invited me and some others who weren't active SCREENFULL-ers back in the day to join the party. Please note I said it was by invitation-only, so recent SAIC graduates can make full-throated complaints about net art elitism and talk about how liberating Tumblr is by comparison.

The move by electronic musicians back to the modular hardware of the 1970s, as a reaction to the laptop music of the '00s, and the gradual reintroduction of digital-based sound-making into this hardware, is a fascinating development. Most of the music is terrible, however.
This demo by Richard Devine isn't terrible, but it's boring. You can skip over his typically over-detailed description of all the gear and patches he's using. Mostly he is trying out one module, the MakeNoise Mysteron, which generates a plucked string sound that can be modulated and overdriven to resemble a funky electric guitar. Devine lays down a mainly unvarying beat, plays the Mysteron to show various ways notes can be bent, and then fades in ethereal pad sounds about midway through. The textures are rich (they had better be with all that gear in the pipeline) but the Mysteron seems like an extremely limited instrument, not worth buying, unless you really like hearing that one sound and think you might use it in more than one tune.
The problem with modular demos, which are largely undistinguishable from modular music proper, is it's all texture. One repetitive sequence is laid down at the beginning and clung to like a security blanket while the tweaker makes subtle or dramatic timbral changes. A true hell on earth is all the YouTubes and Vimeos showing the tweaker's hands turning knobs. This is fine for educational purposes but not so entertaining to watch.
The Devine piece would benefit from some change about a minute in -- a key change, a tempo change, a mood change. Am not necessarily arguing that every piece of music has to have a verse-chorus-bridge-drum-solo structure but some cognizable structure is a real benefit.

Let's take another look at Simon Reynolds' putdown of the PC Music label:

...whether you should even go deep with something so determinedly shallow as the PC Music aesthetic is debatable. But then these sort of operations are never content to just be blank, are they? They can't resist showing how thought-through and conceptual the whole thing is. Pointing out the references, the precursors, the intent.... Just like the art world.

If there's any basis for this it can't be found in this interview with PC Music founder A.G. Cook (hat tip kiptok); it seems quite unpretentious and un-conceptual, while clearly not stupid. Below are a couple of excerpts that get at what this label and producer are about. It's not clear from the music how fully collaborative Cook's production role is -- the various PC artists have a unified sound and intent that makes me think he (or he and someone else at the label) have their hands in everything. Would like to get in touch with one of the artists, say, GFOTY, and ask "who is GFOTY, is it just one person, and if not what is the breakdown of who does what (vocals, production, songwriting, etc)?" Not that it ultimately matters in a post-identity world, it's just a nerdy itch of wanting to know what individual consciousnesses contribute.

Here's AG Cook, from the interview, on his approach to the label:

I've always enjoyed playing a bit of an A&R role, not just through finding new music but also by embracing the major label concept of "artistic development". I particularly enjoy recording people who don't normally make music and treating them as if they're a major label artist. Often we end up developing a really strong musical and visual identity, which is still kinda personal and idiosyncratic. Working with all these different personalities and styles has become a core part of how I think about music, to the extent where, for me, it's becoming a style in itself. So starting a label isn't just a way of releasing all this stuff, but it's also a way of operating as a larger structure that can still be categorised and understood. The label's called PC Music, which alludes to how the computer is a really crucial tool, not just for making electronic music but for making amateur music that is also potentially very slick, where the difference between bedroom and professional studio production can be very ambiguous.

This seems neither studiously "blank" nor excessively "thought-through and conceptual" so Simon Reynolds must be getting those pejoratives from somewhere else. Here's Cook on his musical influences:

...those [UK garage and David Guetta] are both pretty big references for me! I'm relatively up to date with chart music. I like keeping track of the mega-producers who have been responsible for endless hits over the last decade or two – Max Martin is probably my favourite, I'm usually drawn to his tracks whether they're for Britney Spears, Taylor Swift or Cher Lloyd. Also producers like Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who worked on great New Edition and Janet Jackson albums and then gradually evolved their sound to make songs like "U Remind Me" for Usher. I listen to quite a lot of RnB; I really like Cassie – some of her tracks epitomise the minimal, synthetic, almost robotic potential of commercial music, something which can sound crap when it's done badly, but can also become a sort of perfect, untouchable product when done in the right way. I always find any kind of "extreme" pop music interesting. One of my favourite albums is Cupid and Psyche 85 by Scritti Politti, which was a conscious decision to take pop music and make it as shiny and detailed as possible – it's a really beautiful balance of great hooks, rhythms and sounds. There's so much other stuff that has been influential: J-Pop, K-Pop, Nightcore, Ark Music Factory, Hudson Mohawke and Nadsroic, Frank Zappa's Synclavier stuff, Jumpstyle. Recently I've been really into Ukraine's Eurovision 2013 entry, "Gravity" by Zlata Ognevich. It's the same few chords throughout, but they keep moving them around to create different sections – it just feels like it's infinitely escalating, really clever.

cable shouter chris matthews imagined his own head being lopped off and began baying for war -- others also imagined that: his, not theirs

radical group of adult-onset diabetes sufferers "takes out" the inventor of honey mustard

we tortured some folks - no big deal - in hell

spring, and the gentrifier next door is back at work on his flagstone patio ergonomic hot tub tiki grill combo whatever #noise

fetus one direction is not about training the unborn to vote for the right (something i learned from my involuntary "trends" sidebar)

if you're going to write about the Whitney's need to show net art it might be best not to mention brad troemel or the jogging

one who truly hated post-internet art would never write about it ["net art acceptable to galleries" is how i'd define it and leave it there]

years ago a friend with an MFA who was also a programmer explained that hacker aesthetics came down to "is it cool" or "is it shit"

"animal rescue person found with a house full of decomposing pet bodies" is essentially the neocon plan for the middle east