I read a fair amount of music-related publications, web-based and otherwise. There’s been a lot of talk all over the place about the future of music (for recent examples, see this post at Analog Industries or this post at EM411, or, god help you, google the idiocy that is “Music 2.0″). Trouble is, so much of it speculates on what will be the ultimate outcome of current trends, say five or ten years down the line, but little of it addresses anything of any practical use, for example the next twelve months.

Now that Intelligent Machinery is no longer a collective, my immediate future plans are up in the air. I could start a label. I could just sell my stuff on my own, either downloads only or CDs or wax cylinders or whatever as well. I could just continue the formless dabbling I’ve done up until now. I’m not opposed to any of it, except that I have little interest in losing money. As long as breaking even is viable, anything is up for consideration.

So, what should I (or anyone else seeking to do something a little broader than just keeping a website and writing some tunes) do as a next step? Ultimately I’ll make a choice of what to do and get on with it, so there’s no crisis to be resolved, but I’m interested to hear what any of you (the few readers this blog nets) have to say about it. In the next twelve months, what would be a wise or unwise step to make in expanding one’s role in music? Are labels and discs as they exist today still necessary for at least the next five years?

In honour of the last day of 2007, I continue the tradition I started last year and give you a stupid riff.

I apologize in advance for the tweeness, but I couldn’t help myself. I had been playing around with a filterbank and came up with this, finding the singing-like quality of twee people to be mesmerizing. To spare you, I’ve edited down from its original playing time of 5 minutes or so. You might thank me when you realize it’s the same thing ad nauseum.

Happy new wall-calendar day.

This weekend I’m testing out the beta form of Audio Damage’s pending chorus plugin, Fluid. One of the things I usually do when I’m beta testing effects is set up an automated three or four bar A/B project in Audiomulch and then run various permutations of the effect’s parameters and various input sounds to get a good sense of what the effect can do.

This is an example of that, an organ drone, run four bars dry then four bars through Fluid. And you’ll note, a pretty nice sounding chorus.

I then often proceed to fiddle about, to get a sense of how the effect fits in to a musical context. I start layering a few tracks and then layering other effects in. As I was doing this today, I set up a droning sound that I ended up listening to for a reasonably long time. I have three sound sources, the organ drone from above, a copy of it running at a lower pitch, and a sine wave that bounced between 400Hz and 440Hz every four bars.

The dry sound mixed sounds like this.

Not changing the sounds at all, but sticking in some effects, it sounds like this.

The affected version, as it happens, employs only Audio Damage effects (sorry for the apparent shillery, but they really are the first things I turn to, because they are good, I know them inside out, and have them all). The organ drone was followed by Fluid, Pulse Modulator, and Dubstation. I created a second channel with the organ drone run dry. The third channel was the lower register organ drone followed by Fluid, and the fourth channel was the sine wave followed by Liquid, Audio Damage’s recently released flanger plugin.

The most immediately obvious change is the expanded stereo width, a common side effect of using modulated delays, and in this case, primarily caused by Liquid on the sine wave. More interesting to me is the creation of the pulsing upper harmonics, which if you listen to it closely sounds slightly like an attack heavy sound played in reverse. That sound, which feels to me like a separate voice in the mix, is entirely a result Pulse Modulator and accentuated by Dubstation, created by the effect’s distortion stage and complex amplitude modulation.

The original, dry sound gets dull quickly if you listen to it looped at length, but as a result of the added dimension and frequencies created by the effects, I found I could listen to it looped for a long time, despite it on paper being the same stretch of music.

Much of the SIGHUP way of making music is based on the method in this example, taking a single sound source and building as much of a complete orchestration out if its various affected copies.

Every now and again I pop on over to the Mopis website just to listen to one of their demo songs.

The song, downloadable as an mp3 by clicking here, is called Yes Monkeys. It’s a fun little song based around vocal samples, that have that sort of Fred text-to-speech sound reminiscent perhaps of Add N to X’s Plug Me In, except maybe a little heavier on the romantic grand gesture.

Mopis is a reasonably priced software synthesizer that is a hybrid subtractive/additive which converts samples into usable wavetable data for its oscillators. I don’t actually have or use Mopis, as I have really no need for such a synth, but damn do I love that song.

So if you are inclined toward such synths, please do consider getting Mopis, just as thanks for Yes Monkeys.

Runner up is Evolver Acoustic by Saul Stokes available on the Dave Smith Evolver page, which is actually just patch number 33 of Bank one of the Desktop Evolver’s factory programs, but it is always surprising to me.

Following my earlier post on the next big thing in electronic music it has been said to me that perhaps polyrhythms and polymeters will be at the heart of the next big thing.

It’s something I’ve heard before, in fact it was something often touted back in the heyday of the IDM list, often mentioned (usually by mistake as the case may be) at the height of Autechre’s popularity. While I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, I am also sceptical. Here’s my case against:

• to start, polyrhythms aren’t really new in electronic music. Certainly the first wave of the IDMers dabbled in them, and the more academic side of electronic music (that music which they like to call “New”) is rife with polyrhythms and has been since at least the emergence of the post-minimalist downtown scene.
• polyrhythms and polymeters to me don’t exactly scream dance floor, and hipster electronic music tends to always fold out from dance club-centric popular electronic music. IDM evolved from acid/rave/techno and later jungle. Dubstep came out of twostep and garage, itself the poor idiot offspring of jungle and later drum and bass. And dubstep is still very much club music.
• complexity, inherent to the idea of polyrhythms and polymeters, doesn’t exactly go over large with the audiences. My general observation is that it is much like drum solos, really only its fellow practitioners have any interest in it. Just ask the “New Music” crowd about that whole preaching to the converted thing. Perhaps folk musics like gamelan music or bluegrass buck the trend and are both complex and popular (in the traditional folk sort of way) but then they extend from long traditions, and as such, while complex, change very little from one iteration to the next. Complexity tamed through familiarity.
• and last, I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak up for the structural reductionists, whose camp I tend to sit in. This is just a personal thing, but I’m more in favour of less complex music, as I find it speaks less of the self and more of the whole. Complex music often leans too heavily on the crawling inward impulse, I give you a fleet of prog rockers (Yes, Tool (yeah that’s right, I said it), Dream Theatre, Rush, etc) and gonzo muso types (Zappa, Mr. Bungle, etc) as evidence.

Shades of the one thing that has struck me recently as having the potential for superduperness can be found on the stuff being put out by Mexican label Static Discos, especially stuff being done by Antiguo Automata Mexicano. It is as yet still bridging on familar techno territory, but it has a certain vibe going on, danceable and slightly loose rhythmic edges (unlike the very rigid Teutonic deathpulse), which I can only attribute to it being Mexican. It makes sense to me that the growth in the field will start happening in places with a newly emerged and ever-strengthening middle class, places like Mexico, Argentina, India, China. And as a result, we’ll like see an increase in signs of their respective local flavours added to the mix, so that gets my vote for next big thing.

As an aside, it’s also been said to me that how and where to comment on these blog entries is unclear. It used to say automatically when the old backend system was in place, but as it no longer does, I’ll try to point out more often that comments can be made in the ever-welcoming SIGHUP forum. Just sign up, start a thread, and have your say. If you are at all apprehensive about providing information for yet another sign up, know that we here at IM are far, far too apathetic to ever do anything we shouldn’t with your sign-up information.

So, I’m ready to hear the case for polyrhythms and polymeters.