cantosis wrote:Even so Andy you still get new music coming out that sounds original and fresh even if the technology is old hat. and what about granular synthesis? I dont know much about it but it sounded quite fresh from what I have heard on the Namlook albums?
granular synthesis? it didn't strike me as anything new at all, or perhaps it's fairer to say you could have done it years ago, but it would have taken years...all technology has done has made it quicker, the same way that tape was replaced by sampling and then in turn by hard-discs (in theory a tape recorder could do what a Mellotron did...it would have just taken a very long time and a lot of splicing...see Holger Czukay's first album Canaxis, years ahead of Eno and Bryne and yet they got most of the praise). Perhaps as a musician I listen to things slightly differently (no better or worse, just a tad differently), although I should add always emotionally first. This is why (for me) the best tracks on Johannes's new album are the most emotional, I can't ask Johannes to come up with something I've never heard before if the combined might and brains of Korg, Yamaha, Roland et al are looking back for the latest thing, rather than pushing things forward. In someways EM has reached adulthood, rather than trying to find what it can do (the teenage years), musicians are confronted by the problem of 'what do I want to say'? 'How do I combine things'? etc etc...and that's something that all artists have done for hundreds of years, whatever the medium, whatever the message.