There’s a sense that electronic dance music is no longer plausibly ‘futurist’ – the idea that every successive techno or house record is a giant leap forward for sound/music is no longer a credible one – though many still cling to it – if indeed it ever was. For me it seems that many of the most interesting records in the electronic music realm right now are those that enter into conceptual dialogue with dance music past (your own work, the aforementioned No Fun Acid etc). Do you agree?

“I wonder about this. Is this just a function of the fact that there is so much more dance music being produced and released then there was at the time when, as you say, each new record was a giant leap forward?  Undoubtedly a lot of the newer technology that exists for making dance music is focussed more on imitation than it is on invention, but there are still lots of new tools that could be used. For example, I was speaking to Paul Schreiber (of Synthesis Technology/MOTM) the other day and he was describing two new synth modules he’s designed. Both are completely radical and unlike anything out there. There’s lots of stuff out there but I rarely hear it on records.

“I don’t personally believe that the genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres we have today are helping much in terms of the issue you mention. We have Omar-S, Gemmy, Traxx, Levon Vincent…All those guys have recently put things out that I consider pretty radical, things that come out of specific genres but then blow the defining characteristics of those genres to pieces.

“I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past.”

“In my own work I’m really coming from the approach of sound and its energy, its ability to channel energy. Dance music is an obvious choice, an obvious idiom to work in to, as I’ve said, anchor some of this energy into a usable form. Because there’s already all these ideas floating around in the dance music scene about what music can do for you. I think music is way more powerful than people realize, that’s my experience of music, that it is incredibly powerful and can do a lot for a person.When I make music that is primarily what I want to share. I use references, again, as a way of anchoring this energy and translating it into form where it becomes communication. I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past, as all music is because of the fact that it is continually evolving and changing and growing from where it is to where it is going to be. The first wave of Detroit techno is obviously in dialogue with the music of artists like Kraftwerk, OMD and also with Motown and late 70s funk and soul, just as those musics were in a conceptual dialogue with rock, blues and jazz before them. I consider continuing that dialogue to be part of my responsibility as a composer and producer, to participate in the evolution of music as a whole.

“But maybe this is more what the question is about…I think that part of the way the modernist impulse has been interpreted historically has to do with massive movements, inventions or individuals that have been so radical that they have changed everything, destroying what came before and creating an entirely new thing in its place. I think this is largely a historical fiction that is based around marketplace necessity rather than creative development. The futurists themselves, perhaps the most modernist of the modernists, were guided by an impulse to destroy current ideas about art so that it could return to a more authentic place which they saw manifested in so called primitive cultures. So were the Abstract Expressionists. I suspect that creativity that has engaged the past has always been more interesting and that this is all the more noticeable now because of how easy it is, technologically, to create in a vacuum.”

Kiran Sande

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.