Bleeding for the harder styles
Last week I had my essay about DAWs published, and debuted Merino Chute, a project I'm describing as speculative dance music. In the essay, for Liquid Architecture’s Disclaimer journal, I dwell on what we’ve lost as music practices move from stages to bedrooms to laptops to headphones. Music creation has never been so lonely. DAWs are partly responsible for this. I feel this every day. In Merino Chute, I try to respond to this condition.
One reason I burned out after my PhD is because I couldn’t find a way out of the DAW’s recursive, ugly solipsism. DAWs are sometimes described as ‘transparent.’ Unlike the hiss of tape or the dull compression of YouTube audio, they don’t have a sonic identity unto themselves. Sound in equals sound out. But DAWs make you think about music in a particular way. And this DAW mentality encourages some techniques and excludes others. Even in genres that aren’t electronic or born-digital. It is an epistemological shift of generational proportion. Once you’ve acquired this DAW mentality, it is difficult to relinquish. Some central claims in this mentality: all sound is content; all sound can be processed to become any other content; there is no sound you cannot make in a DAW; you can now have total creative freedom to do everything yourself. As well as researching DAW mentality and interrogating these narratives, I teach DAW practice for a living. That friction of teaching the very normativity I was questioning soon became a cognitive dissonance. Maybe I internalised DAW mentality too much. Everything became content and I had become transparent.
DAW mentality isn't inherently bad. But it is hegemonic. This is worth pushing against. I’m interested in what narratives can emerge from that reckoning. How DAW practice can be parsed as metaphor, and what kinds of metaphor can be accessed. It’s important to me to explore these ideas structurally, in the music, in the DAW. There is a lot at stake if artists don’t control the narrative of the technologies imposed on us, or the capitalisation of all forms of value by technologists and crypto-patricians. If we don’t, Daniel Ek will, and he has. If we don’t seize the means of production in a material sense — it’s not that we can’t, I just don’t have the skillset — then is there value in seizing the narratives of production? I think there is. I think my music is ‘about’ those narratives. How can we better align our music-making with our experience in and of the world? How can we wrest control and agency of our stories from this hellscape of bad faith actors and unwitting hegemonies? How can DAW practice be salvaged as a compelling political project?
Two examples of narratives of DAW practice. One is the observer effect, a term I’m borrowing from quantum physics, to describe the psychological effect of visualising every aspect of digital sound, from micro (changing timbre on a software synth, MIDI note sequencing) to macro (song structure, spectrographs). This total visualisation is the definitive feature of DAWs. Presenting sound in this way is designed for productivity, not sonic aesthetics. You can glean visual information much more quickly than sonic information. This is an emotionally complex problem for musicians. What should music look like in this domain? Some address this by exiting computers and DAWs entirely, buying up grooveboxes and modular synths. I interpret this as an attempt to suspend music-making in an un-datafied, pleasurable zone of possibility for as long as possible before wrangling it into the DAW. They are work stations after all. The observer effect is often overwhelming and stifling.
Another example is ‘gridlock,’ a contention that music made with DAWs is too quantised, too on-the-beat; the ‘grid’ is a metaphor for the bars-and-beats regularity that defines electronic rhythm. Once a grid or tempo is established, departing from that grid is a proposition too radical for many dance music traditions, hence the term 'gridlock.' Rubato, the technique of speeding up or slowing down for aesthetic effect, is a cornerstone of music performance, all but flattened out in the DAW. Of course, the Dilla’s and RZA’s of the world were de-quantising electronic music decades ago, but in the Eurozone dance music agora, it is still regarded as a fundamental problem requiring rational solutions. My favourite is a feature of many software drum machines, a button labelled ‘humanise’ that applies short, random delays to each drum hit. As if ‘just play it a bit looser’ weren’t an option.
Thinking through these narratives during a lunch break between teaching labs last year, I wondered how easy it would be to use MIDI notes to control tempo. Higher notes mean faster tempo, lower notes mean slower tempo. Very easily, it turned out. The subsequent Max patch took nine objects. Looping a MIDI clip with some arbitrary tempo changes, I made a few beats in quick succession. They lilted and wobbled. One quarter-note at 62bpm, the next quarter-note at 349bpm, the next at 147bpm, and so on. I hadn’t made an enjoyable beat since I was 19, and in thirty minutes I had several. A student who’d arrived for class sees me jamming on my laptop. “Why is your playhead changing speed?”
“Pretty cool right?”
“I guess.”
I named this project after a neckwarmer/face-mask made by Icebreaker. (Not named after a narrow enclosure for sheep, as one has already ventured, but I like it a lot.) It alludes to a venerable tradition of electronic musicians referencing masks or performing with them. Rubato means ‘robbed’ in Italian, implying that time is being stolen as the rhythm slows down. I like this image of a soft-skinned thief wearing high-performance fabrics, stealing away with a big sack labelled ‘time’ over one shoulder. Merino Chute addresses the observer effect and gridlock by unthreading the relationship between the DAW’s visual schema and the sound it claims to represent. Sequences never sound the way they look. A beat that appears to be 4/4 can feel more like a 5/4 beat with a stammer, or a textural swoop. A vague rumour of a rhythm that never resolves. The downbeat is fuzzy and intuitive.
This process applies to samples and drum breaks too. Ableton’s audio warping tools react well to tempo changes. Aside from the usual drum breaks, I’ve been sampling mid-noughties hardstyle tracks found on a monolithic, 320GB hard drive at my parents’ house circa 2009. I grew up on Wardandi-Noongar country in Bunbury, a place big enough to be called a city but small enough to feel like a country town, with all the ennui that that entails. My brother loved hardstyle and talked about going to hardstyle festivals in the Netherlands with his high school friends. That pilgrimage never happened, but the mp3s we collected over that time are like a time capsule of affirmations that we’ll eventually find our rituals for celebrating togetherness. And, conveniently, hardstyle is a great template for tempo changes. Every beat is the downbeat.
I’ve let the mask slip. This wasn’t meant to be an intellectual project. The music is fun. About halfway into the second song of my set, the promoters Josten and Annika, astutely recognising the itchiness in the room and the need for a furniture change, pushed all the chairs away and threw down with arms flailing. An earnest, modest dance floor emerged. No one was dancing the same way or locking into the same rhythm. It was a wobbly mess. I like the term ‘speculative dance music’ because it feels like an invitation to speculate on new ways to be together. Moving without caveat; embodied problem-solving; world-building and possibility in lieu of predetermination. This project doesn't quite address the loneliness factor that motivated it, yet. There’s more to make. Thank you to Tone List, the other artists, and everyone who had a dance.
I’m playing two Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark shows on April 17 as part of Audible Edge's finale, launching two videos by Filth Goddess and digital penetration (aka Sage Pbbbt). Bookings essential.
xx