Monday 30 April 2012

Engine Ears and Foreign Beggers


 

Apologies to all few of you out there reading. Moving house (part one now, with the sequel next month) not only managed to take up a lot of time and energy but threw out of whack the daily life patterns of two boys a tired partner and a fragile feline. Even as I wallow in the withdrawal symptoms caused by the packing away of cherished instruments and amplifiers (not to mention reliable and fast wired internet connection) I gather up the fragments of writerly strength and free time available to me so I can write to you, dear reader.

What has moved me to write is a musical reconnection with an aesthetic vibe captured by the early fusions of electronic music and metal I first discovered in the 90s. There was a brief window of time when groups such as Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and latter period Pop Will Eat Itself were binding beats and metal with real courage and audacity. In this early period of experimentation (which arguably would go on to be fully realised in the mainstream in the form of nu metal) aesthetic rules were not yet set.

The speed of transmission of these new sounds was as limited by technology as were the sonic possibilities. Many of the accidental, individual sonic concepts - such as the sludgey precision paradox of Ministry's white noise defiance on the Land of Rape and Honey, the welding of strong riffs to hip hop beats on PWEI's Dos Dedos Mi Amigos, the electronically manipulated aural pallet of the guitars of NIN's The Downward Spiral and the reckless slamming together of huge guitars, spectacle and visuals on White Zombie's Astro-Creep 2000 - later became genre conventions. This resulted in the distorted electric guitar tone and a certain swagger possessed by metal being appropriated both with and without irony across a broad range of popular (and underground) music.

Recently, I have been on a contemporary (and so-called) technical death metal binge (what is with all the drug idioms?). Thanks primarily to the excellent metal news blog, Heavy Blog Is Heavy, I have been able to engage with what is essentially new in the genre and within metal as a whole. I have expressed reluctance to some stylistic conventions (refer to my article on Djentlemen) and I have held reservations regarding possible future directions given an over-reliance on the contemporary stylistic elements. Thanks to Heavy, I have gone from knee deep to neck deep and have started to find what I consider to be real innovation. And I like it.

Before that, however, let me circle-back (flashback? groan) to what gelled this altogether for me. A remix of Meshuggah's "I am Colossus" was posted as a really awful remix over at Metal Sucks. It is hard to tell whether this is an attempt at irony or simply post-Illud Divinum Insanus exhaustion and disappointment. Nevertheless, I was inspired to listen as a result of reading the comments in defense of the mix and of the various readers' affection for dubstep.

As for the remix itself, while not necessarily the most mindwarping, Aphex Twin like reconfiguring of musical expectations, it is a fantastic take on the original, taking the riffs and timbres which creates seamless metal-dubstep hybrid much closer to Justin Broadrick's new album Posthuman or the surprising remixes from Chimaira's Age of Hell than to Korn/Skrillex collaboration Path of Totality.

This reconnection of metal with frontrunning electronic musical genres is exciting and is starting to finally yield results. At its peak, it is creating musical hybrids as innovative and gnarly as Disfigure the Goddess' new platter, Sleepless in which the boundaries between electronic metal are shattered and remade in new yet familiar, accessible ways. It excites me to think about how metal and electronic music can continue to co-evolve in the coming years.

Indeed until now, the paradigm has been the incorporation of electronic influences by metal heads via high profile producers such as Charlie Clouser or Rhys Fulber. But now we are starting to see electronic musicians and composers who "get" metal in terms of stylistic conventions, attitude and philosophy. In addition, this new generation are growing up with musical production tools and skills that would have been inaccessible to the hobbyist or even professional ten to fifteen years ago. 

Due to the fast pace of modern digital thought, listeners are repeatedly traversing complex and multiple genre terrains, rapidly encountering new, evolving, social sounds as well as leaving digital pollen bits of themselves wherever they go in the forms of likes, comments, collaborations and connections. The pairing of technological capability and individual ability with the porous spatiality of a social-media-ised musical landscape is bringing about a contemporary musical multiculturalism in which the barriers between ethnicity, culture, gender,sexuality and race are being negotiated in a consensual, polyvocal fashion. 

Cross genre experimentation will no doubt still lead to shameful, shameless and ignorant appropriations but the undeniable fact is that the dominance of dubstep as a social musical meme is contributing to an affectionate intensifying deconstruction of metal by those outside of the genre. Though it is not dubstep that really captivates me, it is rather the opening to the future that it provides. 

What comes next? But also, let us savour now the treasures we will find after the zeitgeist, you know, the stuff that falls through the cracks and accreting value, slowly over time. But I will keep that discussion for another day.