berlin sound
(excerpt from draft written for New Music Box, New York)
If there is a Berlin aesthetic, and I would answer affirmatively on that question, pinning it down is a bit of a challenge. It is all studies in contrast: concrete + ephemeral, bird chirps + white noise feedback, depth + surface. It's all there. For me, the kind of openness demanded by this aesthetic is a breath of fresh air, finally the technology has been stolen away from the geeks and coders and is now firmly in the hands of the art school kids, freed from weary conceptualism and fascinated by the inherently playful qualities of sound, on its own, without apology. Ragtag and idealistic they make pieces with slightly vocoded bell tones mixed with rainfall in the background, occasional bursts of ultra-low frequency sine waves mixing up the rhythm, providing grounding. This is music that is all over the place yet clearly focused. I hope this is the future.
Comments
the future hopes you will become it (in both senses of the word 'become')
Posted by: r. | February 27, 2006 5:03 PM