I’ve recently been reading the work of music theorist Mark Fisher (famous for popularizing Hauntology)) and was pleased to discover that he wrote quite a bit about electronic music. One of Fisher’s claims that I found interesting is that music has been stuck in a loop of recycling the styles / techniques of past generations (vaporwave, chillwave, neo-soul, dubstep) since the late 90’s. At first I dismissed this as being a sweeping generalization - after all music has always relied on borrowing elements from the past and fusing different genres. However a thought experiment of his has give me some pause:
“Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.”
Fisher then goes on to discuss how Kraftwerk is a great example of a music drastically evolving into something that hadn’t been done before and asks - where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?
I thought this was interesting in regards to synthesizers because they are typically the instrument that is often thought of as futuristic, but from my experience most synths today being made are clones of vintage gear used to emulate the sounds of the past, which ties in with the popularity of retro sounding electronic music and supports Fischer’s point. After thinking about it more I realize that although I really love the current music being made these days with synthesizers (SOPHIE, Death Grips, Arca, Flying Lotus) as well as modern synths themselves - they don’t strike me as innovative.
This is just my thought tangent / opinion and was curious what others on this thread have to say on this topic!
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