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I’m a music lover who is beginning to listen to a lot of modular music and have noticed a surge or even a renaissance of modular productions. Aphex Twin brings a rig to shows. Rival Consoles has been putting his together for a while.
As a listener, two musical aspects hit me regarding the modular sound—its timbre, which does indeed have a warm, textural, rubbery feeling. Why is this so, seeing that physically the components are the same as hierarchical, fixed systems?
More important to me, however, is the structure of modular music through time. Essentially, the structure is an increase in volume and evolution of texture and then a wind down. Harmonic and melodic textures are usually fixed and looped. It would seem as if there are challenges in the modular world to make complex harmonic and melodic changes—like the sequencing remains simple and repeatable while modulation, mixing, and layering provides most of the motion forward. Structure ranges in this framework from drone music to more complex, almost choral, symphonic like sweeps of harmonic and timbral content that evolve in complexity and loudness and then settles again. However, some artists, like Aphex Twin are able to generate complex counterpoint based structures with distinct melodic lines of various tonal or atonal phrases. But you don’t see this often. I wonder what the connection is between this and the physical limitations and constraints of modular production.
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